By the Book Reviews

Men in Space (Tom McCarthy)

2012-02-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

Men in Space

Tom McCarthy (Vantage Canada edition 2012, first published 2007; Trade paperback) 293 pages inc. afterword, $14.40 Amazon price

As I was regrettably approaching the finish of Man Booker Prize finalist Tom McCarthy’s first novel, my mind started leaping about like spring trout after early evening flies, thinking of and then rejecting many a possible lede. Then, after the main text was over, I ran into this in the acknowledgements: ‘That it eventually found a kind of warped coherence as a novel about disjointedness and separation is to a large extent thanks to the intervention through the years of several people.’ And so on and so forth. I had been struggling to find the correct encompassing framework and I do thank the author for providing it for me.

Virtually all the characters here are emigres to Prague in 1992, at the tail end of the events that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact of nations. Into the light come the blinking, dazed artists, filmmakers, writers, adventurous American youths, scallywags and crooks. A vacuum does not choose its filling; rather whatever or whomever is in the neighbourhood gets pulled in to the hole. The effect is reminiscent, although not a detectable copycat, of Graham Greene’s envisioned Vienna in The Third Man.

There is a similar undercurrent of criminality going on, although here the main crime is nowhere near as shattering as Harry Lime’s diluted prescriptions. Here, the centerpiece is a masterpiece: an unusual iconic painting which depicts a saint rising (or falling?) above a landscape of people falling off a cliff below which are more people disassembling a ship, while off to the side is some curious indecipherable writing. A motley gang of Russian, Bulgarian and Czech black marketeers hires an artist to create an exact copy of the stolen painting, setting up a switcheroo and sale.

It’s tempting to label the icon as a Hitchcock maguffin, except it’s not. While we never are told its exact origins, the elements of the painting keep occurring as plot points. Sorry if that is slightly opaque, but I really don’t like ruining authors’ surprises. The effect though makes for a fun house mirror - as the painter is painstakingly recreating the icon using l’ancienne techniques and materials, the icon itself is virtually directing the action. Art doesn’t imitate life, it predicts it.

Now is that effect manipulative and obvious? Oh sure it is; and once the Clever Reader figures that the revelation must be in that indecipherable writing, the reveal is equal parts eloquent and ambiguous. Still, Kafka turned people into bugs and no one seems too upset about that.

For there is also a Kafka-esque quality to Men in Space and this one I suspect is intentional. When Anton, a Bulgarian former football referee is hauled into the police station for questioning, one can’t help but think back to The Trial. Similarly, another recurring narrator - there are several - is a nameless police surveillance detective who loses his hearing after too many hours listening through faulty equipment. He doggedly sticks to his task, despite becoming shunned and isolated by his colleagues. A man. With bugs. Shunned. Have you met Gregor Samsa?

There was also a most timely coincidence while I was reading Men in Space. A writer friend asked the question whether it was acceptable to switch tenses within a novel - past tense to present, active verbs to inactive, etc. Tom McCarthy’s novel is a perfect example of how to do this with multiple narrators. The narrative is linear; yet the voices and tenses change. It may make your old English professor twitchy, but I like it. Not only does the switch from past to present and back again keep the writing animated, it also keeps the reader involved with various characters. My personal favourite among the narrators is Heidi, the young American English as a Second Language teacher whose observations on the bohemian artists and their milieu are worth the price of admission.

This is a tremendous first novel and I’m delighted that it has finally been released in North America. It wobbles a bit at the end, leaving the reader hanging as you’ll see; however this is as densely and finely written a book as you’re likely to read this year. Many stars, scattered across the sky.

Be seeing you.

(If you’re sufficiently intrigued, you can order your own copy of Men in Space here. Cheers!)

Boston Cream: A Jonah Geller Mystery

2012-02-06T16:19:00.000-05:00

Boston Cream

Howard Shrier (Vintage Canada 2012, Paperback) 303 pages, $17.95 cover price

You know, this book reviewing business can be a pretty hard track to sled sometimes. You read enough plaintive tales of former prisoners behind the Iron Curtain who are released into the light of Western culture only to find that the light hurts their eyes … I think you get where I’m going with this. As every Canadian hockey player (or curler, bowler or golfer for that matter) knows, after expending massive amounts of energy and passion on a match, it’s time for a beer. Boston Cream is a fine and refreshing beer.

Actually and ale or lager that was named Boston Cream in an utter moment of insanity by a brewer would bring up unfortunate sense memories of buttermilk and cod; separate, not favourably combined in a batter. So perhaps the metaphor was not the best chosen, however the point made is still apt.

There is absolutely nothing wrong and a whole right about the happy relaxation a well-written private dick story can give the reader. I’ve certainly had decades of delight from them, ever since I was twelve or thirteen or so and noticed that there was this Mickey Spillane fellow whose books seemed to take up most of the bookstore shelf down and across from Agatha Christie. Later there was Dashiell Hammet’s Continental Op, never named as anything other than that, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and the list goes on from there.

All the great literary stock types bear much in common with one another. Meet a rustic farmer in a novel and he is either sagacious as a prophet blessed by the ability to hear God’s voice in the rustling of a wheat field; or he eats elderly ladies for breakfast and buries the bones beneath a hill of rusted out car fenders.

Howard Shrier’s private detective Jonah Geller, now smoothly in stride in a third novel, hits the sweet spot in all the attributes a reader expects of the genre. In a rough order of rising importance, Geller runs a small office, is single, has had relationships and is all in favour of then except that the Work tends to be a deterrent to romance, is fast with the fists yet focused in the head, knows the sort of rough characters who can come in handy in a firefight, and like the good hunter he only kills out of necessity while taking no pleasure from the act.

Still, just because one knows all the notes on a piano doesn’t make one a pianist. The skill for the author is in placing these brilliant yet troubled men in intriguing situations which in turn entice the reader to play along. By ‘play along’ I don’t necessarily mean solving a mystery. In the case of Boston Cream, Geller is hired by parents in his home city of Toronto to find their son who disappeared in Boston two weeks’ earlier. There really is no mystery. The path of the novel is set by the hundredth page and the question in the reader’s mind is neither ‘What happened?’ or ‘Who made it happen?’; rather it is ‘How will he solve this?’ If I just told you that the disappearing son is a promising surgical intern graduated from Harvard Medical School and there is a suggestion of money needs and shady dealings in the sale of human organs, I’m pretty sure you can fill in the blanks of the plot with a probable 80% accuracy. I have faith in the inventive capacities of my readers.

No, all the fun is in the finding. Geller reminds me of when Elliott Gould played Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (which is worth a look if you haven’t seen). There is the same troubled Jewish character hidden within the action man exterior. Jonah Geller is the younger brother of a highly successful brother and feels a bit of the black sheep. He does not so much worry about that and other problems, such as a post-concussive disorder, he frets them. As such it’s not laid on too thick and enables some engaging back-and-forths in Boston Cream between Geller and a rotund Rabbi - who of course has a hot daughter. This is private eye fiction which is a world where women must be desirable.

If I’m making Boston Cream sound highly conventional, then I’m doing my job right. The villains are scum for whom one does not shed a single tear in anticipation of their (please let it be grisly) demise. The police are as mean and dumb as a hammerhead shark with a fish hook in its mouth. They must not be trusted with Important Information and they never, ever connect a cluttered trail of bodies back to - Yoo Hoo! - the private dick from out of town who’s been talking to them.

So yes Shrier’s book is conventional and that is a compliment. Genres exist for one simple reason: people like them. And what they like is for all the keys on the xylophone to be struck in a pleasing sequence. Like a great wrestling match, the audience wants those expected moments and characters to appear. When I was taught screen and television writing, the instructor made a firm point about the latter, ‘You must service your audience’s needs.’ Someone must have told Howard Shrier that or something similar and he evidently took it to her heart. He delivers a cracking good entertainment that I think Dashiell Hammett himself might have said to its author, ‘Nice job kid.’

Solar Dance (Van Gogh and Forgery)

2012-02-02T08:57:00.001-05:00

SOLAR DANCE:
Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age

Modris Eksteins (Knopf Canada 2012, hardcover) 341 pages inc. notes and index, $35 cover price

I can certainly tell you one thing. Someone’s going to make one hell of a good movie about a guy named Otto Wacker. The movie could be anything: absurdist comedy, dark drama, documentary; Wacker was also a dancer besides being a dealer in fake Van Goghs, so the movie of his life could even be a musical. He certainly had the personality for it. Undoubtedly a con man, he was one of those interesting aesthetes who always remind one of Joel Grey in Cabaret. In fact, if Der Host and that club had been real and not fictional, Wacker would have been both a regular customer and a big tipper too.

Wacker is the true-life central character that runs through Solar Dance and thank heaven for him. Modris Eksteins’ book comes alive and literally draws one leaning into the pages when the narrative of Wacker is central to the page. When the story occasionally drifts away from him, well it often drifts.

