This is my review of American Rust by Philipp Meyer.

This impressive American "debut" novel must have flowered from the diverse influences of growing up with book-loving bohemian parents in a tough working-class suburb, dropping out of school to gain raw experiences but somehow getting to college, avidly reading Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf, and carrying first-hand research to the extent of riding freight trains and interviewing men on trial for murder.

Set against the backdrop of the crumbling American dream, as foreign competition knocks the heart out of once thriving steel-making towns, Meyer explores the drama of an unlikely friendship: on one hand, puny and eccentric but brilliant Isaac English, haunted by his mother's suicide and burdened by the task of caring for his cranky invalid father, on the other athletic but indolent Poe who has thrown away the chance to train as a football champion. Both share a confused desire to escape the depressed backwater of Buell, mixed with inertia and a love of the area's natural beauty. When one commits a serious crime, acting on impulse to save the life of the other, who will be blamed and with what outcomes?

After a dramatic opening, the story slips into a slow-paced cycle round the inner thoughts of six linked characters: Isaac, his favoured sister Lee who has managed to escape to Yale and a wealthy marriage, his crippled father Henry, Poe, his long-suffering mother Grace and Harris, the local police chief who fancies her, himself a survivor of the Vietnam war. Sometimes, Isaac's streams of consciousness become too obscure and tedious, the boozy sex between Grace and Harris a little repetitive, the minor scenes, as when Lee or Harris is socialising, too corny or banal. The strongest charge is that the denouement seems a little rushed and underdeveloped compared with the rest, although I liked the upbeat but open ending. Yet overall, this is gripping, with sufficient tension and unresolved drama to keep you reading in the belief that Meyer is ruthless enough to opt for tragedy, although it will never be unrelieved.

Less ambitious and "epic" than its successor "The Son", for me, "American Rust" is a technically better novel since the structure is tighter and the characters are more fully developed and therefore you care about their fate, with the possible exception of Lee who is the only one who might be regarded as successful, which perhaps is perhaps intentional on Meyer's part.

A good choice for a reading group as there is so much to discuss, it bridges the blurred gap between literary and popular fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes.

This quirky biography of Flaubert wrapped up in an eccentric almost plot-free novel from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Braithwaite, an uptight retired English doctor obsessed with the French author is unusual, often amusing and, as some reviewers have commented, at times too clever by half.

If I had not read in French "Madame Bovary" and "Un Coeur Simple", I would have found it much harder to appreciate this book, which further restricts an appeal already limited by its status as a "literary novel".

I have learned a good deal about Flaubert, which I wish I had known when studying him for A Level decades ago, only no doubt his penchant for whores, young foreign boys and smutty jokes would have been considered unsuitable by my teacher. I can see that he was an original and truly independent thinker, probably still don't quite grasp the contribution he made to the modern novel, but do not find him very likeable as a person. He comes across as immature and opinionated at times, perhaps because his epilepsy isolated him, although he seemed to think he needed to be set apart, an observer looking on, to be able to write.

With his quicksilver intellect, Julian Barnes lets slip in passing a host of fascinating details and anecdotes. Flaubert wished he could afford to burn every copy of the very successful but deemed scandalous Madame Bovary. Did he mean it? Flaubert was bothered by his tendency to use metaphors. Was the famous parrot one of these and, if so, was it meant to be a symbol of the writer's voice, his obsession with "the Word"? Sartre, in what I find a surprisingly intense desire to attack Flaubert, rebuked him for, as Barnes cleverly puts it, being the "parrot/writer" who "feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert".

Barnes's mouthpiece Braithwaite lambasts the critic who claimed that Flaubert was so careless about the outward appearance of his characters that he gave Emmma Bovary three different eye colours: deep black, brown and blue. Instead, he shows how Flaubert subtly described her eyes in different lights and situations. Barnes uses some entertaining devices, such as three different versions of the chronology of Flaubert's life, the first very positive, the second negative, the third a series of striking quotations from different years of his life – or I think it is, but it's hard to know when Barnes is quoting and when he is making things up, which the novel format permits him to do.

I particularly liked the chapter written from the viewpoint of Flaubert's longsuffering mistress Louise Colet, who seemed to want to be his wife rather than his Muse and confidante, although she must have had "better offers". In the excellent chapter, "Pure Story", the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite explores with great poignancy his relationship with his wife, managing in the process to draw comparisons with Madame Bovary.

Although I found some of the middle chapters tedious and rambling to little purpose, the book contains so many sharp insights it deserves to be kept and read more than once.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Honour by Elif Shafak.

Elif Shafak is a born storyteller, who knows how to hook the reader in a first chapter which ends, "He is my brother. He, a murderer". Although appearing to give so much away early on must detract from some of the dramatic power of later events – you could also argue this gives you the thrill of anticipation – a few red herrings and twists are left to the end.

I do not mind that the story of Turkish Adem Toprak, damaged sins-of-the-father style, and his beautiful Kurdish wife, Pemba Kader, or "Pink Destiny", flits between multiple viewpoints over five decades, but accept that this may confuse some readers. The author often seems to digress, caught up in her own fertile imagination, but most characters and incidents have some bearing on the complex plot which proves to have been carefully thought through. For instance, the forbidden lover Elias, a man of great tolerance, moderation and adaptability, symbolises the ability to survive in any culture since he does not belong to a particular one.

The scenes in Kurdish villages near the Euphrates are too unfamiliar for me to assess their authenticity, but I was convinced by the portrayal of a community held together by superstition and tradition which also have the power to destroy those who do not conform. The folktale aspect which Shafak likes to employ, a world of ghosts, spells, binding customs, unbending beliefs and unlikely coincidences is easier to accept in rural Turkey.

The culture shock of the Toprak family's move to London is well drawn, although too many of the sub-plots struck me as unrealistic with weakly developed or stereotyped characters: Roxana in the Chinese gambling den, Iskender's English girlfriend Katie, Yunus's escapades with the squatters – it seems implausible he is only seven, but I suppose at a more realistic ten plus he might be too old to share a room with his sister Esma.

With fewer characters and incidents to distract the reader, there might have been the space to develop the core of the book: the nature of honour in different societies and its implications, particularly for women in intensely male-dominated communities.

The author does not shrink from scenes of great cruelty, nor from the tragedy of misunderstandings and lack of communication, yet the story is saved from harrowing bleakness by her humour and warmth – which occasionally becomes a little too cloying for my taste. The soft centre irked me, as this potentially powerful book winds to a somewhat subdued anticlimax. Some passages are so insightful – for instance, the casual way British people say, "It's a shame" – that I wished the author had spent a little time editing weaker patches – continuity errors, cringe-making dialogue, etcetera – to make this a great piece of literature (like "Life and Fate" or "A Fine Balance") as well as a "good read".

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars