strange and random happenstance: Masturbation

Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: June 27th, 2017
Format: Kindle, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Fourteen year old Matty Telemachus rather awkwardly finds out he can astrally project. He's just thinking inappropriate thoughts about his cousin Mary Alice and discovers that when he's sexually aroused or, in this first instance, masterbating, he can leave his body behind. Which makes him wonder, is he unique or are his gifts inherited? It turns out that his family is none other than the Amazing Telemachus Family. They were the darlings of TV talk shows until they imploded on air. Which means no one in the family will talk to Matty about their past. Which makes him start digging. His grandfather and grandmother met in a government study into psychic powers. Teddy had conned his way in but Maureen was a genuine psychic. They fell in love and married, having three children. Irene, Matty's mother, is a human lie detector, Frankie is telekinetic, and Buddy can see the future. But the past is in the past and the family's powers have done nothing but destroy their lives, turning them into barely functional adults. Irene can't hold down a job or maintain a stable relationship, Frankie has used his powers for nefarious means and is now in deep with the mob, and Buddy, well, Buddy spends his time digging holes in the backyard and is practically nonverbal. In fact, when Frankie realizes his nephew has been perving on his daughter instead of taking him to task he decides to use Matty to help free himself from the mob. His genius plan is to rob the mob and then pay back his debt with their own money. No matter how "amazing" his family once was, any sane person can see that this plan is flawed. But Frankie, and the whole family, is desperate. Their mother was their rock and without her the family is spiraling. And now the CIA have come knocking. They were reviewing their files from Project Stargate and were wondering if any of the newest generation of family members had started exhibiting powers. Little do they know about Matty... Who might just be the key to solving all their problems, but not as Frankie had planned. The family is in for a reckoning and their whole world is about to change.

I feel like I've been swindled by Teddy Telemachus. If you read the actual blurb of the book you think this is going to be a romp about a gifted family. And it is not that. At all. This was a bait and switch. The best character, Maureen Telemachus, is dead and gone by the time the action starts, and the family isn't just dysfunctional but I dislike them all. Deeply. I was hoping for nostalgic television talk shows with psychic stunts, and instead this is just your basic boring Chicago mafia tale. With a whole heap of nineties historical inaccuracies. I assume the other decades also have historical inaccuracies, but I just caught the blatant ones from my childhood. A SNES doesn't have a standby light. It does have a light when the power is on. No standby light. And these inaccuracies just made me more annoyed with the book than I can adequately explain. It wasn't just that this wasn't the book I thought it would be, it was that it just wasn't a good book. Because having a deceptive blurb isn't the end of the world. In fact a book I read quite recently was nothing like I thought it would be and yet it still completely won me over. So much so that I had to order the sequel from England so that I could read it a full month early because of the US publication date not being synchronous. But all of these pale in comparison to my problem with Matty. Um, how are we supposed to feel about Matty? Because he really creeps me out. I know his cousin Mary Alice is adopted, thus skirting the whole incest vibe, but, um... Is he supposed to be the hero? Or is he supposed to embody how flawed the family is? Because as I said before and will say again, he just creeps me out. I read enough books with gifted people to know that emotion can trigger their powers, but did it have to be masterbating? And masterbating to thoughts of his cousin? Oh, and then when he can't trigger his powers near the end of the book when it's necessary to save their family Mary Alice lets him cop a feel!?! Ew, no, ick. I did not sign up for pervy incestuous teenagers trying to take down the mafia. I wish I could expunge this book from my mind because I feel dirty.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Amazing Telemachus Family, Astral Projection, Chicago, Daryl Gregory, For the Love of Book Clubs, Lie Detector, Mafia, Masturbation, Nineties, Project Stargate, Psychic, SNES, Spoonbenders, Talk Shows, Telekinetic

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: March 19th, 1999
Format: Paperback, 448 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

On New Year's Eve 1974 Archie Jones sets out to kill himself but ends up being unsuccessful, yet like a butterfly leaving the cocoon, he leaves that gas filled car a new man. A new life and a new wife await him! His old army buddy Samad Iqbal has been saying to him for awhile that what he needs is a new young wife, like his own Alsana. That night Archie meets Clara Bowden and by Valentine's Day they are man and wife. Archie is escaping the life left in that car and Clara is escaping her mother, Hortense, whose religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness have stifled Clara's life. It isn't long before the middle aged men are fathers. Archie has a lovely daughter, Irie, and Samad has twins boys, Magid and Millat, who couldn't be more different.

