This Week's Book

The Conference of the Birds, by Peter Sís: The Year's Best Argument Against eReaders

2011-12-12T11:32:00.001-06:00

Evan Cohen / petersis.com

Look at the troubles happening in our world!
Anarchy – discontent – upheaval!
Desperate fights over territory, water, and food!
Poisoned air! Unhappiness!
I fear we are lost. We must do something!

Though the words might sound like a campaign commercial¹, they’re not. Instead, they appear early in The Conference of the Birds, based on an epic poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Farid Ud-Din Attar (as translated by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi). This is not the first retelling of that tale: there is even a stage play. However, this is the first version constructed around the illustrations of renowned artist Peter Sís – and it is a wonder to behold.

The poem: The hoopoe bird called a conference of the world’s birds to address current problems. He told the birds he knew of a king, Simorgh, who could unite them. He persuaded them to follow him to the distant mountain of Kaf in search of this king. The birds followed him across deserts and oceans, and across seven valleys: Quest, Love, Understanding, Detachment, Unity, Amazement, and Death. Kaf lay on the far side, veiled by clouds.

With each new valley, more birds turned back or died, until at last just thirty birds followed the hoopoe up to the mountain of Kaf:

At the end, thirty birds, unified by their quest, reach their king at last
and they see that they are Simorgh the king…
and that Simorgh the king is each of them…
and all of them.

Hmmm… so, more than 800 years ago, a Persian poet was writing allegorically about a journey of self-discovery. Sort of puts modern self-help mavens in perspective, no? Note, by the way, that this version is greatly shortened from the original, since Sís uses his art to tell much of the tale.

The illustrations: Peter Sís, already a three-time Caldecott Medal winner, brings astonishing detail to the pages of The Conference of Birds. To begin with, this 160-page volume is printed on textured paper that adds tactile nuance to the visual wonder of the images. Sís is well-known for the many-layered detail of his pen-and-ink drawings, which have graced the pages of Jack Prelutsky’s The Dragons are Singing Tonight and Monday’s Troll, along with many others. The Conference of the Birds showcases the power of his stunning visuals.

Each image is drawn and colored entirely by hand, which in some instances can only be described as a daunting task. The first illustration of the full conference is a monochrome drawing of the hoopoe in a clearing amid thousands upon thousands of birds. Those in the foreground have beaks, eyes, wings; while those in the distance are mere “blobs.” In the second illustration, Sís has added color to every bird. Each illustration – and every page is illustrated – is a study in detail; tens of thousands of pen strokes in most. Although the fine, crinkly texture of the pages comes from the paper, at the first touch my fingertips were convinced that it results from the detail of the drawings.

The majority of the illustrations span two pages. Each of the seven valleys is shown twice: empty first, then with the column of birds winding through its landscape. The flock thins with each new illustration, the thousands of birds finally diminishing to just thirty. Sís also liberally includes another of his trademarks; intricate, mandala-like circular (or near-circular) designs – one for each of the valleys and several more.

Sís shortens the original 4500-line poem to a few hundred lines, which may disappoint scholars and those already familiar with the original. However, his wondrous illustrations make this a volume that is accessible to young and old, poet and peasant alike. Though philosophically deep, the text is simple enough for children, though readers of any age will be entranced by the illustrations.

¹ The reference to “poisoned air” makes it unlikely to be for any of the current crop of candidates...

Dead Again? "The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes"

2011-07-19T10:57:00.001-05:00

The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes - Marcus Sakey

The naked man regained consciousness on a rocky beach, half-frozen; barely aware that he was human. He warmed himself in a car he found nearby; a luxury BMW registered to someone named Daniel Hayes, from Malibu, California. It was then that he realized he did not know who or where he was...

...yet once he'd checked into a cheap motel, he seemed to know exactly when "Candy Girls" would air on FX - and that the pretty brunette playing Emily was someone he ached for. In narrowly escaping a local Barney Fife, he discovered he had awakened in Maine, he was the Daniel Hayes who owned the car, and cops nationwide were on the lookout for him and the silver Beemer. He just didn't know why...

...until he'd returned to LA, where he discovered that he was "a person of interest" in the disappearance and probable death of Laney Thayer, the actress from the corny TV show who had so entranced him - and also his wife. Could there possibly be a more inconvenient time to come down with a case of amnesia?

That moment on the beach was resurrection from the first of The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, which was immediately followed by life on the run, all the while convinced to his soul that he would never have hurt Laney Thayer. What a memory-challenged Daniel Hayes could not know was that he was due for another life -- and death. Whether his next life would be in hell or in heaven depended on a man named Bennett and a woman called Belinda Nichols. When the three of them connected, everything changed.

Marcus Sakey is making a living - a good one, I certainly hope - out of novels that feature ordinary folks who, through no fault of their own, find themselves face-to-face with a psychopath. Or perhaps a sociopath - Bennett himself thinks he's closer to a sociopath: "A psychopath is in it for the fun. I don't get off on hurting people. I'm just willing to do it for money." Whichever one the guy may be, he's not the sort of person any of us would want to meet in a dark alley; and he's also someone whose attention it's definitely best not to attract. He's not that different from Jack Witkowski, the villain in Sakey's Good People (2006), in truth. Neither one of them is nice, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Whatever the case, Sakey's heroes find themselves struggling with a man who seems to have no scruples and no morals, someone ready and willing to do whatever it takes to get his payoff. Blackmail is Bennett's business, and he seems to have life-destroying dirt on just about everybody. Unfortunately, he's as cunning as he is cruel - sly enough to stay a step and a half ahead of his victims at every turn. Implacable, apparently unbeatable, the man called Bennett is Daniel Hayes' worst nightmare - or would be, if Hayes could just remember him. He might have some help in that department, however...

The theme of helpless lambs cowering before a ravening wolf runs through The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, much as the same theme drove the plot of Good People. Like the ordinary yuppie couple of Sakey's earlier novel, the fates have thrust Daniel Hayes and his companion into circumstances for which their previous, pampered lives could not possibly have prepared them - circumstances for which few of us are prepared. By combining that sense of "everyman against impossible odds" with a plot that crackles with tension, and Marcus Sakey's written us another winner.

Stephen King's "Under the Dome" - At Least He Didn't Turn It Into a Trilogy!

2010-01-04T11:29:00.001-06:00

Under the Dome by Stephen King

It's been a long time since I stayed awake into the wee hours, eyes propped open, finishing a book. My string ended over the weekend at the hands of thriller master Stephen King. It was definitely a guilty pleasure: no one ever calls King a literary genius, after all. The man can definitely put together a story, though; so when he puts the hammer down, it's "Katie, bar the door!" because that hammer ain't coming up until the last page! And by golly, his latest is no different...

Dale Barbara, affectionately known as Barbie, missed getting out of Chester's Mill before the dome appeared: he was soooo close. Once he'd realized there was no way out, Barbie turned back to join the others suddenly trapped by a giant invisible... thing. In its first minutes of existence the dome claimed half a dozen lives, and it was just getting started.

On the other side, the military threw ever-larger weapons at the dome, but the only result was a forest fire set by their cruise missile. The dome was transparent to light and radio waves and let through a little air and water, but nothing else could pass. The two thousand or so citizens of "the little town shaped like a boot" were in for the duration - however long that duration might prove.

In a perfect world, a hero would step forward to lead the frightened citizenry. Chester's Mill, on the other hand, got Big Jim Rennie -- big fish in small pond, Bible-thumping megalomaniac, the kind of used-car dealer that used-car dealers (and ambulance-chasing lawyers) avoid like the plague. Chester's Mill's problem? Big Jim took over and made the town his personal fiefdom. The man was a master manipulator, and his captive audience (emphasis on "captive") was just putty in his chubby hands. From murder and frame-ups to Rennie's personal version of the Hitler Youth, the course was set. Barbie would be just a speed bump under Big Jim's Hummer, even if he had been designated the leader of Chester's Mill by none other than the President of the USA.

Over everything remained the small matter of that damned dome - impenetrable artifact, origin unknown. As supplies dwindled and the air became foul, it became clear that it might eventually make no difference who was in charge Under the Dome.

As a kid, I watched dozens of oaters with the same formula: a silent drifter crosses the rich and decidedly evil rancher / banker / mine owner who rides herd on Dry Gulch; often initially clashing over the wealthy and beautiful widow "Big Jim" intends to wed. The sheriff's in Jim's hip pocket, and an endless supply of hired guns are eager to do his bidding. On the other hand, the hero has only the valiant newspaper editor to watch his back... I think that's the plot of "Pale Rider," "Shane," and "High Plains Drifter," for instance. Of course if the old saw is true, there are really only seven basic plots, anyway: who could blame King for choosing one that's been proven time and again?

In the case of Under the Dome, it works once more. No matter how hackneyed the plot, no matter how obvious the casting of "good" vs. "evil," King proves as facile a manipulator of his reader's emotions as Big Jim Rennie is of his townspeople. Even when King's methods are the predictable reaction of teenaged jocks upon getting guns and badges or the cognitive dissonance of fundamentalist Christians running a giant meth lab, his touch is deft. Perhaps no other mass-market author could populate a novel with so many, so stereotypical characters and manage to pull it off with such élan. His villains are the kind of detestable people who kick puppies and his heroes almost shine with divine light; yet once King dials the pacing up to eleven, the book becomes nearly impossible to set aside.

Hard to set aside in the procedural sense, though less so in the physical sense: at more than 1000 pages and about three inches thick, Under the Dome is a massive undertaking for the reader. Like other King works, it'll never be nominated for the National Book Award or a Pulitzer; but (also like other King works) it'll make Steve a boatload of cash. That's rather a pity, because die-hard fans will gobble up this thirty-five dollar doorstop as if chocolate-covered, then slavishly await his next book. Instead, they should be holding Steve's feet to the fire for a multitude of sins; like a gleefully derivative plot, characters of cartoon complexity, and a patently ridiculous ending. There are other faults, like the thread of precognition that runs through the volume without grounding even in King's phantasm of a cause for the dome. Not least among his sins is King's legendary inability to make a point just once. When he released The Stand in 1978, it was a monumental work -- when he re-released the "complete and uncut" version in 1990, it had become bloated like a week-old corpse. In Under the Dome, Stephen King once again demonstrates first, that few pop writers are his equal; and second, no editor appears capable of reining in his word processor.

As an old saying might have it, "Excuse the length: it would have been shorter, but I ran out of time." A few more months in the editing hopper would have improved Under the Dome, not to mention leaving it about one tree smaller. It's a three-star book that would have reached four at two-thirds its length.

Instead, it's like the Energizer Bunny: it keeps going and going...

Sue Grafton's "U is for Undertow" - It Has Nothing to do with Water

2009-12-31T08:44:00.001-06:00

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Kinsey Milhone returns for episode twenty-one in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. The irrepressible Milhone still lives in fictional Santa Teresa, owns that single all-purpose black dress, trims her hair with fingernail scissors, and – most importantly – still lives in 1988 where (or is it when?) she's about to turn thirty-eight. At least readers can be certain that, unlike Linda Fairstein’s Alexandra Cooper, Kinsey won't ever find herself in grave peril because her cellphone battery just died. Heck, Milhone still doesn’t even own a fax machine…

Kinsey’s latest case finds her caught up in a late-eighties whirlwind, the recalled memory phenomenon (remember that? sure you do…) Her client claims to have recalled seeing two men burying something in his neighborhood his sixth birthday, the recall prompted by one of those “twentieth-anniversary” newspaper articles about the kidnapping of a local child. Could he have seen the kidnappers burying little Mary Claire Fitzhugh? For the sum of $500 (a lot for a PI in 1988…), Kinsey does basic legwork to find the house in question and the possible burial site. She succeeds, and even talks STPD into bringing out a cadaver dog. Sure enough, they find a body… of a dog: so much for her client’s credibility.

Like a terrier with a bone, Kinsey refuses to let go of the case; even after her client’s one-day fee is all used up. Something bothers her about all this, of course (otherwise there’d be no book twenty-one). As one might expect, she accidentally trips over the actual kidnappers… with the usual results.

U is for Undertow (weird choice of titles – maybe U is for Underground would have been better?) builds a plot with flashbacks and a parallel character-development, all centered on a well-to-do neighborhood of St. Terry’s. There’s the Unruh family, with their son and his beatnik-then-hippie girlfriend/common-law wife (she’s morphs from a slut beatnik in 1963 to a drug-addict hippie in 1967). There’s Walker McNally (son of Walter McNally: what an unfortunate naming convention), high-school drug dealer in 1967 and drunk in 1988. There’s Jon Corso, a high-schooler with a stepmother problem in 1967 and a bestselling author in 1988. Grafton’s plot bounces among the four groups of characters and the three different years.

The fact that Grafton only introduces five characters who were present in 1967 effectively limits the field of suspects in the kidnapping; and since she kills off two of them by the middle of the book, the bad guys are pretty much wearing bright red targets. Of course, Kinsey doesn’t know all this, so this is a semi-omniscient reader plot. Whatever. Everyone knows how it’ll turn out, after all… After we’ve figured out whodunnit, the rest of the novel is merely a matter of wondering where they hid the body and how Kinsey will ultimately nail ‘em. On those fronts, Grafton has done her usual workmanlike job.

