The Book Blog of Evil

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

2012-01-27T01:28:00.001-06:00

This is the review of this audiobook put forth by the good people at Audible.com in their recent round up of recommendations:

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is definitely one of my top 5 books of all time! The author and three outstanding narrators take you on an unexpected journey that you never want to end. The book is expertly written with a mini-cliffhanger after each chapter. I love a book that draws you in from the first few minutes and keeps you captivated until the last second. The numerous characters are introduced in a logical manner that doesn’t distract from the overall story. Although this book is over 46 hours, it’s worth every second. This is an excellent example where the audio version adds so much value to the overall experience of the book. (Gary, Customer Care)

I don't know your life, Gary, Customer Care, but I pity you anyway. Because 1Q84 is so far from being one of my top books that it isn't even visible with a telescope. I am on chapter 6, and I hate it. I hate the writing. I hate the translation. I hate narrators. I hate the plot and I hate the fact that this downloaded in four parts and I'm less than a third of the way through the first part, which means I'm only about 8% through the whole book and I hate it.

So--shall I tell you how I feel about it?

Honestly, I can't tell what the source of the problem is, but I really don't like this book. I only got it because it made so many Best of 2011 lists. Trust me, I read a LOT of those lists, because I have so much trouble finding books I like. I'm even back at school getting a master's degree in English lit, because it is so hard to find a book worth reading these days. So when a lot of book reviews that I like said this one is worth reading, I believed them and got this book. I got it in audio because I had some credits I need to use up, and because it would give me something to listen to as I trudge through the lousy winter to my classes.

This is a book that is the aural equivalent of trudging through a lousy winter. It amplifies the trudging. It possibly even makes trudging through a lousy winter seem like an improvement over reading this book.

I hate winter. This is not an endorsement.

So what is the problem? Where to start? The plot thus far involves two unrelated people. Aomame ("green peas" in Japanese) is a bored and snotty young woman who deploys miniskirts and lacy push-up bras in order to murder a wife-beater without leaving a trace. She then redeploys said clothing in order to intimidate a hapless 50 year old traveling businessman into having meaningless sex with her, so she can get over the fact that she is a snotty paid assassin. While doing this, she worries over the class anxiety of possibly being confused with being a prostitute, so she lugs around big books about railway development so she won't be mistaken for a whore.

Meanwhile, Tengo is a mild-mannered math tutor who writes fiction on the side. While reading submissions for a magazine fiction prize, he comes across a novella that sticks in his mind despite its obvious flaws. The magazine publisher suggests that Tengo should revise the manuscript and they should submit it for a bigger prize. Tengo has ethical concerns--and the scene where he discusses this with the editor reads like he's a reluctant nephew getting pulled into Uncle Tony Soprano's money laundering schemes.It's not a fucking RICO conspiracy to collaborate on a book, to edit it or re-write it. Honestly, nobody cares.

So, the plot thus far minimizes the possible points of interest--why does Aomame assassinate? Where did she learn the skills?--in favor of obsessive details about mundane elements of the surroundings. Aomame ruins a pair of pantyhose by walking without her shoes, so she goes to buy new ones, and then finds somewhere to actually put them onzzzzzzzzz--oh, did I fall asleep? What did I miss?

Equally, Tengo goes to buy a word processor so he can re-write the novella, and then he types for a while, and then he prints it out and makes corrections and then he makes those corrections on the word processor and then he types some more. Srsly?

While the plot is failing to be interesting, the writing style is not making up for it. This could be intentional, this could be Murakami's style, or it could be the fault of the translation--I don't know, but the prose is brutal. Aomame sits at the bar and looks at the man she is brow-beating into sleeping with her. "He wore a dark blue suit. His tie was blue, with red stripes. His shirt was also blue. He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. His tie was slightly loosened. He was not quite bald. His thinning hair was combed over to one side." The dreariness of it! Flat, pointless detail piled on top of flat pointless detail. If this is literary style, I don't need it--I have enough opportunities in my life to experience flatness and pointlessness--I don't need to import it.

The narration reinforces the dreariness. The narrators read carefully, precisely, articulating each syllable without much variation in pitch, tone, speed or emotion. The series of sentences above about the blue suit might be tossed off, glossed over. It's easy to imagine a Sam Spade type narration speeding through the details, reinforcing the "blue" repetitions to create a poetic image of a monochromatic (and thus negligible) man in a bar. Instead it reads like an inventory, and who reads those in their leisure time?

Not making me happy. And the larger plot promised in the reviews, about how Aomame has slipped into a parallel world is so far signaled only by the fact that the police officers seem to have different uniforms and carry Berettas rather that old-fashioned revolvers than she remembers. There have been two long discussions about the nature of the guns and the amount of starch in the new uniforms. I wish I were kidding. It's as though Rain Man rewrote Stieg Larson.

Perhaps part of the problem here is that Murakami is stuck in the recursive trap of writing a book of fiction about the nature of fiction writing. Tengo is a writer, and Murakami shows us what it is like to write. Aomame has slipped into a world which is almost but not quite identical to the world she came from--a world which appears to be real but isn't, not quite. So all the pages devoted to the politics and ethics of a fiction prize is writing about writing. Tengo's purchase of a word processor is writing about writing. Aomame's experience in an alternate world is writing about the nature of fiction. So perhaps all this exhaustive accumulation of detail is in service of the point about how a writer creates a world, and how much detail is necessary for something to seem real enough. Which is all very intellectual and smart, but not a lot of fun to read.

Will I abandon this? At this point, I am going to go back and read some reviews and see whether there is anything in them that makes this book seem worth any additional slogging. Unless I find something that makes this book sound more compelling than my experience so far, this one is going to go unfinished.

EDIT: Janet Maslin at the New York Times has written a review that has convinced me that I don't need to discipline myself to keep going. Thanks, Janet! After all--there are so many books, and no one can possibly read them all, so I don't feel even a little bit guilty about abandoning one I don't like.

Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf

2012-01-01T23:55:00.000-06:00

Let's start the new year with a run of Virginia Woolf readings! Because nothing says "2012" like the writings of World War I avant garde!

Yes, I am taking a course in Virginia Woolf next term. It's going to be a Bloomsbury kind of year!

The Publishing Details:
Jacob's Room was written around 1922, and may be based on the life of Woolf's younger brother, Thoby Stephens, who died at 25. It is also an early foray into the stream-of-consciousness/psychological writing that Woolf continued to hone through more famous works like To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. I thought perhaps as an early effort, it might be easier to follow than those works, but I don't think that is true. There is certainly a lot going on in this book, and it's clear that VW had a lot of ideas about literature and its limitations.

The Structure:
The book follows the life of Jacob Flanders in slices: his childhood in Scarborough, his education at Oxford, his adult life in London, his flirtations and affairs, a trip to Greece, and ends with a short piece after his death. Each chapter takes place in a different time and place, and in Woolfian (Woolvian?) fashion, you have to puzzle for yourself where and when. While Jacob is the center of the novel, there is no real attempt to narrate him for the reader. He rarely speaks, his thoughts are not presented through an omniscient narrator, and even the point of view is rarely his. VW is in effect presenting his life from the outside, through the impressions he makes on those around him.

The Literary Effect and Analysis:

Woolf can be quite hard to read, and I find the pleasure less in the reading, and more in thinking about what she was trying to do with literature. Or, as VW makes clear in the course of her writing, since we cannot know what another person is thinking, my pleasure comes from what I find myself thinking about the limitations and strengths of literature--ideas that are sparked by wading through her works.

To begin with, VW's fiction is not terribly inviting. Jacob's Room starts with a family outing at the seashore, with most of the narrative focused on the thoughts of his mother, Betty Flanders. (And it is with that surname that Jacob is obviously destined for death in WWI, although VW doesn't engage in the ominous portentiousness of Edith Wharton in House of Mirth). VW fills the chapter with images that might be read to signal Jacob's destiny--a small crab in the bottom of a child's bucket, trying with its "weakly legs" to escape its confinement, falling back and trying again and again; the two "enormous" people Jacob sees lying on the beach, immobile and disturbing; the misidentification of a rock with a nanny; the skull lying on the beach. Yet VW is decidedly not Victorian, and as much as these images are actually present, they don't really seem to be used as signals of Jacob's future, since they are mixed in with equally vivid, non-morbid imagery, including the "courtship" of Captain Barfoot, the nonsense about Mrs. Flanders forgetting the meat for dinner, the women sitting together after the boys have gone to bed.

Subsequent chapters show Jacob boating with his friend Timothy Durrant to the Cornish coast, where we see as much about random Cornish housewives as we do of Jacob. He returns to London after graduation, falls a little in love with a prostitute named Florinda, and experiences heartbreak when he sees her with another man--he had built up an idealized image of her, which was contradicted when he saw her behaving as she always did, but with someone else.

One could be peevish and complain about the utter randomness of VW's writing--the images and moments she has selected to present to the reader do not serve any larger artistic function that we are used to. Trained as we are by the Victorians to view every detail as significant, VW is frustrating since so much of the book seems to be nothing but details, and they don't add up. I think that is the point, however. VW is using the form of the novel to make the argument that what we think we know about others is really our own projections--not necessarily accurate in any way. And so Jacob is presented via the impressions he makes, and what other people think about him based on those impressions.

An novelist whom I love, Faith Sullivan (The Cape Ann--drop everything and go read that if you haven't already) gave a talk about writing fiction. When writing fiction, you have to choose your details, and there is meaning in what you choose. If you were writing a biography, and the subject wore red shoes, you would put that into the book, because that was the color the shoes were. In fiction, however, the shoes could be any color at all, and making the choice to say they are red is to make a significant choice--a choice that means something, precisely because the author could have made any other choice.

My experience of reading VW is that she is demonstrating that all those choices exist, but they don't necessarily constitute meaning, in any profound way. Many incidents in life just happen, and sometimes a person will interpret those incidents and assign meaning that can't be verified. So Clara Durrant, sister of Jacob's school friend Timothy, falls in love with Jacob. Yet what can she possibly know of him? He is handsome (distinguished looking, VW reiterates), he has been to university, but his actions are opaque, his conversation extremely limited. In some ways VW uses Clara to show us the folly of our trying (as readers) to know any character, since in many ways Clara's infatuation with Jacob is obviously the product of her own projection of characteristics onto him. He never acts contrary to her projections, at least in her presence, and so her fiction of him is preserved--but that in no way means it is accurate.

Similarly, Jacob believes he has a special affinity--an uncommon understanding--with the ancient Greeks. While hiking with a friend, he announces that they are probably the only two people in the world who understand what the Greeks were about. Yet VW is careful to say that their declaiming would not be comprehensible either to actual ancient Greeks or even Greek professors. The supposed affinity is entirely in their own minds, and could never be absolutely verified. In the same way, readers may think they understand who Jacob is, but VW has made it the work of the novel to prove that assumption to be false.

In some ways, Jacob's Room isn't fiction as traditionally understood, so much as it is a kind of fictionalized biography. There are some bare facts of "Jacob's" life, and VW doesn't really embellish or speculate on what might be going on inside the subject's mind. This is not because VW is limited as a writer--in fact, she manages to sketch vivid characters in only a few lines, and has some wonderful sections on the internal states of others, so it is apparent that she has chosen to limit her speculation about Jacob deliberately.

It's an interesting reaction to the sprawling omnipotence of a Dickens, for example, this precise limiting of what might be viewed in real life by an outsider. It's a bit tart, actually, reading this book. Not one for sinking into and wallowing in--rather a novel for precise consideration. Did VW think of herself as a novelist, or was she trying to develop something new? Does VW actually inform how fiction is currently written--or is she a dead end in literary evolution? She might actually have had a bigger impact on biography than fiction--one can imagine she would be right at home in a genre called "literary non-fiction."

Visit By The Goon Squad (Revisited), by Jennifer Egan

2011-09-10T14:49:00.002-05:00

I have already reviewed this book here, but I am thinking about it again in light of Slate's recent Audio Book Club Podcast about it. It's the format that was raised, and which I think is more deliberate than I thought before.

One way to describe this book is that it is a series of short stories that interlock around a world of rock and roll. The two most central characters are Bennie Salazar, who goes from a member of a high school rock group to a successful producer on a comeback, and Sasha, a women who was originally Bennie's assistant. The stories travel back and forth in time, and have as their subjects a number of people who are more or less tangential to Bennie and Sasha. The parts to create a sort of a whole--it would not be accurate to call this "a book of short stories" because they are more connected than that, although it is hard to call it "a novel" because it is so diffuse. It lacks a central figure or narrative arc.

I have come to the tentative conclusion that the best way to think of A Visit by the Goon Squad is as a concept album--the literary equivalent of Sargent Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I still think Sargent Pepper is primarily a collection of songs, and any larger arc or form is little more than coincidence--but people have long claimed that it is the expression of a singular vision and has to be viewed as a whole.

I feel the same way about Goon Squad--there is a little bit more than mere assemblage, but less than a complete narrative. Which is actually a very interesting artistic choice for a book about the people who make rock records.

So, I'm happier with the book as a whole when I view it through that lens. Not a bad result!

Will, by Christopher Rush

2011-09-10T14:41:00.005-05:00

Another book for my class on Adapting Shakespeare, this one an imagined fist person narration of the man's life, told to his lawyer: a confession in the guise of drafting a will. Will's will--play with the puns as you like it.

It's a long book, with lots of words. Possibly too many words.

Rush has tried to depict the man from Stratford as The Man who wrote the plays, showing us a dying Shakespeare so in love with language that it pours forth from him, recreating his own lineage, his youth, his path to London, how his life informed the writing of his plays. He ties the great plays to the autobiographical details, making a convincing argument for the ability of a common man to write transcendent literature. More interestingly, in crafting the man Rush finds ways to talk about the plays--which is clearly his great love.

The first third of the book is long and slow and drags on to little purpose. In some ways, it seems like Rush felt obligated to put in every verifiable fact about Shakespeare that exists. We get background into his parents, his grandparents, aunts and uncles, the rude mechanicals of Stratford. Rush takes great pains to recreate the sights and smells of 16th century rural England, and especially the religious conflict. Bloody Mary had tried to reinstate the country to Catholicism, only to be succeeded by her Protestant sister--herself on the throne less than six years by Shakespeare's birth. Rush posits the family as less religious than prudent--fond of the old religion, but not willing to die for it. Will speaks of a cousin of his father's, executed as a traitor to the new religion, his head stuck up on London Bridge. It is a convincing argument for Will's refusal to commit himself to any religion.

The early part of the book has certain jobs to perform--as mentioned, it has to incorporate all the scanty facts known about Stratford Will; it has to show us a lad with enough education to plausibly have been a playwright; it has to show us a love of language and stories. This last is done through the characterization of his maternal grandmother, "Arden Agnes" he calls her, who tells him the country horror stories of witches and ghosts, firing up his imagination in a way that plausibly provides for his later work.

The book doesn't actually come alive, however, until Shakespeare himself is 18, meets Anne Hathaway, and falls in love. Moon-calf love, forever stealing out of his bed at night to wander the lanes between his house and hers, too shy to declare himself, too hormonal to stay away. Was there an arrangement between Shakespeare's father and Anne's to marry off their children? Possibly. Anne was eight years older, and in Rush's telling, her father was dying and needed to get her landed safely. John Shakespeare is limned as a soft touch for an old friend--no real advantage to the Shakespeare family to ally with the Hathaways, but a favor to a dying friend to see his daughter provided for.

It didn't matter, as Will fell hard for Anne, but in his stupid youth, he wasn't able to do anything but wander around on fire for her until the day of her father's funeral. Which rather left Anne in the lurch--as happened the rest of her life. Rush captures the joy of first love, the burn and the madness, and it is here that his Shakespeare becomes believably the man of the sonnets.

The details accumulate--the hasty marriage and rapid birth of his first daughter, Susanna, followed the next year by the twins Hamnet and Judith. They lived in the Henley Street house with his father, and Rush paints a sad life for Anne--surrounded by her own babies, and her husband's siblings, the youngest of which was still quite small, and only Anne and Mary Arden Shakespeare to do all the work for the house full of men. It must have been crowded--some eleven people in the one house, and Will had no employment. This Will doesn't care for the butchery necessary to work for his father, and so he goes to London to make his fortune.

He finds work for Burbage at The Theater, starting as a livery boy, holding horses for the playgoers. London at this time is mad for Marlowe and Tamburlaine, and Rush gives us a swift precis of the jobs Will might have done in a city where theater was cheap and popular, getting closer and closer to the stage. It is after Will sees the botched execution of a poor, elderly priest named Hartley that he takes up the pen to write. Drunken crowds roam the street after Hartley's death, roaring their hatred of Spain and papists.

The cries grew fainter. I shut my eyes again. It all went round in my head: Tarleton, Hartley, Jacki Vautrollier, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, the Armada, the drunken crowd, fuck the Pope, fuck Parma, long live the Queen!. . .That crowd down there in the street, full of blind energy and leonine pride--it was loose in London and it had no theatre for it's will. It needed a state. It needed to see itself up there. It needed a glass and a chronicler of the time. The future was out there.

So he writes Henry VI, the pageant of national theater and national identity, and his star rises. The book then paces through the questions that lie at the heart of Shakespeare studies and hits all the marks. Marlowe did indeed die in Deptford, but it was the assassination of an operative, to keep his secrets buried. Marlowe was a spy, and one with an inconvenient amount of damaging information, so he and those around him were picked off, one by one. The quarrel over the bar bill was part of the plot--take him to Deptford, to wait for a boat to take him safely out of England. Ply him with drink the long day, then pick a fight over the bill. Marlowe will fall for it--especially drunk Marlowe, and his death will not cause repercussions.

The early epic poems, Venus and Adonis was commissioned as an attempt to get the young earl of Southampton to marry and create heir, and when it failed to convince the young man to give up his youth and settle into a premature middle age, a second (less lucrative) commission to browbeat him with the idea of what would happen should he fail to have heirs--The Rape of Lucrece. This was also the beginning of a youthful friendship between the earl and the writer, and the reason for a first lot of sonnets. And then Rush identifies The Dark Lady as Emilia Bassano, the Italian-Jewish wife of a court musician, an exotic beauty who was lass than discriminate with her favors. Will fell hard, and it all ended in tears and heartbreak when Southampton (Henry Wriothesley) also found his way into her bed and Will caught them. No more sonnets, and apparently the end of the two men's contact. But Will was able to buy a place in the Lord Chamberlain's men with the money he made while with Southampton, so onto another chapter of the life.

Hamnet's young demise brought Will back to Stratford briefly, and he purchased New Place--out of a sense of grief and guilt, perhaps. And then back to London to King John and then to invent Falstaff and Hal--Falstaff as the great expression of the English people, the gravitas and center of the plays, the recognition that the leaders and aristocrats are remembered, but it is the unnamed and unnumbered dead to won Agincourt and Shrewsbury, and they are the real England. This is Rush's declaration of why Shakespeare is still relevant today--why he remains beloved. Because he cared for the actual people of England, and spoke to them and for them. His talent was to show the people their own roles in history.

The book wends it's way through all the plays, all the family deaths and losses, and paints a picture of a man aged by the death of his only son, tiring of the effort of London, putting his griefs into Hamlet and Lear, his cynicism about politics into Macbeth, constrained and inspired by the players available and the life around him, but burning out. The Tempest was his last great effort, and after that, he was burnt out entirely.

Rush offers explanations for the odd provisions of the will, the infamous "to my wife, the second best bed" is an acknowledgement of the coldness of their marriage. Judith's limited inheritance is explained as the legal way to limit her no-good husband's access to Will's wealth; Susanna takes the bulk of the estate and Will hopes she will have sons to secure the family name. In the end, the line burns itself out through lack of children, even female, within two generations. There are only nieces and nephews, too far removed and thus the estate and library and possessions of Will Shakespeare get dispersed, and remain untraceable.

Rush even takes on the doggerel on Shakespeare's grave, "explaining" it as written only as well as necessary to scare off future sextons from digging up the bones and using the space for newer dead. It also served to keep Anne Hathaway from sharing the grave--which was also important to him. As they were never close in marriage and life, his will was to enforce similar distance in death.

It's a brave effort--a lot of scholarship and effort went into it, and it takes a fair amount of effort to read it. So many words--words piled up on each other, phrases and clauses scattered about, lists of elements and the sheer volume of facts substituting for actual poetry or description. But hard to love, most of the time.

The Tamer Tamed, by John Fletcher

2011-09-01T10:50:00.001-05:00

The second book I've "pre-read" for my course on Shakespeare and Adaptation--meaning that while classes haven't started yet, I'm trying to get a jump on the reading because I have no idea how long it's going to take me to get through these book lists.

The Tamer Tamed is a play, written by John Fletcher probably in 1611, and at least some scholars think it was written as a way for Fletcher to introduce himself to Shakespeare. It is a sequel, of sorts, to WS's own The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio gets a taste of the medicine he so liberally dispensed to Katherine.

As the play opens, we find that Petruchio has been widowed, which from his perspective is probably just as well. Apparently the "taming" he performed in Shakespeare's play didn't actually take, and his marriage was fraught with the level on conflict you would expect from someone as vivid and unhappy as the Katherine of Act I. Nevertheless, Petruchio has chosen hope over experience, and married again, this time to Katherine's cousin Maria. Supposedly all that Katherine was not, Petruchio is unprepared for what happens that night, when Maria locks him out of his own house, and announces to the public that she will not be sleeping with him for the foreseeable future.

Maria has laid in food for a month, and brought in her cousin Bianca (also from Taming of the Shrew, Katherine's sister and herself now widowed) and invites all women who have been "worn out by marriage" to join her in laying down the conditions for their domestic lives. Soon they are joined by Maria's (originally obedient and tractable) sister Livia, who loves the handsome young Roland, but who is going to be forced by her father into marriage with the old, ugly, smelly and disgusting (but rich!) Moroso. Other women from the city and the country join the women inside Petruchio's house, bringing supplies and taking a stand for women's rights. All this is by the second act, with three more to go.

According to the introductory materials, The Tamer Tamed was a very popular play, and was performed in repertory with Shrew. It was performed before Charles I and his queen, and revived during the Restoration as well. There are records of its performance into the 18th century, and the Royal Shakespeare Company revived it and brought it to America in 2003.

Certainly, when paired with Shrew, it makes the "taming" experience less deeply uncomfortable. On the basis of the text alone, The Taming of the Shrew feels like psychological warfare and spousal abuse. Katherine is deprived of food and sleep and purposely disoriented for days, until her spirit is broken, and apparently her mind as well, and it's all presented as good clean fun. I have seen a few performances that have subsumed the dialogue to broad slapstick, and in those cases, Katherine gives as good as she gets, but the text itself is still troublesome. After all, from the modern perspective, what has she done that is so wrong? She doesn't want to get married, and she has found a way to avoid it--run off all your suitors. She's managed to make a life for herself that suits her, and the only "problem" is that her father has this ridiculous rule that her sister can't marry until she does. Is this Kate's problem? Should she bind herself into marriage that she doesn't want just because her father has this stupid rule?

Into town drifts this lout--a man who will take any woman, provided she is rich. Who would want to marry him? And why should Kate agree to be handed over to a man who is idle, wealth-seeking, and arrogantly certain of his ability to break her? Why is this an outcome anybody should cheer for?

It's a rom-com formula in extreme--in which the people who are "fated" to be together initially cannot stand each other, but learn to see each other in new and better ways. Which is fine, except for the abuse. Perhaps enforcing patriarchal privilege was funnier in the 17th century than it is now, or audiences were more frightened of women than they are now, but what looks like despotic parenting and authoritarian enforcement of heterosexual male privilege just doesn't amuse me.

Fletcher's play tips the balance the other way, more or less, but does so in obviously ribald fashion, which makes the whole thing more farcical and thus less disturbing. It also benefits from the fact that when the obviously powerless women score some advantages for themselves, they do so without the men apparently losing anything in the bargain. From the start, Maria's demands are actually small--she wants to have authority to run the household without being questioned about it. She wants to guarantee she will have life's amenities--clothing, food, transportation--consistent with her station. She wants to control her own sexuality, and require her husband to gain her consent. What does Petruchio want? He wants to be able to sleep with his wife, get into his house, and experience domestic tranquility. All of which he gets. What does he lose? Only a smidgeon of "face"--other men see his wife make demands, and they see him acquiesce. He doesn't seem too bothered by it, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as she tells him she is going to make demands, he basically agrees to them, whatever they might be. It is her father and some of the other men who urge Petruchio to stand fast, to beat her into submission, to assert his manly rights to be in control. Since none of the men are ever shown to actually be in control, the stakes are pretty low.

Contrast that to Katherine's plight in Taming of the Shrew. She doesn't choose marriage, she doesn't chose her husband, and when she is sold into marital bondage, she has no control over what she wears, what she eats, where she goes, or the nature of her relationship to her husband. She is forced to give up all her preferences, all her autonomy, and simply agree to anything and everything he says, regardless of how crazy that may be. Sure, as far as the text goes, we don't actually see him beating her, but there is no real guarantee that she would be allowed to object to that either. It is the doctrine of couveture in the extreme, where two people become one, and that one is Petrucchio.

Fletcher's play has an entirely different tone--the stakes are lower, and the strategems are much less squicky. Rather than sleep deprivation and withholding of food, as in Shakespeare, Fletcher's Petruchio makes plays for sympathy and pity. He pretends he is ill--and Maria beats him at that game by telling everyone that he has the plague and needs to be sealed inside his house so he doesn't infect anyone else. Petruchio is reduced to shooting his way out of his own house. Maria compliments his intelligence, and maneuvers him into having to travel abroad. Rather than going, he fakes his own death, and presents his "corpse" to his supposed widow, hoping she will admit she treated him badly. Instead, she cries for his wasted live and claims that his death is a blessing, because it means that now he is spared the worse things he was bound to do if he had lived.

This is the final straw, and in a scene that suffers from being seriously underwritten, he asks "Why, why Maria?" And for no good reason that I can see, she confesses that this was all a trick to tame him, and she has now achieved her aim. Now she can go back to her true personality and promises to dote on him and make his life pleasant. In the B plot, Livia has also faked an illness, and supposedly signed documents releasing Roland from their engagment, witnessed by her father and Moroso. In fact, she has switched the documents for a marriage contract, and thus managed to marry the man she wanted to marry. They consummate the marriage while her father and Moroso believe she is still ailing. Again, the stakes for the men are low, and the women's victory doesn't require the utter defeat of the men they are set against. Moroso is free to find another woman to marry--he doesn't seem to have any particular attachment to Livia other than her youth, and her father doesn't seem to have any reason to have preferred Moroso than the man's money. Meanwhile, Livia manages to arrange a happier life for herself than would have been possible if she had simply obeyed her father's orders.

The silliness of the play is so pervasive that almost any page would provide some bawdy exchanges and double entendres--for the moment, take my word for it that it is not in any way a serious meditation of gender roles. It also is worth noting that after writing the play, Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on at least three plays we know of: Henry VIII; Two Noble Kinsmen; and the lost play Cardenio. By all accounts, Fletcher had a brilliant and productive career, producing some 50 plays before his death in 1625.

When you hear of Puritans disapproving of theater, THIS is the kind of play they must have had in mind--it's knee deep in sexual innuendo and outright sexual talk. Characters are forever overturning chamberpots on each other, and pissing against door frames. It's a silly play, and one that makes Shakespeare's language that much more impressive.

Interred With Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell

2011-08-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

This is the first book I read for my new Master's program in English literature--it is one of the many books on the syllabus for my seminar in "Adapting Shakespeare." The course looks fantastic--focusing on Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Hamlet and the sonnets, it looks at ways different artists have used Shakespeare's life and works to make new works. We will be watching movies (Kiss Me Kate and Shakespeare in Love, for example), listening to Rufus Wainwright's adaptations of the sonnets, and reading reading reading!

Carrell is herself an academic, with a Ph.D. from Harvard in English and American lit, with other degrees from Oxford and Stanford, and this is her first novel. It is stuffed with information and academic trivia, and should be a no-brainer for someone like me: mysterious clues leading on a chase to find a lost Shakespeare play and the identity of "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" The bad news is--it's not very good. So much so, that I was about 200 pages in before I realized that I had read this before.

Let's start with a plot synopsis. Our Heroine and Narrator, Kate Stanley, is a former graduate student who finished her dissertation on "The Occult Shakespeare" before leaving academia for theater. When the book opens, she is directing Hamlet at the Globe Theater in London. (I suspended my disbelief about this one--sure, it is unlikely that a 23 year old American woman would be handed such a job, especially since as far as we are told, she had only directed a couple of amateur undergraduate departmental plays before in her life. Your willingness to suspend the disbelief may vary.) She has secured a Hollywood Action Star for her Hamlet, and London theater legend Sir Henry Lee has joined the cast as Hamlet's Ghost.

During a lively rehearsal, in walks Kate's former academic advisor, Roz Howard, with a challenge--Roz has found something big, bigger even than Hamlet at the Globe, and she needs Kate's help. Roz hands over a mysterious package and arranges to meet Kate on Parliament Hill at sunset. Roz doesn't show, the Globe goes up in flames, Kate is followed by a mysterious man who seems to want to kill her, and Roz's corpse turns up in the ruins of the Globe. She has been killed by something injected behind her ear--just like Hamlet's father!

Kate opens the package, and we are off on a Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare. The package contains a brooch and an card from an old card catelog. Roz has scribbled some cryptic messages onto it, sending Kate on a "thrilling" tour of libraries across the world: Widener and Houghton libraries at Harvard; a Shakespeare archive in Cedar City, Utah; the Folger in D.C. As a travelog, it's quite boring, actually, and I am saying this as a person who loves libraries. In fact, her descriptions of the Archive in Utah was the part where I remembered having read this before--it was the only truly memorable part of the novel, with an English garden and a Tudor building plunked into the Utah desert.

Along the way she has Sir Henry financing her exploits, and she picks up a body guard in Ben Pearl, Roz's nephew, who Roz hired to keep Kate safe. Not sure why Roz thought this would be necessary, or why she didn't use him to keep herself safe--no reason given for Roz to suspect that people would begin to be murdered, since she was the first victim.

But nevermind! Don't ask questions! Roz is dead, the Globe is in flames, the DCI Sinclair wants to question Kate about what she knows, so of course she has to sneak out of the country and run to Harvard to follow the clue of Roz's card catelog! And within hours Kate has been chased by a sneaky man with a knife, Harvard's copy of the First Folio has been stolen, and Widener is in flames! But there is a clue in the Houghton library involving actual historical figure Francis Child and his correspondence. Kate finds half a letter, misfiled in Child's papers, which is vague in the extreme. Ben steals it, Kate is attacked, they run off to Utah.

In Utah, there is conveniently a connection to somebody who is a Shakespeare collector, who has built a replica of Konigberg castle in the desert--the model for Elsinore. This eccentric old lady is also a billionaire, and she sneaks Kate and Ben into a conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. There, the head librarian/archivist gets killed like Julius Caesar on the steps of the (U.S. Capitol), and Kate gets another letter, this time from a fictional Ophelia Granville, who has been investigating (actual historical figure) Delia Bacon's claims that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.

At this point, Carrell starts interweaving so many different plots and research trails in different time eras that the whole thing becomes deeply confusing. Kate keeps almost being killed multiple times, and leaves a trail of dead bodies behind her, as well as stolen papers. The deeper one gets into this book, the better The Da Vinci Code looks as a model of clear prose, exciting pacing, and believable riddles. She visits the ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke (where the Lead Guide gets snuffed), Trinity Church in Stratford to open up Shakespeare's grave, back to Elsinore in the desert, and finally to a cave somewhere in Arizona. By this point, things have gotten deeply weird, and I will now try to untangle the various plots and time frames.

The Contemporary Mystery Solved

In the present: Kate finds the remains of a 17th Century Spanish conquistador expedition, deep inside a cave in Arizona. They had been sealed in, and the last one to die was a Franciscan priest, who was carrying one of the earliest editions of Don Quixote in English. Inside that volume was a manuscript of the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio. This is appropriate, because Cardenio's plot was taken from a subplot in Quixote. So now, we have this buried treasure (that was "Interred with their Bones,"--get it?) But wait! There's more!

The priest is also carrying a letter that seems to indicate that Shakespeare was not the sole author of his plays. But before Kate (and we) can read this letter, Sir Henry grabs it and throws himself over a ledge into a pit inside the cave. Why? Good question! It seems that Sir Henry has been a master-mind of the entire plot of the book. As a Shakespearean actor, he wanted to find Cardenio so he could leave a theatrical legacy as the actor who stamped himself on the play--Sir Henry Lee's Don Quixote would stand like Olivier's Hamlet in theatrical history. However, he would not allow "Shakespeare" to be anyone or anything other than the Man from Stratford--he was deeply invested in the story of a poor boy from the sticks becoming the greatest writer of all time. It was a foundational myth, like Abraham Lincoln becoming president--you didn't have to be connected, or well-educated, or aristocratic to succeed. Talent could strike anywhere, and Sir Henry was proof of that. So if the "truth" was different, he would not allow it to get out, and he took himself and the letter into the abyss to prevent any other "truth" from being proved.

Self-sacrifice, perhaps, but made less noble by the fact that the police were closing in, and he had murdered five people (more or less) and committed countless other criminal acts in the course of the book. He had conspired with a junior Harvard professor, who had done some of the dirty work for Sir Henry, out of jealousy of Roz Howard's scholarship and her preference of Kate over him. He also died in the cave--I think Sir Henry shot him. It was confusing, and I had long ago stopped caring about this plot.

So--Kate preserves Cardenio, but loses the letter that "proves" who wrote Shakespeare. The book ends with a (not at all believable) incipient romance with Ben Pearl, the staging of her Hamlet in the restored Globe, and the promise of a production of Cardenio to follow.

Who Wrote Shakespeare?

The book follows several different theories about who really wrote the plays. The controversy does exist in actual academic and amateur circles, based on the assumption that the man from Stratford simply did not have the education and life experience to write convincingly about everything that is in the plays. He would not have known how court life is conducted, for example; he wouldn't know about hawking, he had no legal training, etc. There are several candidates who have been offered up as the "real" Shakespeare, but most of them have problems, such as dying before many of the plays were written, or in one case, not being born until well afterwards.

Carrell solves these problems by positing a "chimerical beast:" a consortium of aristocrats who were the actual authors. And all your favorite candidates, plus a few dark horses, turn out to be the "real Shakespeare." They are: Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford; Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke; Francis Bacon; and William Stanley, Earl of Derby (and de Vere's son-in-law). She leaves out Christopher Marlowe, and makes Ben Jonson aware of the deception, but not part of it. The proof of this nonsense, such as it is, is a weird picture buried in Shakespeare's grave in Stratford--a creature composed of parts of each of the animals of these people's coats of arms. A swan's head and neck (countess of Pembroke), eagle's wings (earl of Derby), boar's heads (Bacon) and falcon's feet (Oxford) clutching a spear (Shakespeare).

I may have some of these elements wrong, but the gist is close enough. Four aristocrats add up to enough training and education to have written Shakespeare. Plus the man from Stratford. Got it? Then let's analyze it.

First off, part of the reason the four aristocrats are even posited as possible authors of the plays is because they are known to have written plays themselves. So why would they need (or want) to work together to produce more plays? Carrell doesn't bother to explain, particularly--as she is too busy just trying to make the dates work out right. Edward de Vere died in 1604, 12 years before Shakespeare died, so no matter how good of a candidate he is for the author of those plays, mortality takes him out of the running. But if you add in his son-in-law, the Earl of Derby, then Carrell finesses that issue. So, yes, technically it would work, but why? Why would they do this? As far as I can tell (and the book does get very confusing on these points) Carrell doesn't say. Certainly, none of the members of this committee appears as a character in the book, so we never get any insight into how such a group of people would work together, and how they would produce such a body of work that wasn't immediately obvious as being by five different people.

What this does allow Carrell to do is to let just about everybody who cares about this issue be right. Do you think Francis Bacon wrote these plays? You are right! Do you think Hamlet is a fictionalized autobiography of Edward de Vere? You are right too! Do you think the glover's son from Stratford came from the country to the city and became the greatest writer of the English language? Congratulations! You are right too!

How Did Cardenio End Up In America?

Cervantes finished the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, and it was translated into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. Carrell invents a brother to Thomas Shelton, who she names William and makes into a beautiful blond boy with a spiritual calling. He goes to train for the priesthood in Spain, at an English school for Jesuits, who train and then return to England to minister to the remaining (closeted) Catholics. In Carrell's world, William Shelton is the actual translator of Don Quixote, who puts his brother's name on it, since as a Jesuit he would be persona non grata in England.

For some reason, when the consortium decides to publish the Shakespeare plays in the First Folio in 1623, they send a copy to William Shelton in Spain, along with a copy of Cardenio. I am still confused as to why they felt he needed a copy. It is quite possible that Carrell just needed her characters to find a copy of the First Folio there in order to further the plot. At any rate, it is explained that Cardenio was purposely left out of the First Folio, because it had served to irritate the powerful Howard family when it was first performed, and the Howards had retaliated violently, including causing the Globe to burn to the ground. So the consortium sent the folio, along with a marked up (but not printed) copy of the missing play.

Then, for no good reason whatsoever, Carrell has William Shelton switch disciplines, leaving the Jesuits and becoming a Franciscan, so he can go to New Spain and die in the American Southwest, so Kate can find the play there. Shelton takes Cardenio, he says because it makes him laugh, as well as an ornate volume of Don Quixote, and that's how it ends up there.

Why Was Cardenio Lost In The First Place?

