Beach Reads: They All Fall Down by Roxanne St. Claire & The Dinner by Herman Koch

I recently returned from a beach vacation where, among other activities, I indulged in summer reading from the comfort of our bed and breakfast. I purposely selected a couple of “light reading” novels for this trip, deciding without hesitation that the book I’m currently reading (The Mueller Report, as published by The Washington Post) was not quite vacation material. My choice led me to take along two fiction works which had long been consigned to my “to read” pile: They All Fall Down by Roxanne St. Claire, and The Dinner by Herman Koch.

They All Fall Down by Roxanne St. Claire is a young adult novel which I purchased due to Amazon.com’s recommendation concerning its similarity to Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard. (I will confess that Pretty Little Liars is a guilty pleasure of mine, as I have read all sixteen books in the series.) The premise concerns a “list” composed by high school boys in which female classmates are ranked by attractiveness. The “list” takes on heightened significance when the young women it contains begin to be murdered in numerical order.

Unfortunately, in my view They All Fall Down cannot be favorably compared to Shepard’s series. The explanation for the students’ murders turns out to be absolutely preposterous. This is coming from a reader who sat through sixteen books of A’s blackmail (in PLL), so please be assured that it was even less plausible/reasonable than the narrative leaps that take place in that series. To add insult to injury, the work is poorly written (and I do hate to say this), with repeated mentions of “sexy eyes” and one character’s ridiculous nickname (“Fifth” – what teenager would call someone “Fifth?”).

The Dinner by Herman Koch proved much more palatable than its companion. Deft usage of the “unreliable narrator” device produces a suspense novel with a distinctly Scandinavian flavor. The novel takes place over a single meal between two couples whose relationship is contextualized by frequent flashbacks. The couples’ relationship is tense, and their sons have jointly committed a hate crime for which they have not been apprehended. I did take a bit of offense at the author’s implication that one protagonist’s apparent sociopathy stemmed from an autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, the illness was never specifically named, so I tried not to get too caught up in this detail. I ultimately enjoyed the work and agree with the comparisons to Gone Girl (another book I have reviewed here) found in the novel’s jacket.

I would not consider either of the two books to be the next great American novel. I nonetheless found them to be enjoyable enough, even if I did end up hate-reading the last section of They All Fall Down. All in all, the two books fulfilled their purpose as “beach reading” – but if you are at the bookstore and selecting between them, be sure to pick up The Dinner.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Hello readers! I am happy to report that I concluded my graduate studies this month (May 2019), and with that goal achieved, I should have much more time to pursue pastimes like reading. I started by finishing a book which I began in late 2018, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I purchased this book months ago; if I am not mistaken, I bought it the same day as Deep South by Paul Theroux, another book I have reviewed on this blog. (I must have been on a nonfiction purchasing spree at the time.) The Death and Life of Great American Cities marked a bit of a departure for me in multiple ways, as I had never read a work on urban planning before, nor had I heard of Ms. Jacobs. My understanding is that though she was a journalist by trade, Ms. Jacobs engaged in urban activism in response to development efforts in her New York City neighborhood. Her own urban planning ideology was outlined in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work which introduced such concepts of modern development as “social capital” (later expanded upon in Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone).

Ms. Jacobs’ central thesis is that the urban planning efforts of her time (the 1950s and early 1960s) failed to incorporate the wishes of residents. The results of large-scale urban development, typified by the construction of “projects,” often occurred in opposition to local wishes and thus failed to achieve developmental objectives (such as increased safety). The author outlines a series of principles that (in her view) should guide modern urban planning efforts. The construction / preservation of areas with mixed zoning rates first among her guidelines, as Ms. Jacobs believed that neighborhood safety depended upon an area’s usage continuing on all days and at all hours. She extensively draws upon examples found in New York City and other American cities (such as Boston and Chicago) to bolster her claims.

I live in a city of 200,000 residents, and it was no struggle to apply Ms. Jacobs’ principles to the development efforts where I myself live. For example, the downtown area in my city is currently being revitalized with mixed zoning, placing residential, government buildings, private companies, hotels, and restaurants within the same concentrated location. The area of town with mixed zoning is the liveliest in the city, and I am told that it is much safer to walk there at night than it was fifteen years ago. Ms. Jacobs’ other ideas are likewise confirmed when I look around me.

The book is a dense / technical read with extensive discussion of the history of urban planning in the United States, more of a monograph than a work of so-called “popular nonfiction.” The book shows its age at times, at one point devoting a whole chapter to hypotheses about the fate of cities plagued by automobile overcrowding. Ms. Jacobs’ prescience in this respect, in my view, lends even further credibility to the work as a whole. In conclusion, then, I would recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities to anyone interested in urban planning, but I also believe it would be a good addition to the bookshelf of any public official whose work coincides with development.