Customer Reviews

Ghost Lights: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An edgy, side splitting novel of a mild-mannered government bureaucrat who fears that he has been cuckolded by "Robert the Paralegal". Subsequently, he goes through a number of existential crises that lead him to the hotels and jungles of the Carribean, where he is confronted by a pair of "neurotic bohemians" and by a family of "aggressive German tourists" in his search for a venture capitalist gone missing. The scenarios in this book are written tongue-in-cheek, and bring to mind a WASPish Woody Allen/Larry David misadventure. I should add that there is a very dark side as well, but this only adds to the novel's edginess. Highly recommended for a very pleasurable reading experience.

This is the story of Hal, who goes through life just being; he is married to Susan who he believes is having an affair with a co-worker. They have a daughter who after having an accident is a paraplegic and her parents think she is a telemarketer, but in reality is a phone sex operator. Susan's boss is missing in Belize and Hal suggests that he himself travel down to there to find him. He is trying to prove that he is man enough for Susan or is he trying to add something that is missing from his life? This is a story about mid-life crisis and self-examination. It may be an interesting read for some, but too cerebral for me.

Millet in the first five pages packs more witty, original, insightful observations and metaphors than most writers might do in an entire novel. After a steady diet of such fare, paragraph after paragraph, with no nuance between what merits such deliberate treatment and what might just move the story along: well, it felt to me like sitting down to a dinner where every dish is loaded with buttery goodness...no contrast of flavors. That's my main quibble with the book. A minor one is how Millet gives the protagonist first a job of drudgery, a wife who might be having an affair--who is certainly distant emotionally--then a damaged car from hitting a curb, an adult daughter who is a parapeligic from a childhood accident--who then Millet has to make into a phone sex worker, which the dad discovers by overhearing conversations? That last bit is where I felt like things had gone plot-wise over the top. When Hal the protagonist breaks free of such a heavy gravitational pull--he heads to Belize to find his wife's missing boss/maybe lover in a modern knight errant, quixotic mission of discovery then the sometimes painful humor zings.

This is my first book review for Amazon and I am jumping in here only because I so loved this book I wanted to see it get another 5 star rating.Others have delved further into the plot and I suggest that readers forgo the "book review" below as it contains an ending spoiler which I would have hated to have uncovered ahead of time. This story is so beautifully constructed that I am going back now and rereading upon finishing in order to appreciate the interconnected pieces and subtly placed hints that carry one to the amazing ending. This is an intellectual journey of an extremely ordinary person coming to find his extraordinary self. The layers of insight revealed relentlessly as we travel with Hal mirror everything from the horrific state of the world we live in and our means of shutting out the terrible pain of what it means to live, love and lose, to the embracing of one's own mortality and the inevitable dispassionate judgement of no god greater than one's own soul.

Yes the book demands that you slow down and read each sentence more carefully than you might normally do, but what rewards await your diligence! This was a feast and I enjoyed every minute...I laughed out loud on the airplane when I started it, because Hal's insight is wicked funny, and later got up in the middle of the night to finish it...I just had to know where it was going, and I was sorry to have to put it down in the end.

For me it was a relief to come across a read like this, original, revealing, stimulating, challenging, funny...if you like to push up against the boundaries of your comfort zone, and end up feeling like you just went somewhere profound in your armchair then this might be a good one for you.

Attuned to the winds of change that roar unexpectedly through the most ordinary of lives, Millet dissects the interior landscape of IRS employee Hal Lindley in Southern California circa 1994. Susan and Hal's placid, quiet world has already been shaken by an accident that renders their daughter, Casey, a paraplegic. By habit, Hal measures daily life in small increments, the surface of domesticity most recently ruffled by the disappearance of Susan Lindley's ambitious boss somewhere in South America. Susan anxiously awaits the return of "T." in the flourishing real estate business with the only other employee, Robert, an enthusiastic Yale graduate, all business on hold. Unsettled, Hal ruminates on the minutiae of marriage to Susan, fueling the vague fears and suspicions of an insecure man learning too late he might have been sleepwalking through his days. In a burst of jealousy and rebellion, Hall volunteers to go to South America in search of the missing young mogul.

Burning with shame at the duplicity he has discovered on the home front, Hal embarks on an otherworldly quest as the pieces of his life fall into place far from the familiar parameters of home. With the sleight of hand of a true storyteller, Millet's protagonist escapes the confines of his own limitations with an urgency that propels him into a dimension of consciousness that is both enlightening and tragic. This is a conventional life examined, the secret corridors of Hal's psyche thrown open to the howling winds of new experience. Memories of home blend with the novelty of adventure, all enriched by Hal's discoveries, though he cannot avoid paying the high tariff on wisdom: "He had turned out to be a hothouse flower- a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third." The quietly forceful Millet explores Hal's newly-awakened interior world, an introspective man assaulted by truths that had thus far eluded him, caught in the extremes of T's failed enterprise, slyly delivering her coup de grace in a deceptively simple tale that might leave you breathless in recognition. Luan Gaines/2011.

