High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
Penguin Putnam Trade Paperback, 323 pages
No posts recently. Not because I've been too busy, but the opposite: my significant other of nearly nine years left me on May 16. And I've been a bit distracted to really concentrate.
And boy, High Fidelity was exactly what I needed. Not least because I loved the movie when it came out in 2000... and the former SO hated it. But also because it speaks of a certain species of male, entering early middle age, stuck doing a job he doesn't really like, moving on inertia more than anything else, who has just been dumped by the love of his life.
The main character is Rob Fleming, played by John Cusack in the movie. He owns a tiny specialty record shop in London (deftly moved to Chicago for the film) and has encyclopedic knowledge of pop music. He works with two other pop-music know-it-alls, Dick and Barry, and their "top five" lists are some of the funniest bits of the book.
Rob's girlfriend Laura leaves him in the very first moments of the book, and the text is largely concerned with Rob's reaction to the breakup. He begins going through his "top five" breakups, beginning with some girl he made out with behind the bleachers when he was fourteen, and moving forward to the present day. Although he claims that Laura's breakup with him wouldn't even crack the top five, it soon becomes clear that he cares for Laura, and that the breakup is much more painful than he lets on.
Eventually Rob will meet up with the five girls on the top-five breakup list, asking each in turn what it was about him that messed up their relationships (to often hilarious results, as Rob sees these women much more clearly now that he's an adult), restart his disk jockey career, and have a one-night stand with an American country singer that is so note-perfect in the way it's executed that it's a minor masterpiece in and of itself.
I could go on and on talking about the things I enjoyed about this book, but let me leave it to just one more thing: while in the movie the ending feels a bit contrived, a bit outside of how these characters would normally behave, in the book Laura's character gets a little bit more space as a fleshed-out character, and her motivations for doing what she does become much more clear. At the end of the book, Rob and Laura are having problems with their relationship, but they're each working towards the other, and the reader is left with hope that these two crazy kids can work it out after all.
For completeness' sake, here is a review I wrote of the movie back when it came out in April of 2000.
Showing posts with label booklog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label booklog. Show all posts
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Booklog, A Condederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Grove Press Trade Paperback, 394 pages
Stick the landing.
That's the advice that I got from this novel: stick the landing. I was reading through it, fully prepared to give it a merely so-so review, categorizing it in my mind as "one damn thing after another," when suddenly I realized while reading the last forty pages or so just how perfect the ending was shaping up to be, and how well it tied the entire rest of this messy, disorganized novel into a neat little bow. It made me understand that the book was written exactly as it needed to be -- there's little or no wasted verbiage here, despite appearances -- and that the book deserves its accolades.
For those unfamiliar with the context of the book, John Kennedy Toole wrote this novel in the early sixties and later killed himself. His mother discovered the manuscript in her son's personal items after he died, read it, and recognized it as a great book. She spent years pestering people in positions to publish the book to give it a read-through, and when the book was finally published, it won a Pulitzer Prize.
The book's protagonist is Ignatius J. Reilly (although the myriad characters surrounding him are given about as many pages as he is), a fat, oblivious thirtysomething who lives with his mother in New Orleans. He has a master's degree in some unstated subject (probably classical studies, given his appreciation for Boethus), and spends all of his time camped out in his room, writing pages upon pages of purple prose into notebooks, the earliest of which he can scarcely even remember the contents of. He also plays at the local arcade, and goes to the movies almost daily -- not because he likes the films, but to expose himself to the further depradations of modern society. See, Ignatius detests modernism, feeling that society reached its peak sometime during the Middle Ages, although he does seem to appreciate the conveniences of modern society a great deal.
Many have described Ignatius as depressed, and I'm not entirely sure I disagree, but to me his behavior seems more closely connected with some form of high-functioning austism. He is enormously intelligent, but completely and utterly self-centered, berating all of those in his life for slights real and imagined, and basically being a giant boor. He refuses to even go get a job until his mother, needing a thousand and fifty dollars to pay damages she owes after getting in a car accident, forces him to go pound the pavement. The majority of the novel details Ignatius's work habits as a filing clerk at a clothing factory and, later, a hot dog vendor.
As mentioned above, there is also a large supporting cast of various characters, all of them deftly drawn "colorful characters," but rarely dipping into caricature. Most affecting (and most central to the plot, as it turns out towards the end) is a formerly-vagrant black man who takes a sub-minimum-wage job sweeping floors at the local strip club -- he is often the voice of reason and wisdom in the book, but never steps near stereotype; he too has a wit and flash all his own, and his scenes are among the most engaging.
This book is described as a comedy, and perhaps the biggest flaw I found with the book is that I did not find it particularly funny. I am clearly in the minority here, but I found the overall sadness of the Ignatius character to be more prominent in his interactions, and while some of the situations he gets into are absurd or surreal, his actions are so grounded in his particular psychology that I couldn't find it in my heart to laugh at the poor guy.
Overall this turned out to be a very good book. I wish I could have enjoyed the humor a bit more, but that's probably a failing of mine, not the book. There's a lot here that I haven't even touched on -- this book is enormously rich in terms of local character and flavor, and most scenes are short, leading to a more engaging moment if you get tired of the one you're on. Keep in mind that there is a meaning to all this, and that there is a subtly-buried plot, and you'll do fine with the book.
It's a shame Toole killed himself. This book is so good that he could have had a long life of writing strangely tragicomic novels; he could have been a common man's Thomas Pynchon, or Phillip Roth with a Cajun twist. As the introduction notes, one of the real tragedies of the book is all the other books we were denied by the suicide of the author.
John Kennedy Toole
Grove Press Trade Paperback, 394 pages
Stick the landing.
That's the advice that I got from this novel: stick the landing. I was reading through it, fully prepared to give it a merely so-so review, categorizing it in my mind as "one damn thing after another," when suddenly I realized while reading the last forty pages or so just how perfect the ending was shaping up to be, and how well it tied the entire rest of this messy, disorganized novel into a neat little bow. It made me understand that the book was written exactly as it needed to be -- there's little or no wasted verbiage here, despite appearances -- and that the book deserves its accolades.
For those unfamiliar with the context of the book, John Kennedy Toole wrote this novel in the early sixties and later killed himself. His mother discovered the manuscript in her son's personal items after he died, read it, and recognized it as a great book. She spent years pestering people in positions to publish the book to give it a read-through, and when the book was finally published, it won a Pulitzer Prize.
The book's protagonist is Ignatius J. Reilly (although the myriad characters surrounding him are given about as many pages as he is), a fat, oblivious thirtysomething who lives with his mother in New Orleans. He has a master's degree in some unstated subject (probably classical studies, given his appreciation for Boethus), and spends all of his time camped out in his room, writing pages upon pages of purple prose into notebooks, the earliest of which he can scarcely even remember the contents of. He also plays at the local arcade, and goes to the movies almost daily -- not because he likes the films, but to expose himself to the further depradations of modern society. See, Ignatius detests modernism, feeling that society reached its peak sometime during the Middle Ages, although he does seem to appreciate the conveniences of modern society a great deal.
Many have described Ignatius as depressed, and I'm not entirely sure I disagree, but to me his behavior seems more closely connected with some form of high-functioning austism. He is enormously intelligent, but completely and utterly self-centered, berating all of those in his life for slights real and imagined, and basically being a giant boor. He refuses to even go get a job until his mother, needing a thousand and fifty dollars to pay damages she owes after getting in a car accident, forces him to go pound the pavement. The majority of the novel details Ignatius's work habits as a filing clerk at a clothing factory and, later, a hot dog vendor.
As mentioned above, there is also a large supporting cast of various characters, all of them deftly drawn "colorful characters," but rarely dipping into caricature. Most affecting (and most central to the plot, as it turns out towards the end) is a formerly-vagrant black man who takes a sub-minimum-wage job sweeping floors at the local strip club -- he is often the voice of reason and wisdom in the book, but never steps near stereotype; he too has a wit and flash all his own, and his scenes are among the most engaging.
This book is described as a comedy, and perhaps the biggest flaw I found with the book is that I did not find it particularly funny. I am clearly in the minority here, but I found the overall sadness of the Ignatius character to be more prominent in his interactions, and while some of the situations he gets into are absurd or surreal, his actions are so grounded in his particular psychology that I couldn't find it in my heart to laugh at the poor guy.
Overall this turned out to be a very good book. I wish I could have enjoyed the humor a bit more, but that's probably a failing of mine, not the book. There's a lot here that I haven't even touched on -- this book is enormously rich in terms of local character and flavor, and most scenes are short, leading to a more engaging moment if you get tired of the one you're on. Keep in mind that there is a meaning to all this, and that there is a subtly-buried plot, and you'll do fine with the book.
It's a shame Toole killed himself. This book is so good that he could have had a long life of writing strangely tragicomic novels; he could have been a common man's Thomas Pynchon, or Phillip Roth with a Cajun twist. As the introduction notes, one of the real tragedies of the book is all the other books we were denied by the suicide of the author.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Booklog, Rant, An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, Chuck Palahniuk
Rant, An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday Hardcover, 336 pages
Well, you can't blame me for dallying. This novel was only released yesterday.
I'm in a strange place with this novel. It's better than I expected from his last work, Haunted, which I felt would have worked much better as a book of short stories than as a novel, and good enough that I recommend it without many reservations, but it also has a number of structural and thematic issues that would probably be pertinent to mention in this review.
But I can't really discuss it. Palahniuk has written a novel that is elegantly constructed for I think the first time in his career, and one of the primary joys of reading it is to experience without spoilers the many red herrings and changes in meaning that the book undergoes as the plot unfolds. Suffice to say that this really could have been three or four books, in the hands of a lesser author, but Palahniuk integrates it all in a way that makes it wholly original, even unique.
Hell, it even has some thematic similarities to Against the Day, or at least a small portion of it.
The book is structured as an oral history of Buster "Rant" Casey, who we learn in the opening pages is a strange sort of celebrity who spread some horrible disease to "half the country" and is the leader of some weird cult. As the book continues, much if not all of that is brought into question by the various perspectives of the persons "interviewed" for the book, and by the end much of what we thought we knew about this character and the world in which he lives are known to be wrong. Maybe.
The oral history aspect feels like an affectation at first, a narrative technique that fails largely because Paluhniak's characters are similar enough to one another to make their voices indistinct. But gradually I realized that Paluhniak is using the technique to give us the "good parts" version of this novel, in which the narrative flow can move from scene to scene without showing a lot of the more dull interconnective tissue. This gives the book a velocity that is hard to resist -- I read the whole thing in about three sittings over the course of twenty-four hours or so, and it didn't feel like a forced read at all.
Palahniuk's fans are going to eat this up. There's a lot here that his devotees will enjoy, and there's enough here that is new to his fiction that he might even get some new readers, although it's really only in the last hundred pages or so that the real meaning of it all becomes clear. The gore factor is turned way down from Haunted, although there's a bit towards the end, and the worldbuilding done in the more speculative-fiction portions of the novel is pretty top-notch (although even that's probably saying too much).
If it seems that I'm discussing this novel without telling anything about it, that's because I am -- if anything that I've said above has interested you, read nothing else about this book (even the dust jacket) and start reading. I haven't always considered myself a huge fan of Palahniuk's writing, and there are some issues I have with this book, but overall this is a hugely confident and largely successful book, a definite step forward for the author, and while I don't plan to own this book immediately, I'll be thinking about it for a while.
Give it a shot. It's a good read.
Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday Hardcover, 336 pages
Well, you can't blame me for dallying. This novel was only released yesterday.
I'm in a strange place with this novel. It's better than I expected from his last work, Haunted, which I felt would have worked much better as a book of short stories than as a novel, and good enough that I recommend it without many reservations, but it also has a number of structural and thematic issues that would probably be pertinent to mention in this review.
But I can't really discuss it. Palahniuk has written a novel that is elegantly constructed for I think the first time in his career, and one of the primary joys of reading it is to experience without spoilers the many red herrings and changes in meaning that the book undergoes as the plot unfolds. Suffice to say that this really could have been three or four books, in the hands of a lesser author, but Palahniuk integrates it all in a way that makes it wholly original, even unique.
Hell, it even has some thematic similarities to Against the Day, or at least a small portion of it.
The book is structured as an oral history of Buster "Rant" Casey, who we learn in the opening pages is a strange sort of celebrity who spread some horrible disease to "half the country" and is the leader of some weird cult. As the book continues, much if not all of that is brought into question by the various perspectives of the persons "interviewed" for the book, and by the end much of what we thought we knew about this character and the world in which he lives are known to be wrong. Maybe.
The oral history aspect feels like an affectation at first, a narrative technique that fails largely because Paluhniak's characters are similar enough to one another to make their voices indistinct. But gradually I realized that Paluhniak is using the technique to give us the "good parts" version of this novel, in which the narrative flow can move from scene to scene without showing a lot of the more dull interconnective tissue. This gives the book a velocity that is hard to resist -- I read the whole thing in about three sittings over the course of twenty-four hours or so, and it didn't feel like a forced read at all.
Palahniuk's fans are going to eat this up. There's a lot here that his devotees will enjoy, and there's enough here that is new to his fiction that he might even get some new readers, although it's really only in the last hundred pages or so that the real meaning of it all becomes clear. The gore factor is turned way down from Haunted, although there's a bit towards the end, and the worldbuilding done in the more speculative-fiction portions of the novel is pretty top-notch (although even that's probably saying too much).
If it seems that I'm discussing this novel without telling anything about it, that's because I am -- if anything that I've said above has interested you, read nothing else about this book (even the dust jacket) and start reading. I haven't always considered myself a huge fan of Palahniuk's writing, and there are some issues I have with this book, but overall this is a hugely confident and largely successful book, a definite step forward for the author, and while I don't plan to own this book immediately, I'll be thinking about it for a while.
Give it a shot. It's a good read.
Booklog, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
Vintage Trade Paperback, 343 pages
It's funny: this book took me about a week to read, has enormous strengths with only a few minor weaknesses, nearly singlehandedly invented the true crime drama, has at least tenuous connections to To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet... I just don't have a lot to say about it.
The story: Truman Capote saw an item in the news about the senseless slaying of a family of four in Kansas, was intrigued by it, and spent something like seven years putting together a definitive narrative about the events that transpired. He worked with Harper Lee to interview hundreds of people in the community and who knew the killers, and integrated the thousands of pages of notes into a compelling and even touching narrative that captured the lives of the two killers as well as the lives of those who were killed. It contains moments of great brutality and moments of great tenderness. And Capote may well have fallen in love with one of the killers along the way. (I have not yet seen Capote, but the writing of this book is the narrative focus of that Oscar-winning film.)
And yet... the whole thing is so straightforward and yet intimately interconnected that there's just not a lot of commentary I can give, without basically reproducing the whole book.
The book starts slow. It spends about eighty pages introducing two groups of people: the Clutter family, the four individuals who would be killed, and the two low-rent ex-cons (Perry Smith and Richard Hickock) who would do the killing. It introduces the reader into the rhythms of the lives of the principals, getting a feel for exactly what transpired that day, the ends Part One of the book without actually "showing" the crime. We pick up in Part Two with the discovery of the bodies, and the two criminals trying to find a place to hole up after committing the crimes.
The community of Holcomb, KS (where the murders took place) is justifiably shocked by the brutality of the slayings, and since most people in-town believe the crime to have been committed by one of their own, a large amount of distrust forms among the local population. The actual killers, several hundred miles away by the time the bodies are discovered, bounce around from town to town kiting checks and hoping to find decent work.
They are eventually caught by a mechanism that is so out-of-the-way that I wouldn't dare spoil the surprise for those who haven't read it, and the crime is finally described by one of the men. Seeking what they believed to be tens of thousands of dollars, the murder of four innocent people nets the two men somewhere between forty and fifty dollars, including a silver dollar stolen from a young girl's changepurse.
Brought back to Holcomb for trial, they are given a mostly-fair but quick trial, sent to Death Row, and, eventually, hung. The book ends less than two pages after Smith's hanging, on a note of loss as the primary detective on the case views the Clutter farm.
Yet... there's so much more than this simple telling would indicate. In the hands of a skilled narrative artist like Capote, the people involved are fully human, full of desires and honesty and integrity and foibles, and if no one is quite fully evil, no one is quite angelic. The killers are portrayed as hugely flawed and perhaps mentally ill, but with dignity of their own, and while the book never excuses their crime, it makes the reader sympathetic towards their own plight.
Critics have speculated that Capote took many liberties with the circumstances of the crime in the past forty years. How the author could have had the kind of access needed to get the kinds of details he has on display here is bewildering. I have little doubt that at least some portions of this book were simply invented, or at least massaged into place by the incredibly talented author.
Reading this back-to-back with The Ski Mask Way just reiterated how insipid the latter book really is: while the main characters in 50 Cent's book are barely even two-dimensional, Capote's "characters" shine with all the complexity of real life. And while the ending of Ski Mask comes from nowhere, and the brutality of the crime is senseless and unnecessary, In Cold Blood makes a similar crime completely understandable, even necessary, for the two young men.
In the end, Capote's work is a masterwork, but a strangely cold one that leaves me not wishing for a reread anytime soon. Fans of true-crime novels will find one of the best ever written here, and it's a perfect example of how to use real events to create narrative tension, but it's also strangely disposable: once it's done, it's done.
Truman Capote
Vintage Trade Paperback, 343 pages
It's funny: this book took me about a week to read, has enormous strengths with only a few minor weaknesses, nearly singlehandedly invented the true crime drama, has at least tenuous connections to To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet... I just don't have a lot to say about it.
The story: Truman Capote saw an item in the news about the senseless slaying of a family of four in Kansas, was intrigued by it, and spent something like seven years putting together a definitive narrative about the events that transpired. He worked with Harper Lee to interview hundreds of people in the community and who knew the killers, and integrated the thousands of pages of notes into a compelling and even touching narrative that captured the lives of the two killers as well as the lives of those who were killed. It contains moments of great brutality and moments of great tenderness. And Capote may well have fallen in love with one of the killers along the way. (I have not yet seen Capote, but the writing of this book is the narrative focus of that Oscar-winning film.)
And yet... the whole thing is so straightforward and yet intimately interconnected that there's just not a lot of commentary I can give, without basically reproducing the whole book.
The book starts slow. It spends about eighty pages introducing two groups of people: the Clutter family, the four individuals who would be killed, and the two low-rent ex-cons (Perry Smith and Richard Hickock) who would do the killing. It introduces the reader into the rhythms of the lives of the principals, getting a feel for exactly what transpired that day, the ends Part One of the book without actually "showing" the crime. We pick up in Part Two with the discovery of the bodies, and the two criminals trying to find a place to hole up after committing the crimes.
The community of Holcomb, KS (where the murders took place) is justifiably shocked by the brutality of the slayings, and since most people in-town believe the crime to have been committed by one of their own, a large amount of distrust forms among the local population. The actual killers, several hundred miles away by the time the bodies are discovered, bounce around from town to town kiting checks and hoping to find decent work.
They are eventually caught by a mechanism that is so out-of-the-way that I wouldn't dare spoil the surprise for those who haven't read it, and the crime is finally described by one of the men. Seeking what they believed to be tens of thousands of dollars, the murder of four innocent people nets the two men somewhere between forty and fifty dollars, including a silver dollar stolen from a young girl's changepurse.
Brought back to Holcomb for trial, they are given a mostly-fair but quick trial, sent to Death Row, and, eventually, hung. The book ends less than two pages after Smith's hanging, on a note of loss as the primary detective on the case views the Clutter farm.
Yet... there's so much more than this simple telling would indicate. In the hands of a skilled narrative artist like Capote, the people involved are fully human, full of desires and honesty and integrity and foibles, and if no one is quite fully evil, no one is quite angelic. The killers are portrayed as hugely flawed and perhaps mentally ill, but with dignity of their own, and while the book never excuses their crime, it makes the reader sympathetic towards their own plight.
Critics have speculated that Capote took many liberties with the circumstances of the crime in the past forty years. How the author could have had the kind of access needed to get the kinds of details he has on display here is bewildering. I have little doubt that at least some portions of this book were simply invented, or at least massaged into place by the incredibly talented author.
Reading this back-to-back with The Ski Mask Way just reiterated how insipid the latter book really is: while the main characters in 50 Cent's book are barely even two-dimensional, Capote's "characters" shine with all the complexity of real life. And while the ending of Ski Mask comes from nowhere, and the brutality of the crime is senseless and unnecessary, In Cold Blood makes a similar crime completely understandable, even necessary, for the two young men.
In the end, Capote's work is a masterwork, but a strangely cold one that leaves me not wishing for a reread anytime soon. Fans of true-crime novels will find one of the best ever written here, and it's a perfect example of how to use real events to create narrative tension, but it's also strangely disposable: once it's done, it's done.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Booklog, The Ski Mask Way, 50 Cent and k. Elliott
The Ski Mask Way
50 Cent and k. Elliott
Pocket Books Trade Paperback, 213 pages
You heard me right. Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, is a published author. Or at least a co-author, with k. Elliot (an author obscure enough not to have a Wikipedia page, although he or she has published at least one or two other books, according to Amazon) he has written and published The Ski Mask Way, and in a lot of ways it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
The plot hinges on Seven, a NYC native who has been transplanted to Charlotte afte NC after serving time for drug dealing, and who runs with Butter, a lowlife thug known more for his brutality than his smarts. The book opens with the two of them sitting in an Impala listening to hip-hop (the artists are all identified in the book, although not being a fan of the music I can't really comment on it), smoking weed, and talking about movies and life. By the end of the first half-dozen pages, they're planning robberies, and by the end of the first chapter they've made some "paper", in the book's lingo.
As the book continues, we meet Seven's "baby-mama", an ex-prison guard named Adrian who lost her job because of her relationship with the then-incarcerated Seven, and their three-year-old son Tracey. Tracey has an unspecified disease that makes it impossible for him to walk, and much of what follows will happen because Seven needs to have the money for his son's operation that will allow him to walk and be rehabilitated.
That's not to say that Seven is a family man. He has a hot girlfriend names Elise who helps to set up victims for his robberies, and who eventually leads him to Reno, a big-time gangster in the relatively small town. Seven's original plan is to get Elise to seduce Reno into giving away the location of his stash of drugs and money, then to break in and rob the more-powerful man. But Reno is no fool, and sees right through the trick, gaining Elise as his girlfriend in the process.
If this all seems a bit strung-together, that's because it is. This all takes place within the first forty or fifty pages, and I've barely given it less description than the book itself -- there is no metaphor or real description to speak of here, but simple dialogue that spells out direct motives for the character's actions, and a long series of sketchily-described locales.
By the end of the book, people die (although not always who you expect) and a whole lot of money changes hands. The characters remain barely two-dimensional stick figures that live violent lives absolutely free of any police intervention (except one very short scene involving mall security) and who seem to have no real inner lives to speak of. Even Seven, the protagonist of the piece, fighting to make enough money so that his son can learn to walk, never seems to have any real depth of character, and a short scene in which he tears up over the life he has to live in order to give his son a new lease on life is perfunctory at best.
The book ends with snippets of two other 50 Cent-authored pieces, both of which seem better than this one, so it may be the Elliott simply isn't a very good coauthor. This book is clearly meant to be a sort of modern-day analogue to the dime novels of the "pulp fiction" era, and in a lot of ways I think it fills the same role. While the writing doesn't stand up to, say, Raymond Chandler's, I'll bet there were dozens if not hundreds of hack writers banging out crime fiction in 1940 that would've read exactly like this, if one switched out the Italian crime bosses for African-American drug dealers, and inserted the word "nigga" approximately twice per page.
It's easy to look at this sort of thing as the collapse of Western civilization, but while there's absolutely no reason to ever buy this book for its literary merits, it does sort of make sense as a dumb sort of thrilling crime fiction. I can't comment on the "reality" of the situations it describes, but there's really no insight here that can't be gotten in a dozen generic gangsta movies or rap videos, and the plot is so thin that I've read cheap erotica with more depth and emotional heft.
Oh, and there's this bit from page 88:
That's right, Fifty name-checks himself in his own book. Raymond Chandler eat your heart out.
50 Cent and k. Elliott
Pocket Books Trade Paperback, 213 pages
You heard me right. Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, is a published author. Or at least a co-author, with k. Elliot (an author obscure enough not to have a Wikipedia page, although he or she has published at least one or two other books, according to Amazon) he has written and published The Ski Mask Way, and in a lot of ways it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
The plot hinges on Seven, a NYC native who has been transplanted to Charlotte afte NC after serving time for drug dealing, and who runs with Butter, a lowlife thug known more for his brutality than his smarts. The book opens with the two of them sitting in an Impala listening to hip-hop (the artists are all identified in the book, although not being a fan of the music I can't really comment on it), smoking weed, and talking about movies and life. By the end of the first half-dozen pages, they're planning robberies, and by the end of the first chapter they've made some "paper", in the book's lingo.
As the book continues, we meet Seven's "baby-mama", an ex-prison guard named Adrian who lost her job because of her relationship with the then-incarcerated Seven, and their three-year-old son Tracey. Tracey has an unspecified disease that makes it impossible for him to walk, and much of what follows will happen because Seven needs to have the money for his son's operation that will allow him to walk and be rehabilitated.
That's not to say that Seven is a family man. He has a hot girlfriend names Elise who helps to set up victims for his robberies, and who eventually leads him to Reno, a big-time gangster in the relatively small town. Seven's original plan is to get Elise to seduce Reno into giving away the location of his stash of drugs and money, then to break in and rob the more-powerful man. But Reno is no fool, and sees right through the trick, gaining Elise as his girlfriend in the process.
If this all seems a bit strung-together, that's because it is. This all takes place within the first forty or fifty pages, and I've barely given it less description than the book itself -- there is no metaphor or real description to speak of here, but simple dialogue that spells out direct motives for the character's actions, and a long series of sketchily-described locales.
By the end of the book, people die (although not always who you expect) and a whole lot of money changes hands. The characters remain barely two-dimensional stick figures that live violent lives absolutely free of any police intervention (except one very short scene involving mall security) and who seem to have no real inner lives to speak of. Even Seven, the protagonist of the piece, fighting to make enough money so that his son can learn to walk, never seems to have any real depth of character, and a short scene in which he tears up over the life he has to live in order to give his son a new lease on life is perfunctory at best.
The book ends with snippets of two other 50 Cent-authored pieces, both of which seem better than this one, so it may be the Elliott simply isn't a very good coauthor. This book is clearly meant to be a sort of modern-day analogue to the dime novels of the "pulp fiction" era, and in a lot of ways I think it fills the same role. While the writing doesn't stand up to, say, Raymond Chandler's, I'll bet there were dozens if not hundreds of hack writers banging out crime fiction in 1940 that would've read exactly like this, if one switched out the Italian crime bosses for African-American drug dealers, and inserted the word "nigga" approximately twice per page.
It's easy to look at this sort of thing as the collapse of Western civilization, but while there's absolutely no reason to ever buy this book for its literary merits, it does sort of make sense as a dumb sort of thrilling crime fiction. I can't comment on the "reality" of the situations it describes, but there's really no insight here that can't be gotten in a dozen generic gangsta movies or rap videos, and the plot is so thin that I've read cheap erotica with more depth and emotional heft.
Oh, and there's this bit from page 88:
Antonio sat in the front, Butter and Seven sat in the back. Squeeze put in a G-Unit mix tape and pulled off in a hurry as they bobbed their heads to the latest Lloyd Banks song. "Yo, that nigga Banks is nice. I like his delivery," Squeeze said.
"Yeah, but I think Tony Yayo is the nicest," Antonio said.
"Hell, that nigga Fifty is the nicest to me. I mean, this nigga is getting his marbles. They can hate if they want, but he has an empire -- clothes, music, video games, Vitamin Water..." Seven said.
That's right, Fifty name-checks himself in his own book. Raymond Chandler eat your heart out.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Booklog, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Harper Perennial Modern Classics Trade Paperback, 323 pages
A few days ago, I wrote a booklog review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which I basically said that it was a fairly simple "good" book, with surface-level allusions that would make it easy to teach to teenagers. I didn't mention it at the time, but I was mentally connecting McCarthy's book to To Kill a Mockinbird, as my memory of the book (and the movie of the same name) was that of a basically simple, straightforward pair of stories that connected only in the most spurious ways.
Well, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. Reapproaching the novel as an adult, I was amazed at the overall quality of the writing, at how structured and (at times) wickedly satirical Lee's voice in the novel is. Teaching it to every ninth grader in America is actually a disservice to the book -- 14 year olds just really don't understand this book, and the movie (good as it is) only aids the confusion.
In case you're one of the half-dozen people in North America who's never read it, let me give you a synopsis. Jean Louise Finch (nicknamed Scout) narrates the story of how her older brother Jem broke his arm when they were both small children in small-town southern Alabama around 1932. In order to tell the story, she starts by telling about Boo Radley, the adult man who lives with his mother and father next door and who hasn't been seen in about twenty years, and about her lawyer father Atticus Finch's unsuccessful defense of an African-American man named Tom Robinson, who is on trial for his life after being accused of raping a poor white girl. The novel is basically disjointed, spending about half of its time on the idyllic childhood of Scout, her brother, and their friend Dill who visits during the summers, and the other half on coutroom theatrics involving a racist jury putting an innocent black man to death, despite the clear moral and legal voice of Atticus.
Except that the version I gave above is the way people remember the story later on. At least, that's basically the way I remember it, and it's basically the way the film version goes. But in reality, Lee's achievement is much deeper than a simple morality play set in rural Alabama -- her fictional Maycomb county is an absolute delight, filled with saints and sinners (who are not always on the side of the fence we think they're on, and who sometimes don't seem to know there's a fence at all) going about elaborately controlled social lives and relating to one another in a variety of subtly interconnected ways.
Who remembers years after their reading that there's a Hitler reference late in the novel? Or that Scout's second-grade teacher is almost assuredly Jewish, and has a similar prejudice against "Negroes" that the Protestant ladies surrounding her do? Or that Scout's Aunt Alexandria, Atticus's sister, is such an effective tool of what in a later era would be called patriarchy, determined to make a "lady" out of the tomboyish Scout?
Who at fourteen would realize how special Atticus's childrearing methods really are? His small children call him by his first name, he is generally opposed to violence but buys them air-rifles anyway, never talks down to his children and even taught Scout to read the newspaper so early that she considers it as natural as breathing. Even by the hopefully more-enlightened standards of the early twenty-first century, Atticus's parenting comes across as revolutionary and progessive in all the right ways, with little of the baggage of his times -- how radical must it have seemed in 1960, when the book was published, or in the 1930s, when Lee herself was being raised? (Atticus is based on Lee's own father, who was a lawyer who tried a similar case during her childhood.)
Much is made of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a "nonfiction novel" which took scandalous events and transformed them through the devices of fiction into great drama. Since Capote was a dear friend of Lee's, and in fact was the inspiration for the character of Dill, it's suggested by many that Capote helped to shape the not-quite-fictional nature of Mockingbird, but given the adroitness of Lee's voice here, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't the other way around. Lee is always in clear command of her narrative voice, and while the meaning of certain sequences may not always be clear on a first reading, the overall structure is impeccable -- every word and every moment has its place in the scheme of the novel.
In short, this is a masterpiece. It's odd to think of one of the most popular books in the English language as overlooked, but I think it's clear that much of the novel goes over the heads of the teenagers who are assigned to read it. If you haven't read it since high school, you haven't read it: go check it out of the library or buy a copy and read it again. It's an utterly amazing book, and it's a tragedy that Lee never wrote anything else after it. The memory of this rereading of her masterwork will remain in my mind for a long time.
Harper Lee
Harper Perennial Modern Classics Trade Paperback, 323 pages
A few days ago, I wrote a booklog review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which I basically said that it was a fairly simple "good" book, with surface-level allusions that would make it easy to teach to teenagers. I didn't mention it at the time, but I was mentally connecting McCarthy's book to To Kill a Mockinbird, as my memory of the book (and the movie of the same name) was that of a basically simple, straightforward pair of stories that connected only in the most spurious ways.
Well, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. Reapproaching the novel as an adult, I was amazed at the overall quality of the writing, at how structured and (at times) wickedly satirical Lee's voice in the novel is. Teaching it to every ninth grader in America is actually a disservice to the book -- 14 year olds just really don't understand this book, and the movie (good as it is) only aids the confusion.
In case you're one of the half-dozen people in North America who's never read it, let me give you a synopsis. Jean Louise Finch (nicknamed Scout) narrates the story of how her older brother Jem broke his arm when they were both small children in small-town southern Alabama around 1932. In order to tell the story, she starts by telling about Boo Radley, the adult man who lives with his mother and father next door and who hasn't been seen in about twenty years, and about her lawyer father Atticus Finch's unsuccessful defense of an African-American man named Tom Robinson, who is on trial for his life after being accused of raping a poor white girl. The novel is basically disjointed, spending about half of its time on the idyllic childhood of Scout, her brother, and their friend Dill who visits during the summers, and the other half on coutroom theatrics involving a racist jury putting an innocent black man to death, despite the clear moral and legal voice of Atticus.
Except that the version I gave above is the way people remember the story later on. At least, that's basically the way I remember it, and it's basically the way the film version goes. But in reality, Lee's achievement is much deeper than a simple morality play set in rural Alabama -- her fictional Maycomb county is an absolute delight, filled with saints and sinners (who are not always on the side of the fence we think they're on, and who sometimes don't seem to know there's a fence at all) going about elaborately controlled social lives and relating to one another in a variety of subtly interconnected ways.
Who remembers years after their reading that there's a Hitler reference late in the novel? Or that Scout's second-grade teacher is almost assuredly Jewish, and has a similar prejudice against "Negroes" that the Protestant ladies surrounding her do? Or that Scout's Aunt Alexandria, Atticus's sister, is such an effective tool of what in a later era would be called patriarchy, determined to make a "lady" out of the tomboyish Scout?
Who at fourteen would realize how special Atticus's childrearing methods really are? His small children call him by his first name, he is generally opposed to violence but buys them air-rifles anyway, never talks down to his children and even taught Scout to read the newspaper so early that she considers it as natural as breathing. Even by the hopefully more-enlightened standards of the early twenty-first century, Atticus's parenting comes across as revolutionary and progessive in all the right ways, with little of the baggage of his times -- how radical must it have seemed in 1960, when the book was published, or in the 1930s, when Lee herself was being raised? (Atticus is based on Lee's own father, who was a lawyer who tried a similar case during her childhood.)
Much is made of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a "nonfiction novel" which took scandalous events and transformed them through the devices of fiction into great drama. Since Capote was a dear friend of Lee's, and in fact was the inspiration for the character of Dill, it's suggested by many that Capote helped to shape the not-quite-fictional nature of Mockingbird, but given the adroitness of Lee's voice here, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't the other way around. Lee is always in clear command of her narrative voice, and while the meaning of certain sequences may not always be clear on a first reading, the overall structure is impeccable -- every word and every moment has its place in the scheme of the novel.
In short, this is a masterpiece. It's odd to think of one of the most popular books in the English language as overlooked, but I think it's clear that much of the novel goes over the heads of the teenagers who are assigned to read it. If you haven't read it since high school, you haven't read it: go check it out of the library or buy a copy and read it again. It's an utterly amazing book, and it's a tragedy that Lee never wrote anything else after it. The memory of this rereading of her masterwork will remain in my mind for a long time.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Booklog: The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Trade Paperback, 287 pages
I guess I've been sucked in by the Oprah hype, but I finally decided to just go ahead and read this thing. And for a book as good as this one is, I have lots of problems with it.
A lot of people questioned the inclusion of a book with child cannibalism and near-starvation into Oprah's book club, until now mainly known for picking feel-good chick-lit, but to me it makes perfect sense: the novel is fairly short, composed of simple straightforward (if very good) writing, and despite its postapocalyptic setting contains themes of hope in the face of adversity, the struggle of being a parent, and the power of basic human decency.
If you don't know the story, let me sum it up for you: in a postapocalyptic wasteland (probably after nuclear war, but it's never explicitly stated), a man and a boy (never named) seek warmer weather by walking along the eponymous road, and dodge cannibals and other unsavory characters along the way. The father (probably a doctor, given some specialized knowledge he has) is dying of some unspecified illness that makes him cough blood every morning, and both father and son are severely malnourished, often going days at a time without any food at all.
And that's basically it. I can't discuss it any further without going into spoiler territory (and the very real joys of this book require coming to it knowing as little as possible), so if you're still planning to read it leave now. Just know that I recommend the book pretty highly, with caveats.
Now that all the spoiler-averse have gone, let me discuss the ending a bit. Basically, the man dies of his illness, and the boy ends up in the care of a kind stranger and his wife, who have apparently been tracking them all this time. Why a kind stranger would simply allow the man to die, to simply allow them to nearly starve to death, to have their supplies stolen, to nearly be caught by paramilitary cannibals, is never even remotely explained. It's a happy ending (and the short description of the boy's life with the family has more in common with a Rockwell painting than the apocalyptic nightmare that make up the rest of the book) that the story doesn't earn, and that feels tacked on.
It's possible that this is part of the religious imagery of the book (and another reason Oprah picked it for her book club) -- the boy has been "redeemed" by the death of his father or some such. That the story is so clearly a parable (no character is ever named except for a blind old man wandering in the forest without any visible means of support, who goes by "Ely") helps to support this contention -- perhaps it's all supposed to be some religious allegory. But for this atheist, it really just seems like a copout.
In fact, the whole thing just seems like a bit of a copout. Despite the harshness of the wasteland described (and it's about as harsh as I've ever seen in a postnuclear novel), these characters never really seem to be in any danger to me. In any sort of reality, this small kid (thankfully not a "cute" kid, but one hardened to the world around him) and his sick father would end up being entrees in a paramilitary pot roast -- McCarthy often has them escape death more by luck than by wit or skill. At one point, they literally stumble upon a store of canned food left behind by now-dead survivalists, perhaps more evidence that the book is really some sort of religious allegory.
Overall I won't be surprised at all to see this book taught in upper-level high school classes in a few years. It has the kind of complexity that goes well in those sorts of classes, as it has a fair amount of symbolism and straightforward "themes" that make it easy to teach. And, as I mentioned above, it really is exquistely written, filled with images and dialogue that evoke the world and the characters in very real ways. That I find myself disappointed with the book speaks more to my own experience with postapolcayptic science fiction (there's little here that wasn't done forty or fifty years ago in pulp science fiction magazines and books) than with the quality of this book.
I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend a book I enjoyed more that touched on some of the same things. David Brin's The Postman (yes, the one on which the movie was based, but don't hold that against it) may not be quite as bleak as McCarthy's work, but it is much more concrete in detailing the kind of society that might survive a nuclear war, and the way it deals with the responsibilities of government and warfare regularly inform my own political views. Instead of ending with a deus-ex-machina, it earns the sense of hope for the future that informs its final chapter. All that and some great action scenes, too.
Cormac McCarthy
Trade Paperback, 287 pages
I guess I've been sucked in by the Oprah hype, but I finally decided to just go ahead and read this thing. And for a book as good as this one is, I have lots of problems with it.
A lot of people questioned the inclusion of a book with child cannibalism and near-starvation into Oprah's book club, until now mainly known for picking feel-good chick-lit, but to me it makes perfect sense: the novel is fairly short, composed of simple straightforward (if very good) writing, and despite its postapocalyptic setting contains themes of hope in the face of adversity, the struggle of being a parent, and the power of basic human decency.
If you don't know the story, let me sum it up for you: in a postapocalyptic wasteland (probably after nuclear war, but it's never explicitly stated), a man and a boy (never named) seek warmer weather by walking along the eponymous road, and dodge cannibals and other unsavory characters along the way. The father (probably a doctor, given some specialized knowledge he has) is dying of some unspecified illness that makes him cough blood every morning, and both father and son are severely malnourished, often going days at a time without any food at all.
And that's basically it. I can't discuss it any further without going into spoiler territory (and the very real joys of this book require coming to it knowing as little as possible), so if you're still planning to read it leave now. Just know that I recommend the book pretty highly, with caveats.
Now that all the spoiler-averse have gone, let me discuss the ending a bit. Basically, the man dies of his illness, and the boy ends up in the care of a kind stranger and his wife, who have apparently been tracking them all this time. Why a kind stranger would simply allow the man to die, to simply allow them to nearly starve to death, to have their supplies stolen, to nearly be caught by paramilitary cannibals, is never even remotely explained. It's a happy ending (and the short description of the boy's life with the family has more in common with a Rockwell painting than the apocalyptic nightmare that make up the rest of the book) that the story doesn't earn, and that feels tacked on.
It's possible that this is part of the religious imagery of the book (and another reason Oprah picked it for her book club) -- the boy has been "redeemed" by the death of his father or some such. That the story is so clearly a parable (no character is ever named except for a blind old man wandering in the forest without any visible means of support, who goes by "Ely") helps to support this contention -- perhaps it's all supposed to be some religious allegory. But for this atheist, it really just seems like a copout.
In fact, the whole thing just seems like a bit of a copout. Despite the harshness of the wasteland described (and it's about as harsh as I've ever seen in a postnuclear novel), these characters never really seem to be in any danger to me. In any sort of reality, this small kid (thankfully not a "cute" kid, but one hardened to the world around him) and his sick father would end up being entrees in a paramilitary pot roast -- McCarthy often has them escape death more by luck than by wit or skill. At one point, they literally stumble upon a store of canned food left behind by now-dead survivalists, perhaps more evidence that the book is really some sort of religious allegory.
Overall I won't be surprised at all to see this book taught in upper-level high school classes in a few years. It has the kind of complexity that goes well in those sorts of classes, as it has a fair amount of symbolism and straightforward "themes" that make it easy to teach. And, as I mentioned above, it really is exquistely written, filled with images and dialogue that evoke the world and the characters in very real ways. That I find myself disappointed with the book speaks more to my own experience with postapolcayptic science fiction (there's little here that wasn't done forty or fifty years ago in pulp science fiction magazines and books) than with the quality of this book.
I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend a book I enjoyed more that touched on some of the same things. David Brin's The Postman (yes, the one on which the movie was based, but don't hold that against it) may not be quite as bleak as McCarthy's work, but it is much more concrete in detailing the kind of society that might survive a nuclear war, and the way it deals with the responsibilities of government and warfare regularly inform my own political views. Instead of ending with a deus-ex-machina, it earns the sense of hope for the future that informs its final chapter. All that and some great action scenes, too.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Booklog: The Colorado Kid, Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
Stephen King
Hard Case Crime Paperback, 184 pages
Okay, Stephen King's just fucking with us now.
I can't say I've always been a big fan of King's. His myriad horror novels were all the rage when I was in junior high/high school, and there were and are plenty of otherwise really smart people who just go gaga over King's particular brand of horror. And, you know, more power to them -- far be it from me to dictate what other people should enjoy.
But I never really got off on it. And during his heyday, it was nearly impossible to not read Stephen King somewhere or other. So I never really respected his talent as much as maybe I should have -- the earthiness and popular nature of his prose and his stories just never worked for me.
But a funny thing happened as the years passed. Once the millions of books were already sold, and once King's horror fans got a little older or a little wiser, it turned out that King had plenty of other stuff to offer, and he started to garner some of the critical respect that maybe he always should have had.
Everyone probably already knows this by now, but there's a lot more going on in that old noggin of King's than just monsters and goblins. Case in point: The Colorado Kid.
Looking at the cover, this looks like a standard noirish mystery (like all the other books in the Hard Case Crime series) -- from the title, it seems more like a Western (I've got to say that the vague soundalike to the Kieselguhr Kid from Against the Day made this one pop in my mind towards the top of my to-read list), but it's really anything but. It's a tale told by two very old newpapermen to their young but whippersmart colleague about an unsolved mystery that they were involved with twenty-five years before. And, bear no mind, the case remains unsolved; at the end of the book we are no closer to a solution to the puzzle in the story than we were at the beginning.
So what the hell is King up to here? I think he's really telling us a story about stories; the theme of a "through line" in newspaper stories comes up several times, i.e. the "hook" needed to keep a reader interested. He's showing how incredibly unrealistic most "murder mysteries" really are, in that searching for the kinds of minute evidence that a show like CSI (name-checked in The Colorado Kid) makes its trade is often impractical, impossible, or unneeded for political reasons.
The mystery is this: some guy in his late thirties or early forties is found dead propped against a wastebasket in a small Maine town on April 24, 1980. With a small piece of partially chewed meat in his throat, apparently the cause of death. It takes nearly a year to even get an ID on the guy -- he was an artist from Colorado, hence the title. Was he alone when he diead? Was it murder or accident? How did he get from Colorado to Maine? All mysteries, none of them ever really solved.
And yet, this doesn't really feel like a cheat, for King gets the whole thing done with quickly (this won't even be an afternoon read for most people -- it's more of a novella than a novel) and has obviously researched a lot of details that feed into his fiction in a way that make the reader feel like there is a solution buried in there, but time has worn away so many facts that it's going to be impossible to suss out.
Overall an interesting book, one that I'm glad I read, and it's a mark of King's storytelling prowess that an essentially pointless story is so compelling. Mystery readers are apt to be a bit put off by this title, but if you're looking for an elegant piece of storytelling to while away most of an afternoon, look no further.
Stephen King
Hard Case Crime Paperback, 184 pages
Okay, Stephen King's just fucking with us now.
I can't say I've always been a big fan of King's. His myriad horror novels were all the rage when I was in junior high/high school, and there were and are plenty of otherwise really smart people who just go gaga over King's particular brand of horror. And, you know, more power to them -- far be it from me to dictate what other people should enjoy.
But I never really got off on it. And during his heyday, it was nearly impossible to not read Stephen King somewhere or other. So I never really respected his talent as much as maybe I should have -- the earthiness and popular nature of his prose and his stories just never worked for me.
But a funny thing happened as the years passed. Once the millions of books were already sold, and once King's horror fans got a little older or a little wiser, it turned out that King had plenty of other stuff to offer, and he started to garner some of the critical respect that maybe he always should have had.
Everyone probably already knows this by now, but there's a lot more going on in that old noggin of King's than just monsters and goblins. Case in point: The Colorado Kid.
Looking at the cover, this looks like a standard noirish mystery (like all the other books in the Hard Case Crime series) -- from the title, it seems more like a Western (I've got to say that the vague soundalike to the Kieselguhr Kid from Against the Day made this one pop in my mind towards the top of my to-read list), but it's really anything but. It's a tale told by two very old newpapermen to their young but whippersmart colleague about an unsolved mystery that they were involved with twenty-five years before. And, bear no mind, the case remains unsolved; at the end of the book we are no closer to a solution to the puzzle in the story than we were at the beginning.
So what the hell is King up to here? I think he's really telling us a story about stories; the theme of a "through line" in newspaper stories comes up several times, i.e. the "hook" needed to keep a reader interested. He's showing how incredibly unrealistic most "murder mysteries" really are, in that searching for the kinds of minute evidence that a show like CSI (name-checked in The Colorado Kid) makes its trade is often impractical, impossible, or unneeded for political reasons.
The mystery is this: some guy in his late thirties or early forties is found dead propped against a wastebasket in a small Maine town on April 24, 1980. With a small piece of partially chewed meat in his throat, apparently the cause of death. It takes nearly a year to even get an ID on the guy -- he was an artist from Colorado, hence the title. Was he alone when he diead? Was it murder or accident? How did he get from Colorado to Maine? All mysteries, none of them ever really solved.
And yet, this doesn't really feel like a cheat, for King gets the whole thing done with quickly (this won't even be an afternoon read for most people -- it's more of a novella than a novel) and has obviously researched a lot of details that feed into his fiction in a way that make the reader feel like there is a solution buried in there, but time has worn away so many facts that it's going to be impossible to suss out.
Overall an interesting book, one that I'm glad I read, and it's a mark of King's storytelling prowess that an essentially pointless story is so compelling. Mystery readers are apt to be a bit put off by this title, but if you're looking for an elegant piece of storytelling to while away most of an afternoon, look no further.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Booklog: Intuition, Allegra Goodman
Intution
Allegra Goodman
Dial Press Trade Paperback, 385 pages
I found this book referenced on Acephalous, and knew I had to check it out. (BTW, despite what Acephalous says, the book clearly states it takes place in the mid eighties on page four, and there are several contemporary-to-the-eighties references throughout the novel.)
Basically, the book takes place in a small research lab affiliated with Harvard where biomedical research involving cancer is being done. Goodman makes the science understandable by not ever really talking about it, so that the reader has no idea what these characters actually do all day, but she seems to have gotten the social and political aspects of being in a lab just right.
The story follows the research of Cliff, who is trying to use R-7 to cure mice of their tumors, is told by his superiors that it's a dead end, and then miraculously starts getting good data out of the project. The pressures that this sudden success places on his relationship with another postdoc, Robin, eventually lead to a falling-out between the two of them, and Robin's inability to get R-7 to work on any other groups of mice leads her to call fraud on the drug.
Along the way, we meet maybe a dozen or so other main characters, all of whom Goodman gives rich inner lives -- she's very good at clearly delineating her characters from one another based on motivation, and making the reader see the way in which personal biases affect each person's response to the situation in front of them.
It is kind of a small book though, despite being a touch overlong. It has no clear meaning, and the ending is I think ambiguous in a bad way. It's a fascinating look at the world of real-life research, but I would have preferred it to be a bit more technically savvy, and to be a bit tighter. I did enjoy the way the author keeps the reader on his/her toes regarding the central mystery, though -- it's only towards the last pages of the book that we understand what really is happening with the mice, and no one other than the perpetrator could have really understood the resolution there.