Grafton’s heroine has changed little from the previous twenty novels; still slogging three miles down the beach every morning and still addicted to QPs with cheese (though she’s beginning to realize that her thighs will be the same shape as a QP if she doesn’t lay off). She still hangs with all those octo- and nonogenarians in her landlord’s family, and still eats most of her meals at Rosie’s place. No pets, a ’71 Mustang (the VW Beetle has been recycled), and an H&K locked in a briefcase locked in the trunk.

A subplot involving an impending Kinsey family reunion also runs through the book, and Kinsey learns a fascinating fact about her Aunt “Gin” (Virginia). Family ties are very much the subtext of U is for Undertow: shattered families, grandparents adopting an abandoned child, an ugly stepmother, and Kinsey’s bizarre family dynamic. Another thick thread of the plot is Grafton’s obvious distaste for the hippie lifestyle; as she paints her flower children as drug-addled leeches who live by begging and stealing – she even kills one off via drug overdose and another via AIDS (in 1984? gimme a break). Having married young, one imagines that Grafton’s distaste might be tinged by jealousy over all the fun the flower children had…

I found several lines in U is for Undertow to be head-scratchers of the anachronism variety. Grafton has a number of characters running five to seven miles or swimming daily: this is in 1963, back when Nike was barely a gleam in Phil Knight’s eye. Another character is seen drinking Diet Pepsi in 1964 – technically possible, but unlikely, especially since the character is a middle-aged male. And I wouldn’t bet that there were many leafblowers on the streets of LA in 1967, just nine years after the infernal device was patented. Could be, though…

Overall, Kinsey’s return is just a middling entry in the series, mainly because Grafton expends more energy on painting ancillary characters as evil than she does on developing motivation for her actual villains. In that, she could’ve done a lot better.

Harry Bosch Plays Frantic Father in Michael Connelly's "9 Dragons"

2009-12-23T19:08:00.000-06:00

9 Dragons by Michael Connelly

After decades in which Harry Bosch's only concerns seemed to be his trad-jazz collection and sticking bad guys behind bars, his creator apparently decided he needed a more human side. Over a span of several novels, Harry learned he had emotions after all. First he fell in love with Eleanor Wish, an FBI agent he'd partnered with on a case. After Wish had been drummed out of the Bureau (a result of their method of solving that case), he found her in Vegas at a new gig as professional gambler, where he learned to his surprise that their... ummm... "stakeouts" had created a daughter, Madeleine. Ten years later, Bosch is now part-time dad to 13-year-old Maddy, who lives with Mom in Hong Kong. He's also discovered a half brother, legal eagle Mickey Haller (the titular Lincoln Lawyer). For 9 Dragons, author Michael Connelly puts Bosch's family ties through the proverbial wringer: and it's not a pretty picture...

It started like any other homicide case: three bullet holes in the chest of a liquor store clerk, the cash drawer standing empty. A minor difference: Harry Bosch had vaguely known the dead man, John Li - all the more reason to put the perp in slam. Bosch and David Chu, a Chinese-American cop from the Asian Gang Unit and his latest semi-partner on the case, finger a triad bagman as the killer. Luckily, they nab him on his way to the airport to skip the country. It's Friday, so Bosch and Chu perform some backroom paper shuffling to keep him stashed over the weekend so they have more time to build their case. As Harry's sifting through the evidence, he receives a message that almost stops his heart: a video of Maddy, bound and gagged in an anonymous room. The message seems clear: drop the case, and you get your daughter back in one piece. Bosch being Bosch, no one - NO ONE! - else is good enough; so Harry's on the next plane to Hong Kong, hell-bent on doing anything to get his daughter back.

Unfortunately, in his hurry to leave, Harry Bosch forgot to say a prayer to the god of unintended consequences. He will regret that omission...

After years of carefully crafting one novel a year, author Michael Connelly's annual output has doubled in each of the past two years - and he's also taken to "cross-posting" his characters, such as Mickey Haller's cameo in 9 Dragons, or the double cameos of Haller and Bosch in 2009's Jack McEvoy novel The Scarecrow. While "factory writers" like James Patterson farm out at least part of their production, Connelly is doing it all himself. And if you ask me, the strain shows this time out.

Bosch, ever irascible, is even grumpier than usual (maybe if he stopped listening to heroin jazz all the time?) in 9 Dragons. Normally pushy and demanding, this time out he's simply arrogant and condescending; and at times just a little racist. While I'd assume that Connelly intended to depict Bosch in a different light with a plot that casts him as a frantic father, he came off more like TerminatorDad to this reader; a veritable bull in a China shop as he shot hell out of Hong Kong. I'll grant that Connelly managed to toss in some pretty wicked plot twists, but I caught on to the biggest one of all long before he even set it up. And at least one of those twists was, to be blunt, completely gratuitous.

Worst of all, however, is that Connelly's writing - the actual nuts and bolts of it - seems to have suffered as he upped his publishing output to two per annum. The flow is choppy, the dialog is sappy, and the plot is messy. Sorry, but Bosch is always at his best when he's thinking instead of going off half-cocked. This time out Connelly's turned him into a visceral killing machine who, frankly, needs to chill out.

Wishin' and Hopin' Wally had Done a Better Job

2009-12-17T14:13:00.001-06:00

Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb

After the other nuns hauled Sister Dymphna, gibbering and drooling, back the convent; her fifth-grade class weren't quite sure what to expect. They definitely weren't prepared for the beret-wearing, French-spouting Quebecoise the principal of St. Aloysious Gonzaga hired to fill Sister D's sensible shoes. The fall semester, however, proceeded normally after the “incident” - normally for a fifth-grade class that is, which, when you think about it, is about as far from "normal" as you can get. Toss a wannabe bad boy (a twelve-year-old held back twice) and a precocious Russian pre-teen vixen into that heady mix, and Felix Funicello (yes, that Funicello family: she's his third cousin) was destined to have a school year to remember. At the very least, he would have a semester to remember.

As a lay teacher (how the fifth-grade boys giggled at that word, even back in 1964) in a parochial school, Madame Frechette had her work cut out for her. The kids didn't make life any easier, of course - they were fifth-graders, after all. But as the days grew shorter and the annual Christmas show approached, this particular group of little rascals pulled out all the stops. Could Madame tame her unruly charges and pull off the requisite Christmas miracle? Keep on reading...

Like many a successful adult author, Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed) figured he had a Christmas book in him somewhere. Or perhaps his publisher figured he had a Christmas book in him somewhere, I'm not certain. If he does, I doubt this is it - all Wishin' and Hopin' turned out to be was an extended version (some 270 pages worth) of a fifth-grader's diary, and only half the school year at that. Though emblazoned with a Christmas tree ornament and the subtitle "a Christmas story," Wishin' and Hopin' is about as much of a Christmas story as John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (after all, Christmas does come in winter, at least in the northern hemisphere).

Sadly, Wishin' and Hopin' falls far short of its holiday billing. It's seems as if Lamb had read Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima back-to-back, then thought to himself, "Hey: if they can do it, so can I!" Unfortunately, he was wrong. Despite (or perhaps because of) the main event’s similarity to other Christmas pageant sagas, Lamb's effort comes off forced and derivative. HarperCollins' decision to brand it a Christmas story notwithstanding, the predictably disastrous pageant doesn't even wander on-stage until well into the book's second half.

Lamb's efforts certainly come off as nostalgic, though his timing is a little shaky - cousin Annette's "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" wouldn't come out for another year, for instance; and it's a little hard to swallow the idea that NBC was selling "Man from U.N.C.L.E." merchandise in the show's third week (this was 1964 - not 2009). Most of that's little niggling stuff (that a researcher should have caught). But Lamb himself should have caught a few other faux pas, such as this decidedly grown-up prose from the pen of a ten-year-old: "It rained on Halloween, gently at first - a moist caress that made the glistening, streetlamp-lit leaves slippery, but not the kind of rain that made your parents say you couldn't go trick-or-treating." A moist caress? from a kid who's still fuzzy on the birds and the bees? I don't think so...

Wishin' and Hopin' left me wishin' for a better Christmas story, and hopin' that this wasn't the best to come out this year!

Kingsolver Takes on the 21st Century's Version of HUAC: The Lacuna

2009-12-04T08:20:00.003-06:00

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Harrison William Shepherd came south from Washington to with his mother, Salomé, after the divorce. It was at Isla Pixol that he took up the habit of keeping a journal: even at fourteen, he had a writer’s ear for the world that surroundedhim. When his pretty güera mother moved on to a less wealthy man (and smaller house) in Mexico City, Harrison accompanied her – by then, into the second volume of his life story. All of Mexico was a hotbed of revolution in the '30s, and Harrison somehow found himself in the thick of it. By chance, he found a job cooking in the household of Mexico’s much-discussed revolutionary muralist, Diego Rivera, and his wife the just-as-much-discussed painter Frida Kahlo.

It was more than a job, it became his home: the mercurial Frida recognized a kindred artist in the slender, quiet boy she called Sóli (short for insólito, “odd” or “irregular”). She also recognized his other “leanings” (that insólito business), and so young Harrison became her friend instead of another conquest. During his six years in the Rivera household, the boy’s talent blossomed until he fulfilled his destiny: he became a writer.

Much more happened in those six years; during which Harrison cooked for the Riveras’ special guest, transcribed his lectures, typed his letters, and helped him clean rabbit cages. He was there the day that special guest, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated by an agent of the Stalinist regime. By then, it was time to go… Harrison eventually landed in Asheville, North Carolina. Like Tom Wolfe, another famous Ashevillian, Harrison published a novel; and then another and another. He led a comfortable existence in his little house with his cats and his devoted secretary. The year was 1949… and Harrison Shepherd hadn't an inkling that life as he knew it was over.

It’s no secret that author and commentator Barbara Kingsolver doesn’t pull her punches. Whether her topic is a missionary family in 1960s Belgian Congo or her family’s year as a locavore, Kingsolver resolutely speaks her mind. Doing so does not necessarily sit well with those who don’t share her worldview, however; which is probably what landed Kingsolver on Bernie Goldberg’s list of “100 people who are screwing up America.” Seems Kingsolver told her then pre-teen daughter, Camille, that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to yield to peer pressure and wear red, white, and blue on September 12th, 2001. That’s apparently not terribly dangerous to our civilization, however, since it landed Mother K at a mere 74th on the list. Hell, Eminem and Ludacris were both more than ten ahead of her! No word on where Bernie thinks Sarah Palin might belong, since when he published his list she was just an unemployed politician/hockey mom in Alaska.

Kingsolver’s position on Bernie’s list (and those of his adherents) will most certainly rise, however, if they read her latest novel, The Lacuna. She might even end up in the top ten, which is pretty darned ironic: you see, The Lacuna is all about making lists of "dangerous" people…

Kingsolver structures her latest novel as an autobiography, her protagonist’s journals posthumously transcribed by his faithful secretary, Violet Brown, and then shelved for half a century. The earliest section she ascribes to the opening chapter of a memoir written by Shepherd himself; and she has also fashioned a literal lacuna – a gap of some two years – where a journal had been destroyed (to protect the "guilty"). The remainder is a remarkable record of a young man’s journey, of a facile ear for dialog, of a quiet and unassuming life. Here is a young man who stood within the shadow of a political whirlwind and yet wrote more of the banalities of his fellow servants' lives; who cared more for Lev Davidovich Trotsky the man than he cared about his politics. That would become an important point to remember a decade later…

If you’re at all familiar with the history of mid-twentieth century America you’ll know without having to finish The Lacuna what was going to happen to Harrison Shepherd – not that anyone would put it down by this point. Of course, the final chapters contain copies of letters from the FBI; the transcript of a hearing before HUAC (pointedly citing the presence of Richard Nixon), “news” filled with half-truths and outright lies, and quotations taken out of context. Harrison Shepherd became a casualty of bigotry and hatred disguised as patriotism, convicted of not being “American enough.”

If Bernie Goldberg happens to read (or more likely, hear about) The Lacuna it’s a good bet that Barbara Kingsolver will climb much higher on his next list of “America’s enemies.” Harrison Shepherd made HUAC’s top ten, and the guy was about as political as Lady Gaga. The reason Barbara has become “more dangerous”? Simple: the story of Harrison Shepherd could happen to anyone – and happen today, when “citizen journalists” feed off each other’s strident pronouncements, all without worrying about “facts”; when out-of-context quoting has been raised to high art; when desk-bangers with radio microphones happily label anyone who disagrees with them un-American. Of course, Kingsolver will herself be quoted out of context, and you can be sure that plenty of people are already calling her un-American… most of whom really, really need to read The Lacuna, but never will.

More’s the pity.

