3 StarsI discovered this author while doing my usual Goodreads stalking. And he fit my current criteria for a favorable reading experience: magic realism, adult (adult meaning not YA, not adult meaning porn), his books can be found at my local library, and the themes of the book deal with something bigger in scope than "how can I get that cute vampire to like me back."For me, reading is a very intimate experience. There aren't too many other types of artists/ entertainers who can get into your head like a good writer can - not even tv and film makers, not even musicians. You enter an author's world and it's like being seduced - they can tap straight into your imagination and monkey about with your emotions. Jonathan Carroll, through his main character Vincent, proves to be quite the charmer. But despite Carroll's innate charm and obvious skills, reading his novel White Apples left me slightly disappointed.Here's what I liked about the book. Carroll uses his main characters as pieces in a complex, cosmic puzzle that he is trying to solve while his readers look over his shoulder. There is some heady philosophy/ theology going on in this book as Carroll's characters attempt to understand the interconnectedness of space, love, god, time, death, life, and humanity. Carroll's treatise is all the more palatable because it comes in the guise of a charming and enticingly written story. Carroll's use of language is, for the most part, engaging and lovely. There is an overall dream-like rhythm and flow to the pace and mood of the novel. Most of the time you can loose yourself in the language. Even his descriptions of violence, as grotesque and strange as these instances seem, all support the dream like quality of the novel. It's like the violence you'd encounter in a dream - perverse and unreal like a Salvador Dali painting - but somehow it all manages to get folded and absorbed into the current of the story.Here's what I didn't like about the book. 95% of the time Carroll's descriptions are fascinating and beautiful - 5% of the time they are really stupid. As an example I mention his description of Isabelle's (Vincent's on again/ off again lover) eyes. He refers to her eyes as being "bee stung." I'm not quite sure if this was Carroll's attempt to rethink the tried and true descriptor phrase "bee stung lips" by implying that Isabelle's sultry, pouting eyes were the natural accompaniment to a set of full and pouting lips or if this was some sort of editorial goof? Whatever the reason, my mind was picturing swollen eyes and severe allergic reaction, not cute and sexy - it completely jolted me out of the groove of the story.My other disappointment with the book was the characters. I did not like the main characters. Vincent is kind of charming in a "man who loves women," philandering seducer, man-whore kind of way, but he and his mistress, Isabelle, seem to have the overall emotional acuity of turnips. Vincent is unable to be faithful to a woman and Isabelle is a self described coward who deserts and abandons at the first sign of trouble. The arc of the story is that these two people are supposed to change - abandon their selfish ways - enough so that they can be the loving and dutiful parents to Isabelle's unborn child. This unborn child is sentient (a plot device that really icks me out) and is supposed to be the next Jesus/ prophet/ cosmically significant person. But I didn't believe their transformations. I don't mind flaws in main characters; quirks and imperfections usually draw me into characterizations. But significant flaws topped off with excessive over privilege (in the case of Isabelle and Vincent these would be the privileges of beauty, wealth, and intelligence) just left me feeling detached. Now there were a few rather lame attempts to show that these characters had matured - Vincent confronting the bitterness of his ex-wife, Isabelle confronting the cowardice of her treacherous past selves - but for me, there just wasn't enough self realization and reckoning. No matter how many pet names or cute couple anecdotes that Carroll tried to bribe me with, I just wasn't buying it - I didn't feel any real emotional depth to their relationship.Regardless of my problems with the characters, Carroll's writing was enticing enough to keep me reading - I did still give this book 3 stars, after all. I don't think I will be reading the next book in this series, but I would definitely be willing to try some of Carroll's other novels.
White Apples is the beginning of a new trilogy from Carroll, and with new beginnings he's decided to modify his modus operandi from previous novels. To start with, gone is the first-person, unreliable male narrator; in its place is a third-person omniscient voice that is both strangly familiar and disconcerting. I hesitate to call it Carroll's true voice, because he's shown in previous novels that he can take on differing personas convincingly, and the voice is still filtered here through the impressions of the characters. However, instead of only getting into the thoughts of the primary character lost in Carroll's latest version of Wonderland, this time you get to understand the motivations of three: the male lead, Vincent Ettrich, "a genial philanderer" (as the dust jacket copy labels him); Isabelle, his true love; and Coco Hallis, his guardian angel.That's the other thing that's different about this new novel. Most of Carroll's novels have something strange and weird about them--the common way I introduce his work to people is to say that it would be labeled magic realism if his last name had been of the Spanish origin. Before White Apples, however, the typical Carroll started off in a world much like our own and only started to look weird halfway through the book when the dog sleeping on the bed starts talking or two characters realize that they share the same dreamworld. In this new novel, Carroll drops us down the rabbit hole in the first chapter when we learn that Vincent is actually dead. Or has died, and now is back, but not in the sense that he was legally dead and the paramedics restarted his heart, but in the Monty Python sense of he had kicked the bucket and was pushing up daisies, and now he's walking his old haunts. No one knows the difference, except for his friend Bruno Mann, but that's