This is perhaps the most confusing part of Carrell's plotting. Actual historical personage Frances Howard was a daughter of Thomas Howard, the 1st Duke of Suffolk, who was himself a son of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. (It is Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk who was instrumental in getting his nieces Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard married to Henry VIII and then beheaded. Not a nice family.) Frances was married to Robert Devereaux, the 3rd Earl of Essex (and descendent of Elizabeth I's own personal Essex, the failed conspirator). The marriage was a political alliance, the bride and groom 14 and 13 respectively, and the marriage may not have ever been consummated. Essex was sent to fight in Europe, and during his absence, Frances fell in love with Robert Carr, eventually the Earl of Somerset.

There is some nonsense--which may or may not be historically accurate--about the Howards setting Frances to capture and seduce the Prince of Wales, Henry Stuart, who was a friend of her husband's. The idea was apparently to make Prince Henry fall in love with Frances, have her marriage to Essex annulled and marry her himself. This is not unlike the plan that got Katherine Howard married to Henry VIII. Somehow, this plan included getting Shakespeare to write a play based on Don Quixote in which a loathsome man was married to a lovely young woman, who was rescued from her terrible husband by the prince. It was PR propaganda move to tarnish Essex's reputation, free Frances from a bad marriage, and raise the family fortunes by getting her to be the next queen.

This plan fell apart, however, because Frances balked, already in love with Robert Carr. Then there is an odd public humiliation where one of Frances's gloves is found on the ground at court, and offered to Prince Henry. The prince refuses to touch it, saying "It has already been stretched by another," thus making the public accusation that Frances had already cuckh\olded her husband with Carr. Soon thereafter, Prince Henry died, so Frances was allowed to marry Carr (after some further scandals involving the annullment from Essex, which play no part in this novel).

By then, the point of staging Cardenio was moot. Furthermore, Cardenio was too close to "Carr," and the play no longer showed Frances in a positive light, but somehow made a mockery of the entire Howard family. So Shakespeare was asked to suppress the play, which he refused to do. It was (historically) performed for James I, and given some public performances at the Globe. In retaliation, the Howards (fictionally) caused the fire that burned down the Globe in 1613. This was apparently enough for Carrell to explain why the play was never again performed and why all copies have been lost.

Who Are The Sonnets About?

Shakespeare's sonnets are famously addressed to a young man (described as "golden") and a Dark Lady. Carrell doesn't identify the lady (as far as I can figure out, at least) but she makes the fictional William Shelton the golden boy. William Shelton is beloved by both the Lady and William Shakespeare (actor, man from Stratford, not the consortium of aristocrats she posits wrote the plays), but he is also a passionate proto-Catholic and is a member of the extended Howard family. The Howards were also rather famously closeted Catholics, and in an elaborate scheme, William Shelton is selected for Jesuit training by the Earl of Northampton (I think), one of the older Howards. There is a chapter in the book where a priest is accused of treason and of being a Catholic, and hanged near St. Paul's Cathedral. Northampton muses that the priest wasn't guilty, but had to be sacrificed or else a Howard would have been discovered. But in a weird bit of karmic balance, Northampton decides that he needs to pay for the priest's death by creating another priest, and he spies William Shelton in the crowd at the hanging and decides he's the one who is going to be sent to Spain.

The Dark Lady and Will Shakespeare are also there, they see the effect the priest's death has on William, and realize they have now lost him to his religious fervor. The Lady turns out to be pregnant, but it is not clear which William is the father--Shelton or Shakespeare. This is supposed to be important, but is not clear in the novel. It appears that there is a girl who is nearly killed in the 1613 fire in the Globe, and she is possibly? probably? William Shakespeare's illegitimate daughter by the Dark Lady, and thus is "balanced" with Suffolk's daughter Frances Howard. Frances Howard's honor has been sullied by Cardenio, and so the injury to Shakespeare's daughter is therefore appropriate revenge?

This part of the plot is scattered throughout the book in chapters called "Interludes" and they are not presented in chronological order, nor are they explored or explained by the contemporary characters of Kate and Ben. Furthermore, they don't tie in with the idea that anybody else wrote Shakespeare's sonnets. So, does that mean that there is no controversy over the authorship of the poems--only the plays? I don't know. and Carrell doesn't say. It does make me wonder--if the man from Stratford wrote the sonnets, doesn't that give make it more likely that he also wrote the plays?

Miscellaneous Shakespeariana

There are other bits of "Occult Shakespeare" scattered in the book--"occult" a word here used in a specific manner, meaning "hidden." So, for example, there is a fair bit of chaff scattered about the book hinting that Shakespeare might have participated the King James Version of the Bible. Kate finds some letters that indicate that committees of clerics did the initial translations, but that poets were asked to "polish" the Psalms. There is a bit of numerology around the 46th Psalm. The 46th word from the beginning of the Psalm is "shake" and the 46th from the end is "spear." Allegedly, Shakespeare was 46 years old that year as well. So were several of the members of the "chimerical beast," so it proves nothing but is probably just a bit of trivia Carrell couldn't resist.

There is also a deep inside joke about people who think that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. There is a shadowy character who never actually appears, named "Wesley North" who wrote a (fictional) book supporting that theory. North is scheduled to make an appearance at a conference at the Folger, but doesn't show. This is because he is a pseudonym for Roz Howard, who vehemently doesn't believe the Oxford theory, but enjoyed the ruse. The joke is that the name would be cited as "North, Wes T." referring to the line from Hamlet that "I am but mad north- northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." Wes North is also allegedly a teacher at an on-line university, so he can't be traced. Internet troll, anyone?

Summary

There are others bits of lore and Shakespeare trivia in the book, none of which adds up to much. In fact, the book itself is eminently forgettable, a book that owes a great deal to The Da Vinci Code and every bit as much to A.S. Byatt's Possession, without achieving the strengths of either of those books. Much of the plot feels forced into shape. The clues are vague in the extreme, requiring a great deal of explication by the characters and a great deal of acceptance by the reader. "Obviously, this refers to the First Folio!" is the kind of dialog that gets the plot from point A to point B, where the reader wouldn't necessarily make that connection.

Nor does the overarching plot make any sense. It is never explained why Kate is never actually killed--everybody else seems to get whacked with a great deal of economy, but for some reason the murderers never seem willing to actually off her. For plot reasons, that's understandable--if Kate gets killed, the book ends because there is no longer anybody to solve the mystery. But that's not emotionally satisfying, and spoils the fictional effect.

Nor is it clear why all those other people had to die, other than to create a (false) sense of threat to Kate. If the murders were actually done by Sir Henry and his professor accomplice, and they were done to keep Shakespeare's identity secret, what did any of those murdered people know that would reveal that identity? Nothing--especially the head of the tour guides at Wilton House in England, or the housekeeper of Elsinore in Arizona. There is no reason why Sir Henry needed them to be dead, and doubly no reason to stage those deaths to look like ones from the Shakespeare plays. So, if he was just a psychopath, then why didn't he kill Kate all the many times she was threatened? No good reason, so no good thrills--just a sense that "well, it's been three chapters, time to throw in another murder."

Some of the clues were ungodly awkward as well, starting with the first one. Roz comes to London to recruit her former protege to hunt for Cardenio. But instead of doing the sort of things an academic would do--calling ahead, saying "I have a lead on Cardenio, and I need your help!" or writing a letter, Roz does things that only make sense in a thriller-novel universe. Why appear mysteriously in the middle of a rehearsal of Hamlet in London when you are a professor at Harvard, and you think the manuscript is in America? Why box up a stolen brooch with a cryptic clue and deliver it during rehearsal, rather than finding time when Kate can listen to the story? Dinner would have been a good time. Why even write out a cryptic clue at all? No reason, other than "It's mysterious!" No reason to think that Roz was the sort of person who would do that at all, actually.

Kate is not an appealing character either. When she isn't just a piece being moved across the board, she is rather obnoxious. She nearly gets killed, but then gets irritated when Ben tells her to do something that will keep her safe, because then she feels like they aren't being equals. Well, no shit, Kate--you just told people your location, you used your cell phone that let the killers track you, you leave death and arson in your wake, and you are grumpy that your security guard wants to keep you from doing those things again?

There is a confusing bit about whether Ben is the killer--he's being bruited about by the actual murderer, who points out that while he claims to be Roz's nephew, Roz was an only child. "I just told you that to make you trust me" he says. So who did hire him? Was it Roz? Was it somebody else? Just how did he get into this book anyway? Not clear and not satisfactorily explained.

So the book is an exercise in proving that you can be really smart, but a good thriller is harder to write than it looks.

A Visit From The Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

2011-05-29T23:15:00.000-05:00

This book has won a bunch of awards, most notably the Pulitzer for fiction, which is no small deal. In fact, that alone might be reason enough to make it required reading. But it was also highly endorsed by two unrelated online sources that I often look to: Salon named it one of the best books of 2010, and the Morning News ran their annual Tournament of Books, and this book beat out Jonathan Franzen's Freedom by the narrowest of margins. And since I had already read Freedom, it seemed that Jennifer Egan was next on the To Be Read list.

Less a novel, and more a collection of short stories, A Visit From the Goon Squad centers loosely around Bennie Salazar. The stories jump around in time an space, and shift narrative voice, so each chapter requires some adjustment as to when and where the story takes place and how this story connects to any of the others.

I understand the reasons a writer might prefer to link a series of stories rather than writing a single long novel. I can do the mental gymnastic required to figure out every few pages who is talking and why I am reading this particular story. I don't even mind doing so, if the book repays the effort. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas repaid the effort. Elizabeth Strout's novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge was worth the work. I'm not convinced Goon Squad does.

Chapter Eight is were I started to question the bargain I had made with the author, in the story of La Doll. "La Doll" was briefly introduced in the previous chapter as a high-powered PR maven who ran an agency where another character had a contract. But by chapter eight, La Doll has lost everything. We soon learn that at the height of her powers, she decided to have a party that would define her era--something that would live on in legend like Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. She put together several (nominal) hosts, and a killer guest list. She also designed plastic trays to be affixed to the lights, holding a mixture of oil and water that would bubble and swirl as it was heated by the lights, creating amazing mood lighting for the party. Which it did, until the heat of the lights melted the plastic trays, dumping burning oil on all the guests.

Burn scars on models and actressess are fatal to careers, and La Doll lost all her assets in the civil suits, and served some time in prison for criminal negligence, which reduced her to the pathetic creature we meet in chapter eight. Now known as "Dolly," she has fallen so low as to no longer even dye her hair to hide the gray. The horror!

Dolly is in desperate straits, as she has sold pretty much everything that has market value, in order to maintain her obnoxious nine year old daughter in a ruinously expensive private school. The daughter has forbidden Dolly from the school, lest her humiliation rub off on Lulu. (Yes, she actually named the creature "Lulu.") Dolly has acquiesced to Lulu's demands, to the point where she drops her daughter off around the corner so no one can see her. And this is where both of these characters lost me. Dolly has failed to take reality into account, and is making herself both miserable and crazy trying to keep up their impossible New York living standards while having essentially no clients. This is stupid. It is extra stupid for her to be completely in her daughter's control--this is not parenting, this is appeasement. But when Egan literally has Dolly peeking in the windows of school in order to glimpse her own daughter, that's when I lost all respect for this book.

Because this is Stella Dallas at this point, and have we really gone back to the social/sexual mores of 1937 Barbara Stanwyk movies? Seriously? Why are we giving awards to a book that punishes a woman the way women were routinely punished in the movies of the Depression?

Look, if "La Doll" was really the powerhouse we are told she was, she would not have ended up in this place. She would have had a halfway decent legal team who would have defended her from the criminal case, and would have easily impleaded the tray manufacturers, the light installers, the building management for the place where the party happened, and all of their insurance companies as well. Furthermore, a PR whiz would have totally been able to spin the situation, milked the publicity, and used the oil burns as a badge of merit--you could prove you were important enough to have been there if you had the scars.

I mean, would we have accepted a story like this about a male PR agent? Think about Donald Trump, for example. Trump has had numerous bankruptcies, has taken to licensing his name to questionable business deals that have cost people their life savings, and he keeps coming back. He doesn't get reduced to the pathetic and needy wimp that Dolly is when we see her. It's regressive and offensive, and I cannot accept that this is writing worth supporting.

Worse, is it led me to reassess the stories I had already read, and they cheapened as a result of this decidedly antique sensibility. Bennie Salazar joins a country club, and news flash! Country clubs are bastions of White Anglo Saxon Protestant privilege and prejudice! It's like breaking news from 1946. And what actually happened in the country club? Bennie joined, precisely because it was the place that was the farthest away from who he was--he forced his way into a milieu where he was not readily accepted, precisely because he would not be readily accepted, and then he got upset when he was not readily accepted! But The Incident was so far from being an incident that it just made me mad that I had been dragged through the melodrama.

Some blowhard military type had shown up at a country club party, and was bloviating about the risk of al Qaeda having moles in New York. As this blow hard was magnifying the risk and raising the fear level of the room, one of the members cut his eyes at Bennie and made the smallest of head shakes to discourage the anti-Muslim rhetoric. Apparently Bennie interpreted this as implying that he was both Muslim and a terrorist, which I think was not necessarily the case. Second, the club member doing this is someone that Bennie so distained that he referred to the man as "Cardboard." I don't see this as Bennie being excluded by virtue of his race or religion--especially since we don't have any evidence that Bennie has a race or religion. I don't see this as the cultural majority keeping him down--it's a pair of buffoons being contemptible. Any other interpretation is 40 years out of date--at least.

Then lets go back to the stories about Lou, the 1970s record producer who gave Bennie his start. Lou had a zipper problem, several failed marriages, a testy relationship with his children, and a penchant for very young women. Lou ended up having an affair with one of the girls in Bennie's circle of friends while she was still in high school. This made her impossibly glamorous to the other kids, but she serves as a cautionary tale in Egan's book, another anti-woman story about someone whose life was ruined because she had sex. That's right--this girl slept with an older man, and then disappears from the book except for a single chapter where she is back from another stint in rehab, unemployed, living with her mother, no friends or relationships to her name, and no future. She then goes to visit Lou, who is dying horribly and alone. Because the sex and drugs and rock and roll lifestyle has to have Consequences! Nobody gets a second chance! Did you have sex as a teen? Your life is ruined (especially if you are a girl)! Did you do drugs? Unemployable and forced to move in with your mother! Did you divorce several wives and fail to maintain healthy relationships with your off-spring? Then one kid will commit suicide and you will die painfully and alone!

At this point, I was over this book. I only kept going because my book club is going to discuss it in June.

Remember that I reached this point in the middle of chapter eight--Dolly's story. And when I went back to finish the chapter, there was a plot point I had railed about. Kitty Jackson, former ingenue, now mostly out of work actress, had small burn scars on her wrist. She made them herself, so she could pretend she had been at Dolly's party. Which was a small redemption of Egan for me--if the author saw the plot hole, but the character didn't, then I was willing to give the character some credit for being unable to see the solution to her problem for reasons that belonged to the character. The detail of the self-inflicted oil burns meant that the author saw something that the character didn't, and in that detail painted a picture of woman complicit in her own downfall. Dolly must have felt she deserved to be punished, or that she was better off accepting her reduction rather than fighting.

Sure, it's a small detail, a small measure of willingness to consider that Jennifer Egan might be doing something more than I had given her credit for. So I finished the book, and now I have to go back and reconsider what she is doing in each of the stories. By the end of the book, we have looped around to focus on a character who was no more than a secondary character in the very first story, but now some 10+ years in the future. Technology has changed, the demographics of New York have swung toward the very very young, and toddlers are the major music market. It's not exactly dystopian, but not exactly reassuring either. But music continues to speak to humanity.

I'll give it some more thought, but I'd love to hear from people who have read it and loved it. What exactly did you love?

Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson

2011-04-15T10:23:00.000-05:00

If you've already read any of Kate Atkinson's books, you know what to expect, and you've probably already picked up this one, if not already devoured it. If you've not read any of her books, there's no reason to wait any longer. Go ahead, get any one of the Jackson Brodie books and come back after you've read as many as you want. Which will probably be the all of them.

Atkinson takes the police/detective novel and turns it inside out. Mysteries happen, of course, there are murders, there is police procedure, there are even solutions. But the mysteries themselves are less important as mysteries than as ways to illuminate and examine the lives of the people around them. Her books peel away the layers that surround human lives and examine what is left.

Maybe this sounds pretentious, but that's only because I can't articulate how she does what she does in a pithy way. But what she is doing is what Tana French is also doing--exploring the form and tropes of the detective format and using it to do something that operates in a different universe than Dan Brown.

Let's get to spoiling right away, shall we? Because honestly, the plot is only the engine for what else Atkinson is doing.

Start with Jackson Brodie, the former police officer and the nominal protagonist of this and three previous Atkinson books. Brodie lost almost everything in the last book, When Will There Be Good News? He was literally resuscitated after a train derailment, he discovered that his wife had been a scam artist, who had married him and lived with him only as long as it took her to clear out his substantial bank account. Everything about her had been a lie, including her name. Now he is effectively homeless, and certainly rootless, driving around England ostensibly while doing investigative work for a woman in New Zealand who wants to find her birth parents. It is not a coincidence that her life is faked too. The birth certificate is forged, the names of the birth parents were invented. It seems like the truth was buried in Leeds, and the person who might have the answers is a social worker named Linda Palliser.

Linda Palliser doesn't want to talk to Brodie, however. She literally takes the first flight out of town and remains out of communication for the rest of the novel. Because she doesn't dare tell anyone the truth. So Brodie has to figure things out on his own.

The second major protagonist of the book is a woman named Tracy Waterhouse. Tracy was a new constable in 1975 on the West Yorkshire police force, and a recent retiree from the force. She was always a big girl, and made her career by being "one of the boys." She never married, had no family, no social life. So, of course, she went into private security, working for a shopping mall in Leeds. One fateful day, she sees one too many children in jeopardy, and she impulsively intercedes. The child's mother is a prostitute and drug addict well known to the police, and Tracy can't stand watching the 4 year old child being dragged and berated across the mall. She has a large sum of cash, to pay the Polish builder who is renovating her kitchen, and impulsively she offers the cash in exchange for the child. The mother grabs the money, hops on a bus, and disappears.

Despite spending her entire adult life as a law enforcer, Tracy immediately acts like a criminal and more or less goes on the run with the child. Does this make sense? I mean, logically, does it make sense that a 50 year old police superintendent would really think that by handing a wad of cash to a drug addict and taking custody of a neglected child from a visibly unfit parent, that she had somehow actually bought the kid? Does she really think that she has descended to the same moral level as kidnappers and pedophiles? Does Atkinson really expect us to buy this complete 180 of behavior?

Well, no, not really. Because Atkinson is operating in a gray area between realism and metaphor. She sets up the plausibility of the situation--Tracy Waterhouse was stinted of love herself, both as a child and as an adult, and she had plenty of traumatic experiences as a police officer, seeing children threatened, abused, and murdered. So the reader can understand why she might just reach a breaking point and snap, deciding on nothing more than an emotional compulsion that this child she would save, to stand in for all the children she couldn't (or didn't) save in the past.

While it is less believable that she would then immediately consider herself to be a criminal for doing so, and run from her home, change her name, and generally skulk around rather than being the powerful force of confrontation she was throughout her career. But Atkinson isn't interested so much in Tracy's character as she is in Tracy's situation--the sudden change of you world, the madness that is parental love, the way the inclusion of a child into your life fundamentally changes who you are.

There are parallels throughout the story--couples who struggle with infertility, women who struggle with unwanted pregnancy, a police officer whose daughter ends up in a persistent vegetative state after her husband causes an auto accident while drunk, that also kills their infant son. There are bad parents, abusive parents, stingy parents, drug addicted parents, and the tragedy that not all the children can be saved, and not all of them manage to overcome the bad hands they are dealt. The woman Tracy "buys" the little girl off of has other children, all the rest of whom have been placed in foster care. One of them we later see on the streets, working as a prostitute.

On the other hand, some children manage remarkably well. The tragic story of Michael Braithwaite, for example, has a good enough ending, although we don't get the full story until the end of the book. The book opens in 1975, when the young Tracy Waterhouse and her partner Ken Ackerman are called to a block of flats by reports of a horrible smell. Ken looks through the mail slot, then breaks down the door. A prostitute by the name of Carol Braithwaite has been killed in her flat, and her 4 year old son was trapped inside with the body for nearly three weeks, subsisting on what food he could find. He couldn't open the door, couldn't get people to notice him in the window of the unit. Tracy picked him up to soothe him, and broke her heart. There was some sort of cover-up, and Michael was taken away by Linda Pallister and disappeared.

At the end we learn that he was placed in a Catholic orphanage under a different name, but when he turned 18 he was given his true name and turned loose on the world. He made a small fortune in dealing scrap metal, married, and has a normal suburban life of wife, three kids, and barbeques. So, yay? Sometimes things do work out?

But it's the convoluted, the ass-covering, the misery that Atkinson feasts on. Back in 1975, what really happened? One of the cops on the force where Tracy worked had been using Carol Braithwaite as a prostitute, and then she got pregnant and used the baby as a leverage for money, ultimately pressuring the cop (named Len Lomax) to leave his wife and marry her. Poor Michael was the result of a previous liaison, four to Lomax daughter's two, and wanted to think of Lomax as "Daddy." In fact, was probably encouraged to do so by Carol as part of her desperate and bi-polar desire for normalcy. She pushed him one too many times, however, threatening to confront his (desperately childless) wife, and in his anger he throttled her to death.

The boys' club of the police rallied around him, got the little girl out of the flat and gave her to a (desperately childless) pediatrician and his (botched-abortion infertile) wife, who promptly lit out for New Zealand. Lomax didn't mention the boy, who was locked in from the outside and managed to keep himself alive until the smell of the decomposing body got the neighbors to call. And broke Tracy's heart. Also broke the heart of one of the other cops, the low level Ray Strickland who was sent to fetch the girl and bring her to the doctor. He left the boy behind, unwilling to ask questions or volunteer information--he'd been told his career might depend on it. He also questioned his own behavior--why not take the baby girl and bring her home to his own (desperately childless) wife? Or the boy? He didn't do either--two chances for happiness he wasted.

Tracy was left for years to believe something wrong had happened. She noticed that the door had been locked from the outside, she noticed that Lomax and Strickland knew the layout of the flat before they should have. Plus, she asked after Michael Braithwaite, with a vague intention of raising him herself. She was told to stop asking questions, and that the directive came from "above." Cops worked with criminals who had connections to cover up, fake passports, keep their careers on track while deeply compromising their own integrity.

In many ways, Atkinson is a chilly writer--this book especially is more about ideas and themes than flesh and blood characters. We have people who have children and don't want them, people who don't have children and do want them, people who have children and are deeply ambivalent about their ability to raise them, people who are doting parents, indifferent parents, cold parents, unfit parents, parents who are doing their best with limited skills. . .a range of parent-child relationships, past and present, from both the adult and the child perspectives. There is quite a lot of background --not directly dramatized--about the things Tracy Waterhouse has seen done to children in the course of her police work, that makes her cynical, angry and hurt on behalf of those vulnerable children. We see the well-intentioned Jackson Brodie being flummoxed by his daughter's teen-aged behavior, his groping toward a relationship with his own four-year old son and the difficult woman he loves but can't be with.

Brodie also manages to acquire a dog, in a plot that parallels Tracy's story. He sees the dog running off leash in a park, which is then corralled by a brute who uses a noose instead of a leash, who kicks the dog then throws it into the boot of the car. Brodie is so incensed that he punches the guy in the solar plexus and takes the dog. He then smuggles the dog around England in a rucksack, learning the rules of dog ownership in a parody of the way Tracy is learning to be a mother. It's a formal device that has some resonance, but doesn't really work. It doesn't really illuminate Brodie's character, and it doesn't really serve as commentary on how society treats children like dogs. It did rather undermine my empathy for Tracy, to find that even she didn't treat her new-found child like a person so much as a difficult accessory. Like a pet, in fact.

This is really a rambling review, in part because there is so much stuffed into this book. I haven't even mentioned the Jackson Brodie doppelganger--another character who hovers ominously around the book, always a step or two ahead or behind Jackson and Tracy. In the end he is revealed to be a "Brian Jackson," a private detective who was hired by Michael Braithwaite to find his parents, again, paralleling Brodie's search. This allows for some of the plot to be driven by other characters confusing the two names. Tracy thinks both the Jacksons are going to turn her in for kidnapping, when they just want to know what she knows about Carol Braithwaite. So Atkinson is wrestling with doubling and tripling of her themes, which is intellectually intriguing if a little cold emotionally.

But Atkinson can do emotionally affecting work! She can! And for that, I point to her wonderful C plot character, Matilda "Tilly" Squires, a character actress whose mind is shredding with early onset Alzheimer's. She works on preposterous police television series, flitting back and forth between her own chilly upbringing, the baby and good man she lost through the officious meddling of her "friend," and her own sinking awareness of her vanishing present. Plotwise, poor Tilly is a bit of disaster, hanging off the main storyline like a loose thread, and then brought in as deus ex machina to finish off the bad guy and let Tracy escape. But I'll excuse that, for the wonderful way Atkinson brings her mental deterioration to vivid life. Honestly, it's heartbreaking and infuriating, and precisely the kind of well crafted character I wish we could have had more of in this book.

Not that I'm exactly complaining--it's a fascinating book, intricately plotted, with layers of meaning playing off against each other, raising the ongoing challenge of how our culture treats children. Atkinson also liberally sprinkles the pages with ruminations on poetry and how it illuminates our lives. The title is taken from a poem by Emily Dickenson, and Brodie finds himself brooding (Brodie/brooding--I don't think that's a coincidence either) on her poems. Tilly Squires finds herself pulling up quotes from the Shakespeare plays she's been in her whole life. Poetry, fiction, cultural mores--Atkinson has stuffed this book full of ideas. It's well worth reading.

The Brothers of Baker Street, by Michael Robertson

2011-04-11T13:16:00.000-05:00

This is the sequel to "The Baker Street Letters," which is reviewed just below, and this book starts just after the previous one ends. Reggie and Nigel Heath are brothers who practiced law together in London. Reggie had recently leased office space for his chambers in the building that comprises the 200 block of Baker Street in London, and it is a condition of that lease that Reggie answer and archive the letters that are delivered there for "Sherlock Holmes." This remains a clever and potentially delightful conceit for a series, as there is no end to the kinds of requests that these letters could bring to the protagonists.

As a result of one of those letters, Reggie is now broke--he personal assets were eaten by his obligations to Lloyd's of London and his participation in the insurance syndicate that covered the Bad Guys in the previous book. His legal practice has also suffered, and he is down to a single employee--a secretary/clerk/administrator who doesn't have much to do because there are no cases coming in. The Sherlock letters still arrive, however, and as Reggie wants to have nothing to do with them, he packs them up and mails them to Nigel to answer.

(Incidentally, does this make any sense? No, it doesn't. Nigel is supposed to reply to each letter with a form provided by Dorset House, and then archive the letters at Dorset House. He has neither of these things in LA, because Dorset House is where Reggie's chambers are, and where Reggie has a secretary with nothing to do. So why does he do this? So Nigel can have some presence in this book?)

Reggie's personal life remains unresolved. He's been dating the gorgeous and successful actress Laura Henson for some time, but can't seem to be anything but a douche about it. (This has now become a character trait for him as far as I am concerned.) Laura has left London, and is currently in Phuket filming a movie. She has also been seeing the fabulously wealthy media mogul Lord Buxton, who owns a particularly annoying London tabloid. As the story begins, this tabloid has published a picture of Laura and an unidentified man together in Phuket, and the man's hand is doing something to her bikini top that seems to involve some intimate contact.

Reggie recognizes the hand as belonging to Lord Buxton, so he promptly goes to Buxton's enormous media headquarters and punches the man in the face. This is captured by a photographer and published the next day. Reggie may be a barrister, but he really isn't very smart, is he? He also doesn't seem to ever consider that this kind of obnoxiousness is why Laura is choosing to spend time with Buxton rather than him. Because god forbid that a woman have any agency when it comes to relationships. Douche.

Anyway--an aggressively good looking solicitor shows up at Reggie's chambers with a brief for him. Her client is a cabbie, a driver of the iconic Black Cabs of London, and he's been accused of murdering a pair of American tourists. This is a major problem for London, as well as all the other cabbies, because Black Cabs are known for their absolute safety and their drivers' encyclopedic knowledge of London. Their reputation is threatened by these murders, as well as by a series of robberies that led up to this outrage. This is the kind of case that--if Reggie wins it--will bring him so much publicity that he could bounce back to his old busy legal practice. Plus, there is an obligation (we are told) that barristers are like taxi drivers at a cab stand--they are required to take the next fare that presents itself.

But Reggie, in addition to being a douche, is also a prig. (There! Multifaceted character development!) He won't take the case unless he is personally convinced that the client is innocent. See, it all goes back to his childhood. . .and here we find ourselves adopting a ridiculous German accent and playing Freud. Because Dad took little Reggie to a football game, to which he insisted on wearing the cap of his beloved Man U team. Sadly, however, their seats were in the opposing teams section, and when Man U lost, the footie hooligans stole his cap, Dad snatched it back, fist fights broke out, and somehow Dad ended up arrested, which somehow caused him to lose his painting business and his will to live and life became dark and short. So little Reggie grew up determined to become a barrister so he could protect innocent men like his Dad and correct the balance of the universe. Again--he really lost his house painting business because of a footie scuffle?

Well, Our Little Prig Reggie has to meet the client, whose name is Walters, and learn about his life long dream to be a Black Cabbie, and how nothing else in the world is like it, and how much money he has had to invest to become one, and all the Secret and Arcane Knowledge of the Benevolent Order Of Black Cabbies and Freemasons. Which is to say, Walters needed cash, so has a motive for the robberies, but he loves his job so much he wouldn't do anything to jeopardize it.

Reggie is unsure. Is cab driving really such a great job? Is it really like all the work he had to do to become a barrister? So while riding in a Black Cab to another appointment, he casually chats up the driver and so becomes convinced that Walters must be innocent! He will take the case! Justice will be served!

Yes, by this kind of logic, finding one man who loves his wife and would never murder her brutally with a dull kitchen blade means that there are no abusive husbands or wife-murderers.

So, back to chambers Reggie goes, to try to find a defense for Walters, the Tragic Cabbie. What is the case against? Well, if you are going to make a habit of holding up your fares, murdering them and then dumping the bodies, it's probably not a good idea to have a vanity license plate that is easily identifiable and memorable. Which Walters has, and which was in fact seen and remembered by two separate sets of eyewitnesses. One of whom even called the police to report reckless driving by that cabbie. Walters' alibi? He was already home, alone, so he couldn't have done it.

But wait! There is a new letter to Sherlock, signed by "Moriarty" which gives Reggie an idea! Check the traffic/security CCTV cameras to confirm Walters' claim that he was driving home to the other side of London at the time of the murders. And in front of a clearly skeptical judge, the tapes show the distinctive cab with the memorable license plate somewhere completely else from the crime scene! Walters is released until trial! That night, more eyewitnesses see a Black Cab with the same license plate stopped on a bridge over the Thames, dumping a body into the river! What has Reggie done? Has he loosed a murderer from custody only so he can kill again?

The good looking solicitor, Darla Rennie, places a frantic call to Reggie--something is wrong with our client! You must go to his home and meet me there! Reggie goes, finds the front door ajar, no sign of Darla. He cautiously enters, finds the gold Rolex watch taken from the murdered American tourist sitting in a bag in the front parlor. He follows the sound of machinery through the flat to the laundry room in the back, where Walters is lying dead, bloody shirt indicating he was stabbed. Of course Reggie opens the washing machine to see what is inside, because. . .Plot Requirement. There is the long kitchen knife that was the murder weapon, and a pair of wineglasses in the washing machine--presumably to remove the finger prints. Reggie, having as much sense as god gave a rock, pulls out the knife to look at it and cuts himself on the broken wineglass. All so that when the police arrive, he can be standing over the corpse, holding the murder weapon and dripping blood. Because that's how you prepare a case for trial in England.

Reggie gets arrested, and Laura comes to his rescue, bringing Nigel back from LA. He immediately makes a connection between the unhinged letters to Sherlock Holmes written by "Moriarty" and concludes that Reggie is being targeted by a mad person who has become convinced that Reggie is actually Sherlock Holmes and has to pay for killing his/her ancestor at Reichenbach Falls. He goes to chambers, and finds Darla Rennie's business card wedged between the cushions of an office chair, and it is also drenched in perfume, which Nigel remembers as belonging to someone who was in his therapy group the previous year when he took some time off for a rest cure/nervous breakdown. (We don't know the specifics of this, despite it being referenced in both books. Fodder for future books, probably.) Fortunately, he can identify this woman by her legs, and realizes that Darla Rennie isn't actually a solicitor, but probably somebody with a grudge out to get Reggie.

Yes, this is truly what is happening. Poor schizophrenic Darla has been taken off her meds for nefarious purposes by her doctor, leading her to lapse into the delusion that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Professor Moriarty, and that Sherlock Holmes killed her ancestor, then discovered cryogenics, preserving himself for nearly two centuries in order to come back as a London barrister. This delusion is then hastily cobbled together with her jealous hatred of Black Cabs, since she wanted to be a driver but was cursed with no sense of direction.

But wait! There's more to the plot! Because the treating psychiatrist is also a software entrepreneur who is trying to sell a system of GPS devices to be installed in Black Cabs! Which the cabbies totally oppose, since it messes with their foundational mythos. Why devote yourself to the Knowledge if you can have a computer installed that does it for you? But in a further twist, the proposed GPS has surveillance video and audio, so anything talked about in the back of a cab--stock tips, celebrity misbehavior, ordinary indescretions--can be recorded and used for insider trading, blackmail and/or sold to tabloids! Because there are actually three Black Cabs with the same distinctive vanity license plates, and two of them were used for crimes while Walters was paid to drive a route that would establish a CCTV alibi!

There is another murder of a co-conspirator, there is the discovery of the second Black Cab with the same license plate which was driven into the Thames, but discovered at low tide. (Why didn't they just remove the license plate? Plot Requirement I guess.) Reggie gets out of prison and goes to confront the doctor/GPS developer, ends up being held at gun point, figures out the surveillance scheme, and then watches in horror! as Laura gets into the third cab run by the Bad Guys. And Darla's the driver! And she is going to murder Laura to exact revenge on Sherlock/Reggie, by driving the cab off the Tower Bridge while it opens to let a ship through.

There is a problem with this part of the plan, however, because Laura is never going to just sit passively in the back and ride to her doom, nor is it clear how Darla was going to escape being killed at the same time. But! it's cinematic! The iconic Black Cab straddling the gap as the Tower Bridge rises open! Laura, the gorgeous actress dangling from the tip of the bridge before losing her grip and sliding down the angled roadway! The Black Cab breaking open and Darla falling to her death (?) into the Thames! Reggie who managed to call Nigel before the battery on his cell phone died, Nigel rallying the other Black Cabbies, who linked arms at the base of the Bridge and saved Laura when her grip gave way!

As I was reading this, I found myself thinking that this read like a novelization of a TV series. You know, some striking images, built in recurrent episodes and characters, enough action to distract you from the fact that the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And then, on the publisher's website I found this information about Michael Robertson.

MICHAEL ROBERTSON works for a large company with branches in the United States and England. His first novel in this series, The Baker Street Letters, has been optioned by Warner Bros. for television. He lives in San Clemente, California.

Oh yeah, give me a pipe and call me "Sherlock Holmes!" I wouldn't be surprised to find that he was a television writer, or something similar.

Again--a fine enough book to read in paperback, to pick up on a second-hand table, to take to the beach. Definitely NOT worth $25 in hardcover. I read the e-book version, which was half the hardcover price, and probably not worth that either. Would I watch a TV series? I'd certainly give it a shot. Would I recommend these books to my friends? Probably not without some serious caveats.

The Baker Street Letters, by Michael Robertson

2011-04-11T02:36:00.000-05:00

Great premise, intriguing mystery set up, ultimately squandered by the poor execution. Reggie Heath is a London barrister with a fabulous life--wealthy, a partner at Lloyd's of London (which requires some serious liquidity), Queen's Counsel, dating a gorgeous actress. He's just rented the second floor of a large building for his law chambers on Baker Street. And yes, the block the building sits on encompasses what would be 221B, the home of fictional Sherlock Holmes.

One of the conditions of the lease, then, is that Reggie is required to answer the letters that still come in addressed to Sherlock Holmes. Reggie's rather feckless brother Nigel is given that task, and Nigel finds himself intrigued by one of the requests for help. Twenty years ago an 8 year old girl wrote to ask Sherlock Holmes to help find her missing father, and included something she called "Daddy maps" to aid in the search. Now Nigel has received two letters purportedly from the same girl, now an adult, asking for return of the enclosures. Nigel believes the contemporary letters are forgeries, and the girl is in danger.

Reggie isn't interested, being far too concerned with the challenge of the upcoming hearing to reinstate Nigel's solicitor's license. Nigel is visibly more interested in the Sherlock letters, and Reggie nags and needles and nudges his brother to get back to his "real" career. It's pretty well sketched that Nigel is only a lawyer because he's appeasing his older brother, and so the reader is not surprised when Nigel doesn't even turn up at his reinstatement hearing, leaving Reggie to vamp frantically as he tries to cover up for his brother's unexplained absence. It is here we find out what Nigel did to be suspended, and even here it's more about Reggie's desperate need to "protect" his brother than anything else.

