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Not Your Grandmother's Vampire

2011-05-26T13:21:00.003-04:00

"Why won't you watch Buffy?" Asked my BFF while driving at her space normal speed of 50 MPH on a city street in a rattling old Nisan convertible with the top down.

"Because I don't want to get obsessed with vampires like I was when I was a teenager," I replied.

"Obsessed like how? I'm obsessed."

"Yeah, you are, but have you sealed your bedroom windows with a paste made of crushed garlic, then painted a row of tiny crosses with actual 24 Karat gold leaf around the edge of each window pane?"

"What? Hell no. [pause] I'd be, like ---- What's the opposite of garlic??"

Considering my adolescent fascination and the lengths to which ti drove me, it was with some trepidation that I picked up the copy of DRACULA; The Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original Classic, by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. I felt somewhat protected by the simple fact that the book has three titles.

With some exceptions, the characters from the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, continue (at least by name) from the first book into this sequel, which is a true sequel and not a re-imagining or re-framing of the story. Except that it is. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the Original Version

For those few who do not know the story or about the story, the Original tells the reader how a vampire named Dracula makes use of the services of young solicitor Jonathan Harker to move house from rural Romania to England. Shortly after Dracula's arrival in suburban London, he begins his seduction (there's no other word for it) of the unfortunate and 1.75 dimensional Lucy Westenra, whom he successfully turns into a vampire. No clue is ever provided within the text as to why he picks Lucy or how she comes to his attention.

Jonathan, his (eventual) wife Mina and a small band of heroes chase down the evil invader from the east, some of whom tell their own part of the story in the first person, after the manner of Wilkie Collins. There is no omniscient narrator, no final authority to whom we can turn to let us know what is true and what is false. The closest we get to that luxury is Van Helsing. The reader decides for herself whether any particular narrator is reliable. Because the characters themselves know and present only fragments of the overall story, Bram Stoker's original Dracula requires that the reader participate in the story by actually thinking.

Van Helsing in his narrative sections orates for much too long at a time, and far too often, and then everyone else just runs off and does what he says, with no evidence whatsoever that he has a clue what he's talking about other than his own commanding presence. At first, his curious use of English is entertaining, then it often becomes confusing and sometimes cloying, at least to this modern reader. Otherwise, the characters have such distinctive voices, perspectives, and commentaries that it's possible to tell which narrator is talking to you by the tone and content of the passage.

The one critical character from whom we never hear is, of course, Dracula himself. Or, as Van Helsing would probably prefer it, Itself.

The Heroes discover poor Lucy's fate and kill the vampire she's become, after which the corpse becomes visibly human again, and they know they've saved her soul as she has not yet taken a life in her vampire form, during which time she supposedly had no soul to lose. this contradiction is never acknowledged let alone resolved. Subsequent vampire deaths follow, (we always get vivid descriptions of male humans driving massive stakes into the writhing bodies of female vampires), culminating in a wretchedly slow lead-up to the death of the title character at Castle Dracula deep in the Carpathian mountains.

Stoker describes his Count Dracula in memorable terms:

His face was a strong - a very strong - aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality for a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.

Mmmm. Sexy.

Nothing remotely like Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella or Christopher Lee. Only Gary Oldham's portrayal comes close to the image presented by Bram Stoker in the Original. And I didn't even get to the hands, which are stubby, have pointy fingernails like your Aunt Estelle in 1952 and hairy palms. Palms.

So what makes this book such a masterpiece of Victorian pornography?

It's the women. It usually is, but here there are the three overtly voluptuous female vampires at Castle Dracula whose sexuality Harker actually finds frightening before he realizes they don't want kisses of the garden variety. There is fragile, ethereal, plot-device Lucy, who epitomizes the ideal woman of the Eighteenth Century, over against her best friend Mina Harker, who is thoroughly modern (knows shorthand, types - albeit both in preparation of being useful to her husband in his legal career - picks up a revolver without flinching or struggling with the weight of it - and is described as having the brain/mind of a man).

The character Mina is the hinge on which the narrative turns from Bram's original vision to that of the sequel. And Mina herself turns.

Now for the Sequel

In the sequel, Dracula; the Un-Dead, the title character himself is definitely a post-Barnabas, post-Spike, post-Angel, post-Edward, and most especially post-9/11 kind of vampire. Vlad has, by virtue of driving back the Renaissance Islamist invasion of Europe, become not a bad guy at all, just seriously misunderstood. All that impaling.

In the sequel, nice female vampires follow their beloved in acts of suttee-like devotion. Bad female vampires bite the girls and they like it.

The Dracula of Bram Stoker's novel was a count. In the new book, he's a prince, and identification of the novel's character Dracula with the historical Vlad III Dracula who defeated the Turkish Empire's attempt to invade Europe with extremely severe measures, is made express, explicit and complete. No ambiguity here, whereas in the original novel there are hints as to a possible connection. This new Prince Vlad was a papal favorite, a hero of the Christian West, a good-guy member of the (historically real but somewhat murky) Order of the Dragon. This book's Dracula is the übermensch we've all been waiting for.

Also notable is that, in direct contradiction to the BtVS-verse, not to mention the original Dracula as envisioned by Bram Stoker, it turns out that vampires do in fact have souls. Let the debate begin.

The book opens with a scene so overtly, and so over-the-top-ly, pornographic readers will either put the book down or lick their lips for more. The body count is almost insanely high throughout.

The villain of this piece is actually not Dracula himself, but Elizabeth Bathory, who, like Vlad III Dracula was an actual historical person.

In the Original, Dracula has three female attendants, two dark-haired, one fair. Bathory here has two, one dark haired, one fair. When, in the Original, Lord Godalming hammers the massive wooden stake into his beloved's heart to destroy the vampire she's become and her head is subsequently severed from her body, no mention is made of her body crumbling to dust, only of her restoration to her humanity in death. When Van Helsing does his "butcher's work," destroying Dracula's female followers, they specifically are described as crumbling to dust. Perhaps this has something to do with how long one was a vampire before being killed/rescued, or perhaps given how vigorously Lucy's beauty has been impressed upon us, it would have been too much to have her crumble to ash just after her would-be husband has pierced her energetically with his big stick.

Dracula himself crumbles to ash when stabbed with a kukri and his throat is cut at the end 0f the first book. He is the only male vampire killed in the book, and killed by human men, and there is no piercing with a big stick, which I think clearly demonstrates that Stoker was fully intentional about the sexual symbolism of the stake. And yet, Dracula has managed to return. So one wonders whether the two attendants on Countess Bathory have any identity with the attendants on Dracula or are they meant merely to recall him and Bathory's replacement of Dracula as villain.

Bathory is more an embodiment of the mythical Lilith than she is of the historical Countess who spent the last years of her life bricked up for killing possibly as many as 600 women. And yet, there are significant differences. The fictional Bathory of this narrative began her human life like any other girl, then was denied the chance to be a normal wife and mother, her nature was twisted by the early experiences of her life. Her children are lost to her, the husband who should have loved her was cruel, and at least in this fictional version, in her vulnerability she was preyed upon by someone she should have been able to trust. Bathory's evil is the evil of the misplaced, thwarted, victimized feminine.

Mina, still young thanks to the gift received from Dracula in the Original Novel, still strong, is a loyal if frustrated wife and mother, her Jonathan still alive, but obviously ageing while she is not. Her son Quincey, named for the band of heroes but called by the name of the one who died in the fight, is himself abnormally strong, and inexplicably attracted to an actor who goes by the name of Barsabas. Quincey, you see, wants to be an actor himself. He first sees Barsabas perform in Paris, where Quincey has been sent to pursue his education, away from distracting influences.

You can stop laughing now.

The now aged (except for Mina) Band of Heroes tries to reconstitute itself, to fight once more the evil they (in this version mistakenly) perceive Dracula to be. But we are let in on the secrets - Dracula, who is now living in the persona of the famous actor Barsabas, is the Prince who saved Europe from the Turks, he is the hero who saved the West, suddenly possessed of a soul, a good soul that seeks to serve God, and the same character who could not endure the presence of a consecrated Host now claims status as papal representative against the Infidel.

And then one can look backward and see the three voluptuous women who attended Dracula in his castle in a different light. Impaling was, sometimes, used by the Romans and referred to as crucifixion. And the name Basarbas, which was in fact Vlad III Dracula the Impaler's family name, conveniently, is an anagram for Barabas.

Here is the best things about the new book. Well, one of the best things, there are two. First, copyright in the United States to the Dracula franchise has been restored to the Stoker family, who haven't seen much out of the US in the way of royalties due to an early legal oversight.

Second, it'll make a hell of a movie, and I can see the line of actresses waiting to play Bathory with my mind's eye. I have my first pick. Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt are careful in that they don't provide much of a physical description of Dracula at all. They certainly can't go with the original, which is actually not that far away from the only existing portrait of Vlad III.

Dracula; the Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original is not as good as the original, but sequels rarely are. This is not to say it's bad, because it's not. It's a very readable, interesting update to the story, not least for its politics, both geo- and gender. It's also exciting enough to make you keep the pages turning, if you aren't squeamish.

It may be a bit of a stretch of "poetic license" to have shifted the action of the original from 1893 to1888 specifically in order to bookend the story with Jack the Ripper on the front end and the sailing of the Titanic on the back. I wouldn't have made that choice but then I didn't write the book, either.

There is one other choice I would not have made. I don't particularly like Van Helsing, but I'd have given him a better end.

If you enjoy the vampire genre, you'll enjoy this book.

The Amazing Adventures of Sam the Bat by Allyson Beatrice

2011-04-06T15:43:00.004-04:00

This is Allyson Beatrice’s second book, and her first for children and young adults. Sam the Bat, of the title, is born into a community of Mexican Free-tail Bats in the southern California desert. While he is still young, disaster strikes, and sends Sam on a world-wide adventure of discovery.

Ms. Beatrice has acquired her own amazingly detailed knowledge of bats around the world, and uses that knowledge well to underpin and compel the narrative. Sam’s adventures are improbable, but far from impossible, hence the Amazing quality. Sam is every mother bat’s ideal of a son – he is clever, brave, curious, kind, generous and loyal. Sam is also lucky in his friends. The story is smoothly written, at moments a little heavy on the exposition, but for the most part, it will likely be absorbed by younger readers not as information per se, but as the story of Sam the Bat. Very clever. Also woven into the story is the imaginative presentation of the perception of human behavior by animals. Equally clever, and possibly on the nose. I can see it as logical, but can’t ask them, so, who knows, but the points made in those dialogs are valuable: be kind, don’t harm others (even bats) randomly, don’t waste, stick up for your family and friends. Basic good morals in any context. The story hits all the notes – sorrow, joy, friendship, mutual and grudging respect between enemies, even love both puppy and mature.

Sam is a likable little fellow, as are most of the characters, and even those who are not are well-written. Renny is particularly well realized.

This is a good book, parents may enjoy reading it with their kids. I would take it as being aimed at readers eight to twelve, but it’s a little too complex and in places scary for the wee tykes.

Allyson Beatrice is a solid writer, able to produce enjoyable material in multiple genres. How often does that happen?

About as often as a young bat makes an unexpected trip around the world.

Still Midnight by Denise Mina

2011-04-06T15:22:00.003-04:00

Denise Mina does not need me to tell you how good she is. If you’ve read her, you know. A new title with her name under it makes my eyes widen like I just saw something shiny.

Still Midnight is the story of a bungled home invasion, and the clumsy investigation that follows. At every turn, the characters’ choices are marred by the thoroughly human capacity for deception, desperation and hope. Some of the deception is intentional, some of it the deception of the self. Amid all of this are three love stories, hidden like gems, one so quietly you may not recognize it at first.

Three small-time marginal criminals, Pat, Eddy and Malki, are taking their game to the next level by means of a home invasion. Somewhat planned and pitifully executed, the home invasion goes off without a hitch, except for an accidental shooting and the kidnap of the target’s father. When one of the kidnap victim’s sons and his friend, still dressed in traditional clothing for their attendance at prayer services in their local mosque, take off in pursuit of the van in which the kidnap victim is being driven away, the police stop them, and give them a kind of full-court press appropriate to terrorists. The delay allows the kidnappers to escape. Fortunately, the confusion is rapidly cleared.

But the kidnappers are now faced with a dilemma: How to spin absolute failure into at least partial success. Eddie manages to sell the heavyweight who hired them the idea that the tiny old man they’ve parked in a filthy house with a pillowcase over his head will still provide leverage to get what they want. Which is, of course, money.

The police are left with the question of why this seemingly ordinary, quiet, middle-class family of ethnic Pakistanis who immigrated to Scotland from Uganda have become the target of a kidnap for ransom. There is no reason to think this family would have the requested “two million quid.” So what has happened? Did the kidnappers invade the wrong house? Why else would they demand to see someone they are told does not live there?

Mina’s presentations of Glasgow bring it into awareness; the city itself is not only place but character. It is every city, and it is the only place this story could have happened. Every city has desperate heroin addicts and people who live on the margin of outright criminality to survive. Every city has a police department that is comprised of officers who are competent and motivated to solve crimes, who are competent and motivated to get ahead, who are burned out, who are marginally competent, who don’t like each other, who want to arrest not only someone but the right someone, who are under pressure to arrest someone, who have personal lives that may have unbearable tragedies hidden within them. Every city has at least one smaller community of immigrants who are largely misunderstood by those around them, including other immigrant communities, who have tried to make a successful place for themselves by one means or another. And yet,these particular marginal criminals, police officers, immigrants and the native Scots who come to know them are peculiar to Glasgow. To tell this story as if it happened in, say, Detroit or Johannesburg would be to tell a different story.

Somehow, out of this stew arise a series of truths. We learn who the kidnappers were trying to take, and who they should have been trying to take, and they learn why. But by then, there are bigger questions that absorb your attention.

And underneath those bigger question, the global question of the intersection of culture and identity, and we as individuals can meet each other across it.

“Billal wanted me to convert,” says a minor character, “go and live with his mother. Don’t get me wrong. I love Sadiqa, she gorgeous, but I’m Catholic, I’m Scottish, I’m not going to move in with total strangers and cover my head with a fucking scarf for the rest of my life.”

The impact of culture on personal identity is primary in this story, as is our ability to find ways to meet each other across cultural divides.

Finally, it is the love stories that stick with you. One perseveres in the face of tragedy. One endures in quiet dignity a threat that cannot be named because the relationship cannot be named, and fittingly leaves itself open to the understanding of the reader. Some will see one thing, other will see something else. The last finds its way into the sun like a weed cracking a sidewalk. You root for all of them.

Facts Are Subversive by Timothy Garton Ash

2011-04-06T14:21:00.006-04:00

Finding this collection of essays originally published between 2000 and 2009 was one of those happy accidents that come along from time to time. In that the title appealed to me, I did at first judge this book by its cover. Then I opened the book. It begins:

Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and postmodernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men.’

These are the first three sentences of the Preface. Unlike some, this Preface is worth your time. I found it comforting to learn there is at least one real journalist left alive on the planet. I had thought the species extinct or close to it.

Ash describes his thorough methods of research in the Preface, his methods are worth bearing in mind as you read, and I can only say we would live in a calmer and better world if more in his profession followed his example. No one can ever by completely objective. All of our personal knowledge is based on our personal experience, and our experience is never direct, but always filtered through the twin strainers of our cultural and linguistic conditioning and our personal experiences up to that point. Since no one can escape these factors (humans are not alone – wolves, elephants and crows, for example, have strict cultural arrangements), no one can completely escape bias. Ash recognizes his own, and states it up front.

I have not read every essay (yet). I have read random essays, and have found good, solid writing evenly present in all of them. Since it seems unlikely that I would just happen to pick only the essays in which these factors are present, I think it’s safe to recommend the book as a whole.

The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, from 2000, was not entirely accessible to me in that my foundational knowledge of the time and place is limited to what I saw ten years and a few months ago on the evening news. These are contemporaneous essays written for an audience with a presumed interest in and knowledge of the topic at hand. If you were not following the story that was unfolding in Serbia in 2000, possibly you would not have read the essay at the time, when the names of the players were fresh, to the extent that we were aware of players beyond Milosevic himself. The evening news, after all, is sometimes limited to being essentially verbal headlines, and headlines do not have room for the second string. In a basketball game, the important things happen on the floor. In politics, they happen behind the bench. To continue the metaphor, even in basketball you may see the play on the floor, credit the player, and never know the name of the assistant coach who thought it up. The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic hints at a similar arrangement. In fact, all the so-called “velvet revolutions” leave room for multiple and varying interpretations. As do the other kinds of revolutions.

Two essays that continue to have relevance, and will for some time to come, are The Invisible Front Line (2007) and Liberalism (2009). The first explores the past, present and future difficulty of walking our collective way through the real culture war of our generations (plural intentional): finding mutual tolerance between Islam and “The West.” Ash propounds that there are as many fronts in this “war” as there are individuals who will connect with each other across that line. That it will be “won” or “lost” in terms of the interactions of these individuals, not in the broad-brush actions of the few at the top. He may be right, I don’t know. I do know that the few at the top have the power to change the lives of those of us farther down the food chain. Their personal interactions fall along that invisible front line as much as anyone else’s, they just have a greater ability to shift where the line lies.

Liberalism is as elegant as it is brief, and addresses one of the more import and abiding debates in US politics. It’s easy to forget that, like many adjectives, “liberal” is relative to the time and place. Ash proposes a short list the basic components of liberalism present as foundational concepts supporting the United States Constitution. These basic elements are, per Ash, “liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress.” Thus Ash helps the reader remember exactly how revolutionary the American Revolution was.

If you read nothing else from this book, I heartily encourage you to read this three-page essay. Is has genuine lasting value.

No matter what your political leanings may be, you will probably not agree with everything Ash presents in terms of political opinion. I did not, but even where I did not agree, it was refreshing to have alternate views clearly expressed and based on reason and facts. Sometimes that opinion is his, sometimes not. A book this broad and as interested in conveying content is useful in its ability to present a kaleidoscope of concurrent events. Political opinion is overtly present in some essays (see Liberalism, above), and largely absent from others (The Strange…).

If you are at all interested in the events that have brought us to where we are at present, you will enjoy or at least appreciate this book. If you are more of the what-we-call-in-the-US a Conservative, you will have to be open to an alternative point of view, but will probably be surprised at the degree to which you find yourself in agreement. The idea that modern day US liberals are somehow “anti-Constitution” will not survive an honest reading of the facts.

And facts are indeed subversive.

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

2011-03-21T19:54:00.002-04:00

Reading The Fifth Witness is like riding on the back of an expert downhill racer. Connelly keeps the narrative fast-paced but the speed is always in control, and no details get skipped. The plot is complex and Connelly takes the reader through it with as much clarity as speed. Mickey Haller is a protagonist you can’t help but like, and this is a book you just can't walk away from until it's over.

In The Fifth Witness, Mickey Haller (also the protagonist in The Lincoln Lawyer), has shifted with the times, and focused his practice on foreclosure cases. As you might imagine, he has plenty of clients. One of them, Lisa Trammel, has turned her predicament into a cause, setting up a website, leading pickets, and offering sound bites to the media about the bank that is foreclosing on her, and one of its officers in particular. When that bank officer is found dead, the police, not illogically, arrest Lisa. It would be nice if the client was as likable as her attorney, but she isn’t. Despite evidence that she possesses some degree of intellectual faculty, throughout the case Trammel behaves like a three-year-old denied an ice cream cone. It's hard to get behind her.

For the most part, the characters behave consistently and believably. Mickey is a nice guy with a hard edge, and the nice guy wins out in a choice that seemed improbable, unless Mickey is not worried at all about being sued for malpractice. This was not a decision that made any kind of sense, and I wonder when in the future it will come around and bite Haller in the ass.

Not a bunny trail: The criminal defense attorney used to be, in reality and in fiction, a respected part of the legal machine, not only necessary but honorable. There are two ways of saying it. One is that the criminal defense attorney is all that stands between the accused and conviction. If you assume that accusation = guilt and therefore only the guilty are indicted, then you might tend to see the criminal defense attorney as almost an aider and abettor of criminal activity. The second way to say it that the defense attorney acts as a protector of the Constitution in that s/he sees to it that Constitutional principles are adhered to in all aspects of the trial, without regard to factual guilt or innocence.

In any trial, both the prosecution and the defense work to answer the same question: Can twelve jurors be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the defendant based on the evidence ruled admissible under in that jurisdiction? If the prosecution succeeds, the defendant will be convicted. The defense attorney’s duty is to highlight every inconsistency, every gap in logic, to find all reasonable alternative interpretations and present them to the jury, and argue alternate theories of the crime, even if it means making your secretary spend her lunch hour running through mud in high heels at the crime scene. No, wait. That was Perry Mason. Never mind about the high heels. It is inevitable in that scenario that on occasion a person who is actually guilty will be acquitted, just as it is inevitable that on occasion a person who is actually innocent of the charge will be convicted. Mickey Haller does his job ingeniously, and the title of the book is a clue to his defense endgame. Where Richard North Patterson would delve profoundly and with keen insight into the psyches of the characters, and Scott Turow would focus on the elegant details of the legal system, Connelly keeps the story moving by focusing on what the characters do. We come to know the characters through their behavior, just like in real life. Strategy is central to Haller's management of the case, but we have to wait to see it play out in the courtroom.

As happens rarely in books of this genre, Mickey Haller and his team are changed by the events of this narrative. The reader does not leave Mickey where s/he found him – Mickey Haller isn’t Perry Mason. It takes courage to shift a leading character in this fashion, and Connelly does it like a master. In fact, it almost slips your mind that the sudden changes in direction are being taken by a man with a long history as a criminal defense attorney, a man who spent years defending drug dealers, actual and/or alleged.

It will be interesting to see where future installments take Mickey Haller and those around him.

You can go and see the film version of The Lincoln Lawyer opening in theaters around the US tomorrow. I wanted to embed the trailer here, but the host site won't allow it. Bear with me while I move to a host that will. Meanwhile, here's a link to the trailer at imdb.

The Memory Thief by Rachel Keener

2011-03-21T19:52:00.002-04:00

Thematic similarities exist between The Memory Thief and Keener's first novel, The Killing Tree.

Once again, we are in the lush and various landscapes of the Carolinas and Tennessee. The Appalachian mountains like a spinal column hold up the geographic setting and the plot. The stage is set by lowland events. The mountains bring clarity, evoke the dénouement of the truth behind the deceptions upon which the characters have structured their lives.

Once again we are taken into the world of class tensions, engaged by delicate characterizations built of spun steel, Keener's deft ear for dialect, and deep insight into the nature of evil.

The story is told from the perspective of three daughters whose lives are joined by adoption and separated by adoption; whose choices, to the extent they have choices, are shaped by the kind of self-righteousness that leads to crippling poverty even in the midst of material wealth.

Angel opens the story with a brief, cryptic description of the night she sets fire to her childhood home, if you want to call it that. Quickly the narrative switches to a recounting of Hannah's story. Angel tells her story in a profoundly affecting, engaging first person, a distinctive and memorable voice. Hannah, a less accessible character to begin with,is suitably conveyed in third person, past tense. It's a successful use of the two techniques.

As is true with all of us, you can't appreciate Hannah's life without some comprehension of the lives her parents have led. Hannah is the late-born only child of Mother and Father, Mother having grown up in an extremely pious family firmly set within a narrow sector of the holiness movement. Father comes to this church setting as an adult, having first sought out the attention of Mother’s sister, only to be rejected by her. Mother was only too happy to step into the place abandoned by her sister. Hannah looks like this ostracized member of Mother’s family, an unhappy coincidence that spurs Mother to greater heights of concern. Is it the case that Mother's need to provide for and protect Hannah is in part driven by an unspoken need to rescue her own sister? If she does this right, will it make taking her sister's place a morally acceptable action?

Hannah is the only child at her school who must live life swaddled in polyester from chin to ankle and wrist to wrist. Watching Hannah struggle leads the parents to adopt Bethie, an orphan from the Philippines, to keep Hannah company in colorless polyester. Bethie struggles to speak, finally retreating from her stutter into communication by means of sign language and writing notes.

The girls' world begins to open on a trip to the Carolina coast when Hannah is sixteen. Largely as a result of boredom, Hannah finds a job, working at a motel with a restaurant. The work is hot. They give her a t-shirt.

The sisters hid in Hannah’s room while Bethie slipped on the extra-small T-shirt. She looked at her reflection and was as amazed as Hannah had been. So many sweet things could be seen. The soft curve of her shoulders. Even the rise and fall of her breath.

Let me keep it, Bethie wrote.

Hannah shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. Mother would kill us.”

Bethie shrugged her shoulders and wrote back, She already has.

Hannah internalizes her Mother’s fears that she will turn out like the aunt she so resembles and eventually takes the concept of modest dress to an extreme. Once again, instead of encouraging Hannah toward a standard less extravagantly at odds with the societal norm, Mother ropes others into aping Hannah, creating another artificial cocoon as she did through the adoption of Bethie. Mother's greatest hope, her cherished dream, is that Hannah will "choose" to be just like Mother. Against any visible probability, Hannah grows in that cocoon.

Angels’ story is in stark contrast to Hannah’s. While Hannah and Bethie’s parents carefully structure every moment of their daughters’ lives, Angel’s parents are present only as sources of danger by neglect as much as action. They provide neither guidance nor sustenance, and Angel grows up almost by accident, by her own lights, ransoming mercy by means of petty theft. There is no romance to this poverty, although Keener conveys well a kind of raw beauty in Angel's intimate relationship to the land. Angel finds in the land a kind of refuge, a bond as profound as it is primal, surpassed eventually by the need that drives her east into the mountains toward the answers she craves.