Overall, a nice read, with good characters, but nothing all that special.
Allegra Goodman
Dial Press Trade Paperback, 385 pages
I found this book referenced on Acephalous, and knew I had to check it out. (BTW, despite what Acephalous says, the book clearly states it takes place in the mid eighties on page four, and there are several contemporary-to-the-eighties references throughout the novel.)
Basically, the book takes place in a small research lab affiliated with Harvard where biomedical research involving cancer is being done. Goodman makes the science understandable by not ever really talking about it, so that the reader has no idea what these characters actually do all day, but she seems to have gotten the social and political aspects of being in a lab just right.
The story follows the research of Cliff, who is trying to use R-7 to cure mice of their tumors, is told by his superiors that it's a dead end, and then miraculously starts getting good data out of the project. The pressures that this sudden success places on his relationship with another postdoc, Robin, eventually lead to a falling-out between the two of them, and Robin's inability to get R-7 to work on any other groups of mice leads her to call fraud on the drug.
Along the way, we meet maybe a dozen or so other main characters, all of whom Goodman gives rich inner lives -- she's very good at clearly delineating her characters from one another based on motivation, and making the reader see the way in which personal biases affect each person's response to the situation in front of them.
It is kind of a small book though, despite being a touch overlong. It has no clear meaning, and the ending is I think ambiguous in a bad way. It's a fascinating look at the world of real-life research, but I would have preferred it to be a bit more technically savvy, and to be a bit tighter. I did enjoy the way the author keeps the reader on his/her toes regarding the central mystery, though -- it's only towards the last pages of the book that we understand what really is happening with the mice, and no one other than the perpetrator could have really understood the resolution there.
Overall, a nice read, with good characters, but nothing all that special.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Booklog: Polaris, Jack McDevitt
Polaris
Jack McDevitt
Mass-Market Paperback, 384 pages
Chad Orzel reviewed this a while back on Uncertain Principles, and I thought it looked interesting. (I blatantly stole his booklog concept for use here, as well.) I had tried reading The Engines of God a while back, but couldn't get into it, so I came at this one with, well, not exactly high hopes.
And you know what, this is actually quite a good book. It's the second Alex Benedict novel (the first, A Talent for War, was not in-stock at my store and I haven't read it), a science fiction mystery that entertains even when the mystery isn't quite as mysterious as maybe it should be. There are two main characters, Benedict and Chase Kolpath (the book's first-person narrator), who work as antiquities dealers in the far future (at least four or five thousand years from now). The Orion Arm of the galaxy has been pretty well explored and settled, and hundreds of world hold human populations -- these worlds are organized into something called the Confederacy, which holds a sort of loose reign over the planetary governments.
The book opens with an extended sequence in which a research vessel Polaris, on a VIP trip to see a neutron star destroy Delta Kay and its planetary system. As the neutron star passes through the star, and all the other research vessels hyperdrive to safety, something happens on board to remove the passengers of the Polaris, while leaving the ship intact.
Sixty years later, the main action with Benedict and Kolpath begins. It turns out that there are some items from the Polaris that have been released by the local government, and Benedict sees a money-making opportunity. As the thing develops, we see attempts made on Benedict's and Kolpath's lives, and a mystery develops which eventually leads back to what happened on that ship sixty years before.
Overall this book reminded me of some of the later Asimov, although McDevitt's writing style is superior and much-better attenuated to modern sensibilities. Like Asimov, McDevitt envisions a future in which even after millennia of star travel and hundreds of colonized worlds, people still behave much the same way that our contemporaries do, with conversations and motivations that would be at home in today's world. While this convention is perhaps a bit unrealistic, it is necessary at least in McDevitt's case, for it allows for a fairly standard "locked-room" mystery plot with several reasonably compelling action scenes.
I didn't find the mystery to be all that convulted, as the basic motivation for the thing becomes clear early on, Benedict and Kolpath keep up with the reader, and McDevitt plays fair by not using artificial means to withhold information. In fact, the way in which clues for the mystery are laid in front of the reader while seeming to be simple worldbuilding is quite elegant, and I found myself respecting McDevitt's authorship repeatedly.
The book is perhaps a touch too long, and some of the action scenes felt a bit obligatory to me, but overall this is a good book, well worth picking up if you're looking for a bit of easy genre fiction, and good enough that I may go back to give Engines of God another try sometime.
Jack McDevitt
Mass-Market Paperback, 384 pages
Chad Orzel reviewed this a while back on Uncertain Principles, and I thought it looked interesting. (I blatantly stole his booklog concept for use here, as well.) I had tried reading The Engines of God a while back, but couldn't get into it, so I came at this one with, well, not exactly high hopes.
And you know what, this is actually quite a good book. It's the second Alex Benedict novel (the first, A Talent for War, was not in-stock at my store and I haven't read it), a science fiction mystery that entertains even when the mystery isn't quite as mysterious as maybe it should be. There are two main characters, Benedict and Chase Kolpath (the book's first-person narrator), who work as antiquities dealers in the far future (at least four or five thousand years from now). The Orion Arm of the galaxy has been pretty well explored and settled, and hundreds of world hold human populations -- these worlds are organized into something called the Confederacy, which holds a sort of loose reign over the planetary governments.
The book opens with an extended sequence in which a research vessel Polaris, on a VIP trip to see a neutron star destroy Delta Kay and its planetary system. As the neutron star passes through the star, and all the other research vessels hyperdrive to safety, something happens on board to remove the passengers of the Polaris, while leaving the ship intact.
Sixty years later, the main action with Benedict and Kolpath begins. It turns out that there are some items from the Polaris that have been released by the local government, and Benedict sees a money-making opportunity. As the thing develops, we see attempts made on Benedict's and Kolpath's lives, and a mystery develops which eventually leads back to what happened on that ship sixty years before.
Overall this book reminded me of some of the later Asimov, although McDevitt's writing style is superior and much-better attenuated to modern sensibilities. Like Asimov, McDevitt envisions a future in which even after millennia of star travel and hundreds of colonized worlds, people still behave much the same way that our contemporaries do, with conversations and motivations that would be at home in today's world. While this convention is perhaps a bit unrealistic, it is necessary at least in McDevitt's case, for it allows for a fairly standard "locked-room" mystery plot with several reasonably compelling action scenes.
I didn't find the mystery to be all that convulted, as the basic motivation for the thing becomes clear early on, Benedict and Kolpath keep up with the reader, and McDevitt plays fair by not using artificial means to withhold information. In fact, the way in which clues for the mystery are laid in front of the reader while seeming to be simple worldbuilding is quite elegant, and I found myself respecting McDevitt's authorship repeatedly.
The book is perhaps a touch too long, and some of the action scenes felt a bit obligatory to me, but overall this is a good book, well worth picking up if you're looking for a bit of easy genre fiction, and good enough that I may go back to give Engines of God another try sometime.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Booklog: Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
Vintage Contemporaries Trade Paperback, 257 pages
I picked this book up knowing only two things: that author Gaitskill was the author of "Bad Behavior", the story that was eventually turned into the film Secretary, and that Veronica was about a nonsexual relationship between two women. I figured it would be a sort of art-lit feminist work with frank discussions of sexuality and with a sort of "New Yorker" sensibility to it.
It was all that, and more besides. Alison is our viewpoint character, and in a more-or-less reliable-narrator fashion, she leads us through first her present reality as a has-been model who cleans the home/office of her friend David for a few dollars, and who has hepatitis and an arm that gives her stabbing pains whenever she tries to use it. She has a sort of vaguely interconnected life from the people who surround her, but seems isolated from the world nonetheless -- she is acquantainces with her neighbor, for instance, but they never seem to discuss the illness they share or the lives they lead.
Gaitskill writes the novel in a sort of vignette style, in which many sections are less than a page long and few are more than a half-dozen pages, with stories of Alison's past and present. We meet many of the important persons in her life that way, and eventually the name "Veronica" starts to become more and more prominent. As Alison tells us of her days as a model in Paris with an abusive boyfriend, then of moving back to the States and trying to go to secretarial school, she moves closer and closer to the present day of the novel, and we see more and more of her personality. Towards the last hundred pages or so of the book, Veronica begins to take more-or-less center stage, and we see her final days in the early days of the AIDS scare (the time frame is fuzzy, but is sometime in the early eighties) as Alison becomes a low-rent model and music video girl.