There was "that thing in Kent." Apparently Nigel won a case in court, then subsequently found his client had lied. Deeply remorseful, he attempted to return his legal fee to the unsuccessful parties, which apparently required him to break into the women's only dorm where he ran into the under-aged (and under dressed) daughter and reached into his pants to offer her a check, only that wasn't what SHE thought he was whipping out. At least, that's the story Reggie tells the committee. He also lies and says that Nigel had a sudden, horrible flu, and was unable to contain his bodily fluids long enough to attend the hearing. . . .no, it wasn't any funnier in the book.

Reggie, being a douche, can't believe Nigel would blow off the hearing, and he is especially peeved because he (Reggie) had planned to go to the airport immediately thereafter, to intercept his girlfriend Laura and say something that was (he thought) going to convince her not to fly to New York to do Shakespeare on Broadway, followed by time in LA making a movie of the play. Because he doesn't realize she's an actress maybe? Because while he can't treat her well or ask her to marry him or even act like he loves her, he also can't stand to let her do anything other than hang around London waiting for him to call? Oh, and there's some nonsense about how Nigel was interested in Laura first. This does not constitute self-awareness on Reggie's part.

Fortunately for the reader, when Reggie does go back to the office, there's a dead body in Nigel's office. It's the obnoxious chambers clerk, his head bashed in by a large reproduction Remington bronze. The office has been ransacked, locked file cabinets broken open, and the interesting letters about the 20 year old case are missing. The cops arrive already convinced of Nigel's guilt, and so Reggie concludes that he has to follow his brother to LA to protect him from being found guilty of this murder.

The LA Reggie ends up in is not Beverly Hills. It would be a series of noir cliches, except almost everything happens in the harsh daylight. Reggie spends some time tracking his brother's footsteps, but can't figure out what Nigel has been doing until he finally meets Mara Ramirez, the girl who wrote the letter 20 years ago. He follows her to her apartment, knocks on the door, and doesn't have any insight into what a creepy thing that is to do, not even when she threatens to set her dog on him. So she does set her dog on him, and the dog knocks him down the stairs.

Now most people would take this as a sign that maybe they aren't equipped to do this kind of stalking/detective work, and might even go see a doctor about the possible concussion. Not Reggie--he keeps trying to get Mara to talk to him. There is a fax he gets from Nigel, calling a meeting at 2 AM at a deserted culvert, and Reggie goes because he is stupid. And so of course he goes there only to find a corpse in a shopping cart and of course that is the exact moment the cops show up and of course that doesn't convince him that he doesn't know what the hell he is doing. And he goes back and talks to Mara again.

For some (not at all convincing) reason, Mara talks to him, lets him in, and shows him the little tin box where she keeps her treasures, including copies of the "Daddy maps" she had sent to Sherlock Holmes twenty years ago. Because of course she made photo copies when she was eight. And not just photo copies, but two complete sets--one set she sent to Sherlock, one set she kept in her tin box, and then the originals she hid "someplace safe." Sounds like all the eight year olds you know, right?

But the documents have been stolen--they aren't in the box. Who could have taken them? Maybe the creepy neighbor who got himself killed and dumped into a grocery cart in the abandoned culvert? Must have been. But look! Mara didn't see this, but there is a corner of one of the documents that tore off and is wedged in the box. So of course Reggie palms it without telling her, because. . .because. . .okay, there is no reason he behaves this way, except that he is a douche.

And it's not just a corner, like the kind of corner that you might actually expect would get caught in the seams of a tin box and would be left behind if the original pages were taken in a hurry. No, this is a "corner" that is large enough that it contains two (illegible--of course) signatures, some identifying location data, and enough content that Reggie is able to recognize it as a geological survey (which--how does he recognize this? Why does he recognize this? Put it down to Plot Requirement Syndrome, where a character knows whatever is necessary to get the plot to the next scene, but no more than that). So he goes to the geology department at Unnamed University, where the suspiciously busy head of the department can't help now, but leave the documents and he'll look at them later.

Instead, Reggie runs into a lovely graduate student who goes out of her way to look at his document, access the data base of all geological surveys ever done anywhere on the planet, where this doesn't match! And this database search takes seconds! And this lovely grad student serves three plot functions, being herself a victim of Plot Requirement Syndrome:

She tells him that the data on his "corner" is evidence that somebody faked the survey results so that anybody using the database information to build. . .for example, a subway under LA. . .would think it was safe when it actually would blow up and kill everybody in the tunnel as soon as they hit the gas pockets.
She flirts mildly with Reggie, supposedly making us think that he really is attractive and charismatic, but actually confirming that he is an ass for entertaining thoughts about this girl while he's also busy being a controlling douche to Laura.
She gets to turn up dead at a time when the plot requires that Reggie get some information but also be prevented from using it in a timely fashion, so he can be discovered with yet another dead body and thus be arrested and have pointlessly hostile interactions with the local police.

Plot Requirement Syndrome is so often tragically fatal to secondary characters. Please give generously as we fight to defeat this disease.

So now it's important to find the full documents--the originals that the 8 year old Mara hid in a safe place. Where could that safe place be? Let's ask Mara--but she's gone, her apartment showing signs of her rapid departure and subsequent violent search. But there's her art (she's an artist of course), and she paints the same thing over and over--a small yellow house with a prominent pepper tree. Her childhood home! And she probably hid the originals under the tree! Reggie and Laura pretend (badly) to be a couple looking for a home, sucking in a real estate agent and wasting her time, but Laura finds the documents! Which they take to Anne, the graduate student with PRS who says "We have to tell the Suspiciously Busy Head of the Department!"

Soon, Reggie receives a phone call from Suspiciously Busy (and Also Nervous) Head, asking to meet at the reservoir so they can discuss the documents. Why the reservoir? Oh, well, Suspiciously Busy doesn't have en?ough time to come all the way to where Reggie is, and also doesn't have enough time to wait for Reggie to meet him, so they'll meet halfway. Where Suspiciously will be running anyway, because he has enough time for that but not for an important meeting. And Reggie will be bringing the original surveys too, right? The ones he hasn't made any additional copies of, correct? And where he won't tell anyone he is going? Good!

There is a tedious description of the ominous reservoir jogging path, and a too detailed description of how Reggie gets the documents stolen by a pair of roller bladers, runs a six minute mile in his business suit and shoes, ends up pushed into the water without spoiling the original documents, and gets caught with the body of the Lovely Graduate Student, who was herself obviously murdered because she told Suspiciously Busy about the forged survey documents.

The climax comes as Reggie discovers that Mara's father is one of the suspicious characters who has been lurking around the periphery of the story, and he's the one who killed the creepy neighbor and dumped the body into the shopping cart to be found by Reggie. And Mr. Mara was the original geologist who surveyed the area twenty years ago, but agreed to fudge the numbers in order to get some pressing gambling debts taken care of. He then ran off to Alaska for two decades, but came back just in time to find the subway approaching the area where his bad data will start killing workers. I don't know how he found that out all the way up in Alaska, since nobody on the ground seemed to be able to figure it out. Despite the fact that there had already been an explosion and a major underground fire.

There is a face-off in one of the gas-filled tunnels, where Reggie, Laura and Mr. Mara are to exchange the original documents (still no copies? Just checking. Because it would be too hard for a bunch of adults to do what an 8 year old did twenty years ago) for Nigel and Mara. But Mr. Mara knows that the bad guys are going to try to set off an explosion and kill the five good guys, so it's important that everybody be out of the tunnels and onto the platform/elevator, because if the bad guys don't try to kill them with an explosion then Mr. Mara will try to kill the bad guys with an explosion. In fact, the risk of explosion is so great, and it is so important that they be out of the tunnels in the event of any kind of open flame, that when one of the bad guys does light a flare--they all run down the tunnel. And there is an explosion, and Reggie feels the flames as the fireball passes over him. And yet all the good guys survive, and the bad guys all get killed plus burned so badly that their corpses are not identifiable.

There is a coda, where a generic corporate hack ties up all the loose ends. Reggie gets called into an office building that was near this problematic subway site--the corporate offices of a film production company. It turns out that it was the corporation that paid to have the survey data altered 20 years ago, as a means of recouping a bad investment in land. Having the subway go near their real estate holdings would increase the value of all this vacant land they were holding (20 years later!), and so they sent somebody to get the maps out of Nigel's offices, plus they had planted a mole in Reggie's chambers (his secretary) and murdered the poor sap who originally answered the letters to Sherlock (he caught on and wanted a bigger bribe). They forged the letters asking "Sherlock" to return the maps, and then hired an out-of-work actor to hang around Mara's mailbox to intercept the letter when it came. In fact, the real mastermind (if you can use that word for such a clumsy plot) was the head of the film studio, whose giant portrait dominates the offices where Reggie is being debriefed. And Reggie recognizes the face! It's That Guy! Who was inexplicably not too busy actually running a company to get personally involved in this farce of a mystery, who was on the same flight from London to LA that Reggie was on! And was at the reservoir when Reggie was pushed! And was the second man in the subway tunnel when the explosion happened! Because corporate malfeasors who managed to buy land inside LA that didn't appreciate over 20 years (!) always do their own murdering and hostage exchanges. How else will amateur detectives ever find out who was behind it all?

In a rather nice twist, the corporate goon doesn't want the company role to be made public, so he offers Reggie a substantial bribe, followed by the threat that since Reggie is a partner in a Lloyd's of London syndicate that actually insures the film company, he stands to lose his entire personal wealth if this goes public. Carrot AND stick. Reggie confirms that, yes, he has insured this particular company, and yes, he is liable to the full extent of his personal assets. But he turns the documents over anyway and takes the hit. The end.

As I said, the set up was so promising, but the execution is uneven. The writing is drearily pedestrian so much of the time. Action sequences are so specifically laid out as to rob them of all their drama. Cab rides are rendered turn by turn, as if by a GPS.

The plotting is also rather poorly handled. There is some cursory sleuthing--much of which could have been condensed if anybody in the book had ever used Google searches. Instead, Reggie calls his secretary back in London to look things up for him, which mostly serves to pad the plot. In the "climactic" explosion in the unfinished subway tunnels, the only people who end up dead are the Bad Guys, and the beautiful women who are the love interests don't even get scratched. Yup, that's a Hollywood explosion, all right. Believable it is not.

Robertson has also grossly miscalculated on his main characters, the Heath brothers. Nigel is clearly the more interesting brother--he's the one who is emotionally engaged by the plight of the girl/woman, the one who tries to learn the art of Holmesian deduction, the one who actually abandons a stultifying legal practice to fly to Los Angeles to solve the case. There is a potentially charming scene where Nigel assembles scraps of data to conclude that Reggie had given his secretary a raise--she is now wearing some designer clothes, there is a form for a car loan. This would have been a better scene if we had seen it dramatized, rather than have Reggie tell Laura about it.

Since Nigel is the more interesting charcter, then he ISN'T the one we read about. In fact, Nigel disappears for more than 80% of the book, and we are stuck following Reggie around as he tries to figure out how to make Nigel stop being so inconvenient. This is an ongoing problem, because after bashing around LA for a hundred pages or so, Reggie finally finds Nigel, who is then immediately arrested, sent to jail, mysteriously sprung on bail, kidnapped, blown up and left in a coma for several days. Basically, it's as though the author has no idea of what to do with with this character so does whatever he can think of to keep Nigel out of the narrative.

Instead, Robertson has made Reggie the protagonist of this book, and Reggie is an ass. He's judgmental about his brother, he's alternately insanely and inappropriately possessive of his girlfriend, while simultaneously unwilling to make any emotional connection with her. He's not a very convincing detective, especially when things get rough--there is no way I believe that he would shake off all the physical abuse he receives at the hands of the various villains. He's a London barrister, not a guy who spends his time getting knocked around physically, yet he gets up after being knocked unconscious at least three times over the course of the book and goes back for more.

Robertson tries to give Reggie some kind of complex emotional life, revolving mostly around his failure to hold onto Laura and his (passing) guilt about having "stolen" Laura from Nigel. That gets rather tidily resolved without any effort on his part when Nigel conveniently falls in love with Mara anyway. Also, it's not clear why Reggie has any trouble keeping Laura as his girlfriend, since she actually joins him in LA to help him rescue his brother. Sadly, she isn't able to save him from being a douche, and in the end their relationship is where it was at the beginning--he thinks she should be in love with him, despite the fact of his being a jerk to her at every opportunity, and he can't figure out why she might not want to spend all her time with him on his terms.

To give the book its due, though, some of it is truly charming. Robertson has some deftness in sketching characters--the tragic Lovely Grad Student, for example, comes to life with only a few details and some good dialogue. The premise is clever, and sets the stage for as many sequels as one can imagine, since there is no reason to run out of letters to Sherlock asking for help. The specific details that lure Nigel into investigating--the touching letters from the marvelous eight year old Mara, the enclosed maps, then the subsequent forged letters asking for their return. . .those are beautifully done. These are the nuggets in the trash, that make me wish Michael Robertson had given the entire book the care and attention it needed to bring the whole thing up to the level of the best bits.

I enjoyed it enough to get the second book in the series, which I'll review next.

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

2011-02-26T15:43:00.000-06:00

This is an enormous book. This is a wonderful book. This is a book that I found engaging and thought provoking, without actually loving it, but I couldn't put it down. Like the characters, this book is prickly to live with, but worth the effort. Franzen does not need my endorsement, as he's doing just fine, but he has it nonetheless.

I read The Corrections back when there was all that fuss about it, and I actually loved it. Sure, there were problems, and "talking turds" were given a strenuous critical lashing, but to me it said so much about the joys and disasters of family that I heartily embraced it. Sadly, I must have read it before starting this blog, because when I went back to read my review, there wasn't one.

So any nuanced discussion of the relationship between The Corrections and Freedom will have to wait until I re-read the earlier book. (Now I'm wondering--did I borrow it from the library, or is it living in one of my bookshelves?)

Anyway, back to Freedom. It is fundamentally the story of Walter and Patty Berglund and their marriage. When they met, Patty was a women's basketball star at the University of Minnesota and Walter an earnest student at Macalester College. We get some background into how they arrived in the same place--Patty's family were well-off in New York, but she never fit in and basically fled to the Midwest to escape the rest of them. Walter's family ran a sketchy motel in Hibbing, and he moved to the city to escape his alcoholic father.. They were brought together through Walter's roommate, Richard Katz, a devastating bad-boy musician and Walter's opposite in nearly every way. Patty is attracted to Richard, Walter is in love with Patty, and Richard does the most un-selfish thing he ever does in his entire life by driving Patty away from himself and into Walter's life. After graduation and their marriage, Patty becomes Donna Reed from It's a Wonderful Life, renovating a run-down Victorian house in Saint Paul and being a full time mother to their two children, Jessica and Joey.

Walter graduates from law school and works first for 3M (total Minnesota shout-outs in this portion of the book), and then for the Nature Conservancy. Franzen mostly skims their lives from the time Patty gives up Richard until nearly 20 years later, when Joey Berglund causes parental grief. Walter and Patty are "stereotypical" liberal Minnesotans, signified deftly by their driving Volvos and listening to NPR. Joey hits puberty and locks himself into battle with his father, becoming Franzen's version of Alex P. Keaton.

(In fact, there is a kind of echo of Family Ties in this book--you can see Patty as Meredith Baxter Birney--warm and likeable, a good mother generally but occasionally out of her depth, while Michael Gross plays Walter as kind of a feckless pussy of a man. Jessica has less personality than either Justine Bateman or Tina Yothers, so that part of the analogy fails. But you can pick either one of them as a visual reference for Jessica as we proceed through the review.)

Joey wants money. There is no reason we ever learn for his insatiable desire for riches, but it is possibly tied up in his battle with his father. Walter doesn't particularly care about money, and Joey is able to absolutely push Walter to fury on the topic. By the time he's 16, Joey has moved out of the family home and moved in next door with his girlfriend Connie and her feckless family. In time, Joey graduates from high school and goes to the University of Virginia, where he struggles to establish himself. He can't quite bring himself to commit to Connie, but he can't give her up either. He falls into the thrall of his roommate's family--a neocon political think tank father and the beautiful sister, but never quite commits himself there either. He dabbles in war speculation, ultimately serving as a sub-subcontractor to deliver shoddy parts for shoddy trucks shipped to the military for use in Iraq. He can't quite bring himself to take the profits or to turn whistle-blower--a common theme for his life. He marries Connie on a whim, then can't bring himself to tell his family, nor can he entirely give up his pursuit of the beautiful sister.

Walter, however, is the engine of the book. Through his work with the Nature Conservancy, he makes the acquaintance of Vin Haven, a Texas billionaire who hires Walter to create a sanctuary for the cerulean warbler, a tiny blue bird that migrates between South America and West Virginia. Haven's controversial plan is to buy a hundred square miles of West Virginia land, mine out all the coal in the fastest (and most ecologically perilous) manner possible, then reclaim the land for the cerulean warblers.

The plan is rather bold and also counter-intuitive, and Walter is a bit too naive to see the (inevitable) damage it will do to his principles to participate. He can see the brilliance of the plan--if you remove the coal before converting the land to sanctuary, there will never be any pressure to destroy the sanctuary for the underlying mineral resources. However, it requires that he trust coal companies and oil men--historically not the greatest of conservators. In pursuit of this goal, Walter and Patty move to Georgetown, and live in the townhouse that is the Cerulean Warbler Mountain Trust. Walter's assistant also lives in the townhouse, and she is a beautiful 26 year old who is visibly in love with Walter. The marriage is in trouble.

Of course, it has been in trouble before--Patty's unresolved lust for Richard resulted in a weekend fling and then the joint decision that they both loved Walter too much to cheat on him with each other. Walter was mercifully unaware of this for years. However, Patty had little to do in Washington, and became increasingly depressed and hard to live with, while Lalitha's beauty and obvious devotion to Walter was increasingly difficult for him to resist. Things come to a head one weekend when Richard arrives in DC at Walter's request to help him start "Free Space" a movement to arrest overpopulation.

Free Space is Walter's gift to himself as he feels increasingly dirtied by the deals he's making to achieve the cerulean warbler sanctuary. As Walter sees it, the root of all environmental difficulty lies in the fact of too many humans on the planet, and he wants to do something to reverse the steady growth of human population. The idea is to appeal to youth through a series of rock concerts and music on the topic, and Richard is their key to musical credibility. Richard agrees to help, mostly because he senses the Berglund's marital troubles are a chance for him to get back together with Patty. Patty tries to fend Richard off with her therapy manuscript,(which compromises a large section of the book), ostensibly because it shows how much she loves Walter. Richard reads it, leaves DC after putting the manuscript on Walter's desk.

Of course, Walter reads it and is infuriated by Patty's betrayal with Richard, even though it was years before. He throws Patty out of the house and lets himself fall in love with Lalitha. They travel together for several months, running the Free Space battles of the the bands, set to culminate near the cerulean warbler habitat in West Virginia. Walter and Lalitha have the closest thing to a fight, and she goes back to W.Va ahead of him, and is killed in an auto accident.

All of this is well written, closely observed, carefully researched, and mere set up for the novel's last 30 pages. Six years have passed, and Patty is working as a teacher's aide in New York, while Walter is back in Minnesota, working a low level job back at the Nature Conservancy. He is living in the old lake cabin that used to belong to his mother, the same cabin where Patty and Richard had their tryst, which Richard made into a successful album he called Nameless Lake. Development has reached the lake, and Walter goes door to door asking the residents of the McMansions to please keep their cats indoors--he cites statistics that nationally, cats kill over 1 million birds per day. There is a conflict set up with the mostly unlikeable Linda Haufbonner (?), who refuses to curb her cat and takes personal offense at Walter. Over the course of a couple of years, things escalate. Then Patty shows up at the cabin.

Walter has refused to talk to Patty, or even about Patty to his children. They are not divorced, because Walter doesn't want to do anything that will bring the living, vibrant Patty back into his life, and destroy the remaining fragments of memory he has of Lalitha. He has essentially frozen himself, working to keep enough life to get out of bed in the morning and to sleep at night. Patty shows up at his door, underdressed for the autumn weather, and sits on his doorstep refusing to move and eventually subjecting herself to hypothermia. Walter literally can't stand to watch her kill herself, so he brings her inside and warms her back to life. She returns the favor, spending about a year repairing relations with the neighbors in the development--especially the noxious Linda Haufbonner. The neighbors are sorry when Patty lets them know the two will be moving back to NYC at the end of the summer. In a lovely touch, the cabin and its woods are left to a land trust and turned into a bird sanctuary.

For a precis, that was quite long. And as interesting as the plot developments are, the book is most engaging in the connections and motifs and themes, of which there are so many that this review is going to get quite unwieldy.

How Do We Live?

The main issue of the book is the question of "how do we live?" Franzen explicitly raises the question in the introductory portion of the book, before we know very much about the Berglunds and their lives. Walter has been hardworking and mostly absent from the neighborhood life, while Patty has been tirelessly generous and social. However, when Joey moved into Connie's house, Patty went a little crazy and began a vendetta against that family, trying to enlist neighborhood support. One of the neighbors isn't too sorry to see them go to DC, and says that the problem is that Patty "never learned how to live."

The theme repeats in multiple ways. Most obviously is Walter's obsession with (and disapproval of) the way American culture gobbles up resources. Coal mining, gas drilling, SUVs, giant TVs, huge houses on enormous lawns, strip malls--all are targets of his anger. Patty's loss of identity in DC is another version--she doesn't work, she no longer has kids to raise, she's depressed and disappointed, yet not able to change things until they go completely wrong that one weekend. The question gets re-addressed with Patty's mother and siblings once her father dies. There is "an estate" that is the focus of much familial disfunction, and Patty ends up helping her mother sell it off and use the money to improve the lives of her siblings. First, sister Abigail, a performance artist who uses the inheritance to extract herself from a squalid bohemian existence in NYC, forming a troupe of female comics who become quite successful in Italy. There is the other sister Veronica, who wants only to practice yoga and paint, to live a solitary life in which she doesn't have to work. There is a brother, Edgar, who lost a fortune in Asian stocks, and ended up living on "the estate," subsistence farming the grounds with his Russian Jewish wife and five children. There were uncles to be bought off, and each of Patty's siblings had a different idea of how the money should be allocated.

Joey also has to weigh various options of how to live. He wants to see himself as a "hard man," but isn't certain he has the stomach for it. He wants his roommate's beautiful sister Jenna, but doesn't believe he has the ability to earn the kind of money she expects from a husband. He wants to escape his father, but ultimately finds Walter to be the only one he can confess to. He is drawn to wealth, but doesn't have the coldness he sees as necessary to become wealthy. The telling incident of Joey is the lost wedding ring. He has married his long time girlfriend Connie on a whim in New York, but can't bring himself to publicly acknowledge his action. He plays with his wedding band in his mouth, sucking on it and knocking it against his teeth, while talking on the phone and abjuring Connie not to tell her own mother, lest the information get back to his parents. He is also "explaining" to her why he is stopping in Buenos Aires rather than going directly to see the salvaged truck parts he is supposed to be buying in Paraguay--while leaving out the important detail that he is travelling with Jenna. After hanging up, he accidentally swallows the ring.

Part of him thinks he should just buy a replacement ring--it would be $300 and Connie would never know the difference. Yet the ring holds real emotional value to him, and he ends up paying $297 for an ER visit only to learn there is nothing to be done other than waiting for it to pass and retrieving it. Of course, the moment arrives while he's in a Patagonia hotel room with Jenna, finding that he has to physically handle his own feces in order to retrieve the ring--and the incident ends his infatuation with the unattainable Jenna.

I Hate Cats

I am embarrassed that I didn't catch this one earlier--the deliberate homophonic "cats" and "Katz." Throughout the book, Richard lives a rock and roll lifestyle, that involves sleeping with lots of different (young) women. In fact, he more or less preys on them, albeit often with their permission. He spends most of the book sniffing around Walter's house trying to catch Patty as well. This pattern is clearly parallel to the situation with Linda Haufbonner's obnoxious cat "Bobby," a near feral sociopathic animal who kills birds on Walter's property and leaves their broken bodies behind. Bobby rarely eats his victims (not "animal" behavior, but more like "human" sport hunting) and doesn't take them home to his "family." Ultimately, Walter live traps Bobby and takes him to a rescue organization in the Cities, there to either be euthenized or adopted by a family that will keep him indoors. Similarly, Richard is metaphorically caged and removed from Walter's life.

Birds

Lalitha's fate is a human-sized version of the plight of the migratory birds Walter tries to save. Franzen writes about how fragile and tiny birds are, and how they are mowed down by wind turbines and airplanes and sport hunters, how when they reach their summer grounds the habitat is often logged or developed or paved over. Lalitha's dies while driving a small (fragile) car, hit or run off the road by the heavy coal mining equipment that dominates the unsafe West Virginia roads. Later, Walter muses on how his memory of Lalitha is breaking up, a feeling that is echoed in his thoughts on the fragility of birds--bits of fluff and bone, nearly weightless once their tiny hearts stop beating.

Only Connect

The message of E.M. Forester's great book Howard's End is the importance of human connection, and Franzen illustrates this in the last section of his book. Walter is deliberately emotionally frozen, trying to keep time from progressing and erasing his memories of Lalitha. He is cold and distant to his neighbors, his children, and himself. When Patty shows up on his doorstep, she deliberately refuses Walter's orders to "go warm up!" until she is nearly dead of hypothermia. Walter carries her inside the cabin, covers her in blankets, and strips himself first and then her, in order to share the body heat to keep her alive. There is a lovely poetic description of when she comes to and stares at him, and he sees how fragile their lives are in the face of the great chasm of death--and he begins to thaw as well. Patty brings her warmth and life to the neighbors in the development, warming their impressions of Walter.

I'm sure I could go on, and as I read other reviews and analyses of this book, I will post an update. Is Freedom the Great American Novel? Probably not, but it is definitely worth reading.

Grade: A

On The Future Development Of Mixed Media Novels

2011-02-09T08:46:00.000-06:00

I ran across this today--an Amazon recommended book for February, called Delirium by Lauren Oliver. It's a YA novel, and I loved her earlier book, Before I Fall. So, a good recommendation, and one I will take seriously, but NOT the reason I am writing this.

No, the real reason I am writing this is because on the Amazon page for Delirium, Lauren Oliver provides a playlist--what amounts to a soundtrack to the book. And this makes me think, again, about the future of the novel and of long form storytelling. Because this playlist might have been the music that Lauren Oliver listened to while she wrote the book, but why shouldn't books have a soundtrack just like movies and TV do?

Sure, this particular iteration is awkward and rather unlikely--you don't find this playlist unless you look at the book on Amazon. If you just picked it up in the bookstore, or borrowed it from the library, it doesn't seem like there is a link to the playlist. Nor is the "playlist" actually playable on Amazon. You can click the links to hear a sample of the music, and purchase it through Amazon's mp3 store, this increasing Amazon's profit margin. So, yeah--kind of cynical, but also sort of brilliant.

I have a recollection that a million years ago (in cultural terms, otherwise known as 1998) Laura Esquivel wrote released Law of Love, her much less successful follow-up to her blockbuster Like Water for Chocolate. Amazon confirms my memory that the book came with a CD of music that you were supposed to play while reading the book--Puccini arias and Mexican dances. I never bought this book, and my recollection is that the CD portion was not particularly well reviewed. Of course, neither was the book, which may have been a large part of the problem.

But why not push it further, now that the world is embracing Kindles and other e-readers? (Yes, I do have a Nook, although I prefer to read on my iPod or my Droid phone.) All these devices have sound capability, so why not have music programmed to the pages. Surely, there is some ability to link the two. I really think there is a future in truly multi-platform reading, and that these are the first clumsy steps toward that future.

There are opportunities for cross-promotion. A playlist like this could be assembled into a one-click purchase on iTunes or Napster easily. Amazon could (I assume, not being a coder of any description) also assemble the various songs into an one-click "album" and even allow you to purchase it at a discount along with the book. This ought to be especially easy to do in ebook format, shouldn't it?

Hallmark is currently promoting the hell out of recordable storybooks right now, the latest version of books on tape, which appears to have embedded the audio in the book itself. Surely I am not the only one who sees how books are beginning to look like blogs and internet pages.

Look, ebook readers have preserved the image of books--they still have "page turn" functions. There is no real reason for this, technologically, but it does speak to a way we have acculturated to the form of a book. Why not approach reading from the other direction as well--make books more like web pages, with music, embedded video, clickable links? Paper books will always exist, but ebooks have the potential to be so much more than mere digitized books. Somebody get on this now!

The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown

2011-02-07T12:45:00.002-06:00

What is there to say about this book other than it is exactly what you would expect from a Dan Brown Novel(TM). There are the ridiculously short chapters. The excessive use of italics for emphasis--when you can't make the point by repeating it, do it again in italics in its own paragraph. There is the physical freak with an inexplicable obsession--this one is a 'roid-fueled bald guy with a full body Nair addiction, who has tattooed every inch of his body, except for the very top of his head. There is the bad guy who turns out not to be so bad. There are the lectures about the "real meaning" of architecture, secret societies, language. There is the ominous secret society, this time the Freemasons. There are the fake etymologies--Amen at the end of a prayer is supposed to derive from the name of the Egyptian god Amun--everything is connected to everything else! There is the beautiful woman companion with absolutely no sexual attraction whatsoever. There is the enormous body count, caused by a sociopathic serial murderer who for some reason never quite gets around to killing the main characters, although the secondary and lower characters have about a 10% survival rate.

It's The Da Vinci Code set in Washington D.C. Robert Langdon, everybody's favorite symbologist (isn't the field actually called "hermeneutics?") is called to DC to serve as a last minute substitute speaker at some event being held in the Capitol building. He gets there, late and disheveled, only to find that there is no event! Statuary Hall is empty! But there is a kerfuffle in the Rotunda--a human hand on a spike, pointing upward. Because being creepy is the only way to get Langdon's attention, apparently.

And the race is on. For some reason, everything "has" to happen on this particular night. There are several threats about "running out of time" although there is absolutely no reason everything has to happen in this particular 10 hour period of time. I mean, all the puzzles and solutions and everything are frickin' carved in granite--it's not like they are going anywhere.

So, back to the hand. Langdon recognizes is as belonging to the guy he was supposed to be meeting at the imaginary event--the ID is the 33rd Degree Masonic ring. But unlike when it was actually attached to Peter Solomon, now it has tattoos on the fingers, which makes it the "Hand Of Mysteries."


Photo from here--an interesting site collecting references from the book

At this point, Langdon is frantic to find his friend, the Capitol security guards are confused, and suddenly in rushes a terrifying Japanese (really? or Japanese-American? ) woman who is a Director of the CIA. She immediately starts throwing her weight around, threatening job security and offering to arrest anybody who fails to co-operate.

Now, I'm no expert--and I didn't just write a 400 page novel with the CIA at the center of it--but my understanding of things is that the CIA doesn't have civil authority inside US borders. That's the FBI. The CIA can't arrest anybody, doesn't have any direct authority over the Capitol police, and basically wouldn't have any official reason to be involved in this matter whatsoever. Maybe the Capitol security and DC cops and FBI might have some interest, but the CIA should really be looking at this as intramural and of no interests whatsoever. In fact, the CIA's interest turns out to be that the Big Baddie has taken video of secret Masonic rites, and the video includes recognizable US Senators and other DC big wigs, wielding knives, drinking what looks like blood out of skulls, and making truly obnoxious threats along the lines of "your viscera will be ripped from your abdomen if you reveal the secrets of this room." Understandably, these things could be considered inflammatory if posted on YouTube.

Again, however, it is not the CIA's job to protect the reputations of American citizens caught doing stupid looking things. If it's anybody's job, it would be the Fibbies--FBI. But it turns out that the FBI doesn't have a giant puzzle sculpture on its grounds, so it's the CIA that swoops in.

Photo from here--nice summary of the sculpture too.

(This was supposed to be a major part of the this book--clues pointing to Kryptos were planted on the dust jacket of The Da Vinci Code, but it's basically just a random detail.)

The severed hand is supposed to be an invitation to hidden knowledge, and there is another clue tattooed into the palm of the hand--"IIIX 588." Which makes no sense at all, and like the equally idiotic scene in DVC where Langdon doesn't recognize that Leonardo wrote in mirror script, here he doesn't realize for an impossibly long time that he's reading this one upside down. It's actually "SBB XIII"--which it also takes forever for anyone to understand or explain, whereas if you had ridden in an elevator before, you would recognize as referring to a sub-basement.

So the CIA woman is threatening everyone in a ridiculous manner, the Architect of the Capitol (a actual job title) comes running in to keep Masonic secrets safe, there is some nonsense about Langdon carrying a package that has been X-rayed. He has no idea what is in it, but the CIA woman has seen the security scan and they holler at each other about it and eventually open it--and its the capstone of a pyramid and it fits the little stone pyramid that was down in the SBB.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Virginia, Peter Solomon's sister Kathleen is doing secret "scientific" research in a secret laboratory that for some reason is inside a perfectly unilluminated warehouse for the Smithsonian. Somehow, when you enter the warehouse you don't see the lab, which is of course illuminated. No, you have to have the disorienting experience of walking through the complete darkness, guided by a carpet runner. Anyway, in this mysterious lab, Kathleen Solomon is conducting experiments in "noetic science" which Brown is himself so uninterested in and skeptical of that he doesn't even bother explaining what they are. Take it on faith that these experiements "prove" things like the soul has mass, and thoughts have gravitational pull, and that God exists and there is life after death and that prayer chains cure cancer--all of which she has "proved" sitting alone in a dark room all by herself, with one assistant who is a computer hacker.

I don't believe a word of it, you don't believe a word of it, and based on the evidence presented, Dan Brown doesn't believe a word of it, and he's the one writing it.

So the tattooed freak covers himself in make-up to hide the tattoos--does he use a liquid foundation, or is he into the newer mineral brands? Does he buy it from Sephora? He represents himself as "Dr. Christopher Abaddon"--which is a total giveaway there, as he might as well have said "Call me Dr. Satan." Or, even better, "Doctor Horrible."

He gains access to the warehouse, kills the assistant and blows up the lab, but Kathleen escapes after a chase scene through the perfect darkness. Which is silly--because when the inevitable Hollywood movie adaptation comes along starring Tom Hanks with heinous head-fur, how do you film a chase scene in total blackness? Anyway, Kathleen escapes and manages to hook up with Langdon, and they spend the rest of the book running away from the CIA and black helicopters while solving puzzles and magic squares.

Sure, there are lots of subplots and red herrings (Aringarosa anybody?) but the story boils down to this. . .

SPOILER AHEAD. TURN BACK NOW IF YOU THINK BROWN MIGHT POSSIBLY SURPRISE YOU IF YOU READ THIS BOOK. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The tattooed freak is the Main Bad Guy, with a particular hatred for the Solomon family. This is because he is a member of the Solomon family--the bad tempered, spoiled brat son of Peter Solomon who got too much money at 18, spent as much of it as he could getting wasted, and got thrown in a Turkish prison for smuggling drugs. When Peter declined to pay a massive bribe to release him from the prison, he paid the bribe himself, faked his own death (yes, another prisoner was bludgeoned to death to provide the required corpse--he then killed the prison official who arranged it all) and started body building and abusing steroids. At some point, he decided that sex, drugs and travel were no longer enough, and he started "studying" arcana.

Now, one constant in Dan Brown's books is his compulsion to explain things. He writes scenes that take place in college lecture halls, he has Langdon discourse pedantically whenever possible, and the secondary characters also usually have pet theories that they love to lay out in excruciatingly pompous detail. So the fact that the tattoo freak (who calls himself Ma'lakh) doesn't explain what he is looking for simply means that Brown never bothered making any sense of this character or his quest.

So Ma'lakh studies "ancient wisdom" and comes to the conclusion that he can transform himself into a literal demon if he just gets the "lost word" that unlocks the secrets of the Masons. How he arrives at this plan is not explained. Why he wants to be a demon, rather than the Most Powerful Person On The Planet is not explained. Why he thinks that tattooing himself, eliminating all his body hair and castrating himself (with an at-home kit?) is not explained. Why he thinks the Masons have the final key--and not any other secret society or religion--is not explained. Why he thinks Masons have anything at all to do with demonology is not explained. Dan Brown apparently had some trouble with writer's block and looming deadlines, and just didn't bother.

Anyway, Ma'lakh plans to write the Secret Masonic Word onto the top of his head and then make his dad mad enough to kill him with Abraham's knife, and then he will become the king of the demons. No, it doesn't make any sense. Not even by Dan Brown standards.

(I wonder what would have happened if he'd written the word "FUN" on his head rather than "circumpunct," which is what Peter told him was the word. More like "circum-PUNK'D," if you know what I mean.)

But he doesn't reveal himself as Peter's son (although I had guessed it hundreds of pages earlier--and I bet you did too) until after he does a ton of squicky things, including running his thick fingers inside Kathleen's mouth and then rubbing her saliva into the small bare spot on top of his head. She's his aunt! Ewwwww! (BTW, that makes no sense either--it's just a gratuitous creepy thing he does.)

In the end, Ma'lakh arranges things so he's in the top of the DC Masonic lodge, lying on the table under the skylight (or "occulus" in Brown-speak) with his father holding Abraham's knife. But dad shatters the knife on the stone table rather than kill his own (horrible nasty mad) son. It's the CIA black helicopter that breaks the glass in the skylight, and the shattered glass is what kills him. There is a queer sort of otherworldly scene where Ma'lakh dies and finds out that he's not greeted as king of the demons and that chaos isn't as much like a five-star hotel as he apparently imagined it would be. Again--not something Brown really believes in, based on the cursory treatment he give it.