While Angel is abandoned by her parents’ physical and emotional distance, Hannah is abandoned by her parents' inability to see, to comprehend, by their sacrifice of compassion in the name of a sterile kind of purity. Both Hannah and Angel know what it’s like to be alone in a room full of people, to buy something that looks like acceptance by fabricating a lie of conformity.

Mother, Hannah and Bethie’s Mother, is a compelling character. Equal parts passion and coldness, capable of extreme cruelty precisely because of her devotion to the welfare of the people she mortally wounds, Mother is hypnotic. I wanted to put the book down, I wanted to avert my eyes from her brutality sharp as the edge of a well honed knife. I could not. Mother is as grand and fully realized a character as Lear, horrible and pathetic, powerfully capable of destroying out of love, needing everything to be just so for the glory of God.

Read this book. You won’t regret it.

Interview with Tom Mendicino

2011-03-21T19:40:00.004-04:00

I had the happy opportunity this week to see an old friend, Tom Mendicino, whose debut book, Probation, is on the list of finalists for the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Award. Tom was intended to be reading and signing at an excellent local independent book store, The Regulator on Ninth Street in Durham.

Write a book about a serial killer and no one will ever ask, “How many people are buried in your basement?”, and I was aiming to avoid the universally asked question, to what extent is this book autobiographical? My actual question was, given that the book is, as it says on the cover “Achingly honest (Vestal McIntyre, author of Lake Overturn)” how does Tom keep himself so much off the page. He's clearly deeply involved with his characters and the events in their lives, but there's still a lovely layer of cellophane between him and the people on the page.

The answer I got was “Well, no, let me talk about that, about that idea that books like this are inevitably autobiographical. I’ve never been married except to Nick. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never given anyone a blow job on I-85,” At which point, Nick chuckled and Tom added, ‘I have given someone a blow job on I-95.

“But I’m really not interested in writing about my own life. What gets me interested is other people’s lives. This was the thing that got this story started:

"One night, I think it was the last night I was here after finishing Law School, I was leaving The Electric Company (a now defunct gay bar in Durham), and I met a stunningly handsome, rather shy man, who eventually invited me back to his home. I figured, what the hell, I'm never going to be here again. I found myself winding my way into a North Raleigh gated community, and this was back when gated communities were still new things. He was very concerned that I not park in the driveway. And as I was walking down the dark hallway behind him, I tripped and fell over what turned out to be a standard infant car seat. His wife was out of town. She was six months pregnant, and he loved her, but something was missing. He didn’t really enjoy having sex with women, he enjoyed having sex with men and so he sometimes did. And that experience has stayed with me.”

I said, “You realize, of course, that you’ve just perfectly described a significant number of young husbands in the upper middle class of Charlotte?”

“Really? So I got it right.”

“Yes. You got it right,” I said. (Please – they don’t call it the Queen City for nothing.) “But I’m also going to assume that every city large enough to have an old money country club has such a sub-set in the upper ranks where someone’s mother can walk in and insist that everyone act as though nothing whatsoever had happened. But that takes care of my second question as well, which was why North Carolina? As I said before, the geography here is interior.”

“Well, if I’d had that experience in Boise, I’d probably have put it there, but it didn’t and I had spent time here, and…”

“You could get away with naming him Andy.”

It took a while but Tom did finally confess that the use of the name Andy was intentional. I'm sorry, but you either get that or you don't.

I asked also about process - "It's something that fascinates me – an actor’s process of building the character, the director’s process of bringing a cast together in a way that communicates the play – some writers work from concept, some from plot, some from character – "

“The plot was cobbled out of characterizations," Tom said, thankfully cutting me off. "I’m an aleatoric writer, characters interest me, sometimes events you see or experience – I had one recently in a train station that will find its way somehow into the next book ... an unbelievable display of uncaution..." Nick cut in with, "Of foolish narcissism." [Tom and Nick described the incident, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, it just wouldn’t be fair.] It’s the opportunity to explore life or experience from a point of view not my own.”

I told them that I was glad to get to the end of the book, read the acknowledgments and, “Learn that you’re still Mrs. Ift. What would either of you tell people who want to be together for 30 years or more, as you have?”

Tom said, “Well, I am Mrs. Ift. But, seriously? …it’s Nancy with the Laughing Face[the song by Frank Sinatra], which everyone assumed was about big Nancy Sinatra, and it wasn’t. It was about little Nancy Sinatra, his daughter. But to quote big Nancy Sinatra when she was asked why she never remarried after Frank moved on to Ava Gardner and all the others - I’m still Mrs. Ift because I’m an Italian wife and I married once and I married for life. You have to have the willingness to commit to it and you can’t have unrealistic expectations.” Nick added, “One of the great ridiculous fictions we have bought into in this country is that people can be happy all the time. You aren’t going to be happy every second of your time together, and it’s foolish to expect that.”

In keeping with my running preoccupation with conversion experiences, I noted that I placed it in the scene where Andy rests on the floor of what had been his bedroom with Alice, whereas Tom had placed it later, when he tells himself "Get out of bed. Shower. Check out. Move on." This led to discussion of meaning as written and the meaning invested by the reader. I could only say that moment in the empty house was pivotal for me as a reader, and as something that I could relate to – the experience of making sure you pack yourself as well as your things when you leave a place. I saw the moment of “conversion” – in this case Andy’s acceptance of himself and everything that acceptance entailed, as being off-page, and Tom felt is had been placed rather clearly and overtly on page.

And I want to make clear, something I failed to do in the course of the conversation, I'm not talking about a conversion from straightness to gayness for Andy, Andy was simply discovering how to be what he already was, and perhaps that is the core of conversion, the discovery of what can be lived as one's own truth. But I shall put away my soap box.

The other thing I realized in the course of the discussion was that I felt Alice had been left unfinished, and Nick reminded me of her new house, her new engagement, her upcoming marriage, all of it indicating her successfully moving on. This is perhaps a gender issue, but to the extent that fiction can reflect reality, I imagine Alice’s new life as being constructed from defiance on the rebound, and am fairly certain that it will unravel in the not too distant future – but that is clearly beyond the scope of Probation. But I wonder if some reader won't provide this book with its own version of The Wide Sargasso Sea where we learn how the first Mrs. Rochester went mad and wound up in that attic. If you have read Jane Eyre, you really should also read The Wide Sarggasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Probation is phenomenally driven by all the characters, of course most strongly by Andy but also by Father McGinley, and one can’t help but care about the other man caught in the bathroom stall on I-85. What happened to him each reader gets decide for her- or himself.

All of which makes me look forward eagerly to the next book, which Tom describes as a study of family conflict set against the backdrop of the 2008 Democratic Primary in Pennsylvania. Unlike Probation, this next book will be as dependent on place as on character and moment in history.

“It’s set in South Philadelphia," Tom said, "Where we live, and it could not take place anywhere else. The bulk of it takes place in the 7 weeks between the Ohio Democratic Primary and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary in 2008. The focal characters are two brothers, the older one is gay, lives above a barbershop, and is a stylist. The younger brother went to college, law school, married into a solid mainline family and is firmly upper-middle class. It’s a look at the incendiary effect of the election on class divisions, divisions based on sexuality and gender, a marriage already in crisis over loss of a daughter in a car accident.

“I think it’s harder for men to understand the electrifying effect Hillary Clinton’s candidacy had on women, but the depth of anger …”

Nick cut in “Never in my life have I heard the N-word bandied about - quite openly. It was astounding.”

“It was the most divisive thing I’ve seen,” Tom concluded. We learned we had both worked on the Obama campaign, and both knew women who had been Clinton supporters who found their way into heartfelt support for Obama after he chose Joe Biden as his running mate, in at least some cases because of now Vice President Biden’s long, consistent and effective support for legislation that has made a positive difference in the lives of women.

I don’t have a spiffy ending, no neat bow to tie everything up in. We had covered the main points. Those with cameras handy took photos, we talked for a few minutes about past mutual friends and parted ways.

There's no other way to end this:

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons

2011-03-21T19:38:00.002-04:00

Mr. and Mrs. Rosemblum are able to be among the lucky few who escape Berlin before Hitler and his ilk put their plans for the eradication of the Jewish people into full effect. When they arrive in England, Mr. Rosenblum eagerly pursues the path of assimilating as completely as possible. Mrs. Rosenblum misses her home. Relations between the two remain cordial, but distance develops.

Mr. Rosenblum at first thinks he has come to a place where a Jewish man can be an equal. He learns how wrong he is, that there is discrimination, even though there are not concentration camps, even though there are no ovens, there are golf clubs (i.e., private clubs formed for the purpose of playing golf) that still won't let you in, no matter how successful your carpet manufacturing business is, no matter how perfect your bespoke tailoring, no matter how hard you have worked to embrace idiom and erase accent.

But the British man plays golf, and so Mr. Rosenblum must also play golf. What is a man to do?

What Mr. Rosenblum does is purchase a large tract of land in Dorsetshire, with a house on it that could be called either dilapidated or in need of TLC, depending on your tendency to be generous.

And he builds his own golf course.

Author Natasha Solomons based this novel on the experiences of her own grandparents, arriving in Dorsetshire following evacuation from Germany. It is clearly a labor of love, and the novel begins to take off once the Rosenblums reach this beautiful place, full of people who are either quaint, welcoming, and tolerant of if puzzled by the newcomer who wants to mae a golf course, or inbred upper class types who invite the unwitting Rosenblums over as amusement for their other guests, who will stay for dinner after the Rosenblums have left when cocktails are over.

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English has something of Babette's Feast about it, the desire to do a thing for its own sake, whether anyone else understands it or not. Also in common with Babette is the theme of embracing the place where you are, and finding the joys it has to offer, whether they are the chance to build a golf course where no golf course has been dreamt of before, or the rediscovery of the flowers of one's childhood.

Solomons writes with a gentle style, aware that her protagonist will seem a little silly, perhaps ridiculous, and investing him somehow with a kinds of rare dignity, his determination and courage overcoming the strange dream of building a small course to rival the links of St. Andrews, or Bobby Jones' achievement at Augusta.

It's a gentle book, filled with insight, and poignant moments. It should be enjoyed without hurry, but maybe with a glass of really good wine.

Otra Vez by Ernesto Guevara

2011-03-21T19:35:00.003-04:00

Otra vez is a travel diary, it's transparently personal, almost hypnotic in the simple, personal, unguarded way Guevara writes of his travels. His writing has a natural elegance, unstrained, as if he were engaged in a private conversation with the reader over some wine after a good meal.

His love for his native Americas is palpable, especially in the descriptions of the ruins he explores as he moves northward from Argentina to Mexico City, where he rather casually mentions the meeting with Fidel Castro that changed the course not only of his own life but of the lives of thousands of others.

And suddenly the text changes. Something has happened between the last travel diary entry and the passionate torrent of belief that ends the slender volume.

In common with Born Again in Bhagdad, the crucial thing happens off-page, and that's the conversion experience itself. I continue to think about why and what that is. Is it because these moments happen with such speed that we can't take the time to write them down as they happen? Is it because there's something inherently ineffable about any conversion experience? Make no mistake, Guevarra may have been ideologically a communist before he met Fidel Castro, but he was a fire-breathing true-believer only afterward.

I'm saying nothing here about the politics, or the content of the politics. I became interested in personal stories that weren't usually seen as travel narratives, and have begun seeking them out and looking at them from that angle. And seen from this angle, Otra vez is an extraordinary personal narrative of making one's way through South America on very close to no money at all, and Guevarra's descriptions of the ruins made me weep that he didn't choose to be a writer instead of anything else.

While they have much in common, Bhagdad is all about explaining, convincing, the stories are structured to bring the reader if not to agreement, then to understanding, and is written toward a presumed audience. In Otra Vez, the text is comprised of musings to the writer himself, and Guevara's conversion needs no explanation, it burns the page.

For me, the most riveting moment of Otra Vez was when Guevarra says he is convinced by the figures on the some ruins that "We Americans"
came originally from Asia. My Anglo-centric education rebelled, my concept of myself and my ancestors who came here in boats changed, and my historical paradigm changed.

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

2011-03-21T19:33:00.001-04:00

Rose Mae Lolley grew up in Alabama, an only child in what should have been an idyllic setting. Except for the fact that Daddy beat Momma right regular, Rose Mae's life was pretty sweet, until Momma left suddenly, and Daddy turned his fists in her eight-year-old direction. At eighteen, just shy of her high school graduation, Rose Mae followed her mother's example and fled. She met and married Thom, and gradually buried the fiery, boisterous Rose Mae under layers of Ro Grandee, dutiful (and bruised) wife.

One day Ro decides to drive her elderly neighbor and only friend to the airport, and meets a gypsy. The gypsy tells her, after a mere three card read during which Rose Mae leads Ro to steal a book from the gypsy's bag, "It's him or you."

It's not so much what the gypsy tells Ro that begins to push things in new directions as it is that Ro knows the gypsy. Or, at least, Rose Mae did.

Joshilyn Jackson never puts a foot wrong in this book. I dare anyone to put it down before the end of Chapter 4. From this point, breaks in the fast-paced narrative occur at natural places, the story rests where it needs to, and I felt I was interacting with a living thing, the story told itself, naturally, and I was along for the ride, and what a ride!

The characters vibrate off the pages, each one a unique voice, even to the split between Rose Mae and Ro, and their eventual nascent unification in the new identity she strives to create for herself, a deliberate being, not the result of a collection of reactions to negative stimuli. After all, she lived with violence all her life, only as Ro in her relationship with Mrs. Fancy does this deeply wounded woman experience anything like a healthy, normal relationship. And she doesn't really know what to do with it.

Jackson's use of dialect is precise, colorful, and realistic. Her local color meets the same high standard, and he insight into human nature sent me reeling in a couple of places.

While Jackson uses a deft feat of irony to turn the narrative, a set up few writers could pull off as well as she does. My one difficulty with the story was the abruptness with which it ended, or perhaps that's just my desire to know what happens next in the life of Rose Mae, who prefers to be called by the name she's given herself.

Private by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

2011-03-21T19:32:00.001-04:00

Private refers to the international, profoundly exclusive private investigations firm headed by Jack Morgan. It has a twin corporation, Private Security, run by Jack's twin, Tommy Morgan, Jr., three minutes older than Jack. The brothers have a complex and complicated relationship.

Jack keeps an eye on the operations of the company's offices in New York and Europe as well as in Los Angeles, the office he personally heads, and where this story is set. While the client list is (mostly) swank, the cases they bring Jack would be equally at home in any gutter. They're just like us, only they can afford to hire Jack.

Against a backdrop of his own personal and familial troubles, Jack is working three challenging cases. First is the murder of a good friend, married to another good friend, who is, naturally, the prime suspect, and now Jack's client. Jack has a personal stake in finding her killer - he introduced the couple. Second, Jack's maternal uncle, a major player in pro football management, brings him a delicate issue that must be settled quickly with zero publicity. These two cases are fully in Jack's hands, and are told to us in the first person from Jack's perspective.

The third case, told mostly in the third person and from the perspective of one of Jack's investigators, Justine Smith, is a long string of vicious and apparently absurd murders of East LA high school girls. (If anything emerges from this book in film format, it will be the Schoolgirl Murders. Blood, gore, evil geekiness and screaming girls - it's a sure bet.) Justine is described as an intelligent, talented, high-powered investigator (also Jack's ex-lover while Jack is busy shtupping his Irish Secretary, Colleen Molloy) and Justine ably works her way through a variety of obstacles in the way of solving the mystery of who is killing the girls and why, even when faced with deep personal shock and loss.

The Schoolgirl case especially involves numerous characters, and some are fairly out there. The other two cases are solved with some basic , old-fashioned gumshoe type work, albeit the technology has changed since the days of Sam Spade. But a stake out is still a stake out, even with a parabolic mike.

Schoolgirl, though, that requires heavy technological guns, and they are here in plenty. I blame CBS for this - all the technical wizards on their crime dramas are extremely, well, extreme. In return for their genius, they get a level of love and tolerance, not to mention workspace perks, the most generic of us can only imagine, and completely out of balance with anything that would happen in real life. (I'm not talking about you, Abby.) But the trend is a little confining, and also becoming hard to believe. In this novel, the phrase "over the top" kept coming back at me, especially with the inclusion of both Mo-bot and Sci and their depths of personal oddity. Give me one genius who is allowed personal luxuries at work that make Donald Trump's personal penthouse look average and maybe I could believe it if that character had something that made her or him different in some enormous but credible way from the rest of humanity. I could go for it then. Two? It's like fruitcake in July - maybe you like fruitcake, but it's just too much.

The structure follows a format that's becoming more common and that I personally don't like, which is extremely short chapters, designed to fit into a coffee break, or a short ride on the subway. It's a matter of taste, pure and simple, but just like the time to get caught up in the narrative a little more deeply than the choppiness of short units allows, unless you just ignore it and keep on reading.

A major hurdle for me was that I simply do not like Jack Morgan. When you create a character who is born to money, good-looking, and highly successful at what he does, living a life of high-octane adventure you also have to give that character some features that allows a reader whose fairy godmothers were drunk at the Christening to feel a sense of humanity about the character, some way in to relate to him or her.

In this case, the flaws Patterson/Paetro have given the hero are not in any way endearing. Jack treats women like Dixie cups (his behavior toward Colleen cannot be excused or made up for) then complains about not being able to keep a good woman in his life.

More difficult to criticize but I will anyway is the choice he made in the heat of battle several years before this book begins, the choice to carry one man and not another from a downed and burning Chinook. He could not have saved them both, since, as it turns out, the chopper exploded just after Jack and his wounded comrade got out. Oh, and he died, briefly, while on the ground. So, I don't blame him for saving just the one. Under the circumstance as constructed, it's remarkable that he got out himself. I do blame him that he made the command decision of which one to save on the basis of personal relationship, and not on the basis of which one was most likely to survive the injuries sustained. That made it a bad decision, and he should give himself hell over that, not over not going back for the second man.

And then there's Jack's Evil twin, Tommy, who actually makes Jack look like a good guy. The novel does provide some interesting insight into family dynamics and the human motivation for doing much of anything.

But here is what's good about the character Jack as presented - you cannot feel neutral about him. In the same way that Dennis Franz could make you either love or hate Andy Sipowitz in rapid turns, Jack did engage my emotions. Not all protagonists have to be nice guys. Some readers will adore him, I just didn't. It didn't ruin the book for me.

Private, the agency Jack heads is well-funded to the point that they can have a better lab than the FBI and local police, and enjoy all the perks of the modern electronic age, while walking the line between being restricted by not being cops, and being liberated by not being actual cops. Their individual relationship with the officers they have to work beside (especially on the Schoolgirl Killings), demonstrates that tension, and its positive uses. This is entertaining, and a sly commentary of the all-too-often failed state of the infrastructure for crime fighting. When the cops have to hire a private detective agency, something is very wrong.

This was my first Patterson novel. It did not make me an instant rabid fan, nor did make me swear off ever reading him again. I have asked long-time Patterson readers, and consensus is it's equally good, but some have felt it starts off more slowly than usual. I would have liked to be drawn in more rapidly than I was. I respect that Patterson gives credit to the rest of his team - no writer does it alone, even if they prefer to do the actual writing in solitude.

Private is an enjoyable read. Patterson fans will not be disappointed, and if you haven't read him before, maybe you'll want to give this one a try.

So Cold the River by Michael Kortya

2011-03-21T19:30:00.002-04:00

Eric Shaw, a talented cinematographer who has more potential than he does discipline to realize it, is unhappy with his life. He feels he deserved and continues to deserve More. The great break could be any day.

Once in demand by Hollywood directors, Eric now makes his living doing memorial videos from photographs, scrap books and other memorabilia collections when someone has died. He takes a pile of memories the deceased left behind and turns them into something that will become a distilled memory of the deceased for the survivors. When he just has a feeling about including a photo of an isolated cottage in one of the memorial videos, he sets off a chain of events that leads him to West Baden, and an encounter with a side of the universe most of us never see.

The place setting that infuses the story, sustains and makes it possible is a real piece of American life and history, the mineral bath spas of French Lick and West Baden Indiana. The resort at West Baden has been restored in real life as well as in the fictional world of So Cold the River. Koryta does an excellent job of conveying the impressive structure's beauty, as well as the feel of the surrounding countryside. The dome above the lobby area was the largest in the world until 1913, and in the US until 1955 when a larger (but far less beautiful) domed coliseum was built in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Equally real is the Lost River, and the unique mineral springs that can be found throughout the area.

So Cold the River is not a travelogue or a local history, but without the unique geography and the local history anyone would have been hard pressed to imagine such a place, and Koryta brings it to life.

Besides creating a living, breathing setting in which the story takes place, this book brings vivid characters that are human, and some who used to be. Which begs the question, do we cease being human just because we've left the body behind?

Josiah Bradford, a young man who is the last descendant of the infamous Campbell Bradford, now works as a lawn maintenance technician at the restored West Baden resort, not so quietly smouldering with rage over his lowly position in a valley his ancestor Campbell once mostly owned and definitely ran. Josiah has in common with Eric the sense of something owed him, of having been defrauded somehow, of the unspecified glories that should rightfully have been his and unfairly are not. Where Eric has several factors in his life to keep him grounded (including people who both believe and understand his vulnerability to dreams and visions), Josiah does not, and when Campbell himself arises from the dead with colorful determination to use them both, Josiah and Eric are put on a collision course. Campbell Bradford, you see, had been an extremely evil man, and he enjoyed it.

He still does.

Another great character is Anne Bradshaw, a slight elderly woman who brings the story a port of stability in a very strange storm. Anne is a brilliantly written woman, full of years and happy to have lived a full life as ordinary as she herself is aware of the non-ordinary side of the place she lives, occupied now with watching her life wind down, and happy to be of extremely practical use. She's a voice of reason as well as belief, a quiet kind of hero, a sweet, generous old woman with nerves of steel.

The only characters who are immediately vulnerable to Campbell are Eric and Josiah, because of terms Campbell himself laid out. They also have in common the chip on their shoulder, the resentment, the ego - the Pride, if you will, that makes them vulnerable to Campbell's manipulation. In Josiah's case that vulnerability turns him into a tool of revenge in the hands of his ancestor. Standing almost off the page, Campbell Bradford is a palpable presence, looming behind and thrumming through the narrative like the vibrations of the train he rides.

As genre fiction, So Cold the River will not disappoint any reader who just wants a decent, well-written shiver down the spine, or a well-planned and precisely-executed mystery. As literature, it provides interesting peeks into the depths of the human experience, and teaches us about our ties to each other, including how binding those ties can be, even beyond the grave.

Enjoy.

How to Be Useful; A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work by Megan Hustad

2011-03-21T19:26:00.002-04:00

This is an enlightening, entertaining, and useful book. Hustad takes her readers from The American Chesterfield (published in 1860) to "The Apprentice," one chapter at a time. Don't pass over the narrative portions, but there are handy bullet-point summaries at the end of each chapter in which Hustad takes the important content from the book(s) discussed and gives her readers some straightforward do's and dont's.

Particularly useful is the chapter Checking Yourself at the Door, in which Hustad takes on the topic of clothing, going to the great Hollywood costumer Edith Head, who said some nifty stuff, like "There must be something you want more than anything else. Is it something that is possible for you to get? If not, get it off mind and start again!" Clearly, this advice from a multiple Oscar-winning designer is useful in areas of life other than clothing and even career.

One of my favorite pearls from Hustad is "Define your current employment as Makng Your Boss Look Good while gathering up whatever wisdom you can in the meantime...." In the chapter on why you should ignore anything written in the period known as "The 70's" (with the notable exception of John Molloy and I agree with her about that), she says:

Once you start seeing your day as a series of petty, predictable interpersonal games, people become pawns - chumps whose hopes and fears do not need to be taken seriously. Being so quick to categorize gets you Dilbert coffee-mug wisdom on one end of the spectrum, Sudanese warlord wisdom on the other. Neither is appropriate for the office.

Now, I happen to have a Dilbert mug that I adore and enjoy using for my morning cuppa. But it would never grace a work space assigned to me but owned by someone who was paying me for my time.

The chapter Self-Deprecation does an excellent job of teaching the difference between this essential art (think of it as a kind of psychological akido) and the completely non-productive mistake of self-disparaging (which is more like slipping on a banana peel). This is a skill that has to be practiced, and it will make or break you, because it makes you seem dreadfully humble about things that are actually enormous achievements.

Example, and this is not from the book, I was speaking recently with a student at Local Major University who told me her pre-set script for the inevitable interview question "Tell me about your biggest failure" recounts how she on the fly re-worked her program for educating African school children about HIV/AIDS after she was on the ground in Kenya and realized her cultural assumptions about how the plan would work were all wrong, pulled a Hail Mary out of the hat and the project ended up being an enormous success. This young woman has a bright future ahead of her, and maybe she doesn't need How to Be Useful, but most of the rest of us probably do.

I strongly suggest that, unless you are deliriously happy with your current career-path, are vested and making at least six figures (not including those to the right of the decimal), forget that the title suggests itself to be for newbies and read this book. There's not a single chapter in this book that doesn't contain useful information to anyone who wants to work in any field.

Here' a link to the book's website: howtobeuseful.com. Have fun.

Probation by Tom Mendicino

2011-03-21T19:22:00.001-04:00

Here's a challenge - review a first novel, written by an old friend. A novel that is getting raves from major venues, praise that could go to the head of a man whose birthday is not referred to as "Mendomass."

