Bleak House

This novel has achieved deserved popularity -- somewhat surprisingly since it is densely written and not a terribly easy read. Nevertheless, it is a gripping story, well told, and difficult to put down. There are parallel novels in American literature, but that does not detract from the merits of this book.

The story is about an immigrant Iranian family, the Beharanis, searching for success in its adopted land, a lower middle class American woman, Kathy Nicholo, and a policeman, Lester Burdon. The story is told alternatively in the voices of Colonel Beharani, formerly of the Army of the Shah of Iran, Kathy, and occasionaly in the third person, of Lester.

Kathy's home is seized in error by the office of the tax collector and she is evicted. The house is bought by Beharani at an auction for one third of its market value. The book is concerned to unravel the tangle.

The unravelling does not succeed and tragedy results to all the major protagonists of the novel. There are elements of Shakespearean tragedy here and of American realism.

The story will bear a number of reasons and the author, commendably, is absent in his own voice. I don't read the book as a social criticism of the United States. Instead, to me the story operates on a type of religious level. It shows the wellsprings of human behavior in greed, hostility, and ignorance and in the tendency we all share to be judgmental and overly moralizing when it comes to our fellows. There is a thin veneeer that separates the lives of most of us from tragedy and violence and in this story, alas, the veneer proves insufficient.

The story teaches reflection, dispassion, and forbearance -- lessons valuable in 20th century American, in Iran, and in every other place and time.

Robin Friedman

There are certain stories we know are going to end badly: yet we read them. The suspense is unbearable even when we have a shrewd idea what the outcome is going to be: yet we keep on turning the pages. Why? Do we think that after all, we may be mistaken, and all may turn out right? Or is it a masochistic tendency to keep hurting ourselves, and sigh with dejection and despair (laced by a sneaky sense of satisfaction) when the ending is even worse than we expected? I don't know. Yet we do that; and the stories which have the power to make us do so attain the pedestal reserved for great tragic works.

This novel - outlining the doomed and intertwined lives of Behrani, a former colonel in Iran and now struggling to have a life of dignity in the USA; Kathy Nicolo, a pretty young woman given a raw deal by life; and Sheriff Lester Burdon, who falls in love with Kathy against his better judgement - is such a book.

Read it, if you are up to it.

13/02/2017

The current anti-immigrant hysteria going on in US brought this novel to mind, again. This novel is the tragedy of an immigrant who came to enjoy the American Dream.

As a renter with cable television, I had a relatively safe perch from which to view the housing boom and bust in America. From the safety of my beloved armchair, covered in crumbs and clad in sweatpants, I could flip the channels and watch any number of reality shows about ordinary Americans flipping houses. The game was simple. You bought a cheap house, with the abundant available credit, fixed it up, and turned around and sold it. Do it right, and you could pocket a year's worth of salary in six weeks.

Do you rememer those days? Back when America's pasttime transitioned from baseball to selling houses to one another? I do. I remember it well because I always thought I was missing out on something, just like I'd missed out on the Internet boom/bust and, earlier in my life, the slap-bracelet boom/bust and the Zubaz boom/bust (I'm still waiting for Zubaz to come back around). Of course, I didn't do anything to get in the game. I wouldn't say I was too lazy, it's just that I didn't want to do anything that required me to leave my chair.

Eventually, the housing market collapsed. And with it went all those reality shows about flipping houses.

Why do I mention this? Well, even though House of Sand and Fog preceded the start of the housing boom, it's essentially the story of a house-flip gone horribly wrong. It pits Kathy Nicolo, a recently-divorced former substance abuser, against Massoud Behrani, a former Iranian colonel (he's still Iranian, but no longer a colonel) who now balances two unskilled jobs, in a life-and-death struggle for a California bungalow with an ocean view.

The story starts wtih Kathy getting wrongfully evicted from her house for failure to pay the county taxes. She is evicted by Deputy Lester Burden, with whom she is soon engaged in a lukewarm affair. Massoud, who has been exiled from his native land, where he was wealthy and powerful, scrapes together the money to buy Kathy's home at auction. His plan is to fix it up, install a widow's walk, and sell it for a big profit. He is motivated to do this in order to recapture the lost wealth and prestige suffered by his family upon coming to America.