Eksteins, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto - which means he’s damn good, as they don’t hand those out with the olives and small sandwiches at swank fund-raising events - he is definitely going big game hunting here. Amazingly, the word geist never appears once in Solar Dance’s pages yet the book is all about just that. With the bulge of the book’s bell curve falling between the end of World War One and the rise of Hitler, Eksteins is essentially saying that the rise in popularity of the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and the attendant crimes of forgery is the perfect microscope slide of the age of the Weimar Republic.

Well it’s an interesting thought. Interesting thoughts are always delightful to consider, tasted in the mind like new flavours on the tongue. However am I convinced enough by the argument to say that I agree? Tepidly yes, but I found the sections that just followed the narrative by far the more enjoyable than when the theme is smashed over its head like a painting in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. These two statements come clanging together. (Italics mine)

The experts would lose their purpose only when buyers purchased art out of love rather than greed, he said. (Curt) Glaser talked of the “authentication illness.”
Hitler’s regime too, would quickly be authenticated. The first international validation came from the Vatican, when the pope signed a concordat with the new German administration in July 1933. In subsequent years a long line of dignitaries paid their respects and expressed their admiration for …

Etcetera and so forth. It’s rather the same effect as Michel Foucault’s comments on structuralism: ‘Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration.’ In other words, just because two things are going on simultaneously does not mean that they are necessarily acting in important ways upon one another.

The analogy might be this. Imagine a newsreel of this same time in the early 1930s. The Wacker trial, for dealing literally dozens of fakes that he had bought from a never-named ‘Russian’ was a sensation in Berlin. With that kind of a storyline, why wouldn’t it be? It was a Vanity Fair piece waiting to be written. So it might have a place in a newsreel. As might Hitler walking jauntily past the Swiss Guards. On the other hand, the third story in the newsreel might be Man O’ War winning a horse race. Now I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone’s yet blamed World War Two on a horse.

The rest of Eksteins’ theory is that because it was the chaotic, insane, yet completely doomed romantic Van Gogh who became the hot artist of the time that indicates national temperaments were feeling much the same in the world after World War One. Now there I think he does have a point. Mind you, Mickey Mouse hit it pretty big back there too and Mussolini made sure to run Popeye in the funny papers. Let’s be generous though; the jury is unconvinced.

Now, the story of Wacker, the art experts who validated his fake Van Goghs and the paintings’ buyers make for cracking good storytelling. When Eksteins allows himself to have fun at some of the characters’ expense, he is hilarious. For instance, one artiste couple had a butler Emil who they both hated.

Nonetheless, they did not have the courage to dismiss him. And so, at a dinner party one evening, they staged a contretemps with a guest, replete with obscenities and threats of violence. The servant found the behaviour so alarming that he resigned forthwith. Here was theatre trumping life.

And who the heck says that Noel Coward wasn’t realistic? I will be dining out on that story for years.

There are many such stories and withering observations throughout Solar Dance, all of which are well-told. Eksteins’ commentaries on Van Gogh himself and his art are also clear and thoughtful. The flailing about of the art experts on the witness stand at Wacker’s Berlin trial (and admitting they’d been duped) is to watch reputations vanish in the air like dandelion seeds. In addition, the question lobbed out a few times like a yellow grenade at a tennis tournament is delicious: If a buyer finds value in a painting that is a fake, how can such forgery be a crime? The price dealers got for selling Van Goghs skyrocketed during the Otto Wacker affair. Now what does that tell you?

Be seeing you.

The Winter Palace

2012-01-24T17:31:00.000-05:00

The Winter Palace

Eva Stachniak (Doubleday Canada 2012, Trade Paperback) 440 pages, $24.95 msl

This review can be read at The Winnipeg Review. It will appear in the By the Book Review archive in May.

Kind regards,

H

(If you would like to order your own copy - and support this site - you can do so at this link: Buy the Book Store)

Ru

2012-01-20T23:35:00.000-05:00

a novel by
Kim Thuy

(Random House Canada, original French version 2009, English translation by Sheila Fischman 2012; hardcover) 141 pages, $25 msl

Is this a novel, a memoir, or a book of poetry? Individually, it is none; collectively it is all. It is gloriously, passionately, delicately unique. Upon its original publication in the French language in 2009, Ru won a shelf’s worth of international prizes including the most prestigious one Canada has to offer - Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Now that there is an excellent English translation by Sheila Fischman, we unilingual knuckle-draggers can finally appreciate what the luckier francophones read three years ago.

This is the story of a young Vietnamese immigrant to Canada, the narrative leaping back and forth between memories of Saigon before and after the end of the Vietnam War, the voyage across the Gulf of Siam as what we used to call a ‘boat person’, to the difficulties and pleasures of arriving in a country that could not possibly be any more culturally different. The narrator and her parents speak no English or French and certainly had never known anything like a Quebec winter in their previous lives.

One can scarcely call anything as short as one or two pages a chapter, yet the term will have to do. Each chapter then consists of an observation, a memory, a meaning attached. They are reminiscent of Zen koans, meditatable thoughts. The classic koan is ‘two hands clap, and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?’ An example from Ru:

‘It’s true that the brick wall between those two brothers can’t be compared to the one that existed between my family and the Communist soldiers, nor do these walls carry the same history as do old Quebecois houses - each wall has its own story.’

Each wall has its own story. True enough. And that leads to the thought - do we erect walls to separate or to protect, or both? Does a wall exist so that we cannot see the outside world or so the outside world cannot see us? Thankfully Kim Thuy chose to let us enter her side of the wall. A remarkable book; one that well-earned every note of praise it received.

Hubert O’Hearn is a Contributing Editor to San Francisco Book Review. He is based in Thunder Bay.

Conversation With: Elliot Perlman (The Street Sweeper)

2012-01-16T22:38:00.000-05:00

(This conversation took place on January 16, 2012. We discuss his new book, The Street Sweeper, this difficulties in writing about the Holocaust, its relationship to the American Civil Rights Movement...and who's going to win the Australian Open. Enjoy!)

Death Comes to Pemberley: P.D. James

2012-01-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

Death Comes to Pemberley

P.D. James

(Knopf Canada 2011, Hardcover) 291 pages, $32 msl

The shrewd novelist planning the latest work that will fill a slot on library shelves for centuries to come is well advised to make sure that his hero and/or heroine are left irrefutably dead, ideally done in by so hideous a manner that no one will ever want to revisit the scene. Dame Agatha Christie, no fool when it came to characters and copyrights made sure that both Hercule Poirot (in Curtain) and Miss Marple (Sleeping Murder) had final cases with no hope of an encore. On the other side of the literary plain, I doubt if it entered his mind, however F. Scott Fitzgerald made a sharp move by bumping off Gatsby rather than having he and Daisy Buchanan go riding off into the sunset in an open-topped yellow roadster.

Why is this? Well you see, if the novel has a happy or open ending and receives the stamp of approval of millions of readers, some bloody hack is going to stumble in once the author’s rights have expired and completely bugger the whole enterprise by writing a speculative ‘sequel’.

I very nearly gave up on reading as an enjoyable pastime by burning my eyes with repeated exposures to such speculative sequels. The last thing I’m going to do is look up the specific titles and authors - a memory sensibly lost is best left that way - but there was a follow-up to Gone With the Wind (ghastly), Casablanca (wretched) and even Winnie the Pooh (tonstant weader...you know the rest). Honestly, there may not be any original ideas left in the world, yet that doesn’t mean all the old ones are good.

With these horrifying experiences as the backdrop, I opened the cover of P.D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley with all the confidence of an ingenue in a horror movie opening the door to the basement stairs. Just in case the title of James’ book didn’t clue you in (pun intended and rather enjoyed, by me anyway) Death Comes to Pemberley is a follow-up to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with a murder thrown because, you know, it’s P.D. James. That’s who she is; that’s what she does.

Oh, just in case you’re hopeful - George Wickham is not the victim. Wickham, maybe the first of the great literary roués, is instead the accused innocent. Yes I think that was a mistake. Everybody who has ever read Pride and Prejudice would happily take a hand in a Murder on the Orient Express style mass execution. (If you’ve never read Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, ha ha jes’ kiddin’! It was the railway conductor what punched his ticket.)

Instead of Wickham being dropped off a cliff or having his skull cleaved by a niblick, a Captain Denny is demised by mysterious means in the woodlands of Fitzwilliam Darcy’s estate Pemberley. Wickham himself is found drunk and sobbing over his dead friend Dennys’ body, moaning that he has killed his best friend. Complications arise.

But let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to business. Is P.D. James taking on the world recorded by Jane Austen up to the task? I’ll vote yes, with a substantial reservation. The second question: Is the mystery itself worthy of P. D. James? That one is tougher to answer, but I’m voting no.

Let’s deal with that second question or issue first, as it is much easier to answer. Murder mysteries are in some ways melodramas. In a melodrama, if you don’t give a shrug about the girl tied to the train track, you don’t care whether or not the train saws her in half. No care, no boo, no cheer. In Death Comes to Pemberley, Denny’s demise is not a tragedy; it is a plot convenience. Someone has to die and James made the choice that it was not going to be any of Bennet, Bingley or Darcy clans. And this had to be a very calculated choice James made, to not sacrifice any of the beloved characters. Captain Denny’s wounds are better described than his character; hell, I can’t even remember now if he had a mustache or what his age was. So the reader’s lust to see justice! I say justice! … is not particularly fed.