There is one glaring irony, it brings me back to earth, and I keep running across it every time I read about the book. Probation keeps being referred to as The Next Big Thing of Southern Literature. Now, call me silly, but I thought Southern Lit was in general the product of Southern authors, and Tom's about as Southern as I am , oh - Canadian, which is to say, not at all. Further, the story is in no way that I could tell informed by its placement in North Carolina. There is truly zero local flavor - the events could have been taking place in Omaha and there would be little to no difference in the general feel of the book.

That's my big complaint. And I am aware that placing it in North Carolina did allow for an inside joke or three to be buried in the text. I do wish he had placed it in a part of the state where he had actually lived, and included more local flavor.

In a larger way, it doesn't matter. It could have happened anywhere because it happens everywhere, and the geography that matters is interior to Andy, to Andy's families, the one he was born into and the one tried to build with Alice.

I have one favorite quote and one favorite scene, both involving Alice. Here is the quote:

I kept my promise, Alice. I never told you I stopped loving you because I never did.

You asked the wrong question.

You should have made me promise to tell you if I ever fell in love with someone else.

My favorite scene is the trip Andy makes back to the house he shared with Alice, to pick up the personal possessions she has carefully packed for him, having sold the house. He slowly explores the rooms that were once the spaces that defined his home are now an arrangement of empty boxes waiting for someone else to lmake life in them. Eventually, Andy decides to take only a couple of particular items, but only after he lies down on the carpet in the place where he slept next to Alice for eleven years and falls asleep.

They're my favorites because they touch me deeply, in a place where I keep a few special memories of my own.

The story line reads like truth, like blood right out of the vein, and his uniquely dark sense of humor runs through every paragraph, making reading even the most difficult passages something that is possible, even, at times, enjoyable.

I knew Tom was smart. I didn't know he is a genius.

[caption id="attachment_1018" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Tom Mendicino"][/caption]

If this book had a theme song, it would be "Sober" by Pink. Andy Nocera (the protagonist) has spent his entire life trying to hide who and what he really is from everyone - including himself, it's a kind of addiction, the lying, the hiding, the rush of the fear of discovery. The change that comes into his life isn't just that he loses his wife, his job, his lack of criminal record, it's also that he doesn't really have to hide anymore. Can't hide, really.

That which was extraordinary, secret, sneaky and therefore either fraught with fear (see The Long Red Snake), or the thrill of newness and wondering if you'll ever see him again - that's mostly gone. New relationships can be had more or less in the open, and if not in the open at least not in the bathroom at a rest stop.

The chemistry has changed. Now, Andy has the potential to have an adult, mature, real relationship that suits who he is and what he is and what he wants out of life.

No wonder Andy spends half the novel being pissed off. The high is gone. Normal has arrived. Andy has to learn how to feel good with the sexual equivalent of sobriety.

Please be aware before you pick up this book that it is not an intellectual exercise in the potentiality of being or not being homosexual. The discussion is not Platonic, it is real-world, and the sexual encounters are graphically described, with an economy that's actually reminiscent of Hemingway. There are no frills, fanfare, or long, lingering looks. Just the mechanics. I have to tell you I found it completely non-arousing.

In fact, the whole book is reminiscent of Hemingway, if Hemingway had been any good.

There should also be a short word of caution. In my mind, In and Out is the movie version of coming out that is the cinematic equivalent of Gone with the Wind in terms of being an accurate portrayal of plantation life in Georgia before, during and immediately after the American Civil War. Both are not merely fiction, they're fantasy. (And being surprise kissed by Tom Selleck is probably not unlike being surprise kissed by Clark Gable, now that I think about it.)

But I digress.

Probation is much closer to reality, said the female reviewer who has no idea whatsoever how it is to come out as a 40-year old, married, gay man, especially in the newspapers and in an unplanned and uncontrolled way. The closest I could come to it is the way my mother found out I was smoking cigarettes. (The smoke pouring out around the edges the bedside table drawer was a dead give away.) That said, I wouldn't want a random 18-year-old struggling with his own sexuality (and what 18-year old doesn't, gay or straight?) to read Probation and think that sure that first year is gonna be rough but coming out to everyone will eventually be essentially painless, mostly cost-free and anyone who can't cope is just too much of an asshole to be bothered with in the first place.

Being forced out of the closet cost Andy Nocera everything he had, yes, everything, including the relationship he'd had until that time with his mother. That she didn't spurn him, that she stood up for him and made sure everyone else fell into line according to her wishes doesn't mean the relationship didn't experience significant change.

Or maybe she knew all along, and Andy was the one doing the catching up.

Andy doesn't spend time boring us with endless soul-searching, there are no long, rambling inner quests for the truth. Andy is no extravagantly emotional, blood-all-over-the-carpet, hysterical stereotype fag. It's all sheer description, place whatever value on the actions and events you like. There's a raw vulnerability to this approach: "Here's what I did. Here's who I am. Think whatever you want about it."

In Probation, fact trumps each and every time. Notice it's fact that rumps, not Truth, which is a much slipperier thing, but facts are what they are, you cant' change them, and in Andy Nocera, we've been given a heroic everyman, who happens to be gay, and learns mid-life to look fact in the eye and give it a big, wet kiss.

Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

2011-03-21T19:21:00.002-04:00

How do I describe this remarkable, brilliant, insightful revelatory novel? Okay, besides using all the adjectives I just piled together.

The image on the cover is a brilliant summation - the pony rides above the water, the fullness of its meaning below the surface. The fullness of all meaning lies just beyond that which is invisible to the naked eye.

Characters in the first-person share in a conversational way what they themselves know, none of them having a complete grasp of the entire story. That privilege belongs solely to the reader, who knows most of the pieces of the greater story and how they fit together, but each reader has to discern the meaning for herself. This is not a novel that allows the reader to be a non-participant in the creation of meaning. No spectator sport here. Life requires involvement, action, choice.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="199" caption="Frederick Reiken, author of The Odd Sea, The Lost Legends of New Jersey and Day for Night"][/caption]

I recognize that we are all magicians in some way. We are complicit in all we see and comprehend that what we see will never coincide with absolute reality.

As a result, the human brain must make a narrative. This I can say with certainty, and yet each narrative we choose will reach a point at which it no longer suffices. One narrative must inevitably be abandoned for another. In this way, any narrative sequence defers meaning, even beyond the point at which it appears to end.

Thus says the character we know as Zeno, the name he used as street-side puppeteer in his youth, who felt clumsy at managing the puppets and went on to become a scientist instead, managing molecules. Zeno serves a critical function to the every character yet interacts directly only with a mysterious woman with many names who threads through the plot like a pinstripe, changing the lives she touches and then blending in with the background. even as she herself changes from being Midnight the puppeteer to Helene-Ariadne the healer, exchanging day for night, as do most of the characters encountered.

Zeno recounts his youthful life as a puppeteer, his long-ago association with Katherine Clay Goldman, ( whose nickname as a puppeteer was Midnight), called by others Tess Eldridge. The FBI, who think she may have had a part in various events, have nicknamed her The Clay Monster, a deliberate spin on the myth of the Golam of Vilna. There is some speculation she may be among the lamed-vavniks, which holds that there must be 36 completely righteous persons (i.e., men) on Earth at any given time in order to sustain its existence, and discussion of why this cannot be. (It should make you pause, this reason.) After Midnight left his life, Zeno changed, decided to become the scientist his old friend later comes to for help. "How do I explain this aspect of my story?" Zeno asks. "My story was that I changed stories."

There are times in one's life when this could be considered good advice.

So one opens the book, and reads the first narrative, and it seems to be going to be a book about a woman who has two teen aged daughters and is anticipating the adoption of her boyfriend's teen aged son when the boyfriend inevitably succumbs to leukemia. I expected it would be about the integration of families. No. In the next chapter, Timothy Birdsey, who has shown Beverley the sunken carousel, attempts to help his bandmate /bedmate Dee rescue her brother Dillon, being kept in a hospital while comatose from which they try to rescue him on Beltane (a wonderfully obscure reference). Dillon is moved to the pool house of his parents' estate, and is ultimately rescued from there by Katherine Clay Goldman. At this point the story is picked up by an FBI agent who has been pursuing Goldman for some time, and seems to be about the possibility of a cult and mysterious goings-on. But then the story shifts back to Beverley, born Bejla in Poland, whose father may or may not have been among the 500 male Jewish intellectuals who were killed by the Nazis, two of whom may or may not have escaped, one of whom may or may not have been her father.

Heisenberg may or may not have liked this book.

Reiken achieves in each instance a unique voice for each of his characters, some of whom know each other, some of whom do not. We never hear directly from Dillon, the unconscious man who must be carefully awakened/integrated, and we never hear directly from Katherine Clay Goldman, which has gone from being Midnight to being Helen-Ariadne (look it up), and is the agent with Zeno's help of that careful awakening.

Have I mentioned that Zeno is the name of a Greek philosopher who more or less invented the paradox?

Along a secondary line, the book has a great deal to say about getting tangled in untruth leading to the creation of interior fissures, of multiplicity within the self, and the subsequent need for movement toward interior unity. I confess I liked this, as I often find myself fulminating against all the pop-psychology that advocates transactional relationships with oneself, which are actually not possible. Transactional relationships (forgiveness, for example) require at a minimum two entities, not one, and a healthy self is One.

But this is only my opinion, which, with the addition of about three dollars might get you a decent cup of coffee, depending on where you live.

It's also my opinion that this is not only a brilliant book, but a delightful and useful one, it will open up a point of view on life, if you let it, that you may have never considered before.

Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci

2011-03-21T19:14:00.002-04:00

In short: This is not a book for your granny, your adolescent son, or anyone the least bit squeamish, impressionable, or inclined in certain ways. It is an interesting, thought-provoking read for emotionally stable adults, well-written, action-packed, possibly the basis for a new series on the model of the Camel Club set. Only darker.

It's hard to write about this book. I enjoyed Baldacci's usual high-standard of writing. I enjoyed his characterization. The intertwining of plotlines is complex and masterfully handled, the timing so tight you have few natural breaks in the momentum to take a break from the story without losing the sense of it. From all those perspectives, it's a great read, an excellent book from an excellent author.

But there were things I did not enjoy, that left a taste in my metaphorical mouth, and stuff in my head I didn't want there. Up until now, Baldacci's books have been free of much in the way of described sexual encounters, and haven't eroticised violence. They also haven't been terribly graphic in the description of violence. In Deliver Us from Evil, the sexual detail is mild (and a little awkward) by comparison to most authors, but the descriptions of violence and torture are not, and there is potential for the violence to be erotic for some readers. This is a risk that has to be taken if some issues are going to be addressed in anything resembling a direct fashion. This didn't give me nightmares, but it has given me a good deal of afterthought, not all of it welcome.

That said, and as I'm not really all that squeamish and nothing in here can match the level of horror contained in The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugene Kogel (the definitive study of the Nazi death camps; a book that I don't recommend outside of academic necessity, which is where I encountered it and which did give me nightmares - for years), I do have misgivings about some of the content in Deliver Us from Evil. Besides a slide onto the greasy slope of realistic horror, Deliver Us from Evil has something of the roman a clef about it - Individuals and places symbolic of larger modern political issues. You can figure it out if you watch the news. Baldacci is often saying more than he says. Maybe I'm wrong about that, it's just my opinion, but I've always felt Baldacci knows how to load content into the words that make up the story the way a pastry chef puts that delicious cream inside a cannoli. You need the shell to hold it together.

The obvious issue the book explores is torture. I'm confident that the vast majority of us will agree there is a difference between forcing someone to stand on a stool for several days and flaying them alive. The remaining question is whether the two practices belong on the spectrum of what constitutes torture or whether they belong in different categories of thing altogether.

Is waterboarding torture? Sen. John McCain (nobody's liberal), who has been waterboarded, says it is. He's also not too big a fan of stress positions, having lost the full use of his arms to stress positions. And we have called him a hero in part for enduring torture - so are these things torture when done by some but when done by others? When someone has unlimited power and no oversight (as was the case with Kuchin in the Ukraine), the darkest fantasies easily find thier way into reality. Forcing someone to stand, kneel, or sit in a stress position for days in order to get information you hope will save lives may be torture, but it's not the same as flaying someone alive just because you can. But what is the difference? Is the difference one of inherent nature or of degree? Does the reason for the action come into consideration? Should it? Are some things just wrong no matter what?

Does the freedom to do the less horrible lead to the freedom to do the worse thing?

These are questions you will have to answer for yourself.

In Deliver Us from Evil, we are back in the world of Shaw, whom we met before in The Whole Truth and again in First Family. Shaw is big (6 and half feet tall - which beggars the imagination for a person in a line of work where blending in is necessary) and in constant motion; secure enough in his masculinity not to be threatened by a strong female counterpart; and as able to follow as to lead, as long as it's a good idea or an order. Shaw is capable of violence, but not driven to it, and still grieving Anna.

The primary plot of Deliver Us from Evil revolves around a character (one shudders to call him a man as that requires the realization that there are in fact humans just exactly like this) born Fedir Kuchin, now known as Evan Waller, Canadian businessman. Kuchin's father was Ukrainian and mother French (from Gordes, where some of the action takes place; in real history, Gordes was an Resistance community, awarded the Crois de guerre as a community for its actions between 1939 and 1945); as an adult member of the KGB Kuchin was responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of thousands during his work in the Ukraine under the old Soviet regime. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kuchin reinvented himself as a new sort of blot upon humanity, Canadian businessman Evan Waller, selling hordes of young women into the short-life expectancy of the global sexual slave trade. He lives a life of palatial luxury in absolute anonymity. Yet he yearns for the old days, for being known as someone to fear when he walks down the street, an odd balance to the elaborate measures he takes to isolate himself at an almost Dr. No level of privacy. You can't just drop by Kuchin's house for dinner, and there's no reason a sane person would want to.

Kuchin is the target to two groups, neither of them given names. One is British, private, off-the-shelf, and managing on donations and a little old-fashioned (but effective) in their methods. They began as Nazi hunters and have moved on to target men like Kuchin, for termination with extreme prejudice. This group knows about his re-invention of himself as Waller, and his trafficking of humans for sex slavery, but this isn't what attracted them - they are after Kuchin as Kuchin, the "real" Butcher of Kiev, not as Waller, faux Canadian flesh-peddler. Getting a major trafficker in humans off the street is gravy, but he did enough in Ukraine to make him a worthy target. Their strike teams are led by various agents, the one we see in action is Reggie, a woman with a dark past of the sort that creates a killer. She's a good counterbalance for Shaw, but not as completely realized as Annabelle Conroy, from the Camel Club series, but we have gotten to see Annabelle over more than one novel. (Baldacci and Mankell are the only male authors I can think of who are able to write fully credible female characters. )

In a parallel mission, Shaw and his group are after Canadian businessman Evan Waller, and have no idea of his true past. They want him for one thing, and one thing only. Waller has attracted their attention by being involved in a deal to move uranium into dangerous hands. They know Waller is into other nasty business, but their vision is focused like a laser on the one thing and only the one thing.

Naturally, the streams cross.

I'd like to say more, but I don't want to give away any of the plot, which is especially well-constructed, and full of surprises that actually surprise, from characters who develop yet remain in character. Why spoil it for you?

Having read Lost: A Search for Six among Six Million, Child 44, and Deliver Us from Evil, I would like to see someone intelligently address either in a fictional or non-fictional setting, the effect the Holodomor had on the severity of the Holocaust in the Ukraine. The two are deeply related, and no one that I'm aware of has ever taken a look at this interplay of evil begetting evil. We try to keep the lessons of the Holocaust in front of our eyes, to not forget, so we don't let it happen again (even though it has). We should take the lesson a step or two further into the past. History is a game of dominoes - nothing ever happened in isoaltion or just because.

The Exodus Quest by Will Adams

2011-03-21T19:12:00.001-04:00

In his new book, The Exodus Quest, Will Adams delivers another exciting ride through ancient history, filled with details and concepts that are actually based in reality (unlike another author whose name I'll let slide - we all know who I'm talking about). Controversial reality, but there's still a connection to known history, known people, known events.

Daniel Knox is the thinking person's Indiana Jones - an Egyptologist with a willingness to hurl himself head first down a dark shaft closed for centuries, and a mind full of actual knowledge about the past, where people were a lot like they are now. Knox shows us a past filled with people who loved, were both powerful and fragile, who had success and failure, and who eventually, no matter how great they were, died, just like the rest of us.

The book gets the details right, from Akhenaten's probable disease, the controversy over the possible existence of a Secret Gospel of Mark and its putative explosive content, to the potential for connection between the Theratuptiae of Ancient Egypt and the Essenes of Ancient Israel. One error is to lump in the Carpocratians with these two groups known for their asceticism, whereas the Carpocratians were known as being antinomian in their inclinations, at least according to their opponents. But then, history is written by the winners,, in this case, not the Carpocratians.

Which leads me to wonder if the comments of those opponents as to the Carpocratians complaining that the group help both goods and women in common should be read as that they held their goods in common and "their" women as equals . That would have been shockingly radical at the time, and could easy have been misconstrued by others as a different kind of communal living.

Also shockingly radical is Adams putting in print an ancient allegation from the Secret Gospel of Mark, which may or may not have ever existed as anything but an ill-intentioned hoax. What slips past most modern readers is that there's plenty of material in the canonical gospels to allow for a similar interpretation, and we miss it because we don't, for the most part, bother to learn to read Greek. (The Greek language has many words for love, just as the Eskimo language has multiple words for snow. There is philos which is how you'd talk about a friend or your favorite flavor of ice cream. A step forward in closeness was agape the word both Jesus and Paul use, and the word the earliest followers of Jesus used to describe their gatherings. This left them open to the accusation of immoral behavior, because agape was considered to be the precursor to the kind of love called eros. First you felt Philos, then perhps sometimes your feelings progressed into agape, and after that, eros happened. Just like now. This is crucial to understanding, for example, John 21:15-19, in which what grieves Peter is not that Jesus asks a third time but in the third question he uses a different verb than in the first two.)

The revival of the alleged allegation alone will guarantee sales and controversy, which in turn will generate sales. Also picketing, and fulminations by conservative (or, indeed, merely orthodox) Christians. Mr. Adams is fortunate that Christianity does not issue fatwas.

In one scene, the characters are listening to story of the destruction of Sodom, while working at a dig that bears on the Exodus story, in a book that will be published around the time of Passover. Passover annually commemorates the Exodus and it's associated events, and oral tradition has held that Lot and his daughters were rescued from Sodom at the same time of year as the much-later Exodus from Egypt. I love meta refs, intentional or otherwise.

It would have been interesting to have had some tie-in with the Armana letters, and the theory proposed by those who work in sociological models that perhaps the Exodus was more political split than geographic migration. This theory does explain the utter absence of archaeological indicators of the movement of roughly half a million people (maybe - I know at least one Old Testament scholar who reads the text differently) in the Sinai Peninsula.

In contrast to his first book, The Alexander Cipher, The Exodus Quest provides less in the way of information about the ancient artifacts and events being discovered, and more sheer non-stop action. We get little to no exposition about the characters who survived the previous adventure, possibly presuming that readers will have already become familiar int The Alexander Cipher, and I still don't know if Gaille's name is meant to be pronounced in an English manner or a French one. Is she "Gay-el" or is she Gai-yuh"?

Personally, I thought the balance between action and information in the first book was better. The Exodus Quest also in distinction to The Alexander Cipher felt rushed at the end and less like it concluded than like it stopped, if you get my meaning. I would have liked a page or two more to give the feeling that things had reached something more of a conclusion, a greater sense that the ends of this adventure were now tied. But it won't stand in the way of enjoying this book, if you can stand being open to varying interpretations of history and Jewish/Christian scripture, so go out and get it. Then, start this book when you'll have time read it straight through, because you won't want to put it down, you won't want to lose the express-train like momentum, a thrill ride that's a huge part of the fun of reading this book.

But there will be more adventure for Daniel Knox and his friends, I hope and expect.

A Most Wanteed Man by John LeCarre

2011-03-21T19:11:00.002-04:00

I'm not going to go so far as to say that only leCarre could have written this story, although it probably woudn't have been as good if someone else had.

It would also likely never have seen the light of day. Only someone with leCarre's stature could get published a book this courageous, this close to the edge of the reality we now find ourselves in but choose to ignore except as entertainment.

As compelling as each and every character is (no matter how little space they take in the narrative), they shouldn't be seen as purely individual representations. Everyone's an archetype, some are conscious of it. Tommy Brue, for example, knows himself to be a dinosaur, presiding over the terminal phase of his inheritance, Brue Freres, a Scots bank operating in Hamburg with a French name indicating the existence of brothers who never were; an anachronism in a world that doesn't know much anymore about ledger books, except in the figurative sense.

Annabelle Richter, who sits upright (as she should) and finds herself having to be certain she doesn't put a foot wrong from more than one perspective, is a thoroughly modern, highly-educated, self-determining Western woman who nevertheless finds herself swathed in multiple layers of baggy clothes and wears a headscarf to put her client at ease. It takes no time at all for Brue to fall for her.

On the other side, or I should say another side for there are far more than two, sits Gunther Bachmann, an old-fashioned spy-master, expert recruiter and runner of the original on-the-ground human eyes kind of intelligence gathering, now part of an officially non-existent Unit operating under a Joint Committee intended on paper to draw German espionage into a single coherent organization with one boss. The rest of the team is that: Drawn clearly as individuals, they nevertheless act as a team, following orders, blended thoroughly into the new way of doing things, deeply dependent on the kind of technological data gathering that it should scare you "they" can do, and actually do, all the time. Bachmann almost alone understands that data isn't knowledge, a point he tries repeatedly to make; a Quixotic exercise.

All the to-do flies like a storm around a young man named (not for nothing ) Issa Karpov, the son of a Russian Army General turned criminal and a Chechn mother. Issa is the creature of Russian culture gone awry anda become aware of the devastation wrought my his father not just as a person but as a nation on his mother not just as a person but as an ethnic group, and he has sided with her, with equal amounts of ignorance and passion. All we know of Issa is that he has been tortured, beaten in a Turkish jail for unspecified crimes, that he is broadly considered a terrorist either in fact or in potentialis; he is the eye at the center of the storm. Rather as is the case for his namesake, a lot goes on around him and because of him, but at his heart, Issa himself remains a mystery.

Layer after layer is peeled back to show us the history of the characters (please, this is much smeller than an onion), the way things got to be this way, at least in part, and details accrue like sand on the beach but they mustn't be ignored.

A Most Wanted Man begins with a pace that is almost laconic, and slowly builds, Issa the still point against which everything else pushes, until the story reaches an ending that will leave you as shattered as the characters.

John leCarre has given us a masterpiece that isn't merely timely, it is the times in readable form. It's all there - the anguish of irrevocable change both personal and cultural, visited upon us from outside somewhere, not our choosing; embracing the loss of the past and celebrating the resulting freedom only to find oneself in a new land without a road map; the violent clash not only between cultures but between patriotism and jingoism, promises meant and promises that are lies for what the speaker thinks express loyalty to a greater truth; and on almost every page the deep anguish of discerning the right thing to do no matter which moral lexicon you were raised with, if any.

We live in a world where we are collectively and individually unsure of who we are because we are collectively and individually unsure of where we are, or what. This is what it's like for those who are so fortunate as to live through one of the hinges of history. This is the situation we are in.

A Most Wanted Man is a keyhole through which we can peep at that situation. That you'll find it in the fiction section may make the experience a little easier to take.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

2011-03-21T19:03:00.001-04:00

I'm not merely excited about this book, I'm excited about this author. Helen Oyeyemi is a brilliant, original, unique voice in a world of also-rans.

White Is for Witching for me came on the heels of reading two books seminal to the vampire genre, and of course, in a story about vampires, the Biblical phrase "for the life is in the blood" never quite leaves the back of your mind. In White, the main character, Miranda Silver, a sliver of a girl, develops Pica, a disease that causes its victims to crave substances that have no life in them to give - chalk, dirt, plastic spatulas. The taking in of an inanimate bullet closed Lily Silver's life, cutting a hole in the Silver family that can't be healed or patched over.

As Miranda Silver, daughter of Lily, consumes things that cannot sustain her, the house around her consumes her, the not-living eating the living, who in turn eats the things with no blood, no life, in them. The myth of the Soucouyant reaches the pages, along with the acknowledgment that if one does not feed one's own life, move it forward, one must live off the lives of others, like Dracula, like the vampires Buffy slays. (BtVS as background of serious literature.) Trading one's own future for the consumption of the past of the other, of their potential future.

What has a soul? Can a house have a soul, a spiritual existence? Does the Soucouyant, the vampire? Miri's craving for inanimate objects, for taking them into herself and reconstituting them into her being represents her desire to not-be. Miri wears her mother's watch, stopped at the time of her mother's death, a death caused by violence, and is befuddled when a friend buys her batteries for the watch, energy to feed it, to make time move forward again. Time has stopped, so should she, become fixed, perfect, good.

Miri and her brother Eliot are twins, driven apart first by her disease and secondly by her acceptance to Cambridge, leaving Eliot to (perhaps) go to South Africa. But Miri has other twins, and isn't quite herself, sitting in her room she calls "the psychomanteum." A psychomanteum is a place designed to reflect, to contact the world of spirits, to induce an altered state, and Miri is certainly not the girl she was before a bullet tore her mother's life away in Port au Prince.

At first you get told which character is speaking, then you become so familiar with the different voices you simply know when the narrator has changed. Miranda herself is always described in the third person, as is Luc, father of Miranda and her twin brother Eliot. Luc is a lost man in more ways than one, and Miri, in her silence, remains a mystery.

White Is for Witching is gothic, but not horror. There's too much crammed into its few pages to call it just one thing. It's gothic, it's feminist, it's romance, it's current events, it's the impact of cultures against, within and beside cultures, its totally worthy of your time to read and I can't wait to see what Oyeyemi does next.