Patricia Cornwell, "The Scarpetta Factor": Too Much Angst and not Enough Action

2009-11-22T20:16:00.001-06:00

The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia D. Cornwell

Back in 1985 Bobby Ewing was murdered on Dallas, but he was resurrected in a ham-handed “dream sequence” the next year; a television event that may rival the infamous “jump-the-shark” episode of Happy Days for small-screen hubris. Not to be outdone, author Patricia Cornwell left signature character Kay Scarpetta grieveing upon finding lover Benton Wesley’s engraved Breitling watch amidst the ashes of a bomb site in 1998’s Point of Origin; only to raise him from the dead five years later in Blow Fly. The reunited couple has since wed, moved to the northeast, and set up multiple psychiatric and pathology practices in Boston and New York… a real shuttle family. And yes, Lucy and Marino have tagged along, though Marino can only afford housing in NYC, and lacks a squat in Beantown. Scarpetta's billionaire niece Lucy can, of course, afford both…

To keep busy while Ben (or is it Wes? I never remember) toils at the McLean Institute; the Doc, as Marino calls Scarpetta, does pro bono autopsies for the NYC medical examiner and picks up pocket change as a forensics consultant to CNN. Guess that latter’s how the couple affords both a home in Boston and a pied-à-terre on Central Park West. Though the latest media sensation in the Big Apple is the disappearance of money maven Hannah Starr three weeks ago, Scarpetta’s not on that case – instead, she’s on the case of a young jogger whose body was discovered in the Park. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection, but during Scarpetta’s next appearance on CNN the host tries to get her to connect dead woman to missing woman, going so far as to claim that both had been seen “getting into a yellow cab.” Gee, I thought everybody in Manhattan rode in cabs all the time…

Wes… errr, Benton has his own problems, involving an “inappropriate” Christmas card from a recently discharged patient at McLean. Something about this woman sets his teeth on edge – though it’s difficult to figure out what could ruffle the preternaturally calm shrink and former FBI wunderkind. That is, of course, before the bomb shows up on their doorstep. All of which kicks Marino, Lucy, Lucy’s squeeze Jaime Berger (ADA in charge of sex crimes [ain’t that Linda Fairstein’s job?]), and a host of cop-types into high gear. A missing BlackBerry and a deteriorating relationship between Lucy and Jaime add to the fun.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet – if you thought Benton’s (did I get the name right) resurrection was something, The Scarpetta Factor is gonna set you on your ear.

Somewhere about 1998, the Kay Scarpetta series went off the rails. Instead of being about a ferociously intelligent woman who uses her skills and intellect to solve crimes, the series morphed into something about relationships – dysfunctional relationships. First there was Scarpetta’s niece Lucy, the supercali-technologic-XP-all-precocious young lesbian: her coming out, her violence, her tendency to be completely uncontrollable and just abour as antisocial. Then there was the whole Wesley thing, with his “death” and reappearance. Then there was the Marino thing - a drunken attempt to “hook up” with Scarpetta. There were all the moves - Virginia to South Carolina to Florida to Bos/NYC – and Scarpetta’s career changes. Oh, and the whole wolfman Chandonne thing, too…

Recently, it looked as though author Patricia Cornwell had pulled the series out of its funk, especially in the last installment – simply named Scarpetta. In the seventeenth book of this venerable series, however, Cornwell backslides something fierce. Of the nearly 500 pages of The Scarpetta Factor (a hefty tome), much more than half is given over to the characters’ analysis of their feelings, fears, hopes, desires, memories… There are soliloquies on what kind of tomato Scarpetta should slice up for a 3:00 AM salad to make herself feel better about the bomb squad’s leaving fingerprints on her glass sculpture. There are extended – and I mean several pages – renderings of Lucy’s barely-contained rage at what she considers a slight by an FBO air-traffic controller. There is page after page of Marino and Wesley in their ongoing pissing contest. It’s rather boring, in fact.

Yes, the pieces of a good mystery are all there: Marino has his cop moments; Scarpetta is a pathology goddess in scrubs and a hair net. Lucy has better computers (and more smarts) than NSA signals intelligence, and knows how to use them. But Lord! There is so much misdirection and so much sniveling going on in here that its removal would have cut the book in half and still left the plot intact.

Last time out, I thought Scarpetta was back: sadly, it appears I was wrong.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road": Now, Tomorrow, and For Ever More

2009-11-13T21:58:00.003-06:00

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In some not so distant future the unnamed man and boy shamble slowly across a bleak, ashen landscape, headed toward the shore of an unnamed sea. They are two of the last survivors, a pair of dying souls making slow progress across the face of a world already dead. They're following The Road down its winding path, passing desiccated village, burnt-out city, and dilapidated farmstead. The leaden sky is empty of birds; the cold, mucky gray water supports no fish; no animals prowl among the blackened stumps of the forest alongside their route. The few humans still alive forage for scraps of preserved food among the ruins or, worse, commit that unthinkable act so familiar to the last survivors of disaster.

In some other, brighter time, the man had had a wife, a home, a career. Now he has but a pistol with two bullets, a shopping cart, a few tattered blankets, and a plastic tarp to keep the ever-falling ashen snow from soaking through their few meager supplies. The boy, a child of indeterminate age, was born as the cataclysm that destroyed their world struck; his mother is long gone, dead by her own hand after uttering her own epitaph: "We're the walking dead in a horror film."

In this post-apocalyptic world there is no color left; only black, white, and an all-encompassing gray. There's little left for a father to teach his son: there will be no more games of catch, no more pop-up storybooks, no more hours whiled away on fishing trips. All that remains is survival, and the boy's grim, oft-repeated question: "We're the good guys, right?"

Maybe.

From the pen of Cormac McCarthy (the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men) and soon to appear in theaters, The Road set a new standard for the author's often grim worldview. In his chilling saga of life amidst the ruins of our civilization, McCarthy has envisioned a future so bleak, so dismal, that to have given his characters names would have endowed them with too much humanity to bear. Instead, a nameless pair treks slowly through a blasted, ashen future world, their dragging steps lit sporadically by lightning flashes by night and rare glimpses of a wan sun behind billowing clouds of ash by day.

"The nights now only slightly less black, by day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

McCarthy's prose is beyond spare in The Road: his words have been stripped to bare essentials, their spare form a conscious parallel to the starvation diet upon which his characters subsist. Like the blighted world in which it's set, the book itself is nearly depopulated. The few characters are reduced to mere skeletal remnants in more than merely the physical sense; their sole surviving emotions a guttering orange flame of will to live and the white hot light of fear. For father and son alone, there is one other emotion: filial love; the pair's only constant in a forgotten and forgettable world. The power of that bond between father and son will overcome fear; overcome sorrow – it is what makes them the good guys.

McCarthy's bleak vision may serve as a prediction; it may serve as a warning. It will most certainly serve to incite contemplation.

If Ron Paul Wrote Science Fiction: “The Unincorporated Man”

2009-11-10T20:13:00.005-06:00

The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

Justin Cord awoke after a nap that put Rip Van Winkle to shame; awoke looking upon an angel. In fact, Neela Harper wasn’t an angel: she was a reanimation specialist. A lot happened in the three centuries since Justin Cord had crawled into a secret cryogenic suspension unit and staged his disappearance. He woke to an entirely different society: not long after he went under, the world economy collapsed and society followed close behind. The center of American society became Alaska, and the hardy self-sufficient types who populated the last frontier had some interesting ideas about how things should run. In short, every human being is now a personal corporation – all forty billion of ‘em, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. At birth, each person accrues 100,000 shares of stock in himself. Five thousand belong to the government, 20K belong to the parents, and the remainder get used to feed, clothe, house, and educate the child. Once of legal age, the citizen takes possession of whatever stock remains. A system-wide stock exchange allows every citizen to trade in the shares of every other citizen – including oneself. The ultimate goal is to buy enough of your own stock to become the majority holder, which – in theory – allows you to do pretty much what you want. If you have special talents or skills, your stock becomes more expensive; same thing if you get a good job or become famous – even if it’s just for being famous, like Paris or Nicole.

Justin Cord, however, is a “new” breed of citizen: no one owns a single share of Justin Cord, and he also refuses to own a share of any person. For that stand on principal, Cord earns the undying enmity of the world’s most powerful corporation, CGI, in general; and CGI’s corporate hatchet man Hektor Sambianco in specific. Why the fear and loathing? To CGI and Hektor, Justin Cord – the “one free man” – represents the greatest threat in history to their economic and social system. On that basis alone, Cord must be neutralized: either forced to incorporate, or just plain terminated; either one would be fine. CGI is up against a formidable foe, however: Justin Cord has already had one lifetime of experience fending off financial and legal attacks – but he’s also in a world in which everyone has had a lifetime of experience in high finance. Can Cord remain The Unincorporated Man? Stay tuned…

Speculative fiction can be especially difficult to write successfully: not only must the author fulfill his audience’s expectation of solid plot and believable characters, those readers also expect a future that’s a logical outgrowth of current trends. That probably explains the plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War era; the predictions of rampant sea-level rise in more current scifi. Readers cut authors slack on those predictions by way of a process called the willing suspension of disbelief. Even when we can’t quite accept an author’s vision, we’re still willing to adhere to the polite fiction that all things are possible – as long as everything hangs together in a coherent whole. An author who struggles to make his future fit that convention is an author who has failed his readers.

SoCal brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin base their first joint novel (the latter’s website cites three prior YA novels) on a single change that sweeps society, uniting every human under a single socioeconomic system; the system of personal incorporation. The brothers take particular pleasure in explaining how their prediction of a sort of hypercapitalism is the best of all possible worlds, alternating between paeans to the perfection of the market and the evils of any government larger than the brain of a brontosaurus. The system government’s only purpose is to let contracts to private companies for the largest possible projects – terraforming the other planets of the Solar System and developing interstellar travel, for instance. Any other functions handled by present-day governments – education, the justice system, transportation – are “better” handled by private corporations in the Kollins’ future.

There is no argument that the Kollin brothers have postulated a future that, while unlikely, could occur under certain circumstances (this reader finds it both amusing and slightly chilling that the father of the personal incorporation movement was a “minor elected official from Alaska…”). That duty of the scifi writer has been satisfied – though the “universe” of personal incorporation has some obvious flaws that the writers either ignore or overlook; that's what "willling suspension of disbelief" is for. On the other two responsibilities of the author, the brothers meet with less success. The arc of the plot resembles a poorly-rigged tightrope: it seems taut at both ends, but sags badly in the middle. In the case of The Unincorporated Man, this is because vast chunks of the novel’s central third are riddled with gratuitous expository passages, presumably intended to laud the libertarian premises that underlie the fictional universe. Only a few minor characters are particularly likeable; and the major characters are so heavily stereotyped that they should be wearing Kabuki makeup. The writing is often clumsy; and the novel suffers from editing lapses, dangling plot threads, routine visits from the Coincidence Fairy, and a scattering of continuity problems. It ain’t gonna win awards from the proofreaders.

It’s unusual, but not unheard-of, for a work of fiction to thinly disguise proselytization for a political position. A recent example of such a work was the late Michael Crichton’s heavy-handed State of Fear. The Unincorporated Man, however, takes the practice to extremes. Going beyond Crichton's rather genteel partisanship, however; the Kollin brothers take their lead from AM radio: that which is not part of their philosophy deserves no respect, and must instead be mocked. That means tht the government is ineffective by definition. The “tax man” has become an evil demon; who might as well have a big knife and a hook, and spend his nights lurking on lovers’ lane. Government courts need to ask for help from the private sector because they can’t afford anyone who isn’t simply mediocre. Oh, yes, the future universe is a capitalist paradise.

Yet there are still serpents in that paradise: the system’s most powerful corporate boardroom looks like an episode of “The Apprentice,” for instance; and the excesses of that same corporation (CGI) are every bit as repugnant as anything a democratic government has done (we’re not talking Idi Amin’s Uganda here…) – bribery is routine and murders are contracted with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. And if you’ve read this far and don’t mind a spoiler, by the end of the novel the characters suggest that incorporation is akin to slavery, and that anarchy would be preferable…

The Kollin brothers have written what amounts to a white paper for the Libertarian Party of the 24th Century – so be it. But don’t be fooled by all the accolades heaped on The Unincorporated Man by “fellow travelers.” Five hundred pages in defense of a futuristic libertopia notwithstanding, at its core the novel remains a work of science fiction: and it’s really not all that good.

Marcus Sakey, "The Amateurs": This is a Job for Professionals

2009-11-07T10:21:00.001-06:00

The Amateurs by Marcus Sakey

Imagine that you’re thirty-something, stuck in a dead-end job, and not one of the lofty dreams of youth has come true. If someone came to you and proposed a scheme that could change your life, what would your answer be? Even if it meant breaking the law? The Thursday Night Drinking Club answered, “Yes.”

The Club is Alex, a bartender; Mitch, invisible doorman at a swanky hotel; Jenn, a travel agent (do they even still have those in the era of the internet?); and Ian, the club’s one semi-success – a trader who hasn’t grabbed the brass ring in years. Every Thursday the friends meet at the restaurant where Alex tends bar; meet perhaps mostly because misery loves company. Their favorite drinking game is one they call “Ready-Go”; basically a form of “what if?” When one night Alex’s question is, “What would you do if you had a share of a quarter-million dollars?” the question is more pertinent than most: Alex knows where there is a quarter mil just ready to be picked up. The problem is that to get the money, the four will have to steal it. That should be no problem: they’re smarter than the average crook, after all. And so a pact is made, a foolproof plan is formed, and the Thursday Night Drinking Club set themselves up to embark on a life of crime.