The most puzzling note - and it truly amazes me to write this, as I would happily place James along with G.K. Chesterton as the most cunning of mystery writers - is that there are no viable suspects. Everybody is so damnably decent and absolutely no credible character thinks Wickham done him in, save for the Magistrate and who ever believes the initial opinion of the investigating officer in a mystery? James loves Austen’s creations too much to make any of them naughty. Murder needs naughty like sex requires naughty.

Now, as a pastiche of Austen’s style, great swaths of Death Comes to Pemberley is actually pretty good. I’m willing to wager that the short Chapter 2 in Book Four titled The Inquest is the first section James wrote. It is a pleasant reflection on Elizabeth Darcy’s first visit to Pemberley, remembrances of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, etc. In sum, a five finger exercise by an accomplished pianist. James has some of Austen’s raised eyebrow of ironic statement - i.e. ‘Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip; it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided..’ Zing! Everyone behaves just as you would expect them to behave; there are no discordant notes.

I am curious as to why it is that once the trial of Wickham begins, James effectively shoves Elizabeth off-stage and instead focuses all the action and internal thought on the men in the novel. She makes a turn for the boys, as it were, and here too I believe a mistake has been made. Jane Austen is as much an industry as Shakespeare and Dickens precisely because she was (forgive the wearying term) the proto-feminist.

Ultimately, I suspect that this was a work of love for P.D. James. It has all the evidence of a work years, decades perhaps, in the making. Her insights and theories into some of the smaller plot points in Pride and Prejudice are academic-worthy. And I’m quite sure Colin Firth will do a fine job once more strapping on the breeches, dear friends, in the inevitable movie. This is an enjoyable enough read for Austen fans who crave more, or for P.D. James who have an equal craving. I just wish there had been a little more desperado and a little less devotion.

Be seeing you.

(If you would like to buy your own copy of Death Comes to Pemberley, you are welcome to do so...Here.)

Conversation With: Guy Magar

2012-01-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

This Skype interview was conducted January 10, 2012. Guy Magar is the Director of thousands of hours of primetime television in the US, as well as several feature films. His excellent memoir Kiss Me Quick Before I Shoot is reviewed elsewhere on this site.

In our discussion, we go into the health crisis that affected Guy's beloved wife Jacqui, the techniques of directing actors, the possible stage adaptation of his book, and much much more. In particular, Guy has an exciting series of 'finishing school' seminars for filmmakers called Action/Cut.

Enjoy, and I welcome your comments!

- H

The Wealth Cure

2012-01-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

The Wealth Cure

Note finger pointing at watch: "It's time.."

Hill Harper (Gotham Books 2011, hardcover) 264 pages, bibliography, $26 msl

This is quite an interesting fusion of two concepts by Harper Hill: a personal medical crisis blended with financial advice. It seems that the well-known CSI:NY actor has intended this follow-up to his three best-selling books to be a straightforward discussion of personal financial planning. Then in 2010 he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 33 and well, that will tend to alter a man’s plans. I’ll save the reader a Google search by revealing that Hill’s surgery was successful and he has returned to health. That knowledge will not hurt appreciation of the text.

The cancer diagnosis may not have done much for Harper’s peace of mind, although he seems to have handled it ably enough. It definitely did help the book, as the author’s need to call time-out and take a few days to digest the news led him to take the Skychief train from Los Angeles to Chicago in order to reflect and write. This gives The Wealth Cure a narrative line which separates it from the warping shelf of financial self-help books that are released with every sunrise.

As I was a personal financial consultant for over four years before leaving the profession in April 2008 - right before the roof fell in as it turned out - I can vouch for Harper’s advice. The great secret of financial planning is that there are no great secrets. Pay yourself first through savings, know your tolerance to risk, budget and don’t be seduced by the siren call of what’s new, what’s hot and what’s sexy. Harper believes more in equity markets and index funds than I do at present (that roof is still unrepaired); however the tools he provides are sound and they would do well by anyone who followed them.

The narrative of the people Harper meets on the train and emails he exchanges with friends while on the journey provide the spiritual meat to the financial drink. These exchanges of opinion lend weight to the philosophy of what Wealth truly means. Money and its accumulation is not the definition of Wealth - true spiritual qualities and following a path of love are.

It’s a good book. I was impressed by the end, to the point that were I still in the financial business I’d buy a crate or two and hand them out to clients.

(Speaking of buying crates of books, to purchase The Wealth Cure, you can do so ... here)

The Little Shadows

2011-12-31T07:12:00.001-05:00

The Little Shadows

Marina Endicott (Doubleday Canada, 2011 hardcover) 527 pages, $32.95 msl

As a work of historical research, Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows is impressive. As a detailed narrative of the lives of vaudeville artists circa World War One, it is invaluable. As a novel, it is as lousy a book as I’ve read in years.

Sorry to be so blunt, but the usual reviewer’s trick of pointing out several noble, even praiseworthy achievements before sliding in the dagger at the end just doesn’t apply here. The Little Shadows is the moral equivalent of purchasing the most beautiful plot of land in Canada, one overlooking vistas of mountains, lakes and majestic waving fields and then building a one-hole outhouse on it. This is a positively murderous waste of great material.

The story (and there is one, not that you’ll care) is about the three Avery sisters - Aurora, Bella and Clover who form The Belle Auroras singing and dancing vaudeville act under the watchful eye of their mother Flora, a vaudeville veteran herself. Just for a tiny example of the annoyance that awaits the reader, although the sister’s names start with A, B and C; in age they run eldest to youngest A, C and B. I found myself having to do a mental reminder of who the baby in the bunch was for the first, oh, 300 pages or so because there is little if anything to differentiate Bella from Clover. And if parents want to be cutesy-poo and name their children in alpha order, why would they do so in dyslexic fashion? I guess it must have seemed ‘writerly’ and symbolic of something or other. It isn’t. It’s just annoying.

By the time one gets deep into the novel, the question starts to percolate: Why did Endicott go to the bother of writing in three sisters in the first place? Their lives run in such parallel that it just doesn’t seem worth the bother. Aurora seems to be the prettiest, Clover a better monologuist and Bella from the sounds of things had a pretty nice rack, but beyond that (or those) they all lead the same life. They all fall for Inappropriate Men, two become pregnant, two get regularly humped by Influential Producers, all abandon the act without proper notice, etc.

The above is a pretty serious literary point. It seems to me that the opportunity a writer has in creating three sibling characters is this: three people come from the same background, go through similar experiences, yet have differing perspectives on the world. the reader, by looking at that world through three pairs of differently-viewing eyes, gains a holistic understanding. Instead...well we have the fictional equivalent of the real-life Baldwin brothers. Alec/Aurora achieves first prominence and gets the better roles, but I defy you to tell me what difference there is between Daniel or Stephen. Or, if that was too opaque a comparison, it is like going to an advertised Marx Brothers reunion only to find that the Brothers in question are Zeppo and Gummo.

Speaking of...my interest did spark when I read the following:

They had a dressing room of their own. or, if not quite all their own, they were only sharing it with one other number, the strawberry-haired woman from Swain’s Rats & Cats. The cats, and most fortunately the rats, were housed in another dressing room, and the woman assured Mama that never, not once, had a rat been known to escape.

Now that made my little ears perk up because I had heard of Swain’s Rats & Cats. That was a very real vaudeville act. Where I heard of it was on a recording (an LP, kids ask your parents) of Groucho Marx’s concert tour that he did with Marvin Hamlisch in the 1970s. There is also this version of the act as told in The Groucho Letters, which is by the way the funniest book I have ever read:

In case you are too young to remember this offering, it consisted of six rats, dressed as jockeys, perched on six cats, dressed as horses, galloping furiously around a miniature race track. It was an extraordinary act.
Of course, i get more salary than Swain paid his actors; as a matter of fact, they didn’t get any salary. Swain paid them off in cheese. Each rat got two pounds of mouse-trap cheese a week. With the country facing a three-hundred-billion-dollar (this was 1946) deficit, this doesn’t sound like much, but you must remember, this was all net. These rats didn’t have an agent - they knew their own kind and booked themselves independently. They didn’t even have to shop for cheese - they just sat in their dressing room and waited for Swain to throw their salary over the transom.

If I may ask a question that would be termed as leading by any awake and sober judge, did you find Groucho’s description funny? You have a good sense of the act, now don’t you? Well you’ll get none of that from The Little Shadows.

Not that Endicott doesn’t describe other acts in detail that can only be described as forensic. I’m going to pick a passage at (I swear) random. Feel free to skip forward. Trust me, you won’t miss a thing.

His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown aside, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.

Undoubtedly exhausted from all the excitement. But really - scudding? Slow-flurrying? In trying to write, shall we say, ‘in period’ Endicott throws in clunky phrasing that brings to mind nothing other than The New Yorker and Wolcott Gibbs’ famous description of Time Magazine’s style: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.’ One other point - Groucho actually was from that period, and he sure never talked like that, nor did Bob Hope, George Burns, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice or, hell, no one who ever drew a living breath.