Here are some links:

To the site for the book (UK edition)

To the randomhouse page

To a lovely interview conducted by Bernardine Evaristo, herself an accompmlished author.

Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts by CiCi Mcnair

2011-03-21T19:01:00.001-04:00

This is the first non-fiction book published by Clarissa, A.K.A. CiCi, McNair. It recounts her experiences getting into and staying in the business of being a private detective.

Reading Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts is a lot like reading Sue Grafton at her best (which for my money was L is for Lawless), except the story is being told by a real person about her own life. It will make you want to put the book down and go learn how to skip trace.

McNair is a good, solid writer, handling the English language in a refreshingly crisp fashion, getting the details right so a whole picture can emerge. Her supporting cast are each well-defined, they feel real, and of course, they are real, but it's not so easy to put real people on paper as you might think.

McNair made me far more aware than I had been of the issue of counterfeit goods, how that industry operates, its impact on the larger political and economic systems, and the lives of those at the bottom of it all - the people who make the fakes, often in fear.

I kept waiting for the moment when the title would emerge naturally from a comment made by someone or from an experience recounted within the book, but that didn't come. McNair uses the phrase twice, but as a tag line. Doesn't make it any less true; does make it feel more contrived.

My favorite part of the book was the section that took McNair home to Jackson, Mississippi, where she worked often with her mother riding shotgun. In this section, McNair's writing took on the softness of a Southern vowel, without losing any sense that the jobs she took on were at least occasionally risky. Mississippi is more alive as context than is New York, where fashion tends to take the place of geography, even when the fashion under discussion is jeans and boots. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, only that the cases described could have happened anywhere, there's nothing peculiarly New York about the settings, even if NYC does have the largest Chinatown in the Western hemisphere.

There's also a lesson in this book about family tensions, pre-planning, and advanced directives, and the odd comfort of having what you already know is true confirmed by the observation of a third party.

You could easily get at least three movies or a really nice tv series out of this book. And I hope someone does.

I also hope McNair writes her next non-fiction book about packing for travel.

Jantsen's Gift by Pam Cope

2011-03-21T18:59:00.001-04:00

This book is about a ton of things, possibly more than Cope intended. I don't know where to begin. Cope is willing to openly discuss subjects most of us shy away from and she does it face-forward, with dignity.

Probably it would be useful to tell you that the Cope family (Pam, husband Randy, son Jantsen and daughter Crista) were living a fairly comfortable upper middle class modern American life, until the day that Jantsen died from one of those rare congenital heart conditions that have as their first symptom sudden death. He was fifteen. Sitting on a sofa, watching television. The Copes, their extended families and circle of friends were understandably devastated.

Someone established a memorial fund, and not long before the first Thanksgiving after Jantsen's death, the Copes realized they had $25,000 on their hands with which they could make a difference in the world to honor their son.

They began by accepting an invitation from friends who were involved in charitable work in Vietnam to go there over the first Thanksgiving after their son's death. Their experiences there led to the establishment of the Touch a Life Foundation, as well as the adoption of a son they named Van.

Touch a Life's first project was a group home for fifteen at-risk street children in Vietnam, with a housemother, food, medical care, clothing, and most important, an education - at the staggering cost of $2,500 a year. After the first year, Cope looked at the balance in Jantsen's memorial fund, made what most of us would consider a startling sacrifice, and went and got fifteen more kids in a second group home.

Another trip to Cambodia, in which Cope unflinchingly describes the Asian child sex slave trade, led to the adoption of three more children, two who were brought to the US for desperately needed medical treatment, and another who joined the Cope family.

While in Cambodia, Cope wonders if the lurid warren of shanties that pass for brothels will ever be made into museums, will the suffering that takes place there ever be recognized for the genocide it is. It is a simple, stunning, precise connection of the dots from one culture seeking to say who is worthy of being fully human in society and who is not to another culture, doing the same thing. Far from allowing modesty to tape shut her mouth in the face of injustice, Cope speaks out about the abuse of children in the sex slavery trade frankly. She challenges us. If she, a nice, white, suburban Christian mother can speak of these things, how can we turn a blind eye? We must look, and having looked, we must choose.

Some of the alarming statistics: Approximately 20,000 children are sold into prostitution annually from Vietnam alone. UNICEF estimates that almost 60% of the 45,000 prostitutes in Phnom Penh are children sold or lured from Vietnam, where a virgin can fetch between $350 and $450 from a Cambodian brothel owner. This is a lot of money for a too-large, hungry family in a country where $2,500 can house, clothe, feed and educate fifteen children for a year.

I was recently involved in one of those long and interesting conversations on facebook that end up including comments from people you've never heard of let alone met, and a man said that in his 39 years of life, he'd never had a white person walk up to him and apologize for slavery.

I responded that if I knew where he was, I'd do that, but since I didn't I apologized on thread, and said it also grieves me that it goes on today. (Seriously, do you think all that stuff made in China sells for such low, low prices everyday because the workers got paid? Please.)

So I was most intrigued by the chapters recounting Cope's experiences in Ghana, and the successful liberation of at least twenty-one children from slavery on Lake Volta.

Ghana, you may know, is home to the Elmina Castle,

[caption id="attachment_647" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Elmina Castle, built in 1482"][/caption]

through whose Door of No Return walked most (if not all) of the slaves brought to the United States. Elmina Castle, like Tuol Seng in Cambodia, like Auschwitz, is now a museum, a profitable tourist attraction dedicated to the ending of slavery in a country with its own modern economy dependent upon the use of child slave labor. (Not only in less-visible situations like the fishing industry on Lake Volta but also in the cocoa-growing industry. Ghana is the primary producer of cocoa in the world, and child slave labor makes the industry run there, as well as in Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon and Nigeria. Think about that the next time you reach for that Snickers bar.) Cope makes the complexity of the issues that create the situation comprehensible, while showing the answers that are, in fact, available to be used.

The need to rescue children from slavery on Lake Volta in Ghana led the Copes to another choice that, if presented out of context, will seem extravagant, ridiculous, as if they had lost their minds, when in fact, they were finding them.

As of August, 2008, they had 21 children out of slavery and living in the newly-built Village of Hope, which includes schooling.

But I don't mean this to be a panegyric. There is the random split infinitive. There is the glaring difference between Cope's attitude toward Jantsen, the child she gave birth to, and Crista, the first child she adopted, and who got very short shrift during the months immediately following her brother's death. But this is perhaps not something I can fairly assess, and Crista herself shows remarkable resilience and generosity.

There are passages in the beginning of the book when it feels as if the narrative gets bogged down too deeply in trying to convey something that can't be conveyed. The only way to understand the impact of grief is to experience it. That said, Cope does one of the better jobs I've read.

It's clear the intended audience is other white ("Everyone should experience being in the minority at least once"), well-to-do, conservative evangelical Christians, and Pam Cope's husband Randy does provide a section of the book, making it possible for male conservative Evangelical Christians to know that Pam wrote not only with her husband's support/permission, but his active participation enables them to read this book too.

I know this sort of attitude may seem archaic to most of us, but it's out there. I'm quite serious.

All of that aside, and whether you decide to support this particular foundation's efforts to end child slavery in Ghana and rescue street children in Asia or you want to choose a more secular approach to support, Jantsen's Gift qualifies as an Important Book, it deserves to be read, and the children deserve not to be forgotten.

If you didn't know about this before, you do now. And now, you have some decisions to make.

The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

2011-03-21T18:53:00.001-04:00

"Dammit!"

"You knew him?"

"He was one of the good guys."

The Ghost War is an enjoyable read, a bit of escapism, which could have been rather a good bit more. There are an abundance of (let's be generous and call them) typos that a proof reader should have caught, and I read a signed first edition, not an advance copy.

There are some problems that seem clearly the result of revisions being hurried. For example, the four-page description of a plane trip during which essentially nothing whatsoever happens. On page 79, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment is flying out on its collective 3rd deployment in five years. On page 82, however, "Many of the men in this cabin had never seen combat."

Trying simultaneously toconvince me of the military-professional, combat-hardened, ready-for-anything-ness of the 504th and the pervasive uncertainty of a maiden voyage does not work. This and the occasional use of the kind of Grade-B stock dialog quoted above are what keep The Ghost War from rising out of genre, something it easily could have done.

I was a little disturbed by the homo-erotic nature of John Well's (he's the hero of the piece) preferred method of killing. I was also curious why it was necessary in one sequence to kill a German Shepard dog while using tranquilizers on the people, and I wondered, as the dog is actually killed off-page, whether John used the same method with the dog. Would it still be homo-erotic, or should some other term apply? Anyway, why not just tranq the dog? C'mon.

I also felt my usual frustration with the rapid killing-off of characters who could be left alive for later use in a successful series. Even series with classically comic structures (which is that everything springs back to more or less the same state at the end of the book as it was when you opened the book, at least with the characters you're supposed to care about), interesting characters can recur, and bring a sense of grounding, continuity, to the series as a whole. The Wo Fat approach. I did not necessarily just date myself. One need not be so very old to have watched "Hawaii 5-0."

The best written sections are those involving Eddie and Janice. They feel real, there is no lack of genuine human hope, pain and disappointment. I should be more emotionally invested in Exley than in Janice, and yet it's the other way around. However, the scenes involving Eddie prove Berenson has the capacity to take the genre novel to the level of literature without losing the thing that makes it fun.

The Ghost War has a fairly high body count, the violence is graphic, not for the squeamish. If you just want an enjoyable diversion, that's certainly here. There are also, if you pay attention, some interesting peeks into the wheels within wheels that make the world go 'round.

Will the Vampire People Please Clear the Lobby? by Allyson Beatrice

2011-03-21T18:52:00.002-04:00

This delightful book by Allyson Beatrice puts the lie to the idea that online communities are not real communities, that they don't foster actual human-to-human connections, and that fandom is comprised of pasty-faced auto-erotics who have no life between eps of their favorite shows.

Did I go too far?

Beatice's introduction to life among the fen was by means of the world of Buffy and Angel, and her anecdotes come from that particular fandom. I'm not personally into the whole vampire thing, my original addiction was "ALIAS." I'm not going to tell you how badly into it I was but it was pretty damned bad.

Here's the thing. Common interests are common interests. Until not very long ago, if you just looooved a television show, you might be able to discuss it briefly with one or two people in your immediate geographic vicinity. The internet has made it possible to share the squee with viewers all over the world.

How is that isolating?

Exactly. It isn't.

Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby; True Adventures in Cult Fandom isn't filled with profoundly heavy insights - but it does have some inspiring ones into the generosity of strangers, and I'd like to recommend the chapter "The Internet Wants Your Daughters" to nervous parents, and the chapters "The Bronze is Dead, Long Live the Bronze," and "Save Firefly" to fans who want to get an accurate idea how message boards and the industry work.

Beatrice has a light touch, liberal doses of snark, and great insight. This is a smooth, enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.

To Baghdad and Beyond; How I Got Born Again in Babylon, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

2011-03-21T18:50:00.004-04:00

This book is part memoir, part travelogue, part polemic that splits again between religion and politics, and it serves as an introduction to the concept of the New Monasticism. It does a lot for such a slender volume. Much is being said in various venues about the New Monasticism, and I want to approach that topic in a separate review. There is a sense in which the book is also an apologia, both for going to Iraq and for the manner of life the Wilson-Hartgroves and some friends of theirs (an ever-widening group) have chosen.

I also should say now that I know Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove, and have many times been on the receiving end of the generous hospitality at Rutba House.

To Baghdad and Beyond begins with the concept of needing to be Born Again, and with the assumption that the reader knows what that's all about and agrees. Not all Christians subscribe to the concept. I fall into the group that doesn't, at least not in the sense meant, so I felt not part of the intended audience. This is not a criticism. Every book has to be written toward a particular readership. Whereas most books never find their way out of their target audience, this one has.

As background for those who would like to have it, all the faith groups who now practice adult or believer's baptism exclusively (as in do not ever baptize infants or small children) can trace their roots (whether they know it or not) to the Anabaptists, derived from the Greek for "re-baptizers." Bear in mind the first generation of Anabaptists had been baptized as infants, and therefore, their adult baptism by choice was a repeat of the action. Adult baptism typically (but not always) goes hand-in-hand with the concept of being born again. Some modern churches that do consider the experience of being born again the definitive mark of whether one is or is not a Christian also emphasize "water baptism," and some do not but consider it an act of obedience in imitation of Christ.

In its attempt to base individual and corporate life on the positive evidence of the Bible (positive evidence = that which is specifically mentioned,negative evidence = that which is not specifically prohibited, this is also the core of the divide over the use of musical instruments), the 16th century Anabaptist movement chose to shun infant baptism in favor of adult baptism because all the specifically mentioned baptisms in the Christian Scriptures are baptisms of adults. (Or they seem to be of adults. I will argue that the phrase "She was baptized and her household with her," [Acts 16:15] could logically be construed to include any infants or children who might have been present, especially since parents were considered to have absolute, life-and-death kind of control over their children at the time.)

To say the Bible should be the basis of your life begs the question, "Which Bible?" (Please, let that stimulate your own research.) It also ignores the historical fact that the Christian Scriptures were written by, to and for already-existing faith communities.

Part of the historic dispute over infant baptism versus adult baptism has to do with the peculiarly Christian idea called Original Sin. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understanding of the doctrine (which are the same and have historical precedence) is crucially different from the Protestant concept, rooted in certain writings by St. Augustine of Hippo which were declared heretical by the Church authorities during his lifetime. Does this make St. Augustine wrong? Good question. It's possible to look at the discernment process of the Early Church as less an exploration for Truth and more of a consensus of belief. In any case it was these condemned beliefs that were later taken up by John Calvin and those more radical than he. Some Baptist traditions are profoundly Calvinist, others are less so. End of short-course.

In the section describing his earliest faith-life, Jonathan says his youth minister, Andy Oliver, asked him what he thought it meant to give his life to Christ, and that he gave an answer that satisfied Andy. Since Jonathan was only seven at the time this happened, I'd like to know what he said, what the conversation contained. That would have been more interesting to me than the anecdote about the water glass.

And I'm spending a lot of time on this being Born Again and Baptism stuff because so much of the modern American Church will tell you, "That is the conversion experience, that's it, the end." All done, once and for all. Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised to read Wilson-Hartgrove speak more than once about conversion as a non-ending process, and that he tells us in the subtitle about a particular rebirth, not the only conversion experience he ever had, or that he doesn't expect to keep on having them. Every time I came across this concept in the book, I said a little "Yay" under my breath.

The profound irony that Wilson-Hartgrove served as an intern for one of the most conservative - not to mention hawkish - United States Senators ever to hold office (Strom Thurmond, R-SC), and took the post because he aspired to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis is sadly left unexplored. His choice instead to attend Eastern University has affected many lives beyond his own, including mine. I've gone over the little bit that's there several times, and each time, I ask the book for more, please, only it isn't there. I very much wanted to understand this critical shift in ways that weren't made available to me. I wanted the same transparency here that can be found in other parts of the book.

As foundation for the choice to go to Baghdad, Wilson-Hartgrove gives some discussion to the history of the concept of the Just War, an idea that became necessary to the Church after it merged with the Roman Empire, which was about nothing if not war. And road building, which was helpful to the war thing. There is ambiguity throughout this section, a good reflection of the tension between the desire to be good citizens under civil authority and the desire to be first and foremost good citizens of a kingdom not of this world. The book is not a systematic presentation of any sort of theology, it's an account of real experience, and real experience is messy.

Wilson-Hartgrove talks about our need to repent as a nation for our complicity in events like Saddam Hussein "gassing his own people," as part of his own struggle to decide how he felt about the approaching war and how he should respond to it, and to the evident need to free the Iraqi people from a cruel despot.

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis, during the war between Iran and Iraq, Saddam Hussein was our Flavor-of-the-Month, and we were funding and supplying arms to Iraq because we didn't want the Islamic Revolution to move beyond the borders of Iran. If you weren't around then, or perhaps not old enough to be paying attention, it's difficult to appreciate the depth of anger everyone in the US felt toward Iran at the time. Anger over the Hostage Crisis produced the policies that , on our side, keep us from engaging in much of a constructive dialogue with Iran even now. It was during this larger war that the Kurdish population of Iraq chose to provide the Iranians with a sort of rear-guard, guerrilla, one might even call it terrorist, action.

Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds who were insurgent members of a specific political group who were working actively within the borders of his country in support of a foreign enemy during a time of war. And we were actively supporting the Iraqi military in the war against Iran at the time. If we didn't hand Saddam the gas used on the insurgent Kurds, we may as well have. So, yes, to the extent that one feels this action to have been immoral or sinful, and to the extent that one feels oneself to have been a participant in that action (taxes and whatnot), it's legitimate to call us as individual citizens to repentance.

But also, while you're assessing that situation, imagine that we were at war with Canada and the Francophone population of Maine decided to fight on the side of Canada in hopes of eventually forming a unified "Acadia." (I made that up. Once upon a time, there was a Kurdistan. There has never been a nation-state called "Acadia.")

We'd probably do something about it. Hopefully something less draconian, but still, we would do something. Any government would do something to quash an uprising within its own borders.

In 1985, our elected representational Government deemed it to be in our interest to help Saddam Hussain stop the Kurds (whom he had in fact betrayed and who were therefore slightly pissed) from joining with invading Iranian forces. Seventeen years later, in 2002, The Powers That Were deemed it to be in our interest to use a version of the events of 1985 to create supportive public opinion here at home and to fire up Kurdish support for our troops as they invaded.

Wilson-Hartgrove buys into the gassing as an example of Saddam's despotic rulership, which underlay the concept of needing to remove him from power, and comes close to endorsing the legitimacy of other nation-states taking some form of action to do so. Most of us did, at the time, accept this statement and there's no reason in any case to think of Saddam Hussain as a nice man or a particularly good ruler. Wilson-Hartgrove's objection to the war itself seems at times based primarily on the action not rising to the standards of a Just War than on the more categorical opposition to war that might be expected from a burgeoning Mennonite. In doing so, he lets the text transparently reflect his own changing attitudes. There's a vulnerability to the telling of this story. That vulnerability allows the reader to open up her or his own ideas, and participate in the changes of attitude.

Practically speaking, and this is me now, once you begin to question the authority of the earthly state, you begin to move down a slope that's more terraced than slippery, but which requires you to decide where that authority should stop. If you oppose the power of the state to make war and exert the death penalty, do you also say the State has no business saying it's own grace over marriage, for example? Legal marriage, after all, is more about property than anything else, in that property passes down in lines that are declared legally legitimate. If you're abjuring or perhaps limiting the concept of personal property and private ownership of property (in the sense that led to Proudhon's pronouncement that "Property is theft"), then you have to go back and ask the question again. What's collective and what's personal? Does the lines change depending on the scale - a household can share goods in common more easily than a city of half a million. But a city of half a million can do things collectively such as pave roads and lay water lines that might be hard for a household, a street or a neighborhood.

So there is this tension, for the pacifist, Christian or otherwise, that cannot be resolved, between being a good citizen and being in opposition to a fundamental function of the state - any state, under any system - of the use of force to maintain order, and the extent to which the state can or should insert itself into the lives of the citizenry. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just acknowledging it, and the intense scrutiny it brings to bear on an individual's choices and actions. This tension, this scrutiny, is the positive spiritual fruit borne of the tension, because it removes the individual from the easy chair of prepared belief.

The other thing the Anabaptists accurately brought forward is the awareness that to be Christian is to be different from being anything else. During the centuries between Constantine and the Reformation, when the cultures of Europe considered themselves to be co-terminal with Christendom, this idea was easily lost. Even so, at some point everyone of us must answer some version of the question, "Are you God's man or Henry's?"

In To Baghdad and Beyond Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove answer that question by putting their bodies where their mouths are.

Speaking of slaughtered clergy, Wilson-Hartgrove describes visiting the tomb of Oscar Romero, and says "To the people of Ecuador, Oscar Romero was a saint." As true as this is, it's worth noting that Romero's Cause for canonization is stalled largely because there is the sense on the part of the Vatican that Romero's death was more political assassination than martyrdom. For my money, being shot while celebrating Mass because your faith leads you to take positions that are disliked by the powers that be the modern equivalent of a crucifixion. If Romero's death doesn't count as martyrdom because of the political context, it seems logical that you must also re-visit your ideas about Jesus' death at the hands of the Roman Empire.

Does God call us to obey the law of the land? Good question. I can point out that it was the ability to call on this principle, attributed to St. Paul in a letter he did not write, that made possible the "banality of evil" so beautifully documented by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem. (If you haven't read that most-excellent and important book, it should be the very next thing you do.) Does God in the Bible call us to question earthly authority? Which earthly authorities? Perhaps you should come to own conclusion.

Working with various groups, Jonathan and Leah finally make it to Iraq, along the way meeting people like Marty Jenko, who provides a profound lesson about forgiveness and gratitude.

From this point on, the reasons for going, the reasons for acting, and choosing, are woven into the narrative, we are out of exposition and into the course of events, and this is the best part of the book. It should have started there, and brought the other elements in through the course of the narrative, but Wilson-Hartgrove is at first concerned to explain to his target audience how a good boy from King, North Carolina wound up going to Iraq just as we began to bomb the place.

The brief discussion of Ghandi further provides proof that the Church (at least in America) is in deep trouble. To whom can we look for the most effective example of the implementation of the non-violence preached by Jesus? Not to any living Christian leader I know of. Martin Luther King, Jr., was by his own admission influenced as much by Ghandi as he was by Jesus. Ghandi, a man who accepted Jesus' teachings but rejected the Church that claimed to follow Jesus.

I found interesting Wilson-Hartgrove's reaction to the same statement received from two different sources. One, a trusted friend of like mind, who assures the team that God will take care of them. This comment is accepted as reassuring. Another from a friend who worked at the Pentagon (therefore, not of like mind) who, when Jonathan called to tell him what they were about to do, assures him the same thing, in the same words, "God will take care of you." This seems to have been less reassuring.

In one of the more dramatic moments in the narrative this assurance gets tested. It puzzles me that Wilson-Hartgrove does not consider that God takes care of them in the situation precisely through the instrument of the friend at the Pentagon.

I am fascinated by the phrase "abandonment to reality," which can be found as part of the narrative I'm trying not to describe in detail because I believe you should read it unspoiled. The Western religions tend to assume first of all that there is such a thing as ontological reality, and that God has something to do with that ontological reality such as having thought it up and keeping it running in ways that are according to his will (they also have in common that the creator of reality is to be spoken of in masculine terms). It follows, in this model, that to abandon oneself to reality is to abandon oneself to the God who runs it. Anyone who chooses to follow a man who got himself nailed to a cross can't expect that sort of abandonment to guarantee personal safety.

Most important, though, is Wilson-Hartgrove's realization, sitting there in the desert, that while he had book-knowledge of God, he had yet to meet God in those "dark places where we must go," to paraphrase an old Egyptian blessing.

Frankly, it is impossible to meet God, whoever and whatever God is, anywhere else.

There is some awkward struggling with metaphors from the Psalms. This could have been left out, Wilson-Hartgrove does best in this text when he's simply telling the story. What does work, and rather beautifully, is Wilson-Hartgrove's account of a fugue state under stress.

The rest of the book leads toward the early days in the formation of the New Monasticism movement. I'm leaving that topic alone for now, as Wilson-Hartgrove has another book devoted entirely to the subject, and I need to know more before I go shooting my mouth off in a global venue.

The Rutba House as it is now is not the Rutba House as it is depicted at the end of To Baghdad and Beyond. When I asked, Wilson-Hartgrove said he would not now use the phrase "Mennonite Worker" (which comes not from his own mouth in the text but is used in the text as a way of defining the nature of the place) to describe Rutba House. Things evolve, and sometimes it takes a while to know what something is going to be when it grows up.

If you aren't a professing Christian, To Baghdad and Beyond is worth your time as a look at what it was like to be on the receiving end of the actions covered so well by the embedded reporters. By telling the story of entering Iraq, their time in Baghdad, and what happened in Rutba, Wilson-Hartgrove provides a perspective on the invasion we would never have gotten from the six o'clock news.

If you are a professing Christian, To Baghdad and Beyond provides a useful challenge to the prevalent sense that all you have to do is get yourself saved and relax in your recliner until the Rapture.

The Meaning of Sarkozy by Alain Badiou

2011-03-21T18:49:00.003-04:00

"If competition, the 'free market', the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent."

Alain Badiou is a leftist philosopher, whose work you should read perhaps especially if you anticipate disagreeing with his conclusions.

The book, The Meaning of Sarkozy, uses the election of the current President of France as a focal point for discussing ideas. Thereby, Badiou manages to intersect two of my favorite things: politics and philosophy. And he writes really well, too.

The difficulty faced, of course, in this sort of consideration, is that Badiou is deeply concerned with what he calls "the real," and in politics, finding the real is like finding the net proceeds from a film. Ça n'existe pas.

Badiou claims, I think correctly, that the distinctions we are used to, those of right and left, which arose from the political situation following the Second World War, are defunct. What he suggests has replaced right and left is one kind of fear over/against another kind of fear. The first kind of fear, the primal and used rather brilliantly by one party in the last US election cycle, is "essential:"

"This fear, conservative and gloomy, creates the desire for a master who will protect you, even if only while oppressing and impoverishing you all the more."

The second kind of fear is simply fear of the first and its logical if not inevitable consequences.

I will just tell you that I took a personal comfort in the passage in which Badiou refers to Lacan's cure for depression: shifting from a sense of impotence to impossibility.

