A Visit From The Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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

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

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.