But wait! There's more! Even though Langdon isn't a Mason, he's "earned" the knowledge, so Peter Solomon is going to show him the "lost word" that Ma'lakh was looking for! The secret knowledge of the Masons, that would completely change human history and unlock humanity's god-like powers if people knew and used it! And it is hidden, at the bottom of a spiral staircase, hundreds of feet below a pyramid, located in Washington DC!

Yeah, Brown tries to obscure this by having everybody talk about things being hundreds of feet underground--kind of unlikely in a city built on a swamp, so not a very effective misdirection. Of course, he was talking about the Washington Monument, which is capped by a 12 inch pyramid made of aluminum, which was more expensive than gold at the time. There is a staircase that winds up to the top, although everybody now takes the elevator. And at the bottom of the staircase, in the cornerstone of the monument, is a copy of the Mason's edition of the Bible. ! That's the big reveal. All the talk about "words of power" and "apotheosis" and "the world is not ready for this knowledge" is actually a mish-mash of humanist thought and conventional religious belief. God made man in God's image, humanity would be better if it lived by the pattern set by Christ, human knowledge and advancement would look like divinity to George Washington, and the Masons are actually a harmless bunch of dudes who drink red wine out of human skulls and conduct Bible study. Oh, and there's a secret third back-up of Kathleen's noetic science research that escaped being blown up earlier, but that's not as important as The Bible as the source of True Wisdom.

So, you get to the end of this book, and feel kind of--dirty. So much of the book is this fetishistic creepiness--the tattoos, the body obsession/horror, the way corpses just pile up without the book slowing down at all, the creepy New Age/demonology mash-ups--it's a book chock full of dirty secrets and slimy creepy things, and I end up wanting to take a shower to get the unsavory scenes off of my skin.

Like I said--exactly what you expect from a Dan Brown novel.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua

2011-01-20T13:16:00.001-06:00

What happens when an irresistible force encounters an immovable object? This book.

The kerfuffle over Amy Chua is starting to die out, as the actual book is available. It is now obvious that "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is not a parenting advice book, but more of a memoir and there is a degree to which Amy Chua "gets" that some of her parenting decisions were--how do we say this--not the Best Choices. Arguably, some of her more obvious excesses might be excused as being her "sense of humor," which is admittedly dry. Dry, like the topsoil of the Dust Bowl. So dry as to have shriveled up and blown away without a trace. Dry to the point of being not actually funny at all.

Clearly the woman is nuts, and as you read her accounts of her battles with her strong-willed daughter, you have to wonder if she likes to run head-first into brick walls as a hobby, because Sister! She sure resists learning anything from her own experiences!

The signs are obvious early on. Amy Chua wants to introduce her younger daughter, Lulu, to piano when Lulu is about two years old. Amy puts one finger on one key, plays the note three times, and then asks Lulu to do the same. Lulu splays her hands as wide as she can, hits as many different keys as hard as she can, as fast as she can, as long as she can until Amy physically removes her from the piano. At that point, Lulu begins thrashing and screaming and flailing.

So Amy "decides" (not clear that she's actually using any higher brain functioning at this point, but there's no word for that) to put Lulu outside into the cold to shock her into obedience. Lulu is put outside into 20 degree weather with only light indoor clothing on. And then--did you see this coming?--refuses to come back inside, forcing her mother to self-flagellate about the fact that her tiny daughter is outside in inappropriate clothing.

At this point, it is apparent to me that the whole "Chinese mother/Western mother" thing is a distraction. What we have is the same battle almost every family faces--when a strong-willed parent is confronted with an equally strong-willed child. One of them is supposed to be the adult.

But Amy Chua doesn't want to learn this lesson. As self-reported, she has a theory about the "best way to parent" and she's not going to let actual failure dissuade her from her pet theory. Geez, this is the kind of towering intellect we want to encourage--the facts don't fit the theory, so we ignore the facts and just scream the theory louder.

Actually, that might be exactly what makes for a successful law professor at Yale Law School.

Things escalate until the inevitable moment when the child figures out the exact Perfect Storm of circumstances to humiliate her parent. After all, the odds are in the kid's favor, since the mom has to win every argument, and the kid only has to win one. Chua never figures out this math either. So the stage is set for a horrible show-down in a restaurant in Moscow. Amy orders caviar and Lulu refuses to eat any. This is not a fight Amy can win, and most parents I know have figured this out well before our child reaches the age of 13. In fact, this is a lesson that is often learned during the struggle to potty train. Your kid has more control over excretion than you do. Same with food.

So Amy tries to make Lulu eat caviar. She orders, she threatens, she shames, and nothing works. She stakes her entire parental authority on making Lulu eat one egg. Who think this is ever going to work? Only someone caught up in her need for control would fail to recognize the way she has created a zero sum situation over a single caviar egg--something that is literally the size of a pin head. Amy is hissing at her daughter, and makes the classic novice blunder. "People are looking at us."

Well, you might as well turn the gun on yourself and pull the trigger at that point, because if you let your kid know that you don't want people to look at you, you have given her a powerful and deadly weapon. Which Lulu uses. She starts to scream. "I HATE you and I HATE being Chinese and I HATE this family and I HATE violin and if you don't leave me alone I'm going to smash this glass." If people weren't looking before, they certainly are now.

At this point, I am trying to figure out how to get into a poker game against Amy Chua, because this woman will raise the stakes with nothing in her hand. Because when Lulu threatens to start smashing restaurant glassware, Amy Chua says "I dare you."

So Lulu does.

And Amy Chua is the one who runs out of the restaurant in humiliation. As she should have. Because what she was doing wasn't parenting, it was brinksmanship, it was posturing, it was a desperate struggle for supremacy. With a child.

Most appallingly, Amy Chua learned nothing from this experience. Sure, she let Lulu cut back on her violin commitments and take up tennis instead, but once Lulu showed any aptitude for tennis, she started back in on her over-investedness. And then she published this book, in which she once again exposed her bad parenting in public, and failed to realize that people would look at her and judge her, just as they did in that Moscow restaurant. Since the publication of the excerpt in the WSJ, Amy Chua has gotten a great deal of pushback--bloggers, op-ed writers, Chinese-American parents and children, have pointed out many different ways in which Chua has perpetuated racial stereotypes and failed her children. Apparently, she has been surprised by this. Really?

The Mommy-sphere is a tightly wound and exquisitely sensitive environment, full of smart, articulate, successful women who worry that whatever we do is never Good Enough. Take that group of conscientious and worried women, and surround them with contradictory and harping media about what they "should" be doing: pre-natal foreign language, Baby Einstein, breast vs bottle, cloth vs. disposable, homeschool vs. public vs. private school, daycare vs. staying at home. Every decision, every purchase, every life choice is potentially damaging to your child's future!

Then throw in a "Tiger Mother" who comes roaring out of the pages of the WSJ to deliver a verbal bitchslap and declare her way is The Only Way. Face it--who reads articles like this? People (usually mothers) who care about doing a good job. Who are then both assaulted and battered by Amy Chua's broad smear of all their efforts. She doesn't even acknowledge that they have even tried to do right by their children. Once again, Amy Chua has set up the perfect ingredients to create a temper tantrum. We don't like Amy Chua and her dictums. We don't want to be part of her family, we don't want to be like her, and we take glee in finding her weak spots and errors and tearing down her so-called "successes."

Her daughter played at Carneige Hall. My daughter (definitely NOT raised by a Tiger Mother) has sung a requiem at Carneige Hall. Did you know that Carneige Hall can be rented as well?

Guests at her home listened to her daughter play piano and gushed about her talent. Well, quelle surprise! They then went home and rolled their eyes when telling the story of the pushy woman who trotted her daughter out to perform for dinner guests.

"Tiger Mother" is not a scalable program. If your girls were in a classroom with 20 children of Tiger Mothers, they could not all be the top of the class.

What's the logic behind pushing the music--and the dismissal of drama and gym? Why should "be the best in everything" exclude being "the best" at a sport? Especially since sports have things like tournaments where who is "the best" can actually be determined?

How many college applicants already have perfect GPAs and perfect SATs? If you want your girls to actually get accepted in many of the "most elite" colleges, then they have to stand out from all the other "perfect GPA/perfect SAT" applicants. Oh wait. They'll get into Yale, because both their parents work there. So I guess the whole "best in their class" thing doesn't really matter. Cf. George W. Bush. Legacy happens.

It's not clear to me what Amy Chua thought she was doing when she wrote this book, and what sort of reception she expected it to have. Again, it's not clear that "thinking" is what she does. Instead, the book reads like childbirth triggered some irrational impulse that she followed with only minimal consideration; a pattern that she repeated when she got the idea that writing it all down would be a good thing to do. You know what Amy Chua needs? A chill pill, and a Sassy Gay Friend.

After all, the book is selling. But not to me. I made the specific point of going to a bookstore and reading this specifically so there would be no financial benefit to anybody associated with this. Plus, I'm not going to buy her husband's books either.

The Laughter of Dead Kings, by Elizabeth Peters

2011-01-18T22:03:00.000-06:00

Elizabeth Peters is justly best-known for the Amelia Peabody mysteries--a series based around a husband and wife team of archeologists who work in Egypt during the golden age of archeology, from the 1880s to the discovery of Tutanhkamun's tomb in 1922. Despite all indications, this book is not from that series.

Instead, it is one of a series of contemporary mysteries staring a character named "Vicky Bliss" who is some sort of art historian, who also solves mysteries, usually involving some form of art theft. Sadly, this book is not as well crafted as the Amelia Peabody series--Vicky Bliss doesn't have a personality so much as she has either an eating disorder or a tape-worm. Many many scenes are of people sitting around chewing over plot developments (or lack thereof) while being fed. It's the go-to solution for ending a scene: "I'm starving. Where shall we eat?" "We can discuss what to do next while drinking beer!"

The plot: somebody has stolen the mummified body of Tutanhkamun from his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and Vicky's boyfriend (and former art thief) John Tregarth is the leading suspect. The two of them, plus Vicky's boss Schmidt and their Egyptian friend Feisal set out to discover the thieves and retrieve the body. There is a lot of running around Europe finding nothing before they set off for Luxor, where they still find nothing.

Eventually, however, even these clumsy characters have to stumble over some sort of clues, but for the most part they believe they have to keep their deductions secret from each other so they literally end up stalking each other until they finally all end up in the same room with the criminal. Who turns out to be a minor, off-stage character with a long-simmering resentment of John Tregarth and so planned the whole thing to look like something John would have done. Not sure why that was satisfying in any way, but whatever.

The best part of the book is clearly the setting in Egypt, and the best part of that is the scene in the temple of Luxor at night. While the "detectives" can't seem to keep track of who they are following, the image of the colossal columns and statues seen by moonlight is irresistible. In the end, the book is mostly notable for being competently written, and having an interesting enough plot to highlight the exotic location.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by David Mitchell

2011-01-18T21:44:00.000-06:00

I'm sure this is a great book, but frankly, I didn't like it much. Like a bad wax museum, the book poses life-like figures in attitudes of historical verisimilitude but utterly fails to give the scene life. I struggled to get through this book. It was literally work.

Jacob de Zoet is a young clerk newly arrived in Japan in 1799, with plans to work for six years to earn enough to marry the girl back home in the Netherlands. At this time, Japan remains closed to the Western world. Somehow, the Dutch East India Company has managed to arrange a single trading port outside Nagasaki--the artificial island of Dejima.

Roughly the first third of the book sets up the characters and protocols of Dejima: the company directors, the clerks, the slaves and servants, the interpreters, the Japanese magistrates and functionaries, the hangers-on. Technically, only Dutch are allowed on Dejima, but the Company takes anybody it can get, and the Japanese can't really tell Irish from Prussians from Dutch. All the Europeans are crude, obnoxious, corrupt and angling to maximize their profit from the Company by whatever means they can find. Poor Jacob de Zoet is hired to reconcile the accounts and root out the rampant embezzlement, which means everybody hates him and he is totally going to get set up to take a fall. So, the score thus far: Decency--1; Manipulation and Venality--Everybody else.

There is probably a lot of meaning and nuance in this section, but frankly, I couldn't tell most of the characters apart from each other, and their shifting alliances and crude self interest meant that I never cared to make much of an effort. Lots of bad people, trying to outmaneuver the Japanese who don't like them anyway. And the Japanese are racist and controlling and equally corrupt. The sheer amount of payola that passes in each transaction--plus the all the fictional accounting entries--it's no wonder the Dutch East India Company goes bankrupt.

So, there's really nobody to root for on either side of the Dejima trades. Jacob de Zoet is criminally naive, and so he stands out from everybody else who is trying to use him to advance their own financial crimes. There is the Japanese midwife, Aibagawa Orito, who is at least doing something other than trying to make a fortune in trade. So of course Jacob falls in love with her, and spends a great deal of (boring) time wrestling with the (boring) complications of cross cultural infatuation. There is also an orangutan named William Pitt. Don't ask.

The middle section of the book takes an abrupt turn from turgid discussions about freight costs and interest on loans, and becomes schlock melodrama. Or speculative fiction, if you are being charitable. Poor little Aibagawa Orito. she has a burn on the side of her face after a childhood accident, and is officially considered unmarriageable. Even so, Jacob wants to "marry" her, in the traditional way of Europeans taking "Dejima brides" and then abandoning them when they return to Europe. Jacob is too conflicted or naive oridealistic or racist or shy or something, so he never asks. Anyway, her family was too high status and wouldn't have allowed it. There is also a young (Japanese) interpreter wants to marry her, but his family forbids it. When Orito's father dies, it turns out that he was in significant debt to the Abbot Enomoto, and so Orito is sold to his monastery and spirited away to a mountain shrine which has a Terrible Secret!

Mitchell tries to heighten the mystery of the Terrible Secret by dribbling out the facts, but they are pretty easy to guess. Fifty monks and twelve nuns live in the compound. Two of the sisters are "chosen" each month for "engifting," meaning five to ten different monks come over five nights and try to impregnate them. The subsequent infants are taken away, ostensibly to be given to foster families. Instead, they are killed to allow the monks to drink their essence and live forever. There is much Maguffin-ing around the fact that the sisters serve for 20 years, and then are allowed to descend the mountain and live with their children. The graveyard of unmarked stones just downhill is not really a surprise, is it? Also, there is some monk whose job it is to write annual letters that purport to be from the babies as they grow. Orito discovers all this during her escape attempt, conveniently stumbling on the forged letters and then overhearing a particularly damning conversation, and then discovering the Top Secret Shrine of Death as well!

Plus, she escapes the monastery, but then voluntarily returns because (what a coincidence!) also that night her friend goes into labor with twins--a certain death sentence without a trained midwife. Really, it's kind of a creepy Japanese Death Cult/Vampire story crossed with a Bruce Willis movie, and a far cry from the stultifying financial plot of the first third of the book.

Which is not to say that this section does not itself suffer from being over-written. Orito's escape laboriously winds through nearly every room of the entire monastic compound before she gets over the wall. Simultaneously, the poor rejected interpreter/suitor from the first third of the book is informed of the abominations at the monastery, so he too mounts a rescue mission with his old martial arts master and 10 masterless samurai. This gives Mitchell a chance to be boring about each of the different bridges between Nagasaki and the mountain, to detail each minute alteration to the flora and fauna of the terrain, and generally make a midnight ninja raid on a Temple of Doom into a boring lecture on natural sciences.

As a sign of Mitchell's resolute insistence on making everything tedious and unexciting--just before he enters the temple to rescue the fair maiden and claim her as his bride, the poor schmuck takes a drink that turns out to be drugged, and he wakes up to find all his samurai and his old dojo master were in the Abbot's pay all along. So there was not actually any rescue mission, there was no fight, there was no triumphal entry. . .just a drowsy little man who gets killed for his pains, and even that scene takes place off stage.

So, two thirds of the way through the book we have--venal back-stabbing and gossip on Dejima, leading to nobody actually making any money or getting off the island. We have Japanese Creepy Secrets which are all related second hand. We have an action sequence that isn't. If the vulgar inhabitants of Dejima were to review this book, they'd assume that the author had difficulty sustaining his manhood--all build up, no climax.

De Zoet is still toiling away in unappreciated honesty in lonely Dejima. Orito is still stuck up on the mountain. The interpreter is dead. So what the book clearly needs now is a gouty British ship's captain with delusions of forcing open Japan to British trade. Done!

All of De Zoet's financial hygiene has resulted in only one person getting caught and removed from Dejima--a foul insect named Snitker. Snitker has managed to worm his way into the notice of this delusional British captain, and convinced him to sail (with only one small ship) to Dejima. By flying a Dutch flag, he can take advantage of the fact that Dejima doesn't know that the Dutch East India Company has dissolved into bankruptcy. The ship can enter the harbor, commandeer the shipload of copper that is bound to be anchored there, and declare Japan for England.

There is much tedium about the causes and effects and treatment of gout in 1800, the specifics of which sails get raised and lowered in which order, and other boring details of ship's life. Nobody on board the ship is particularly likable either--they are all gunning for glory or riches in one form or another, and are basically as unlikeable and venal as the Dutch and Japanese we have met so far, but with fewer syllables to their names.

Seriously, that's about the only difference.

But once the ship gets to Dejima, there is no copper to commandeer. The negotiations with the Japanese have broken down, and the Company never sent a ship to carry it anyway. So there is a desultory bombardment of Dejima, and some bad feeling between Snitker and all the rest of Dejima, and then the British go away and Jacob De Zoet ends up in charge of the port. Again--lots of build up, but no pay-off.

Except! The magistrate of Nagasaki has been humiliated by the British encroachment and prepares for is ritual suicide. He asks the Abbot Enomoto to assist him, then cleverly poisons himself, his chamberlain, the Abbot and the Abbot's acolyte as his judgment on the Abominations at the Temple of Doom! And they all slump to the floor while monologuing about the justice of their positions! And thus the temple will be brought down! And the women freed! And immortality no longer bought at the price of murdered babies!

Then we get some epilogues. Jacob spends another eleven years as the head of Dejima, but since there is no trade, it's not clear what he does other than father a son and eventually meet Orito again and apologize. Eventually he gets banished from Dejima and he goes back to the Netherlands, marries some nice girl and dies an old man the end.

To be fair to Mitchell (and I loved Cloud Atlas, so I want to find merit in this book) there are some potentially nifty metaphors that are played out in parallel. Orito is isolated in her monastery just as Jacob is isolated on Dejima. The secrets of the monastery are eventually made public, just as Japan has to be opened to the rest of the world. Enomoto might be 600 years old, but the cost of keeping him alive is not worth it--just as the culture of Japan cannot be preserved because the costs of that preservation are not sustainable.

It's a novel of ideas, perhaps, and an impressive recreation of a time and place that are not well known. It was carefully observed and the writing was well-crafted. It was just so much work to get through this book, and I didn't enjoy it, and even in retrospect I can't endorse it. The pain-to-pleasure ratio is way out of whack. If you want to know about the history of Japan from 1799-1800, get a history book. If you are looking for a ripping good read, get Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas instead.

Naked Once More, by Elizabeth Peters

2011-01-10T19:01:00.000-06:00

I listened to this* because I love Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series--fun mysteries steeped in the the minutiae of archeology and Egyptian history. This is the first book of a different series, featuring former librarian turned novelist Jacqueline Kirby, and it's just not as good. The mystery is entirely reliant on the arcane feuds of authors and agents, and is set in a rather loosely sketched contemporary "small Southern town" it lacks the exoticism of location and time that Amelia Peabody books have going for them.

The plot starts with the discovery of a car accident crime scene in this small Southern town, and the missing body of an author named Kathleen Darcy. Darcy wrote a best selling debut novel called "Naked on the Ice"--a sort of "Clan of the Cave Bear." After seven years,Darcy is declared legally dead and a sequel is authorized by her heirs. Jacqueline Kirby is chosen over several other authors considered for the job, and she moves to Pine Ridge (or whatever it's called) to research Darcy's remaining papers and to start the writing process. Things start going badly: anonymous threats, break-ins, and clumsy attempts on Jacqueline's life. When a book seller is found dead under a toppled book shelf, Kirby finds she has to solve the murder and the mystery of what happened to Darcy seven years ago.

Peters assembles a large cast of characters, or as they are known in the business, "suspects." Before we even get the the question of the author, we are introduced to Jacqueline Kirby, her old agent Christopher, her new agent Bouton (or "Bootsy" as she calls him), the subordinate assigned to Kirby named Sarah, the other four authors who are competing to write the sequel, and Patrick O'Brien, a cop and former lover of Kirby's. There are the Darcys--Mom, who has gone completely potty; Kathleen's siblings St. John, Sherry and Laurie, and Laurie's husband and three kids; as well as the the family's lawyers--three generations of Craigs. There are Tom and Paul, the models for the rival hunks in "Naked on the Ice." Tom and his wife Molly run the inn where Jacqueline stays, Kevin the busboy, Mrs. Sheridan annoying deaf woman who is a "regular" at the inn, and a few townspeople with walk-on roles. None of them ever snaps into focus as a real character, so there's really no reason to try to guess whodunit--they are all fungible.

Approximately two-thirds of the book goes by before there is any sense of urgency or plot. Jacqueline has to get selected, do publicity, move to Pine Ridge, read through Kathleen Darcy's papers, begin to draft a book outline, and meet all the characters/suspects. Sure, there is something fishy about Kathleen Darcy's disappearance, which has been ruled a suicide, but Kirby's too busy meeting deadlines and fending off unwanted dinner invitations to look into it. There is also a lot of ink devoted to the logistics of how she will get her mail without tipping off media about her location--this is just as boring as it sounds.

Things don't actually get going until poor Jan Wilson, the book store owner, is found dead. The bookcase on top of her body was heavy enough to have killed her, but it had been secured into the floor with three inch bolts. And Paul calls her "Kathleen." Yes, there is reason to believe that Kathleen isn't dead--or wasn't until this happened. And Kirby has to figure out who tried to kill Kathleen seven years ago in order to solve this murder and keep anybody else from being killed.

This is where the esoterica of publishing gets to be important. Kathleen Darcy left a will, made two weeks before her "death" with elaborate instructions for how a sequel should be pursued, and something about the percentages of sales constitutes a motive to kill her before she wrote the sequel. It turns out that Kathleen planned her own disappearance and planned to be the writer who was chosen to write her own sequel. But since her new identity as an author didn't use Bootsy as her agent, she got tricked out of the assignment. So she was mad and wrote threatening letters to those who manipulated the process. So, it turns out that Bootsy was the one who tried to kill her back in the day because she had warned him she was going to fire him as her agent. So he cooked up some elaborate plan (?) to kill her before she fired him (?) so he could keep getting his percentage of her book sales (?) and then use one of his own writers to develop a sequel. But for some reason he panicked and thought the book store owner was actually Kathleen Darcy so he killed her before she could reveal what he had done?

I don't know--I was hoping it was the ditzy, pregnant inn-keeper's wife who would turn out to have been jealous of the successful writer who had used her husband as the model for her Main Hunky Character. That would have been more interesting in my opinion.

Competently written, with some interesting insights into the workings of literary business, the book suffers from an abrasive main character, few memorable characters, and a meandering plot where pages go by but little seems to happen. Not Peters' best work.

I wouldn't endorse this book, but I can endorse another Jacqueline Kirby book: The Murders of Richard III. That one was fun.
_________
*See how I did that? Got it from Audible.com, read by Barbara Rosenblatt, who is generally delightful and has been known to improve a book with her gifted acted. Can't say she succeeded this time, however.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin

2010-07-25T18:13:00.003-05:00

What makes this the "go to" book of the summer? Why is this book the hyped product it is? A more perceptive question might be "why is this even a book?" I ask, because it reads like a recap of a television mini-series. That is not a compliment.

This monster book clocks in at over 800 pages on my nook, and at that is only the first of a projected trilogy. The book skips around to many stories. Ideally, this gives us multiple perspectives on the action; in reality, it just forces us to meet and attempt to care about a bunch of two-dimensional characters with all but predictable back stories who get killed.

Of course they get killed--it's a vampire book.

At least, it's a book which contains vampire-type former-humans. Sometime in the near future, a professor's wife died. So instead of trying to cure or prevent the disease that killed her, he chooses (as so many people do) to travel to South America and find a virus or immortality. Because that does--what does that do for him? I mean think about this for a couple of seconds. Professor Lear lost his wife, and he doesn't want that to happen again? Well, she's already dead and this doesn't bring her back. If Lear becomes immortal, then he would get to watch everybody he knows die--again, not really the outcome one would be looking for, given his back story. So, what if he finds the key to immortality, and makes humanity immune to death and disease--Paging Dr. Malthus. Dr. Malthus, please answer your page!

I mean sure, Harvard-trained medical personnel can be arrogant and oblivious, but surely this guy thought about this for a couple of seconds. I mean, he had to have filled out some paperwork to get a grant, right? Surely there was some time he had to fill out a form that asked him the purpose of his research, and simply saying "immortality" is not going to be enough.

But Cronin doesn't go beyond the glib armchair psychologist explanation to create anybody who might be a nuanced and recognizably human character. No, Lear has a dead wife in order to conduct the mad experiment so the book will have vampires. And in approved movie cliche fashion, the military gets involved. And all does not go well.

This fall into cliche is so disappointing, because Cronin started off with such delicacy and nuance. Two of the stories in the beginning of the book are heartbreaking and exquisitely crafted stories of desperate humanity that totally absorbed me.

In the first section, Cronin gives us a moving series of vignettes about a slipping down life--a young woman named Jeannette who had a brief affair with a traveling salesman and wound up a single mom. Without a high school education, Jeanette ended up working poorly paid jobs, forced to leave her daughter at home alone since she couldn't afford child care. Barely making it by working two jobs, she loses one when her co-workers find out she leaves her very very young child unattended. After losing that job, she can't keep up her rent payments, and ends up living in a crummy hotel and turning to prostitution to keep herself and her daughter fed and housed. A snotty frat boy picks her up, clearly intends to have her service the entire fraternity, won't take no for an answer, so she makes a (another) bad decision and pulls a gun to get away. Of course, she kills him, and that's all she wrote. Even Jeanette can see the writing on the wall.

So she goes back to the hotel, takes her little girl (named Amy) to a convent, and pretends that she's coming back in a couple of hours. Even at age 6-ish, Amy knows she's not coming back.

That was excellent writing--sensitive to the harsh realities of a life out of control, articulate about Jeanette's deep love for her daughter, and the cruel way life can turn out. So I had some real investment in this book, because Cronin had shown me what he could do--he quickly and deftly sketched the arc of a desperate life, capping it with the heart-breaking scene of a young girl who knew she had been abandoned.

But suddenly, we are reading a cryptic series of emails from Lear who is somewhere in South America on an expedition searching for something that isn't really explained. The military gets involved, and is doing some security for the academics, as well as having some hidden agenda that Lear isn't smart enough to pick up on. And here I was a little sceptical, but not yet jaded--because I knew this was a vampire book, but it was light-years from sparkly emo kids moping around the Forks High School. This was cynical--the military wasn't involved out of the goodness of their hearts after all. Vampires as super-soldiers! If you could get a rapid-healing immortal soldier, you wouldn't have to keep recruiting and training new soldiers! It would make warfare more cost efficient! As a reader, I was enjoying thinking about all the ways this could go bad--because really, there was no way that a clueless academic trekking through rain forests with military escort wasn't going to go wrong.

Then we get the story of Carter, a man on death row. Another desperate, slipping-down life with a hint of hope that is dashed. The scene where Carter meets the woman he is accused of killing is wry and smart about the toxic mix of race, sex and class. Carter is begging at a busy intersection in Houston (I think?), holding a sign that says something like "Anything will help, and God will bless you." A white woman in a shiny SUV pulls up and opens the window. Cronin deftly contrasts the blinding heat where Carter is standing with the cool interior of a leather covered SUV. But the woman can't find any cash in her purse, and is clearly at the end of her own emotional tether. She NEEDS to give this man some money because she NEEDS God's blessing.

As she continues to fumble, the traffic light changes, and the drivers behind her get impatient. Carter can see the disaster brewing: a poor black man talking to a rich white woman is not going to get the benefit of any doubt. And indeed, as soon as the first white male driver gets out of the car to investigate the delay, the cry goes up "That man is trying to carjack that woman! Get him!"

So much about the worst of our own instincts is in play in that scene, and yet everybody is not only recognizably human, but arguably trying to do the right thing. And yet it all goes so horribly wrong--the disaster is inevitable. It is Cronin's skill with these scenes that made me so excited about this book, and the fact that he abandons this excellent writing and substitutes "competent TV quality thriller writing" that so disappointed me about this book.

As the story develops, we learn that some Agency guys are recruiting death row inmates for the secret vampire/immortality experiment, and Carter is one of them. One of the Agency guys is losing his taste for this work, and completely loses it when he's sent to pick up a little girl--Amy. (Of course, he has to have a back story about losing his only child to a terrible disease, because without some sort of traumatic history like that he wouldn't be bothered by turning an orphaned six-year old over for military medical experimentation, right?) But Amy isn't just any little girl. Apparently she has some unexplained ability to talk to animals or something, and her first trip to the zoo results in animals escaping their cages trying to get close to her. And despite the fact that this is the first time she's ever been near animals, she knows what happened, and it has to do with "what I am." And this is BEFORE she gets injected with vampirism.

There are some nicely done touches about the progression of the American Security State, and some nice atmospherics in the Sooper Sekkritt military station in Telluride, but really the point is to get the vampires created and then loosed on the population. And poor, sad, little Amy with her Peter Rabbit stuffed animal for poignancy. How many Secret Military Vampires are there? There seem to be twelve (or "Twelve" for maximum Biblical resonance), although there is a subject "Zero" who might have been one of the scientists who originally went to Bolivia, and Amy as well, so fourteen?

The expected disaster happens, the nasty vampires get loose and turn every tenth victim into a minion vampire, exponentially decimating the population and increasing the number of vampires. Nuclear weapons are deployed. Amy and the Agency guy with a conscience ride out the first year of vampire mayhem in an abandoned camp in the Cascade Mountains. This allows Cronin to show us only glimpses of the massive upheaval caused by the vampire virus. The plot then skips ahead some 93 years into post-vampire apocalyptic society.

This is potentially a major problem, because once again, we are forced into learning about a whole bunch of new characters who are all likely to get killed off. Again. If not by the vampires this time, then by the fact that the technology that keeps their little enclave safe is starting to wear out. That and the nasty way small towns have of forcing people into too much intimacy. So in this section we get a narrative of WWII-style evacuation of the children, followed by post-apocalyptic social structure and survivalism, lightly seasoned with Sinclair Lewis social analysis. This is where I'm thinking Cronin must have watched Lost.

Events transpire, and it doesn't much matter what they are, but they result in a Small But Hardy Band of young people set out on a Quest, along with Amy. That Amy. Yup. Same one. Because remember when I said we were forced to learn about a whole bunch of new characters? We are, but we are also constantly meeting the old characters from the first third of the book. In fact, time after time, people disappear or die, only to pop up again later. Amy is the first one, but not the last.

[This gets so bad, that at one point Our Small Band of Heroes recognizes somebody, and I can't even remember who he is or why I should care about him. He was just one of the many many people who had disappeared earlier in the book, and I decided not to bother going back, since this time he died for real anyway.]

Do we care about the members of the Band of Heroes? There is the boring guy with mother issues who is the leader (one reviewer called him "as exciting as a Sears shirt model"--nice!); a weapons expert who happens to be female; a pregnant woman looking for her lost baby-daddy; a younger kid in silly sneakers (comic relief, I think, although he's not actually funny); a mechanical whiz who can fix anything; a nurse who's pining for the shirt model; some dude with a beard; and Amy, (who now looks to be about 15), the psychic vampire whisperer. And none of them really rise about their cliches. And once they are on The Road (with apologies owed to Cormac McCarthy), we get all the brilliance of cliffhanger TV writing.

Using old maps from pre-Vampire days, Our Heroes head out to Las Vegas. The experience is a West Coast sort of Planet of the Apes, where Cronin can show us the ruined remains of the landmarks we know, only less movingly, since who's going to get verklempt over a 1/2 scale Eiffel Tower with views of the airport?

Once in Los Vegas, they end up trying to find safety from the vampires who infest the city. So of course they don't go find a defensible industrial kitchen in the basement of a mega-casino hotel--you know, some place with limited entrances as well as bright lights that will keep the vampires away. No, instead they go up several floors to a large suite with floor to ceiling windows, because there's no way a vampire won't break in dramatically through the glass and snatch one of their number away.

Oh wait. That's exactly what happens.

Not only does it happen, but it happens as the climax to some emotional drama between members of the Band. Accusations, emotional conflict, resignation, resolution of the confl--oh no! Vampires! Our Heroes are lost, alone in the dark, almost certainly going to be attacked by swarms of vampires when--hello! What's this? A para-military vehicle with bright lights appears out of nowhere in the nick of time and scoops up Our Heroes, saving them from an almost certain death! I can see the way it would look on screen, because we've all seen it so many times: ominous situation, bright light appears out of the gloom, hazy figures moving behind the bright light. Are they friend or foe? Tune in tomorrow!

We go to a compound of several hundred people living in an old prison. They are all nice, and smile all the time, and all the women are pregnant. Our Heroes are convinced there is something off about this situation. Of course there is! There are old men, young girls and pregnant women--it's a polygamist outpost of LDS!

Well, maybe it is that too, but it turns out that it's also a sort of human farm for one of the original Twelve. Once a month, Babcock requires the people of The Haven to give him four cattle and two humans, and Babcock protects them from all the rest of the virals. It's a Faustian bargain, perhaps, but it's kept this group of humans alive for a hundred years.

Our Heroes have nothing but contempt for this system, of course. These people aren't human, they're collaborators! But wait a second--what gives them the right to any sort of moral high ground? Because within a few pages, they find the two humans being offered to Babcock are friends! One is the missing Baby-Daddy who is also the brother of Sears Shirt Guy! The other is somebody who I can't even remember who he was before he showed up here! So they move in with weapons and kill several of the Haven residents in order to save their own friends.

Let's do the math. Haven residents offer 2 humans (and 4 cows--does no one care about the cows????) in order to save the lives of the remaining hundreds=BAD. Heroes kill 2 humans in order to save their 2 friends=GOOD? I mean, one could have a principled belief that if Haven didn't have this arrangement, they would all have died a hundred years ago, and hundreds of people would never have been born. If the calculus is 2 lives versus 300 lives, clearly the Haven solution is not completely unconscionable. But instead of exploring the moral quagmire living in such a system entails, Cronin goes for the Captain Kirk/Star Trek level of moral examination and declares this is BAD and so anybody who gets killed in Our Heroes' escape deserved it anyway.

And just to heighten the melodrama, the 4 cows and 2 humans don't just get thrown outside the walls, or tied out by people who skulk away and refuse to examine their actions--which would force the reader into an examination of how far a human being will go to survive. No, that wouldn't be sufficiently cinematic. So Cronin writes up a sort of Thunder Dome, where all the hundreds of people of Haven stand around a rigged up Coliseum, chanting in unison and calling for blood. You're getting tired of me saying this, but we've seen this before!

But have we seen anything like when Our Heroes come down from the ceiling vents and throw a grenade, only to be tossed back by the explosion? Why yes, yes we have. It's like outrunning a fireball--good guys don't explode, no matter how close they are to the epicenter. It's all about the visual. Or how about the part where somebody tries to stop A Hero from disrupting the event, and so shoots--only to hit her in the leg, which doesn't slow her down at all? Bad guys = bad aim, check. Bad guy + bad aim + bad decision of not taking a second shot? Check, check and check. So Our Hero, only minimally slowed down by a bullet to the thigh, manages to rescue her Hero Boyfriend, maneuver through a stampeding crowd, climb onto a train that doesn't stop, and only later gets even a compress to stop the bleeding.

Oh yeah, notify the Nobel committee--because this is literature.

We've seen it--sure, it's competently written, and it's somewhat engaging, but it's kind of like Lost with blood-suckers instead of smoke monsters. Episode after episode of people trying to survive, facing various threats to their existence, salvaging what they can and trying to survive in the wild, with some added mumbo-jumbo to make the story seem larger.

I have a few questions about this sequence that are not answered.

Babcock and the dreams--Apparently, Babcock projects dreams about the woman he killed that got him onto death row back in the olden days. Somebody spends days and weeks trying to get Baby-Daddy replicate the murder in his own dreams: to pick up the knife and kill the fat woman the way Babcock had. He refuses to do so--and we're lead to believe that B-D was unique in his refusal to do dream-murder. Is this why he becomes one of the sacrifices? But the other sacrifice is also originally from the Colony--so why did the dream matter, since outsider status is apparently enough to make him the victim?
Why does the rebel leader trying to escape from Haven give a powder to Fix-It Guy when she takes him out to repair the escape vehicle? There is some discussion about how it will eliminate the fat lady dreams, but it's not like he was going to be sleeping anytime soon--he's supposed to be going to fix a train.
Sex with willing young women makes you immune to being a sacrifice? How do they find anybody who qualifies then? What are the selection criteria anyway?

Okay, now seriously? Seriously? Justin Cronin is going to have Our Heroes drive a car alongside a speeding train so they can jump into the engine? How many westerns have this scene, where somebody is trying to match the train speed by riding a horse? Same thing, only with a Hummer. I think I even remember something like this in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Then there is a Damsel in Distress who is too afraid to make the jump and gets dragged off by the virals? The technique is supposed to heighten the suspense--will Our Heroes suffer the same fate? The problem is that the damsel was actually a Star Trek red shirt. There was never any question that the Heroes were all going to jump successfully. I won't even mention the uncoupling of all the train cars, so that only the people in the engine survive, but I do have to mention the fact that hundreds of people just died BEFORE YOUR EYES and all Cronin does is give us a Bad Ass Action Figure Quip: "They were already dead, long ago."