But what does this actually mean? A number of things. It means finding a real point to hold on to, whatever the cost. It means no longer being in the vague net of impotence, historical nostalgia and the depressive component, but rather finding, constructing and holding onto a real point, which we know we are going to hold on to, precisely because it is a point uninscribable in the law of the situation, unanimously declared by the prevailing opinion to be both (and contradictorily) absolutely deplorable and completely impracticable, but which you yourselves declare that you are going to hold onto, whatever the cost; you are then in a position to raise impotence to impossibility. If you hold onto a point such as this, then you become a subject bound to the consequences of what is unanimously held to be a crazy disaster and happily quite impossible, but to which you grant reality and thereby make yourselves an exception to the depressive syndrome.

Long quote. Forgive me. I find this concept of taking oneself out of the context of being the object of a situation over which one has no control and choosing to be the subject of a "sentence" one writes for oneself deeply liberating on a personal level. If your life has ever gone to pieces rapidly and unpredictably, this sort of idea is actually rather useful, without regard to anything else in the book.

But I digress.

The core of the book can be found in the chapter "Only One World," with which I must argue that while Badiou is correct in principle, in fact, there is not one world, there are at least two. I move back and forth between them every day. I agree, however, that it is this construction of the two (at least) worlds, and the reinforcement of their literal and ideological existence that creates much of the agony in the world today, while promising more tomorrow. (I was reminded of Thomas Merton's Conjectures of Guilty Bystander as I read this chapter. The second world, the world of deprivation, is the direct construction, the denied child, of the first, or at least of the first as it presently exits.)

ETA: Here is how to tell if you livein the First World or the Second. If you think of anything smaller than a twenty dollar bill as useless wallet-clutter, You are a First World resident. If a Twenty (oranything larger) is useless to you, you live in the Second world.

Badiou is a damned smart man, and I hope I've done his concpets justice. As I say - this book is worth reading because it will make you think, never a bad thing. Re-examining our preconceptions is a very healthy activity

The Animal Dialogues; Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs

2011-03-18T18:28:00.005-04:00

I've been reading this book slowly, as if I were on a desert island and it was my last chocolate bar.

In The Animal Dialogues; Uncommon Encounters in the Wild Childs brings a series of essays about meeting animals in their natural setting, without romanticism or condescension, and there's no anthropomorphizing, either. The animals he discusses are entirely themselves, and they belong to no one. His writing is vivid, clear, and engaging, filled with metaphor that makes the narrative sing. The stories themselves are in each case interesting, and emotionally engaging. The story Dog left me angry with Childs for a few days. The story Raven will challenge every preconception you have about birds, animals in general, and the questionable uniqueness of humans and a sense of the sacred.

Delving into this book is more than just reading, it's opening your life to the natural world around us, the one we (supposedly) came from in the first place.

Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson

2009-03-30T18:41:00.004-04:00

Gerald Sampers, long-time resident of Tuscany, has had his home fall down the side of the mountain where it was formerly perched, and on his birthday. He and his guests just happened to notice the garage had gone and got themselves out in time. The following day, while surveying the damage from a helicopter, Sampers makes an offhand remark that's taken much too seriously by the helicopter pilot. The consequences are as bizarre as they are far-reaching, and the end result is an opera you will wish you could actually see and won't soon forget.

Sampers is the narrator of most of Rancid Pansies. He's also a writer, a cook, and a delightfully arch critic of the world around him. As a narrator, he's distinctly unreliable. As a social critic, he's capable of delivering insightful observations so sharp you could cut yourself on them, without ever becoming base. It's a neat trick, I'm not sure how he does it. At the same time, I was never sure if he (the character) was being deliberately thick for the sake of humor when he took a sign at a local church for a Pilates class as being a casting call for an upcoming Passion play, or if Samper really does live a life as récherché as that.

As a cook - well. Don't read the first part while you're eating, promise?

Hamilton-Paterson's style is nothing short of brilliant. Anyone who can combine the phrases "Dernier cri" and "Blowing chunks" properly in a single sentence has my admiration.

Rancid Pansies is utterly hilarious, and it makes a point or two. Don't miss it.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Sarah Jane Gilman

2009-03-23T21:34:00.006-04:00

The review for Undress Me in the Temple Of Heaven by Sarah Jane Gilman can now be found here.

The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano

2009-03-17T14:51:00.002-04:00

T. S. Eliot wrote

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This debut novel has three basic things to recommend it: A clear, consistent voice in the person of the protagonist, nice clean prose, and nice clean vocabulary.

I don't personally have an issue with words we tend to call profanity, when they're used in appropriate ways and not to the point of boredom, but I also think it's all too rare to read something that's both adult and something you could hand to your mother. You can hand this book to your mother and know she'll enjoy it.

The book jacket says the story is about identity. I found it to be more about Stockholm Syndrome, which is in turn about identity I suppose, to the extent that identity is a function of volition. Melody, the protagonist and narrator, was truncated at age 6, as a result of witnessing a Mafia hit and her parent's decision to testify for the prosecution. The result is a lifetime of rotating, common names each three syllables long, none of them really hers. It's her job to be invisible, but all of us have an inborn need to be seen.

It troubled me that the terrible things that are confessed are handled so lightly they don't feel as terrible as they are, nor are they always reacted to as being terrible, perhaps because other characters have done the same or worse. Or perhaps because Melody's entire life has been shaped by an act of unimaginable violence.

Melody floats through the narrative, both in terms of the linear progression of the story and the sense of meeting her via the medium of the story. On the one hand, she feels she lost long ago the ability to act as agent in her own life, and yet the major turning points of her life have been the result of her (often inept) exercise of the little choice she had.

There are elements of the modern fairy tale, but these fairy tale elements are grounded in a context that makes them work. She's used to being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, told to go and then going. It is, fact, the context of her life. Melody's voice is child-like but powerful, and the effect is to create a story that's like 21 grams of protein hidden in a slice of angel food cake.

Here's a link to a short essay David Cristofano wrote about writing in a female voice.

The Alexander Cipher by Will Adams

2009-03-13T15:16:00.004-04:00

A legendary king, a vast treasure, a mystery passed down through the millenia, ciphers in ancient languages, adventurous buddies, a damsel in distress, the exotic sands of the desert.

The Alexander Cipher delivers all this. It's well-written, exciting, engaging. I had a great time reading this book. It's a good, old-fashioned treasure hunt adventure in the spirit of Indiana Jones, only believable.

Which brings me to one of the things I liked most about it - female characters written by a male author who read like people who might actually exist. None of them are exactly feminist role models blazing a trail through modern literature, but still refreshing.

There's no sociological sub-text, no axes being ground. It's not The Book to Change the World, or Read This and Shatter Your View of History As You Know It, it's just a ripping good yarn that happens to be based in some actual history. The history is presented in very conversational ways, it's not at all preachy, no three-page expositionary soliloquies. It may even get you curious enough to learn some more.

I was casting the movie in my head.

Three Books of Poetry

2009-03-02T17:04:00.009-05:00

I don't often get around to poetry, odd, since it's something I love. These came to me from A Midsummer Night's Press.

Fortune's Lover, a Book of Tarot Poems, by Rachel Pollack.

Pollack, who has written a number of books on the Tarot, draws on not only the more familiar Ryder-Waite deck but the Merlin deck and on Kabbalistic traditions, mathematics, and Jewish Yemeni folklore as she gives modern lyric expression to the meaning of the Tarot deck. There's a dash of Tao in there, as well. Appropriately enough, she begins and ends with The Fool, the middle portion of the book being given over to Magician, High Priestess, Empress and Emperor, Lovers, Wheel of Fortune, Hanged Man, World, Devil, and Tarot Pi. Each poem has a style and flavor suitable to the essence of the card/concept treated, and in the case of Lovers, we have a poem within a poem.

One of my personal favorites, though, is "Hanged Man," which in this treatement begins like this:

A Story of Merlin

It happened in his early days,
before the elder wise man gig, the
young king with his twelve disciples,
and long before he let his secretary
lock him in a cave.
Back then he lived in Wales,
and for a time in the woods,
a Hermit Fool, astray,
like Sweeny, eating twigs
and talking to owls,
Then one day, something
drove him sane....

It seems light, but Pollack's work is layered with meaning, some of it sneaking up on you, and not all the works are this easy in tone. If you are familiar with the Tarot, you'll enjoy this book as an exploration of the symbology used to write the cards. If you enjoy good poetry, you'll enjoy this book.

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life by Achy Obejas

This collection of poems by Cuban-American author Achy Obejas is a very different sort of experience, more like a confidential conversation between friends than a book of poems, and no less serious or effective for that. The art lies in its seeming artlessness. Obejas takes us from the first stages of an affair to the recovery, ending with the haunting "Historia de Amor."

Obejas is a prolific writer in many genres, from journalism to poetry, working and translating in both English and Spanish.

This is the opening stanza of "Goodbye:"

Every detail is an accident
the horror
of the next moment.
You will peel from me like
plastic surgery;
later a tuck, a fold.
Public appearances matter so.

Evoking so sharply those moments when you know that this, right here, is the very last of that, and so on, trying to maintain a "face to meet the faces that you meet." I think of this more as women's poetry than men's, which may be sexist of me, because anyone who has loved and lost will surely feel the simple power of these lines. Of the three books, this one was the one I first wanted to press into the hands of a friend.

Banalities, by Brane Mozetic

This work was translated by Elizabeta Zargi and Timothy Liu. (I apologize for the lack of diacritical marks. I can't find a way to include them.) The translation deserves to recognized, as it provides work that retains the flavor of another language while working perfectly well in English.

Banalities, as you might expect, is an exploration of nihilism, a very well-written exploration of nihilism. The sexually-graphic, book-length poem evokes the moment before the existential experience, the agonizing, hanging boredom that comes just before you shrug and say, "So what?" Here's part of a representative stanza:

They didn't give me anything to help me
survive. No faith or hope
to repent, beg, be redeemed. No love
to scatter about. So I wouldn't go on
crashing into things, begging for attention,
tenderness, arms
to embrace me....

They gave me a world
in which I'm staggering and which
I can't feel. I can only see a crowd of
people who've put on t-shirts
that say: I'm nobody. Who are you?

The writing is riveting. I had limited endurance for the content. Once in a while, something like this can actually be bracing, the necessary shock to the system, or expression of one's own stare into a hollow moment. This is just me, but at this stage in my life, I found sixty-three pages of it a bit much to take in one sitting, and unlike the first two books, I've yet to read the whole thing. That said, I can remember a time in my own life when it would have been entirely welcome. What I did find uplifting as I read it now was the sheer quality of the writing, never mind the content. Mozetic is a significant voice.

These are well-bound little chapbooks, reasonably priced. They fit into a pocket or purse. You don't have to read the tabloids in the checkout line. You could read poetry.

The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener

2009-02-26T18:58:00.010-05:00

The review for The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener can now be found here.

Kill for Me by Karen Rose

2009-02-19T18:44:00.006-05:00

I will not hear the phrase "I helped" without snickering for a while.

This is the third (last?) in the Vartanian series written by Karen Rose. The first book (Die for Me) was by far the darkest, the second (Scream for Me) a little less so, this one almost light by comparison, but still pretty intense, though the most disturbing content is alluded to rather than described in detail for you, and let me just say thank you. For a woman who writes very graphic sexual encounters (if books had theme songs, for this one I would nominate "Sex Is Not the Enemy"), Rose is very careful about handling the truly disturbing while producing an extremely high body count.

If you haven't read the first two, you may want to before picking this one up. While Rose does an excellent job of balancing the crime/thriller aspects of the novel with the romance part of the novel, keeping the pace moving and clear in both plots, the exposition necessary to bring a new reader up to date is at points confusing. This is a long tale with a large cast of characters and some twists you might not expect. Do it justice and read from the beginning.

If you read and enjoyed Ashes to Ashes or Dust to Dust by Tami Hoag, you're likely to enjoy these three books. Rose puts more emphasis on the romance side than does Hoag, and the first installment (Die for Me) drifts at times toward a non-supernatural horror story (the scariest kind, after all), and I'd be hard put to assign any of them to just one genre.

Does that mean they're literary? No. There are problems. We see the phrase "That I can do," or "That s/he could do," too many times. It's in the voice of the (third-person omniscient) narrator as well as multiple characters. There are a few wobbly adverbs here and there.

I am tired of the ubiquitous pairing of the great huge he-man with hands like bear paws and the itsy-bitsy doll of a woman. It's in every other book I pick up, and enough already.

Another thing that bothered me was the identification of both the Vartanian and Papadopoulos families as Catholic. They'd be far more likely to be Orthodox, the Papadopouloi being specifically Greek, and Vartanian a name from Armenia where people are either Muslim or Orthodox Christian and not Catholic. This is sooooo easy to get right it annoyed me, especially as there is a large Orthodox polulation in the South that you never hear about. (I'm a geek. I've admitted this many times.) "What if they converted?" you may ask, and I'd say when Hell freezes over is how often people leave an Orthodox church for the Catholic. That division is over a thousand years old and the chasm is filled, I'm sorry to say, with resentment, as well as a few legitimate theological differences. That said, I didn't put the book down, and this is the sort of thing that sometimes does inspire me to put a book down, as in close it and not open it up again, as well as in the sense of speaking negatively about it.

Why not this time?

These books tell an engaging story filled with characters you can care about despite the uncluttered way they're drawn. Rose uses elements from various genres to tell that story, instead of picking a genre and then sledgehammering the story to fit the rules of the genre. As in a romance, people meet, fall in love, there's tension, there are false starts, there's the suspense of wondering whether, when and how they'll go mattress surfing. As in a fairy tale, there's evil in the land that must be ferreted out before the prince(s) and princess(es) can go off and live happliy ever after. Like a well-done crime novel, in these books there's a crime or thirty, there are suspects, there's a plot that doesn't yield easily to resolution, there are cops who work to solve the case. Rose does this very well, I think, and I'd like to see her write a straight-up crime novel someday. Her sense of timing is good, her characters are believable and didn't do anything out of thier established character just to service the plot, which in turn is well-constructed and holds together over not one book but three books. What's more, there's nothing outlandish about how these cops go about enforcing the law from within it's borders, not outside of it. No one is part robot or psychic or going blind or can't remember who they are or was sent to learn the ways of the outside world before returning to Ulan Bator. Refreshing.

And like your average horror story, blood-curdling things happen in dark, confusing, twisted ways behind the clean curtains of what passes for Normal, USA, and as I said above, it's more scary (to me) precisely because the story is set in something like real-life. This is garden-variety human evil, set against garden-variety human decency. The bad guys are bad but not for no reason, and the good guys have a quirk or two but we're not talking Lethal Weapon quirky. You can imagine these people living next door. Even the bad guys. Maybe especially the bad guys.

I told you it was scary.

Fado

2009-02-16T14:14:00.006-05:00

Which means something to the effect of "Once upon a time," or, my preference: Pay attention, here's a story.

And Galway Bay by Mary Pat Kelly is a story. Let me tell you how good this book is: I was so engrossed in the first chapter I didn't notice my pyjamas had caught fire. Seriously.

In my defense, I wasn't in them at the time. But, as you will notice from the fact of my writing this now, I did notice it in time, put them out, got rid of the smoke, and went back to reading the book. As I read this book, I laughed out loud, cried actual tears, and talked back to it from time to time. These characters reach out and grab you.

Kelly has a fine ear for the way people talk and subtle shifts in the use of language. The prose of the section of the book that takes place in Ireland is profoundly different from the prose of the American section, and I don't mean just the dialog. Honora, our protagonist and narrator, has an Irish voice and an Irish-American voice. You can feel that you're in a different place, no one has to tell you. Within the story that comprises the narrative of the book, there are smaller stories embedded, like jewels in a brooch. She uses enough Irish to provide a feel for time, place and culture, but not so much that you're lost. (But there is a glossary in the back just in case you want it.)

If the first section, set in and called "The Before Times," reads at first like a bit of a fairy tale, enjoy that. You'll need it later. It should read that way, written as it is by an American descendant recalling a way of life that's forever gone, one that she never lived. It's memory, passed down, and in this memory, Ireland in the Before Times, while not exactly Tir na nOg, is inevitably idealized. This is fine, actually, because Kelly stays away from treacle, is forthright about actual emotion but shuns sentimentality, and where she uses a convention, does so well. (Connemara Ponies = Nice Farm in the Country, imo.) Besides, who am I to say it didn't happen just that way?

We go with the family as they face the struggles of the Great Starvation, the shattering of families, communities, the deliberate erasure of a way of life, then come with them to America, where a new life gets built with courage and industry.

The weakest section of the book deals with the ocean voyage from Ireland to America, and for my taste, this bit could have been left out with no damage to the book as a whole. We've had ample description of the journey through other characters. Still, it's better written than most of the stuff that's floating around, and isn't all that long.

The description of mid-nineteenth century Chicago is engaging and vivid. Even at this stage of its existence it's the "city of the big shoulders," shaping and being shaped by the influx of Irish immigrants. As in the section set in Ireland, Kelly's abundant research is conspicuous precisely because it seems not to have been there. There is exposition, no denying it, but for the most part it's not clunky. I do wish she had taken more time with this part, though. In places it feels a bit rushed. The gift of it is that you'll learn things about the past you never knew. Much of the book isn't really fiction at all, and it's very timely indeed.

Should you read this book?

Yes. You should definitely read this book.

The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani

2009-02-05T13:15:00.006-05:00

Los Angeles is the object of love in this story, a vibrantly living place, almost the central character. In juxtaposition, the book is peopled with human characters who are largely from Somewhere Else. Leaving, arriving, giving up, becoming - this ordinary and mystical process is the heart of this book, a cautionary tale about not doing it successfully. Be what you are or what you are will destroy you.

The protagonist is given to us by the single name Black, though we learn he was called by another name as a small child. Black struggles with many things, his lack of sense of cultural identity, of sexual identity, but never with a sense of ambiguity toward Los Angeles. Black, who once escaped his sense of displacement by pretending to be Navajo - which he is actually not, paints murals. This is what and who he is, a painter of murals. How he ekes out a living is, in fact, never made clear, and it really doesn't matter. The two things Black and the reader know without question about Black are that he is a painter and he loves Los Angeles - his Los Angeles, which is somewhat more real a place than anything you've ever imagined any city could be.

Black lives in a spare room at a tattoo parlor cum coffee house run by psychic, where he's built a spaceship for himself on a pole. In his spaceship, he keeps things that focus his obsession - a photo gallery of the Virgin and a photo gallery of Sweet Girl, a Mexican transsexual stripper. The obsession, in turn, is less about the Virgin and the stripper than about the vacant space in Black himself.

If you are not able to make the distinction between the graphic portrayal of sexual acts as literary metaphor and the graphic portrayal of sexual acts as pornography, this book is not for you. The core of it will escape you and you'll be left with a sort of shadowy misconception of what Abani is writing about. What I think he's writing about, anyway. What I think he's writing about here is the depth of disjuncture in modern life between Place and Identity, whether the place is geographical or state of being, the slippery fish that enculturation has become. The distinction between perception and reality underlies much of the book, something to be celebrated in itself. (Despite what you may hear, perception and reality are not the same thing. They are different, which is why Perception is called perception and Reality is called reality.) Black, Sweet Girl and a less pleasant character called Bomboy each in their own way exemplify the difficulty of navigating the change from one thing/place to another. Bomboy, who has the external trappings of a successful transition, is no more confortable in his life than Black. Iggy, the psychic tattoo artist who is Black's landlady, has made a successful shift both in terms of place and in terms of Self. Her voice grounds the novel, just as the totemic Ray-Ray embodies the native Angelino.

Abani's prose is captivating. His rhythm is unique in my experience, and mildly addictive. I wanted to keep reading it after the last page, just as I wanted to go back to it not so much to find out what happened next as to simply enjoy the way the words slid in front of my eyes.

Abani does something in this book I've rarely seen before - surrender everything to the story. I'd tell you what I mean, but you haven't read the book yet, have you?

How to Live by Henry Alford

2009-01-30T20:33:00.013-05:00

It would be impossible to overstate my enthusiasm for this book.

How to Live is not just another compendium of interviews with the well-known and well-heeled (Ram Dass, Phyllis Diller, Sylvia Miles, Edward Albee, among others). These chapters are revelatory not because the subjects are well-known but because Alford refuses to write about them as celebrities, choosing instead to go the more interesting route of writing about them as people. The same sort of respect, curiosity and wonder shine through the portraits of people we might otherwise be tempted to think of as "ordinary."

One of the quiet messages hidden in Alford's book are that there are no "ordinary" people, at least not in the sense of being negligible or meriting being ignored. Nor is there a celebrity so special as to be beyond the sort of life events that come to everyone.

This book is about being human. It's about embracing life in all its potential for good and ill with courage and generosity, wit, stamina and grace. At the risk of sounding silly, reading How to Live makes you feel good, oddly braced to meet whatever comes next with a smile and an aphorism.

The characters you meet in these pages, whether you've heard of them before or not, will challenge you to revise your idea of what lies ahead of you in your own life, and of your own obligations to yourself and others. If you think the elderly have nothing to offer you as a young person facing the blank page of a new career, meet Phyllis Diller and Sylvia Miles. If you think the elderly have no power to impact their society in positive ways, meet Granny D. If you think only a young person can lose it all and start over with grace and generous creativity, meet Althea Washington. If you think your family is alone in facing the Shattering Surprise just when you think everything is settled, well, meet the Alfords.

I found Alford's description of places I know well to be refreshingly clear, vivid, and without the sort of puzzled condescension that often occurs when someone is describing a place not their own. If you aren't familiar with Durham, let me assure you he has captured well the complex variety of the city that runs from the upmarket haute-shabby of Foster's Market to the more "spatial" aspects of the area. (Read the book, you'll get it.)

Behind all the truly useful insights brought to you by the people you encounter in How to Live lies another bit of wisdom that is the more important one. We are, as a society, making a huge mistake when we marginalize, ignore, devalue and (frankly) jettison the elderly. Never mind the sheer practicality of realizing that, given the speed with which social change does not occur, whatever we insist on for them is what will be there for us. There's another issue here. The elderly have a vast wealth of that which we call wisdom to share, and they want to, for the most part, do that. We who are younger stand to gain from this, if we will just realize we don't know it all already.

Wisdom isn't the same thing as being smart, or having accrued tons of experience and information, useful as all of that is. Wisdom often consists of shutting up and listening to those who have been there first.

That's what's wise about reading this book.

Info about the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival here.

Drood by Dan Simmons

2009-01-30T19:51:00.020-05:00

In an internet interview with Lotesse on the fansite wotmania.com, Simmons declined to "sharecrop in other writers' universes," after being asked what he would do with the One Ring were it to fall into his possession. It begs the question how this laudable mind-set worked in the context of creating a fictional narrative of the lives of two very well-known historical personages, no matter how well-researched. I'll come back to this.

Simmons does a masterful job of creating a sense of place and time, creating a slowly brooding atmosphere embedded in plain-as-day reality, taking the reader with his characters through a wide range of experiences with great authenticity.

Our narrator is a fictional Wilkie Collins, giving homage to Collins' own use of the first-person narrator. However, the farther you go into the story, the more you question whether the character Collins is a reliable narrator or whether he's compromised by his years of opiate addiction. Do all his experiences belong in the category of the Woman with Green Skin? (Very odd but believable in context as the character's objective experience.) Or do they belong in the same category as the Other Wilkie? (Very odd but believable only as the character's subjective experience - most of the time.) By the way, the historical Wilkie Collins was also haunted by a doppelganger only he could see, whom he called "Ghost Wilkie."

In 1865, the historical person Charles Dickens was in a tragic rail accident. Most of the passengers were killed or badly injured. Dickens, somehow, survived. This accident is translated into the fictional world of the fictional character Dickens, and used as the springboard for the events that follow, including the introduction of the character Drood. The passages describing the accident and its aftermath (told largely in Dickens' voice) are among the best I've ever read.

It's important that neither the reader nor the narrator is actually present for the accident. The scene of the accident is where the character Drood first appears, and we experience that appearance third-hand. The character Collins mediates for us the degree to which this should be taken seriously. But then, Collins is man who believes there is another of himself hanging about the house, and then there's the Woman with Green Skin.

Does Drood, a person not yet met by Collins, perhaps never met by Collins, belong in the same category with Dickens, with the Woman with Green Skin, with the Other Wilkie?

Woven in and out of the narrative that pertains to Drood the character is abundant material about the rather more normal daily lives of Collins and Dickens, replete with romantic foibles, domestic drama, travels and of course the pursuit of laundanum. These passages are where Simmons' ability to create scene and atmosphere are perhaps best used, not that the descriptions of the other are less well-executed but because these scenes build our ability to believe the outrageous. They also provide a good deal of humor, greatly needed, and the flip side of the ability to see in the ordinary the shadow of the unordinary just waiting to be discovered.

We are drawn into the story, and pushed out of it, and pulled into it again. What is true? How horrified should we be? And by what? What is more horrible: Collins sudden departure from his mother's (probable) deathbed or his finding on her a scar to match his own? Or is it the incomprehensibly abject destitution of the residents of Undertown, which was quite thoroughly real?

Drood takes you into a world where the normal and the barely imaginable coexist, you slide seamlessly from one realm to the other. As with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, you will have to decide, more than once, whether this narrator is telling you a story that is bizarre but true within the fictional construct of the book, or whether the narrator is relating both perceptions that can be taken as real beyond the confines of his mind and those that are the result of his psychosis.

What do you choose to accept?

This book is not for everyone. If you are squeamish, you probably don't read this genre anyway. Squeamish or not, you may want to not follow my example of reading this book just before you go to sleep. (I only did this once.) If you believe Charles Dickens was a nice man, and you want to retain that impression of him, you may not want to read this book.

