I liked The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, by Jonathan Evison and I am going to go out and get his other books, All About Lulu and West of Here.kI’m a snot when it comes to books. There are so many really bad ones out there.  Sometimes I get about 60 pages into a book, and I think, ” Clearly the author is sleeping with the intern who is reading through the slush pile.” and I have no respect for the intern because I would never sleep with anyone who was such a bad writer.

But back to Evison.  I like his book. This is an unusual plot line.  The main character is a stay-at-home dad until his successful wife decides to move on, and then, lost and lonely with no discernible job skills, he becomes a caregiver to a disabled teenager.

A road trip ensues, complete with a runaway girl teen, estranged fathers, broken hearts, and wheelchair accidents. I hate books with tidy endings, and this book does not have one. Like real life, things are not quite resolved at the end of the book, and perhaps never will be.

Then there’s Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck. I became a fan of Larson when I read Isaac’s Storm and, shortly thereafter, In the Garden of the Beasts. The first is about a murderous storm that practically wiped Galveston TX off the map, but it also the history of the United States weather service. The book flips from one story to the other until they meet, and the reader  (well,me, anyhow) can barely wait for each installment.

It was the same with In The Garden of the Beasts, which juxtaposed an American ambassador’s family in Berlin and the rise of Nazi power.

But when it came to Devil in the White City, which told the stories of an architect and a serial murderer during the Chicago World’s Fair, I flipped over the architect’s progress and focused on the fiend who lured women into his clutches and did horrible things to them.  I was, metaphorically, one of those people (you are, too, I know it.) who slow down to look at a highway accident.  The architect was a bore.  The fiend was irresistible.

So it was with Thunderstruck.  Read about Marconi’s invention of the telegraph?  Or the self-effacing doctor who peddled snake oil and was completely pussywhipped by his voluptuous and selfish wife until he … but I don’t want to spoil it.  Just flip past the Marconi stuff.

What’s really great about Larson is that his books are entirely non-fiction.  The research he has done is more than admirable. It’s unbelievable. They read like pulp fiction, but I guess real life does, too.

Eric Nuzum’s memoir boils down to a sentence he writes near the very end of his book: “…I don’t believe that places are haunted, but I do believe that people are haunted.” And poor Eric Nuzum is haunted indeed.

I don’t think that all the mind-numbing drugs and alcohol he ingested as a teenager were much help in making sure he saw the world as a logical place, but the reader is no more educated about the mysteries of the Little Girl in the Blue Dress that haunts him or the elusive girl Laura he might be in love with. And we readers are sober. Maybe.

It’s a worthy read. It may inspire you to drive down Clinton Road in New Jersey to scare yourself or visit the abandoned Mansfield Reformatory. Nuzum seems set on giving himself a heart attack.

As for me, I don’t invite ghosts or search them out. I had a few other-worldly experiences after Philip committed suicide. Strange, almost comforting experiences – which were also experienced by his brother and his fiancee. We traded his ghost back & forth for a few years, less often as time went on. But I agree with Nuzum. I too believe that people are haunted, and they bring the ghosts with them wherever they go. Although Nuzum calls his book and his efforts in it GIVING UP THE GHOST, I am not at all sure he has.

Louise Erdrich’s newest called The Round House was a surprise, even though I always carefully scour the New York Times Book Review section to be sure I don’t waste my time.  … I hate that.  I usually get 6-7 library books at a time so if I get a lousy one, I can just flip to the end to see who got murdered or married, toss it on the floor, and pick up the next one in the stack.

The Round House promised a mother attacked, adolescent trauma, and life on an Indian reservation. I was intrigued and not disappointed.  In fact, Erdrich is such a fine writer that I did not hurry through the prose to get to the plot.  That’s the sign of a terrible writer – when the plot carries the book, not the words. Would be nice if they were of equal weight, but that seldom happens.

Maybe here.

No romance, unless you count the ghostly presence of the Ojibwe tribal ceremonies and spirits. Or the efforts of our protagonist’s father to reach his damaged wife after she has been brutally raped.

Basically, it’s a mystery, but with none of the tricks of the trade. I was less concerned with solving the mystery than I was with how everyone was going to deal with it. What happens could only have happened within tribal law — and there’s a sort of satisfying curiosity about it.

The ending reminded me of the final scene of The Graduate. Benjamin and Elaine (in her wedding gown) are in the car.  They ride together, saying nothing, until Elaine says, “Benjamin?”

And Benjamin answers, “What.” And they just keep on driving till the credits roll up.

The final sentence in The Round House is “We just kept going.”

I really wanted only to write about books I love so that my friends could read them, too, but I must warn you about TOWNIE by Andre Dubus III.  You may have, like me, fallen in love with HOUSE OF SAND & FOG – the book and the movie – and you may be tempted to read his memoir.

Don’t.  Dubus grew up first a wimp — and then, trying pathetically to make himself into a Charles Atlas so nobody would kick sand in his face,became a muscle-head.  He tries to explain, psychologically, why he liked to beat the shit out of bad guys, but he only succeeded in convincing me he was a thick-headed mule with a very bad temper.

The story takes an eye-rolling turn for the worse when Dubus dreams that a Bible-thumping black preacher (his wife is black) predicts that he is going to die.  He wakes up sweating and terrified, and a copy of the New Testament just happens to be on his bedside table.  He flips open the Book to a random page in Matthew and reads, “Love one another.”  And he never has the urge to stomp someone’s head in again.

Isn’t that nice?

Throughout the book, I was more interested in his father than I was in him, and part of that is due to the fact that Dubus was mystified by him, too.  So upon finishing TOWNIE at the airport, I gave it to a stranger and promised myself that I would get Dubus’s FATHER’s work from the library and see where Dubus’s talent came from.  It’s certainly not clear from this memoir.

But DO read John Irving’s new book IN ONE PERSON about a surprisingly well-adjusted bisexual man.  He goes from wearing his girlfriend’s bra to bed to having sex with the town librarian, who is a sexy woman with a penis.  Almost everyone in the book has some sort of sexual dysfunction, if you consider gender fluidity a dysfunction.  It was a shock to read the cover story of the New York Times Magazine (August 12) about boys who like to wear dresses … the very day I finished Irving’s book.  Remember not to take much of anything Irving says too seriously.  He’s still the same old crazy John Irving.

And DO read A LADY CYCLIST’S GUIDE TO KASHGAR.It flips back & forth from the 1920s to current day, from the Middle East to London, but after while it comes together.  An 11-year-old girl gives birth and dies in the desert right on page 3, the rest of the book offers everything from missionaries, lesbians, and a homeless man fleeing from immigration officials. Somehow it all works.