That's the set up. Like any good thriller, the stakes and tension rise with each page, until the inevitable collision. To say the least, Andre Dubus' novel holds your attention, and forces you to keep reading, even though you can probably guess that things won't end amicably.

House of Sand and Fog is a genre novel - a contrived culture clash - burnished by Dubus' literary pedigree. The book is structured so as to provide opposing first-person viewpoints: that of Massoud and Kathy. There are also sections told in third-person that focus on Deputy Burden. The two first-person narrators works quite effectively. It gives you deep insight into the main characters, but also avoids the Dickens Effect, a term I've coined to describe first-person narrators that are never very interesting, since they're always only looking out their own eyes. Dubus' framework allows us to be both outside-looking-in and inside-looking-out.

Dubus' strives to find a consistent voice for both Kathy and Massoud. Kathy is the least interesting character in the book. It's hard to see her as anything other than a white-trash whiner. Dubus has far more success with Massoud. Clearly, he did his homework on Persian culture, and crafts a fully-realized man with a rich and complex history.

Earlier there was fog, but now the sky is the color of peaches and the sun is low over the ocean I cannot yet see from our home. The najars have for two hours been gone. Before leaving, they cleaned up the area well, covering the new lumber with a large green canvas they weighted with old wood from the roof. I sit upon the front step and view my son using the rake to gather the cut grass in the yard. He wears what is called a tank shirt, and short pants which are quite loose, and I see the long muscles beginning to show in his arms and legs, his shoulders as well...

House of Sand and Fog is fine for what it is: a quick, detail-oriented, better-written-than-normal thriller (and by "thriller", I mean a story that, by its nature, ends ludicrously). Yet from its title, to the cover, to its repeated mentions of fog, you are knocked over the head with the novel's literary pretensions. Indeed, it was a National Book Award finalist. My praise certainly does not go that high.

A book like this suffers from the snowball effect. You know, when a snowball starts rolling down a mountain, until it becomes a big snow-boulder (like the kind you see in cartoons that run down an anthropomorphic animal on skies.) At the beginning, in the snowball stage, things are fine and dandy; that is, the drama is tight, believable, relatable. As the snow ball picks up more snow, and gets bigger, the story gets a little shaggy. By the end - the snow boulder stage - when characters are getting into unbelievable situations, and things get a little pulpy, well, that's where I lose interest. Still, it's a good deal of fun getting to that weak ending.

This is a book you'd usually feel guilty about reading - especially because it's been another summer and you still haven't finished War and Peace - but you don't feel guilty because it has a leit motif and its written by a guy named Andre.

This book, a thriller, is based on a simple idea: two families fighting over the ownership of one house. I found myself intrigued and couldn't wait to find out what happened - who would eventually get the house?! Kathy did not come across as a very likeable character (I'm not sure if that was the intention?) so I found myself hoping that Behrani and his family would keep it. I thought the ending was a bit rushed and perhaps too unrealistic, but I'm still giving it 5 stars because I think it is a book that deserves to be read and it will keep you hooked.

4.5 stars.
Didn’t love the ending but the journey is very unique and messed up, just how I like my books!

Putting this on my "Read" shelf isn't exactly right--I only made it to page 45. Some people have touted this book as one of the finest ever written and I believe it was a finalist for the National Book Award when it was written. I was at the library and saw it on the shelf and decided to give it a try. However, I just could not keep reading. And from some of the reviews I read online after I put it down, I'm glad I stopped. Although the central theme of Home is important and worthy of exploration, the author's decision to surround the theme with foul language, drug use, adultery, graphic sexual scenes (according to the reviews I read), and murder kept me from reading beyond the first couple of chapters. It's not that I can't handle literature that takes a hard look at the realities of life--I did that for the 6 years I studied English in college. This book just went beyond my limits.

I should stick to my GoodReads list next time!

Reread: April, 2018. This was like catching up with an old friend. It's stayed with me since I first read it back in 2016, and I'm glad to say it was just as good--if not better--the second time around.