Then, after all Our Heroes make the jump, the train manages to travel unimpeded for 400 kilometers on century old train tracks. Frankly, I find that unbelievable--nobody has been maintaining the rails for a century, and you get 400 kilometers without a popped spike, a silted over or decayed track that would cause a derailment? Oh, no, Cronin can't afford to have that kind of obstacle, because he's got to get his Heroes to Telluride before winter, and he needs them to cover that distance. But just in case that seemed too easy, he has one of the characters suddenly notice a hatch.

The dialog goes something like this:

Comic Relief Guy in Silly Shoes: Wow! We just escaped from a literal cloud of vampire virals with no losses of Main Characters and now we are ostensibly safe! Now we are going to abandon this train and head off on foot to the mountains. So of course, since it doesn't matter, I'm going to do something that I have no reason to do, and I'm going to notice that there is a hatch here on the underside of the train engine. Since I'm not the Fix-It Guy, I have never taken the least notice of anything remotely mechanical, and there is no reason I should notice this particular hatch. So I'm going to. What's that hatch?

Fix-It Guy: (shrugs) Don't know, don't care, doesn't matter because we are abandoning this train and going on foot to the mountains. But I happen to have a wrench if you are curious, although there is no reason you should be curious, especially after just narrowly surviving a cloud of vampires and sending hundreds of people to their gruesome deaths so we could escape.

Bad Guy (with gun pops out of the hatch): BOO!

This is literature? This is what an English professor with an MFA from Iowa actually put into his novel? A Bad Guy who jumps out of a hidden spot and kills one of them? I swear to god this is an exercise in how many TV Tropes Cronin could fit into one book. When will we get the "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" scene?

Then we are back to the "Wagon Train West" storyline--eight people (about--it's hard to keep track of how many paper thin characters are on this journey) are headed on foot to Colorado. Cronin does some desperate vamping to account for the number of days this takes, until they inexplicably find a nearly intact farmhouse, where the Pregnant Lady and her Baby Daddy decide to go no further. I think there was a scene like this in Lonesome Dove, where two people separate, uncertain that they will ever see each other again in this life. You can imagine the mixed emotions on both sides--the people who are staying not certain if they will survive the coming Colorado winter, the ones traveling on not certain if they will come back this way again.

Cronin give us: Peter has a hissy fit that his brother didn't stand on the porch and watch them all the way out of sight.

A small thing, but it had seemed important to Peter that Theo remain where he was, standing on the porch, until the six of them were out of sight. But when Peter looked again, his brother was gone; only Mausami was there.

When the sun was high they stopped to rest.

That's it. That's the epic emotional scope. I guess Peter was wearing his whiny underpants that morning. Geez, the McKenzie brothers showed more genuine distress over separating in Strange Brew. Too bad I can't find a clip of that.

The book goes on. There is a Lost Garrison that feels like something lifted from Dances with Wolves and F Troop. Female Weapons Expert becomes a member of the military, hunting out nests of vampires, Fix-It Guy joins the motor pool, Nurse gives up pining for Sears Shirt Model and falls in love with Bearded Guy. Lots of meals eaten in the mess tent as winter approaches. Eventually, Sears Shirt Guy and Amy go alone to the mountain where the original experiments took place, and they find. . .Ancient Magic Black Woman who just happened to be the nun who took Amy in over a century ago. She can explain all the missing plot elements, plus she has both a vampire antidote AND a small nuclear bomb!

Our Heroes use both, and it turns out when you kill one of the original Twelve, all the vampires they created die as well! So now humanity can be saved if they only find the original Twelve (or Thirteen? How many were there--do we count Zero?).

But it might be less than Twelve. See, it's starting to occur to people that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to give vampire super-powers to homicidal maniacs. But Zero was a scientists, so maybe he's different? And Carter wasn't actually a murderer (it turns out), but a victim of "Texas justice." Plus, Female Weapons Expert got bit, got the antidote, and she's mostly still human but super strong, so maybe there's a cure? Except that Amy destroyed the other vials of antidote, so what was that all about?

And then Our Heroes all re-unite and head to Roswell, where the Lost Garrison winters. Even New Mom (formerly Pregnant Lady) and Baby Daddy leave their idyllic Little House on the Prairie existence and join them. And the book ends with the information that Nurse's journal was found at the site of the Roswell Massacre. Because there's got to be a cliff-hanger.

There are about four cliff-hangers, actually, none of which I find myself caring about.

In the end, this is a book I felt betrayed by, because of the bait-and-switch. If it had all been Lost, with Bloodsuckers I would have been less irritated, because I would have gotten a perfectly serviceable summer thriller. I tend not to read many of those, but there is definitely a place for well-executed adventure novels. But when it started out as so much more, I was fooled into expecting that I was getting something really wonderful--like maybe a Michael Chabon-level genre-bender: the Kavalier and Clay of vampire novels. As it is, I got something that will doubtless be incredibly successful, but ultimately fails to live up to the promise I had been lead to believe would be there.

Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver

2010-07-05T22:25:00.000-05:00

Is there a particularly rich seam of YA fiction available just now? Because on the heels of 13 Reasons Why and When I Reach You I met this book, which also struck me powerfully.

Snarkily billed as Groundhog's Day meets Mean Girls, this is the story of Sam Kingston, one of the "it" girls of her high school. She has three Very Best Friends, is dating the "it" boy, and has decided to sleep with him the evening of "Cupid Day"--a version of Valentine's Day. It is not a spoiler to say that she dies, however--the prologue explains it. The first chapter chronicles the last day of her life, before she knew it was going to be the last day.

As one of the popular girls she describes herself and her friends as (paraphrasing here) "we laugh too loud, we play too hard" but she feels that she's living life to the fullest. She goes through the day collecting Cupid Day roses, and goes to the Big Party that night. Her boyfriend drinks too much, which turns her off and she goes home with her friends. On the way home, they are in a car accident, but she wakes up the next morning in her own room. Sam is surprised, since she doesn't remember anything after the accident--and then she finds out its Friday. Again.

Oliver does a nice job of taking us through each of the next seven reiterations of "Cupid Day" without repeating--she gives us several events that serve as signposts so we know where in the day things happen. Yet Sam doesn't just repeat the day--for several days she tries to avoid the accident, including by not even going to the party at all. However, while she is safe, she finds that another girl in her class has committed suicide that night--and she still wakes up on Friday morning.

The lessons Sam has to learn are not anything new--appreciate your family, your actions affect other people, sometimes the right boy is NOT the boy you think it is. Oliver delivers these lessons in a way that makes them feel like Sam is really learning them for the first time, and the repeated day allow us to see all the ways Sam might have become a different girl based on her choices on that single day.

I really enjoyed this book, as it is clever, well written, and offers an unsentimental look at a believable teenager and her life. At the same time, Oliver deftly sketches out the better human being Sam could have become, and actually does become, if only for a few hours on the last day of her life. Thought provoking and worth a look.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Steig Larsson

2010-06-17T22:00:00.006-05:00

And so we come to the end of this "Millenium Trilogy," the oddest international publishing sensation of the last few years. It started with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I hated, continued with The Girl Who Played With Fire, which I hated fractionally less, and finally resolves with this most recent entry. Yes, I read it. Yes, I felt like I was buying the literary equivalent of Twinkies when I picked it up. I read it for the sake of completeness, because if I'm going to hate on it, I should at least get the full story.

Did I hate it? No, actually, I didn't. But I still don't get why this is so damn popular.

Word on the Internet has it that Larsson considered this a single novel, and it was his publishers who broke it into three separate books. Larsson's name for it was "Men Who Hate Women," which has the advantage of being accurate at least. Viewed as a single work, it is clear that the story is really about Lisabeth Salander and how an unconventional woman systematically runs afoul of a conformist society. Part of the "problem" is that she is a woman, and in Larsson's world, there is an awful lot of violent misogyny. However, it isn't clear that Salander's story would be any different if she were a man: after all, there is a lot of violence generally throughout these books, and while I felt there was a special nastiness in the treatment of women, pretty much everybody gets beat up one way or another.

In Dragon Tattoo, Salander is a secondary--and probably more like a tertiary--character. She assists Mikael Blomkvist solve a mystery using her mysteriously excellent computer skills. Oh, she's a hacker? And that's how she gets personal information on suspects? Quelle suprise. Except not.

In Played with Fire, we learn that Salander is the off-spring of a violent criminal who is protected by the Swedish government because he defected from the USSR, and was considered to be a valuable source of counter-espionage. So whenever his violent and criminal dealings became public, someone from a super-secret branch of government would come and cover it all up. One of the things he did with horrible frequency was to show up and beat Salander's mother--the final time so badly as to cause permanent brain damage. Salander couldn't get anyone to help them, so she tried to kill her father with a home-made Molotov cocktail. She was about 12 at the time.

Via the hush-hush machinations of the super-secret spy department, Salander was declared mentally ill and locked up in an asylum where she may have been sexually abused. She was eventually released, but placed under guardianship in order to keep her from revealing anything about the super secret spy club. Even after the fall of the USSR, the spies couldn't allow her to say anything that might jeopardize their organization, so when her (nice) guardian had to retire for medical reasons, she was placed under the care of a Spy Doctor, who did sexually abuse her.

Hornet's Nest picks up where Played with Fire ends, after Salander has attempted to kill her father before he kills her. Both of them end up surprisingly not dead, and placed in hospital rooms very close to each other. Salander remains the primary suspect in multiple murders and is kept from her computers, but oddly isn't actually guarded in any way for quite some time. This raises the odd plot device where her father tries to finish her off while the night shift nurses aren't watching. As an American, I can only marvel at the trusting nature of Swedish law enforcement depicted here. They don't even seem to be afraid that she might escape.

Once she is safely locked into her hospital room, Larssen mostly just leaves her there while the book follows an ungodly number of different groups of people investigating the mayhem that trailed in Salander's wake. At least two different groups of police officers, the super secret spies, the prosecuting attorney's office, Blomkvist and I don't even know who all else are all running around trying to eavesdrop on each others' conversations to find out who knows what about what really happened. I actually found this the most enjoyable part of the books--people began to act the way normal people act, with a whole lot less of the gratuitous hyper-violence of the first two books.

Not that the violence has completely disappeared. No, there is the sickening story of illegal Russian immigrant women who are simply locked in a room and left to starve to death, and there is the continuing saga of the thugs of the motorcycle club who do a lot of dirty work for whoever will pay them. But there is so much less of it, and hardly any of the extended sequences that should have left everybody dead! It's almost refreshing.

I'm pretty sure no one will be surprised to find that Salander is vindicated by the end. There is some slimy trial work in which the head of the asylum where Salander was imprisoned tries to get her re-committed: he's also in the pay of the Super Secret Spies. He attempts to smear her with her claim that she was abused by her guardian--since that obviously couldn't have happened. So Salander's attorney gets to show the video Salander made of the last attack--one that was so violent, and lasted so long, that Salander passed out during it. Thank god the judge is sickened by it--given the kind of men who live in Larssen's Sweden, he might have thought that was perfectly normal behavior.

There is an entire subplot about Erika Berger that seemed unnecessary to me. The editor of Millenium, and Blomkvist's life-long "friend with benefits," Berger is offered the position of editor at a large and prestigious newspaper. She takes the job, and of course experiences push back from the Old Boys (there are no girls at all?)--not because she's new of course, but because she's a woman. While she's getting accustomed to her new job, over at Millenium somebody's doing an investigative piece on why toilets cost so much in Stockholm. Turns out that Erika's new boss is grossly overpricing his imported toilets, so that's why real estate is so expensive.

Yeah, I didn't follow it entirely either.

Anyway, Erika's friends at Millenium show her the piece so she's not blind-sided. She steals the piece to publish in her newspaper, confronts her boss who won't roll over for her high-minded ideals, so she quits and goes back to Millenium. And everybody lives happily ever after. Blomkvist gets a new girlfriend--a weight-lifting Amazon who just can't get enough of him. Salander goes back to her old girlfriend; Erika is still married to her husband and still sleeps with Blomkvist when he doesn't have a girlfriend. The super secret spy network is dragged into the light, and Millenium finds something to fill the space other than expensive toilets. And the people of Stockholm are once again safe.

So, now I've read the whole thing, and I have to say I don't know why this has been such a break-out hit. I mean, of all the books published in the last three years, why is this the series that everybody is reading? You see these books plastered all over airports and book stores and even grocery check-out lines, and I just don't understand the global passion for these books.

So, I don't recommend these at all, and if you know anybody who wants to know if they are worth reading, send them over here and I'll tell them how they end. After all, life is too short to read worthless books.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

2010-05-24T21:55:00.005-05:00

This is a Very Popular Book with a Big Message. Gladwell purports to study outrageously successful individuals--those who are "outliers" from the main sequence of humanity--to try to discover what makes them successful. Surprise! It's not just talent!

As you might expect, I am underwhelmed.

When you get right down to it, Gladwell comes to the astonishing conclusion that success requires talent, plus hard work, plus opportunity and luck. Sometimes it requires picking the right ethnic/cultural background. Sometimes it requires being born at the right time. Sometimes it's being good at something that turns into a growth industry after you are already good at it.

Basically--it's out of any one person's control.

But Gladwell isn't interested in drawing that message. Instead, he tries to draw lessons from the stories he tells in order to create a moving call to social change. Many people who are successful are the lucky recipient of opportunities. So let's make sure everybody gets opportunities! Or, as Gladwell puts it:

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.

Really? Does anybody really think that Bill Gates might still be The Richest Man In The World if he had been born into an illiterate nomadic tribe of Mongolian sheep herders? Does anybody think that the incredible run of Victorian era robber barons might have had something to do with being in the right place at the right time to exploit vast natural resources in a period before environmental and business regulation? That your brilliant kid will still win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry if he goes to the local vo/tech community college instead of Harvard?

I didn't think so.

Gladwell misses the real point. It's not that we don't believe that the rules don't matter, so much as we can't predict which rules will generate which successes. Sometimes rules have to be arbitrary, because we need some rules. And if those rules happen to advantage Kid A over Kid B, well, that's maybe unfortunate for Kid B, unless Kid B turns out to be perfectly placed as a result of that rule to take some advantage Kid A can't take--maybe even decades later.

We can't really predict a priori what the "right rules" are, after all. Sure, in retrospect, a Gladwell can pick out a year--say 1955--when it might be advantageous to be born, if one wants to be a computer billionaire like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what about all the millions of babies who were born in 1955 who didn't turn out to be either Gates or Jobs? And can society really write rules that will guarantee another Bill Gates? After all, it's not like we can require that all babies in the country be born in 1955.

Which is the essential problem with Gladwell's "method"; there isn't one. He has a rough sort of thesis, and then he cherry picks his way through pop sociology and history to locate anecdotes that support it. There is no critical examination of whether his ideas are actually true; rather, because they are good stories and generally well told, they feel like they must be meaningful. In the end, however, this book hardly creates a blueprint for a better society.

Start at the beginning: the first chapter describes a small town in the mining hills of Pennsylvania--Roseto. The town is insular and almost entirely populated by emigrants from a single village in Italy. Despite adopting American diets and work habits, there is almost no heart disease in this town. Nearby towns have disease rates equal to or exceeding American averages, but sure enough, in this town of Italian emigrants, there is zero incidence of heart attacks below the age of 65. A pair of medical researchers studied this town, and ran through myriad theories as to why this might be, but by the end of the chapter, the conclusion is that the only factor must be that the nature of this particular community is the protection against heart disease.

To which one can only mutter a skeptical "really?" Do we really think that there is absolutely no other possible explanation for this anomaly? That it's a "magical Italian" way of life that involves strolling around in the evenings talking to your neighbors that is the silver bullet? How can we know that every single other explanation has been tested--do we really think that medical science is so complete that we understand what every last cause of heart disease might be, and that each one was tested? Personally, I am more likely to consider that there is some factor we don't understand and so can't control for than I am to believe that this small town is just magically immune from heart disease.

Plus--even if this is true--how is it even reproducible?

We then move to Canadian hockey players. Gladwell sets up a straw man assumption: that no matter where you are born in Canada, if you are a great hockey player, the system will find you. Does anyone really, actually believe that? I have some great ocean-front property in Haiti to sell you if you do.

Anyway, lo and behold, Gladwell discovers that Canada's youth hockey leagues have a January 1 age cut-off, and that kids born in January are generally bigger by that date than kids born in December. So the bigger, more mature kids get funneled into more elite teams, where they get better coaching and more ice time. The end result is that a staggering 40% of kids on national championship teams are born between January and March, while less than 10% of kids are born in the last three months of the year.

Gladwell asserts that if Canada had two leagues, with the second cut-off date being June 1, they would have twice as many hockey stars to chose from! But wait--that assumes that Canada could simply and easily double the resources it has to support elite teams: rinks, coaches, audiences, ice time, etc. Nor does Gladwell consider the social costs--whether having twice as many hockey players chasing the same limited number of professional spots (because the NHL is also not likely to be economically feasible at twice the size) isn't rather a waste of lives that could be better spent pursuing some other goal.

It's not that an arbitrary cut-off date has no effect, it's that there has to be some limit of some sort, and January 1 is no more or less arbitrary than any other date. Why have one cut-off date rather than two? That's an idea, but why stop at two? Why not twelve different leagues, so kids never compete against anyone more than a month older than they are? I can think of at least two reasons: 1) there's just not enough resources to support that fine a distinction (as I suggested above), and 2) there are some benefits to kids testing themselves against others who are bigger, stronger, etc.

Or, maybe Gladwell's "insight" has already been adopted, just at a different level. After all, the fact that Canada has leagues for each year means that Canada has three times as many elite hockey players than there would be if leagues grouped by age, such as "under 5," "6-8," "9-12," etc. Why does it need to double that number again?

The point is, in order to run a viable hockey league, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Gladwell doesn't really quibble with the fact of a cut-off date, merely about where that cut-off is made. Even if there was suddenly a second league, with a cut-off date of June 1, what could we expect would happen? The next "Malcolm Gladwell" could come along and note that the new system now discriminates against kids born in May and December, so there should be additional leagues with cut-off dates of April 1 and September 1.

There is also the risk that the quality of "elite" coaching might drop, if there is suddenly twice as much demand for it. Rather than adding opportunities for more kids, we are taking those opportunities away from the ones who currently have it. Do we have a better, more vibrant league if more kids are mediocre and fewer are exceptional? How many hockey geniuses are there, really? Maybe the December born kids are the real phenoms, while the kids who are born January-March are just winnowed out later? Who are the actual losers in a system where kids play hockey--or don't play hockey anyway. Gladwell doesn't ask any of these questions; he's moved on.

Gladwell uses Canadian hockey to segue into another theme--the 10,000 hour expert. It is the contention of at least one scientist that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything: music, hockey, computer programming. For example, the Beatles were invited to Hamburg when they were young, where they played seven days a week, 8-10 hours a night. Gladwell contends that this is what made them into The Beatles as a phenomenon, and it wouldn't have happened without all those hours of playing.

Okay, but what about all those other bands who played in Hamburg who didn't become The Beatles? Or what about the Rolling Stones, or the Beach Boys, or Led Zeppelin, who didn't play Hamburg? Or what about the fact that The Beatles actually didn't become The Beatles until after they brought on Ringo Starr, who hadn't been in Hamburg? Gladwell doesn't gloss over those criticisms so much as he just doesn't even acknowledge that there is any such criticism possible. The Beatles were famous. The Beatles played in Hamburg. Therefore, the Beatles became famous because they played in Hamburg. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And, I guess it means that all rock bands should go to Hamburg in order to get famous.

It ain't necessarily so.

Gladwell's thesis starts getting even squishier after this point, as he considers the genesis of Bill Gates. Prior to 1968, computer programming was an arduous and boring process of creating punch cards that had to be turned into a mainframe administrator and run in a batch. If there were any errors in the punch cards, the entire batch would be rejected, and the programmer would have to go through the entire batch to find the error, correct it, and resubmit the cards. Even without errors, a single batch could take hours to run, and there were always errors. (For no good reason, my college roommate, who was majoring in accounting, was still running these damn punch cards at the University of Minnesota in 1984!!)

However, around 1968, a couple of American universities discovered a way to bypass the damn punch cards, and developed a method of using terminals to program. Bill Gates happened to live near one of these universities, and also happened to go to a school with a well connected parents' organization that got one of these terminals for the school's computer club. Gates was immediately obsessed, and through a couple of other lucky breaks, he managed to spend thousands of hours in middle and high school with this new technology, programming computers.

Gladwell seems to think that he is breaking new intellectual ground: Bill Gates wasn't just a gifted computer programmer--he also had unusual opportunities to program, he had his 10,000 hours young, and he got them at the dawn of the personal computing era. More obviously, he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time, with both interest and talent for computers. How innovative is this? All the rest of kids in that computer club aren't the Richest Man in the World after all--there was something unique about that kid in that place with those opportunities. Giving every kid in America unlimited access to computer programming in 1968 wouldn't mean every kid in America would become the Richest Man in the World.

What Gladwell doesn't acknowledge is that there really aren't universally applicable lessons to be gleaned from his anecdotes. Every kid simply cannot have every opportunity, nor does every kid who has any particular opportunity become an Outlier. Would Bill Gates have founded Microsoft if he'd been forced to play hockey in Canada? Would the Beatles have become famous rock stars if they'd been keying in computer code all through eighth grade?

In fact, we can't predict which opportunities will be seized by which kids, nor can we predict which things are actually opportunities. Gladwell takes us to the mean streets of early 20th century New York, where recent Jewish immigrants developed their own garment shops. The grandchildren of these garment workers often grew up to be doctors and lawyers. The anecdote for this section is the story of Joseph Flom, the first associate hired by the firm that became Skadden Arps. As a fat Jewish boy, Flom was not going to be hired by the white shoe law firms of 1950s New York. So he worked for the start-up firm of Skadden Arps, doing whatever work came in the door. Some of that work was hostile corporate take-overs, which the white shoe firms refused to touch. So he spent years perfecting this recondite area of law, which suddenly became very lucrative in the 1980s. By the time the white shoe firms decided they could touch this area of law, they simply couldn't catch up.

Gladwell goes on to point to a number of factors that positioned Flom to become the mergers and acquisitions shark he became: factors that were outside anybody's control. He was born in the 1930s, when birth rates had dropped due to the Depression. As a result, the schools he attended were not overcrowded, and were comparatively new. The quality of teaching was especially good, as there were highly educated teachers who simply couldn't get college jobs and so taught high school. He was able to get into law school and support himself because there were more jobs than workers. The white shoe firms didn't realize how lucrative M&A could be. M&A got lucrative before everybody else caught on. None of these factors is reproducible generally, and not every fat Jewish kid born in 1930 became Joseph Flom.

But look how much depended on luck. M&A became the money bubble of the 1980s, and Flom happened to do that. But he could just as easily been practicing divorce law, which white shoe firms also didn't touch, or DUI, or criminal defense, or any of a number of other things that wouldn't have become a license to print money. Joseph Flom didn't start doing M&A law because he saw there was a lucrative future market in it--he just happened to be the guy who was in the right place at the right time, with the right experience. He could just as easily not been--the 1980s could have been about derivatives rather than hostile take overs. In which case, Skadden Arps would not be the firm it is today, and we wouldn't be reading about Flom at all.

Gladwell has an appealing writing style, and he teases out interesting stories. He also seems to only ever see the rosy side of whatever story he is writing, and so one gets the sense that he honestly believes his insights into Canadian hockey will easily double the number of Wayne Gretzkys produced every year. Yet his steadfast refusal to examine his "findings" with any sort of critical eye means that they remain so many rainbows and unicorns--lovely to imagine, but without any role in the real world.

An Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon

2010-05-19T12:30:00.003-05:00

Is there any point in trying to summarize this book? Or even review it? As the seventh doorstop sized novel in this series, there is so much incident, so many characters, that either you know the series and love it enough to make it this far, or you don't. In the latter case, this review will probably not be helpful.

Where to start? "Outlander" was the first book in this series, and Gabaldon's debut. It tells the deeply Scottish story of Claire Beauchamp (pronounced "Beecham") Randall, an English woman in Scotland of 1946. Reunited with her historian husband Frank after they both served in WWII, they are enjoying a second honeymoon when Claire finds herself amid a circle of standing stones on Midsummer's day. Turns out that the stones are a time portal, and Claire is thrown back some 200 years to a very different Scotland, one on the verge of rising against England in hopes of returning the Stuart kings to the throne.

This summary does absolutely no justice to the craft of the book, however. These things happen, but they happen slowly, after Gabaldon has meticulously accumulated so much detail that as a reader you find you don't even have to suspend your disbelief. Gabaldon manages to make this science fiction premise seem plausible, and even rational. Claire is an ex-Army nurse, hard-headed and practical, and not the kind of character who would easily accept this weird happening. As such, she is a wonderful guide to the 18th century--tart tongued, skeptical, well-educated enough to know her history and to experience the way history leaves out all the details that MATTER when one is trying to stay alive.

It is here in the 18th century that she meets Jamie Fraser, the man who turns out to be her soul mate. There are some romance novel machinations in which Claire finds herself forced to marry this younger man--but again, the novel uses the plot as a frame on which to hang something far more engaging than a mere romance. The bulk and appeal of the book lies in the relationship of the characters and in the way a 20th century woman comes to experience the past as its own country and culture, and things that seem incomprehensible to a modern sensibility come to make sense in the context of the past.

Much happens plot-wise in the six books before An Echo in the Bone, which themselves cover some 35 years of history and range from Scotland to France to America. (Not to mention the Lord John Grey novellas that augment the Fraser story.) Claire and Jamie age as well, and at the start of this book are living mostly obscurely (if not exactly quietly) on their homestead at Fraser's Ridge, North Carolina. But the American Revolution has started in Boston, and the ripples are disrupting lives even so far away. Jamie determines that his best option is fetch his printing press from Scotland and publish pro-Revolution documents. It will come as no surprise to fans of the series that while Jamie does manage to make it to Scotland and back to America, the trip is neither straightforward nor easy, and by the end of the hundreds of pages of this book, he still is not printing anything.

So much gets in the way, and the sheer number of characters is almost impossible to believe, much less keep track of. Jamie and Claire have a daughter, Brianna, who was concieved in the 18th century, born and raised in the 20th, then came back to the 18th century to meet her father. At the end of the previous book in the series (A Breath of Snow and Ashes), Brianna, her husband Roger MacKenzie and their two children return to the 20th century and buy Jamie's ancestral home Lallybroch. Their lives are not uneventful either, and by the end of the book, it appears that Roger may have gone again to the 18th century. This is not clear, however, and remains one of many cliffhangers that makes fans of the series rabid for the next book.

Many other characters are also given significant narratives. It is my recollection that the earlier books were primarily first person narration by Claire. While Claire continues to serve as our primary guide, her sections are nearly equalled by the third person sections that follow her nephew Ian Murray, Jamie's illegitimate son William Ransome (Lord Ellsmere), and William's stepfather and Jamie's ontime jailer-now-friend Lord John Grey. As so we see the Battle of Fort Ticondaroga both from the view of the Frasers inside the fort, and of William Ransome as a British soldier. It provides a fascinating view of the American Revolution to see it from the perspective of both the enemy and the accidental participants.

There are a few weaknesses, of course, but those are far outweighed by the many many delights. I could have done without having Lord John meet Benjamin Franklin in France, and would have happily not had Claire run into Benedict Arnold while he was still an American general and patriot. There are a few too many events and coincidences--both Ian Murray and William Ransome meet and fall in love with the same Quaker woman, while never meeting each other, for example. And the farce of piracy and counter-piracy that constitutes the Fraser's trip from North Carolina to New York takes far too long to tell, and made it hard for me to believe that they could ever make a longer journey over to Scotland.

But then balanced against those quibbles are the deep delight with which Gabaldon writes of things like Claire getting spectacles, because both she and Jamie are aging. Or the complicated character of 20th century Rob Cameron, a hydro-electric employee who works under Brianna in modern Inverness--he plays a nasty hazing trick on Brianna, but seems genuinely pleased when she foils it. He is both a damaged man who triggers sympathy, and a dangerous man who kidnaps young Jemmy after reading the McKenzie's papers about hidden gold.

The gold--dates back several books to the chests that King Louis sent to aid Charles Stewart in his attempt to reclaim his throne. It came to Scotland far too late, and a significant portion ended up in the illegal possession of Jamie's aunt, Julia Cameron. It was stolen from where she had hidden it on her own plantation by Arch Bugg, one of the homesteaders on Fraser's Ridge. He apparently hid it under the foundation of Jamie and Claire's house, where it was guarded by a white sow so bad tempered it was commonly held to be possessed by demons. When the house burned down--a burglary attempt by another time traveler seeking gems to protect him in his trip back to his own time ended up with spilled ether and Ian unknowingly lighting a match--Arch and his wife attempted to retrieve the gold. Mrs. Bugg threw a hatchet at Jamie to prevent him from stopping her, and Ian shot her with an arrow that killed her. Arch, already a fanatical Jacobite who seemed to want to take the gold back to Scotland to renew the rebellion, went entirely mad and swore to stalk Ian until he took a wife, and then Arch would kill her.

So, while a crazed and murderous stalker would seem to be unnecessary to create dramatic tension in a book that puts its characters into the middle of Revolutionary battles, one has to give Gabaldon some credit for the intricacy of her work. Arch Bugg (and his wife) first appeared two books ago, in The Fiery Cross as a factor for Jamie's farm, and they served as solid tertiary characters for comic relief and plot advancement for years before they turned into villians in this book. That's why it's hard to even review this book as a book, rather than as part of the larger saga to which it belongs.

So, in brief--yes, this book is as good as its predecessors, and worth the time. The entire series is more than a guilty pleasure, and deserves the devotion it has from its fans. The audio book is delightfully read by Davina Porter, and the time spent listening feels like time spent with a good old friend.

Tithe, by Holly Black

2010-05-08T10:27:00.004-05:00

This is one selected by one of the members of the Mother-Daughter book club, and by the time we read it and met, not even she thought it was a good book. It is the debut novel by the writer who went on to write the much more popular Spiderwick Chronicles, and is targeted to an older, YA audience. It is a mash-up of Irish folklore in a grimy New Jersey setting, with cardboard characterizations and an unrelievedly bleak outlook.

Sixteen year old Kaye lives with her mother Ellen, who is getting too old to keep chasing her rock and roll dreams. Kaye is the parent in the relationship, and has dropped out of school to deliver Chinese food full time for the income. She also loads band equipment, drops cigarette butts into her mother's beer bottles, and holds her mother's hair as she vomits into the toilet. Her life is like a bad Kesha video, actually. They are in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the book, when Ellen's boyfriend tries to stab her with a knife. Ellen makes the only good decision in the entire book and decides to move out, taking Kaye back to her own mother's house in New Jersey.

Back in New Jersey, Kaye reconnects with an old friend named Janet, who mentions that Kaye used to have some imaginary friends that she used to talk about all the time. It turns out that these were fairies, and Kaye herself turns out to be a changeling--a fairy child substituted for a human baby. Kaye starts to discover all the magic that underlies her existence, and ends up inside the sithen in the Unseelie Court in America. There is a wounded Seelie knight she saves the life of and falls "in love" with, and a complicated intrigue involving a "tithe." Every x number of years (I forget exactly--seven makes sense, but it might have been more) the Courts of Faerie require a human sacrifice which binds all the solitary fay to the court's rule. Kaye's childhood fairy friends want her to be the sacrifice, because she isn't actually a human and thus will negate the sacrifice. The fay will then not be bound to the courts, and free to live independently. They convince Kaye to join this plan.

But things are not so easy--because there is a power struggle between the Seelie and Unseelie courts (which concepts are not explained--you have to already know a fair amount about Irish folklore to get the full impact of these alliances and conspiracies) and some of the fay know Kaye isn't human, and some of them are lying about aborting the sacrifice, and some of them are maneuvering for their own power. In the end--after a lot of plot machinations that don't make a whole lot of sense, Kaye's wounded faerie knight is on the throne of the Unseelie Court, and she is positioned to be his consort. But she also has to go home to her mother and grandmother, so I'm not certain what Black was trying to do here.

There are some real weaknesses in this book, not the first of which is the grotty life Kaye lives as a human girl. When her actual life is that unpleasant, it's hard for Black to paint an Unseelie Court that is more repulsive than what her life is like living in New Jersey. A nasty "party" with some high school kids in an abandoned warehouse is every bit as off-putting as the underground sithen of the fay. Kaye's "friend" gets drunk, tries to make her boyfriend jealous by hitting on another boy--who turns out to be a kelpie who drowns her. So she's dead, but no one seems to be bothered much by her death. Her life was pretty grim anyway, living in a trailer home with her older brother who worked the night shift at a gas station. . .all so dreary and dirty and unhappy that there was really no sense that any of the characters stood to lose anything either by chosing to remain in Faerie or in leaving it.

So, in short--don't bother.

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

2010-05-06T19:00:00.004-05:00

I picked this up while at the book store, in part because of the Newberry Award sticker on the cover. It was also cleverly promoted on a table of other YA fiction, under a sign reading "Recommended books with positively NO vampires, zombies or monsters!" Which tells you all you need to know about all the other books being promoted right now.

Don't get me started on What Hath Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Wrought.

When You Reach Me is a clever and generally angst-free story about a sixth grader named Miranda, who lives in 1979 New York with her single mother. Her best and only friend, Sal, lives in the apartment underneath with his single mother as well. Miranda's mother has been selected to compete on the $20,000 Pyramid, and she, her boyfriend Richard, and Miranda practice after work. When she forgets her apartment key, Miranda goes to the nearby market and tells the owner the story of A Wrinkle in Time.

There is something odd about this story, however. Miranda has found a cryptic note which says "I am here to save your friend's life and my own" and asks her to write a letter about what is going to happen and everything leading up to it. Miranda doesn't know whose life is in danger, and soon after finding the note discovers that the spare key is missing, and a pair of Richard's shoes are missing.

Other things happen as well: Sal gets punched by a boy they don't know and stops speaking to Miranda. Miranda makes friends with Annamarie, who is being "punished" by her usual best friend Julia. There is a homeless man who sleeps with his head under the mailbox at the corner by Miranda's apartment. Miranda, Annamarie, and a boy named Colin spend their lunch hours together doing prep work at a sandwich shop, and Miranda finds herself feeling jealous of his attraction to Annamarie. Periodically, kids are prevented from going outside the school building due to reports of a naked man running down the nearby streets.

As the school year progresses, Miranda finds a few more notes from this mysterious person who seems to be able to predict things that haven't happened. Meanwhile, she begins to grow up. In a deft and slightly surprising scene, Miranda steps out of her own self-centeredness, and reaches out to "the only girl in the sixth grade who has to keep extra clothes at school. " Alice Evans is too shy to ask to be excused to go to the bathroom, and one day Miranda simply pretends she needs to go as well, and offers to take Alice along as a "bathroom buddy." She also recognizes that she is standing in between Annamarie and Julia's friendship, and manages to step aside to be friends with both of them.

She also recognizes that Sal's rejection of her was unrelated to the punch he received--he'd been sending hints and signals that he wanted to have more than just Miranda as a friend, and she'd not seen them. That relationship gets rebalanced as well.

Then there is Marcus, the boy who punched Sal, apparently for no reason. It turns out that he is essentially a absent-minded genius who is usually thinking about physics, but was trying to be a more "normal" boy and expected Sal to hit him back. Marcus and Julia and Miranda have a conversation about time travel and A Wrinkle in Time, which turns out to be both Miranda's and Julia's favorite book. Julia understands, while Miranda can't wrap her brain around the idea. Marcus and Miranda have a growing acquaintanceship, which is totally missed by Sal, who continues to avoid his first friend.

On afternoon in spring, due to some misunderstandings, Marcus sees Sal running down the block, and tries to keep him from running into the street. However, Sal only fears Marcus means to punch him again, and runs faster. As Sal steps into the street in front of a large truck, the homeless man manages to kick him out of the way but gets killed by the truck instead. It's a horrible scene to watch, and Sal lives, although he has several broken bones.

All of this seems incomprehensible to Miranda, until she is sitting in the audience watching her mother compete on the $20,000 Pyramid. Nervous for her friend, Sal's mother keeps repeating "Dick Clark just never ages," and something clicks for Miranda.

Yup. Big spoilers ahoy.

The homeless man was Marcus. A much older Marcus, who grew up and invented time travel, and came back to save Sal's life. Much of what she thought was evidence of mental illness was Older Marcus trying to remember what he needed to do, after getting his brains pretty well scrambled by time travel. And his last cryptic comment to her makes sense as well: "She is gone, and I am an old man, so don't worry." His wife--Julia--died, and he's comfortable with his own death.

So it's a mystery, science fiction, and a gentle coming of age story which might also encourage readers to pick up A Wrinkle in Time. There is really no reason that this book couldn't be set in modern day Manhattan, except for the Dick Clark reference--which is clever, but probably going to go over the head of the intended audience for this book. After all, while he didn't seem to age for years and years, he's a very old and impaired man now. But maybe YA aged readers will just assume that both Dick Clark and the $20,000 Pyramid are also fictional.

