White Teeth by Zadie Smith
I read this book because I didn't have anything on hand at the beginning of the month that I needed to review for LibraryThing, and none of the books I'd placed on hold had come in. This book was on ReadingGroupGuide's 25th anniversary list of most discussed books (and was the one for the first year, 2000). Ironically, the first book I read with my local book club (of which I am no longer a member) was Zadie Smith's On Beauty, so I decided to read this one. It was the only one actually available as an e-book at my libraries; there were wait lists for the other six (although, to be fair, they were all from 2018 on).
I should have re-read my review of On Beauty first. Didn't like it, and didn't like White Teeth either. Too long, too wordy, too hard to follow. But I did finish it.
This was Smith's first novel, at the age of 25. There are some autobiographical aspects to it, in that one of the main characters, Irie Jones, is, like Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican woman and an older English man, and much of the novel is even set in the Willesden area of London, where Smith grew up. Write what you know, right?
The book is an example of hysterical realism, which is described as a "genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other." I didn't care for the absurdity.
The Pacifist by Lyn Bixby
Chris Thompson is a Vietnam War protester in Boston in autumn 1968 when he is drafted. He reports to an army base but refuses induction, and winds up being taken away unconscious in an ambulance after a supposedly accidental fall. His sister Lisa, living a back-to-nature lifestyle on the family's farm in Vermont, doesn't believe it, and enlists a black civil rights lawyer, a newspaper editor, a combat veteran, and a couple draftees who witnessed much of what happened to Chris in her fight against the Army and the FBI to find out the truth about his subsequent death.
Author Lyn Bixby is writing what he knows. According to his website, he " protested against the Vietnam War before he received his military draft letter weeks after graduating in 1969 ... He passed his physical and was ordered to join the Army, serving at ... a number of bases ... before he was discharged because the Army couldn’t turn him into a soldier." He became a newspaper journalist and worked "as an investigative reporter focused on corruption. Some projects gave him opportunities to dig into issues raised in his debut novel, The Pacifist. During his newspaper career he received a range of prestigious writing awards, including a shared Pulitzer Prize." The book was also inspired by a classmate who died fighting in Vietnam.
This is both an intriguing murder mystery and a timely story, given the state of the United States federal government today.
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