Review to come!!

“For our excess we lost everything.”

Here I am, another Oprah Book club selection, continuing to be impressed by the pickings. My edition shows a gloomy black house, enshrouded by fog, perfectly matching up to story’s disconsolate atmosphere.

As I felt myself disappearing into the characters, my initial doubt about adjusting to the semi-unusual writing styled faded. It’s a slow-paced, sedate book where the reader feels as if they’re moving in a dreamy fog with the helpless characters who, despite effort, drift forward toward inevitable tragedy. With talent, Dubus somehow makes their dire situations seem tense, urgent, all while maintaining fuzzy, surreal atmosphere.

Right off I was intrigued by Behrani, even if I was indecisive sometimes on if he was doing right by not selling. Certainly no classic, dashing hero, he holds himself rigid in the face of demeaning profession while wanting to cut loose and better himself by taking it easy and trying a new tactic, which he phrases in his mind as legal theft in America. Even if he holds close to morals in relation such as not striking a woman, he proves a few times he still oversteps his own self-imposed boundaries. His imperfections in the face of his morals makes him human, his regret when he falls makes him sympathetic. Still, even if one admires going as far as you can for the sake of self and family, remember that sometimes all really is just vanity. A man who lives for his family can exclude the well-being and plight of the rest of the world (in this case Kathy and his country) to his personal moral detriment.

I was enraged on behalf of Kathy – no one likes government incompetency – but I ended up repulsed by her later. Her weak spine wasn’t helped by the unrealistic, dopey Lester. She moves through life by avoidance, evading the truth and facing up to stressful issues and ‘small nuances’ like unopened letters from the county. Failed marriages, issues hitting the bottle, soured dreams, she avoids her family when she can so she doesn’t see the disappointment in their eyes and isn’t forced to bear their derision. Meeting the family, I’m sympathetic, they’re jerks, but she is kind of one of those people who you just have to kind of throw your hands up at.

Their lives are ruined in this book, they share this in common. The difference is how they came to that place.

Even if Behrani embraces denial as a way of dealing with his past, and the wife looked away when life treated them well, he at least is trying to climb up to an American dream, unlike Kathy, who gets screwed over not only due to unfair city screw-up, but because she’s put herself in a self-pitying bubble so that tragedy just rolls over her. I felt bad for her - I really did – losing an inheritance and home is a nightmare. It’s her pitiful behavior later which drove the annoying victim-mentality stake deeper. And Lesters just silly, come on.

In conclusion, the reader must wonder, was the house worth it? Its existence as a house was not. What it stood for, the idea of it, perhaps was? Fighting to hold on to home, comfort, inheritance for Kathy? Security and restored dignity for Behrani?

Of course fights in unfairness end bitterly. No one except the child was blameless, but this isn’t a balm to soothe, considering all were also in the right in their own ways.

A simple story which soars with its complexity.

A great book that goes a little off the rails toward the end.

This starts off as a simple enough story about an Iranian immgrant struggling to make good in American, but Behrani's world quickly becomes complicated when he purchases a home at a county tax auction. Interestingly told from three perspectives: Behrani's, Kathy's (the original homeowner) and a random narrator who gives us the whereabouts of Kathy's cop boyfriend Les, House of Sand and Fog is quick moving (as the book jacket suggests), but I often felt while reading that the movie would be a better way to get through this story.

For Kathy, her father's home is only thing keeping her from falling off the wagon after the departure of her husband. When Lester, one of the cops who comes to kick her out of her house shows a little more than sympathy, Kathy quick take up with him and all three parties become far more entagled in each other's lives than they would ever believe.

The book is well set up and well paced, but I wish it had been more balanced in its depiction of the central characters. All throughout the book I felt much more sympathy for the Behrani's than i ever did for Kathy, who comes off as lazy and self-destructive, who herself is sympathetic next to Les, who, among other things, cheats on his wife, plants evidence, and gives booze to a known alcoholic. The ending, though tense, was largely unsurprising. A quick summer read, that left me unchanged after reading it.

ThIs is the worst book I have read in my entire life.