It's a fast read--it took me about an hour and a half--and diverting. Grade: A

I had to come back and add this: the chapters are all titled. Many of them are direct references to how the game of $20,000 Pyramid is played--in the Winner's Round, one contestant is given a category and has to list items to get the other player to guess the category. So the chapter where the spare key is lost is titled "Things That Go Missing." Another layer of cleverness that I missed and had to be pointed to by other reviewers!

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

2010-05-06T10:15:00.003-05:00

Wow. Just. . .wow.

Sure there are some weaknesses. Sure there are things I could poke at. But really? They don't matter. Because this is a powerful book and absolutely worth reading. Worth buying and reading and keeping and passing on and recommending and then reading again.

I don't often say that. Anybody who reads this blog knows that I'm actually pretty hard to please. (But fair! I try really hard to be fair!) And I want to be pleased, I really do. It's just that there are so few there that blow my socks off.

This one did.

Good guy (and first person narrator) Clay Jensen comes home from school to find a package with no return address. Inside are seven audio tapes. Audio tapes? Who uses them any more? Why would anybody be sending a package of audio tapes?

The slightly antique nature of the medium is intentional. Hannah Baker, enigmatic classmate, has committed suicide, and these are her stories of the thirteen reasons why she took her life. Each one is a story about a specific person who hurt her, and the ongoing and cumulative affect of each hurtful thing. No one thing was enough, but each one lead to another one, and by the end, she was tired of fighting. So she made these tapes, and sent them out.

Jay Asher got the idea for the format of this book from working in a museum, where patrons could get audio tours. Hang the player around the neck, push the "play" button and hear a story while looking at the work, move on to the next one. It translates incredibly well to this story--Hannah Baker's thirteen stories are each tied to a location, and as Clay listens to the tapes, he moves around their town.

I literally just put this book down, and I'm not able to completely articulate what makes this book so powerful and effective. But somehow, Jay Asher nails high school--smothering and judgmental, the way teens are painfully self-obsessed, and yet struggling to be better people. The mix of weakness and strength, the bullies who take what they want and the people who are afraid to stop them. The strange sense that one has power to do ill, but is powerless to stop it. The way teens are both too constrained and too free.

I am going to have to come back to fully review this book, but don't wait.

Go read it yourself.

We can talk about it.

The Swan Thieves, by Elizabeth Kostova

2010-05-04T22:17:00.003-05:00

This should work: we have a central mystery to drive the plot--why did the genius painter take a knife to a famous painting in the National Gallery? We have a noble psychiatrist who seeks to help the artist, the painter's wife, his mistress, and his obsession with a mysterious woman who might--or might not--also be his mistress. We have several relationships that echo each other across time and space. We have mysterious letters, written in French, from a century ago. We have meditations on art vs. domesticity, age vs. youth, love vs. obsession. This should work.

And yet it doesn't.

Kostova burst onto the scene some years ago with her debut novel The Historian, in which an ordinary history graduate student ends up on the trail of the real Dracula. It was all the rage when it came out, and Kostova was under some pressure to replicate the success of that book. Except not from me. I was, apparently, one of the few people not giddy about The Historian. A fine book, decent for a best seller, but not terribly satisfying. I can say the same about this one.

Kostova starts with a fascinating premise that sets its hook into the reader--why did Robert Oliver attack the painting of Leda and the Swan? Oliver isn't talking, and it's up to his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, to piece together the clues in an attempt to restore the man's mind. The biggest clue is the face Oliver paints over and over again--a woman's face, rendered with such sensitivity, the face of such a fascinating woman that everyone falls in love with her, at least a little.

Oliver is more than a little in love with this mysterious woman, and when he's not painting or drawing her, he is reading over a set of antique letters. He lets Marlow take copies, but since Marlowe can't read French, the letters have to be translated and are mailed to him as the translations are completed. Thus Kostova has set up the bottleneck through which information can only seep through. This becomes the motif and a great weakness-this book is just so. damn. long.

If Oliver would speak, we'd understand why he did what he did, end of story. If Marlowe could read the damn letters, we'd figure out who the mysterious woman was. So Kostova makes the information elusive, and sets us up for over 500 pages of . . .is tedium the word I want? Not quite--it's not quite that bad. But it is long, and honestly without much of a payoff.

Just for an example--once Oliver is committed to his care at a psychiatric hospital, Marlowe goes to see the Leda that was attacked. This takes over a hundred pages to happen. While at the museum, Marlowe sees an arresting young woman--and it takes another hundred pages to find out she is Oliver's ex-mistress. It's almost like a Woody Allen joke about being in therapy for years, because everything moves so slowly.

Since Oliver isn't speaking, Marlowe resolves to go down to North Carolina to speak to the ex-Mrs. Oliver, to learn what he can about the patient. Allegedly reluctant to talk about her ex-husband, Kate Oliver narrates a great number of chapters, in which we learn far too much about her and very little insightful about Robert. I mean, off the top of my head, we learn about:

Kate's mother,
Kate's feelings about parenthood,
pretentious conversations between art students in bars,
her first dates with Robert and what she did to try to fascinate him,
frankly inappropriate rhapsodizing about Robert's body.

None of this is necessarily out of place for a novel, but it's ridiculous that anybody would talk to a psychiatrist like this, and equally ridiculous that he'd just listen like this, rather than--oh, just a suggestion--ASK SOME DIAGNOSTIC TYPE QUESTIONS? Maybe, and I mean only just maybe, he'd just sit back and listen if Kate was his patient, and they were doing some Freudian therapy. But as treatment for a potentially violent patient who has been committed to a mental hospital? How about some facts about "first noticed symptoms" or "changes in mood or behavior" or even "what medications was he taking?"

But no. So, while Kate comes off as an interesting person, Robert remains a big blank and Marlowe comes across as self-indulgent and a fairly incompetent doctor. So then, he goes and does the same thing with Oliver's mistress, only worse. Because she shows up at his apartment, but refuses to talk to him, preferring instead to write out her memories of Robert. Which are ultimately even more self-indulgent and less helpful, since she had so much less history than Kate did. And again, because she controls her narrative, Marlowe doesn't ask any actual questions or seem to have any treatment motivations. He comes off as just a gossip junkie, worming his way into the lives of the women around this famous painter.

So basically, we have an interesting premise that is more or less abandoned for literally hundreds of pages in favor of extended monologues. Not that these monologues are themselves terrible, but they fail to advance the plot of the novel, and they fail to create distinct voices. Marlowe's generic narration of the novel sounds exactly like Kate's talking about her husband, which sounds exactly like Mary's written narrative, which sounds exactly like the third person sequences set in the 19th century. Which is to say, that they all sound exactly like Elizabeth Kostova.

This could have been easily fixed, of course, by writing the entire book in the third person. Then all the drippy prose about how to paint, or how the light slanted its fingers through the trees, etc etc etc would all have been easy to just accept. Kostova chose not to do this, and the book suffers for it.

Frankly, the book suffers from Kostova's inability to actually create interesting and three-dimensional characters. Everybody sounds the same when they talk/write/muse, and very few of them are very interesting either. Of course, we are told they are interesting, even charismatic and powerful and eye-catching, but almost nothing these characters ever do is very interesting.

Which brings me to the letters. Remember those? The antique French letters Robert Oliver kept reading? Well, as you might have guessed, just as Kostova has demonstrated her inability to create convincing modern characters, she is equally bad at creating believable Victorians. The first few letters are about as banal and pointless as one can imagine, and they fail to get better. They are stilted, formal, perfunctory to start with, and as they progress they become opaque and circumspect--at best. To give them that much character is to assume that the letters themselves are covering up something that is going on between the lines. In fact, the letters become so hopeless as a device for carrying the plot that Kostova abandons them in favor of actual third person narration.

So here we come to the spoilers, if one can spoil something that a reader is bound to guess several hundred pages before the characters do. Robert Oliver has become obsessed with Beatrice de Clerval Vignot, a minor Impressionist painter who stopped painting entirely after the birth of her only child. She is the person he has painted obsessively--although he has only ever seen one painting of her face. They are her letters.

We soon figure out--again, well before the characters--that she has an affair with her husband's uncle, who is also a painter and who encouraged her to submit paintings to the Salon. They sleep together just the one time, and of course she gets pregnant, although she also slept with her husband within the next 24 hours, so there is technically no reason for scandal. Uncle then moved to Algeria and they never saw each other again. But neither one of them seems to be too broken up about it.

To which I say--what? WHAT? Why is Robert Oliver obsessed with this woman? We don't really know--he saw a single portrait of her (painted by the Uncle/lover) in a museum and then he lost his mind or something. Everybody keeps asking how he paints these pictures, all of them with different expressions, different costumes, different poses. Everybody assumes he must do them from a model--but apparently he doesn't. So, how does he do it?

Frankly, it would have been a more interesting book if she was haunting him. A little ghost story to add to the tortured artist meme would have been a juicy plot. But no. Apparently he's just some sort of insane--a version that is never actually diagnosed. He took out a pen knife, attacked a painting, then refused to talk. Why is this guy not just sent to jail, anyway? It's not like he gets much medical treatment in any of the 564 pages of the book. Nothing else he does seems to be particularly mentally unbalanced, really, and his refusal to speak is less a symptom than a plot device.

With the whiz bang opening, I had some hopes that this would be like A.S. Byatt's Possession for the painting set. What was he doing in the museum? Who is the mysterious woman? I fully expected it to turn out that Beatrice de Clerval was Robert Oliver's grandmother or something. But no. Again.

Maybe this could have been a well-written Da Vinci Code, with hints about Robert Oliver's condition discovered in his paintings. There is a weird moment when Marlowe finds the words "Etretat 1879" written in an obscure spot in Robert's home office--but it's not like that leads anywhere particularly. Why did Robert write that? Why write it there? Why write it at all? No reason.

At the end of the book we finally meet a couple of semi-interesting characters--two fossilized art dealers who knew Beatrice's daughter. One lives in Acapulco and owns three de Clerval canvases, the other lives in Paris and owns the last canvas de Clerval painted. They were once lovers, but broke up when the one went to live in France with de Clerval's daughter. These aged, exquisite gentlemen are the best thing that happens in the book. We also find the answer to the "final mystery." Why did Beatrice de Clerval stop painting?

Well, we kind of know why, because Kate Oliver stopped painting once she had kids--it's hard to live such a selfish life when others depend on you. Kate eloquently described how being a mother moved her from the world of seeing to the world of touch--the way small children demand your attention and make such physical demands that you can no longer devote time to merely looking.

But that's not where Kostova wants to go. No, what happens is that after she sleeps with her Uncle-in-law, he writes her a letter and leaves it on a table in the hallway of the hotel they are in. So of course, the unscrupulous art dealer picks it up and apparently (we never actually read the letter) it contains some completely uncharacteristic description of their relationship, so the Unscrupulous Art Dealer uses it to blackmail her. He forces her to turn over everything she paints so he can claim it as his work. This is the Leda that Robert attacked. She turned it over, and then painted one last picture, the eponymous Swan Thieves, showing UAD and his brother as obnoxious hunters grabbing a swan.

But again--not much tragic about this. Beatrice never seemed to regret not painting. She is depicted as perfectly happy with her husband and daughter, not even missing Uncle very much. Unscrupulous Art Dealer doesn't get found out, but dies bankrupt because he was a poor businessman. Robert spontaneously recovers--not sure how--and is able to sign himself out of the mental hospital and he moves away and no one sees him again but he becomes even more famous. Marlowe marries Oliver's old mistress because he gets her pregnant. And the final question is--was this really worth 564 pages?

Well, it didn't suck. It didn't live up to its own premise, it failed to create engaging characters, the plot fizzled out on most levels. There are potentially interesting ideas about young women falling in love with old men, the difficulty of living an artists life in a domestic setting, the imperatives of genius. But again, they are kind of raised and then allowed to float away into thoroughly bourgeois happy-enough endings.

Meh. C+

A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolnick

2010-04-21T16:50:00.004-05:00

This book is everywhere. Literally everywhere. It's marketed as a cross between Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. If you loved those books, you'll hate this one.

Wealthy Wisconsin tycoon Ralph Truitt has lived alone after the loss of his first family some twenty years before. For some reason, the loneliness has finally gotten to him and so he has placed an advertisement for "a reliable wife." The book opens as he stands in the cold, waiting for the train to bring the woman who has answered his ad. We quickly learn, however, that the woman traveling to meet him has her own agenda and is not going to be what she appears to be. I guess this is supposed to be the Rebecca part of the book.

In the second chapter, we are privy to Catherine Land's thoughts, and she is not going to be "a reliable wife." There is a scam being perpetrated, and even if we aren't immediately aware of the details, it's pretty clear that she isn't planning on revealing her past as a prostitute and drug addict. So why in the name of advance planning did she get onto the train wearing her elaborate dress and all her jewels?

And it's not just that she got on a train--she was traveling in Truitt's private railroad car. A car that was staffed, presumably by Truitt's employees. Her destination is a tiny town practically in Canada. So, no chance that she'd be noticed or anything--do you think? Goolnick has her wearing her full Chicago-courtesan get-up until the conductor alerts her that they are about half an hour away from her stop. Only then does she change out of her obvious red velvet clothes and put on her simple gray dress. She also waits until then to take off her jewelry and sew it into the hem of the simple gray dress. Then she wads up the velvet and throws it out the window. Because she wants to appear to be a simple, plain woman. The better to fool Truitt into trusting her.

So why didn't she set up her disguise before she got on his train? I don't know. Goolrick doesn't know. Probably because it's much more cinematic to have her tossing expensive clothing out of the window as she approaches than it would have been for her to act sensibly. I'm not seeing this plot working out--I don't think anybody has thought this through very well.

Meanwhile, Truitt is all but sex-crazed. All he thinks about is sex, it seems: even all these people who are miserable and killing their families get to go to bed at night and have sex with each other. At least that's what Truitt thinks. And he spends a lot of pages thinking about it. Oh, and death too. Sex and death. This isn't a theme, this isn't a leitmotif--it's a summary of the whole damn .

The plot becomes increasingly obvious and unbelievable. On first meeting, Truitt immediatly notices that this woman is not the one in the photograph she sent him. (Who knew that was such an old trick?) But he's so lonely, and he can't let anybody see him as anything less than the master of every situation, so he takes her back to his house. On the way, Truitt is injured and Catherine ends up nursing him back to health--because he can't die until AFTER they are married, see, because she plans to kill him for his money and then go live happily ever after with her drug addicted lover.

How many romance novels have this happen? All of them, maybe? She nurses him through a near fatal fever, and the experience leads her to start seeing him as a human being and not just the means to an end. He recovers, and then he sits down and tells her his entire back story. In one sitting.

Rich and withholding father, religious fanatic mother. Dissolute youth spent among the prostitutes of Europe. Love at first sight in Italy, where beautiful daughters are sold into marriage for sizable dowries. Italian wife doesn't like living in frozen Wisconsin--Truitt is surprised! But blinded by love! So he builds her an expensive mansion and imports Italian builders and sculpters and music teachers and OMG she has an affair! With the Italian! And since this is what Italians do, she doesn't understand why he's so surprised and angry! So he banishes her, tells their son she died, and fails to love his son! Who ran away! But now that Truitt is going to be married, he wants his son back and he plans to send Catherine to find him!

This is where I gave up. I knew where this was going, and looking at the last two chapters I found out I was right.

HERE COME THE SPOILERS

Catherine finds the unloved son, and surprise surprise, he's her drug addict lover! It was all a plot they cooked up between them to get revenge on Truitt and live off his money. So the three of them live together in Wisconsin, Canada, and apparently there is a lot of sex. Badly written sex, judging from the rest of the book. There is divided loyalty and jealousy and then Catherine chooses Truitt. Which upsets Antonio (or whatever his name is) so he rapes her. Which upsets Truitt, who chases him down and beats him up. But then is sorry for it, but it's too late! Because they are standing on a frozen lake and the ice breaks and Antonio falls in and drowns! So then, Catherine and Truitt hare left to make what sense they can out of their lives and there's a hallucinatory scene where Catherine sees the ruined garden restored to glory, which I think is supposed to mean that she's pregnant and the future will be better. Or something.

What are the problems with this book? Well, I've already outlined the obvious and melodramatic plot. I've sketched the irrational behavior of the characters. So let's talk about the bad writing, which is repetitive, overblown, and boring.

Goolrick says he was inspired to write this book after reading Wisconsin Death Trip, which reported on the high death toll among 19th century Wisconsin settlers. Sure, life was hard and winters were long, but simply listing the kinds of things that happened does not make those things emotionally affecting. The first chapter is made up of multiple paragraphs like this: "Children died, babies died, women died, in childbirth, of influenza, diptheria, scarlet fever, exposure, starvation. People killed themselves, killed their children, killed their wives, killed their parents." (I'm not quoting, just mimicking the gist.) The result isn't a mounting of horror, it's numbing. You start to think the people who stayed weren't heroic--they were masochistic.

Goolnick's writing style is such a mind-numbing repetition of the same half-formed ideas and obsessions that I started to root for disaster, just to break up the monotony. I'm guessing that's how the rest of the people who lived in Wisconsin may have felt as well. Sure, tragedy is horrific, but at least it breaks up the boredom of another long winter!

In summary--I give this book a D grade, and most definitely do NOT recommend it to anybody.

Body Movers, by Stephanie Bond

2010-04-20T10:39:00.004-05:00

You know, sometimes you get a recommendation about a book and you take it and are delighted to find a book you love.

This is not one of those times.

I picked this one up on a recommendation from Audible.com--actually, it was the sixth book in the series that was recommended, but the advice was to start from the first one, because the cast kept growing and it was better to get in at the beginning. I will not be picking up the rest of the series.

See, here's the problem. In a world where crime solving has become highly technical, it is increasingly difficult for anyone to write a novel about an amateur detective. There is really not much a non-professional can bring to crime solving. Add to that a writer who comes out of Harlequin romance writing, and you get a weird mix of CSI and moralism.

The main character of this series, Carlotta Wren, is 27 and single, working at Neiman Marcus in Atlanta and living in a townhouse with her 19 year old brother, Wesley. Ten years ago, their father was indicted for fraud, and their parents abandoned Atlanta and their two children. Except for the occasional cryptic post card, there has been no contact since. Carlotta was left to raise her brother, and her then-fiance Peter(who was apparently a sixth year student at Vanderbilt) ended their engagement. Carlotta has not moved on.

The Wren siblings are living in dire financial straits, made worse by Wesley's addiction to Texas Hold 'Em poker and his poor choice of lending sources--two separate loan sharks send various thugs to the townhouse to scare up money the Wrens don't have. Peter's wife enjoys shopping at Neiman Marcus while drunk, the better to flaunt her life to the pitiable, dumped and poor Carlotta. Then Angela turns up dead in her own pool, and Carlotta feels the need to see that justice is done.

So where to begin the catalog of eye-rolling moments? How about this one: Carlotta (despite having been raised to wealth and privilege until her parents bolted) has developed a tacky hobby of crashing "society" parties in order to collect celebrity autographs. Because, yeah, that's just what a 27-year old who was Raised Better Than That would be doing with her free time. And it just so happens that this particular party is where she runs into her ex-fiance after TEN YEARS. And despite having been dumped--over the phone--a decade ago, she's still in luuuuuve with him. And he's still in luuuuuuve with her. So he walks her to her car--humiliating! Because she couldn't afford valet parking!--they kiss. The next night, his wife is dead.

So even if you give a pass to the whole "twue wuv," which I don't because girlfriend should have SOME pride--that kiss is just. . .well, that kiss is blown up into The Motive for Murder. Because no hot-shot society broker types ever get drunk at swanky parties and drunkenly kiss people who are not their wives. Actually, it has been scientifically proven that every time a man kisses a woman, he IMMEDIATELY goes home and kills his wife. I mean, have we learned nothing from Tiger Woods and Jesse James? You can verify that on Snopes.

So Bond drags her heroine (and also the reader) through page after page of endless blathering about the Moral Implications and Legal Ramifications of that kiss! Oh my god, you'd think we were talking about selling state secrets to the Soviets! I shouldn't have kissed him. It was wrong to have kissed him. I wish I hadn't kissed him. What if somebody saw me kiss him? What if the police find out that I kissed him?

Because Atlanta is well-known for their crack team of investigative kissing police.

Barbara Cartland herself couldn't load more significance! to a single kiss than Bond manages to heap on this tired plot device. HESTER PRYNNE couldn't have felt more guilty about a kiss than this character does. Which is the point, here--this Puritan-approved moral code lies uneasily in a book whose plot includes upper income partner swapping parties, sleazy hookers in five-inch stilettos, a gym bag full of unspecified drugs, and a Bored Housewife Prostitution Ring. Former professional football players slipping off their wedding rings while drinking martinis in the middle of the day at a cigar bar, the inept slinging around of designer labels and couture shopping, infidelity and gun fire--all depend on us believing that That Kiss has made Carlotta and Peter the Prime Suspect and Motive for the murder, and thus forcing Carlotta into her amateur sleuthing.

So, there was that. Then, there is the Troubled Teen Brother, Wesley, who dares to lecture his sister on why she shouldn't be in love with Peter. He wants to protect his big sister, you see, so she should stay away from this bad man who dragged her into a murder investigation. As opposed to himself, who is so far in debt to criminal loan sharks that they send thugs to the house weekly to collect on the debts. Who lost all the cash he had to pay those loan sharks by losing in a high stakes game of poker, leading to his sister nearly being raped by one of these thugs. Who is on parole for hacking into courthouse records, drives his motorcycle on a suspended license while on parole, tries to buy an illegal handgun while on parole, actually obtains a handgun and brings it home while on parole, goes to make a drug delivery while on parole--and actually gets caught by his parole officer. . .oh yeah. This is the guy you want to take lifestyle advice from.

Oh, the reason Carlotta is still in love with the rich bum who dumped her ass a decade ago? Because he was the one who took her virginity. Bond literally, actually, has the chutzpah to say "a woman has a special relationship with the man who takes her virginity." Maybe in the Harlequin universe, but oh honey, please! Especially NOT when that man is such a putz that he dumps you. Over. The. Phone.

ANYWAY--did you notice the tiny writing at the bottom of the book cover? "A Sexy Mystery" it says. Well, about as sexy as you can get where any woman who actually has sex ends up dead, the lead character all but wears a chastity belt, and gallons of ink are spilled in the handwringing over That Kiss. There's a detective on the police force who wears bad ties, has big hands, and maybe has a potential thing for Carlotta--if you squint. Wesley gets an off-the-books job as an eponymous body mover, and the Chief Body Mover might also have a thing for Carlotta, except she is so thoroughly squicked out by his career that she can't stand it--yeah, that's pretty sexy right there.

Oh, and that Bored Housewife Prostitution Ring? (That's a spoiler, by the way)--one of the murder victims was a rich, young widow, killed in her own home in the middle of the day, while wearing expensive lingerie--was pregnant! How could that be? She wasn't married!!! Nobody even asks what she was doing in the middle of the day lying around the house in her underwear--for some reason that's not an odd thing for a former debutante to do. But thank god she got killed before she had to be an Unwed Mother!

So, in order to pad the book out to the minimum length, Peter goes and confesses to killing his wife. But one of Wesley's No-Goodnik friends identified her as a hooker he paid $500 to have sex with in her pool house. So Peter's noble sacrifice to protect his hooker wife's reputation after death is all for naught. Everybody already knows that she had sex for money! The shame! Better to confess to murder and be executed than to let people at the country club know your dead wife wasn't happy in her marriage.

Except you totally know that everybody already knew that--for god's sake, they Bored Housewives were recruiting each other and buying each other expensive lingerie to wear for their johns. Strange men were coming into the neighborhood during the day and visiting their houses. This was not a secret, except possibly in Stephanie Bond's strange conception of a sexy Puritan Atlanta.

Oh, wait! I didn't solve the mystery for you yet! Okay, here it is and now you can use those six hours of your life to do something more rewarding: it was one of the johns. Who Peter's bored wife thought she was in love with, so she bought him an expensive suit jacket from Carlotta, and then got mad at him and returned it. Then he killed the other woman too and blah blah blah last minute expositioncakes he was somebody who appeared for about three pages as a tertiary character and then decided to take hostages at gunpoint in Neiman Marcus because that's not obvious. . . .

I've spared you a lot, you know. You might think that this was as lame as it got, but I spared you plenty. Carlotta digging used chewing gum out of a wastebasket in order to send it for DNA testing. The "comic" scene where the six foot python gets out of its cage and slithers up Carlotta's leg in bed, and how she has to be rescued by the Body Mover while standing on her dresser in tiny see-through lingerie. The Judith Lieber breastplate necklace that deflected the bullet. The caterer who is going to start moving dead bodies in her catering van--because nothing says "festive canape" like mortuary services.

Do not pick up this book. Just don't. You're welcome.

Open House, by Elizabeth Berg

2010-04-19T16:05:00.003-05:00

I thought I had already blogged this book but I haven't been able to find an entry, so here goes. Another book chosen by my book group. I had read it years ago, and liked it enough that I read several other books by Berg as a result. How does it fare on re-read? Not quite so well.

Samantha starts the book devastated. Her husband has left, asking for a divorce. She is left alone with their eleven-year old son Travis, a house that is too large, and no career. The book follows the incidents of her life as she attempts to carry on after the cataclysmic event.

We learn almost nothing about the marriage, or why it fell apart, or much about David either. He appears in only a handful of short scenes, none of which show us why Sam would ever have loved him. What we do see is what happens to Sam as she attempts to put her life back together. She decides that since life is not going to be the same again, she will make the different be better. So she takes cues from Martha Stewart, showering and dressing as soon as she wakes up, using the good china in the dining room for breakfast, making French toast on a weekday morning, her make-up perfect.

Her son's reaction is perfect. "But I don't want French toast, I want cereal!" he whines, and Sam can't help arguing. "You have cereal every morning." "Because I like cereal. God, Mom!" And so Sam has to manage her son's needs as well as her own. Because nothing can be easy, can it?

She goes off on a spending spree, as a way to get back at David for leaving her. Unlike those of us who would go to Target and buy a new vacuum cleaner, she goes to Tiffany and buys china and silver for twelve. Because she's angry and hurt, and because she can't stand to have the snooty sales clerk see her be indecisive. Of course, this just leads David to cancel the joint accounts, because you can't be on the hood for a grief-crazed ex-wife who splurges at Tiffany's.

Eventually, Sam settles down a bit and looks at her situation rationally. She can't afford the mortgage on their big house, but she doesn't want to make Travis move. The only solution is housemates. She gets a couple of gems: first, the elegant and elderly Lydia, a grandmother figure who fits in and gives Sam some confidence in herself. Lydia moves out to marry her gentleman friend, and the room goes to Sam's gay hairdresser. Because every single woman needs a Sassy Gay Boyfriend, right?

There is another roommate who doesn't really make much of an impression, to the point of wondering why she is even in the book. Travis doesn't like the changes--of course he doesn't--but he's not immune to the charms of the new way of life as well. Sure, he'd rather not have strange people living in his house, and he doesn't trust the changes he's seeing in his mother. On the other hand, his request to live with David goes nowhere, as it is clear that David has no interest in raising a child anymore.

Sam also begins to re-enter the workforce, through the gentle guidance of King, an astrophysicist who prefers to take temporary jobs so he has time to think. Sam begins to find a new way of being in the world, one that is focused less on the shiny surface of a "perfect life"--as illustrated by her fixation on Martha Stewart--and focused more on opening her house and her life to other people. She has a moment of utter clarity about her own mother, who is frankly crazy, but is crazy in a way that allowed her to cope with the unexpected early death of her own husband.

In the end, David tells Sam that he made a mistake, and will be moving back in. After spending much of the book mourning her old life, Sam realizes that she can't go back. She tells David it's too late and he isn't welcome. She continues to move forward, and ends up in love with King--a man who is really a wonderful friend first, and a love interest second.

Would I recommend this book? I would, but with some caveats. Elizabeth Berg writes some beautiful and tender scenes, but the moments don't really all add up to a really good novel. She might even be described as a low toner version of Ann Tyler--who is herself a master of the closely observed and small moments that make up a life.

The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein

2010-04-19T15:29:00.005-05:00

For a book "written" by a dog about NASCAR racing, this book is oddly ubiquitous. Maybe it's just oddly ubiquitous in general. A woman approached my mother at church and insisted she read it so they could talk about it. I've seen it prominently displayed in book stores and at Target (which doesn't carry very many books, so each one you see there is pretty popular). My book club chose it as well. I'm now free to post about it, because we discussed it yesterday.

The story: Dog "Enzo" is owned by a young man who is apparently a talented race car driver, and who works at an auto repair shop for his day job. Their bachelor nights are spent watching video of famous races as Denny Swift studies the tricks of the masters. Then Denny falls in love and so Eve enters their lives, followed soon by their daughter Zoe. Things happen: they buy a house with a yard, Enzo gets accidentally locked indoors over a three day weekend, Denny begins to be noticed in the racing world.

All is not well, however, as Enzo smells Eve's illness that later turns out to be brain cancer. Eve goes home to her parents' home to die, and Zoe goes with her. Denny bears this stoically, spending his days with Eve, coming home to Enzo and an otherwise empty house. When Eve dies, her parents fight for custody of Zoe, claiming that Eve wanted them to do so.

Denny is disadvantaged financially, of course, and the grandparents use every weapon they have, including an alleged sexual assault on a minor--one of Eve's young cousins tried to come onto Denny and got mad when she was rejected. Denny, amazingly, never gets angry--he applies the lessons of racing to life, and those lessons lead him through the morass of family dysfunction and grief.

Lessons like--don't get angry when somebody makes a mistake that knocks you out of the race, because it's your fault you were in the way. Always finish the race, because even if you don't like the outcome you have a better result than if you quit. The car goes where your eyes go, so make certain your eyes are in the right place.

Of course, there is a dog on the cover, and are there any books with a dog on the cover where the dog DOESN'T die? Apparently not. You are well aware this is coming, as the first chapter begins with Enzo ridden with arthritis and planning his own reincarnation. Yes, because Enzo is apparently Buddhist, and he plans to come back to earth as a human being. So at the end, when Enzo does die, it's not too sad because he's the narrator and he's looking forward to being human.

No, that does not qualify as a spoiler. This does:

By the end, Denny has gotten his daughter back, gotten a dream job working and driving for an Italian car manufacturer in Italy. And a racing fan asks to meet the Famous Denny Swift, because he five year old son, Enzo, is a huge racing fan. Oh yeah, they went there.

As a book, it's not terrible, and can be affecting, but is the dog narrator really anything more than a gimmick? Hard to give it any props, since the use of the dog seems to allow Stein to avoid some of the harder parts of writing the book. Complicated human dynamics? Rendered shallowly, because the dog doesn't understand those. Esoteric legal procedings? Evaded, because dogs aren't allowed in courtrooms.

It's hard to point to anything that the dog-narrator does to improve the book, since it's such a convenient way to gloss over any literary weaknesses--which is itself a literary weakness. Had Stein written it as a straight third-person omniscient narration, the characters would have had to stand on their own strengths and weaknesses, whereas with a dog narrator, you get a sort of unconditional acceptance and cheering on of The Owner that isn't necessarily supported by the book itself.

I was impressed with the way Stein handled the dog's death--a lovely bit of writing in which the elderly and infirm dog finds himself able to run through a beautiful field, never tiring, while he hears Denny's voice telling him it's okay to go now. It wasn't maudlin, or manipulative. It was Just Right. To have tacked on the happy-ever-afterlife of the little boy meeting his racing hero wasn't strictly necessary, but wasn't an embarrassment either.

The other two women who read this book for book club liked it a bit less than I did, finding a lot of the racing information boring, even as they recognized its role as metaphor. Yet even I would be unlikely to recommend it to someone looking for good book--unless they were looking for a book about NASCAR, narrated by a dog. Then this is the top of the recommendation list.

Okay, so the video shows what I believe is called Formula One racing. I don't think that is what Denny actually does in the book, but what the heck. If someone is looking for a dog-narrated book about Formula One racing, I'm still recommending this one.

Mathilda Savitch, by Victor Lodato

2010-04-17T09:56:00.002-05:00

I picked this up before vacation because it was the winner of Barnes and Noble's "Discover New Writers" (or whatever they call it), and that's a pretty good recommendation. I picked it up and read the first chapter, and stuck it in the bag for reading on the plane. Or whatever.

But you know what? It suffers from the fact that I had recently finished reading "Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie," a book it resembles a great deal.

Mathilda Savitch is thirteen years old, and her older sister has been dead for a year. The ineffably good, kind, tender-hearted, beautiful Helene was pushed in front of a train, the man who sent her to her death never found. Mathilda's parents are buried in their own grief and don't seem able to notice the child they still have. Mathilda is tired of being ignored, and resolves to be awful. "Being awful" translated into wearing her sister's clothes and sending emails from her sister's email account.

The book hovers uneasily between genre detective novel and mid-list fiction bildungsroman. Mathilda sets out to "solve" her sister's murder, delving into her sister's on-line life to try to understand what she was doing at the train station the day she died. Mathilda is also trying to "wake up" her parents to her needs. About three-quarters of the way through the novel, Mathilda finally confesses her own guilt about her sister's death. That morning, Helene was having what can only be described as a tantrum, screaming "I wish I was dead" before locking herself into her room.

Being the opposite of an angsty teen, Mathilda says, "Why don't you then?" An incident that would have been forgotten if Helene hadn't actually died that day. So Mathilda has her own demons to exorcise around Helene's death and she turns detective to do it. What follows is not particularly memorable or ultimately very surprising.

YUP. HERE BE WHERE THE SPOILERS START.

Helene was having an affair--can you call it that when neither party is married and one of them is underage? Helene had a relationship with a guy that Mathilda finds out about via the old email account. Improbably, this guy doesn't know that Helene died a year ago, and when Mathilda cautiously contacts him pretending to be her sister, she finds herself in the position of deciding which is worse--him believing she dumped him, or learning that she died.

The guy in question--I've forgotten his name, and I don't care enough about the book to go look it up--is a former soldier who lost an arm in the service. He's in his mid-twenties, and Lodato has set up the book so that you see exactly why Helene fell into this relationship. He's like a big injured stray puppy, living on a military pension, in a small house in the garden of his blind mother's house. So it's a bleeding-heart two-fer! Disabled vet and blind, aged mother! No wonder Helene got in over her head; she was thinking with her legendary soft heart.

So, of course, the reality is that Helene was pregnant, hence the emotional storms and misery. She had a train ticket in her pocket, on her way to tell her lover about their predicament. But she never got there, and once she was dead, nobody knew her email password and so "Helene" never answered his messages.

Mathilda finds herself growing into Helene's place, feeling a pity that might someday be mistaken for love (when she's older than 13) for this wounded man. She shows up at his house wearing one of Helene's dresses. There is even some hint that she might actually have sex with the man, but the moment passes--he sees she isn't Helene, even though he probably wants to believe she would come back to him.

In the end, Mathilda decides she can't tell him that Helene is dead. She tells him about the pregnancy, and that the baby died. He believes that's why Helene wouldn't speak to him, and why she would have sent Mathilda to him. Mathilda makes up a plausible story about Helene's current whereabouts and that she is happy. Then she goes home. The end.

And what about that skulking figure who pushed the Tragic Girl in front of the train. Was he real? Did she jump? Does anybody care? Lodato doesn't seem to--we don't hear anything about him and the "mystery" just evaporates. It's not even that it isn't solved, so much as that Lodato doesn't seem to know what happened in his own book. If there WAS a shadowy guy who was seen on the platform and who pushed Helene, he's never identified and there doesn't seem to be any effort to find him. Or, as Mathilda seems to think, Helene jumped, then there is no mystery, but again, Mathilda doesn't seem to feel guilty about it by the end.

So, did Mathilda grow as a result of her investigation? Maybe. Which isn't much of an endorsement for a bildungsroman.

As I think about this book, I keep remembering Harriet the Spy, which I read at least twice as a kid. I kept waiting for Harriet to find something to spy on, for some mystery to appear that she could solve, and it kept not happening. Even at the time, I suspected that I missed the point of that book, but I remain mad enough about it that I won't go back and re-read it. I think much the same of this one: there is potentially a better book contained inside this one that I just missed. But I'm not going to spend any time going back to look for it. The "mystery" remains unsolved, the "secrets" pretty predictable, and the writing didn't make the journey enjoyable for its own sake.

But by all means, tell me why I am wrong. I would love to be wrong! Really! I would love to find out that if I just adjust the lens through which I read this book, I'd see it for the masterpiece it really is. You know, like finishing The Turn of the Screw and having somebody say "But the narrator isn't reliable--she's projecting." And suddenly what was a C+ book turns into an A+ experience.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, by Alan Bradley

2010-04-15T20:59:00.002-05:00

This would be the second of a projected five "Flavia de Luce" mysteries, and is every bit as oddly charming as the first one. Flavia remains passionately interested in chemistry, especially poisons, unhealthily interested in death, ridiculously embattled with her sisters, and as eccentric as ever. This time, however, the mystery doesn't really kick in until a third of the way through the book.

To get us there, however, we meet two strangers in the village, Rupert Porson of "Porson's Puppets" and his lovely assistant Nialla. The Porson's Puppets van has broken down fatally, and there is no way to pay for repairs without holding two puppet shows at the church hall. Flavia happened to be playing corpse in the graveyard when the van arrived, and was quickly dragged into service to make the shows happen.

Rupert Porson is a minor celebrity, and his "Snoddy the Squirrel" is apparently a very popular children's program on BBC--which Flavia didn't know, since there is no television at Buckshaw. Thus there is a built in audience for a show, and Flavia quickly becomes the gofer for Rupert and Nialla. She is also as nosy as before, and after conducting some chemical experiments (delightfully described to the point they would conceivably be replicable), she figures out that Nialla is pregnant, Rupert is a batterer, Gordon Inglesby grows marijuana, and that many of these people have known each other from before.