Bobbie Burns was right: even the best-laid plans often go awry.

Everything begins according to plan, but then things begin to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, but horribly wrong – and a man lying dead in the alley behind the restaurant isn’t even the worst of their problems. You see, the friends may be smart, but they are definitely amateurs and they make an amateur mistake: they don’t realize who they’re dealing with. And the four are dealing with people who are a lot, lot worse then they’d ever expected…

Chicago author Marcus Sakey seems to be building a literary career out of “what if” scenarios himself. The Amateurs begins slowly, seeming at first glance little more than a by-the-numbers thriller with the quartet of amateur crooks caught in the inevitable squeeze between the cops investigating a crime and real crooks wanting their booty back. If that were the case, the plot of The Amateurs would play out with but slight differences from Sakey’s previous novel, Good People. That was, in fact, my first impression of the novel. In the earlier tale, however, Tom and Anna Reed (the titular “good” people) find themselves forced to make tough decisions that will affect their lives. The four friends in The Amateurs find themselves in much, much deeper doodoo. What the four of them do, what the four of them decide, will affect their lives and the lives of those they love – and that’s only for starters: what the four of them finally do, what the four of them finally decide, will effect millions of lives.

In that, Marcus Sakey has raised his new novel far beyond some simple by-the-numbers thriller – not that The Amateurs isn’t a first-rate thriller, because it certainly is. More than just write a crime novel, however, Sakey has crafted a study into the psychology of how ordinary people react under extraordinary circumstances. The Amateurs goes even further: it is ultimately a study of how a seemingly ordinary person can give his life meaning.

"How to Rob an Armored Car": How Not to Succeed In Business WIthout Really Trying

2009-11-03T20:55:00.025-06:00

How to Rob an Armored Car by Iain Levison

Welcome to Slacker City, PA, population three – average age (and average annual salary) twenty-something. The local slackers - Kevin (ex-con turned professional dog-walker), Doug (English major turned food-service worker), and Mitch (nothing much turned auto parts manager at Accu-Mart) – certainly seem friendly enough, though their affability might well be because the three are constantly stoned. Mitch and Doug live a life of glorious underachievement, with their grody apartment and beater rides. Kevin’s life is a little more interesting, since his wife’s job helps pay for the slightly larger house the family of three needs and a slightly newer truck; but the marriage was never all that solid and it seems to be getting shakier (ask Doug why, eh?). The slacker lifestyle becomes more appropriate after first Mitch and then Doug lose their jobs in quick succession; but at least Mitch’s exit doesn’t come before he can arrange for an $1800 flat-screen to “fall off a truck” into Kevin’s pickup at the Accu-Mart loading dock. Flushed with pride at the easy success of their first foray into grand larceny – not to mention intrigued by the apparent lack of effort – the trio determine that their destiny is to become master criminals.

Jobs having gotten scarce as hen's teeth in the dying rust-belt town of Wilton, the friends end up dividing their time between plotting their next caper – a caper that never quite seems to go right – and regularly refilling the house bong with weed - job searches can go hang. Whether it’s dealing pills for a shady MD; a steal-to-order Ferrari; or the ultimate caper, robbing an armored car; the three wannabe gangsters quickly prove that they’re a twenty-first century edition of The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (except that these three don’t shoot at all). The trio prove remarkably lucky, though: their victims can’t shoot straight, either.

If you ever need to know how to knock over an armored car, talk to Howard C. A high school classmate of mine, Howard knocked over a Brinks truck just a couple of years after we graduated. Of course, Howard managed to knock it over by T-boning the truck with his semi at a busy intersection, as opposed to cold-cocking a guard and making off with bags of cash at gunpoint; but it still makes for a good story. On the other hand, Iain Levison’s literary version of his three slackers’ similar feat – How to Rob an Armored Car – turns out to be somewhat less interesting. Perhaps it’s the overstudied aimlessness of his characters that makes Levison’s plot uninteresting; perhaps it’s the by-rote stupidity of every one of their criminal plots that does the deed. Then again, it might be just how hard Levinson struggles to make his characters maximally slack. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t quite work for this reader. Lacking much of a plot, How to Rob and Armored Car still manages to be moderately entertaining, mostly because of some fairly stock gags and a couple of cute twists. It’s readable – but I wouldn’t put it on the top of the stack. (Confidential to Levison: those who speak English with Hispanic accents don’t pronounce Mitch “Meesh” – that’d be French.)

Thrice before an author (Dog Eats Dog, Since the Layoffs, and A Working Stiff’s Manifesto), Iain Levison seems determined to carve out a niche for himself writing about aimless stoners too lazy to get off the couch to repack the bowl on the bong. Someone ought to warn him that embers of his chosen demographic aren’t real big on reading novels…

An earlier, slightly different version copyright ©2009 for curled-up.com by Rex Allen

A Last Look at Fifty-One Lives: Marion Winik, "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead"

2009-10-21T18:59:00.004-05:00

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik

Back when I first moved to Austin, Texas, I already knew about the little band of local celebrities. Where most of the locals kept their eyes peeled for Matthew McConaughey or Sandra Bullock down on 6th Street or watched for Willie, Jerry Jeff, or Marcia at the Broken Spoke; I was a little different. When browsing the shelves at Book People or fondling the produce at Whole Foods or Sun Harvest, I always kept one ear open, listening for a distinctive velvet growl. The Austin celebrity I was always hoping to meet was Marion Winik.

Alas, Marion moved away from Austin; and a few years later, so did I. Not long after she left, the frequency of her commentary on NPR's All Things Considered dwindled and I heard that voice redolent of whiskey and cigarettes no more. Widowed in 1994 (the story she spins out in First Comes Love), Winik remarried some six years later, moved to small-town Pennsylvania, and began a new phase in her life - perhaps even growing up just a little... but she still writes, thank the Lord, as she proved with her 2005 collection of essays titled Above Us Only Sky (the title’s from John Lennon’s “Imagine”). After a three-year hiatus, Winik returned with a vehicle that’s a little bit spiritual, a little bit weird, a little bit funny – and a whole lot of interesting.

In her latest, a tiny volume that might well be described as Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology as told by a female Jack Kerouac, Winik shares fifty-one vignettes of people (mostly) she has known; people who have since “moved on.” They’re dead – hence the title, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a riff on the Tibetan Book of the Dead cross-bred with Winick’s post office address in southeastern Pennsylvania. Just as the deaths of those we know leave the survivors feeling the full spectrum of emotions, Winik manages to share that same breadth of experience. No matter whether she’s writing about her cat, her father, or her son’s second-grade teacher, she manages to capture not just the essence of the dearly departed but also the fundamentals of her understanding of the person and his life. Some deaths left her sad, a few left her puzzled – and at least one left her angry that she could no longer berate the deceased.

Most of the fifty-one subjects are identified not by name, but by some characteristic that defined their relationship. Her first husband, Tony, is The Skater; her father, The Driving Instructor. Many of the characters who’ve passed through Winik’s tumultuous life will be familiar to those who’ve read her memoir or her collections of essays including The Skater and his friends, all dead of AID;, and The Clown, dead by his own hand in Austin. An ominous number of Winik’s friends from her twenties and thirties (and perhaps forties) died of overdoses (though one died when hit by a bird while motorcycling in Mexico). The Glen Rock Book of the Dead isn’t all dark and dreary, however: Marion shares many a pleasant memory – there’s a paean to the insouciant King of The Condo (an Austin alley cat named Rocco); and then there’s a memorial to a little pink house at Catina and Moulton in New Orleans, casually killed by that bitch, Katrina.

Perhaps the most poignant is her vignette of The Competition, a fellow memoirist with whom she shared an alma mater and a messy life – except that she’d never met the woman, didn’t know her from Eve...

When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in The Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was in my mind even more of the time, When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple of years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blues Clues armchair for my daughter, and on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: a Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met. [Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: a Love Story and Pack of Two, died in 2002. She and Winik never met.]

You might think the subject odd; you might be put off by the references to homosexuality and drug use. You might merely think, who cares about her optometrist, who died when she was eleven? So what if her first father-in-law was a Quiet Man? Why should we care about the deaths of her second husband’s three brothers? We’ll not go all John Donne on each other here – let’s just acknowledge that Marion Winik has the skill, the words, the heart to make us care about these people.

Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood": You'll Hear that Final Whimper...

2009-10-18T17:12:00.004-05:00

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

With the exception of limericks about Nantucket and perhaps Poe’s “The Raven,” there may be no bit of poetry more familiar to those who received an education in the USA during the mid-twentieth century than the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Say it with me:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

A flourishing sub-genre of fiction is entirely devoted to predicting whether Eliot was right – it could be a bang, after all – and to just how that inimitable whimper might come to pass. Though the method of civilization’s passing might be secondary to the plight of the scattered survivors, the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction still must address the instrument of our demise – hence Eliot’s verbal musings. On the “bang” end of the spectrum authors have postulated rogue comets and mindlessly diabolical asteroids; alien invasion; or nuclear holocaust (e.g., Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon) – sometimes with but the barest of hints (c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) about the events. The “whimper” contingent leans more toward environmental upheaval, plague (Stephen King’s The Stand), or both. And then there’s Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in which a thoughtful author predicts that the proximal cause of mankind’s unhappy fate will be his own unrelenting hubris. For The Year of the Flood, Atwood reprises her dystopic vision of mankind’s future; this time as seen through the eyes of a handful of survivors – survivors of “the waterless flood.”

Toby survived the waterless flood partially because she’d prepared for such an eventuality – building a hidden store of provisions and medicinal herbs – and partially because the schoolmarmish, fifty-something herbalist had the good luck to be living in a secure high-end health spa. Ren survived by accident: when the plague hit, she’d been quarantined after possible contamination by one of her “clients” at the high-end sex club where she worked a trapeze act. This is their story…

Toby and Ren have shared history, believe it or not. They’d spent several years together as members of God’s Gardeners, a sect that seems to have been created by mating the Amish with PETA – the central tenets of the faith are to avoid the use of modern conveniences and to never eat anything with a face or a mother. The Gardeners celebrate a different saint each day, saints like Dian Fossey, Euell Gibbons, and Terry Fox; and live simple lives amid beehives and rooftop gardens. All the while, “modern civilization” swirls around their little colony – a dystopian hell in which gargantuan corporations have taken over even the last vestiges of government, and therefore may comport themselves pretty much as they please. When the only police or military agency on the planet is CorpSeCorps – the corporate security corps – the question of “who’s minding the minders” pretty much becomes moot. Meanwhile, the Corporations sequester their scientists and technicians in secure compounds where they gleefully develop “new and improved” product after “newer and more improved” product to peddle to the rest of humanity, those called the “plebes.” Filled with the bored, the uneducated, and the chronically unemployed; the plebelands are a sea of hedonism and violence upon which the scattered islands of the compounds float uneasily. The billions of plebes subsist on a diet of SecretBurgers (the secret is where the meat comes from), get their health care from HelthWyzer, get their rocks off at Scales & Tails (Ren’s employer, a division of SecksCorp), and the women dream of a spa weekend at ANooYoo (where Toby’s a manager). Obviously, the txtg gnrshn named the businesses.

And then one day the world changed: a particularly pesky new bug got loose and the corporations couldn’t manage to get it under control. And when the dust cleared, the only survivors were the few who’d been isolated when the plague struck – a surprising number of them Gardeners…

The Year of the Flood tells the same story as many another post-apocalyptic novel: a small band of survivors struggles to find food and shelter, and fights off the criminals who flourish with the disappearance of social order. Where Atwood’s saga differs is in the construction of her plot: instead of a sharp break when “the flood” occurs, Atwood’s content to let her story wander back and forth across that line in flashbacks of varying lengths – mostly how Ren and Toby got to this point; less of how the planet got in such a state. As in her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood spends little effort on answering procedural questions – the “how” and the “why” are explained in just a few toss-off sentences. She is instead content to let her audience read between the lines of a 400-plus page social commentary – which makes it no less biting, when all is said and done.

The “universe” of The Year of the Flood is the same as that of Oryx and Crake, right down to the appearance of a handful of characters in both tales – The Snowman, narrator of Oryx and Crake, shows up as a teenaged Jimmy; Crake slips into the plot several times as Glenn; and Oryx even shows up once – as do the Crakers, the post-modern humanoids Crake designed and gave to Oryx to “train.” Though they share the same universe, however, with its manmade piggoons, rakunks, liobams, multicolored Mo’Hairs, and phosphorescent lumiroses; The Year of the Flood stands resolutely alone.

A superb example of Margaret Atwood’s renowned ability to spin a tale that both entertains and enlightens, The Year of the Flood is one of those rare books that can take its reader through the full range of emotions. By turns dryly witty, terrifying, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; Atwood’s latest is one you simply shouldn’t miss. As you're reading, you can hear that whimper...

John Sandford, "Rough Country" - Virgil Flowers Returns (if Anyone Cares)

2009-10-08T17:59:00.002-05:00

Rough Country by John Sandford

Erica McDill paddled her canoe out to watch the eagles return to their nest at sunset. She never came back. Virgil Flowers was on a boat of his own when he got the call, only a couple of hours into a big muskie fishing tournament. Virgil never came back, either. The difference was that, a few hours later, a very alive Flowers stood looking at a very dead McDill.