There are extensive discussions of the process of writing and the nature of collaboration between writers. I found these sections interesting, but I'm not able to say with confidence they'll be as interesting for the majority of readers. The book might have been just fine without them, but they are valuable as a yardstick for Collins' attachment to what you and I might casually call reality. Mr. Simmons provides a good deal of material that's useful to other writers on his own site, delving into the creative process itself is clearly something important to him. I've enjoyed exploring this part of Simmon's website, as well as the sections of Drood that are (frankly) lit crit and "behind the scenes." These are perks to choosing an author as your narrator if you are a writer who enjoys talking about and exploring the process of writing. Add a second author as his closest friend and collaborator and you get even more of a peek behind the curtain.

All my enthusiasm notwithstanding, I have two concerns with this book. One is that there will inevitably be readers who will construe this as some sort of "hidden truth" about Dickens and Collins. There is truth in here. There are historical facts mixed in with the very tightly and plausibly developed imaginative parts, so well developed and so plausible and so brilliantly combined that it would be easy to take the characters created here as biographical depictions of the real Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. And while it's possible that these two gentlemen would not mind, it takes me back to the question I asked when I read the interview on wotmania.com. How does writing a book like this with two lead characters who were real people square with being unwilling to share crop in another writer's universe? Does the creative construction of a writer trump that writer's actual life?

The answer to this question is (I think) in one of the passages about writing. And if the answer is, as I suspect, "Yes," there is the question of Simmons' Drood as a derivation of Dickens' Drood, and is that not sharecropping in another writer's universe? The story behind this story is the one I want to read now.

The other concern is that there will be readers who don't choose to read The Moonstone because they know how the mystery of that book is resolved in the end.

Please, I'm begging you, if you have not read The Moonstone by the real Wilkie Collins, do so before you read Drood by Dan Simmons. You won't be sorry.

Simmons has written an excellent book. It's profoundly creepy, it's thought-provoking, it accurately depicts the era in which it's set (and, yes, I actually can say that), and it is very well-written. I hope you will enjoy it.

Sheer Genius

2009-01-28T13:06:00.001-05:00

Check this out: Loads of classics, downloadable, to your cellphone. Never be without something good to read again.

Here's the link: booksinmyphone.com

Paging Dr. Freud!

2009-01-01T14:56:00.008-05:00

I've just read Beat the Reaper, first novel by Josh Bazell, which will hit the stores on January 9th.

If Elmore Leonard had written the first three pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it would not have been any more of wild, intense, violent ride through territory that doesn't exist on Earth.

You can treat this fast-paced, totally enjoyable thrill-ride in a couple of ways. One way is to just rave about what a good writer Bazell is (because he is a very good writer) and get on the bandwagon for what will be a very successful first book in a very successful series of books. Let's call this the Path of Least Resistance.

The other way, and this will be the bulk of this review, is to look at the book as literature that reflects on our culture at a specific moment in time as much as it reflects the mind of the author, and which will therefore have an impact on the world-view of its readers. Call this the Path of the Weltanschauungen.

Bazell does an excellent job of replicating the detachment from natural time that comes from being in a hospital for more than a couple of hours. The protagonist is already exhausted when he finds it necessary to beat up a would-be mugger on the way to work. From there, we follow our Anti-hero through his medical routine, which is hair-raising enough. Finally, his stack of patient files takes Dr. Peter Brown to the room of Nicholas LoBrutto, a.k.a. Eddie "Consol" Squillante, a man he is alarmed to find. Mr. LoBrutto, meanwhile, is terrified to find himself at the mercy of the man he knows as Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwa, who is called Ishamel by his former WitSec handler. (The more prominent a character is, the more names he has.)

While a classic example of the hard-boiled crime genre with oodles of sarcastic wit spilling out onto your lap, Beat the Reaper is not really a "whodunit" sort of book. The primary questions of the book don't use the interrogative "Who," they use the interrogatives "How" and "Why." Why did Pietro walk away from a lucrative career as a hit man, and How will he get out of his present difficulty?

Bazell's choice of technique leads to a unique style. He's chosen a first-person narrator, which works very well in this sort of novel, but put a spin on that by narrating the book's present tense in the present tense, reserving past tense for flashbacks. Many of the more interesting bits of information come in the form of footnotes, some of which are pure snark and you shouldn't skip any of them, snark being a major food group. But this use of footnotes in a novel isn't just a clever little little trick. These asides contain much of what lifts the novel as a whole out of genre and into literature.

Another laudable element is dialog that's bright, intelligent, and snappy. All the characters who speak have unique voices. I would quote my favorite interchange, but it would spoil a key plot point. Let's just say Squillante is a funny guy. Stupid and mean, but funny.

Before I go any further into this, I should tell you that I'm jaded when it comes to modern medicine in America. Maybe anywhere, but I know America, so I'll confine my opinion to my own country. And by "jaded" I mean I step away from doctors at social events.

So I had no difficulty believing in a doctor who used to be a hit man. After all, the two professions require some similar personality characteristics. Both require assimilating a large amount of information about complete strangers in a short amount of time and formulating an effective plan of action based on that information. Both require a good deal of physical stamina. Both require the ability to endure long periods of boredom followed by fifteen minutes of chaos during which you must be able to think on your feet in a clear and calm fashion. Both require an accurate knowledge of human anatomy. Both require the delusion that any one human being has the right to decide when another human being has lived long enough. The difference is in how these traits are put to use. I don't mean to trivialize that difference by saying that. Many things have multiple applications in life, some constructive, some destructive.

I didn't have any difficulty with the campy versions of the pharmaceutical rep and the Famous Surgeon. Caricature exists to convey something you just can't quite say any other way without being ridden out of town on a rail. Behind these caricatures is more than a teaspoon of truth. Because I have known doctors socially, and because I have a friend who used to date ER docs almost exclusively, and because I used to be in insurance, I know that some of the situations described in the book have happened at least once, somewhere. I also noticed lots of the factoids he warns you to jettison at the end are accurate reflections of information I have encountered in other settings. (No, I'm not going to tell you what they are. I don't want to get sued, either.) Some of this information should annoy you, or scare you, but cumulatively, it should definitely push you out of your comfort zone. This is the power of literature to convey information that can't be conveyed elsewhere, and to awaken in the reader an awareness of situations screaming out for change. Bazell has put himself in better literary pedigrees than McDonald's by providing these extra elements that allow his book to put one foot down on the literary side of the fence.

There are, however, some significant issues.

When I read about someone hiding in a bed where someone had just died but the sheets hadn't been changed, I laughed aloud. If you want me to go there with you, give me a reasonable way to travel the distance between reality as I know it and reality as you want to present it. Like all readers of fiction, I'm asking to be taken somewhere that I know is not real, I want to cooperate with the illusion, but things like this are about as seductive as a bucket of cold water.

The ending is problematic for more than one reason. After 300 pages of first-person narration, much of it present tense, during which we have learned to trust Pietro as the authority about his own life, his own story, his own truth if you will, we have a final chapter in which the essential information is provided third person, past tense, by someone who wasn't even there when it happened. (But is a physician.) It was cold, disappointing, and undercut Pietro as a reliable narrator for future outings.

But it's a first novel and by a talented author and you tend to overlook some things under these circumstances. There's enough insight, witty dialog and action to make the book an enjoyable read, if these are the only things you consider.

But should you read the book? Can I actually say to someone else, "Here. Read this?" That's the question I started this blog to answer: Which of the thousands of books out there might be worth the time it takes to read them? I try to answer that question for each book I write about here. In this case, I can't tell you. On the one hand, if you don't read this book, you will miss out on something that isn't only entertaining, it may actually be Important. (Watch that be the one sentence anyone actually quotes.) On the other, if you do read this book, you'll be subsidizing some of the most unforgivably misogynistic material I've ever read.

There are few female characters in the book. That's fine. You generally don't find ballerinas in a logging camp, characters have to fit the setting. The problem is that, of the female characters in the book, not one is a positive image of women. In this book, you will find a dead grandmother, a Mob wife (who, being a submissive wife and doting mother, is actually the most completely drawn and sympathetic woman in the book), a lying Auschwitz tour guide, a murdering confidence woman, a pair of voluntarily drugged-out teenaged sluts of the kind everyone knew in high school, involuntarily drugged-out whores, involuntarily drugged-out dead whores, a pharmaceutical rep who is essentially a whore with a Pez dispenser in her navel (okay, he gets a bye on that one), and a patient with spookily prescient parents who seem to have named her Osteocarcinoma Girl. Osteocarcinoma Girl keeps coming on to Dr. Brown by flashing him with her tampon string. Classy.

Last but not least, there is a dead plot-device of a girlfriend, who has a first name: Magdalena. Notably, it's her family that has a last name, which is Neimerover, as fact that comes out only to explain her brother's nickname. In this book, the female characters are fortunate to get first names, while the male characters not only have names, they have nicknames and aliases, which come with explanations (stories, pedigrees). We are supposed to see Magdalena as a desirable woman, a contrast to the varieties of sluts, dead sluts, objects of abuse and housewives who make up the rest of the contingent of female characters. This is difficult. She's a plot device, mono-chromatic, with the body of a child that the protagonist (who describes himself as a longshoreman as interpreted by a sculptor from Easter Island) finds irresistible. We should find this juxtaposition of big strapping man and waif-like, tiny woman/child creepy, and yet, it's everywhere. It would be nice if there had been someone in the course of his life to tell Dr. Bazell that a man's inability to keep his hands, tongue and penis off and/or out of a woman doesn't make her a positive female image.

Granted, you don't expect to find "nice people" in the setting of mob life, or Nazi-occupied Poland, anymore than you'd expect to find ballerinas in that logging camp, so the women in these cultural settings shouldn't be presented like they're Mother Teresa. All the more significantly, Magdalena represents a missed opportunity to have explored a note of genuine contrast to all that, to see Pietro reaching out to an utterly different way of life. This is a tragic misstep when looked at from a literary viewpoint. Even if you leave the political/feminist perspective out of it, this book would have been truly extraordinary if Bazell had taken the non-genre option when dealing with Magdalena.

As a comparison, read Silver; My Own Tale As Told by Me with A Goodly Amount of Murder by Edward Chupack. Chupack introduces a character to challenge the moral world-view of the principal characters, as well as the reader, as does it well. Silver is also a first novel.

It's not giving anything away to tell you that Magdalena is dead. You know the first time Pietro mentions her that she was dead before the novel opens. You know it's going to be horrible. You know you're going to feel all the pain and outrage Pietro felt when she died, and deeply understand how he had the courage not only to turn his back on the mob (though he never was "made"), walk away from the only semblance of family he had, and go into the Witness Protection Program.

And then, you don't. At least, I didn't. Given what happens in the preceding pages, it was an enormous relief when Magdalena was finally dead. It's not what the Bad Guys do to Magdalena that's a problem. It's what her author does to her. By trashing Magdalena, Bazell makes it okay for her to die. Thinking her loss will be harsh for the reader to bear (but really, it's hard to miss a cardboard cut-out) he kills her before he kills her. This is the only logic I can imagine for the choices he makes.

Here is the real question: Did Bazell mean to be this self-revealing?

Real, three-dimensional women, in literature as well as life, do actually have sex, feel passion, act loyally, do wicked things, make desperate and/or stupid choices, face terror with courage, stand up for what they believe in, be intelligent, buck tradition and all of that is far more interesting when done by believable, three-dimensional characters than by plot-devices, whether in real life or in fiction of whatever sort.

On the one hand, seeing an attitude toward women that should have left the page decades ago re-invigorated for a new generation made me tired beyond telling. Because of his later status, we forget that in his earlier years, MacDonald's works were published in smeary little paperbacks that Daddies brought home from the corner store in a brown paper bag along with a six pack and kept in the den on a shelf too high for the children to reach. Which is to say, he was considered about as reputable as your average skin mag. (Skin mags not being "cool" at the time.) While some of this book will be offensive to many women who read it, it threatens the most damage to the male reader, because it serves to reinforce concepts and stereotypes of women that are distorted and harmful, especially when written by a doctor, an image of authority in our culture.

I've come back to add this paragraph, to avoid misunderstanding. MacDonald was a brilliant writer. I've read and enjoyed his work. His ability to write action, to describe place, to engage the reader in the narrative and keep him there - all unmatched. But he wrote women poorly. It's possible to emulate the praise-worthy and leave the time-worn behind.

On the other hand, reading something written by a physician that at least implies that the very things that are most frustrating, most discouraging, often even frightening, to patients and their families about medicine as practiced in modern times are also all of those things to doctors - well, that was refreshing and made me feel a teensy bit of hope. It gave me an idea, about the kind of desperately needed improvements that could occur in medicine if the providers and consumers of medical care would ever just sit down and listen to each other in a non-billable setting.

But those tiny crumbs of encouragement were embedded in a weltanschauung that creates problems at least as difficult as those caused by the twin strangleholds of insurance and big pharma, both of which are skewered in the narrative. In the view of the narrator, who like the author is a doctor, women are largely reduced to bodily functions, and not necessarily their own bodily functions. At the same time, the female characters' relationships with their own bodies is detached. Magdalena evidently doesn't feed hers very well. This does two things - it tells the reader that she understands the need to keep the female body intensely restrained (Russell would be proud - also aroused by the childlike shape of the ultra-thin, possibly amenorrheic, body) and is therefore a "good girl," and it gives some credence to Pietro's ability to swim for hours while she's sitting on his face. (Yes, you read that.) Osteocarcinoma Girl is unware of her own bodily functions, to the extent that she doesn't stop to think about the fact that there's a tampon string she might want to deal with before flashing Dr. Brown, and makes no connection between the recurrence of pain in her knee and the onset of menses. The puzzle of her body has to be solved for her by the doctor who has known for about twenty minutes altogether.

At the end, the protagonist (now a patient and therefore supine and semi-clothed - c'mon, you can get there without me) has to be told his own truth by the doctor who sweeps into the narrative to unravel for Pietro/Bearclaw/Peter/Ishamel the most insanely ridiculous denouement I've ever seen on page or screen. It is not believable. I laughed. And it wasn't supposed to be funny.

Since readers, like addicts, always want the next fix to take them a little further, the ending creates other problems for Bazell. He has no where to go in terms of ramping up the intensity of the narrative unless he wants to make Peter into a different kind of Doctor and involve Daleks in his stories. In terms of third-dimensional reality as we know it, I don't see how he can top this.

So, I leave it up to you. I will say that this is not a book for youngsters or the squeamish or anyone who is contemplating surgery in the near future. Or maybe you should read it if you're contemplating surgery in the near future. Other than that - make up your own mind.

End of the Year Grab Bag

2008-12-29T08:24:00.011-05:00

In my family we had a Christmas tradition called the Grab Bag. Everyone got together for an evening, ate Red Velvet cake, talked ontopofeachother and passed around a huge bag filled with "gifts." All of the gifts were inexpensive. Some were outright jokes. What you pulled was yours, whether it matched you or not. I have a terrific photo of a Great Uncle wearing his brand new bloomers, with eyelet trim and a nice ribbon around the leg that I'm willing to bet was red.

So, in the spirit of tradition, here's a sort of Grab Bag of books I read in 2008, and didn't have time to give a proper review.

Reach in and grab one.

Silver; My Own Tale As Told by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder, by Edw ard Chupack
This amazing first novel is the life of the fictional pirate Long John Silver (whom we all know from Treasure Island) re-told from his own perspective. The use of language is nothing shy of brilliant. The characters are beautifully drawn, the dialog is credible, and Chupack delivers a sense of place that is extraordinary. Obviously, I have no real life experience of a Sixteenth Century pirate ship, but this book made me feel as if I have. This is not for the kiddies, though. It is a thoroughly grown-up version of the story, with, as the title promises, a goodly amount of murder.

Burn Out by Marcia Muller
This is the latest installment in Muller's series about San Francisco private detective Sharon McCone. I hadn't read any of the earlier books in the series, and found this book totally accessible. I've also put the earlier installments on my list for the future. Muller's a solid writer who knows how to deliver a stripped-down crime story with style. This is a well-done genre novel. It won't change your life, but if you want an entertaining weekend, Burn Out won't disappoint.

Giants; The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer
Here is yet another biographical look at Abraham Lincoln (about whom more books have been published than about anyone including Jesus), made innovative by the successful parallel to Frederick Douglass. While I learned more about Lincoln than I had ever known, I especially appreciated the depth of detail about the life of Frederick Douglass. The two men have much more in common than you'd imagine, knew each other, and were mutual admirers as well as friends. Part of the appeal of this book is the lost American concept of being able to invent yourself, in the real sense of starting out with nothing and taking those opportunities life offer to make yourself into something more, and starting over from absolute scratch if that's what it takes. We admire Frederick Douglass for his courage and determination in escaping the life of a slave and making something new and unique in the world out of his life, but the fact is it would not be possible today.

Stauffer does a good job of conveying the significant differences in American culture then and now, and the deft handling of depictions of early American culture and social life bring the book to life, enabling it to read more like fiction than like the stereotypical history book. If you're interested in the era, and in the figures, but tend to shy away from non-fiction, give this book a try, it's a good introduction to history as subject matter. My one complaint is that Stauffer carries on too long about sexuality. Yes, people used to randomly share their physical literal beds with other people for the purposes of sleeping. Beds were expensive, not everyone had one, and if it was wide enough to accommodate more than one sleeping human, it did, always of the same sex unless they were a married couple. Get over it. We've used the words "sleep" and "bed" as euphemisms for sex to the point that to the modern ear, they're taken as synonyms when in fact they're anything but.

That aside, this is an interesting, eye-opening, and encouraging book, as well as being a great read. I heartily recommend it.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Nemirovsky was born in Kiev, her family Jewish. They moved to Paris, where she eventually converted to Roman Catholicism in 1939, after having been denied citizenship in 1938. In 1942, the French police arrested her as a stateless person of Jewish descent, and she died not long after at Auschwitz, as did her husband. Manuscripts of her unfinished novels Suite Francaise and Fire in the Blood were hidden with family members, the pieces only recently put together. Nemirovsky had a fine sense of the ironic, an ability to create compassion for characters who behave abominally in petty ways. The rediscovery of her work sparked controversy, which you can read about here and here and here, so I won't go into detail here. All I want to do is encourage you to read her work. Her voice is unique, her rediscovery is a major literary event.

About Alice is a tribute book, by Calvin Trillin for his wife Alice, and therefore a labor of love. Altogether not maudlin, this slim volume is packed with anecdotes, humor, palpable love, and respect. Trillin sees Alice with humor, because she was funny, but there's no condescension here. I found this book in the aftermath of death in my family, someone who was not only a relative but a friend, and while the relationships were radically different, Trillin's book gave me some tools for thinking about the experience of living out loving relationships, and the loss of them. Most of all, while his sorrow is real, it's clear he wouldn't have passed up the brilliance of the life the shared to evade the pain of the inevitable end. It's a fine example of really being human.

Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell by Elaine Forman Crane
I keep this book lying on my kitchen table. I say I'm going to do an actual full-out review, and I never get to it, so here we go.

It's an interesting book, not least for its insight into Colonial life and what passed for justice in the Seventeenth Century. That said, it has major flaws. It doesn't seem to have a clear sense of what it wants to be. I can't tell you if it's a feminist treatise, a study on the justice system, a social history, or something else. While acknowledging the odd nature of the evidence against Thomas Cornell, Crane never really questions the accuracy of his conviction.

It isn't possible to apply any sort of modern forensic concept to the death of Rebecca Cornell. Too much time has passed, the house no longer exists, and the evidence against Thomas Cornell consisted largely of an accusation made in a dream by a ghost the testimony of a bleeding corpse. Yes, you actually read that. Thomas Cornell was a prominent citizen of the Colony, but could not have been well-liked, and he had an exceedingly sketchy life story. Even at a glance, Thomas Cornell made a great suspect for the crime, but there's nothing like the sort of evidence needed today, even on the circumstantial front. Of course he had access, he lived in the house. But Rebecca's room had a door to the outside, which was not locked, so really just about anyone in the Colony had access. Home invasions were common events.

In our modern justice system, we assume innocence (or say we do) until the accused becomes the convicted. From then on, guilt is treated as if it were a fact, even though we all know it sometimes is not. This happens in a system that would never consider the second-hand testimony of a ghost. Given that Thomas Cornell's trial was predicated on that testimony from beyond, and that the jury was comprised of people who knew and probably didn't like him, the chances of his actual innocence rise exponentially.

When Crane gets around to "Considering the Alternatives," the title of the chapter, those alternatives turn out not to be alternative theories of the case, but a recitation of the legal difficulties faced by actual and possible descendants/relatives of Thomas Cornell, notably Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted. In court, anyway. (Lizzie makes a great example of the flip side of the system - in Thomas we have the convicted who may have been innocent; in Lizzie, the acquitted who may have been guilty.) To imply that Thomas Cornell must have been guilty because Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her own father is less logical than to suggest that Rebecca Cornell died as a result of Spontaneous Human Combustion.

Killed Strangely is worth reading, though for other reasons. If you're interested in American genealogy, Colonial culture, or the evolution of the justice system, you can read this book and gain something from it, despite the flaws.

Dennis Lehane doesn't need my help to sell books, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this novel. With this book, Lehane steps a little further outside of the realm of the crime genre that saw his debut. Smartly (what else?), he builds on what he knows and is known for: A literary examination of the City of Boston, and the perspective that comes from law enforcement in one form or another. Emily Dickenson, and Agatha Christie by way of her character Jane Marple, held that it is possible to know all that you need or want to know of life by paying a good deal of attention to that corner of the world where you are. Lehane understands this, and gives the rest of us a great gift in the process.

The Naming of the Dead and Exit Music, by Ian Rankin

The Naming of the Dead has been out for a couple of years, but I got my hands on it this year, so it goes here. Rankin deals in these two novels with real-time historical currents that impact the believability of the genre. The life of the reader has changed, indelibly, and so the form of the literature must change to reflect that or else begin to be shelved in the Fantasy section. Rankin gets my respect by wrestling with this on the page through the lives of his characters, in a very human way.

Rankin brings us to the end of Rebus' career in fine style, and gives a ending that fits the series. Put me in the camp of those who'd like to see Siobhan Clarke move to center stage in future installments. It works to retire Rebus. I'm sad to day that, but it does. I hope, though, that we will see him again.

That's it. That's my Grab Bag list for 2008. I hope you find something here to enjoy.

Three Guys One Book: Interview with Josh Bazell

2008-12-27T14:47:00.000-05:00

Three Guys One Book: Interview with Josh Bazell

Try this at home

2008-12-19T12:45:00.008-05:00

Make 'Em Laugh by Michael Kantor is a wonderful survey of the history of modern comedy in America. Artists are grouped by style rather than period, which allows the reader to see how the torch was passed from one performer to the next. The cover art is a good clue to the sense of the book, which makes a narrative of selective bios. The book is refreshingly free of intrusion into the comedians' private lives, and the bios focus on the professional life and contribution to the world of comedy made by each performer.

Since comedy is a live-performance medium, it might be hard to imagine how a book can convey the power of comedy not only to make us laugh but to comment on the human condition. Just open to the transcription of the interchange between Grouch and Chico in The Cocoanuts and you'll see not only that the script they worked from was brilliant, but that some things never change.

Classic giants like Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Charlie Chaplin are not ignored. Neither are more recent comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Pryor, Cheech & Chong, Larry David, Roseanne Barr are all included along with others. The immediate shift of performers from vaudeville to television is well-documented, and I think this is a feature of the development of television as an art form/conveyor of entertainment that's often overlooked. The sitcom is well-represented, and there are many shows that could have been included but weren't. There is also humor to be found in the story of the development of The Dick Van Dyke Show, based on the real life of Carl Reiner, who was considered not right for the part of himself. Reiner, thankfully, was more interested in doing the show than being onscreen, and as a result, we got to have one of the best shows ever on tv.

In fact, there are comedians that could have been included but weren't. Red Skelton is mentioned only briefly, as the man for whom Buster Keaton went to work after his own career tanked. Skelton may not have been the stylistic genius Keaton was, but he was an awfully good business man, and it is a business.

The book ends with a series of portraits of more recent ground-breakers, including Steve Martin, who did away with the punch line, and Andy Kaufman, who did away with the joke.

This book stands up to multiple reading, because there's so much in it. You find something new and funny every time you plop it open.

An amazingly cool thing

2008-12-14T17:38:00.003-05:00

I just tripped over this site. Click here to go to Literature Map, and then enter the name of your favorite author. You'll get a "map" that shows the names of other authors who are also read by fans of the original author.

It's a great way to find the work of other writers you may not have thought to explore.

Entering Denise Mina got me a map that includes P. D. James, Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane, Elizabeth George, Henning Mankell, Martin Cruz Smith, authors that might spring to mind as being in the same field. But it also reminds me of Douglas Adams, J. R. R. Tolkein, Ruth Rendell, and Isabel Allende, among others.

Try it out. It's fun.

Have you ever met Christian Holloway?

2008-12-13T13:18:00.009-05:00

Don't expect this book to take place in Dallas, or have anything to say about the grassy knoll. Kennedy's brain (and its disappearance) are largely analogical to the events of the narrative.

Louise Cantor, an archaeologist in her early fifties, goes home to Sweden from her dig in Greece to discover her son dead in his bed, wearing pajamas. She takes this as her first clue that something was dreadfully wrong with the manner of his death. Henrik always slept in the nude. Louise holds fast to this central and basic premise even after she learns many things about Henrik that she never knew, even though the police assure her the toxicology report showed a large amount of barbiturates in his system, and close the case with a finding of suicide.