The vicar casts about the neighborhood for a place for Rupert and Nialla to camp, and the invitation comes from the Inglesbys--Gordon and Grace--who lost their five year old son some six years before. As a result, Grace has become nearly mad with grief, and the farm is mostly run down. Also residing on the farm is a former prisoner of war, Dieter Schratz, and a Land Farm Girl named Sally Straw.

The matinee performance goes well, but at the evening performance there is a problem. As puppet Jack (who looks exactly like the Inglesby's dead son) chops down the bean stalk, there is a rumble and a crash. But it is not the puppet giant who lands on the small stage--it is Rupert Porson, apparently electrocuted and dead.

As Flavia pedals her bicycle (named Gladys) around the town, she learns that Robin Inglesby's death was not usual. In fact, his body was found hanging from the remains of the old gibbet left rotting in the woods outside the village. He had been playing with a rope all that day, and apparently died accidentally while recreating a scene from a Punch and Judy show. Or did he?

The suspects mount up: there is Nialla, Rupert's current paramour; Mutt, the BBC producer who comes down to round up Rupert to face some unspecified mess he's left behind; the vicar and/or his wife; the ex-German Luftwaffe pilot; the scorned Land Farm girl; the ganja growing farmer and his mad wife.

But over all, there is Flavia. Flavia who shows up the police inspector with her solution to the crimes. Flavia who insinuates herself into everyone's business with her sharp eyes and clever way with science. It is she who manufactures an antidote to cyanide from pigeon droppings. It is she who poisons the chocolates sent to her sister by a lovestruck village boy, and then manages to prevent their being eaten by her entire family, plus the vicar. It is she who worms information out of the village postmistress while sucking on horehound candy, who competently bandages the scalded hand of the tea shop proprietress, who breaks into the library archives using her mouth to break the seal around an old window.

The world is a better place for Flavia de Luce.

The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault

2010-04-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

This debut novel has a fascinating premise, insight into an esoteric environment, strong thematic resonance and competent characterization. It's an intriguing and engaging read, if not a great one.

The hero of the story is a recent college graduate named Billy Webb. Not highly employable in New York with his philosophy degree, he ends up hired as a writer for Samuelson Company, a mythical publisher of American dictionaries. Thus we, along with Billy, are introduced into the arcane world of citation collecting, research reading, defining, and fielding ridiculous requests for information from a public that could be better informed.

Arsenault was herself a lexicographer, and she deftly reveals the nearly silent and introverted world of intellectuals who cull language rules from publications. One of the more disruptive ideas introduced in the course of the novel is that lexicographers should go out into the world and discover how language is being used in common life, before being ossified into print. But the senior Samuelson is appalled at the idea that lexicographers should listen to radios, or watch television, and so the world Billy enters remains as quiet and remote from the outside world as it would have been in the 18th century.

Billy's assignment on the first day is to read the "front matter" of the dictionary--all the pages most dictionary users skip, which explains rules of pronunciation, the rule for listing spelling variations (alphabetically), what a schwa is (the "uh" sound in English, represented by an upside down letter e). You can practically feel Billy's eyelids sagging as he works his way through these pages, and share his discouragement when he looks at the clock and sees only 26 minutes have passed.

As Billy gets used to the place, however, the dreary atmosphere lightens, and becomes a calm place of intellectual rigor, a condition placed into comic relief by the occasional phone call from the public. The invisible man in the next cubicle fields a question about the difference between a "boil" and a "pimple," and ends up recommending that the caller consult a medical practitioner. After all, he says, speaking to a doctor will not only give the caller the proper word to use, but will also allow for treatment. Arsenault plays up the wry humor of the situation by recording only one side of the conversation.

Once the atmosphere and personalities of the place are well settled, a mystery pops up. Lexicographical queries also arrive by letter, often from bored men in jail who have the time to obsess over arcane oddities. Why does "editrix" have two possible plurals ("editrixes" and "editrices") but "dominatrix" has only one? A review of the sources for "editrix" turns up something odd--a citation from a source that seems to be a book about dictionary editors, called "The Broken Teaglass."

Billy and the slightly more senior Mona Minot turn up quite a few more of these odd citations, that seem to be about this workplace. Each of them is much longer than a typical citation, and the word they ostensibly source is often unusually irrelevant to the text. And since when is a book published with a precise date, 14 October 1985, as "The Broken Teaglass" seems to be? And why are all the page numbers less than 100?

Mona can't locate any book called "The Broken Teaglass," nor can she find any references to the alleged author "Delores Beekman." And one of the cites mentions "a corpse."

The mystery becomes irresistible to Mona, and she drags Billy along with her for quite a while before he becomes interested himself. Are there sinister ties to the apparently kindly head of the editorial department? What about the retired editor who stops by once a month to socialize and deliver doughnuts? Is there way to locate all the "Teaglass" cites short of paging through the millions and millions of paper citations that have yet to be computerized?

There is a method to the madness, and Arsenault is able to use her own esoteric knowledge of words and lexicography to lead us along with Mona and Billy into the solution of the mystery. It turns out that the "Teaglass cites" are all for words that entered the language during the 1950s.

In the end, the journey is more interesting than the destination. The few, disconnected paragraphs hint at a more dramatic and thrilling story than the one that ultimately emerges. Corpses and madness are hinted at, but ultimately a dictionary publisher is not ripe ground for Poe-like gothic tales.

HERE BE SPOILERS

What ultimately emerges, and is reproduced in whole, is the story of a former lexicographer at the company. While walking home one evening, she was grabbed by a scary guy who apparently was attempting to abduct her. She had a bag in her hand, full of broken glass--the tea glass she had shattered while at work, and she was taking it home to dispose of. She shoved the glass into the man's neck and escaped. She was hysterical, but unable to tell her boyfriend what had happened. The man died, and the search was on for "The Glass Girl."

Turns out the guy had recently served time for another botched abduction, and was suspected of at least one murder/dismemberment that couldn't be proved against him. The Glass Girl was now a hero, but the murder remained unsolved and the Glass Girl was never identified.

The citations were her way of writing out her story, but then dismembering it as well; telling and untelling in the same act. The kindly head of the editorial department was her boyfriend at the time, and he knew about the citations all along. In the end, the story was re-scattered among the other citations, there to be discovered again by future editors--perhaps.

A solid B+ of a book--interesting setting, clever jigsaw puzzle of a mystery, gentle characters and a coherent conclusion. If the mystery had been juicier, perhaps, or if there had been some consequences for discovering the story, the book might have been more exciting and satisfying. As it is, the mystery is perfectly consistent with the atmosphere of the company--intellectual, but ultimately a bit boring.

A Word About The Audio--this was one I listened to from Audible.com, and it was well presented with one quirk. Rather than having a single narrator for this first person novel, there are several, who are used to provide the voices of the other characters in dialogue. This is not necessarily a choice I would have made, as it is a bit jarring to get used to. The woman who voices Mona, for example, seems to have been recorded at different sound levels, and so her dialogue seems to come from a different location--it's rather echo-y and the treble is set higher, and it takes some effort to believe she is actually speaking to the narrator in the same room. On the other hand, having a different voice read the "Teaglass cites" makes them stand out from the the rest of the book effectively--aural indenting, one could call it.

Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley

2010-04-15T10:15:00.000-05:00

Everybody loves this book. Everybody. So, of course, since I am invariably disappointed by popular books, I've not leapt onto the bandwagon. It took me months and months of picking it up and putting it back on the shelf to finally just pick up the damn thing and read it.

And I love it too.

I know! Surprised the heck out of me too! (Don't think I didn't hear you saying "But you hate EVERYTHING!")

Flavia de Luce is the eleven-year old antagonist of this novel--I use the word "antagonist" because she is introduced at war with her older sisters. They have ganged up on her, tied her up and locked her in a closet in the attic. She neatly arranges her own escape and appears at dinner before her sisters. By this time she has impressed us with her savvy on having her hands bound (tenting her fingers to keep her wrists apart, she ended up with slack in the rope which she used to escape) and her ability to pick locks. We have also learned that she had the ability to pierce through pretentions--her sisters Ophelia and Daphne are invariably called "Feely and Daffy."

Bradley also paints the status of the family in swift, certain strokes. Mother Harriet is missing, presumed dead after a mountaineering accident shortly after Flavia's birth. Dad is stern but absent-minded, and probably overwhelmed by being left alone with three fierce young females. The house is an old country house, built by generations of variably eccentric de Luces, of which our family are the last. In fact, Harriet was the one who inherited the house, Dad was a shirt-tail relation. Each family member has his or her own passion: Dad is a philatelist, Ophelia loves her own reflection, Daphne always has her head in a book, and Flavia is a chemist.

Charmingly, if improbably, a semi-recent ancestor was also mad about chemistry, and outfitted the top floor of one wing with what was then a state of the art chemistry lab. Flavia has inherited it, and she is especially devoted to poisons.

This, then, is the set up of the family, and only a few more details are necessary to ground the novel: post WWII British countryside, a world where Flavia is free to hop onto her bike and run down to the village to snoop to her heart's content. Also present on the Buckshaw grounds is "Dogger," the jack of all trades who is truly master of none as a result of "shell shock" from the war. He has held most of the jobs around the mansion, and been allowed to sink to his own level, ending up as a sort of gardener/chauffeur. There is also a cook, who comes in mornings and afternoons, making foods the de Luces detest in order to take the leftovers home to her husband.

The novel starts with a bang, in the middle of Flavia's war against her sisters, who torment her by claiming that Harriet adopted her. Flavia exacts a chemical revenge against Feely's pearls, and things have scarcely died down before she finds a dead body in the garden. She literally trips over the body, in fact, while prowling around at night. This scarcely fazes her, of course, nor does the fact that she recognizes the body as that of a man who had been arguing with her father earlier that day.

Could this have something to do with Father's strange behavior when the cook found a dead blackbird with a stamp impaled on its beak?

Flavia is off and detecting, then, running down to the village to do research in the library, chasing down dotty sweetshop proprietors, scaling bell towers at the boys' school, turning out moldy clues and picking locks, while fostering a romance between her sister and a local lad.

To be brutally honest, I have forgotten many of the details of this book, as I finished it while on vacation and immediately picked up the next book on my list. This is not as bad as it might sound, however, because it means that I can go back and re-read it and be charmed anew.

I highly recommend this as a satisfying and charming read, slight, perhaps, but thoroughly delightful. So much so that I have already bought and started the sequel, The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag.

The Opposite of Reader's Block

2010-04-15T10:05:00.003-05:00

Not many posts here the last month, but no apologies either. For about the first time in ages, I am Too Busy Reading.

Yup, that's right. Somehow I have fallen into a rich vein of good books that I am excited to read, and that I actually have in my hands! So, rather than finish a book, stew about it for a while, post a loong review and then search for the next thing to read, I am just setting down one book and picking up the next one.

And then doing it again.

Which means that not only has this blog suffered, but I am rapidly forgetting what it is that I have read and what I wanted to remember about it. Which is not ideal, obviously, but is much more fun for me than not knowing what to read next and settling for something that is only okay. You know, books that are the literary equivalent of kissing your sister.

Although, your sister kisses really well.

So here is a list of the reviews I fully intend to get around to writing and posting:

The God of the Hive, by Laurie R. King
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley
Still Life, by Louise Penny
The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny
The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein
The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault
The Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore (Part 2)
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Open House, by Elizabeth Berg
River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters
A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick
The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, by Alan Bradley

So, stuff will be happening. Watch this spot for updates!

EDITED TO ADD: Two other books I had forgotten I have finished:
Mathilda Savitch, by Victor Lodato
Bite Me, by Christopher Moore

I love it that I have been doing so much reading that I can't even remember what all I've finished.

A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore-- Part One

2010-03-05T12:49:00.005-06:00

What is "A Gate at the Stairs" anyway? The cover of the book helpfully informs us it is "A Novel." I take this somewhat skeptically, because the picture on the cover isn't "A Gate at the Stairs;" it is "The Stairs at the Gate." In my mind, a gate at the stairs is more like this:

It's what you put up to keep babies and toddlers from falling down stairs that they are too young to manage on their own. So, as the narrator Tassie starts out the book looking for a babysitting job, the title made sense to me. There is even a gate to the yard of the home where Tassie gets hired as a babysitter, a gate that has lost some screws and has to be juggled into true before it can be latched.

Am I on the right track? I don't know--I am finding this novel to be interminable: directionless, overly invested in its own liguistic cleverness. I am not enjoying it much.

The Plot Thus Far: twenty-year old college sophmore Tassie is on break at a vaguely metropolitan midwestern college. Looking for a part time job to augment her income, she is hired by Sarah Blink to care for a child that Sarah has not yet adopted. She goes home to her small Wisconsin farming town, where her father has retired (at age 45) from growing artisinal potates--the kind served by Sarah Blink in her expensive restaurant. Tassie's mother is Jewish and seems to be going blind, her brother is failing high school, and Tassie spends a week lying around her bedroom reading books and being superior.

I have just finished listening to chapter 2, which is mostly taken up by Tassie's obnoxious condescension about the town where she has lived her whole life. And frankly, Moore has lost me here. Sure, she has bitingly witty things to say about how the city used to be nearly a theme park of fake Indian attractions, until the city council renamed the town "Delacrosse" and invented a UFO mythology that failed to last. She is as funny as one can be about idiosyncratic grammar of Wisconsin small towns--but seriously? Does Moore really believe that a 20 year old who spent her entire life in this town would actually consider it odd to say things like "on accident" or "bored of?" This is how they speak, and realistically, this is how Tassie herself would have grown up speaking. And it's not like she went so very far away to go to college either--she might have crossed the border into Illinois, it's hard to tell because Moore isn't specific--that she could suddenly be articulate about the use of the past perfect verb tense as a mode of storytelling by the rubes back home.

I am listening to this from Audible.com, and the narration is dripping with bored condecension about everything and everyone. I am finding it wearying. Moore is famous for her use of language, and she is apparently in fine form here. However the writerliness of the language is clearly all Moore's--it doesn't properly belong to the character, and it doesn't advance the story either. Tassie hates her small town, and feels superior to it, but doesn't seem to have any basis for that feeling--she's hasn't demonstrated any basis for that sense of superiority. She fails to connect with her parents, she's unable to talk with her brother, she's been abandoned by her college roommate who has all but moved in with a new boyfriend, she is uncomfortable with her new employer. She's mean spirited and aimless, and all of Moore's signiture linguistic gymnastics aren't distracting enough from the nasty tone of this story.

What is a reader to do? The reviews of this have been uniformly fantastic, and it's been listed as one of the best books of last year. Books so rarely live up to their hype, but what is the point of trying to find a good book to read if reviews that recommend "good books" oversell them and make them disappointing? It's hardly worth trying to read everything in hopes of stumbling on something good; there's just too many books out there.

I've got to put this one away for a while, for a time when I'm more willing to put up with an unpleasant character in the hopes that she will lead me somewhere worth going.

Becoming Jane Eyre, by Sheila Kohler

2010-03-03T20:10:00.003-06:00

This book starts out so promisingly, but sadly Kohler overreaches her initial premise and loses the tight focus that made the first third of the book so effective.

Pretty much anyone who picks up this book is going to be someone who knows at least something about the Bronte's story. Patrick Bronte (nee "Brunty") was born in Ireland, married Maria Branwell of Penzance, and moved his young family to Haworth in Yorkshire where he was given a lifetime curacy. His wife died young, and his two oldest daughters died at ages 10 and 11 from tuberculosis contracted while at a boarding school for parsons' daughters. The remaining four children (Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne) were schooled at home and spent much time writing epic tales of imaginary lands.

Adulthood was not easy for them: the girls had to earn their own livings, but were unhappy in the roles of teacher and governess, all that were available to them. Branwell was the darling of the family, but after a failed romance, he turned to alcohol and opium and died a squalid death. Emily and Anne both died within a year of Branwell, from tuberculosis and probably from the unhealthy conditions in Haworth. Charlotte lived only about another six years, and died nine months after her marriage to her father's curate. Poor Patrick Bronte went blind, and outlived them all, cared for to the end by Charlotte's husband.

This much is pretty well known, or certainly knowable--hello Wikipedia!--by anybody who has read more than one Bronte novel. It's part of the hagiography, and isn't THAT a fun word for the day? Insanely bright and repressed Victorian sisters stuck in a tiny parsonage in the middle of nowhere write deathless prose and become immortal members of the literary pantheon. Which doesn't actually make them immortal, and they all die. The End.

What Kohler's novel does at the beginning is to give us Charlotte Bronte before she wrote Jane Eyre and looks into her soul to show us what made that novel possible, and what it might have felt like to be Charlotte Bronte as she wrote the book that made her famous. So the novel opens in a small dark room in Manchester. Patrick Bronte is recovering from cataract surgery, and must lie motionless in a dark room as his eyes heal. Charlotte has traveled with him, and passes the time writing: Patrick can hear the scratching of the pencil against the paper.

Kohler matches up the incidents in Charlotte's life with the plot of Jane Eyre--an exercise that runs the risk of flattening the Bronte novel into thinly disguised autobiography, and runs the risk of turning Kohler's own novel into an undergraduate English paper. Charlotte loved her oldest sister Elizabeth, therefore Helen Burns is Charlotte's doomed sister. However, Kohler narrowly escapes this reductionism by showing how Charlotte transformed the mere facts of her life by injecting her passionate nature into her writing. Kohler juxtaposes the oppressive scene: dark and cold room, poor food, the need to stay near her father; with the freedom Charlotte feels in writing.

Kohler gives us entry into Patrick's thoughts as well. I have my own image of Patrick Bronte, of a man who managed to raise such exceptional daughters in such unpromising circumstances, and so I was deeply offended by the picture Kohler painted of him. Kohler depicts him as an unremittingly lusty man, who all but murdered his fragile wife by insisting she perform her "duty." She begs him to spare her, to allow her to recover from her many pregnancies, afraid that another one will kill her, but he orders her to submit, finding a special excitement in having her as she audibly prays for God to spare her. Give Kohler her due, this is unforgettable stuff.

However, once back at Haworth, Kohler widens her view and loses her focus. Apparently she could not resist telling the Whole Story. So we have to go back and see the four children writing their juvenalia, the stories of Angria and Gondal. We have to watch as the sisters send out their novels and have them rejected over and over. We get snippets of Anne's Great Passion for one of her father's curates, a boy who never spoke of love and who died young (what else?). We get a curiously abbreviated history of Branwell's affair with his employer, a woman who rejected him after her own husband died--weirdly told from Anne's point of view. We see Emily venture out at night to fetch her inebriated brother home. We see a sort of "movie montage" of life at the parsonage, while failing to see how these happenings influenced the girls' writings. Sure, there are lots of allusions to, for example, how Anne's miserable experience as a governess is detailed in Agnes Grey, but that's all they are--references, glancing nods in the direction of the novels.

In the first third of the book, Kohler actually gets down to the details of how an writer can make art out of mere events; in the second third of the book, she fails to apply her own lessons and gives us mere event. And really, the Bronte's aren't famous because they lived such miserable lives, they are famous in spite of having lived miserable and circumscribed lives, and the reason those lives are interesting is because of how they manipulated them and made them universal.

By the final portion of the book, Kohler has even lost this level of attention--we meed Charlotte after she is famous, after she has made a great deal of money from Jane Eyre and even has presumably published Shirley. Branwell, Emily and Anne have all died off-stage, and their deaths don't seem to have changed Charlotte much at all. More important to Kohler is to breeze through what might have been Charlotte's imagined romance with her publisher, George Smith--who might have married her, if it hadn't been for his meddling mother. Then a final chapter that completely abandons the pretense of limited p.o.v., where Charlotte marries Arthur Bell Nichols while the narrator tells us she had no way of knowing that she would be dead nine months later. And then a tacked on epilogue to show us Patrick Bronte, who outlived his entire family, blind and alone, listening for the sounds of his dead family and imagining he hears the scratch of pencil on paper.

After such wonderful imaginative rendering of the characters in the first third of the book, the rest of the book is disappointingly sloppy and pointless. If Kohler really intended to present the Bronte's lives, then there is really no reason she should have skipped over so many important moments. For example, Kohler does not describe Branwell's death, or Emily's refusal to get medical help and her death in the family parlor only a few months later. She should not have implied, as she does, that Anne is buried in Haworth--Anne died trying to get to Scarborough, where she hoped the sea air would cure her lungs, and Charlotte chose to have her buried there rather than bring the body home to Haworth--also a scene that Kohler skips. She gives us nothing about Charlotte's life in Haworth alone with her father, almost nothing about her courtship or life with Arthur Bell Nichols, very little about the writing and publication of three more novels.

There is a nicely dramatized scene where the three sisters receive their much delivered package of novels: this publisher wants to publish Anne's book Agnes Grey, he would like Wuthering Heights to be expanded to three volumes, and he declines to publish Charlotte's book The Professor. The terms are not good either--they have to pay publishing costs up front, and will only be repaid after costs are recouped by sales. Charlotte urges her sisters to accept the offer, while believing that they would never publish without her novel's acceptance. Emily and Anne agree, leaving Charlotte angry and wounded and unable to protest. Besides, Emily says, she has the new one almost finished, and that one might get accepted. Kohler gets inside Charlotte's head and vividly depicts her chaotic emotions about being "left out," and then brilliantly gives us Emily's internal monologue about the failings of Charlotte's novel.

That is a scene that captures an emotional strain of being both sisters and artists, the tensions of different levels of achievement made rockier by living in such close quarters. It is a scene that shows how bonds of affection are strained by the fierce need for expression, and Kohler also captures the very different personalities of the three sisters as a bonus.

But this economical and effective storytelling gets lost as Kohler tries her tricks on an increasingly larger scale. Charlotte and Anne head off to London to confront the shady publisher who is claiming that Emily and Anne's novels are written "by the author of Jane Eyre." So why do they go visit Charlotte's publisher? And why do we get treated to an internal monologue by the publisher's mother? By this point, Kohler has fallen into the trap she successfully avoided earlier--at this point, she is pairing up the characters of Charlotte's novels with their "Real Life Counterparts." Kohler has stopped trying to demonstrate Charlotte's character and thinking with these match-ups, and so we are in roman a clef territory, where "Dr. John Graham Bretton" is "really" her publisher George Smith. And thus Villette is reduced to a revenge novel against a man who jilted her, rather than the complex novel that many critics think is Charlotte's best.

I was also unimpressed with the artificial division of this short book into three "volumes" in the Victorian fashion. It doesn't serve any artistic function and smacks of pastiche. I really thought there were some wonderful and meaty sections of writing, and if Kohler had stuck with a smaller canvas--maybe a close examination of Charlotte's writing of Jane Eyre and its influences, as well as seeing the process through the eyes of those closest to her--she could have delivered a powerful work of imagination that examined the work of creating art. If she had ended the story at the moment that Charlotte sent the book out and thus stopped writing it, she would have had a tightly focused and powerful tale.

Instead, she got seduced by the melodrama of the Bronte story, and failed to give it either the weight it was due, or to nail it down with such specificity that it ceased to be melodramatic. So it's a nice try, and not a bad read, but frustrating because it so clearly could have been so much more.

The Help, by Katherine Stockett

2010-02-25T20:31:00.003-06:00

Have you read this yet? Odds are that you have. So let's see a show of hands of who all HASN'T read it. Okay, put those hands down onto your purses, and go get this book. Come back after you have read it.

Even if you have read it, you might want to get the audio book, because the voices are wonderful.

Synopsis: Set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962-64, it is the story of the relationships between several young white women and the black "maids" who serve their families. "Maid" appears to be an all purpose word, since the maids in this book clean, cook, wash and iron and raise the children, as well as serve as secret keepers. Basically, the maids do all the work so the white women are free be idle.

The story is handled by three narrators. Aibeleen is maid for a couple with a two year old girl, and she's the Butterfly McQueen--loving, kind, gentle. Minny Jackson is sassy and mouthy, married to a drinker with five children at home. Skeeter Phelan is a white woman, a recent graduate of Ole Miss, and the only one of her set who isn't married yet.

Though the various narrations, we see the fundamental contradictions of domestic service in a segregated society. Aibeleen genuinely loves the children she raises, and they genuinely love her, yet they inevitably grow up to insist on continued segregation. Aibeleen is required to use a separate toilet (stuck in the garage) in order to keep her "colored germs" away from the family, yet she washes their dishes, cooks their food, polishes the silver, does the laundry. . .There is just no logic to the arbitrary limits, given all the ways their lives are entangled.

What passes for a plot occurs when Skeeter Phelan decides she wants to interview some maids for a book about how it feels to work for white families. It's a project fraught with danger, as it requires them to meet, something that is simply not imaginable in their strictly segregated world. Then, it requires the maids to tell dangerous secrets--both the failures of the white families, as well as their own complaints. But complaining about white families can easily mean getting fired, if not beaten or killed. This is the town where Medgar Evers was firebombed and killed, and a man was beaten nearly to death for accidentally using a "whites only" toilet.

Of course, the interviews happen, and the book gets written. Along the way Kennedy is assassinated, jobs are lost, babies born, cancer, engagement, Junior League power plays. But the strength of the book is the voices. I am in no position to comment on whether the black voices are authentic to the time or the place, but the characters (especially Aibeleen) feel three dimensional. Stockett acknowledges the major events of the times, although they mostly happen in the background, for example on television channels that get changed. The Vietnam War has less impact on these lives than the arrival of a window air conditioner.

Which is probably accurate, and feels true to the characters. Stockett packs a lot of events into this book, but for the most part they feel believeable and well grounded in the reality of the lives being depicted.

If there is a fault, it might be that the ending is a bit too tidy. Skeeter Phelan gets out of Mississippi entirely; Aibeleen loses her maid job, but is poised to become a writer; Minny leaves her alcoholic husband. But it's hard to fault that, when Stockett has given us so many well balanced stories. Definitely worth spending time in Jackson Mississippi.

The People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

2010-02-16T19:51:00.004-06:00

I'm listening to this one on audio, and while the book begins well, it simply doesn't sustain for the long run. I know I am going to finish it, because, well, it's not like it's taking up time I could use for much else--it's hard to actually read a book while driving, but I can listen to one.

I will also take some breaks from it and listen to something funny once in a while. And I can't guarantee that I will come back to it promptly.

Plot summary: In 1996, Our Narrator is a 30-something Australian book conservationist, who is called in to stabilize a precious 14th century Haggadah that has been saved from the bombing of Sarajevo. The book is unusual in that it has been exquisitely illuminated, something highly unusual for Jewish books, which tended to take the injunction against the making of idols and images seriously. As she works on the book, she discovers small items that could give her clues as to the book's history: a fragment of a butterfly wing, a small white hair, a wine stain, salt crystals, grooves on the cheap 19th century rebinding that indicate that there should have been a clasp to keep the book closed.

The story of Hannah Heath as she analyzes these fragments is interleaved (ha!) with the stories of the people who left behind the clues she has found. Brooks doesn't try to show that Hannah learns these stories--no, only we, the readers, are privileged to learn the history of the book's previous owners and makers.

The stories work backwards in time, but are tied to the clue Hannah found. So the butterfly wing is identified as having belonged to an insect that had a range limited to a small area of mountains. We are then whisked back to 1945, and a young Jewish woman whose entire family is killed by Nazi. Brooks invests a great deal of detail into the story of the girl and her working class roots. Her father was ordered to report to a labor camp, which he did, thinking that because he was strong he would survive. Of course, it wasn't actually a labor camp. The rest of her family, all females, was rounded up and locked into a church. Our girl (whose name I have forgotten, as I have for most of the characters) breaks in to try to rescue them, and then is forced to break out as the Nazis arrive. There is a young girl who insists she can get them to the Resistance, so the two of them set out. They find the young men of their village who had previously attended Zionist propaganda meetings, and she earns her way into the group by washing their clothes free of lice. She stays on as laundress and mule wrangler until Tito orders the irregulars home.

Of course, there is no home, so she joins one of the older boys and the younger sister who got them there, and they attempt to walk out of country--like the Von Trapps at the end of The Sound of Music. But illness and frostbite cripple her companions, who commit suicide by walking out onto thin ice over a lake. She stumbles back into Sarajevo (I believe) and ends up being sheltered by a Muslim couple. The wife is her own age, the husband is older and works in the museum that housed the Haggadah. The Nazis are rounding up Jewish books for burning, so the Muslim husband conspires with the head of the museum to trick the commandant into believing that the book was already taken away. He smuggles the book out of the library, and the sends the Jewish girl and the book to a sanctuary in the mountains.

The missing clasps turn out to be a story of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the world of Sigmund Freud, growing anti-Semitism, and (apparently) rampant venereal disease. The book binder given the task of re-binding the Haggadah is in the later stages of tertiary syphilis, and there is a chance of a cure, which is, of course, expensive and only available from a Jewish doctor. The book binder is desperate for the cure, and so he steals the silver clasps that came with the Haggadah, and offers them as payment. The doctor is not inclined to accept them, but then he realizes that the clever angel-wings-around-roses clasp would make two lovely pairs of earrings: one pair as a sending off present for his mistress (of whom he is beginning to tire) and the other for his wife--who he has discovered is having an affair, which reignites his interest in her.

The wine stain propels us back to Venice, at a time when the Pope's inquisition is genially ignored by the more cosmopolitan Venetians. We meet a silver tongued orator of a Jewish rabbi, who is such a gifted preacher that the local Catholic priests attend synagogue in order to steal and recycle his sermons. The rabbi is good friends with a noble lady, who pretends to have converted, but secretly meets the rabbi to give him gold for the Jewish poor. She wishes to leave Venice for the Ottoman Empire, where Jews are more welcome--as she wishes to marry. She is the current owner of the Haggadah, and needs to have it passed by the censor so she can take it with her.

The rabbi has his own dark secret--he likes to mask at Carnivale and go gamble with the lady's money. In mask and cape, he is no longer identifiably Jewish. Brooks gives us a loooooong and detailed account of his giving into temptation, the machinations he takes to get to the gambling house, the many hands of cards he plays, his ultimate loss of all the gold, and his humiliation at being spotted as a Jew.

Once rattled, he is no longer the flawless orator, and he makes the mistake of presuming on his friendship with the Catholic censor on a morning when the priest has a hell of a hangover. They bicker and wrestle with theology while the priest continues to drink communion wine. He reaches the tipping point and becomes an angry drunk, and forces the rabbi into a wager. The stakes are the Haggadah--if the rabbi wins, he will get the signature, although several pages will be redacted. If he loses, the entire book will be burned. The priest is too drunk to run the wager properly, and the rabbi wins. Oh, but the priest has rigged the bet, and then he kicks the rabbi out of his chambers. Once again alone, but drunk, the priest has a nervous breakdown, spilling wine and cutting himself on the glass, as he experiences flashbacks that reveal that he himself was born a Jew!

The salt crystals are experimentally confirmed to be sea salt, taking us back to 1492--the time Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. A Jewish calligrapher buys the unbound illuminations from a Moorish refugee and writes them into a Haggadah as a wedding gift for his rich nephew. He has his own troubles, however, as his only son has converted to Catholicism in order to marry a Spanish girl. Father declares his son is dead, and has even sat shiva for him. But when the son is picked up by the Inquisition, the father goes to ask his rich brother to ransom the young man.

But all the Jewish gold in Spain has to be dedicated to a bribe to forestall the rulers from ordering all the Jews to be expelled, converted, or killed. So we are treated to the horror of the young man's torture, which I won't repeat here. His crime was possession of a leather tefillin with Hebrew scripture inside. He had it as a remembrance of his family; the Inquisition saw it as evidence of a "false conversion." His wife's family refused to make any effort to ransom him, out of fear that they themselves were now vulnerable to accusations.

The calligrapher's daughter, Ruti, was having an affair with the book binder, and was dallying with him on scraps of tanned leather when the Inquisition came to her father's house looking for her. Her brother had named her as the one who brought him the tefillin: had tempted him to renounce Jesus. The thugs looking for her beat her father to death. Her uncle comes back from the capital where the audience with Ferdinand and Isabella (with special guest appearance by Torquamada!) has not gone well. He has to persuade the village to leave Spain.

Ruti manages not to be caught by the Inquisition, running off with the Haggadah (which she was supposed to deliver home) to some caves she knew. How did she know about the caves? Because she used to sneak off to go study kabballah secretly--something only men over 40 were allowed to study. But who is already at the cave? Her brother's pregnant wife, who is about to deliver the baby: who looks to have been born dead, but comes back to life. So Ruti immerses him into the sea in order to turn him back into a Jew, and takes off with him.

The white hair is identified in contemporary England as belonging to a cat, with pigment caught in the cuticle, as if someone dyed the cat's hair. We end up in 14th century Turkey, with a Muslim slave embarassed to be a slave to a Jewish doctor. With a flashback within a flashback (within yet another flashback), the first person narrator is a small child in a polygamous household, with an elderly father who is a doctor. Owing to a number of coincidences, the narrator is found to have some talent with painting, and begins to illustrate the medical books, so that the herbal cures can be identified even if the plants are called different things in different areas.

The happy family starts off for a hajj, but is attacked by Berbers, and our narrator is sold as a slave to a book maker, and starts at the bottom of the business preparing parchment, but soon is noticed for the ability to paint likenesses. Which is not something much in demand, as radical iconoclasts have been vandalizing books on the basis that humans should not usurp God's creative prerogative. But conveniently, the Emir has fallen foolishly in love with a Christian captive, made her his Emira, and wants a likeness to take with him on his siege of Christian towns in Spain. Fortunately, it turns out the narrator won't have to be made a eunuch, because she's a girl!

So after perfunctorily being raped by the artist who owned her, she is sent off to the palace, where she paints the Emira and they spend the time the Emir is away in Hot Medieval Islamic Lesbian (implied) Sex. Because there was so much of that between white Spanish Christian captives and indigo dyed Muslims forced to spend weeks in the empty rooms of the harem. But times look rough for our heroines--the Emir's son by his first wife (who was sent packing when the Christian woman was brought home) plans to murder his father and rule! So the Moorish painter is given away to the Emira's ob/gyn (another Jewish doctor) along with the Emira's brother to keep them both safe. The Emira manages to escape herself to a convent, and her child turns out to be a girl, so there is no threat there.

While living with the Jewish Doctor, the Moorish painter begins to learn about Judaism, and begins to paint images for the doctor's deaf-mute son, so he can learn about his own heritage. Oh, and her brushes were made with cat hair.

And thus, we have worked backwards to encompass all the steps to creating the book that Hannah was asked to stabilize for display! All the clues left in the book have been accounted for! But don't think that Hannah merely served as CSI:Book Restoration--oh no! She has her own troubled relationship with a cold and distant mother who is a world famous neurosurgeon. Who, it turns out, fell in love early in her career with a Jewish artist from Australia! Who died after surgery to remove a brain tumor, which was causing him to go blind! And while he could have successfully lived if he'd opted for radiation therapy, that wouldn't have given him back his sight, so he went for the riskier surgery, because painting was more important to him than the love of the surgeon and the impending birth of his first child! But mom was cold and withholding, and wouldn't let the artist's extended family ever see the baby until Hannah was in her 30s and her (unknown) grandmother had died in an auto accident while driving Dr. Mom around Boston! So since Dr. Mom was in the hospital recovering from the accident, Hannah had to go sit shiva with the family she never knew she had.

There is also a fling with the librarian who rescued the Haggadah from the Sarajevo museum during the Bosnian wars. His wife was killed by a sniper, and a bullet fragment went into the skull of his baby son, so now he has a dead wife and a vegetative son! And he keeps a giant painting of the two of them in his bedroom, to which he brings Hannah, because there is nothing weird about that at all!

And in the end, this book is just exhausting. There is so much plot, so much melodrama packed into it by using the device of skipping through history. There is no story that is not about a traumatic event, no moment in history that is not a major turning point in the life of the Jews. The book never seems to belong to anyone who actually uses it, or treasures it as a religious item. It's always something in contention, something being passed around from person to person. The stakes are always life-or-death--expulsion, torture, lesbian cross-cultural sex. People are impaled on stakes, forced to watch their wives raped and children kidnapped; corpses left to desert vultures; un-attended child-birth; racial humiliation; genocide.

At the same time, this book is terribly cold. Family members shun each other, religious calling is nothing more than a sanctuary from murder or the shame of being born Jewish. The Jewish families that possess the Haggadah never use it for seder; they are too busy being murdered apparently. It's a fairly cynical novel--the Haggadah is never loved, never treasured as a family relic, never shown except as the byproduct of melodrama. It's as though Brooks has only a theoretical understanding of what a Haggadah means, and she has a blood-thirsty imagination that can't be set to the quieter themes.

A word about the audio book. One of the problems with an audio book is that it's hard to keep track of how close you are to the end. I think I'm almost finished, but I could be horribly wrong and have hours and hours left. Whereas if I had the actual codex in my hand, I could immediately begin skimming once I knew there were only so many pages left.

The narrator, Edwina Wren, is also great at the start, but begins to wear as the hours (almost 14 of them!) pass. Her contemporary narration as Hannah Heath is sharp and clear. As the narrative skips through time, however, she develops these vague accents that all begin to sound alike. The Italian noblewoman invariably ends-a her words-a with the stereotypical Italian accent from-a vaudeville. The Spanish Jewish doctor and the Yugoslav Muslim sound exactly the same. The medieval African Tuareg sounds exactly like the Jewish Sarajevan from WWII. And they are all vaudeville-caliber accents.

