All About Lulu / by Jonathan Evison

Born in California in 1968 but raised in rural Washington state, Jonathan Evison left home as soon as he could. He drifted to San Francisco he tried reliving the city's bygone hippie era with "all the other alcoholic misfits" before realizing it was a losing effort. Ultimately he engendered himself to the burgeoning punk rock scene in Seattle where he helped found the band "March of Crimes", a group which headlined several future members of bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Getting out of the music business in the late nineties, Evison worked several odd jobs before taking up writing fiction, gigs which including disc jockey and telemarketer among other things. A fervent devotee to social networking during it's earliest days, Evison was among the first to credit the online tool--Myspace in particular--as a key component of his literary success--he "cold-clicked" several hundred people whose profiles had James Joyce as their favorite author. His first novel All About Lulu, though a largely different story altogether, vaguely rehashes his own coming of age experiences through the eyes of a young dilettante.

In the wake of his mother's death from cancer in the early 1970's, young Will Miller must find a way to cope with his grief. His father and younger twin brothers already have their outlet--bodybuilding. Will's father, Big Bill, is actually on the professional circuit and a regular at their local Southern California hotspot, "Muscle Beach". And while Big Bill's good enough to place high in the rankings, he's not quite stellar enough to win first prize, always losing out to more pedigreed competitors like Arnold Schwartzenegger. Will's no bodybuilder, not even much of an athlete at all. In fact by the age of 12, he's become a vegetarian and is more interested in music than muscles. When Big Bill remarries, Will gets a new mom, Willow, a stepsister named Lulu and the first love of his life. Lulu's not only smart and beautiful, she likes Will for who he is and by the end of their first year of high school, the pair are dating. But after a summer spent in Vermont with relatives, Lulu comes back different. Isolated and moody, she starts to push Will away, begins dating other guys and ultimately leaves the family altogether to live in Seattle. These circumstances may have ended the relationship but not Will's fixation. For him, Lulu, even though she's just a friend now a thousand miles away, is the only reason to breathe. Slogging his way through the rest of high school as a mediocre student and fast food employee, he ultimately turns to philosophy for consolation, developing a taste for the works of Descartes, Kant, Hume and Kierkegaard as he begins a haphazard path to higher education at the local community college. The years pass by but Will's compulsion towards his life's only love never wains.

Though the level of writing would deem it worthy of adult literature, All About Lulu reads like a lot of YA books, even bearing a striking resemblance to one or two notable ones. It's a work which well characterizes the big events in the lives of young people which can remain just that, a big deal, long after adolescence, denoting that there are just some things in life, first loves among them, which don't diminish with age. Stories like these come with a lot of heavy-hearted delineations and morbid self-analysis, consequently there's a lot of irritating narcissistic qualities about the protagonist. Much like the archetypal love-scarred male adolescent, see Goethe's 18th century novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (FIC GOETHE), Will's emotional reach may touch others (his father, brothers, friends, etc.) but most of him is simply incapable of empathizing with much beyond his own afflicted feelings. This isn't a major fault but it does kind of limit the scope of the book and lend a distorted view to the other characters. In an odd way, especially seen in retrospect, Lulu herself seems to accommodate Will's passionate longing, and while not exactly reciprocating his advances, she's at least tolerable of them in amiable, even affectionate fashion--maybe not a typical reaction but you could argue that it keeps the story moving. Evison followed up this award-winning effort with West of Here, currently a bestseller about the history and heritage of Washington's Olympic peninsula. (FIC EVISON)

Moral Disorder / by Margaret Atwood

Toronto native Margaret Atwood is not only one of Canadian literature's best authors, she's become something of a worldwide phenomenon duringher three-to-four decades long tenure as a truly recognizable talent. As a poet, novelist and short story writer, her insightful, sardonic voice is at once mysterious and lucid, her prose and arrangement of words an evocative display of brilliant art. Her 2006 semi-autobiographical novel (written in short story form) Moral Disorder is no exception to her long line of superior work. A thinkpiece and generational purview of life, love, fate and existence, the book reflects Atwood's one-of-a-kind take on the western tradition.

The initial, uneventful but precursory tale lays the framework which the rest will follow. Nell & Tig are an elderly couple at first seen discussing some sobering news over breakfast--it seems some Middle Eastern terrorist have murdered several war hostages--and though they're evidently concerned about it, the pair are visibly and emotionally distant, their own lives too much encumbered by their own misunderstood concerns and weighted anxieties. While this relatively subdued scene resonates mostly the external turmoil of the encircling world, that's exactly what the world internally is like for Nell--a mentally exhausted attitude of despondency and hapless emotion towards her life and the people in it.

The accompanying stories and episodes present a swirl Nell's life, both past and present, looking back on her childhood and young adulthood, her tentative teenage relationships and first job as a freelance editor. Things are fastforwarded to when Nell meets Oona, a life-wearied woman with two children and married to Tig; Nell soon after becomes the "second wife" amid fluctuating reactions. Nell's world is one of incohesion and relational dissonance, evoking a life bonded together by an isolated, soulless web of "moral disorder". Swooping back and forth in time and soberly assessing everything from fashion to children to social upheaval and inflation, Atwood's stories are as absorbing as they are dismal, extracting a gripping morbidity with both empathy and remote interest. (FIC ATWOOD)

Another World / by Pat Barker

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Known for her thought provoking literary novels, author and historian Pat Barker is a skilled writer and a worthy craftsman of historical and contemporary fiction, her Regeneration trilogy--three historical stories concentrated in the World War I era--garnering critical acclaim. Another World examines the contrasting lives of a modern blended family and the father of the clan's 101-year-old grandfather, a World War I veteran living out his last days.

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Nick and Fran have been married for 3 years, each previously divorced with one child--Nick the father of 14-year-old Miranda, Fran the mother of 11-year-old Gareth--and having had a third child, toddler Jasper, just recently between them. While it hasn't been easy with both Nick and Fran working hard on the job and at home, Gareth and Miranda constantly at odds, Jasper needing round-the-clock attention, etc., things malinger on in the haphazard way of families everywhere, sparse outings and family togetherness given a priority just as the more pressing issues swallow up time, energy and resources.

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Meanwhile across town, Nick's very elderly grandfather Geordie, who's outlived both of Nick's parents, spends his last days remembering a very long life which has spanned the entire twentieth century. Geordie may seem old and a bit senile but he's still with it enough to remember his early boyhood in the late Victorian era, the formidable way of life in the rough blue-collar mining town of Newcastle, his youth alongside peers in the trenches during the first World War and, most of all, his terrifying experience on the battlefield of the Somme where he witnessed the grisly death of his younger brother.

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Barker really is a unique talent, subtly remarkable in the way she fabricates a story, her prose at once elegant and engaging yet reverberating poignancy and authenticity through piercing observations. Entirely different worlds are portrayed through Geordie's steadily decaying body, his century of thoughts, feelings, events and relationships revealed through a solitary repose, a milieu well contrasted by Nick and Fran's more conventionalized balancing act which includes son Gareth's violent outbursts and a new baby on the way. Each generation forms its own distinct realm, possesses its own misunderstood dimensions. But even as the boundaries of time and age are reiterated, strange similarities bind families and people together. Because, as Barker is so apt to unveil, each individual is merely a continuation of all the generations of their ancestors, their lives a collective embodiment of the world then and now.