(Reviewer Note: I’m not enjoying writing this. Then again, I didn’t enjoy the book either. Although I suspect you’ve probably already come to that conclusion.)

I was going to point out an example where Endicott, trying to slide in a pun makes an absolute clunking banger off the word ‘Ho’, but why torture you further? Let’s leap ahead to what is actually the most critical mistake in the novel.

I note in Endicott’s bio that she has been an actor, playwright and director. That’s swell, for so have I. Within a span of 107 opening nights, I ran a teaching theatre for three years. The most critical lesson i taught my actors was that a play is a conversation between the actors and the audience. That’s why people go to live theatre: because it’s real, the audience can feel. And nowhere - I emphasize nowhere - in The Little Shadows is there the slightest sense of the audience. Who were they? How did they feel? Where are the stage door Johnnies? Were they poor, rich or middle-class? What jokes did they repeat, what songs (and dear God this book is a hymnal of long-forgotten songs) did they hum while the next day doing...whatever they did.

The average reader in 2011 hasn’t got a clue what it means to be a performer. But that same reader does know what it means to be an audience. Yet Endicott only presents her acts from the perspective of other performers. This is such a massive mistake that I’m honestly shocked that it wasn’t noticed and fixed during the editing process.

The shame of it all is that there is so much material here for a really great, entertaining book. Where The Little Shadows rises is in the excerpts from old comedy sketches and the inner life of the performers as they reach out to connect with that nameless, faceless audience. Were the story of vaudeville been put in the hands of an E.L. Doctorow or J. B. Priestley (whose The Good Companions is still the best novel written about traveling theatre companies), this book would have been a little gem. Instead, it will serve as a serviceable research piece for theatre students. Marina Endicott was short-listed for The Giller Prize for her previous book Good to a Fault. I admit I haven’t read it. But it had to have been better than this, which is a fault to good material.

The Other Side of Suffering (JonBenet Ramsey)

2011-12-25T22:26:00.000-05:00

The Other Side of Suffering

John Ramsey with Marie Chapian (Hachette 2012, Hardcover) 237 pages, with appendix $19.85 msl

When you saw thye name John Ramsey, did you remember? Did your mind open fifteen years of boxed and taped shut memories to go back to 1996 when a little girl named JonBénet Ramsey was murdered in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder Colorado at some time on Christmas night? And in that box of memory did you find small slips that read the JonBénet was killed by her mother, or her brother, or her father, for reasons of jealousy or bedwetting? Is it all coming back to you now?

Dear God we owe these people an apology. Not just the Boulder police who butchered the investigation, or the media piranha fish who devoured the survivors, but all of us who devoured the tabloids and leapt to judgment. The Ramseys had already suffered, had already been tortured, by the loss of a beloved child. Our prurience chose to kick the corpse right before their eyes.

When The Other Side of Suffering is released in March, its co-author John Ramsey (father of JonBénet, widower of Patsy) will, I’m sure, put himself through round after round of press interviews at which he’ll be asked round after round of the same questions. Who do you think...? How did it feel when...? What was she...?

I couldn’t put myself through that and I doubt if you could either. Yet, John Ramsey is going to do just that in support of this book because he thinks it can help. Not him - although I hope he turns a good dollar out of all this - he wants to help you and me.

As a piece of great literature, The Other Side of Suffering isn’t a great addition. It wanders, it rambles, it repeats itself. As an honest statement of an innocent man trying to cope within the media vortex with the help of God and Christian faith, it is outstanding.

Someone or other once wrote that, ‘There is no such thing as bad PR.’ When it is your child, and the PR is in the papers (more column inches than Princess Diana’s death! An estimated One Billion Dollars in ad revneue for JonBénet realted stories!), oh yes there is such a thing as bad PR. The Other Side of Suffering, I hope, brings back some balance to the past and encourages balance in the future.

To pre-order your copy, look here: By the Book Store

Elliot Perlman's The Street Sweeper

2011-12-25T00:38:00.000-05:00

The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman (Bond Street Books 2012, hardcover) 554 pages, bibliography

This is my second review of Elliot Perlman’s new novel The Street Sweeper. My first was sent to a friend at Random House Canada, the publicist who sent me the book. That review? It was one word: Wow. For you, I’ll expand on that opinion.

This is a giant’s footprint of a novel, covering the Holocaust, Civil Rights, and the meaning of History itself. These are not topics for writers with faint hearts and impatient fingers. A story like the Holocaust and the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau is something which the average reader thinks he already knows - you’ve seen it in school, you’ve seen it in movies, you’ve read it in books - what more can possibly be said to bring any new emotional reaction to the experience? How can something old become something new?

For me, the core passage of the book is where the cancer-ravaged Holocaust survivor Henryk Mandelbrot decsribes how he survived the brief prisoner’s riot at Auschwitz by running into the burning Crematorium IV and away from the indiscriminately firing SS. Mandelbrot summarizes the experience from his hospital bed by telling the black janitor, Lamont Williams, the following:

‘I didn’t know anything, Mr. Lamont. I could try now to pretend to be a hero. I was not a hero. There were plenty of heroes. I was not one of them. The heroes died. Look, when a building is on fire sometimes not all of it is on fire.’

Yes exactly. No matter what the death, whatever the destruction, something survives. Something survives, waiting to be discovered, unearthed, brought back to life. Something from then which can speak to now. And whose job is that, to do the discovery?

Meet Adam Zignelic, Professor of History at Columbia University in New York. I am not a clinical psychologist so I am in no way qualified to make a diagnosis of a living person. However, as Adam is a literary creation and I am a reviewer, I will do just that. Adam is suffering from clinical depression. Nowhere in The Street Sweeper is that termed used, however all the symptoms are present. His research and writing has dwindled to evaporation; he can scarcely make it through a lecture of his course (with the alluring title of What is History?); he suffers from sobbing nightmares of the atrocities of racism in America; he ends his long relationship with his common-law spouse Diana because Adam does not feel capable of raising and supporting a child; he phones people when they are unlikely to be in to receive the call. He’s a mess.

Having a reputation to live up to will do that to a man. Adam’s late father Jake was one of the liberal Jewish lawyers who joined with the black lawyers in Thurgood Marshall’s office to fight the legal battles which led to the civil rights struggles and successes of the 1960s. Another of those lawyers, one of the black lawyers, was William McCray, whose son Charles is now Chair of the History Department at Columbia. The McCrays and Zignelics were and are close.

That alone is indicative of the echoing structure that is The Street Sweeper. I’m going to throw out a dangerous name here, so be prepared. In the way plots and sub-plots match, mingle, reflect and comment on one another Perlman has created a piece of storytelling worthy of Shakespeare. I take a deep breath, because that is the sort of comparison that can get you in all kinds of trouble. Still, this novel bears that weight.

Consider the various searches. Lamont, recently released from prison, searches for his daughter. Adam, at William’s urging, goes searching for evidence that black troops were involved in the liberation of the death camps. Henryk searches for someone to hear and remember his story of the Holocaust. And the trump card is Dr. Henry Border, who in 1945 travels to Europe to interview the death camp survivors with a wire recorder discovers a truth he never sought. Whether for good or for ill, when one searches, one always finds more than what one seeks.

What I admire most about Elliot Perlman and how he handled this true epic is his restraint until it is time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. It fooled me at first; I admit that. Even while I was enjoying every page, particularly once the plot began to move forward into the past, with the shadow of the death camps clouding the story of civil rights and academic struggle, I was still hoping for the writing to fire. I wanted emotional payoffs, in other words. A young black girl (Lamont’s lost daughter, we wonder?) is alone on a subway in New York City and as Adam’s nightmares had included the story of young black girls torn to death by racist mobs we think, expect and fear an outcome...which doesn’t come.

It doesn’t come yet. When it arrives in Henryk Mandelbrot’s oral history of the prisoner’s revolt and its aftermath it comes in all the angry power of gods gone mad. The words burn, the sentences explode, the pages reach out, grab you by the scruff of the neck and force you to live this scene.

I was equally drained and paradoxically exhilarated by the end of The Street Sweeper. Not every loose end was tidily wrapped, which I also think is shrewd storytelling. For there is always the message: seek out and listen, and you shall discover the truth.

Or as I said before: Wow.

(If you would like to order a copy of The Street Sweeper, you may do so at the By the Book Store. Thank you.)

Who Wrote This?

Hubert O'Hearn is a syndicated book reviewer, Contributing Editor to San Francisco Book Review and Contributor to Herald de Paris. He is available for reviewing, editing and public speaking and can be reached at: hlohearn@gmail.com

Reviewing With Invisible Friends

2011-12-17T23:58:00.001-05:00

Reviewing with Invisible Friends

by: Hubert O’Hearn
Dec. 16, 2011

Yes well, the title of this essay may be a trifle misleading. I’d actually thought of a back-breakingly long one: The Invisible Life of the Distant Book Reviewer. Now that would be just grand if I was about to pitch a movie to Pedro Almodovar, but I’m not. Instead I’m writing pieces that have to be Twitter acceptable. At 32 characters it leaves just enough room for the url plus a come hither hashmark. To be concise is the Twitter haiku.