So, while the book is basically solidly crafted, it's hard to recommend it. The "history" covered in the book is mostly sensationalistic, the religion is cliched, the pace is exhausting, and the characterization is thin. It's hard to see any of the hundreds of people who flit through the plot as three dimensional, with the possible exception of Hannah's mother--who is herself a cliche.

Some of the best information of the book is hopelessly short changed. The most interesting part of the book is the beginning, when Hannah Heath describes how old books were made: how pigments were created, how gold leaf is hammered. There is a color she describes that no longer exists: it was made by feeding cows on a diet of only mangoes, then the color was distilled from their urine. The British forbid this practice while ruling India, as too hard on the cows.

Yet after the wealth of fascinating information like this, once Hannah sits down to the book, the actual task of stabilizing and restoring it are pushed off stage, in favor of how many days she slept with the librarian who saved it.

So, if you are stuck at an airport with nothing to read, it's fine and won't cause you to throw the book down the aisle in frustration. However, with so many other books out there, it's not really worth the time.

The Cure for Reader's Block

2010-02-12T13:46:00.002-06:00

So I've recently found quite a few books I'm interested in reading, so I'm in the happy situation of NOT having Reader's Block--like Writer's Block, only pathetic, since I'm the kind of reader who will read cereal boxes and junk mail in order to have SOMETHING to read.

Still, I for the last several months I have had a hard time finding something I want to read, or enjoying whatever I am reading. Now that I have several books backed up like planes over O'Hare, waiting for a slot to open, I found this blog: Find Your Next Book Here.

Even more useful is this particular entry: My Take Another Chance Challenge. Here are multiple ways to just pick a damn book to read already! So I am copying them here, so I can turn to these challenges for the next time when Reader's Block interferes with my reading enjoyment.

Challenge 1: Read Your Doppelganger (worth 1 entry)
Find an author who has either the same initials, the same first name, the same last name, or the exact same name as you. Read a book by this author and write a post about it. (If you try to keep your identity anonymous on your blog, you don't have to reveal what part of the author's name is the same as your name.)
Example: If your name is Susan Kasischke, you might read a book by Stephen King (same initials), Susan Donovan (same first name), Laura Kasischke (same last name) or Susan Kasischke (same exact name).
Challenge 2: Blogroll Roulette (worth 1 entry)
Find a blogroll at either your book blog or a book blog you like that has at least 15 book blogs on it. Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the number 1 for the min. and 15 for the max. and then hit generate. Then find the blog that is that number on the blogroll you selected. (For example, if you get 10 at Random.org, then count down the list of blogs until you get to the tenth one). Go to that blog and pick a book to read from the books that they have reviewed on their blog. Read it and write a post about it. Be sure to link to the blog post you picked the book from!

Challenge 3: 100 Best Book (worth 1 entry)
Choose one of the lists below and go to the link provided. Choose a book to read from the list that you haven't read before. Read the book and write about it.
Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List
Top 100 Sci-Fi Books
100 Best Romance Novels of the 20th Century
100 Best Mystery Novels
100 Best Non-Fiction Books (pick from either Board List or Reader List)
2009 Best Books for Young Adults
Challenge 4: Prize Winner Book (worth 1 entry)
Pick one of the major literary awards from the list below. Click on the link for the award you picked. You will find a brief description of the award and links to past winners. Pick one of the past winners, read the book and write about it.
Booker Prize
Caldecott Medal
National Book Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
Newbery Medal
Nobel Prize for Literature
PEN/Faulkner Award
Pulitzer Prize
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
EMMA Awards
Challenge 5: Title Word Count (worth 1 entry)
Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the numbers 1 for the min. and 5 for the max. and then hit generate. Find a book to read that has that number of words in the title. Read the book and write about it.
Example: If you get 1 for your number, read a book that has a one word title. If you get 2, read a book that has a two word title and so on and so forth.
Challenge 6: Genre Switch-Up (worth 1 entry)
Go to this list of book genres and pick a genre that you have NEVER read before. Find a book from that genre, read it, and write about it. Note: If you seriously cannot find a genre that you have never read, then pick the genre that is as far away from what you normally read.

Challenge 7: Break A Prejudice (worth 1 entry)
We all have reading prejudices--authors we don't like, genres we don't like, or even publishers we don't like. For this challenge, think of a reading prejudice you have and then find a book that is an example of this type of book. Read the book and then write about the reading prejudice you had BEFORE you read the book and how reading the book either changed your prejudice or reinforced it.
Examples: I always say I can't stand James Patterson; therefore, I might read a James Patterson book for this challenge. Or, if you sneer at "chick lit" books, you might read a "chick lit" book. Or, if you think books published by Harlequin are pure drivel, you might read a book published by Harlequin. If you turn up your nose at the Twilight books, then you might read one of the Twilight books.
Challenge 8: Real and Inspired (worth 2 entries)
Many authors or books inspire others to pay homage to them by writing another book inspired by the original work. For this challenge, read both an original work and a book inspired by that original work. Write about both books in one post. Note: This might require some research on your part and requires reading two books so it worth 2 entries.
Examples: Christopher Moore's Fool is based on Shakespeare's play King Lear so I plan on reading both King Lear and Fool. Another example is Jane Austen, who inspired the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. For this challenge, you might read both Pride and Prejudice and the zombie version. (There are tons of other Austen-inspired books out there too.) Another idea would be a graphic novel version of a "standard" novel. The only real requirement is that the "inspired by" book must clearly state what original work inspired it.
Challenge 9: Same Word, Different Book (worth 2 entries)
Find two books that have the same word in the title. Read both books and write about them. (Worth 2 entries because you have to read two books).
Example: If you pick the word "Love," you could read any two books that both have Love in the title. To help you find books that have the same word, you could go to Amazon.com, type a word into the Search box and see what books come up with that word.
Challenge 10: Become A Character (worth 2 entries)
For this challenge, you can read any book you want. However, you have to write about the book as one of the characters from the book. The character can comment on his/her treatment by the author, other characters, the "untold story," what happened next, and so forth. You could even have two characters interviewing each other! Your imagination is the only limit. Because of the difficulty level of this challenge, it is worth two entries.

Challenge 11: All in the Family (worth 2 entries)
The writing gene often runs in the family. For this challenge, you need to find two authors from the same family (either by blood or by marriage) and read a book by each of the authors and then write about both books. Because of the research involved and having to read two books, this challenge is worth two entries.
Examples: The Bronte sisters; Stephen King and his wife Tabitha OR his son Joe Hill; Jonathan Kellerman (husband) and Faye Kellerman (wife); Michael Chabon (husband) and Ayelet Waldman (wife); Joan Didion (wife) and John Gregory Dunne (husband); Mary Higgins Clark (mother) and Carol Higgins Clark (daughter)
Challenge 12: Author Anthology Pick (worth 2 entries)
Find an anthology of your choice. Read at least 5 entries in the anthology. Of the 5 entries you've read, pick your favorite one and then find a book by that writer and read it. (If your first choice doesn't have a book, then pick your next favorite until you find a writer that has a book.) Write about the anthology, your favorite pick from the anthology, and the book you read by your favorite pick. Because of having to obtain and read two books, this challenge is worth t

wo entries.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

2010-02-11T22:10:00.003-06:00

This is an amazing work: equal parts Turn of the Screw and Brideshead Revisited, with a dash of Daphne DuMarier's "Rebecca" for spice. Narrated in the first person by Dr. Faraday, who like the second Mrs. de Winter has no first name, the book concerns the fall of the Ayres family and their estate, Hundreds Hall. Sometimes this book is marketed as a ghost story, which it is, and most reviewers are aware of its depiction of class resentment. I think the book is primarily about the change of class structure after WWII, and the ghost story is itself a metaphor for the changing social landscape--which makes the book, in my opinion, even more worth close reading.

The opening set piece sums up the entire plot: Dr. Faraday's first memory of Hundreds is from a 1919 public event for "Empire Day." At that time, the hall is inhabited by Colonel Ayres, his lovely young wife, and their seven year old daughter Susan. He, along with a number of other boys, receives a medal from Mrs. Ayres. Because Faraday's mother was once a nursery maid at Hundreds, she takes him inside the mansion while she visits with her former co-workers. Young Faraday is allowed a brief peak at the family's part of the house (as opposed to the servants' areas) and is overcome with the desire to possess a piece of the grand home. He prises out a plaster acorn from a decorative frieze, but is disappointed that it doesn't come cleanly, but trailing strings. His theft is discovered by his mother at home, and the acorn is taken from him and put on the fire, where it smokes and melts, ruined but not utterly destroyed.

You have just been given the condensed version of the rest of the book. Waters is very good.

The story picks up again some thirty years later. Faraday is now a doctor, both his parents dead, WWII just over. The colonel has also died in the intervening years, as had the Ayres' daughter Susan, of diphteria when she was eight. Hundreds was requisitioned by the army during the war, and the family has now fallen on hard times. Only Mrs. Ayres and two grown children live at Hundreds, with a single teen aged maid and a daily cook to support them. They have been forced over the years to sell off most of the land, and are struggling to survive on their small remaining farm. Faraday is not the Ayres' usual doctor, but since Graham is busy on an emergency case, Faraday comes to see to the ailing maid, Betty.

The maid, it turns out, isn't actually ill, but she doesn't like being alone in the house and claims there is "something bad here." Faraday is rather kind and understanding: Betty is lonely and frightened in her new position, having been there no more than a month. Faraday orders a day of bed rest, and speaks to the family about getting her a wireless to keep her company, and letting her avoid the servants' staircase that frightens her.

The family is presented like refugees from a disaster; they only use a few rooms of the house, and huddle together in the small parlor around an inadequate fire, unable to heat even one room adequately. Mrs. Ayres is elegant but visibly impoverished, her children more devolved. The son, Roderick, was an RAF pilot who survived a plane crash that left burn scars across his skin and damaged one leg. Caroline was in the Wrens during the war, but was called home to nurse Roddy. She dresses shabbily, with bare and unshaven legs. She lounges in her chair, stretching her bare toes to run them through the fur of her old dog Gyp.

Waters' book is heavy with metaphor and symbolism: the family is living like Gypsies in their own home, wearing salvaged and tattered clothing, clinging to their elevated status even in the face of visible privation. Yet they continue to be gracious and charming to the doctor, even while denigrating the rise of the working class. Rod is rather bitter about the fact that the family does without calling in a doctor, but apparently they can't expect the servants to do without. He also claims that the "pirate class" is just waiting for the word from Attlee to rise up and loot Hundreds and all the other "county families."

Having gotten his foot into the door, Faraday manages to insinuate himself into the Ayres' lives, initially by using an experimental electrical treatment on Roddy's leg--not that the Ayres can afford the treatment, but Faraday offers to do it as research for a paper on the technique. This allows him entrance to the family on a weekly basis, but he's soon there more often. Fatefully, he is invited to attend a "drinks party" Mrs. Ayres has decided to give in honor of their new neighbors.

The preparations for the party are harrowing: Caroline and Betty on their knees scrubbing the marble entryway; Caroline pinning up the yellow wallpaper in the saloon. The cook complains of all the work, all for just a "drinks party." The party itself is, of course, a disaster. None of the Ayres have really appropriate evening wear--it's all out of date, the wrong size, threadbare and patched. The new neighbors are horrible: they arrive in "lounge suits," not proper evening dress; they have brought along a ill-mannered and badly raised eight year old daughter; they have also dragged along a visiting brother. It turns out that Mrs. Ayres, at least, expected the brother, as she is obviously trying to make a match for Caroline.

Things start to go badly when Rodrick fails to show up. At first Betty is dispatched to find him, then later Mrs. Ayres goes and returns with the news that Rod isn't feeling well and won't be joining them at all. Caroline gets insulted, and then the nasty little girl ends up behind a curtain with Gyp, and gets bitten. Dr. Faraday stitches her face in the kitchen, then rides down to the neighbors' home to get the girl settled. The next morning, he goes to check on his patient, only to find that they have called in their own doctor, and Faraday feels himself humiliated--replaced because they felt he wasn't good enough to continue to treat the girl.

Up at Hundreds, the family is sad and confused. Gyp was never the sort of dog who bit anyone. Of course they felt badly for the girl, and simply cannot understand why Gyp would have behaved that way. There is even the intimation that the old county families would have seen it as an unfortunate accident. The Baker-Halls, however, are threatening to involve the police and want the old dog destroyed. After some objections by the family, eventually they see there is no choice, and Dr. Faraday is asked to "destroy the dog."

Poor Gyp--not only is he an old dog, Caroline's sole companion, but he is also a stand in for the very class the Ayres belong to: pedigreed, well-bred, well-trained, amiable and unthreatening. Betty blames the dog's unusual behavior on the "dark thing" in the house that had frightened her before, and Roddy ends up confirming this opinion. What is carefully never articulated is what I assumed: that the foul child had teased and provoked the poor dog until it lost it's temper and snapped. She was a thoroughly provoking child, after all, spending nearly the entire time begging for wine and brandy, "which she always drank at home" and insisting that she had a right to smoke if she wanted to and no one could stop her. While the local families were all appalled at her behavior and her parents' permissiveness, the Baker-Halls simply gave in to her demands. Waters has deftly illustrated the coming social changes, in which the privileges of adulthood were demanded and granted without any of the attendant obligations. And as Waters demonstrates with Gyp, when this licentious behavior creates an unfortunate effect, there is no consequence to the provoker.

You can see how the values of the Ayres generation is overrun by the demands of the new people. No one at Hundreds believes Gyp is to blame, but they have neither the resources or appetite for an confrontation, and acquiesce in the demand for Gyp's death. It simply isn't the done thing to litigate, or accuse the child of causing her own injury, and the Ayres take the blame for something that wasn't their fault.

Waters writes compassionately about the old dog's death, but it is hard not to see the death of the old way of life, and the Ayres family, encompassed in the situation. The dog follows Dr. Faraday, who gives him a shot and waits until the heart stops beating. It's a gentle death, but it changes the life of the house--as the death of the gentry class changes the life of England. The people still think they hear him walking around the house, and the cook found herself even putting out his dinner. The emotional tenor of the house has changed, although it takes some time for the inhabitants to actually realize he won't return.

It is at this point that the ghost story kicks in. Rod becomes more and more erratic, barely leaving his room. He eventually reveals to Faraday that there is a presence, "an infection" that will leave the rest of the family alone if he stays alert to prevent it. Rod believes that this ghost left his room and caused Gyp to bite the Baker-Hall girl. There are "accidents" and a dangerous fire that started in five or six locations in his room while Rod slept. Eventually, Dr. Faraday becomes concerned, and Rod is bundled off to a mental hospital--one that the family finances can barely afford. Perhaps it is a recurrance of his earlier breakdown--the one that happened after his plane crash, or maybe it was caused by the strain of trying to keep up the estate with no staff, no land, no support.

Of course, I was wondering--why not just sell off everything and move? Surely there are better ways to live than locked up in a freezing house, huddled around an inadequate fire? Rod says repeatedly that he is trying to keep the hall "for the family," but there isn't really any family left. There is just the three of them, and no real prospects for Rod or Caroline to marry. The Ayres are fighting off the inevitable--there is no real way to go back to the glory days of the house, and no real future for it either.

Once Rod is gone, the work of running the estate falls to Caroline, who seems to be better suited to it than Rod ever was, although there is no way to really make things better. It is at this time that Faraday starts to see Caroline's charms, and he begins to court her. He has also published his paper on the electrical treatment of Rod's injuries, which lead to some interest in him by a London hospital. It is apparent to the reader that Caroline sees Faraday as her escape route--there is no one else for her to marry, and if he relocates to London, she is safely away from Hundreds. Unfortunately, it starts to become obvious that Faraday sees Caroline as a way to gain Hundreds Hall for himself. He's gotten to be a regular visitor, often letting himself into the house without waiting for the door to be answered. He imagines marrying Caroline, living at Hundreds and restoring the house, without ever really calculating how impossible that would be on his limited doctor's income.

The ghost is back as well--making noises in the speaking tube between the kitchen and the old nursery, knocking on walls, leaving scribbled letters on the walls behind large pieces of furniture. Mrs. Ayres becomes convinced that it is her lost child, Susan, dead these forty years, trying to get her mother to join her. The noises have thoroughly unnerved Betty and the cook, and Mrs. Ayres is beginning to show welts and cuts that she blames on Susan. There is even a frightening scene where Mrs. Ayres was locked in the old nursery, a sequence that pays brilliant homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Faraday convinces Caroline that her mother also needs mental care, but the morning she is to be sent away, Mrs. Ayres is found hanged in her bedroom, the door locked from the inside and the key thrown out the window. It is at this point that Faraday starts to become quite obnoxious to the reader, although he sees himself as perfectly rational. He begins to badger Caroline to set a date for the wedding, and when she doesn't make any plans, Faraday makes them for her. Matters come to a head when he shows up at the house with a wedding dress, flowers, and a ring. Caroline cancels the engagement, making clear that she will sell the house and even emigrate to get away from Hundreds.

Faraday loses it, clumsily arguing with Caroline, trying to guilt her into staying, roping his friends into making his case to her. It is increasingly clear that Faraday is more afraid of losing Hundreds than he is of losing Caroline. He puts padlocks on the gates to the park; he has some reason, which I have forgotten, but the feeling is that he is trying to keep his hold on the house. Caroline, on the other hand, seems stronger and more purposeful then ever, as she boxes up possessions, sells what she can, and readies the house for sale.

One fateful night--I have forgotten whether it was the date Faraday had set for the wedding, or the day Caroline was going to leave Hundreds--Faraday is out late and falls asleep in his car out at Hundreds. He dreams of going into the house, passing like smoke through the locked gates. The next morning, Caroline is found dead at the foot of the stairs. Betty says that saw Caroline on the landing, and just before she fell, she said "You!" (I may be the only one who draws this connection, but I was struck by the similarity of Caroline's death with that of Amy Dudley, the inconvenient wife of Robert Dudley--the man widely believed to be Elizabeth I's lover. She was found dead at the foot of the stairs at the Dudley country home, and her death might have freed Robert to marry Elizabeth, but the mysterious manner of her death created a scandal that tainted her husband and left Elizabeth free to stay single.)

The book ends with Dr. Faraday more or less haunting the house, keeping hold of his keys, sweeping out rat dung, catching sight of himself in the reflections of the old glass.

Waters leaves the ghost story unresolved. Faraday missed most of the overtly supernatural events, and never believed they were real. As our first person narrator, our insight into those events is severely restricted by Faraday's rational insistence that they never happened. The specters or phantasms experienced by the Ayreses are very different: Rod's ghost moved small objects and left burn marks on the walls and furniture; Mrs. Ayre's ghost made noises and cut her. There is reason to believe that Caroline was killed by Faraday's jealous anger, projected out of his body and into Hundreds and causing her death. Her exclamation of "You!" could have been caused by recognizing Faraday, who may or may not have actually been present in the house.

Which has lead to a great deal of discussion on the internet about what "really" happened, and in at least one interview, Waters has admitted that she didn't really wrap up the ghost story. Which can be frustrating, but is less so if (as I do) one reads the ghost story as a metaphor for the class conflict that pervades the novel.

Faraday himself is an outcast--raised by education and training out of his own working class roots, he fails to fit into any other class. He resents that the gentry don't make him their doctor, and he feels invisible. He is ashamed of his lack of progress in his field, jealous of his partner's success, ambivalent in his feelings about the sacrifices his parents made for his education. The childhood desire to possess a piece of Hundreds lives on in the man--although never articulated, one can see that Faraday believes that he can gain social acceptance through his position at Hundreds. And that he naively believes that by marrying Caroline, he will magically restore Hundreds to the place it occupied back in 1919. But there is no longer an English Empire, so no more Empire Day celebrations. The best future for Faraday lies in accepting the invitation to practice in London--there he can escape the class limitations he experiences in the country. Caroline sees her future in the (relatively) classless societies of America and Canada, but Faraday doesn't want the future--he wants to go back to the past, but occupy a privileged position there.

Mrs. Ayres' death can be seen as the pull of the past on the present. She, like Faraday, preferred the past, embodied as her greater love for the dead Susan than she had for her living children. There is no future for those who prefer the past--Mrs. Ayres dies, and Faraday ends up trapped by it. I'm not certain I can explain Caroline's role in the extended metaphor, but as I think about this novel, I am reminded of Bertolucci's movie The Last Emperor. Born into unbelievable opulence and treated as a god, Pu Yi ends his life in modern China as a gardener, riding a bike and wearing plain cotton Mao jackets. Caroline might not have thrived in a classless society.

Some final thoughts: the family name is a pun on class consciousness: Ayres is pronounced as "airs" or even "heirs." By the end of the book, there are no Ayres left, no heirs to the old properties. I think the book would have been better named "A Little Stranger," as the book and Dr. Faraday each grow a little stranger with each passing episode.

Waters writes beautifully, and the ominous mood is masterfully set forth and sustained. I listened to this on audiobook, and Simon Vance does an outstanding job with the narration. The book might be a little slow for some, but the accumulation of details is what makes the mood so gripping. A worthwhile read, a credit-worthy listen, and an author I will come back to.

When Will There Be Good News, by Kate Atkinson

2010-02-11T09:05:00.005-06:00

I bought this book almost a year ago now, while on vacation in Palm Springs. It was on a baragain table for $5, and since I had been wanting to read it, it was too good to pass up. It is not, however, a book for reading while on vacation in Palm Springs. I read the first few pages, and put it into my suitcase for later.

Atkinson is a vivid writer, and within a very few pages, I was deeply into her world--a world that is fundamentally at odds with sunny desert vacation, I might add. A family--mother, two young girls, a baby in a stroller, are struggling home through hedgerowed lanes from a shopping trip. It is summer in rural Scotland, and grocery shopping requires a two mile walk from the house to the bus stop, a long bus ride to the village, which includes wrestling the baby and the stroller onto the bus, the several block hike to the grocery, and then the whole thing again in reverse.

Driving is not possible, because the father, Howard Mason, has driven off with the car to go back to London to be with his mistress. He had moved the family out to the country so that he could write his novels, but after six months of hobby farming (all disastrous--even the bees froze in their hives over the winter) and being cooped up with his young family, he had had enough and ran away from home. Which left his artist wife stuck in the country, where she had never wanted to be, struggling with raising three small children alone.

So that's where I stopped while on vacation, and thus I stopped before they met a man walking the other way who pulled out a knife and killed them all, except the middle child, a six year old named Joanna. Joanna who escaped into the abutting wheat field and was the sole survivor. Like I said: not vacation reading. I suppose I should have figured that out by the title.

The book then skips ahead thirty years, and in typical Atkinson fashion, we are thrown in medias res into the lives of new and different characters. A man, who has disguised himself as a "typical tourist" is lying in wait for recess at a Yorkshire school. In particular, he wants to see a very young boy who is only about three years old. Is this man a kidnapper? Pedophile? What does he want? The ominous mood builds up, and when the particular boy shows up, the unnamed man lures him close by offering a ball. We are told the man ponders whether he could grab the boy and escape in his rented car before anyone could stop him. What is going on? The boy gets close enough to receive the ball, and the man ruffles the boys hair. The boy leaps away and the man backs off--politely.

Only after we have watched the boy return to the safety of his school do we learn that the man is Jackson Brodie--the former cop who was the lynchpin of two previous Atkinson novels: Case Histories and One Good Turn. Brodie suspects that the boy is his son, although the boy's mother denies it. Brodie has pulled some hairs for the boy's head and plans to get a DNA analysis to confirm his paternity. This creepy subterfuge tells us a lot about Brodie--he has some good instincts, and he wants to be connected to the child he believes is his, but he goes about it in such a creepy way. Frankly, if I were is ex-girlfriend, I'd insist the child wasn't his too--there is just something so off-putting about Brodie's inability to live normally.

We then meet Reggie Chase and Dr. Hunter. It takes a while, in the good old Atkinson way, to piece together the picture of these people. Reggie is short for Regina, and is a sixteen year old girl--although it takes quite a few pages to even get her gender straight. She's rather a lost girl: no father in the picture, and her mother recently died while on holiday in Spain with a new boyfriend. Reggie has an older brother, who has gone bad in a thousand petty and not-so-petty ways. Reggie herself is smart and capable, and had won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. But she never fit in with the girls there, and she dropped out at the earliest opportunity. However, she values education, and has managed to arrange private tutoring with a former teacher from the school--Ms. McDonald, who no longer at the school because she is dying of a brain tumor.

The most normal part of Reggie's life is her job as "mother's helper" for Dr. Hunter. Dr. Hunter has a baby and Reggie comes in every day to take care of the baby until Dr. Hunter comes home from her medical practice. The three of them make a lovely family--the odd one out is Dr. Hunter's husband, Neil, who is an "entrepeneur," a word which here seems to mean "a shady operator."

Then we meet Louise, a detective in the Borders and Lothian police force--which finally makes it clear that we are in Edinburgh. Louise is married to a lovely man, a surgeon, and she is chafing at her newly affluent life. Louise is herself a cliche, but a well executed one--the cop who is already married to her job, unable to relax into civilian life, fierce and grimly determined to keep the world safe, and frustrated by the impossibility of it. Louise shows up at Dr. Hunter's house, and that is where the threads start to come together.

Dr. Hunter, it turns out, is Joanna Mason Hunter, the little girl survivor of the massacre thirty years ago, and Inspector Louise Monroe has come around to warn her that Andrew Decker--the man who murdered her family--has been released from prison and presumably loose in Edinbugh.

Jackson Brodie is also headed north--by mistake, as he meant to take the King's Cross train to London, not from London. His trip is stopped in dramatic fashion, as the train derails. The threads come together: the derailment happens mere yards from where Reggie is studying for her A levels at Ms. McDonald's house. Ms. McDonald herself is killed when the train hits her car that had stalled on the tracks. Reggie--having learned CPR and first aid from Dr. Hunter, in case she needed it for the baby--happens upon Jackson Brodie and saves his life. Brodie somehow ends up with Andrew Decker's driver's license and loses his own wallet, and Louise finds him in the hospital. Of course, the two of them had worked together in the past and should really be with each other, but have managed (in true cop fashion) to screw up their private lives as well.

Louise has two other cases on her plate--Alison Needler, whose ex-husband showed up at their daughter's seventh birthday party with a pistol and killed two women before being scared off. Alison has been moved to a safe house, but everyone expects David Needler to come back. She also has the little matter of Neal Hunter, Joanna Hunter's husband, who is under investigation for arson. She goes around to talk to him about it the morning after the train wreck, and he's particularly jumpy about his wife. She's not there, the baby's not there, Reggie isn't there. Dr. Hunter has gone missing.

Neal called Reggie early that morning, with a not--very-believable story that Dr. Hunter and the baby drove down to Yorkshire to care for a sick aunt and wouldn't need her for a few days. Reggie doesn't believe this--Dr. Hunter would have called herself! The whole thing is completely out of character. So she goes over to the Hunter home, offering to walk the dog, since Mr. Hunter is so busy. Mr. Hunter tells her to keep the dog for the duration--again, suspiciously jumpy. Reggie, bless her fiercely loyal heart, plays girl detective and finds a number of highly suspicious anomolies:

She left her cell phone behind--the one she calls "her lifeline."
She apparently left barefoot and without changing out of her work suit
She left without her purse, which contained her asthma inhaler, her driving glasses, and her Filofax
Her car is still in the garage
The dog found the baby's blanket crushed in the mud and apparently bloodied
She overheard a conversation between Neal and a thug threatening him that implied Dr. Hunter had been kidnapped.

Louise finds Reggie hard to believe, but Neal Hunter is the kind of guy who might murder his wife in order to get the insurance money to cover his "business interests," maybe. So she goes to check out the ailing aunt in Yorkshire, only to find the aunt has been dead for two weeks. Something is definitely going on.

This, as you can tell, is a lot of plot. There is a lot more as well, but what Atkinson does so marvellously well is tell this thriller story with a novelists touch. Reggie isn't really Nancy Drew--she's a girl with a troubled life, much of which we see vividly, trying to hold on to the parts that are sane. Atkinson reveals Reggie's life in a leisurely way, peeling back the layers and showing us her relationship with her brother, the tragedy of her mother's death, her relationship with her tutor, even substantial chunks of her studies--Latin translations, literature reading. Reggie is a great character--tough but not jaded, honest (mostly) and someone who has admirable inner strength and is also really kind and likable.

Jackson Brodie is also displayed as on his own life journey--we see his lonely life, his desperate longing for connection with his children, his sadness over the way his past relationships have failed. Even his being on the train that derails is a marvelously detailed set piece: the other passengers on the train, his slowly dawning realization that he's going north instead of south, the way his military training kicks in when the train carriage falls over. He's an ex-cop, at loose ends, oddly disconnected from his new marriage. Again, Atkinson has a light touch as she reveals his story, even making his near-death experience something that bears close reading.

Louise is a bit of a cliche, but Atkinson deftly limns her discomfort with a comfortable life. She feels not good enough for her new husband, and there is a lovely playful scene as she calls to switch homeowner's insurance. "Do you have any jewels, furs, or guns in the house?" And Louise finds herself momentarily daydreaming about a different life, one in which she wears jewels and furs while using guns to rob banks: a Bonnie and Clyde fantasy far removed from the staid domestic life she has married into. And, honestly, one closer to her real character than the life of French Toast and Mexican raspberries on Wedgewood china we see her living.

It is this deftness with character that is so striking in this novel. Brodie spends about twenty four hours in hospital after the train crash, yet Atkinson memorably depicts two nurses and three different doctors in the briefest of exchanges. Howard Mason, the bastard who left his family without a car in rural Scotland thirty years ago is fleshed out and dispatched in a devastating summary of his career with the concluding snarky comment that "all his books were out of print." Atkinson makes Joanna Hunter and Reggie Chase so well rounded and so believable--as well as so likeable--that when the novel ends, I was deeply satisfied by the resolution of their stories.

If there is a weakness, it's that Atkinson has attempted too much plot. After I closed the book, I found myself niggling at the loose ends and the glossed over holes in the story. So with the warning that SPOILERS LIE AHEAD, I will attempt to wrap up this book.

Joanna Hunter has, indeed, been kidnapped. Her dodgy husband has come to the attention of a Glaswegian mobster who wants his money, or all of Neal Hunter's businesses signed over, and is holding Joanna and the baby hostage to get it. Reggie guilts Brodie into leaving hospital to go find Joanna, and first they head to Yorkshire to check out the alleged sick aunt. There is a "humorous" mix up, when Brodie is arrested for being Andrew Decker, sorted out only because Louise and Marcus (her assistant) turn up and pull rank, dragging Brodie and Reggie back to Edinburgh. Again, however, Atkinson brilliantly uses the in-car cross-talk to flesh out the characters.

Back in Edinburgh, Brodie and Reggie take Joanna's car and tail the bad guys, following them to a remote farmhouse. The bad guys go in and come running out, yapping on the cell phone and rapidly leaving the scene. Joanna has managed to kill both the thugs guarding her and freed herself. Brodie torches the crime scene, then returns Joanna, Reggie and the baby to the Hunter house. There Joanna cleans up, confuses the police trying to make the kitchen a crime scene, and stonewalls Louise's questions about what happened. Why? Because she wants normalcy for her baby, so he will never be grist for the tabloids.

Neal is shown to be a complete putz, as it is apparent to everybody that he should have signed over all his businesses and then sued to get them back, rather than risking his family's lives for four days as he tried to come up with the money. He's also arrested for the arson and will not likely be allowed back into Joanna's life.

Meanwhile, David Needler shows up again, as predicted, but after one too many panic button calls, so Marcus goes over to check on the house and gets shot in the chest. Which sucks, but is kind of a throw-away plot point. Needler kills himself as well. Louise is pissed, because she wanted him to die slowly and painfully at her hand. Louise also decides to wait until Hogmanay to leave her husband, because his first wife died on Christmas Eve, so at least he won't have lost two wives on the same holiday. Wait, what?

Brodie finally gets back to London. He is still in love with Louise, but now he's closed the door on any possible relationship with her because of his torching of the farmhouse. He can't ever tell her what happened or what he did. He gets back to Heathrow in time to meet his wife's plane from the States, but she's not on it. He checks other airlines, other flights, but not only is she not there, there is no record of her. In fact, there is no record of her at her workplace, no confirmation of her anywhere. She has, however, cleaned out his bank account. That's right: It Was All A Dream, I Mean Scam. The whirlwind romance and marriage was a four month investment in a plan to take the million pounds he had inherited a few years back. Fortunately, the money from the sale of a house in France was delayed, and showed up after she had taken everything else, so at least poor Brodie was not destitute.

But his bad luck didn't end there. No, when he finally got back to the flat in Covent Garden, there was a dead man lying in the living room who had blown his brains out with a Russian gun. He also had Brodie's wallet and ID on him. The omnipresent Andrew Decker, apparently. Turns out that Joanna Hunter had visited Decker in prison, about a month before his release, and supposedly whatever she had said lead him to kill himself. After being in a train crash where he switched identities with Brodie? Why? This part made no sense to me at all.

Reggie still has a terrible home life--during the course of the novel, her brother Billy has gotten himself in deep trouble with some very dangerous thugs, told them his name was "Reggie" and gave him the real Reggie's home address. So in addition to having her mother die, her tutor die, her tutor's dog die, identifying her tutor's body in the hospital and arranging for her funeral, walking over dead bodies at the train crash site, saving Jackson Brodie's life, finding and rescuing Dr. Hunter and the baby--she goes home to find the flat trashed and urine and feces spread around, she is attacked by the thugs who did it, she goes back another day to find they have set fire to the flat, and they attack her again, and she finds the heroin her brother stole and then stashed at Ms. McDonald's house. And after all of this, she has the presence of mind to place the kilo of heroin inside Ms. McDonald's casket for cremation, thus eliminating all traces of it. However, it looks like she might move in with Dr. Hunter as a permanent mother's helper.

Like I said, that is a lot of plot, and as superb a writer as she is, Atkinson can't really make all of it credible in a mere 400 pages. Why did Dr. Hunter go visit Decker in prison, and what did she say to him that made him kill himself? And why didn't he do it before he swapped identities with Brodie? And isn't it just a little too much of a coincidence that it was Brodie's wallet he stole--of all the possible people he might have met between his release and his death? What was the point of the identity theft? And why did we have to have the Needler subplot anyway? It was tangential at best, and a bit overly melodramatic at worst, the way it resulted in the death of Marcus. And what was the point of the "humorous" scenes of Brodie trying to rent a car with only Decker's driver's license, and then getting arrested in Yorkshire? Did the terminal brain cancer tutor really have to be the cause of the train accident that brought Reggie and Brodie together? And did her dog really have to die in his sleep that night? And did Reggie really have to have so many Major Plot Events in her story? Did Brodie really have to also be the victim of a marriage scam at the same time he was the victim of Decker's identity theft? How many crimes can happen to how many people simultaneously before it's not possible to suspend disbelief?

It's this large, baggy plot that undermines the book. To some degree, I am willing to accept outlandish coincidences, but at some point one has to draw the line. And I am afraid that Atkinson sailed past this line for me, although admittedly not until after I had finished the book--she is that good of a writer.

Oh, and remember that boy that Brodie was so creepily stalking at the beginning of the novel? By the end, he's apparently decided not to do that DNA analysis after all. But instead, we find out that a 19 year old Brodie is the volunteer who found the six year old Joanna Mason in the wheat field.

Oh yeah. Just a few too many coincidences. Even Charles Dickens would agree, and he never met an unlikely coincidence he didn't find a way to use. I still enjoyed this book; the writing and characterization is outstanding. Just too many plots.

Divine Misdemeanors, by Laurell K. Hamilton

2010-01-27T09:27:00.004-06:00

Meredith Gentry is back in LA working as a private detective, living with an unspecified number of exiles from the Unseelie court, and pregnant with twins. Someone is killing demi-fey--the small winged creatures humans think of when they think of "fairies"--and arranging the corpses to copy children's book illustrations.

Much of this book is perfunctory--less a novel and more a short story padded out with recaps of previous books in the series and re-introductions of the many different characters. Some new supernatural characters are introduced, including a "Jack-in-Irons" named Uther. A couple of characters gain new powers from Meredith, and a new sithen is produced magically, disguised as an apartment building, although that development happens entirely off-stage.

The only development of interest to the larger arc of the novels is that Meredith faces off against Barinthus, a former sea god who is regaining some of his former strength by living next to the ocean, and who wants to return to Faerie to rule with Meredith through power and fear. Meredith refuses and makes clear that he has obligations to contribute to the upkeep of the LA exiles. By the end of the book, Barinthus has eaten some of the humble pie he's been served.

As a measure of how thinly plotted this book is, there are three murder scenes, but no suspects until after the third one, and the novel is "solved" by the voluntary appearance of someone who rats on an acquaintance. So, basically, no mystery solving, no complexity to the crime. There are two perps, one of whom literally appears only at the end of the book after the informant has passed on what he knows. Meredith and her people go confront the bad guys, who are quickly killed after a short confrontation. The End.

Not worth the purchase price--if you have to read everything by Hamilton, get this from the library, read it at the bookstore, or wait until the inevitable clearance sale lowers the price on this one to under five bucks. Safe to skip--all the developments will be recapped in future novels. Read it with very low expectations to avoid inevitable disappontment. Less original than the widely reviled Micah.

Fans can hope that Hamilton is working on something meatier and that this is a contractual obligation; ex-fans can feel justified in their opinion that Hamilton has run out of ideas.