In Virgil Flowers' experience, murder is usually about sex or money; and McDill seemed to have plenty of both. The Eagle's Nest Lodge near Grand Rapids (the one in Minnesota, not the one in Michigan) began as a family joint; but a while back the owners had converted the Lodge to a high-end, women-only resort and the place had thrived. Though not officially a hangout for wealthy North Woods lesbians, a good chunk of the clientele had always been either full-time residents or visitors to "the island," McDill among them.

Nothing back home in St. Paul looked suspicious and the setting of the killing seemed to indicate a local, so Virgil began his investigation by nosing around the Eagle's Nest and the Grand Rapids lesbian community - a community that substantially overlapped with the local music scene. That overlap was mainly due to one person: the top local band's lead singer, Wendy Asbach, a brash, brawling blonde C&W type with a set of pipes to die for. So, the number one question: did McDill die for them?

Virgil Flowers commenced to do what Virgil does best: he poked his nose into enough people's business and turned over enough rocks to build a case, and then he let nature run its course. Witness and suspect interviews were a little tougher than usual for Virgil this time, though, since the cop who looks like a surfer dude (blond hair that's a little too long, tight faded jeans, and a string of rock concert tee shirts) figured out that good looks and an "Aww, shucks, ma'am" style just didn't seem to work as well on these particular women. Well, they worked fine on one of ‘em's sister: now, if he could just get his cell phone to stop ringing at all the wrong times...

Rough Country, John Sandford's third Virgil Flowers novel (after Heat Lightning and Dark of the Moon), finds Lucas Davenport's go-to guy still wandering around Minnesota's back roads in a state pickup truck, pulling a private boat. He's also still more inclined to leave his sidearm under the seat of the truck than under his arm, and he still has enough of an anti-authoritarian streak to sleep with witnesses and the occasional suspect - that he doesn't this time is probably more a result of the sexual preference of most of the women in Rough Country than for lack of trying.

Given the small-town setting of the McDill murder, Flowers truly doesn't have much to work with - and that means neither does Sandford. A single red herring is pretty much all that separates readers from an open-and-shut case, and identifying the killer on about page 100; even with the stinky fish it's still close. So Sandford has to find other ways to pad out the plot. I lost track how many times Flowers had to backtrack because his chief local source, Zoe Tull, "neglected" to tell him yet another interesting factoid - one of which in fact turned out to be important, but the rest of which were just more distractions. All of that means that, while the two previous novels featuring Virgil were not only fun, they were also good mysteries that kept readers guessing. This time, though, the fun factor is just as prevalent but the mystery element is pretty ho-hum.

As ever, Sandford keeps up a running patter for his character . Clearly, Virgil was ADD as a child (consider that he doesn't sleep, and he doesn't seem to be able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time - except fishing). We learn that Virgil detests the Dixie Chicks (probably more a Clear Channel thing on Sandford's part than a music critic thing, since Virgil thinks Leann Rimes is the bomb); we also get minor insights into his three ex-wives. Unlike the previous two novels, though, Virgil has little luck with the ladies this time - however Sandford spins Virgil's frustrations into an amusing secondary thread. The problem with Rough Country, unfortunately, is that this thread is almost as engaging as the murder mystery. For that, Virgil loses half a star...

It's Got "a Lot of Bad, Bad Words in It": Whale Talk, by Chris Crutcher

2009-10-02T10:24:00.002-05:00

Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher (2001)

Rumor has it that for most people, “high school” turned out to be little more than a variant spelling of “hell” – head cheerleaders and varsity quarterbacks excluded, I guess. I can’t speak from experience: my usually well-ordered memory seems to have misfiled most of what happened during my teens. I don’t know why, but the few lingering scraps seem to suggest that the rest is hidden out of willful self-defense. The renowned young-adult author Chris Crutcher, however, clearly does not suffer my peculiar memory malady: oh, no, Crutcher clearly remembers high school just fine, in all its excruciating, humiliating, embarrassing detail. He’s been making a living remembering those years for a couple of decades. Not only does he remember them, he shares them in all their glory – and Whale Talk is one of his best.

Somewhere in northeastern Washington, not far from Spokane, lies the town of Cutter. This bucolic little logging burg is, like many an American small town, proud of its high-school athletes; though Cutter might take things to extremes. As are most small western towns, Cutter is pretty homogeneous, which is just a fancy way of saying that almost everybody who lives there is White and Anglo-Saxon, and most are at least nominally Protestant. Cutter just happens to be where T. J. Jones lives with his adopted parents. The name on his birth certificate is “The Tao,” having been named after her favorite book by the birth mother with whom he spent his first two years. Considering that “Tao” is pronounced “dow,” it’s easy to see why The Tao Jones goes by a nickname (especially after the DJIA shed about a third of its value last year). T. J. also happens to be what lots of locals call a “mongrel” (a little further east in Idaho, he’d be called a “mud person”): his birth mother was Caucasian and his birth father (“the sperm donor”), Afro-Japanese. Sort of like Tiger Woods, T. J. Jones is a walking advertisement for what geneticists call “hybrid vigor,” ‘cause T. J. Jones has it all. A superb natural athlete, intelligent, and also darned good-looking; T. J. is everything one expects in a homecoming king – except perhaps he’s a little, errr, dusky. Oh, and he can have a wicked temper. Luckily, T. J. has a fantastic support system in his parents, his girlfriend Carly, and his therapist/friend, Georgia Brown (one of the other two people of color in Cutter) – otherwise he might have gone postal by his late teens.

Not all of T. J.’s classmates are so lucky. Like every school, every town – heck, every group of more than three people - there are students at Cutter High who are marginalized by their so-called peers for having the unmitigated gall to be “different.” Different can mean just about anything: developmentally disabled or super-intelligent, overweight, stick-like, painfully shy; anything that makes a kid stand out is grounds for exclusion… and worse. T. J. knows all about this exclusion stuff; having missed birthday parties and had dates broken because the parents of would-be friends don’t want “one of those people” in their homes. He’s getting through it, though, thanks to that support system.

When approached by his Senior English teacher to start a varsity swim team, T. J. is initially dubious. That’s for good reason: sure, he can swim; but not only does Cutter High not have a pool, there’s just one in the whole town (at the All Night Health Club), and it’s not exactly Olympic quality. And then T. J. has a brilliant idea… and soon Cutter High School has its first swim team ever. Only it’s a team composed entirely of the misfits, the marginalized, and the otherwise excluded – it’s a team with only one swimmer and no hope of ever winning a meet. Swim-team captain T. J. Jones has set his sights far higher than mere athletic accolades, however. He intends to give his six teammates something that the rest of their classmates have been trying to take away from them since first grade: their dignity. And so, the Cutter High swim team takes to the water: besides T. J., there’s a swimmer who weighs over three hundred pounds, one who’s the ultimate geek, one who’s a weight-lifting singer, one who’s so “average” that he just plain disappears in a crowd, one developmentally disabled, and one who has a weird limp and the baddest attitude ever – for darned good reason. Throw in a homeless man who sleeps in the health club at night as assistant coach, and you have all the ingredients of the most heartwarming sports story since Robert Redford blew out the stadium lights in “The Natural.”

If only it were that simple… but of course, it’s not.

Remember that T. J. is a “person of color”? Well, there are plenty of people in this corner of Washington who don’t much care for any color but lily-white – and chief among them is Rich Marshall, owner of the local lumber mill and the biggest cheese in Cutter’s alumni club. He spends more time roaming the halls of CHS with the football team than he does in his company office – and every time he sees T. J. Jones, something nasty just has to happen. See, Rich’s high school girlfriend Alicia left him and went away to college, then came back to Cutter with a mixed-race daughter. Rich married Alicia “anyway,” but little Heidi is collateral damage in a relationship that goes past dysfunctional to dangerous. When T. J. first meets Heidi, she’s attempting to scrub the “dirt” off of her arm – an arm almost exactly the same shade of brown as his.

T. J.’s senior year at Cutter High will be a delicate and sometimes dangerous balancing act for him and everyone around him: his swim teammates, his family, and little Heidi. It’s a year that will give him the strength he needs to be someone – perhaps someone great – and it’s a year that will take away one of the most precious things he has. To characterize Whale Talk as merely a “coming of age” tale is almost an insult to the growth T. J. Jones undergoes.

One pretty much knows what to expect when opening a young-adult novel written by Chris Crutcher: the protagonist will be an athletic high-school boy who doesn’t quite fit into the rigid caste system of his small high school. He could be a jock – the king of the jocks, probably – if he wants, but he finds the jocks small and shallow. He has great (a) great parent(s) and somehow makes a connection with that one teacher who puts him on the right path; meanwhile thumbing his nose at those adults who’ve never outgrown their high-school attitudes. He participates only in those interscholastic sports in which he competes against himself – track, swimming, cross-country – even though he could be an all-around athlete. He has a smart, slightly quirky girlfriend with whom he hasn’t had sex. And he knows in his heart of hearts that the people who run the cloistered little world of his high school are complete idiots. Chris Crutcher’s books are all that way; more like a prix fixe meal than a la carte…

That’s pretty much the outline of Whale Talk, like Running Loose and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes before it (and, I’d wager, Chinese Finger Puzzle and Athletic Shorts, too). But even though the basic concept of his young-adult novels doesn’t stray far from the one central theme of “Be Your Own Person,” each novel also has its own flavor and its own set of issues. In the case of Whale Talk, the flavor is definitely chocolate – and the themes are much darker. Front and center is racism; the ugliest form of hatred – here directed not only at a strapping teenage boy but also at a little girl. Another theme is that of violence, violence for its own sake and violence born of ignorance – especially physical abuse of a wife or girlfriend… or a child. Crutcher does not pull any punches in Whale Talk – you are hereby warned not to come to this book looking for sanitized dialog or simple, happy-days solutions. The ending… is not as happy as it could be.

Whale Talk gets pretty rough. Crutcher has never been one to pull any punches when it comes to his plots or dialog. He’s softer on organized religion this time than he is in his other books I’ve read; though he still takes some shots at other favorite pastimes of the social conservatives. Such “problems” are never the reason that books like this are challenged – and Whale Talk has been challenged regularly ever since its publication in 2001. The reason that’s stated most often is “profanity”: I haven’t any idea what number he or she reached, but I can guarantee you that some stick-up-the-butt type somewhere has gone through the book counting and can tell you exactly how many “dirty” words are in the text. Then he went and screeched to a school board somewhere about how “we don’t let our children talk like that at school, so you shouldn’t make them read those words.”

The shame is, that while the dirty-word counters are making their little marks on a tally sheet somewhere and just about foaming at the mouth over the language, they aren't reading the rest of the words – and so they’re not getting the point. There are some sections of Whale Talk that are incredibly difficult to read, to be sure. The first scene between T. J. and little Heidi is a race between breaking your heart and turning your stomach – yet it is the utter realism of hideous words coming from the mouth of a child, the instant knowledge of what a little girl’s life must be like, that gives this scene power rarely seen in adult fiction – much less young adult writing. One courageous educator in Alabama said of complaints about the language in this book, “[the message of this book] is more important than the language used.” Cooler heads don’t always win, however: s/he was, of course, eventually overruled…

Whale Talk is a tough read, one that your teenager may well find disturbing. It isn’t disturbing because it uses “a lot of bad, bad words”; as a school board member in Decatur, Alabama, would have it. Whale Talk is disturbing because what’s in there is utterly, entirely possible.

Why Read "The Spire"? It's Pointless...

2009-09-27T18:57:00.002-05:00

The Spire by Richard North Patterson

Sixteen years ago as a senior (and one of the B-est of MOCs) at Caldwell University, Mark Darrow stumbled off fraternity row early one Sunday morning, only to find the body of a young African-American classmate lying in the shadow of Caldwell's iconic landmark, The Spire. The uproar over the death of one of the school's few minority students (not to mention a beautiful young woman) and the conviction of a second student - one of Darrow's closest friends - knocked the legs out from under the tiny college's fundraising efforts, and it'd been downhill ever since. Darrow's career, on the other hand, had moved in the opposite direction: after Yale Law, his rise in the ranks of attorneys was positively meteoric until, at forty, the handsome young man was a millionaire many times over. That's when his Caldwell mentor and the closest thing to a father he'd ever had, Lionel Farr, came calling in his Beantown highrise office with a proposition. Since the current president of Caldwell had just been caught with his hand in the till (to the tune of $900K), would Darrow please quit his law practice and take over for him?

Well, of course he would...

Back in Wayne, Ohio (home of Caldwell), Darrow found his alma mater clearly on the skids, with morale among both alumni and faculty tanked. Since that long-ago murder started Caldwell on a long, slow decline, Darrow found the case weighed heavily on his mind. Though snowed under with his presidential duties , Darrow nonetheless found time to investigate Angela Hall's murder - especially when he realized that, in hindsight, some things had never added up. To make his nights even shorter, Darrow also embarked on a personal investigation of the alleged embezzlement by his predecessor. Juggling not just a job and a new-found "hobby" would be plenty for a normal man, but Mark Darrow's not your ordinary man: there was also a certain young woman he hadn't seen in sixteen years.

