The Book of Famous Iowans: A Novel

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Summary: a writer through and through
Review: Bauer is a writer through and through. Neither this nor any of his other books ("Dexterity." "The Very Air") has anything ground-breaking to say, so thematically this is just another coming-of-age novel. But it (they) makes for a great reading experience. He writes like a dream--the pure sensuousness of his prose is a pleasure. Yet it has an appealing simplicity--it never lapses into preciousness or syntactic complications. He also has a wonderful sense of place--he's written with equal authority on New York State ("Dexterity"), the Southwest ("Very Air"), and Iowa. The Fox

Rating:
Summary: Adult reminiscing gets in the way of the boy's narrative.
Review: I am mystified as to why The New York Times raved over this novel. Though the author has a nice sense of place, he incessantly injects the dull reminiscing of the adult Will into what should have been a compelling story of the summer his family fell apart. He'll put in an aside to the effect of: "And though I didn't realize it at the time, the way my father told that joke at the restaurant was an indication of a side of him we didn't often see, and now I understand that . . ." Blah, blah, blah. Get on with the narrative, already! It also strikes me (as the mother of 2 boys) as extremely unlikely that this mom who loved him through childhood and into adolescence would desert him and disappear without a trace. A disappointment.

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Summary: I Can't Get This Book Out of My Mind!
Review: I've read the other reviews posted here including the Kirkus diss. What troubles me about this novel is that it is so true--what the boy feels, what his father feels and how he is unable to say it, how his mother feels and is unable to act it out, and how his friend Bobby feels. That's a minor miracle of writing. I too thought of Madison County, but this is real literature, not a romance to cry over. I identify with the boy, as many of us must, and it's too bad that the author doesn't give us a mother who at least would contact her son in later life, having declared to her husband that she was taking him away. But that's not an essential plot point. Bauer gets inside the skin as well as the head. His use of words, his sentences, his writing style, have been banging around in my head for week. Read it and see for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: a writer through and through
Review: Jumping into The Book of Famous Iowans is jumping into a landscape--a farm that becomes so familiar that you undertand the loss the main character feels when you, like he, finish the book and leave it. Bauer is able to captures the wildy varying feelings of a young boy, his grandmother, his father, his mother, and her lover, designating no favorites among them. It's a true life story, showing how nothing, and everything, happens in a small town...how we who come from small towns can never leave them, and why we search for glimpses of them in well written books like this. If you like Wallace Stegner, Doris Lessing, and Ian Frazier, you'll like Doug Bauer.