because Bruno's dead himself.It only gets weirder from that.Carroll's strength is never in the weirdnesses, although every one of his books contains a major element of the fantastic. Instead, Carroll's best writing centers around those integral and important details that make up characters and relationships. I consider the first third of Bones of the Moon to be the best love story I've ever read and think it would have not been out of place had it appeared in The New Yorker. There's no fantasy anywhere in it, either, except the wonder that such a love could ever grow between two people. In White Apples, the reader never gets to see those important details between Vincent and Isabelle, and must instead learn about their character and relationship from the things they tell each other and awkward flackback sequences. In the world of creative writing workshops, we would consider this "telling, and not showing," except that Carroll's an accomplished storyteller and doesn't linger on the telling for that long. If this is your first taste of Carroll, you might not even notice it, but for those fans, it provides enough of a twist to the tale that it is every bit as off-putting as the Twilight Zone cliffhangers at the end of each chapter here.I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like this book. I read it with the same fervor that I reserve for only a few authors (Carroll, Pat Cadigan, Iain M. Banks, and, recently, J.K. Rowling). But something nagged at me constantly, and I think it was the assumption that the relationship between Vincent and Isabelle was love, beautiful and strong. My suspension of disbelief didn't have any trouble with Vincent back from the dead, but I could never get over the precious way that Vincent and Isabelle reflected on their past. It was like listening to a couple baby-talk with each other thinking that you would hear their words as endearing and not sophomoric.This is supposedly the first book of a Joyce Cary-like trilogy, where this was from the viewpoint of the man, the next will be from the viewpoint of a woman, and the third from a child. Having heard Carroll read the first chapter of the new book during his recent U.S. tour, I'm already excited by it, and it should be interesting to see how well he gets into the female viewpoint--the sections in White Apples give us a just a taste of that. That first chapter is weirder than anything in this book, and perhaps that is what Carroll is heading to: a book that shows us normal is really the fantasy, the fantastic.
What do You think about White Apples (2004)?
WHITE APPLES is one of my favorite Carroll novels; the sequel is GLASS SOUP, and both contain my favorite characters, Vincent and Isabelle. From his website:"Vincent Ettrich is in a tight spot. He has died and been brought back to life to help save his unborn son from evil and chaotic forces who want to prevent this son from becoming the savior of the universe. Sound bizarre? Welcome to the surreal and metaphysically massive novel WHITE APPLES by Jonathan Carroll.In Carroll's world, humans are key threads in a giant tapestry that is being woven as life is lived. But there are dark forces at work who don't want the weaving to continue as is and Ettrich, his beloved Isabelle, and their sentient fetus find themselves standing in the way. Their struggles to merely understand what is happening to them and to stand tall in the very face of darkness makes for a humorous, touching, and thrilling tale with, as is expected, a big bang of an ending. But the most marvelous aspect of the novel is not its far-reaching, mind-blowing metaphysics. It's the wonderfully tragic love story of Vincent and Isabelle that keeps this flight of fancy grounded and beautifully human."A critic wrote: " 'In February, the month when suicide always looks good to me, I taught a class in Poe...' This and other strange sentences lace the baroque and iridescent world of novelist Jonathan Carroll. Too fevered and hallucinatory for lovers of popular literary fiction, Carroll's strange hybrids exist in a twilight zone that has both befuddled mainstream publishers and eluded a mass readership. Yet they've won him a string of admirers--including Jonathan Lethem, Pat Conroy, Katherine Dunn, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman."And me!
—Julia
This is a typical Jonathan Carroll novel. I've just finished it, so I'm still feeling a bit weirded out. More than some of the others I've read, this one had some jarring plot twists... first you're here, everything's normal (given that the main character's actually been resurrected from the dead and he can't remember being sick or dying) and next thing he's in a taxi next to a giant rat named Alan Watts. Sometimes the plot changes are implausible enough to jolt you out of the story, and in my case I had to put the book down, take a few breaths and a break, other times they add to the otherworldliness. Carroll is a deep and philosophical thinker, he plays with themes of death, afterlife, the soul and with profound love, but he does so within the framework of a fantasy/magic realist novel whose characters are likeable and ordinary. Despite some extremely weird elements, this book was still a good read.
—Adele
Non so nemmeno come definire il genere cui appartiene Jonathan Carroll. Non è fantasy, non è fantascienza, forse fantastico? Chissà. Non sono molto abituata a leggere libri così.Ma la cosa bella è che oltre al Caos che si presenta sotto forma di un ratto con il rossetto, oltre a Dio che è un mosaico, oltre a un bambino non ancora nato che parla con la madre, oltre alle spiegazioni su com'è la morte, oltre a tutte queste cose pazzesche che succedono, c'è la descrizione perfetta di un amore vero. Ci sono pagine assurde su mondi impensabili e pagine umanissime sui sentimenti.Ed è questa secondo me la forza di Carroll, e il motivo che mi fa piacere i suoi libri nonostante io preferisca il quotidiano: sebbene la mente dell'autore sia in grado di concepire scene totalmente surreali (e gran parte delle volte, devo ammettere, molto divertenti oltre che affascinanti), conosce bene anche l'animo umano e lo descrive con parole sagge, originali e ben scritte.Forse se non vi piace il genere non lo apprezzerete, ma io l'ho letto per amore e vi ho trovato l'amore.
—Thais