Did the wrong man go to jail for life? Where's the missing money (and who made it go missing)? Could Mark Darrow turn Caldwell around in spite of having zero experience running a university? Would the young widower's broken heart be mended by a raven-haired beauty? All the answers will be found near the center of the Caldwell campus, at The Spire.

Richard North Patterson's seventeenth novel (and second for 2009), The Spire isn't a novel of political intrigue (The Race or Balance of Power), nor is it a courtroom drama (Dark Lady), nor an "issue" piece like Exile or Eclipse): Patterson has written what may well be the first (and very likely the last) mystery with a university president as protagonist. In creating his fictitious Caldwell, Patterson draws heavily on his undergrad days at Ohio Wesleyan University, though the real place seems to have no "spire" at the center of campus (that would be The University of Texas).

Although the plot of a white-shoe Boston attorney turned university president trying to solve two different crimes (one more than a decade old) bears no resemblance to anything else in Patterson's oeuvre, the novel remains immediately recognizable as his work. As in both Exile and Eclipse, the protagonist is a single male legal eagle called to help an important person from his past; about to re-encounter a woman he'd left behind - even though the circumstances are demonstrably different in this instance.

Though I said that Patterson avoided the sort of issue that permeated the plots of Exile and Eclipse, some might say that that statement isn't completely true. Some might think that the dynamics of small-town race relations and the friction between "town and gown" in small university towns are issue enough for Patterson in The Spire, though I would disagree. Neither such stress is covered in any particular detail, and race relations are actually glossed over except to say that "some people were racist back in the old days." In the absence of a great question to discuss and about which his characters might wax philosophical (endlessly...), Patterson's latest is decidedly smaller that most of his recent works. It's not much smaller physically, but it's smaller intellectually. Where protagonists in his "large-scale" novels are world-class experts working at the leading edges of their vocation (the law), Darrow seems somehow able to have leapt into an entirely new job and still have time to investigate not one but two crimes - and have hot monkey sex with a beautiful woman in the remaining three hours of his day. Oh, to be young again, eh? Or perhaps it's the Perry Mason effect - lawyers are all supernatural beings.

Besides a plodding and pedestrian plot, The Spire also suffers from a surfeit of transparency. That both of Darrow's investigations would result in miscarriages of justice uncovered was, per convention, a given from page one. What is worse, however, is that the true villain of the piece, regardless of Patterson's clumsy attempts at misdirection, is as obvious as an NBA center amongst a tribe of pygmies. What a generous reviewer might call a "huge plot twist" came as no surprise whatsoever for this reader. Last, Patterson never laid any groundwork for Darrow's decision to leave a highly lucrative legal career and become president of a tiny college - while barely in his forties. Such shortcomings do precious little to recommend The Spire as a mystery/thriller novel - and I don't recommend it, either.

Running Loose: A Challenge to Bluenoses Everywhere

2009-09-21T07:30:00.003-05:00

Running Loose by Chris Crutcher

I don't know about the rest of the guys out there, but if my senior year in high school had started out like Louie Banks', did, I'd have been one happy camper. Louie was a certified Big Man on Campus at THS – Trout (Idaho) High School – he had a starting slot on the football team, a better-'n-average GPA, and a cheerleader for a girlfriend. Maybe he was a big frog in a very small pond, but it sure seemed that Louie had it all. But that was before Coach Lednecky put a contract out on an opposing quarterback and called him some pretty unattractive names, starting with mild racial slurs and ending with the N-word. When Louie decided to stand on principle, Coach denied everything and almost the whole town turned against one confused seventeen-year-old.

Everybody, that is, except his best friend Carter, his parents Norm and Brenda, and Becky. Beautiful, smart, sexy Becky…

I don't know about the rest of the guys out there, but if my senior year in high school had turned out the way Louie's did, I might not have made it. It's a testament to a strong, levelheaded young man who'd been well prepared by loving parents that he made it through the trials and tribulations heaped on his head over those nine short months. It's even more astounding that he came through more grown up than he'd ever imagined. Dear Abby used to say, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Louie Banks would definitely have had enough lemonade to keep Trout, Idaho, from getting thirsty for a long time. Here's to Louie, Running Loose on the back roads of western Idaho.

Like most Chris Crutcher books, Running Loose is written for adolescent males; guys who can identify with what Louie goes through every day at school (and what he does every night under the covers). It's a coming-of-age story in the sense that every seventeen-year-old has to come of age; but it's also a coming of age tale in the sense that Louie Banks does more growing up in that short year than a lot of "adults" have gotten around to doing by the time they're thirty.

Sure, the story is simplistic – it has to be, because people don't write another Ulysses for YA fiction. The idea is to entertain, to give the reader something he can identify with, and get across a hidden message or two. The twin messages in Running Loose are pretty powerful: a stand on principle is position of strength, and one must always roll with the punches. Louie Banks may shoot himself in the foot from time to time – he is, after all, only seventeen and therefore only about 10% as smart as he thinks he is – but when push comes to shove he makes some decisions that his parents can be proud of.

The odd thing about that last sentence is that there are parents out there who apparently would not be proud of their kids for acting like Louie Banks. Like many of Crutcher's books (Chinese Handcuffs, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Athletic Shorts, and Ironman), Running Loose is a banned book. It's been challenged dozens of times over the years, not long ago (August, 2006) in Rochester, New York. According to the mother of a child given this book on a summer reading list, Running Loose is "soft-core pornography." She was described in a local newspaper as, "so upset by the book's use of racial terms and sexual references that she believed her son could gain little by reading the literature." Her husband said, "Some of the things in the book are unbelievable, and I was extremely surprised."

They must not have read the same book I did: here are just some of the lessons Louie Banks could teach the children of this couple:

1) Take a stand against intolerance and racism.
2) You do not need to have sex to prove you are in love.
3) Not every authority figure is a fit role model.

Soft-core pornography? Excuse me? The kid uses the words "hell" and "bastard" a couple of times. He does make not-infrequent references to, shall we say, the practice of self-gratification, but he gratifies himself, and his girlfriend's not involved.

Here is what is really wrong with the book, things that the couple from Rochester clearly want the libraries and schools to keep out of the sight and mind of their child: Louie calls his parents by their first names. He spends a (sexless) night with his girlfriend. Instead of the minister, the high school football coach, and the high school principal, some of the best advice Louie gets from adults comes from a bar owner and even the town drunk. And, worst of all, Louie blames an unfeeling God for some of the worst things that happen to him. Something tells me that those are the only passages that those Rochester parents ever read…

The Siege: Stephen White Makes You Forget All About Alan Gregory!

2009-09-15T22:09:00.001-05:00

The Siege - Stephen White

Along about April every year, things start heating up on the Ivy League campuses. Perhaps it's because the end of the school year is imminent; perhaps it’s the sap rising in hormonal student bodies. Whatever the case, Yale is no different – perhaps even more loony than others, since April is when the societies “tap” new members. Societies like Skull & Bones, Book & Snake, Scroll & Key may sound like the houses of Hogwarts; but they’re real: several Presidents have been members (as have a few cartoonists…). So when things at the “tomb” of Book & Snake start getting strange one April Friday, the campus cops write it off as tap-week festivities.

Things had already started, though: Ann Summers Calderón found the cryptic note in her purse during the week, the one that warned her that something was about to happen and that she was not to tell anyone. But she does: she tells Sam Purdy… That’s why Sam is there for the opening salvo. At the start, it looks like another student prank; a good one – one that might go down in history. The thing about “orange for my disappointment, blue for my contentment” just smacks so much of a prank, especially since blue is Bulldog holy colors and orange belongs to detested Princeton. It looks like a prank when the first student to appear on the steps of Book & Snake shows the little black box taped to his belly, the one with the cartoonish label saying “bomb.” It looks like a harmless prank right up until the moment the bomb blows the hapless teen to bits – and whoever's inside the near-impregnable tomb of Book & Snake still has seventeen more just like him inside…

Yale’s an elite school, and the “taps” are supposedly the elite of the Yalies – the ones inside Book & Snake include children of captains of industry, of a Supreme Court justice nominee, of the Secretary of Defense… and of Ann Summers Calderón. With “assets” like them in danger, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team is in town on the double – along with a host of other alphabet agencies; not one of whom has the slightest idea who’s in there, how many are in there, and – most important – why they’re in there. Disgraced Boulder cop Sam Purdy is in town as Ann Calderón’s eyes and ears, and that’s how he meets Poe – Chrisopher Poe, the FBI antiterrorism version of Fox Mulder – and Dee, wunderkind CIA counterterrorism analyst. Good thing: ‘cause whoever’s inside that tomb and whatever’s on their minds, there’s plenty of terror to go around…

There are suspense novels, and there are suspenseful novels – and then there’s Stephen White’s The Siege. This, my friends, is a suspense thriller in the classic tradition, written by a man who knows how to trip all your psychological switches: White is, after all, a clinical psychologist. His tale opens on a sunny day marked only by the vaguest sense of uneasiness, but by the time it finishes two days later, you’re bordering on cardiac arrest from the tension. It is a book of which I happily say something I very rarely say: you’d better block out a long weekend to read The Siege in one sitting, because you will not want to put it down. It is that good.

One reason it’s that good is that Stephen White has written a hostage novel in which the readers, like the horde of cops and FBI agents that surround the nearly impregnable building, have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside. That’s right – instead of shifting the viewpoint from inside to outside like most (if not all) novels and movies about hostages, White did not write a single scene – not a single word – from the viewpoint of the hostage takers: readers, like the hostage negotiator; like the HRT; like Sam, Dee, and Poe; have no earthly idea what’s going on in there – or why it's happening. See what I mean about suspense?

As he has shown in past novels – both his standalones and the Gregory series – White is in his element when it comes to crafting his characters. It’s a treat to see behind Purdy’s cop mask, for instance. But White’s best chops are reserved for his new characters, Dee and Poe – with that relationship that’s a twenty-first century version of Burstyn and Alda in “Same Time Next Year.” Then there’s the local New Haven PD hostage negotiator, thrown into the shark tank on a world stage – she's one gutsy woman. Even minor characters are rock-solid.

Longtime White fans might be disappointed to find his usual protagonist, Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory, relegated to a small cameo role in the epilogue; though Gregory’s frequent running buddy Sam Purdy does get to strut his stuff. This isn’t the first time White’s left Gregory on the sidelines, however; he also played a minor character in 2005’s Kill Me; which, frankly, is the only other White offering to come close to The Siege for suspense. As far as this reader’s concerned, Stephen White doesn’t need to write any more Alan Gregory novels: more like The Siege will be just fine.

Stand Up For Yourself!

2009-09-11T08:43:00.001-05:00

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes - Chris Crutcher

There are few things on the face of the earth that are crueler than a teenager confronted by someone who is even the slightest bit "different." Saddled with a genetic code that left him on the husky side - heck, all the way on the other side of husky at F-A-T - it was inevitable that Eric Calhoune's life in Junior High and High School would be an endless string of wedgies, swirlies, and general mayhem at the hands of the "normal" guys in his class. Since misery loves company, "united we stand," and all that; it's no wonder that Eric eventually joined forces with the other misfit in his class, Sarah Byrnes. Sarah Byrnes - never just "Sarah" - didn't have bad genes, though, she had the kind of family on whom dysfunctional families look down their noses. At the age of three, her face had been severely burned and her father had categorically refused to allow any attempt to reconstruct her horribly scarred visage. Sarah "Burns," indeed.

All that was, however, before the high school swimming coach spotted Eric working out at the public pool. Long known as "Moby" (the great white whale) for both his size and his swimming ability, Eric reluctantly accepted her invitation to try out for the team. The daily three-hour workouts began to melt off excess poundage, and Eric found himself gorging like a bulimic prom queen in hopes of Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. And when Sarah Byrnes found out what he was doing and why, she just whacked him upside the head and told him to cut it out and slim down. That's what friends do... That's also why after Sarah Byrnes stopped talking and got moved to the funny farm, Eric was the only kid from school to visit.

But Eric has plenty of other things on his plate besides visiting Sarah Byrnes: the swim team's prepping for state meets, the erstwhile fatty may actually finally have a girlfriend, and the fur is about to start flying at debates in his very special "Contemporary American Thought" class. This young man is in for a wild ride over the next few days; a wild ride that has "Chris Crutcher" written all over it.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes follows a pattern similar to that of other Crutcher books, books such as Running Loose. A teenaged boy finds his life changed by his interaction with a classic role model - an athletic coach - who also helps teach him some of life's most valuable lessons, even while a cadre of lemon-pussed adults tries to keep the young man "in his place." Crutcher's adolescent males seem to inhabit a world in which athletics and hard work are the crucibles in which "real men" are formed; a world in which there are two kinds of adults and the two camps seem to be pretty uneasy around each other.

From a literary standpoint, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes isn't quite as well-written as Running Loose or Crutcher's autobiography, King of the Mild Frontier. The characters are just as rich and the lessons just as profound, but it just seems sometimes as if Crutcher is trying too hard to thumb his nose at his detractors. Unlike other Crutcher books I've read, this one seems just a little contrived - of course, he sets a pretty darned high bar. But his writing isn't why a certain group of people foam at the mouth whenever his name's mentioned...