GHOST LIGHTS: MILLET'S CROSSING

-----------------------------------------------

BOOK REVIEW: MILLET'S CROSSING

-----------------------------------------------

GHOST LIGHTS

By Lydia Millet

W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, pp. 255, $24.95

REVIEWED BY JOHN M. EDWARDS

*************************************************** ----------------------------------------------------------------

Upfront, I'll admit I know Lydia Millet, author of the new novel Ghost Lights, personally. Thus I am of course obligated to give a good review, which is easy enough considering Lydia writes large, has already absconded with a PEN USA Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

First off, let me say that Lydia in person is "purty." She looks like she writes, with poise and pizzazz, whether she is ragging on the precious term "emotional rollercoaster" or enlivening the action with a drop comment:

"He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men."

Her wickedly perverse sense of humor is as deliciously burlesque as Dorothy Parker riffing at the Algonquin Roundtable. With already six critically acclaimed books under her equatorial belt, she seemingly writes with her left hand. Oddly, I don't always remember what her memorably titled novels--"George Bush, Dark Prince of Love" and "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" --are about, just the elusive aftershocks and radioactive fallout from her equinoctal prose. They are penned as intentional bestsellers and potential prize-winners.

Ghost Lights centers around an IRS agent named Hal, who flies to Belize on a quest to find his unfaithful wife's boss, T. (also the protagonist of Millet's previous novel How the Dead Dream), who is MIA. Like Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's A Heart of Darkness (and "Apocalypse Now"), T. has gone troppo in the Central American primary rainforest. (Incidentally, Lydia used to work as a conservationist with NRDC: The Natural Resources Defense Council.)

Grappling with such issues as longing and intrigue, love and marriage, philosophy and philandering, adventure and stasis, this seriocomic book travels like mostly fine weather with the occasional literary rain squall. Lydia is a lover of unusual images, such as comparing fish swimming to "the Mohawks of teenage punks drinking in a graveyard."

With an elegant prose style and believable dialogue, Ghost Lights makes us feel like we are listening in to catty conversations overheard in museum cafes, while Lydia forces us to turn the pages of this well-paced book as deliberately as if flipping through a dictionary looking up the word way in the back "widget":

widget n

1. any little device or mechanism, especially one whose name is unknown or forgotten (humorous)

2. a hypothetical manufactured object, considered to represent the typical product of the manufacturer

--Encarta World English Dictionary

Unlike other writers, Lydia Millet, compared to Kurt Vonnegut in The Village Voice, and by me to Italo Calvino with a sex-change op in Amazon.com, lets her characters speak for themselves. Although the dramatis personae are in many senses winning personalities, we gather from their creator that we are not supposed to be big fans. Instead, we should admire the peripheral ghost lights scribbled into the blank margins of earth and sky, memory and mneumonics. Or, aurora borealises.

With T. found but turned over to the policia as a murder suspect of his native guide (dead from natural causes), Hal ultimately is fatefully knifed by a beggar boy, and ends up wandering and wondering in an elegiac danse macabre towards death:

"He did not pretend to know much about souls, or the idea of them. He never had. But once or twice he had thought he could hear a soul, a faint music. The spirit moves around us, falls past us invisible like air through air . . . all we are sure we have, all that we know, is the suspicious air of its presence."

--Ghost Lights, (p. 255)

Hal's soliloquy reminded me of another "Hal," the fritzing fazing-out computer singing "Daisy!" from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." With thoughts of his paralyzed daughter Casey and fading wife Susan in his head, Hal ventures like a ghost light into the eternal. I am glad that Lydia is killing off her forlorn protagonist in this one, that the hapless Hal will be gone forever: it is instead the legendary T. that we are anxious to see survive and appear in yet another new read. . . .

--John M. Edwards, New York City, 2011

------------------------------------------------------------------

Bio: John M. Edwards has traveled worldwidely (five continents plus), with stunts ranging from surviving a ferry sinking off Siam to being stuck in a military coup in Fiji. After graduating from Tulane University, he worked as an editor at Pocket Books and as a copyeditor at Emerging Markets, covering world development bank meetings abroad. His work has appeared in Amazon.com, CNN Traveller, Entertainment Weekly, Missouri Review, Salon.com, Grand Tour, Islands, Escape, Endless Vacation, Condé Nast Traveler, International Living, Emerging Markets, Adventure Journey, InTravel, Xtreme Travel Stories, Traveling Stories, Amazing Travel Stories, International Business Times, Travelink, Adventuring and Exploration, Pure Travel, Literal Latté, Coffee Journal, Lilliput Review, Poetry Motel, Artdirect, Mango, Mabuhay, Verge, Slab, Stellar, Trips, Travelmag, Big World, Vagabondish, Glimpse, Go World Travel, Eclectica, The Expeditioner, Danse Macabre, Essays & Fictions, The Smoking Poet, Europe Revisited, BootsnAll, Hack Writers, Tulane Review, Richmond Review, DVD Express, Borderlines, ForeWord, Go Nomad, North Dakota Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review. He is the recipient of a NATJA (North American Travel Journalists Association) Award, a TANEC (Transitions Abroad Narrative Essay Contest) Award, a Road Junky Hell Trips Award, a Literal Latté Travel Writing Award, a Bradt Independent on Sunday Award, and three Solas Awards (sponsored by Travelers' Tales). His fantastical novella, "Tom James, Zagat Reviewer," is available in samizdat. His new work-in-progress, Dubya Dubya Deux, is about a time traveler. He is editor-in-chief of the upcoming annual Rotten Vacations.