However, I got to thinking about something quite particularly today. The news had come across last night about the death of Christopher Hitchens and I’d written a memorial this morning, sent it in to my editors, published it and was busily sharing it around. And it occurred to me that I had never met in person a good 90% of the people I felt close enough to personally or professionally to share a subject very close to my heart - I idolized Hitchens.

I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this, nor do I think it placed me in the company of crazed loners who in earlier times would have spent their off-hours plotting assassinations. Now they stay at home and post humorous pictures of cats on Facebook. The internet is nothing if it isn’t at least a shiny, music-playing Fisher-Price toy for the borderline mentally deficient. (Now there’s an advertising slogan those smarty-pants boys at Apple never thought of!)

However, on the great Venn diagram of humanity, I think the only arc shared between me and the basement creatures is that we both spend a lot of time on the internet. My excuse (and I am sticking to it) is that this situation of developing close relationships with people who I literally would not recognize if they came to the door is a direct outcome of writing and in particular book reviewing.

One develops these close relationships - and I’ll get to whether or not these actually are close relationships in a moment - with three general groupings of people. The publicists are key. In a rough tie are the authors, along with the Editor/Publishers. Granted actual visual contact would be much more likely with those who live in the same city. I happen to live in the land where Nowhere goes to hide. Regardless, I believe that urban overlap would only alter the percentages and not the structure. It’s not like you would go banging on doors every week of every month.They have security guards for that sort of thing. Plus you’d be broke, starving and permanently drunk if you went to all the wine and cheese book signings, cocktail parties, fund-raisers and comments floating through the air like, ‘You do like wearing that outfit a lot, now don’t you?’ As Great Britain found with the English Channel, a little distance can save you from uncomfortable invasions.

Now I do believe that these are close relationships. I’ve found over the years that I can learn much more about a person by taking one long look at their bookshelf than by looking over their refrigerator magnet collage. Rifling through the wallet, purse and/or medicine cabinet is best; however those deeds will get you arrested. So with the publicists then, for the relationship to work well, there has to be a nearly-intimate exchange of tastes. At the least, a general matrix gets formed as to what each other likes by measuring the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of the eventual review. How many of your, shall we say, three-dimensional friends really know your tastes? Have you looked at your recent birthday presents lately?

In much the same way, the reviewer does get to know some authors quite well. I would say particularly well with the newer, usually younger authors that I want to give a push to. There are editors out there who think any such relationship is as bad as bribing the high school quarterback with tattooed hookers and a cigarette boat the night before The Big Game. I say that’s nonsense. What if an author I thought of as a friend wrote a book that I hated? If the book was not assigned to me by a publication, I wouldn’t review it. Simple as that. If it was assigned, then I bear the duty to the public of honesty...phrased as kindly as I could. It hasn’t come up. Yet.

Finally, there is inevitably going to be a kindred-ness between reviewer and editor for that relationship to work at all. There are elements of style (first person usage, pungent humour, level of syntax) which if held in common I believe indicate likely well-matched personalities. I read about an hour or two ago Martin Amis’ line, ‘Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.’ Precisely in thought, and phrased precisely too.

In any event and to sum up - it’s actually quite pleasant. The beauty of these email, message, occasionally Skype-based relationships is that one always can look one’s best...and you can eat a sandwich while doing business. That may be a lame ending, but honestly, haven’t we gone far enough?

Be seeing you! Merry Christmas!

A Book and a Martini: Christmas Buying Guide

2011-12-17T20:22:00.002-05:00

A Conversation with Darryl Nyznyk - Author Mary's Son

2011-12-13T08:29:00.000-05:00

Weekend in Amsterdam

2011-12-08T15:32:00.001-05:00

Weekend in Amsterdam

Roy A. Higgins (Strategic Book Group 2011, Trade Paperback) 288 pages, $14.95 msl

(If interested, you can buy Weekend in Amsterdam at the Buy the Book Store.)

Over the course of a typical week, I probably receive about a dozen tweets, Facebook follows, Linked-In notices and dear old emails (those seem positively antique now, as though delivered by a butler on a small silver tray) all politely asking me to spend some time looking at an independently published book. Out of that number, I usually say yes to about four. Out of that number, I usually receive one or two. Finally, out of that number comes the occasional review.

As I have often said, I will only rarely write a damning review. When I was in theatre, I was in more than one take-it-on-the-chin production and you know what? It hurts. Worse, the bruises last a long time. If a writer wants a private opinion, I’ll happily give it to them, but you’ll never know about that unless the writer is idiot enough to want to tell the world out there that I think he has all the syntactic subtlety of a dancing cow.

So I only publish reviews of indie books if I think they’re damn good. Having come this far, Mr. Roy A. Higgins of the United Kingdom may cease holding his breath. (Note to author: Congrats Roy. You’ve written a damn good book. I’m about to describe why I think people should buy it and why I think they will enjoy it. I have a couple of reservations, mind, and I’m going to beat you about the head and shoulders for one of them, however rest assured that the ‘damn good book’ comment will prevail.)

This is Higgins’ first novel. According to the book’s cover he is a retired electrical engineer, which only makes me wish that he’d been lousy at that job so he could have turned to writing earlier. He has a deftness of observation, an ear for natural dialogue, and enough narrative bravery that it’s fair to say he would have carved out a solid career as a novelist with hearty sales and a couple of fat film rights cheques stuffing his bank account. Nonetheless, Weekend in Amsterdam has been worth the wait. It’s a damn good...oh right, I’ve already said that.

The plot is simple enough, emerging from an incident in Higgins’ own life. In 1968, Ray Evans, an electrical engineer is approached while on a business trip to Amsterdam by Vladimir, a Soviet agent. Vladimir wants Ray’s co-operation in stealing videotape technology from his workplace. Ray refuses. Complications arise.

The best part of Weekend in Amsterdam is the vivid picture it creates of life in 1960s England. Not the Carnaby Street, Swinging London 1960s; rather the life of young men enjoying the new-found sexual freedoms mixed with traditional pub n’ footie life in Lancashire. I don’t know how much of this is direct diary transcription by Higgins, nor do I care. What is important is the careful attention to detail: the cars, the music, the cultural clashes with Johnny Foreigner, and of course the first peak of the rivalry between fans of Manchester United and Manchester City.

Higgins can be funny as all hell in describing some of these scenes and even his most minor characters are given full attention. One of the best scenes is where Mo, the local hard man, profanely informs Ray that as Mo’s sister has taken a shine to him, he is to take her home but lay one finger...you can guess the consequences.

Ray lays lots of fingers over the course of the book and that may be one of its two problems. Women and girls alike are drawn to him like lint to a sweater. While certainly possible, I’m not so sure Ray’s James Bond-style series of conquests helps the novel. The problem isn’t with the bedding, it’s that one wonders whatever becomes of several of the women. It’s not a huge problem; more an opportunity lost.

The other problem is one that drove me to tooth gritting and grinding. ‘You’re house’ means you are a house - it does not mean the place where you live. Similarly, Higgins consistently misses the correct usage of ‘it’s’ versus ‘its’. Its a darn shame. Pardon me, I meant to write, it’s a darn shame. These grammar school errors need to be fixed and pronto, please!

All that said, this is a truly enjoyable, nostalgic and funny thriller. You’ll have as much fun with its reading as I suspect its author had with its writing. It’s a delight.

Be seeing you.

Grapho-Persuasion (Confessions of a Marketing Man)

2011-12-03T16:54:00.000-05:00

Grapho-Persuasion:
Mastering the Pyramid of Persuasion

(Confessions of a Marketing Man)

Victor Semo (Jamin 2010, Trade Paperback) 158 pages, indexed and illustrated $13.45 msl

(Available for purchase Here)

This is a pleasant time of year for me as a book reviewer. As it’s early December all the big releases by the big publishing houses are already in release and honestly I’ve reviewed all the big literary novels and non-fiction dire looks at the future that I’m going to do this year. Instead, for the next few weeks I’m finally able to get to my etcetera pile: usually paperbacks, usually sent to me by smaller houses or independent authors, and often on topics that are comfortably quirky. The books are like Christmas crackers. Sometimes you get a wonderful, practical prize like the miniature set of tools I kept in my wallet for years (you’d be shocked at how handy they were) and sometimes you just get a paper hat that rips within seconds.

Grapho-Persuasion certainly fits the miniature tool category and I know all too well the craftsmen who will most benefit from it. A bit of confession here: Before choosing to make an honest living out of writing I was a personal financial consultant for four years. I was very good at things which were important for my clients - assessing their needs, lowering their taxes, managing their debts and so forth - while being very bad at things which were important for me. I was (and am) a terrible salesman.

Utterly incapable of structuring instant oral presentations that would seduce like Warren Beatty in the 70s, I would instead present the hard facts and logic.

