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Sixteenth Of June, The: A Novel (2014)

by Maya Lang(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1491523158 (ISBN13: 9781491523155)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Brilliance Audio

review 1: Really enjoyed this novel, and not just because I know the author. It's that very rare thing--both a successful satire (the narrator is irreverent & witty) and a book that in the end is tender (as most satires are not) towards most all of its characters, loving their flaws as well as their strengths. The heart of the book is the ever-shifting, fascinating relationship between 2 brothers, Leo and Stephen, and a young woman named Nora. This triangle is somewhat similar to that of another novel, Jeffrey Eugenides' _The Marriage Plot_, but though Eugenides is a novelist I really admire (_Middlesex_ is a work of genius) his _Marriage Plot_ felt to me contrived and heavy-handed, with the 2 male characters becoming really tiresome in their dominance. In Maya Lang's novel, the... more triangle is much better balanced--and her moving and beautiful twist of an ending gives a much more potent reworking/reinterpreting of the 'marriage plot' conclusion of conventional fiction than did Eugenides. I'll add that the pacing is crisp and smart, the sentences beautifully honed and balanced. Throughout are delightful allusions to Joyce's _Ulysses_: Leo's and Stephen's parents enjoy throwing a Bloomsday party of June 16th every year, for the boost it gives their social status in Philadelphia, for instance, and both Leo and Stephen are witty reimaginings of Leopold Bloom's everydayness and Stephen's artsy pretensions. But you don't need to be a _Ulysses_ devotee to relish this read. Bravo!
review 2: I have read a number of books by young(ish) American female authors lately and generally been a bit disappointed. Somehow I have felt a distance towards the content, the books have felt a bit inauthentic; my willing suspension of disbelief has been unwilling, I haven’t been able to rid myself of the feeling that I’m reading a construed novel and the characters have not stood forward as people of flesh and blood and all that. (or it may just be the fact that I’m a middle-age(ish) European male, and the books are not meant for me ... I don’t know).Anyhow I approached Maya Lang’s novel The Sixteenth of June with some scepticism. I got the book from the publisher to write a (this) review.The novel is very loosely based on James Joyce’s Ulysses but please don’t let that get in the way. You don’t need to have read Ulysses, as the book stands quite good on it’s own (and thankfully, without form experiments as in Joyce’s book).The novel is about three people in their late twenties, the brothers Leopold and Stephen (named after characters in Ulysses) and Leopold’s fiancée Nora (from Ibsen?). The plot is simple: on the sixteenth of June, we follow these three during the funereal of the brothers’ grandmother followed by a Bloomfest in the evening, put on by their socialite parents to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the action in Ulysses.This book is all about character, about who we are and what forms our appreciation of ourselves. This is a book of the mind, not of action. This is a slow book, a book the savour, a book of reflection and thought. There are a lot of different themes in the book, intertwined with the characters' internal dialogue.This is a book about time. “There is no longer any downtime, bubeleh, ... Everyone is much too busy for it.” It is a book about loss, about remembrance and coping with it. It is a book about growing up, from the (more-or-less) carefree student period into adulthood. It is book about being in-between. It is not about getting old, but about getting stuck. It is novel about how we are stuck in our preconceptions, not only our preconception about others, but even more about ourselves. The book delves into what it means to be authentic, about how forces within and without pressure us into being in a certain way, into saying or doing the “right” thing. It is about dislocated subjects, about half-communication, about the difficulty to get across. It is about introverts vs extroverts, about radical different approaches to understanding ourselves and our place in the world. In such, it has much in common with what I believe was Joyce’s mission, to tell thing the way they are, in truth and honesty. Life, as it is. As Nora reflects on the rabbi’s speech in the funeral: “... maybe the rabbi is getting it all wrong, each word a wound.”The characters in the book seem to “get it all wrong”, not out of lack of concern, nor from bad will but simply because that’s the way it goes. And in this the novel has more in common with Virginia Woolf (Stephen, the academic brother has been working 7 years on a paper on subjectivity in Woolf).But this is not a bleak novel, this is not Lear, nor Hamlet. Again it is more Woolf in its insistence on the power of imagination. It is a story of becoming – through imagination and, I suppose, love. It is a book that, in spite of it all, reaffirms a belief in life and the fascination of it all. It is a novel that insists on believing in the last sentence of Ulysses: “Yes I said yes I will Yes.”I take back everything I have thought and said about female young American authors. The sixteenth of June is a rich, intelligent and immersive experience. It’s beautiful prose paints the characters, “our faulty selves”, with great precision and believability. It revels in the mystery of the other and comes highly recommended. less

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