Louise can't accept this finding, and continues to discover things that propel her into the mystery that surrounds not only her son's death but the last few years of his life. The story as it unfolds presents events that seem unlikely (but not, sad to say, impossible) with the occasional reminder that Kennedy's brain not only disappeared from the National Archives, it was in the national Archives to begin with.

The best parts of the book take place in the rural areas of Sweden, Australia and Mozambique. Mankell writes about the natural world with an elegance I've not seen in any other writer. The understated contrast between this natural realm and the twisted lives the human characters create for themselves (and each other) lets itself be realized by the reader according to her or his own awareness.

As in his Wallender mysteries, Mankell has constructed Kennedy's Brain so that it can be read and enjoyed on a number of levels. The book works as a suspense novel, and it works as a literary commentary on the modern state of man's inhumanity to man.

Christian Holloway is an all-too-believable character.

Have you met him?

Small Towns Only Look Idyllic

2008-11-07T17:27:00.006-05:00

Once you get to know them, they've got all the challenges faced by any city.

This installment in the adventures of the Camel Club picks up where Stone Cold left off, with Oliver Stone's daring escape. He, and the rest of the Camel Club, are faced with significant risks in this installment, which also looks at the dangers of blind obedience and the cost of silence.

Divine Justice provides an interesting look into some issues of modern life that need a little examination, without hammering away at them in such a wway as to overwhelm the narrative. We get to see the real human cost of the coal that drives so much of our modern lifestyle, as well as the potential for abuse when the punitive side of criminal justice is taken out of the hands of the people, and put into the hands of private enterprise, with no oversight. And Baldacci makes us care about these issues through the danger faced by characters we already care about, and those he's just made us care about. As usual with Baldacci, it's a well-written, well-crafted yarn that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

I don't want to say anymore, because I don't want to spoil it for you. If you like Baldacci, you won't be disappointed at all. The link lets you read a sample.

Tony Hillerman

2008-11-07T15:40:00.002-05:00

Tony Hillerman died on October 26th, and I'm late paying him tribute, for which I apologize.

Hillerman wrote a series of novels, detective stories, set in the Four Corners area, mostly among the Navajo, and from the Navajo cultural perspective. This is a remarkable feat in and of itself, considering Hillerman was not, himself, Navajo. Of course, it's possible to point out that I'm not Navajo, so how can I know whether he did a good job? What I do know is that in 1987, the Navajo nation honored Hillerman with the Special Friends of the Dine Award.

For myself, I found special meaning in the way Hillerman used the books to give examples of respect toward others, cooperation, the skills of observation and analytical thinking, and I always liked that the characters weren't geniuses or holders of Ph. D.s, just ordinary people who used the brains and courage they were given at birth.

I also appreciate that Hillerman, perhaps aware he was drawing toward the end of his writing career if nothing else, gave his readers a sense of their beloved characters drawing to a good jumping off place.

Hillerman had a rare gift for description. Without drowning the reader in words, Hillerman brought to life a vivid sense of the desert, as beautiful as it is dangerous, something to approach with respect.

This is, I think, the central feature of all of Hillerman's work. He had respect for the place, the characters, the culture he wrote about, and for the people who would pick up the books, and read them.

The world is better for his having been in it.

Going home again

2008-09-24T16:41:00.007-04:00

proves dangerous for John Whitman Sutter in The Gate House, Nelson DeMille's eagerly-awaited sequel to The Gold Coast.

The action picks up ten years after the end of the first book. Elizabeth Allard, an old friend who has a life tenancy in the gate house for which the book is named, is on her deathbed, and Sutter comes to New York to handle her affairs and remove the last of his things she's kept for him. In the process, he finds himself involved anew in the unresolved strings of past events.

Ten years ago, John's wife, Susan Stanhope Sutter, became involved in an affair with Frank Bellarosa, Mafia don. The affair ended when Susan shot Frank, and he died. Credible loopholes spared Susan from prison. John and Susan got a divorce. John went on a three-year sail around the world, then settled in London. With all that movement, however, he has not been able to get away from the events that sent him on the journey.

No one wants me to give away the plot, do they? Didn't think so.

DeMille effortlessly conveys a sense of the intersection of different sections of society, also of Society, and John is a witty, if jaundiced, observer of the world around him. John is the most fully realized character, which makes sense as he narrates the action. If I had one significant issue with the book, it would be that I'd like to have seen more depth and shading in the female characters, especially Susan, although the other male characters don't have that much more depth. While it's clear that Character A genuinely loves Character B, it's less clear to me why. It's easy to see why there might be fascination or obsession, but what I think of as love needs a different foundation than the one provided on the page, perhaps not instead of but certainly in addition to that foundation. But this is a novel of actions described not psyches plumbed.

I can imagine younger readers might find it odd that a major theme of a person's life could be on hold for ten years, then seemingly pick up where it left off, like someone pushed the "play" button on a remote control. All I can tell you is, just wait.

John's sense of dislocation, coming home to New York in the months following 9/11, worked for me. Situating the action in the summer of 2002 made it possible to frankly explore the social ripples left by that tragedy, analogous to the lingering ripples still moving outward from the crater left in John's life by the events of ten years ago, including the feeling of lingering unreality, and to juxtapose different kinds of social evil. Not that the book ever gets terribly deep about that sort of thing.

The Gate House is an entertaining read. You really want to turn the page and see what's next, and it's never predictable, never dull.

And there's really rather a lot of sex.

Daniel Mendelsohn

2008-09-14T18:20:00.002-04:00

There's a lovely article up on the NPR website's homepage about Mendelsohn's latest work, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, including an excerpt and a link to an audio file.

A while back, I read and reviewed Mendelsohn's book The Lost: A Search for Six among Six Million. The story, excuse me, stories, he told in that book were compelling, conveyed with both compassion and detachment, not an easy mix. He has a rare gift for handling words firmly, with respect, and as the title of his newest book suggests, an awareness of the inherent delicacy of meaning.

Here's the link. Enjoy.

Politics, Greed and Religion

2008-08-19T15:59:00.006-04:00

In Death's Half Acre, Margaret Maron weaves a tapestry of daily life that provides a rich background to the case at hand, making it part and parcel of the lives of her continuing characters, as well as providing a piercing view into the life of a community.

To the extent that the book is a roman a clef, it's handy to have some idea of what the real names are, and unlike many who try to do this, she gets the details right. Accents are believable, syntax, the rhythm of daily life, the countryside, and how folks simply live are extremely accurate to the North Carolina I know. This is a refreshing thing, especially since the setting is so vividly a part of the story that it's practically a character. Some tales can be told in any setting, but this one could only happen where it does. At least, that's how Maron makes it feel.

There was one, relatively minor, aspect that was not in keeping with my personal experience, and I'm willing to bet that's because it's something she's observed from a distance. The first-hand stuff just breathes off the page. In any case, it wasn't a significant problem for me, and it won't be unless this is a thread she plans to develop. Time will tell.

For those who are new to Maron, her protagonist is Deborah Knott, one of a large number of children of the still active and charmingly sly Kezzie Knott, reformed bootlegger. Deborah is a judge and married to a member of the Sheriff's Department. That she became a judge, and an upright and decent judge, through her father's quiet blackmail is just part of that rich tapestry I was talking about. Deborah herself seems not yet entirely comfortable with this bit of legerdemain, but it doesn't seem to get in her way on the bench.

The book begins with an appalling scene in a church, one I have to tell you I have no doubt could only have actually happened. This forms the basis for the book's subplot, which is in some ways more interesting than the major plot involving the murder. It was hard to get up much in the way of sympathy for the victim of the crime, a woman on the County Commission who had her fingers in a lot of pies. This is not unusual - the characters tend to have their fingers in lots of pies, and the pies are often related.

Maron has a keen insight into the sorts of dilemmas faced by areas that are undergoing the conflation of people who have lived there so long it may as well have been forever, and those who are coming in in large numbers from other places, other cultural backgrounds, and how the expectations of each group as to how to live do and don't mesh.

Maron uses a narrative technique I haven't seen often, one of switching between third-person narrator and first-person. The last time I saw it used successfully was in Traitor to Memory by Elizabeth George. The sections in which Deborah is a participant are from her perspective, the others third-person. Maron makes this work seamlessly.

In fact, this is a huge part of the genius of her writing - it flows effortlessly, with the story in the front, carried along on the words, like a casual conversation over lunch, with sweet tea of course.

A Gently Examined Life

2008-08-10T15:18:00.006-04:00

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

These essays seem much more simple than they are, and that's the charm and the power of them. Behind stories about plastic ponies, mystifying bosses, and dubious friends lie universal themes. Childhood erupts into adult life at unexpected moments usually bringing with it a gift of insight.

If you've ever been a bridesmaid, you'll enjoy "You on a Stick," which recounts Crosley's experience as the unlikely maid of honor for a high school friend. In "The Ursula Cookie," Crosley recounts an early job where she learned that she didn't have to be on the receiving end of what seemed like odd behavior from her boss of the time. What I would like to have seen in this essay, though, was some awareness of her own contribution to the situation, as it's hard not to think that Crosley's nights as described didn't bleed over into her days. If "Ursula" reads this, she will no doubt feel vindicated.

The same cannot be said for the "friends" who came for chocolate tart.

Most of her prose is handled well, and glides along under the narrative like good prose should, but there are bumps. For example, an attempt to modify the word unique, and the use of the reflexive pronoun myself when what she really needed there was the objective pronoun me. But very probably most people wouldn't be bothered by it. In fact, these glitches stood out as much as they did in part because they are refreshingly rare.

One of the most intricate and interesting essays is "Sign Language for Infidels," which is on the surface an account of volunteering at the Museum of Natural History's butterfly exhibit. Beneath the straightforward account lie questions such as How do we as individuals reach out to help others, human and otherwise, and why? What does that mean? What do our choices say about us, if anything? What's beautiful, and why? Are we open to sheer serendipity as a casual factor in life?

I hope you'll read this book.

A Delightful Work of Sheer Genius

2008-08-06T16:53:00.003-04:00

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.) by Michael Chabon

This unforgettable excursion into what might have been is set in a paralell now that is both familiar and strange.

In Chabon's vision, the attempt to establish a State of Israel at the end of World War II failed, and the United States offered the Jewish refugees a long lease on some land along the coast of Alaska, then a territory. A colony develops, clinging to the rim of the world, hanging between frozen tundra and the sea.

Wit is razor sharp, the real joys of mature love, family and babies are celebrated, the tragedy of family rifts are mourned, the murder mystery real and engaging, and the characters spring up from the page and into the room. My one sorrow is that Jerry Orbach cannot play the protagonist should anyone ever make this into a movie.

Sweetness, buy the book. If not here, then somewhere. It would be too, too sad if you were to go through life having denied yourself the legitimate pleasure of reading this delightful and charming book that Mr. Chabon worked so hard to make for you.

Red Means Stop

2008-08-02T13:51:00.007-04:00

Careless in Red: A Novel by Elizabeth George

Be aware, if you haven't read the book, this article contains spoilers, though I'm not giving away whodunit.

Elizabeth George returns to the story of Thomas Lynley in this latest book.

We reconnect with him in the midst of an unplanned walkabout along the coast of Cornwall, where he finds a body. Not precisely a busman's holiday, given the circumstances, but there is the sense of the sudden intrusion of the past life he's tried to leave behind into the present he's trying not to experience and a future he can't really imagine.

In that the unevenness of the book communicates how awkward it is to navigate the early stages of grief it works. In that the narrative is jarringly unlike anything that came before, in that the quality of writing differs dramatically from one section to another, it does not.

The body belonged to a young man (sorry, he's eighteen, and therefore not, as the characters insist, a boy) named Santo. Once dead, Santo largely vanished from the narrative, leaving behind a glotted bundle of nosey parkers, professional and otherwise, who tumble down to the conclusion of the book.

There is not much of an investigation, for all the crashing about over a few hundred pages. A constable who can be described as well-meaning but naive gives away the sole piece of forensic information that can be found, until then also the only thing known only to the killer and the police. The same constable later tries to get the DI's attention to a significant clue, but can't because she has decided who she wants wants the murderer to be. This is the high-point of DI Beatrice Hannaford's sanity.

Hannaford delivers for 14-year old son to the care of his father so he can be adequately supervised while she head her investigation. Ray, Pete's father and Bea's ex-husband, is also a cop. Further, they divorced over a disagreement as to whether the pregnancy should continue to term. After making this arrangement - because she herself will not have time - she devotes blocks of that non-existent time to bringing the dogs to Ray as well, then searching his house for the smut she's sure is there, and pretty constantly visiting Pete. All of this broken home turmoil leads eventually to a personal resolution for Bea that is less out of left field and more out of the Orion Nebula.

Tommy, meanwhile - see how that worked? You didn't really give a gnat's hind leg about DI Hannaford, or Pete or the long-suffering Ray, did you? I'd be willing to bet you were a little disappointed to see that the investigation was headed by someone other than anyone we already know. Tommy has been walking for 42 days, sleeping rough, eating little and bathing not at all. When he finds the body, he breaks into a nearby cottage in hopes of finding a phone, so the owner of the cottage arrives to find a smelly, unkempt man who speaks really rather well rummaging around. Dairdre, said cottage owner, is a veterinarian with a Secret. Her secrecy, however, leads to lies that can't be verified and present a lumpy inconsistency.

But so does the story itself. Dairdre claims to have been born in Falmouth, but there's no record of that, nor of her going to school - anywhere - until she was 13. As far as it goes, that does provoke curiosity. We learn (eventually) that she was adopted. There are reasons why her birth was not recorded in the usual course of events, and I can get on board with them, but there's no reason to think a standard birth certificate would not have been generated for her when she was adopted, showing her new name and adoptive parents. This implausible gaffe costs the reader however long it takes to plod through a good 100 pages.

Another waste of reader time is Hannaford's presumption that the other woman seen in bed with the dead "boy" was Dairdre, the owner of an isolated cottage she rarely occupies. Two fairly obvious questions, asked in a timely fashion, would have led to a much more logical progress. It's hard to imagine any investigator not asking these questions, although we have by this time become too familiar with Hannaford's obsessive hammering of Daidre into the mold of Prime Suspect, so she gets the slenderest bye. But Havers (!) is also there, and she has no such excuse. Asking these questions could have shaved another 50 or so pages from this interminable manuscript.

Bunny trails are everywhere. I wouldn't mind if the characters had been engaging, or if their lives and struggles illuminated anything - anything at all. Among the characters introduced for this book, and please God, for this book only, the only one I'd care to meet again is a Mexican parrot named Pooh.

As for the characters I do care about:

Lynley is still deeply shell shocked. Finding the body, the aftermath of finding the body, forces him to take early steps out of the fog of grief. George here does some interesting work on the nature of identity as well as the impact of significant personal loss. He left Howenstow with no identification. All he has to give DI Hannaford in the way of identification is his own word for it. Fortunately for him, Ray is there as well, and recognizes the name. That and the "posh accent" are enough for Ray, and therefore for Bea, though she takes care to manifest the chip on her shoulder. And while Lynley has made the deliberate (if not conscious) choice to leave his official identity behind, has tried to resign the job he holds responsible for Helen's death, and tries with genuine desperation to get back to being "Tommy," it's his position as Lord Lynley that actually defines him here.

Havers, though mentioned almost in passing a bit earlier, makes a real entrance into the narrative only on page 308, and spend most of her time after that with Hannaford. Hiller and Nkata are mentioned, only.

Deborah and Simon don't even get that.

The book bludgeons the reader with several social themes. One is the imperative for parents to notice the time for letting go of their offspring and honoring it. Hannaford's oversight of Pete is intense, but he is fourteen and she's seen what can happen to you when you're fourteen. I don't like her, but will cut her some slack on that point. The parental (and grandparental) imposition of personal will on the younger characters who I presume are somewhere between the equivalent of high school graduation and 25 (the only specific age we're given is that of Santo, the dead "boy,") is explored and explored and explored and explo - you get the idea. Not one or two families, but every single one is stymied and suffocating on this point. I kept hearing Pink Floyd thrumming along under the ink. ("How can you have any pudding when you haven't eaten your meat?")

One father, who suffered reversal early in life and who connects that reversal to his own fondness for surfing, forbids his own son to surf and instead encourages him to take up rock climbing. Rock climbing, he thinks, will be safer. (Yeah - I know. I heard it, too.) Predictably, this is Santo. Another is intent on controlling his son's choices in life in order to preserve his business past the point of being able to do it himself any longer. That accomplishing this hinges on the son's needing to grasp some basic life skills that he would need to be a successful beachcomber is a happy accident.

The exploration of male:female relationships comprises another major theme in the book, and I found this fairly disturbing. God knows it's a rich vein to mine. But, to mix my metaphors, the blooms George gives us in this book grew in the dark.

Santo, where described at all, is described as being like his mother, Dellen. What is meant by this is that for Santo, there is nothing more important in life than sex.

Dellen is a wounded sexual predator. We do eventually get a half-clue as to the origin of this wound, but it's late and comes to us from Dellen herself, who is by this time a thoroughly unreliable narrator, so it doesn't matter. No one listens, least of all the reader.

Dellen wears red in a systematic fashion when she's on the prowl. She'll start with lipstick, then maybe a scarf, until she's red all over and therefore has unresistable power over whatever poor male she has in her sights. It doesn't matter for Dellen when she's in this state, any man will do, but she does selectively target. In red, Dellen is a force of nature, a wave not meant to be stopped.

Which leads me to the use of color in the novel. We are used to Havers' purple high tops. Hannaford comes to us with a shock of burgundy hair, and she's more than a little out of the frame. Dairdre seeks to surround herself with a colorful garden, and Aldara has a commercial orchard - not only red again, but apples. A traveler woman in a chaos of tartan and red socks. The bad girls are awash in color (mostly red), and the good girls wear brown and black.

Dellen, when eventually stripped of all her red clothes, can be controlled, can even be resisted long enough to be sent away. And this was the most cruel thing in the book. More cruel, even, than the murder of an almost-character for whom we're never led to care. (He's fictional, remember.) Don't get me wrong - Dellen should have been sent away decades before. It's not the fact of her banishment, it's the timing of it - right between her son's murder and his funeral.

Platonic imagery abounds. The good girls are plainly dressed, lightly colored, and submissive to the appropriate male, or else enter a convent. The bad girls are dark, colorful, and not at all submissive, with varying degrees of undesirable results. This has to be rejected. The Traveler background Dairdre tries to hide has to be rejected, as does even the concept of miracles, which are also outside the realm of reason and control, just like Dellen in red.

Havers and Hannaford discuss the female need to bond and the male need to not bond. Perhaps, they speculate, women should bond with each other in groups, with a sole man to "service" them, the way some animals do. The reference to animal behavior puts this arrangement in the category of "Things Natural," so that later, when we learn about Aldara's carefully structured private life, we are able to see it as not natural. Aldara, dark-haired grower of apples, has her own unique take on the way to run her sex life. But she runs a profitable business, so she, unlike Dellen, gets to stay.

The sea, ultimate home of chaos, is a living character in the story, the one I like besides the afore-mentioned parrot. The surfers, essentially feminine characters no matter their sex, hang about, directionless to the naked eye, waiting to ride the chaos in search of the perfect experience.

And that is how Santo dies, in red, alone on the cliff, seeking experience.

A more minor character, a "freegan" dedicated to eating for as little actual money as possible and calling that the political subversion it is, is also an alcoholic ex-con with a temper. Santo was designing a t-shirt for him. Santo's mother is careless in red, he was careless in red (the color of his jacket the day he fell to his death), and he's producing clothing for a careless red - red in all its connotations is a thing to be shunned.

But what of Tommy? Glad you asked. We learn he's only 38, which tells us his social standing very possibly allowed him to move along a fast career path. We learn that even hampered by grief and an anomalous position in an investigation, he's a good investigator willing to see what's there not what he wants to be there.

Which leads me to the last utterly unbelievable feature of the plot, and it's such a rookie mistake. Hannaford regards Lynley as both a potential suspect, then a witness, and a member of her investigative force. Very little of the book, however, is taken up with Lynley's presence. These are the best parts of the book. The whole would have been improved by significantly trimming the other sections, including the multiple bloodless and mechanistic descriptions of sex that are nothing less than shudder inducing.

Does Lynley go home? Does he resume his life as a police officer? Does he take the significant promotion he left hanging when Helen died? Not here.

George has used the last four books in the series to re-orient the whole outlook. What we have here is almost a stand-alone, a one-off that presages more one-offs. This seems to end one of the few series of detective novels with forward motion, that don't offer book after book in the comedic structure (comedic as distinguished from the classical tragic structure), characters springing back to their original shape at the end of the last chapter.

In this case, that is what we have, Tommy at the end, as at the beginning, tramping along the coast of Cornwall, itself something of a circle. But at least at the ends he seems to have some idea where he is.

North River by Pete Hamill

2008-07-09T18:06:00.003-04:00

Here's a truly lovely book, redolent (don't get to use that word all that often) with valuable things that waft off the page like the smell of a good stew.

Jim Delaney is a doctor, of solidly Irish stock, the son of a Tammany operative. His roots run all over his New York community. He married a woman with a past he didn't question, they had a daughter, and then he went to France to try to patch together the boys blown apart by World War I. Delaney gets blown apart himself, as does his marriage, which ends in practice when his wife goes for a walk and never comes home. His daughter grows up and marries a man of political ideals, then follows him to Mexico. Now it's 1934, and her husband has gone to Spain, she feels she has to follow him again, so she brings her own three-year old son to New York, where Delaney finds him in the vestibule when he comes home from house calls. (For the younger reader: A House Call was when your own family doctor who knew your name by looking at your face would come to you because you were sick and had no business running around outdoors.) This is where the story begins.

Carlito brings with him all the things that come with small children - noise and needs and curiosity, vigor and life, change. Perhaps the thing that will be most jarring to many more modern readers is Delaney's reaction to this event. He doesn't call Social Services, or bemoan the time this child he didn't ask for will take from his days. Delaney embraces the boy (I had forgotten about that affectionate Irish use of the word "boy") and the pleasant chaos that comes with him.

Delaney's patients run the spectrum from battered wives to Chinese prostitutes, neighbors with heart trouble to mob bosses. Life and death sit side by side, just like they do in real life.

This book is utterly a child of New York, not monochromatic, a patchwork of Europe in miniature. Many if not all of the characters have left behind their religion but not their culture, and not their sense of what makes a decent human being. Delaney navigates this new thing in his life, carrying the nightmares left over by a war we've largely forgotten and the loss of his wife, toward whom he's remarkably generous. Some of the loveliest passages are Delaney's memories and dreams of his missing wife. Carlito is written as a real person, not a plot device. The child can be a challenge to adult writers, it's so easy to forget how it was to be one. Hamill has not, and writes a child with thoughts, emotions, and compassion bounded by a small vocabulary and little experience of the world into which he's been thrown.

Hamill is an excellent writer, very skilled, the words seem to just slide through the story - he makes this look easy, and it's most certainly not. He's a pro, writing a story the way Astaire would have danced it. You can't see the strings.

It's not a perfect book. There is one scene I would have deleted because it adds nothing and is a little confusing in and of itself. There is one character I would have preferred to see handled a little differently. Nevertheless, the flaws aren't enough to diminish the book in any significant way.

This story rests on believable plot points, and characters (one of whom is New York itself), and one a set of values we need to be reminded of - real love, community, loyalty, honesty, and courage.

It's a good book, and I hope you'll do yourself the favor of reading it.

How Many People is Your Family Worth?

2008-05-30T17:06:00.005-04:00

The characters we meet in Child 44 by Tom Robb Smith have to answer that question every day.

This extraordinary first novel is set primarily in a few months on either side of the death of Stalin, in the Soviet Union, 1953/54. There is a chilling prologue set in the Ukraine in 1933, in which we see both compassion (humanity at its best) and desperate venality (a sort of sub-human existence with language). Desperation to survive is a steady theme in the novel as whole. Characters have to make moment-to-moment decisions based entirely on whether this action or that, this word or that, is least likely to get them in trouble, noticed, arrested, sent away, tortured, killed.

Leo Stepanovich Demidov and his wife Raisa are our protagonists. Something of a celebrity in a theoretically classless society, Leo is a noted hero of the Great Patriotic War, which the rest of us think of as World War Two. This status inspires the same reactions from those around him as they would anywhere else: admiration and/or envy. This is the most subtle illustration of one of the novel’s major themes – the impossibility of constructing a political system that eradicates human nature.

On/Off, Good/Bad, Soviet/anti-Soviet, Alive/Dead: This is the progression of dichotomies that underlay daily life, and there was no shading, no gray area, no middle of the road, and yet the pattern of life that results is, as depicted here, Byzantine in the demands it places on the lives of those living within it. This stark polarity of values is often inconsistent with what it is to be human, and human is in the end all there is to be.

The difference between the characters here and the characters in CLOSE is that these people make an attempt to acknowledge and navigate the inverted and complex moral terrain in which they live. How many people would you send to torture and death to preserve your own life? How many for your child? How many for your whole family? Admonishment under Stalin never stopped with the individual who broke the rules. Like cancer, the treatment was to excise healthy tissue around the lesion, just in case. Readers will find themselves through the looking glass at one point, as well, and it’s quite a shock.

Leo and Raisa are thrown into revelation about the true nature of their lives, and it turns out that Leo, the professional seeker of truth, is the one who has been most deluded. He is A Believer, a person who by nature has to believe in something. At the beginning of the novel, he believes fervently, only everything he believes in is false.