Me: “You need to do this and that, and you’d better do the other.”
He: “I’d rather spend my money on beer and motorboats.”
Me: “Oh okay. It’s your life after all.”

And so much for that. I got out of the business in April 2008, just before the world’s markets began to crash and crumble. Timing is everything, both in comedy as well as careers.

Now, I have absolutely no intention of going back into the world of commissioned sales. However, if I was struck by a hot fever of madness and did, I know that I would be memorizing Victor Semo’s book as the key part of my training. A Marketing Manager as well as a researcher on Corporate Responsibility and political persuasion at Wolverhampton University in the UK, Semo has compacted more useful advice in terms of reading, understanding, and convincing a client in these 158 pages than you will find anywhere else. Putting my money (or at least my email) where my mouth is, I contacted the President of my former financial institution employer to say, ‘You need to bring this guy over to talk to all your Consultants.’

Reading a book will not make anyone a million dollars unless the book is actually used. From Graph-Persuasion’s Appendix B:

Everybody wants to be successful, yet very few have the courage and tenacity to practice rigorously what they learn in the business books or self-help books they read. They give up too early. If it was so easy to implement everything we read and see, the world would be a very different place. It is easier to try for a few days or weeks, then return to watching TV and browsing the Internet. And a few months later - within 18 months exactly according to book marketers - the same people will buy another book on how to become successful or a better business executive.

In other words, it’s up to you. Speaking of ‘in other words’, a piece of Semo’s wisdom is choosing what words to used when talking to a client or an audience. Did you know that ‘but’ is an argumentative word, off-putting in its reception. Instead, use ‘however’, ‘yet’, or ‘and’. That sort of thing is a little gem that will shine up a sales presentation.

Interestingly, what one would think is the core of the book given its title, is just one tactic among many. Handwriting can certainly be interpreted to gain insight into a person’s psyche and Semo demonstrates how to analyze a person’s lettering. Here again, were I to be a financial consultant again, I would begin by having the client-prospect write down their goals, needs and worries.

If you are in the business of sales and/or marketing, buy the book. If your spouse, partner or adult child is in the profession, but the book. No ifs, ands or howevers about it.

Be seeing you.

Mary's Son: A tale of Christmas

2011-11-30T16:00:00.002-05:00

Mary’s Son: A tale of Christmas

Darryl Nyznyk (Cross Dove Publishing 2010, Hardcover) 174 pages, $15.95 msl

I realized something when I sat back to write this, one day after finishing this truly loving book; one day spent enjoying its after-glow. Standards are different for Christmas stories. They are, you know. Things like melodramatic mothers, great banging coincidences, plot elements so closely following other works that copyright lawyers might well start wagging their briefcases in anticipation of the hunt - any of these things would ordinarily lead an honest reviewer such as myself to spend no little time metaphorically frying the author in hot oil. Or screw the metaphorically part - let’s cook!

However, not here, not now, not me. I wrote a play once about Christmas which did rather well whose theme was based on my belief that Christmas is what you remember. There are days in one’s life that provoke outsize reactions - births, funerals, weddings and the like. Christmas is the vast tribal day of outsize reaction. It brings back and re-sets all the memories of anticipation and joy, sadness and loss; and with it all ways of thinking with refined objectivity take a well-earned holiday. For one day annually the heart triumphs over the mind.

Therefore, when I tell you that Mary’s Son borrows great gulps of Miracle on 34th Street with Santa Claus himself the main character in a modern setting, that is not a charge of plagiarism; rather the praise of tradition. If the young tough Jared and the lonely, spoiled rich girl Sarah are as broadly drawn as anyone Charles Dickens ever drew up - well, I’ve just used a Dickens comparison so how bad can that be? If Nicholas/Santa Claus does magical feats that make disbelief suspend like the umbrella that appears above his head...Why not? Christmas is a day to simply believe. When the infant Jesus makes a cameo appearance in a Nativity re-enactment, that is only right and proper.

You simply cannot think logically about Mary’s Son any more than you can about Christmas itself. To do so defeats the book and the day’s whole purpose. They both exist to urge us to trust that the imaginable is in fact so. As such, Darryl Nyznyk’s gentle yet thrilling story of how Nicholas saves the day and teaches (ah yes) the true spirit of Christmas is a statement of what makes us human. Our bodies are fueled by many things - air, water, food. Our souls though are fueled by just one thing - hope. We go to sleep at night in the belief that tomorrow will be better than today. Everything’s going to be all right. There is a God and God cares. And a little fat man squeezes down chimneys and he knows all our names. Mary’s Son: hope and belief.

(If you would like to purchase your own copy of this charming story, here's a direct link: By the Book Store)

The Occupy Reader (video)

2011-11-26T16:21:00.000-05:00

As mentioned, any of the books mentioned can be purchased at: http://astore.amazon.com/bythe-20

Merry Christmas! - H

Amy Goodman: Breaking the Sound Barrier

2011-11-24T16:03:00.001-05:00

BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER

Amy Goodman (Haymarket Books 2009, trade paperback) 377 pages, indexed $16.00 msl

I rarely review a book more than six months after its publication date. Perhaps that is a flaw common to both reviewers and readers alike where we snuffle about like truffle pigs seeking the tastiest fresh discovery. It takes a truly exceptional work to break the rules, or in this case the sound barrier.

Amy Goodman is a rare and exceptional writer and broadcaster who breaks all the rules of modern ‘balanced’ journalism. Please forgive my ignorance in that I hadn’t been made aware of her work until quite recently, when I started to dig deep into the Occupy Movement for my political column ‘Politics for Joe’. (The curious can find those archived at thefearandloathingpage.blogspot.com) I noticed and read Goodman’s articles at truthdig.com and was impressed. I watched an interview she did alongside Chris Hedges on Charlie Rose and was interested. I requested Breaking the Sound Barrier and became an admirer.

What does the title of this collection of essays mean? From the introduction:

My goal as a journalist is to break the sound barrier, to expand the debate, to cut through the static and bring forth voices that are shut out. It is the responsibility of journalists to go where the silence is, to seek out news and people who are ignored, to accurately and clearly report on the issues - issues that the corporate, for-profit media often distort, if they cover them at all.

‘Wow.’, I thought in a full blossoming of eloquence. I have many, many followers and friends who are working journalists and I sent them the above quote while asking, ‘Well? Did we do our job today?’ Most days we hacks, scribes, freelancers, journos and scribblers don’t do our job. We write what’s available (i.e. what’s handed to us in a press release) and easy most of the time. But to actually take risks...it’s a very good thing for the profession and the public alike that there are a few people out there like Amy Goodman to take up the slack and prove that courage is not dead.

You see, there really is no such thing as objectivity in journalism. In my opinion it is nonsense to assume objectivity can ever exist in any media where choices are made. The mere decision as to what to cover becomes a bias. Those of us who have the luxury of choosing what to write about choose that which interests us. Even on the editorial side, what story will be featured in bold on the front page, which will be buried in the back, which will be spiked and never seen at all? You can no more have a purely objective news story than you can a purely objective novel or poem.

This is not to say that one should not present argument and counter-argument; facts, facts and facts. And do quote accurately - both those who are heroes and deserve adulation, as well as the scoundrel for the fullest public examination. Above all, wherever possible, make the context that of real people and real lives.

Breaking the Sound Barrier is composed of short columns and commentaries Goodman wrote for Democracy Now! and her weekly column distributed by the King Features syndicate between 2006 and 2009. Arranged by topic (e.g. Torture, Elections, Global Economic Meltdown, and Obama), these columns reveal a disturbing world. One image I shall never forget is the specific targeting of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad during the US-led invasion. What was so special about that hotel? That was where the journalists were staying. The US tank turned, aimed and fired.

Or what about the children who died because health insurance companies fought paying for their operations? Or Senator Max Baucus of Montana, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee who refused testimony by advocates for a single-payer health care system all the while lapping up the sour cream of millions of dollars in political contributions by the health insurance lobby? It all becomes a pattern, and not a pretty one.

I also give Goodman full recognition for being smarter than the vast majority. She saw through Barack Obama long, long before I did or probably you did. During the 2008 campaign, he backed away from the dismantling of NAFTA, backed away from opposing immunity for the telecommunications companies complicit in illegal surveillance of Americans, backed away from his support of the existing ban on handguns in Washington DC. So why the surprise when after the election he did not support single-payer, did not prosecute Bush Administration officials who approved torture as an interrogation technique, and carried on the same policies of massive corporate bailouts with virtually no oversight? Again, it all becomes a pattern, and not a pretty one.

There are uplifting stories contained here too. If we don’t have hope, there is no point in waking up tomorrow. Ultimately though the reader is left with a sense of anger. Anger can be a very good thing. Anger motivates. Amger organizes. Anger protests. Anger can overcome...anger.

Brilliant book. Brilliant writer.

Be seeing you.

