Still Life with Book Maven: Recommended Reading: "Apologize, Apologize!"

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The Hachette imprint "12" publishes by conceit: Just 12 books each year, one each month, ostensibly "to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only form publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works -- that is our ultimate purpose.

This language is a bit high-toned ("communities of conversation," feh), but the intent is good. More important, so are the books. I don't like them all, or many unreservedly, but for the most part, I can count on a 12 title as one to which I'll want to pay attention.

I was drawn to Apologize, Apologize! in its ARC (advance reader's copy) form for a very simple and narcissistic reason: The author's name, Elizabeth Kelly, is the same as my grandmother's (I co-opted it for a year or so in college. Yes, instead of changing my name to something punk, I decided to emulate a grandparent. I've never been cool.). I took a look at the jacket squib and put it back on the galley pile. (NB: It will be released on February 10.)

Mea culpa, 12 Books. I should have opened it and started reading right then and there. Kelly (who seems to be Canadian, but has a remarkable ear for East Coast U.S. diction) has written a novel that literally picks you up by your collar and throws you in medias res with the Collier-Flanagan family. According to that jacket squib, this is "a dysfunctional family novel to end all dysfunctional family novels." I disagree. Protagonist Collie Flanagan's family -- father, mother, uncle, brother, many dogs, numerous racing pigeons, and terrifying grandfather -- at times seemed more functional than the majority of quiet suburban 2.5-children households. They each truly care about something or someone, and they each guard their loves (be they alcohol, mischief, left-wing causes, pigeons, or good old-fashioned capitalism) fiercely.

After the initial whirl of house, beach, and infighting is over, there is a lovely long interlude about Collie and his brother Bingo that deserved to stand on its own as a novella. Although the Alex P. Keaton-esque Collie, with his love of order and white shirts, never fully springs to life, his love for his ghostly pale, frecklefaced, greeneyed scamp of a brother does. Wherever there is Bingo, there is trouble, an it's not the accidental kind. Bingo seeks out practical jokes, underdogs, real dogs, hapless local girls, and revenge in equal amounts and many different orders. The unspooling of the brothers' teenaged hijinks is familiar territory that is made new by Kelly's absolutely remarkable and elegant prose. She creates similes the way other people blink: Bingo's sense of humor "overran him like a form of Tourette's," while around their father, "the smell of whiskey filled the air around him like incense."

Supposedly each of the family members is reacting in his or her own way to the financial tyranny imposed on them by maternal grandfather Peregrine Collier, known as "the Falcon." Collier, who owns a megamedia corporation known as "Thought-Fox, Inc.," owns a huge estate outside of Boston called Cassowary (in case you don't remember, a cassowary, unlike a peregrine falcon or even a humble pigeon, cannot take flight). The boys spend many summers and holidays virtually on their own amid the bizarrely whimsical topiary of the grounds (circus elephants in a ring?) and the freedom offered by the private shoreline. Between this luxurious neglect (not always benign) and the suffocating squalor of their island home, two different characters are formed. And -- surprise, surprise -- neither one is fully functional.

Unfortunately, the same might be said of this debut novel's second half. I hesitate to give out any spoilers, and talking too much about that second half would inevitably do so. However, I can say that two extended vignettes, one in wartorn El Salvador and the other in Ireland, do very little to advance the picaresque. Both vignettes seemed, like the section on the brothers, to have been standalone pieces that were crammed in to make this a full-length novel. I did read them, and there was some amazing material in both, but they did not seem to belong to the same book.

I subscribe to a school of critical thought (perhaps I'm its only member?) that believes highly flawed books are often more worthy of an audience than highly polished ones in which there is nothing new. Apologize, Apologize! is not perfect, but I'd rather spend hours in its company than minutes reading canned fiction.