What can one say about Chris Crutcher? As one of the most frequently-challenged authors of the past two decades, Crutcher continually stays centered on the radar screens of the bluenose set for his ever-frank approach to the lifestyle of teenaged males. He's not one to tiptoe around the subject of self-gratification (so near at hand... errr... dear to the heart of teenaged males); not one to soft-pedal the cloud of hormones that follows every teenaged boy like the cloud of dirt around Pigpen in "Charlie Brown." Worse, Crutcher is never shy about portraying a subset of adults as undeserving of the respect of youngsters - and worst of all, these inglorious adults seem to often occupy positions such as preacher, teacher, and principal. Small wonder that many would-be censors aren't too fond of him.

The distaste of challengers for Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes seems at times odd, since - just as Louie Banks in Running Loose - Eric Calhoune, hero of Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, leads a pretty tame life. He doesn't have sex (at least not with anyone else). He doesn't drink, smoke, swear (much) or do drugs. Instead, he's a quiet, well-mannered young man who's hard-working, a good friend to Sarah Byrnes and Ellerby, and a loving son. What's not to like?

Be that as it may, in truth Crutcher does at times seem to delight in poking the hornet's nest of censorship. In Staying Fat..., he touches on a broad array of topics from which some people would much rather shield their kids. The "Contemporary American Thought" class discussion of abortion is a case in point; but Crutcher's plot also brims with topics such as child abuse, suicide, hypocrisy, the existence of a God, and even adult sexuality. While on the surface the book is about self-realization - the dedication is to "All those who finally stand up for themselves" - Crutcher clearly intends to remind his audience that not every Evangelical Christian is a saint (Falwell, Hagedorn, Bakker...) and not every teacher has the best interests of his students in mind.

So why is Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes so often challenged? Darned if I can tell... OK, in truth it's pretty obvious: my guess (since I have a blood relative who is the kind of person who'd lobby to have this book banned) is that their objections include:

• a classroom dialogue on the topic of abortion - and not just a one-sided presentation, a dialogue
• an evangelical Christian who is a pure-D hypocrite
• a "mainstream" Christian minister who takes no guff from his evangelical brethren
• evil parents; parents who abandon children and/or physically and emotionally abuse them
• the occasional appearance of mild profanity
• a scattering of offhand (groan) references to masturbation
• an attempted suicide
• an adult who uses children as pawns
• a divorced mother who has boyfriends who... gasp! stay over!

In short, like my narrow-minded relative, the idea is to make certain that children are not exposed to other belief systems and other lifestyles. For that, bluenoses, I give you a big, fat raspberry: ppppppbbbbbbbbbbbttttttttttttt!

Finding God in Your Own Way: Bless Me Ultima

2009-09-06T16:30:00.002-05:00

Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya

In the summer before he turned seven, there came many changes in the life of Antonio Márez; changes such as the first day of school, where he began to unlock the magic of letters and learn his first English. There was the return of his three older brothers, unharmed, from the war in Europe and Asia. But the greatest change of all was his parents' decision to welcome into their home the aging healer la Grande, or Ultima. This great curandera, midwife, and philosopher was famous both on the wilds of the eastern New Mexico llano, where Tony's father's people herded sheep and cattle, and in the rich bottomlands along the Pecos River where his mother's family tilled their fields and tended orchards. From the moment he first saw Ultima, Antonio realized that the two shared some special bond; that their fates were linked in a manner he could not describe.

For the Márez family, life was simple and yet complex: like some New World Romeo and Juliet, the marriage of Tony's parents joined rancher to farmer, with old enmity between the families still lying just beneath the surface. Forced by marriage to give up an almost nomadic existence on the llano, yet too proud to be a farmer, Tony's father instead worked for the state and drank to calm his genetic wanderlust. Meanwhile, his mother pined quietly for the rich soil of her family's valley and dreamed that her youngest son would someday be called to the priesthood. Still, theirs managed to be a happy family, and the next few years were happy days for Tony.

One day, Tony's uncle came to ask a favor of la Grande: another of Tony's uncles lay on his deathbed; the doctor could not help and the priest was of no help, either. Could the great curandera heal him; could she reverse the spell cast on him by an evil village woman? This was how Tony learned of Ultima's full power. There was another power in the young boy's life: the church of his mother, a devout Catholic. As First Communion approached and he completed his Catechism classes, Tony thought he could feel the majesty and glory of the Church - at clear odds with his friends from town, who teased Tony unmercifully about his faith, with that special cruelty of which only young children seem capable.

A child is a sort of psychic compass, pointing toward the greatest power in his vicinity, and Tony was no exception. He seemed to have no difficulty concocting a philosophy that integrated his mother's Catholicism, Ultima's shamanist spirituality, and even pantheic influences from his friend Cico with the tale of a godlike golden carp. Tony's faith in all three influences, however, would be tested early - and often - in his young life. Which of the three would provide the protection he most desired, protection against evil? Which, indeed...

Renowned Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya allows that his classic novel Bless Me, Ultima (also published in Spanish as Bendíceme, Ultima) is partially autobiographical in that it records parts of his childhood in the Santa Rosa area of eastern New Mexico. He's also been known to state that - although curanderas (traditional healers and herbalists) still plied their trade in his childhood, and in fact do so to this day - none like Ultima was part of his youth: instead, Ultima came to him in a dream as he began writing. If you ask me, that was one heckuva dream...

The life of a little boy in wartime New Mexico was wildly different from today: no internet or television, not even a radio; no soccer or Little League, no Cub Scouts or 4-H. Instead, Tony's days were filled by his chores around the house and his games with the boys from school. Anaya recounts that play as rough-and-tumble, filled to the brim by boasting and fighting, with curses hurled at one's playmates at the drop of a hat. Antonio's gang were all quite different from their younger friend, however, lacking both his faith and his desire to learn. They were more the type who would end up with DA haircuts and hot rods in high school, where Tony was obviously destined to become a man of learning - after all, Ultima said he would. Those of us who are interested in learning other languages (particularly the naughty words) will be pleased with Anaya's tale, which is chucky-jam full of both English and New Mexican Spanish maledictions (most of which I'd already learned from John Nichols in The Milagro Beanfield War).

The novel faithfully records a critical period in young Tony's life. It's a life filled by a loving family, friends of many stripes, and a strong vein of religion. Most of all, however, it's also a life guided by the mysterious Ultima, who many think a bruja or witch. As L. Frank Baum pointed out before Rudolfo Anaya was even born, however, there are not just wicked witches in this world: there are good witches as well.

Bless Me, Ultima is usually called a "coming-of-age" tale. In certain aspects, Tony's story is a typical coming-of-age tale; recording as it does the formative years of a young boy when he first leaves his mother's side for that great collection of stimuli called "school." Yet I personally consider "coming of age" a misnomer: instead, Anaya's novel is a coming-of-faith novel. In its three short years, little Tony weathered many crises of faith; witnessing death up close and personal, and observing the evils of the Church's deadliest sins, particularly wrath. At each of these critical moments, even as he took his First Communion, he felt a sort of emptiness in the religion that Europeans had forced upon his Native ancestors. Guided by Ultima's power, by her quiet competence and ancient calm, Tony was eventually able to reconcile his questioning with a different sort of spirituality, a spirituality that finds harmony with creation instead of attempts to control it.

An interesting and thought-provoking memoir, not to mention a novel that was crucial in helping elevate Latino literature in the eyes of the literary community.

Almost since the day it first hit store shelves in 1972, Anaya's novel has been challenged and banned in schools and communities nationwide. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it's also been chosen as a "community reads" book on several occasions (usually by liberal bastions such as Boulder, Colorado). Challenges generally cite the language (both English and Spanish) used by characters in the book, the presence of a brothel in Tony's little town (frequented by his brother Andrew), and the "glorification of witchcraft" - even before Harry Potter! It's a poorly-kept secret, though, that the main objection of most protestors to Bless Me, Ultima is that when Tony decides on a religious path top follow, Christianity loses out to a form of Native American animism - the detested "Earth Worship" they call "paganism" (see Gaia). Most practitioners of the type of Christianity that feels threatened by a spirituality embracing all of Earth as a blessed gift seem ignorant of the manner in which their own religion has appropriated pagan and animist symbology and celebrations into its theism, which is probably just as well: you wouldn't want their heads to explode (it would be messy).

Though a novel whose main character is a pre-teen boy, Bless Me, Ultima is far too mature for children of Tony's age. Even if you don't object to the frequent bilingual maledictions (one wonders if challengers are bamboozled by the lack of a glossary to define words like cabrón or jodido), the themes are clearly beyond the ken of preteens; even most early teens. I see no reason why a mature high-schooler (sadly, a vanishing breed) should not gain from the reading, however. If you're the type of person who believes that your child deserves a chance to think for him- or her-self, slip a copy into their stocking come Christmas - or Winter Solstice, if you prefer...

Death is a Three-Letter Word: N-A-M

2009-09-04T17:08:00.001-05:00

Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers

For many men of my generation, the Baby Boomers, death might best be personified by three simple letters: N-A-M. Fought in a far-off land for reasons that were often unclear even to the combatants, the war in Vietnam still looms both as one of this country’s most humbling and its most divisive experiences. It seems capable of galvanizing the country’s most easily polarized even today, more than thirty-five years after the last jarhead scrambled into the last helicopter to lift from the grounds of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. The war and the men and women who directed it, fought in it, and died in it have been memorialized in scores of motion pictures and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of books. One such volume, directed toward a young adult audience, is Walter Dean Myers’ Fallen Angels. Myers’ book has garnered its share of awards: it’s received a Coretta Scott King Award; and was cited in the American Library Association’s (ALA) Margaret A. Edwards Award presented to Myers for his lifetime contribution to young adult literature. It’s also generated its share of controversy: Fallen Angels stands at number twenty-four on the ALA list of 100 most frequently challenged and banned books (1990-2000) and number six in the ALA’s list of most frequently challenged books of the twenty-first century. But why? To understand, perhaps you must understand the story…

Fallen Angels is not a deep philosophical discussion of the war in Vietnam; it’s a single soldier’s diary of his one and only tour of duty in-country. As seen through the eyes of seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, Vietnam is an alien land; dark and steamy and full of danger the youngster from Harlem has never sensed before. He misses his mother, his brother, shooting hoops with his friends. The other “men” – men by virtue of being a soldier in the midst of a war zone, not for their age – of Charlie Company become more than bunkmates: white, brown, or black they become brothers for having shared hell on earth. Though out in “The World” back in 1967 racial tension is shaking the cities; in Chu Lai and Tam Ky, everyone bleeds the same bright red blood no matter what the color of his skin. It’s a lesson Richie has learned quickly…

Through vivid descriptions of the few months of his tour, Richie Perry bears witness to the insanity inherent in war; to the moral ambiguity that so characterizes the war in Vietnam even to this day. His descriptions of battle action are raw; his record of a boy-soldier’s emotions powerful and lucid. It’s an account that is almost hackneyed for the appearance of all the standard highlights of a war narrative: the sudden death of the guy standing next to you; the slow and agonizing death of a man-child; the battle-hardened veteran NCO dismissive of his charges; the officer exposing troops to additional danger as he’s bucking for a promotion. Since the war is Vietnam, we know to expect racial hatred of anyone small and Asian; watch for the round-eyes’ frustration at their inability to distinguish between friend and foe; await the overreaction of the American soldiers to one too many deaths.

In the crucible of war, Richie Perry becomes something more than he was when he arrived. And yet he returns to his home diminished…

Walter Dean Myers penned Fallen Angels in 1988, fifteen years after the fall of Saigon and twenty years after the events chronicled in his book. He takes his title from the prayer uttered by a young lieutenant upon the death of a soldier under his command:

“Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, O Lord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.”

Based in part on his own experiences as a soldier in the early 1960s, Myers’ depiction of life on the battlefields of Vietnam had little different to say when it was published in 1988; long after movies like “Coming Home” and “Apocalypse Now” had inserted catchphrases like “Charlie don’t surf” or “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into the American consciousness. Richie Perry’s story is, however, even more powerful because he becomes everyman by simply surviving from day to day. His is a story told in a stark, linear narrative; unvarnished by flowery language and maudlin sentiments – the words of a simple young man who has to conserve all his strength for the business of surviving. It is this straightforward simplicity that imbues Fallen Angels with such power – and has made it a classic in the genre of soldier’s diaries, just as “Vietnam” made death a three-letter word.

When people challenge books in schools and libraries, they are usually required to state the rationale for their objection. Fallen Angels has been challenged often in the past twenty years, ostensibly on the basis of raw language and – oddly enough, for a book written by a Black man about a Black soldier – for racism. Indeed, words beginning with S, H, D, and F do occur in its pages, albeit somewhat less often than one might expect of a war story. The so-called N word also makes an appearance or two, much in the same context as in gangsta rap (which, frankly, doesn’t say much in its favor).