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark

2011-11-22T16:20:00.001-05:00

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark

Brian Kellow (Viking 2011, hardcover) 417 pages illustrated and indexed, $27.95 msl

I was looking for just the right anecdote to lead off this review. It needed to be both bright and telling of Pauline Kael’s personality, as well as indicative of those qualities that brought her legions of fans and a rather impressive selection of haters. I’m going to go with this one. Charlie Seligman, who had been a fact-checker at The New Yorker before going on to become an editor, shares the following in Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark -

“She was funny and lethal right up to the end,” said Seligman. “One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can’t write.’ And she said, very weakly, ‘Yes - they say things like ‘It never ceases to amaze me.’”

That’s just the sort of death ray one-liner that always makes me fall to my knees and bow down to the speaker. Far too many people are far too polite which makes them far too boring to quote. Pauline Kael, the late film critic best known for her twenty-three year stint as the movie reviewer for The New Yorker was never, ever boring. She wasn’t overtly rude; there was no enjoyment of hurting people. Rather, she was like the honest hunter who only kills when necessary.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that had I been a movie reviewer in the 1970s or 80s, instead of a book reviewer in the twenty-teens, I would have been one of the Paulettes - the sycophant imitators whose self-worth was measured by Kael’s approval and support. One doesn’t want to launch a hyperbolic satellite (not that hyperbole ever bothered Kael), but I truly can’t think of another reviewer or critic in any art form who so influenced a generation. James Wolcott, Owen Glieberman, Michael Sragow - it’s a long list.

Yet, you can’t be very strong at something without inviting others to say you’re actually very weak. Andrew Sarris, the equally long-term reviewer for The Village Voice is the Iago or Brutus of A Life in the Dark taking clear pot-shots and putting (obvious cliche alert) Pauline’s reputation in peril. All right, that was an exaggeration designed to fit a joke. By the early 1970s, with best-selling collections of her reviews behind her and the luxury of writing for William Shawn’s New Yorker which gave her limitless space for her reviews, Kael attained the stature of best-known and most coveted reviewer in the business. Directors courted her - particularly Robert Altman; actors and producers tried to lure her into the business. Warren Beatty succeeded in the latter, conquest being his natural talent, although Kael’s time as a producer was both disastrous and short. She returned to reviewing with her stature unsullied - which if you think about it is a helluva achievement in itself.

Brian Kellow’s biography is at its best in two areas. One, he ably digests Kael’s favourite and damned movies year by year. It is the shrewd biographer who chooses a subject so quotable that she livens up every page. Equally, Kellow does a fine job of examining the professional rivalries with Kael’s fellow critics.

Anyone who thinks that all the people composing an artistic circle are happy little bunnies given to creativity and nuzzling mutual support has never spent any time in an artistic circle. Drunken Klingons armed with knives is much closer to the truth. Any opinion expressed which runs contrary to one’s own is a knife crack to confidence composed of egg shells. Yes it’s all rather silly, but if there weren’t people with delicate psyches and sharp minds there would be no writing at all. Or movies. Or acting. Or music. There would probably still be architecture, but who’s going to pack up the family on a Saturday night to go look at a lobby plinth?

At the nut of it, the split between the Paulettes and the Sarrisens (my term, not Kellow’s) was and is classically Freudian. Pauline Kael wrote from her gut - a highly informed and intelligent gut to be sure - nonetheless her desire was for visceral appeal to her Id. She wanted to be surprised, moved, frightened, challenged and entertained damn it.

The Sarrisens, on the opposite side wrote their reviews based on a Superego of cool Vulcan intellectualism. (I’d apologize for the Star Trek metaphors if I felt they were inappropriate. They aren’t.) Judgment of a movie, or pardon me a film, was based around how well it fit a given framework or theory. This is where the auteur theory comes from. Pauline Kael hated the auteur theory...except of course when she would judge a director’s new movie based on how he had developed from his earlier work, which sort of is the auteur theory. This business can give you a headache, but no matter, as every circle meets at a point. Everybody got bored with Woody Allen after awhile.

Kellow also does an excellent job in writing about Kael’s upbringing in Petaluma and Berkley and her long rise as a reviewer, starting out writing the capsule descriptions of the movies shown by her first and only husband’s revival house in San Francisco. Where A Life in the Dark stumbles is in Kael’s personal life as an adult. In terms that I’m sure she would appreciate, if Kael ever got laid after the birth of her daughter Gina, there are no rumpled sheets to be seen here. Still, the addition of five or ten pages of rumpy pumpy action wouldn’t have added anything to my appreciation of this book. It is a movie book for movie lovers and a movie book for book lovers. Honey, you won’t go wring reading this one.

Be seeing you.

A Conversation with Joan Thomas

2011-11-19T16:16:00.001-05:00

(As you'll hear, both Joan and I had a brain cramp when it came to a certain name. Who we were reaching valiantly for was the late Jay Scott, who was an incredibly erudite writer and film critic. Apologies to listeners for my stutter - hope you otherwise enjoy - H)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Apricot Jam

2011-11-19T13:33:00.001-05:00

APRICOT JAM
And Other Stories

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Counterpoint 2011, hardcover) 375 pages including glossary, $28 msl

In ‘Fracture Points’, one of the nine stories comprising what one assumes is the last collection of work drawn from the final years of the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, there is a quote from Gogol: “I’ve given birth to you, and I can kill you as well.” If pressed to name an organizing theme to Apricot Jam, I think that would be it - survival in a world that can either nurture or murder on whims of fate.

When I was about halfway through this collection, the thought occurred to me that these nine stories might have been the working notes for one last gigantic novel by Solzhenitsyn. Certain characters re-appeared in cameos decades after their first introduction, and there was an undoubted linkage to the Civil War following the 1917 Revolution, through to the central narrative of World War Two, ending with the denouement of the USSR transitioning into Russia. By the time I had come to the end, reading the closing words of ‘No Matter What’ - All will proceed according to plan - I had changed my mind. These were not notes. This is the entire symphony. This is a people’s history of the USSR.

There is always the temptation to open the cracked leather briefcase of well-worn phrases and lift out the line of, ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ That would be grand if it were true. Instead, the parts are equal to the whole. You will never forget these people; whether the simple village girl Nastenka in the story of the same name, who gives her body at first reluctantly then willingly to men, then manages to become a teacher faced with an ever-shifting list of what books or poems could be or could not be taught; or the historical figure of Marshal Georgy Zhukov in ‘Times of Crisis’, a true hero of World War, alternately praised, damned, elevated or exiled by Stalin and his successors.

Truth be told, I had never been a great fan of Solzhenitsyn. I had read most of the major works, beginning with August 1914, through Ivan Denisovitch, and The Gulag Archipelago, without ever truly enjoying one of them. He himself was a controversial enough figure in life. When he was exiled to the West in 1974, the assumption by many was that he would become ‘the Russian we could all love.’ Instead, the uncomfortable truth arose that he was as critical of the West as he was of the communist state he had left. He was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War, for instance, which was not what people in correct literary circles wanted to hear. Most annoyingly to some, he retained an intense Russian patriotism, which is extremely clear in Apricot Jam. No matter what peasants, soldiers, technocrats or police officers go through they still love their country.

I’m highly pleased to say that my opinion of Solzhenitsyn’s writing has changed. Perhaps the translation by his son Stephan Solzhenitsyn with Kenneth Lantz is superior to those earlier works; perhaps I have matured and can now appreciate the author’s work. Regardless of the reason, I can unreservedly endorse Apricot Jam.

Books of the Year 2011 - Oddities and Curiosities

2011-11-17T16:24:00.001-05:00

Books of the Year 2011

Oddities and Curiosities

(any of the following books mentioned can be purchased Here)

Right at the moment, I’m actually curious to know why it is that curious has a U in it, whereas curiosity doesn’t. The word must have originated either with or without, so how did the U either get shoved inside like that extra pair of slacks you’re never going to need on vacation but get squished in the suitcase anyway, or snipped off like an unwanted wattle in plastic surgery? These are the questions that try men’s souls...

...and likely your patience. However, I do think it’s important to know what sort of mind you’re dealing with here, particularly if you’re going to follow my recommendations and start ordering in books by the crate. My theory on reviewers of any form - and in my career I’ve regularly reviewed for money the fields of television, theatre, music, ballet and books - is that you should find a reviewer whose tastes closely parallel your own and reasonably entertains you. When you find one, stick with him or her. Much the same definition applies to friendship. Right, so what time we meeting round the pub then?

The books below don’t have a lot in common with one another, but I couldn’t in good conscience stack them up against the contenders in either the Novel or Non-Fiction categories. As an example, would it really be fair to stack Oliver Jeffers’ wonderful book for small children, The Heart and the Bottle up against Dan Vyleta’s decadent Austrian Nazi collaborators in The Quiet Twin? I doubt if poor Dan would stand a fighting chance.

That wasn’t just a cheap and obvious joke by the way. The ability to tell a complete story in a thousand words (or many less in Jeffers’ book) that can teach a lesson while metaphorically cuddling the reader to sleep is a pure art form of writing unto itself. Dr. Seuss may not have written a modern-day Hamlet, but there’s no record of Shakespeare quilling out an Elizabethan Winnie-the-Pooh either. So there. Read The Heart and the Bottle to your youngest child, then loan it to your older child, then grab it back for yourself and keep it by the bedside for the lonely nights when you think No One Cares.