It is 1984 and now Samad's life is about to change forever. He falls hard for his son's music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. The lust stirred in Samad has him questioning everything. But the attraction is mutual, and soon he has a new outlet for his lust. Yet his religious beliefs and the sin he is committing because, as he claims, the lure of the Western world has seduced him, leads him to do something that his wife will never forgive him for. He feels that if he could be degraded in this way, his sons are in even worse danger. He wants to send them back to Bangladesh, but only has the financial resources to send one of them. Magid and Millat are separated and Alsana can never forgive him until Magid is returned to her.

The 90s have come and Irie is grown up and in love with Millat. Millat has indeed fallen prey to the lure of the West as his father feared. He sleeps around, does drugs, gets into fights, and is still somehow the object of Irie's affection, which he doesn't return. One day at school Irie is confronting Millat near resident nerd Josh Chalfen when there is a drugs bust. The three of them get brought before the principal for Millat's marijuana. In the hope that Josh and his illustrious family, his mother Joyce is an author while his father Marcus is a genetic engineer, will be a good influence on Irie and Millat they are to go to the Chalfens once a week and have Josh tutor them. Soon it's everyday. Joyce takes an extreme interest in Millat while Irie starts to work for Marcus as an assistant. Even Magid, back in Bangladesh, befriends Marcus and decides to return to England. But the life of Chalfenism is divisive, and soon Josh has joined an animal rights group, FATE, to protest his father's genetic engineering of FutureMouse, while Millat has joined a fundamentalist Islamic group, KEVIN, to turn his back on his old life and the fact that Marcus prefers Magid. On the eve of the new millennium, everyone gathers to herald the arrival of FutureMouse... most with differing ideas as to how the evening will go.

From the little blurb I have assembled above you might be drawn to the false conclusion that this book actually has a plot. It doesn't. Well... it kind of does at the very end where Zadie Smith apparently realized she needed one and just threw in a handful of new characters and a whole bunch of organizations with stupid acronyms and built words into an unsatisfying conclusion with guns and Nazis and genetically engineered mice. That is right, she brought in Nazis. And I think that's the problem, she brought in whatever she wanted randomly and then just threw it aside when she got bored. Though she never seemed to get bored of slightly tweaking the reader with little asides in some random post modern moments of incomprehensibility. So the book actually feels like a bunch of interconnected short stories, some of which might have been good if they hadn't been thrown in with the morass of crap and depravity that makes up the majority of this book.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend and she asked me if I had read Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I replied that I had, mainly because it was a loosely, if failed, reimagining of Howards End, and was mentioned on The Vicar of Dibley. She was wondering if I was put off by the very detailed descriptions of one of the character's nipples. I honestly said that I had no recollection of this, most likely I had blocked it from my memory. I can honestly say though, after reading White Teeth, I will never forget Zadie Smith's obsession with nipples ever again. In fact, this book can be summed up as very boring with a veneer of eww. If I wasn't bored senseless I was quite literally wanting to throw up. Thirty pages of a 57 year old man masturbating (a different friend claims it might have been more, perhaps I'm preemptively blocking this out). Domestic abuse, where the children are placing bets on their parents. Teenagers marrying men in their 40s (proving Smith has daddy issues). A father of Irie's classmate calling her a big black goddess and ruminating about her breasts, when she's only what, fourteen! The aforementioned nipples, except for multiple characters, not just one. I wanted to wash my brain after reading this book.

Now, you're thinking that I missed the point, that the book wasn't about these accumulated repugnant and repulsive moments. I totally get that the book is about heritage and ancestry and genetics and what limitations we are burdened with, nature, nurture, fate. The second generation versus the first generation. You would have to be blind to miss this, especially once we get to FutureMouse. But the truth is, I can't, I couldn't, give a tinker's damn. It doesn't matter if you set out to write the most amazing, most profound story, if your characters are not only unlikeable, but reprehensible, then there is no way I will care. With all this ick as I will pejoratively call everything in this book, there wasn't a redeemable character or any reason to even finish reading this book except for the fact that I am incapable of leaving a book unfinished. So I finished. I read ever last work Smith wrote and I hated it. Mine is an educated hate, you can't say fairer than that!