Veronica is portrayed as feisty and hotblooded even before her illness, but with a death sentence looming over her she becomes a spitfire. The relationship between Veronica and Alison is never really "warm", but each gains something from the experience of knowing the other, and the "reality" of Veronica's illness and eventual death are played thematically against the fakery of the modeling industry. Despite the great writing and well-conceived imagery that Gaitskill brings to these themes, she subtly warns us against taking our own understanding too seriously, by always making Veronica's illness stand up against that same flowery language like a concrete wall -- any "meaning" that we think we find in death is always more abstract and meaningless than the reality of that death itself.
This is a very good book towards the end, although it seems a bit formless at times and insufferably insular towards the beginning. Gaitskill has a clear command of language and metaphor that is worth reading, and the portions towards the end dealing directly with Veronica's death and understated and haunting. It's a bit outside my comfort zone, but it was definitely worth the extra effort.
Mary Gaitskill
Vintage Contemporaries Trade Paperback, 257 pages
I picked this book up knowing only two things: that author Gaitskill was the author of "Bad Behavior", the story that was eventually turned into the film Secretary, and that Veronica was about a nonsexual relationship between two women. I figured it would be a sort of art-lit feminist work with frank discussions of sexuality and with a sort of "New Yorker" sensibility to it.
It was all that, and more besides. Alison is our viewpoint character, and in a more-or-less reliable-narrator fashion, she leads us through first her present reality as a has-been model who cleans the home/office of her friend David for a few dollars, and who has hepatitis and an arm that gives her stabbing pains whenever she tries to use it. She has a sort of vaguely interconnected life from the people who surround her, but seems isolated from the world nonetheless -- she is acquantainces with her neighbor, for instance, but they never seem to discuss the illness they share or the lives they lead.
Gaitskill writes the novel in a sort of vignette style, in which many sections are less than a page long and few are more than a half-dozen pages, with stories of Alison's past and present. We meet many of the important persons in her life that way, and eventually the name "Veronica" starts to become more and more prominent. As Alison tells us of her days as a model in Paris with an abusive boyfriend, then of moving back to the States and trying to go to secretarial school, she moves closer and closer to the present day of the novel, and we see more and more of her personality. Towards the last hundred pages or so of the book, Veronica begins to take more-or-less center stage, and we see her final days in the early days of the AIDS scare (the time frame is fuzzy, but is sometime in the early eighties) as Alison becomes a low-rent model and music video girl.
Veronica is portrayed as feisty and hotblooded even before her illness, but with a death sentence looming over her she becomes a spitfire. The relationship between Veronica and Alison is never really "warm", but each gains something from the experience of knowing the other, and the "reality" of Veronica's illness and eventual death are played thematically against the fakery of the modeling industry. Despite the great writing and well-conceived imagery that Gaitskill brings to these themes, she subtly warns us against taking our own understanding too seriously, by always making Veronica's illness stand up against that same flowery language like a concrete wall -- any "meaning" that we think we find in death is always more abstract and meaningless than the reality of that death itself.
This is a very good book towards the end, although it seems a bit formless at times and insufferably insular towards the beginning. Gaitskill has a clear command of language and metaphor that is worth reading, and the portions towards the end dealing directly with Veronica's death and understated and haunting. It's a bit outside my comfort zone, but it was definitely worth the extra effort.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Booklog: No Witnesses, by Nancy Sanra
This is a new feature I'm starting here at Chez CounterMonkey, in which I review the books I run across. I'm currently working my way through the Pynchon roster, so my day-to-day reading tends to run towards the simple and straightforward, but once I've gotten Pynchon out of my system I'll be reading and talking about more in-depth books. I'll probably leave the Pynchon out, because I'm intending these to be short snippets about books, things that I will generally read in a day or two and which are very easily digested. More complex posts about books will go in under a separate label.
No Witnesses
Nancy Sanra
Rising Tide Press Trade Paperback, 182 pages
This is a bit of an inauspicious deput for this feature, as this book just really isn't all that good. Oh, it's a decent little read, fine for a couple of hours' entertainment, but other than the basic premise it's really not all that special, and the writing drags in places.
No Witnesses is the first of what seems to be a series of books (my store also carries No Escape and No Corpse starring Tally McGinnes, a private investigator out of San Francisco (ex-cop, naturally), who is called in by Lieutenant Cid Cameron of the SFPD to help solve a murder case involving Tally's ex-lover, Pamela Tresdale. And herein lies the main "twist" of the book -- other than a few supporting characters, all of the speaking roles are gay women who are very aware of each other's sexuality and tend towards wearing sensible but sensual clothing. Though I'm not a longtime fan of the field, I am aware that most of the mystery novels on the shelf at the local bookstore are fairly lightweight affairs with some sort of theme or character that runs through them, so I suppose this isn't really any worse of an example of this than, say, a series of mysteries involving food, or a series involving a knitting club.
I was hoping, though, that Sanra (openly gay herself) would use her setting as a way of poking holes at the conventions of these sorts of crime thrillers, or to make some sort of sly social commentary with her characters or with the crimes that occur in the novel. Instead, these characters remain stubbornly two-dimensional despite the twisting web of motivations that Sanra attempts to use to envelop them, and the actual killer is telegraphed from her very first appearance. Fans of complex or entertaining mysteries should look elsewhere, as should anyone looking for depth of characterization.
In fact, this book is barely even a novel -- at 182 pages with wide margins and large type, it's more of a novella in length, and the $11.95 sticker price would scare me away if I hadn't been able to read it for free. Even readers hoping for steamy love scenes will walk away disappointed, as aside from a memory Tally has of Pamela early in the story, there's really nothing at all dirty in the book, and the romantic subplot towards the end remains mostly platonic. The writing is also choppy, composed of simple sentences strung together into barely descriptive paragraphs. It's far from the worst writing I've ever read, even in a published novel, but it never really feels like a professional work to me.
Granted, I'm not the target audience for this book, and it's certainly worth an afternoon's reading, but I can't really give this book my recommendation. Later on I may try one of the sequels to No Witnesses, but for now I'll leave the series thinking I got my money's worth.
No Witnesses
Nancy Sanra
Rising Tide Press Trade Paperback, 182 pages
This is a bit of an inauspicious deput for this feature, as this book just really isn't all that good. Oh, it's a decent little read, fine for a couple of hours' entertainment, but other than the basic premise it's really not all that special, and the writing drags in places.
No Witnesses is the first of what seems to be a series of books (my store also carries No Escape and No Corpse starring Tally McGinnes, a private investigator out of San Francisco (ex-cop, naturally), who is called in by Lieutenant Cid Cameron of the SFPD to help solve a murder case involving Tally's ex-lover, Pamela Tresdale. And herein lies the main "twist" of the book -- other than a few supporting characters, all of the speaking roles are gay women who are very aware of each other's sexuality and tend towards wearing sensible but sensual clothing. Though I'm not a longtime fan of the field, I am aware that most of the mystery novels on the shelf at the local bookstore are fairly lightweight affairs with some sort of theme or character that runs through them, so I suppose this isn't really any worse of an example of this than, say, a series of mysteries involving food, or a series involving a knitting club.
I was hoping, though, that Sanra (openly gay herself) would use her setting as a way of poking holes at the conventions of these sorts of crime thrillers, or to make some sort of sly social commentary with her characters or with the crimes that occur in the novel. Instead, these characters remain stubbornly two-dimensional despite the twisting web of motivations that Sanra attempts to use to envelop them, and the actual killer is telegraphed from her very first appearance. Fans of complex or entertaining mysteries should look elsewhere, as should anyone looking for depth of characterization.
In fact, this book is barely even a novel -- at 182 pages with wide margins and large type, it's more of a novella in length, and the $11.95 sticker price would scare me away if I hadn't been able to read it for free. Even readers hoping for steamy love scenes will walk away disappointed, as aside from a memory Tally has of Pamela early in the story, there's really nothing at all dirty in the book, and the romantic subplot towards the end remains mostly platonic. The writing is also choppy, composed of simple sentences strung together into barely descriptive paragraphs. It's far from the worst writing I've ever read, even in a published novel, but it never really feels like a professional work to me.
Granted, I'm not the target audience for this book, and it's certainly worth an afternoon's reading, but I can't really give this book my recommendation. Later on I may try one of the sequels to No Witnesses, but for now I'll leave the series thinking I got my money's worth.
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