Slightly longer in form than children’s books are short stories. The surest way for a writer to get printed in popular literary magazines is to write an article titled either ‘The Death of the Short Story’,or ‘The Revival of the Short Story’. (making memo to self...write...one of...those) My way of looking at it is that a writer should write until the story he or she wants to tell has reached its natural conclusion, then type out the words The End and don’t look at the word count until then. We really don’t need thirty pages of describing the silverware at that divine dinner party just so you can flog a skinny piece as a novel. Size matters in the bedroom (sorry to break it to you so harshly) but not in the library.

There were two collections of short stories that I admired closely enough that I’m willing to call it even and call it a day. Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting comes from the one current writer who has never, ever bored me for even a single page. Perhaps it is that we share the same Irish sensibility of observing the world with desperate eyes and quip-filled mouths; regardless, these stories of men who have advanced in life just past the point where the amount of that which was is greater than that which will be are letter-perfect sketches.

A delightful surprise awaited me after I had reviewed the young Canadian writer Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden. These tales of modern life, essentially centered on the under-classes of society combine into a magnetic documentary of urban survival. The surprise was that i had no idea Christie and I share the same hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Like, ever cool, eh?

Regarding a non-fiction curiosity, I really admired and was intrigued by the late Stanley Greenspan and Gil Tippy’s book Respecting Autism. The subject area is so narrow that i couldn’t in good conscience stand it up against the works of Chris Hedges or Christopher Hitchens. However, Respecting Autism has an immediate practical value that not even Hedges or The Hitch can match. The book is composed of clearly told case studies with a strong message of what a parent should avoid and demand for their autistic child’s education.

Following the weaving path taken by one of my idols, Dorothy Parker, I do enjoy reviewing a how-to book now and then. I was disappointed that I didn’t read any cookbooks this year that sent me into a kitchen frenzy. Instead of slicing onions I kept my golf balls from slicing into fescue after reading The Golf Delusion. It’s a beautifully illustrated (as all golf books seem to be) look at a golf school housed in, er, a downtown basement smack in the middle of London.

A little book that made me want to go clap clap clap was The Meowmorphosis by the living and quite dead tea, of Coleridge Cook and Franz Kafka. This is a work of really deft comic satire, wherein your old friend from high school lit classes Gregor Samsa wakes up one day not as a monstrous bug...but a lovable kitten. You get a fine tour through the works of Kafka, while Cook never forgets that it’s ‘story first’. To be honest and risk damnation by correct literary circles - I enjoyed this mash-up a hell of a lot more than I did the original.

Lastly, I was truly tempted to include this with the Novels of the Year. However, if ever there was a book which deserved the title of Oddity it is this one: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. A tale set in England about a group of schoolchildren with most unusual powers, it is clearly the kick-off novel for a series. The writing shines with brilliance on every page with exquisite black-and-white photography to back it up. Just to give something away - those photos of highly unusual children are actual archive pictures, not re-stagings for the novel. That gives the whole package a ring of veritas that to my mind trumps anything Harry Potter or (shudder) Twilight ever offered. This is the Book of the Year in this category.

And so...you read sixteen tons and what do you get? Another year older and deeper in debt to writers, publishers, editorsand the dear and wonderful publicists who bring great books to my attention. As such, I want to put out a public thank you to them all. I’ve rarely met personally with any of these people, but I consider each and every one a friend. So let me close off by wishing a Merry Christmas, Mazel Tov and Happy New Year to the following Special Ones, presented in no order...

Sharon Klein
Adria Iwasutiak
Megan Renart
Meghan Paton
Ross Rojek
Maurice Mierau
Elisabeth Calamari
Nick Sidwell
Bronwyn Kienapple
Karen Blair

… and you, ya big crazy lug of a reader you!

MUAH!

H

Books of the Year 2011 - Non-Fiction

2011-11-12T19:21:00.000-05:00

Books of the Year 2011 - Non-Fiction

When I was being trained for a short-lived career as a personal financial consultant, our class was taught that when entering a prospective client’s home for the first time one should try and manage to get a good look at the refrigerator. For it was in that jumble of lists, children’s drawings, old photos and reminder memos that one would get both an instant and a deep understanding of who it was we were dealing with.

Well, I approached things in a different way. I thought that staring at a virtual stranger’s fridge might appear to be a hint to crack open the snacks. Besides that, if I want to know a person I take a peek at their bookcase. If there is no bookcase, or at least a decently filled shelf or two, it’s time to run for clearly there is no hope of any intelligent conversation.

I think that with reviewers you will know us best by this section. Except for the relatively rare instances where an editor suggests or demands a given book to be reviewed, by and large we pick what we want to pick. Fiction allows some insights - more by what is missing than what is there. You may have noticed a lack of vampire or horror stories on my Books of the Year - The Novels list. That’s because if I want to know more about hideous soul-sucking monsters I can just turn on a Republican candidates’ debate and so save my reading time for better things.

Nasty little chuckles aside, we reviewers choose books we’re likely to like. (I can’t imagine what sort of strange masochism it would take to choose books I probably won’t like.) So by the time you’re done scanning a reviewer’s non-fiction titles you’ll know his or her politics, art, hobbies and curiousities. Pleased to meet you.

In choosing these titles as the best of the books I read and reviewed in 2011, I have used the same four-way test as I did in judging the Novels. It’s described more fully there, but to save you the trouble here it is in brief:

1) is the writing exciting?
2) Are the people written about enjoyable company?
3) Did I learn about the world?
4) Did I learn about me?

I’m going to start off recommending a book that I finished reading so recently I haven’t even had the chance to write the review yet. Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark was released a week and a half prior to this writing and I immediately rushed to open it and read it slowly. I savoured it. The author, Brian Kellow, showed the good taste and sensible sensibleness to not try and compete with his subject by writing audaciously. He effectively reports on the life of perhaps the most famous film critic of all time, while making clear when he thought either Kael or her critics had run off the rails. Movies and movie personalities have been the subjects of many a fine biography over the years...I think this is my favourite. Certainly friends who have been bombarded by emails from me ordering them to order themselves a copy will know that as my opinion. Now you do too. Enjoy.

The other book I’ve been shoving at people for most of this year is The Hellhound of Wall Street. (clicking on the book titles will lead you to the original reviews). The story of Ferdinand Pecora’s 1932 investigation into the dubious banking practices of the era is incredibly timely. After you read Michael Perino’s tightly-written, well-researched book you will wonder how on earth the United States ever went backwards over the past twenty years.

There were several excellent sports books this year. I’m going to single our Jimmy Breslin’s Branch Rickey as my favourite. It’s Breslin’s style that really puts the book over. Newspaper columns used to be filled with the kind of street smart, hard-argued prose that makes you smell the hot dogs and hear the honking car horns. Thank God we still have Breslin to, I hope, inspire some heirs.

Chris Hedges is also a newspaper veteran - a Pulitzer Prize winner when he wrote for the New York Times. His style is the mirror opposite to Breslin, but Hedges writes with the same passion and same felt rage. This year’s offering is The World As it Is, a collection of recent essays and articles mostly appearing originally on the excellent truthdig.com web site. To read this book will give anyone who questions why Occupy Wall Street happened all the answers needed.

By far the finest memoir I read this year was David Berlin’s The Moral Lives of Israelis. For the first time , even after years of studying the history of the Middle East conflict, I truly felt that I reached an understanding of the schisms that run through Israeli society. Berlin confronts the issues through a unique and achingly honest perspective. This book deserves a much wider audience than it has received so far. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Berlin - a conversation which can be found here.

Another interview I thoroughly enjoyed was with Chris Turner, author of The Leap. Essentially, The Leap is a user’s guide to the new economy - renewable, local and quite pleasant. Any politician or other decision-maker who doesn’t not just read it, but memorize this book isn’t doing his or her job.

And finally, a few words from God. I say that because if the author reads it, he will be equally amused, exasperated and slightly pissed off that I have implied he does not exist. This year there were many books I have enjoyed, some I have loved, and one that I treasure. Christopher Hitchens’ Arguably has been a massive international best-seller and it deserves every ring (or do they mostly beep now?) of the cash register. If this collection of essays does mark the end of The Hitch’s book-length career - he is bravely battling esophageal cancer - no Broadway show ever had a better closing number. I realized one important thing while reading Arguably. I don’t think Hitchens has ever received the acclaim he is due purely as a writer because his personality as a commentator at the podium or on television is so huge. Even when one does not agree with him (and having that mental debate within one’s self is one of the best things about reading Hitchens) the exactitude of his phrasing, the perfection of his evidence, the cutting of his humour; well, there’s not another journo in the world who can lay a glove on him.

Just a reminder - if you would like to purchase any of these books for yourself or for a friend, you have my gracious thanks if you do so here.

The final part of this three-part look at the best books of 2011, The Curiousities, will appear in a few days. Thanks for reading.

Be seeing you.