In the course of another investigation, if it can be called that, Leo is dispatched to talk to a co-worker who believes his son was murdered. This is a political problem, because the Party does not allow for the presence of murder within a Soviet State. The official position is that crime, per se, is a result of the sort of social ills produced (in theory) by capitalism, primarily poverty, and as poverty has been (in theory) eradicated in the Soviet Union (where capitalism is no longer practiced), there is no crime per se in the Soviet Union. Leo and his co-workers do difficult, truly awful things to protect the good (i. e., Soviet) citizenry from evil (i.e., non-Soviet) influences, in pursuit of The Greater Good, never realizing the greater good cannot be built out of lesser evils.

When he first knocks on the door of the bereaved father, Leo actually believes what he’s been sent to say. Among Leo’s epiphanies is that, not only are there murders and murderers in the Soviet Union, there is a serial killer who targets children. His personal revelation spurs the plot. There could have been more development of the theme of shattered belief, the toll it takes, and exploration of Leo’s inner workings at this point, especially how he made the leap from his many years of indoctrination to independent thought, but the novel as a whole doesn’t suffer too much from its absence.

Despite the bleak structure of the society, at that time and place, Child 44 contains brilliant moments of love, human connection, and beauty. Extraordinary acts of generosity can only be performed by people who seem to have nothing to give, and everything to lose.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot, because I found it engaging and capable of delivering surprises on a regular basis, and don’t want to spoil it for you.

Whenever a person is writing about an historical era, there is the danger of anachronism. The author several times uses the faulty construction “report back,” which was not in common use before the mid-1980’s at the earliest. It might be possible to overlook this grammatical error in that the author is young enough to have heard it all his life. In another passage, we have the following:

Was he jealous of Ivan’s relationship with his wife? Yes, he was. Did he want to share their investigation with Ivan? Not for a second.

Since this sort of question and answer phrasing was not in common use until after 2003, it's harder to cut the writer some slack, and I found it so out of keeping with the rest of his phrasing that it jarred me so far out of the narrative that I laughed. What was happening on the page was decidedly un-funny. (I would like to distinguish between the stacked phrasing used here and the occasional usage of internal questioning that we have with Leo. Investigators – real investigators, which Leo eventually becomes – ask questions of themselves as well as others.) Other than these mistakes, I found the writing to be just about perfect.

There is a bit of a deus ex machina at two points, the first necessary to the continuance of the plot and actually reasonably plausible. The second is less necessary and less plausible, unless you want to (a) sell the movie rights or (b) serialize, and duh. It’s made as believable as possible, and stranger things have actually happened. I liked the book, so I'm willing to cut some slack.

Note – there are passages that aren’t for the faint of heart, but if you find yourself uncomfortable, it is possible in this case to skip a few paragraphs without losing the thread of the plot or missing any truly significant information about the characters.

CLOSE by Martina Cole

2008-05-30T15:54:00.006-04:00

Hardcover Audio

Word of Warning: If you choose the audio option, be aware that the book is riddled with profanity of an extreme sort, fairly well beyond the usual both in quantity and word choice. Actually, boringly beyond the usual. I don't care if you over-use sofa, it's boring, and then when you need the punch, you've got nowhere to go. So, you probably won't want to listen in the car if you've got your kiddies with you.

This book could be called Sociopaths Are Us.

Don't get me wrong, when you're writing about organized crime, you need a sociopath or three for verisimilitude if nothing else. But the level of violence in this book is over the top. Should a reader find themselves knee-deep in a scene they'd just as soon skip, it won't make any difference. Every scene is laden with overt brutality or the hostility that produces it. Page after page, someone is

Disassembled while alive, or
Hacked to death with machetes, or
Made to watch someone be hacked to death with machetes, or
Skinned - yes, alive, or
Shot (see how that seems like nothing now?), or
(if female) Used as a spittoon for seminal fluid.

Despite what it says on the jacket, there is no plot that I could discern, only a series of scenes strung together, albeit in sequence. Where there is a need to reference larger culture contemporary to the scene, Cole gets it right. But history, culture - these referents are largely irrelevant to the story, because in their world, the only thing that changes is which drug is bringing in the most money that decade. Language isn't specific to time and place, only to sub-culture, and again, is fairly static over the course of the book.

Despite what it says on the jacket, there's no emotional complexity, only one emotion, and that's fear. Even the anger/hostility/brutality is based in the fear of losing one's place in the pecking order, and therefore the ability to survive. Parents love their children, but it comes across as biological, as the need to preserve progeny. There's no thought given to whether they might be able to leave the world that surrounds them, no hint of wanting something better for their children. One main character has his son working for him when he's ten. This is love?

Comparisons to other works and other authors are inevitable. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River comes to mind. One of these stories is set in Boston the other in London, with heavily Irish, down-at-the-heel neighborhoods as a backdrop. In Mystic River, the characters' involvement in criminal activity takes a back seat for the most part to the more "ordinary" aspects of their lives, and we know them as people who might live next door before we see them as criminals capable of deciding whether their next-door neighbor gets to live. The novel derives much of its power and complexity from this juxtaposition, this moment when things are turned on their head, and Lehane is a master at exploring the emotional complexity of characters who are capable of being liked, even when liking them makes the reader uncomfortable. That discomfort produces thought. Which is why Mystic River is literature and not just another crime novel.

CLOSE does not provoke thought. It does not provide any amount of insight into the human condition or the human experience. That's because the characters, as written, are no more human than a pack of hyenas. In fact, the comparison is insulting to hyenas.

Cole's skill as a writer is abundantly evident, but she hasn't used that skill to produce literature, though I have no doubt she's capable. This is part of why CLOSE made me sad - it's a wasted opportunity to produce something that has worth. As it is, the only moral of this story is: Be Born Elsewhere.

The Whole Truth by David Baldacci

2008-05-09T15:02:00.003-04:00

Hardback
Audio

Bonus link: here's a short video on youTube in which Baldacci talks about the book, how the idea came about, and a bit about the plot.

In The Whole Truth, we meet Nicholas Creel, major weapons magnate, the 14th richest man in the world with a net worth of roughly $21 billion. Creel's motivation, which underlies all plotlines of the novel, is to return the world to the stasis of the the Cold War era, when there were major nation-states running the world according to well-known, established rules, before chaos, before asymmetrical warfare, before, well, now.

Turning back the clock by pushing the present, and by altering public belief. To accomplish this, he uses a Perception Management firm, headed by Dick Pender. Pender knows some of what Creel is up to, not all, and doesn't even want to try to guess at the whole picture. He just wants his own yacht.

What's Perception Management? It's propaganda on steroids, magical thinking/the power of belief taken to whole other levels of quantum reality. Truth is divorced from fact, isn't based in fact at all, and can be manufactured on a wholesale level.

Alongside the important part of this book is the action plot, our hero a man who goes by the single name Shaw, who loses grace (Anna means "grace") and partners up with an equally scarred reporter named Katie. Their paths cross at first by accident, and later by intent, hers, as she smells what could be a career-reviving story.

To tell much else would be to tell too much, and I can't give it to you any better than Baldacci.

Buy the book. Preferably by using the handy links just above.

2008-05-01T15:47:00.003-04:00

If you enjoyed the earlier books in the Kinsey Milhone series by Sue Grafton, you'll like Pitch Black by Susan Crandall.

Madison Wade, who adopted a teenage son while living in Philadelphia, has moved to Buckeye, Tennessee, and taken over the local newspaper, although I was never clear whether she'd been hired as editor or simply bought the thing outright. (That's okay, it didn't matter enough to the plot to make me go back and re-read.) She's also attracted the attention of the local Sheriff, in a good way. Her son, Ethan, had a rough life before having to survive on the streets of Philly, and the locals are largely wary of them both.

Ethan manages to make one friend at school, Jordan Gray, and is included in a camping trip with Jordan and two other boys by Jordan's step-father, who dies on the trip. Jordan withdraws inside himself so deeply he can't speak, and the other boys all take the position that Mr. McPherson's death was an accident. Pathology proves otherwise, and Ethan, the street kid from Philly, is in everyone's crosshairs.

Madison, meanwhile, begins a front-page expose of steroid use among the high school athletes, and begins to receive threatening letters.

The plot is well-laid out, logical, and provides enough foreshadowing to give the reader direction without giving away too much too quickly. There are several plausible suspects, and there is no sudden appearance of either villain or hero from Off-page-ville. The relationship between Madison and Sheriff Gabe Wyatt proceeds at a realistic pace, and no one behaves as if they aren't on potentially opposite sides of a life-altering situation.

I have one issue, and that's the attempted use of dialect. More than once, Crandall has a native Southerner use the term "y'all" in reference to a single individual. No actual Southerner would say this. "Y'all" is a plural form, just like "Youze," "Yous," and "Youns," in New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, respectively. Similarly, the reader is overtly reminded far too often in ways that do not directly drive either plot or characterization that Maddie and Ethan are fish out of water.

Dialect issues aside, if you enjoy a puzzle you'll like this book. The plot is - I know I've said this, but you have no idea how refreshing I find it to read a mystery plot that is not solved by a deus ex machina - very well laid out, paced and developed. The protagonists are likable. There's little profanity, the violence is largely abstract and potential, and there are no gratuitous anatomy lessons. You can read this, enjoy it, and recommend it to your Mom without blushing.

Buy it, read it, have a good time.

Scream for Me by Karen Rose

2008-04-23T18:58:00.008-04:00

Scream for Me is the upcoming release from New York Times Bestselling author of Die for Me.

There is continuity between the two books in terms of characters and plot lines. Scream for Me stands up very well on its own. You will not be lost if you haven't read the previous book.

Rose has written a book that crosses genres and works equally well in both. This is not easy. Rose makes it look easy.

The protagonists are Alex Fallon and Daniel Vartanian. We get a good sense of who these characters are before their lives intersect. Fallon is introduced first as a teenager in the immediate aftermath of violent deaths that have torn her family and her life apart. (I'd like to be able to say that I found the first scene unbelievable, but I'm from the South and lying's a sin. It was all too real.)

Moving quickly to the novel's present-day, Fallon, now an ER nurse, has to return to the small town she hasn't seen since her adoption by her aunt and uncle. It's here that her path crosses that of Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Daniel Vartanian, initially investigating what appears to be a copy-cat murder. The original victim, thirteen years before the primary action, was Alex Fallon's twin sister.

Rose's characters are believable, and even the "bit parts" are multi-faceted. There was only one character I would have liked to see with a bit more texture, but it didn't ruin the story for me. She uses dialogue well, giving each character a distinctive voice. Even in scenes with multiple speakers, I never had to drop back in the text and re-read in order to keep track of who was speaking. The characters never act unlike themselves, or take choices purely for the sake of providing a plot point.

In Alex Fallon, Rose has written a leading female character who is a very satisfying representation of women. Alex is an accomplished professional, a well-rounded person who confronts her demons, and manages to turn what could be weaknesses into strengths. She's able to make healthy distinctions between sexuality and venality, and between the moral and immoral uses of violence. Unlike the female leads in many romance novels, Alex is a fully-realized adult human, and extremely likable.

Sense of place is handled lightly. Dialect is one of the major tools Rose uses to tell us where we are geographically, and this is wise. Any large city with adjacent smaller towns and rural areas would have served as the place for this drama, and the choice of a Southern location is refreshing. However, often when the South is chosen as a setting, the place becomes a character in the story, sometimes overwhelming both the human characters and the narrative, and Rose ably avoids that pitfall here.

Stylistically, I'd make two suggestions. I'd like to see fewer ellipses. There's nothing wrong with them, I use them myself. They're very visually obvious, though, and the trick is to keep them far enough apart that they don't catch the reader's eyes.

The second thing that stuck out of the narrative to me was the frequency with which the adjective "hard" is used. Characters breathe hard, stare hard, kiss hard. While this word conveys meaning and intensity and keeps the narrative moving quickly, it got to be used with too much frequency and I would have liked to see other adjectives brought into play. Still, neither of these issues made me want to stop reading, or distracted me to the point that I lost the sense of the story.

Rose writes multiple plot lines each of which is interesting and complex on its own, and brings them together at just the right narrative junctures. Her narrative is logical, and flows smoothly. Again, this isn't easy. Rose makes it look easy.

If this is your first book by Karen Rose, I'm willing to bet it won't be your last.

An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg

2008-04-14T14:13:00.006-04:00

The blurbs on the back from other former CIA-agents will tell you this book reads like reality. They would know.

On opening the book, tfirst thing you encounter is a statement that the manuscript was, in accordance with the rules, submitted to the CIA for review to make sure that no classified information crept out. The result is that bits and pieces, sometimes entire pages, are blacked out. This threw me at first, but I decided it was actually pretty cool.

What I don't know for absolutely certain, and never will, is whether these blacked out passages were truly redacted by Agency censors, or whether it is the result of Weisberg's "tradecraft" as a writer, which is of a very high level.

Whether intentional or the result or seremdipity, the blacking out works within the confines of the story. "Need to know" takes on a life of its own, as specificity recedes and the narrative emerges as something much more universal. The protagonist seems not only an ordinary spy but an ordinary man, with a sort of unusual job. Not knowing exactly where the action takes place removes the burden of description from the author and imagination from the reader, and the characters become the context, their inner lives drive the plot. Everything is about decision and relationship, and relationship as the result of a thousand tiny decisions in the same direction.
This is a fascinating book, on many levels, and a true pleasure to read.

The Crazy School by Cornelia Read

2008-03-24T15:34:00.005-04:00

Ms. Read has cleaned up my mouth by convincing me that the commonly used "F-Word," which has until now fallen from my tongue like the golden coins from a childhood fairy tale, is inherently misogynistic and promotes violence towards women. She's right. It is invariably used in a derogatory sense, and meant to describe the person who is, in crude terms, the "Bottom." Never the "Top."

"F-ed" = used, usable, discardable, discardable because used, in real trouble or peril, subject to violence.
"F-ed" = Bottom.
Bottom = Female or female equivalent.

So, thank you, Cornelia Read, for this blaze of insight. For this reason, only, there is a link. Sadly, on page 11, I read the following:

Tim was a little guy, mostly harmless, with skin and hair so pale he was practically opaque.

Now, obviously, he is opaque, because he is a human being and humans are, in fact, opaque.

The issue on page 11 was only the most obvious problem in what could have been compelling prose.

Surveillance by Jonathan Raban

2008-03-13T15:22:00.004-04:00

Meet Lucy Bergstrom, freelance writer, who lives in in a charming old San Francisco apartment with her daughter. Lucy is, when we meet her, on her way to interview another writer, an older man who has become famous and wealthy by writing a memoir of his childhood under the Nazis. Her experiences on the trip may or may not be true, she doesn't know, and doesn't seem very concerned about it. We l ater learn the story that made her host famous may or may not have been true. Lucy is offered a chance to learn but doesn't seem too concerned.

Most of the engaging characters in this novel, though, believe that truth may not make you free, but it will keep you safe. To have The Truth on someone else gives control, power, domination. The Other Person's Lie is the most dangerous thing for the characters, except for Lucy, who can't conceive of such a thing. Your own lie keeps you safe from the penetrating glare of those who would like to know your truth and have control.

These characters live in a world where fact has become slippery, no one really knows what's going on or who anyone is. Everything shifts out of control.

Questions rest on the pages, between the words Raban has given us, and we wait for the characters to ask them.

This book will haunt you for weeks after you reluctantly accept that there is no more, and you have to close the cover.

Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith

2007-11-05T18:08:00.004-05:00

People have begun to see Stalin's ghost on the Moscow Metro. Elderly men pin their wartime decorations to their chests and ride the subway, in hope. Det. Arkady Renko and his partner are quietly investigating another team of detectives (Nikolai Isakov and Marat Urman) whom they suspect of being private assassins in their off hours. Isakov and Urman are well-known heroes of the war in Chechnya. It isn't unusual for police officers, even famous war heroes, to moonlight as killers for hire. It's an efficient arrangement that allows the detectives to investigate the murder they themselves committed.

Isakov also suits the new Party, which needs a clean face for an upcoming election, someone whose very name evokes the Russian Patriot at his best. Isakov needs to be elected: As a Senator, he would be immune from prosecution for the true nature of his heroism, not to mention his more recent activities. Urman, an ethnic Tatar who served under Isakov's command in Chechnya, is consigned to the role of faithful retainer and thematic Brooding Threat.

Renko is assigned to investigate the mystery of Stalin's ghost, which distracts him from his goal of derailing Isakov. The war that Stalin fought is conflated in the public imagination with the Cechn war, heroes wrapped in nostalgia merge with their younger versions, and patriotism blooms out of the snow.

Then members of Isakov's old unit begin to die, as does a reporter who had taken photographs of the battle that made Isakov famous, as he waits to meet Renko. Someone shoots Renko in the head.

Martin Cruz Smith creates a vivid sense of reality through deceptively simple means. The characters' dialogue is in English, the sentences structured with Russian syntax. The Russian winter, itself both charcter and plot point, is effective because there's nothing special made of the cold, the wet, the weight of the snow. Allegory is always employed gently. The novel works if you get it, and it works if you don't. Smith's prose is as dense as it is sparse, riddled with dark, sardonic humor like a marbled steak.

I'm looking forward to Det. Renko's next outing.

The Collectors by David Baldacci

2007-09-13T15:33:00.001-04:00

Baldacci has embraced the New Normal, and shows that one truths abides: The con will always be on, somehow, somewhere.

A former spy, who goes by the blatant pseudonym of Oliver Stone, lives as deep in paranoia as is possible while continuing to breathe at all. Stone is Alpha Male to a mis-matched but mutually complementary crew of eccentric specialists. In a parallel story, an Alpha Female deftly and successfully leads her own cohort of professional grifters through "two shorts and a long."

Baldacci never drops either plotline, brings them together at precisely the right point, and masterfully handles the juxtaposition of the probable and the improbable.

Saying more would be saying too much. Among the major joys of this novel is the surprise on nearly every page. So I'll just shut up except to say buy the book, read the book, enjoy yourself.

S is for Silence by Sue Grafton

2007-09-12T23:16:00.001-04:00

I've read every book in the Kinsey Millhone series to this point. I used to look forward to each new release with bated breath, and by the time she reached L (L is for Lawless), was actively trying to imagine what titles Grafton would discover for challenging letters like Q, X, and Z.

I no longer care. R is for Ricochet was a weak outing, and I disliked the way the sudden relationship with Cheyney Philips felt forced, just poof, there it s, no ängst. Kinsey without ängst is like a fried baloney sandwich without an egg. Nothing more effective than reassurance to whoever needed it that our Gal Kinsey ain't gay.

Yawn.

However, any author with the ambition to tackle the entire alphabet is going to hit a slump now and then, so I chalked my dissatisfactions with Ricochet up to that. I'd read in interviews with Ms. Grafton that there were increasing challenges with keeping Kinsey in the early to mid 80s while the world around us whizzes ever faster into new technological marvels.

On the positive side, in S is for Silence, Grafton has tackled a challenging story structure by having Kinsey tackle a very cold case. The novel opens with a segment in the time frame of the crime, and then brings us back to the mostly familiar voice of Kinsey in the series' "present," the early to mid 1980s. The shifts enhance the sense of past versus present day (and let's face it, the world of the early 80s is long gone away). When a character in a section narrated in in 1953 uses a pickup truck parked by a pay phone as an office, we accept that. Since we are reading the book in a world where cellphones without Bluetooth are antiquated, it seems frankly odd to have Kinsey also have to hunt for a phone in the narrative "present."

This case Kinsey takes on is about a woman from northern Santa Teresa County who disappeared along with her brand new Bel Air and Pomeranian named Baby on Independence Day weekend, 1953. The vanished woman is Violet Sullivan, an altogether un-shy redhead with green eyes, Irish skin and a temper to match (wait, where's that saxophone music coming from?). After thirty-some-odd years, Violet's daughter Daisy wants to know if her mother is alive or dead. If dead, whether her father killed her mother, and, most pitifully, if her mother is still alive,why she abandoned Daisy without so much as a kiss, but took the dog. Violet's husband, and Daisy's putative father, is Foley Sullivan. A violent man, Foley was always the prime suspect, who has lived his life since the disappearance as an outcast among his own community. Still, Foley is a cardboard cut-out from central casting.

Violet, however, is vividly drawn, the classic noir femme fatale, paving the road to her own destruction by being a woman with a sex drive and the will to use it.

The female characters in this novel fall into two broad (no pun intended) categories: the whores and the frigid (no virginal madonnas, just the base and the passive), the connivers who use their bodies - sexually and otherwise - to get what they want and the straight-forward and straight laced who seem barely to be willing to condescend to having bodies at all. If you've been keeping up with this series, you know there's really no place for Kinsey to live in this landscape, so it's no wonder she serves more as narrative voice than as the center of her own case.

There are structural problems. In the example that bothered me most, a May shower occurs between the first and the fourth of July.

While the details of the disappearance and the events leading up to it were recounted in the omniscient third-person with a crispness that was both clear and vivid, Pod-Kinsey's work in the "present" was anything but, and her presence was in fact utterly peripheral to the story. When her tires are slashed, supposedly as a warning that she's come too close to the truth, I was hard-pressed to understand what she could have done or said to provoke such a response. Even at the end of the book, when all has been made known, the tire-slashing serves no real purpose other than keeping Pod-Kinsey in town another day, a well-worn device that can either work or stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Here, it does the latter. Despite her ebullient assertion that the tire slashing is good thing, proving she's on the right track, making someone nervous, she doesn't continue to pursue the case quite so much as the next decent sandwich.

In parallel to Violet's sexual escapades, described in much more detail than is usual for Grafton, we read of the events leading to heartbreak for Liza, a girl of fourteen who can only be called Violet's protégé. The sexual encounters of the adult Violet are only described from the viewpoint of the men, particularly Chet Cramer. Cramer is the only other fully realized character in the novel, but also a blatant rip-off from Agatha Christie's Nemesis, complete with second wife who is a look-alike to a vanished woman. Chet's encounters with Violet are conveyed to the reader more in terms of sensations and emotions more than of specific actions, a commercial for adultery as psychological liberation.

In contrast to this relationship (which at least serves up some psychological insight into the characters, no matter how warmed-over), we are forced to endure an excruciatingly dead and technical description of the loss of a fourteen-year-old's virginity that amounts to sterile kiddie porn. I have asked this question before but never gotten an answer: Does it hurt to soak your brain in boiling chlorine? Because I'd really like to.

When speaking to other Grafton fans, I have noticed there is a consistent appreciation for the depth of characterization, for Grafton's ability to build a satisfying puzzle with a logical conclusion, for the familiar supporting cast of Henry and Rosie, and for the availability of well-written, adult, and clean mystery genre novels.

This is none of that. Rosie and her mythic diner are mentioned but never on page. Henry is on page, for a paragraph or two, then vanishes. Cheyney makes two appearances, by telephone, and even they feel like intrusions. There is no forward movement in that relationship and less rationale for its continued existence. The plot is a predictable pastiche for anyone with any history in the mystery genre, the characters flat, the suspense about as effective as my grandmother's bra.

The trend downhill that began in Ricochet is full-blown in Silence. The prose doesn't even feel like Grafton's use of language.

This book made me sad. In the end, all that's left is a morally bankrupt hope for the reunion of a child and her rapist.

Thus, no link. Ms. Grafton will get to Z without me.

The Last Templar by Raymond Khouri

2006-12-02T15:10:00.002-05:00

Mr. Khouri's basic premise, which seems to be that it would be nice if people would stop killing each other because of differences in faith, is laudable. But this book, even as fiction, has so many problems.

For one thing, his commas are all in the wrong places. Nit-picky, I know, but it distracted me from the narrative. The attempts at vivid imagery are often unintentionally hilarious, as in the "precisely seamed black dress that floated a few inches above her knees." I know what he's getting at, but....

My favorite: "underground hellhole." It's like standing between two mirrors.

Yes, this is fiction, but when working in the historical arena, even fictionally, a writer must maintain some connection with the historical reality of the world in which s/he wants the reader to believe. Therefore, when Khouri has an archaeologist relate the history of buildings occupying the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and completely ignores the Second Temple, one begins to wonder if the author meant to establish an alternate reality as the context for the story. If so, that's fine, I can get on board with that, but say so.

Another error is that he has a young Templar knight be the son of another Templar knight. Since all the monastic chivalric orders took vows of chastity, this is unlikely, but not impossible. However, if it's going to be introduced, given the monastic vows - which Khouri mentions elsewhere - it must be explained, which it is not.

More significant, he advances the theory that one of the founders of the Templar order may have been a Cathar.

The Cathari were Gnostics. They were dualists. This much he gets right. "Cathari" is derived from the Greek word katharos, however, does not mean "The Pure Ones," but "pure," or "purity." "The Pure Ones" would be more like hoi katharomenoi. (Geek is Greek without the R.)

All the Gnostic dualist sects agreed on at least one thing: there were two gods: A good god who was entirely spirit and who could not come into direct contact with matter, and an evil god who had created and controlled matter. Like other Christian Gnostics, the Cathari believed that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body. Therefore, he neither suffered pain, nor died on the cross.

This being the case, to suggest that the Templars were founded in whole or in part by a Cathar who believed that Jesus had been only and merely a normal mortal man is preposterous, even in a fictional context. (Again, a paralell reality would have come in handy here.)

As I said, it would be wonderful if people would stop killing each other because of differences in faith. On this point, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Khouri. However, the way to achieve this is not to recommend to members of any particular religion that they change core content of that faith to make it more compatible with other belief systems. This is not an advancement in tolerance, but merely an attempt to seduce Christians into what amounts to conversion to another faith.

What Khouri does right is create characters who are likable and believable, and who never act out of character simply to advance the plot. This is no mean feat, and he deserves credit for it. He also writes very natural and believable dialogue that would translate very well to the screen, which is where this story will inevitably end up.