Fallen Angels has also been challenged for “promoting homosexuality”: one character might be homosexual, while another says he doesn’t much care as long as the guy can fight. Yup, that’s “promotion” all right… It’s likewise been challenged in some venues as “pornographic” (I kid you not) and a “sex manual” (an odd description, given that the protagonist is still a virgin at the end of the book). Perhaps the only true grounds for objection might be for its violent nature; but if war isn’t violent, then what is? Besides, few challengers (if any) complain of the book's violence.

It’s curious that protests against Fallen Angels increased in the first few years of the twenty-first century, at precisely the same time that the country ramped up for, entered, and prosecuted a “good” war in the Middle East; one more “recovery” from the bad taste the war in Vietnam a generation ago left in the nation’s collective mouth. Perhaps the book’s open discussion of atrocities committed during that earlier war threatened some of the more PATRIOTic Americans, who felt that leaving it on library shelves might give young men and women pause when considering entering the armed forces. Indeed, Myers candidly discusses mutiny, “fragging” a superior officer, mutilation of corpses, a friendly fire incident, “collateral damage” involving the population of an entire village, bogus body counts, and a host of other shameful acts exposed by the memoirs of Vietnam veterans (although nothing about the humiliation and torture of prisoners of war). One can only hope that the forces of “right” are not so cynical as to attempt to put a positive spin on the Vietnam era by silencing critical viewpoints. One can only hope…

What do you call a guy with no arms, no legs, no ears...

2009-08-31T08:07:00.001-05:00

Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

He was just your ordinary joe: nineteen, maybe twenty years old. Somebody's son. Somebody's brother. Somebody's friend. Somebody's co-worker. Somebody's lover. And then one spring day he stepped aboard a troop train in Los Angeles, bound for the trenches of the war that the politicians said would make the world safe for democracy; the first step of a journey that would never end. His name was Joe Bonham, and he took up arms to answer a call he didn't even understand. What happened to Joe after that should never happen to any living creature.

A couple of decades ago a spate of tasteless little jokes made all the rounds; each followed a simple pattern: "What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs sitting on your front porch?"* Oh, there were dozens of 'em, all answered with a name or nickname; none of them really all that witty -- just sort of the elephant jokes of the eighties. They do, however, bring us to the question in the title:

What do you call a guy with no arms, no legs, no ears, no face, no eyes, no mouth, no nose... Dalton Trumbo called him Joe Bonham, and made his GI Joe the subject of the twentieth century's most renowned antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbo's novel was written about the First World War and published at the dawn of World War II. The book's been reprinted more than forty times; it was made into a movie at the height of the Vietnam war. Today, more than sixty years after first publication, Trumbo's narrative remains ageless, relying on a simple message spoken in the voice of a frightened young man.

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're pretty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in the churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm...

But what do the dead say?

This is a text that is as distant from Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown as one could possibly get. There is no glorious battle action, no fall-on-the-grenade heroism, no gritty cigarette-behind-the ear dialogue, no bombs bursting in air, no crisp pennants flapping in the breeze. No war. Everything that occurs in Johnny Got His Gun happens inside Joe's head, for -- as we learn right along with our narrator -- his brain is the only thing left that works.

Joe imagines a telephone ringing, ringing, ringing in the distance -- and he dreams that his mother is calling the bakery where he worked to tell him his father just died. When he realizes that the only sounds he hears are inside his skull, he knows he's deaf. But that's OK, a deaf man can get by if he works at it. Chapter by chapter, we see Joe as a boy, a young man -- we see the funny tales of his co-workers at the bakery. We go fishing with him and his dad in the Rockies. We share his last night with Kareen, the young woman whose ring he wears. But the hand that wore the ring is gone, and so is the other. Chapter by chapter, we are led through an horrific inventory of a battered body. No legs. No arms. His entire face wiped out by an exploding artillery shell -- deaf, blind, dumb, no lips, no tongue, no nose, no eyes. How can he not go mad?

I can't. I can't stand it. Scream. Move. Shake something. Make a noise any noise. I can't stand it. Oh no no no.

Please I can't. Please no. Somebody come. Help me. I can't lie here forever like this until maybe years from now I die. I can't. Nobody can. It isn't possible.

I can't breathe but I'm breathing. I'm so scared I can't think but I'm thinking. Oh please please no. No no. It isn't me. Help me. It can't be me. Not me. No no no.

Oh please oh oh please. No no no please no. Please.

Not me.

Years before Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross tallied the stages of dying, Trumbo wrote all about the pleading.

And then Trumbo wrote about the acceptance. Here lies a man who, by any reckoning including his own, would certainly be better off dead. He's imprisoned inside a body that retains only one sense; touch; but lacks fingertips with which to feel. Yet he uses what little remains to try to master his environment: first, he tackles the passage of time. How do you know how long a day is when you cannot see the sunrise, or hear a clock? Joe masters time with logic and persistence. Having beaten the clock in his own way, he attempts to communicate; and the idea that he wants to communicate is that his mutilated body should be the ultimate example for peace. But it is not to be.

The language of Johnny Got His Gun is the language of a young man, literate but not well educated. He makes no impassioned polysyllabic pleas for peace, he speaks only in the plain language of working-class folk. The sentences are short, the sentences are simple; flowing in a stream from Joe's consciousness. The thoughts are simple and sincere, expressed in self-talk; for there is no other way for Joe to express himself. Trumbo's choice of language is much of the reason why this work has lasted, because it is couched in terms that almost anyone can understand.

The life Joe relives and retells is one that each of us can relate to: he remembers teenage angst, first love, a boy's coming of age, a child's loss of his father. Each time he realizes yet another part of his body is gone, he slips into memory of the sensations he can never have again. The sound of his mother reading "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"; the sound of artillery shells whistling to earth. The scent of the pines high in the Colorado Rockies; the odor of a dead body in no-mans-land. The glorious colors of a desert sky at sunset; the sight of rats feasting on a dead body in the trenches. The touch of his lover's hand; the cold muck in a foxhole. All gone; the good and the bad.

A poster child for peace indeed.

On censorship and Book Banning:

In the first (1959) of his two introductions to Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo wrote that the timing of the book's first publication was unfortunate. Few but the most radical would disagree with the oft-repeated sentiment that, if any war was ever necessary, it was World War II. Although a dedicated pacifist, Trumbo allowed the book to go out of print for the duration of the war once the US had entered in 1941:

After Pearl Harbor its subject matter seemed as inappropriate to the times as the shriek of bagpipes... My correspondents, a number of whom used elegant stationery and sported tidewater addresses... proposed a national rally for peace-now, with me as cheer leader; they promised (and delivered) a letter campaign to pressure the editor for a fresh edition.

Nothing could have convinced me so quickly that Johnny was exactly the sort of book that shouldn't be reprinted until the war's end. The publishers agreed.

Long a dedicated leftist, Trumbo chose this self-censorship when he found his work becoming a vehicle for right-wing opposition to America's entrance into World War II. He was, however, more than happy to find its resurgence as a rallying point for a new generation of antiwar activists during the Vietnam era, as evidenced by these words in his second foreword to the book, circa 1971:

Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 Americans dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born. (The last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already.)

Trumbo was himself the victim of perhaps the one of the most heinous act of censorship in American history. When the longtime Communist was called to testify before Joseph McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, he refused to speak. For this "contempt," he was jailed briefly, and blacklisted. The blacklist period lasted from 1947 until 1960, when director Otto Preminger announced that he would hire Trumbo as screenwriter for "Exodus." Trumbo was not by any means inactive during his blacklist period. The prolific writer worked under several different pseudonyms (including James Bonham). His work during and after the blacklist period includes the screenplays for "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Papillon," and "Exodus," among others.

In what may well be the ultimate triumph of an artist over censorship, in 1956 the Blacklisted Trumbo won a screenwriting Academy Award for "The Brave Ones," written under the assumed name Robert Rich.

* you call him Matt.

A Tale of a Tutsi

2009-08-28T19:03:00.001-05:00

Strength in What Remains – Tracy Kidder

As is the custom of his people, Deogratias has a single name. As the family tells it, his mother looked upon her tiny newborn and cried, “Deo gratias!” and that is how his name became “Thanks be to God.” He prefers to be called Deo, caring not at all that, to those who speak Latin, he asks to be called “God.” Deo was born into a deceptively simple society, the son and grandson of cowherds who’d always assumed that his destiny, too, was to be a cowherd. Life had other plans for Deogratias, however, plans he welcomed: Deo would become a doctor. So when he finished secondary schooling, Deo entered his tiny country’s one medical school. He wanted to be a doctor to help his people you see; to build a clinic near his village where the sick and the injured could find comfort. Then life took a different turn. As Deo served his internship in a village near the border, however, ethnic violence erupted. It was October, 1993, and that country was Burundi: the desperately poor central African nation next door to Rwanda. Deo remembers his classmates whispering among themselves before the violence began; puzzling through the slogans they shared: “At the level of the ear!” and “Heat him up!” all advice on how to kill the hated enemy. Deo just didn’t realize that he was the enemy… And so he fled, dodging men (and women) wielding guns and machetes, transistor radios pressed to their ears as some unseen voice chanted the same instructions to its followers over and over.

You need to know that Deo is Tutsi; an ethnic “fact” he had only recently learned in 1993 – a fact that colors his being to this very day. Deo spent not just those first long and violent October days, but the next six months fleeing for his life. He witnessed scenes of unspeakable brutality: massacre, mutilation, and degradation; all based on a belief that Tutsis are different from Hutus.

Deo must have been born under a lucky star: in 1994, after six months hiding from his Hutu neighbors, he flew from Burundi to New York City on a faked business visa. When he arrived in the States, he spoke not a word of English; only French and his native Kirundi. For the next year, Deo survived by squatting in an abandoned tenement; living in the forest of Central Park; delivering groceries twelve hours a day, six days a week for fifteen dollars a day. He survived because people noticed the slender young man with the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the unstoppable drive to become the doctor he’d planned to be. He survived because the strength of his character and of his will impressed people – people with the means to see his dream come true. Within five years, Deo was a student at Columbia University on his way to a medical degree.

This is his story – and it is the story of Burundi: the two are inextricably intertwined.

The William Wordsworth poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood gives us the familiar phrase, “splendor in the grass” (the title of the 1961 Oscar-winner written by William Inge and directed by Elia Kazan). Later in the same stanza of his poem, however, Wordsworth speaks to the darker side of human emotion:

“…Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind…”

It is from this same ode that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes the title of his latest work; Strength in What Remains. The saga of Deo’s escape from Burundi and his “rebirth” as an adopted American are more than simple history; more than some sort of modern success story. It is also a stark depiction of cultural differences – not merely the hypertribalism that led to the mass murders in Rwanda and Burundi, but of other, simpler differences. Deo’s native Kurundi has a word for which there is no English equivalent. No strike that, there is an English equivalent for the word – there is no American equivalent for the practice. It’s a culture that either lacks or suppresses the victim mentality that so seems to characterize our society. The word is gusimbura:

“…And when we get to Butanza we don’t talk about Clovis.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their names, anyways. They call it gusimbura. If for example you say, ‘Oh, your granddad.’ And you say his name to people, they say you gusimbura them. It’s a bad word. You are reminding people…” Deo’s voice trailed off.
“You’re reminding people of something bad?”
“Yes It’s hard to understand, because in the Western world…” Again, Deo left the thought half finished.
“People try to remember?”
“Yah.”
“Here in Burundi, they try to forget?”
“Exactly, he said."

That entire concept seems as alien to our society as the word itself: gusimbura…

Tracy Kidder might well have yanked his readers’ heartstrings in writing Strength in What Remains by playing to their emotions; he chose not to. It would have been unutterably simple to have cast Deo’s story as some great rags-to-riches triumph with overtones of Horatio Alger. After all, Deo arrived in New York without a word of English and only two hundred dollars to his name; yet he ended up a student at a prestigious university, a student who returned to a tiny village in a backwards country as a hero. Kidder, however, laid out Deo’s story in simple, straightforward prose; avoiding those bloody details that both titillate and disgust. Where necessary, he called upon scholarly explanations of the Hutu/Tutsi conflict, which he writes is rooted in European colonialism instead of ethnic differences. Instead of concentrating on the horrific violence – obviously, his narrative cannot completely ignore it – Kidder chooses to concentrate on the stories of people who sheltered Deo and helped him escape. It’s the people to whom he owes his life that Deo honors in his return to Burundi, in his creation of a clinic in a small border town.

Kidder is clearly in awe of his Burundian friend. It speaks from the pages of the first half of Strength in What Remains where the author recounts the incredible resolve of this young man. He was barely out of his teens when he escaped the violence in Africa, only to be dropped unceremoniously into – and eventually thrive within – a culture so foreign that he might as well be among Martians. As a young refugee, he learned English (a damnably difficult language) to matriculate at a prestigious university. Kidder’s admiration for Deo is just as obvious in the second half, which recounts a 2006 journey the two men took to Burundi. Deo returned to his native land in hopes of bringing healthcare to one of the poorest nations on Earth. Yet in recounting the story of Deo’s flight and the following fifteen years, Kidder does not toss about superlatives. He chooses instead to matter-of-factly recount Deo’s history and his vision. Deogratias is a humble man, and Kidder respects that humility.

Simply put, Strength in What Remains is the story of a remarkable young man, elegantly told.