Abandoned Books

A Handful of Thrillers, Most from the Seventies

2011-02-19T04:55:00.002-05:00

MADONNA RED -- James Carroll

Exceptionally odd thriller tries to marry the “Catholic Problem Novel” (which always seem to down to “Those Mean Old Priests Are Trying To Stop Reform, Dammit”) with, ah, um, a thriller.

I don't know what to say. I suppose it's better than marrying the thriller with the “Jewish Writer Problem Novel”, which would probably end up with a lot of scenes of the hero masturbating fiercely in the bathroom. But it still seems like a really strange thing to do. Also a lot of genuflecting Irishims, the kind of book where JFK is mentioned and we're all supposed to bow our heads in prayer. Ridiculous, avoid.

THE SPY WHO SAT AND WAITED – R Wright Campbell

I only read a few pages into this, so maybe I'm missing some tremendous payoff down the line, but I kinda doubt it. For one thing I've been around, y'know? I know how stories work, pretty much, and I'm pretty sure I know where this is headed. Secondly, I kinda skimmed ahead and what I saw didn't surprise me none, yo.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can live with that.

And anyway, I decided years ago I wouldn't put up with books that weren't good. Life is short, you'll never read half of what you promised yourself, let alone what's out there, don't waste your time on crap. At it's heart book reading should be fun, not a chore. This isn't 11th Grade English and you do not have to make a report on this when you're done.

Anyhow, the general concept here is this the “spy in deep cover who has to juggle his mission against the friends and connections set up in his new country”. I have never bought this notion from the start, at least in any serious way. In it's more entertaining gonzo variants it's a plot right out of a Nick Carter: Killmaster novel, basically it transfers the “invasion of the body snatchers” type story to the spy novel. Fred the kindly old barber is really a Chinese Commie Spy? Really?

In it's more serious variants I think it's trying to move the “undercover cop in danger of losing site of his mission” trope to the spy arena. This is a more serious variant and I suspect that's the inspiration, particularly because I suspect “R Wright Campbell” is really “Robert Campbell” a guy who was once well known for tough guy novels. Like IN LA-LA LAND WE TRUST. So it would make sense, see, this would be a logical move for him.

In it's more serious variants it runs into problems immediately, though. To begin with, people do not leave their home, stay deep within another culture, and then at a predetermined time rise up and start blowing up bridges or whatever. Psychologically it doesn't work that way. The environment is too strong, the pressures to great, in the absence of careful mentoring (and it's made quite clear early on that there's no careful mentoring here) the subject will just join the new culture.

Yes, of course, moles have existed in the past and continue to do so, but don't miss the thread – these guys are converts. That's the point, and actually the interest of them. See TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY on this – the point is the mole wouldn't be so interesting if he actually WAS a Russian citizen, would he?

So, I don't really buy the premise. But let's set that aside, as much as we can, anyway, and look a little at where this comes from, like I said up top....probably the undercover cop story.

There's really only a couple of ways those kinds of stories can go. One is the “guy infiltrates Bad Guys to Bring Them Down, all the while Suffering Emotionally/Mentally/Physically”. Think Scorcese's THE DEPARTED, if you need an example. In that case, our hero is definitely an outsider, has a mission, suffers but in the end completes (or at least tries to complete) the mission.

The other way is the “both sides are rotten” kind of story, the undercover cop tale as social commentary. This is much harder to pull off, because it's a lot less clear who to root for in such stories, but usually you end up just focusing on the viewpoint character himself, who usually comes to embody all that is Good and Pure and Noble in the writer's mind. Laurence Fishburne in DEEP COVER was a version of this.

Now, it's kinda dicey in a crime story, but if you got skills you can sometimes make it work there. In a spy story? Particularly a WW 2 spy story like the above? Never.

Think about the problems Campbell set for himself. He can't make it a battle between two equally bad systems, Nazi Germany and Great Britain, because, even setting aside the fact that it WASN'T in fact, it's going to be a helluva tough sell in the story proper. WW2 stories always occur in a context, they can't help it, it's a mediated war, and one of those contexts is “Nazis are evil bastards”. If you're gonna challenge that context well.....well, good luck, I guess. It might even be an interesting book. It certainly would have a hard time out there, though. Probably.

So Campbell can't do that, he's a consummate pro and he realizes that trying to disengage the message of the 400 WW2 movies his readers have seen is a losing battle. So the Brits (actually, here the Scots) are good and the Nazis are bad. So.

So, why doesn't this guy just make a new life for himself in Scotland?

Because mind, this is a sensitive, caring, intelligent guy. This is part of the point too. A guy in his absurd position who really stayed loyal to Deutschland through all of those years, resist all the normal psychological pressures working against it, would almost certainly be some kind of weirdo – he certainly wouldn't be able to blend in under “deep cover”. But since we ill-advisedly are in this guy's head, we see that he's a pretty decent chap, all in all. So why doesn't he just give up Germany? We're even told he has nothing to keep him loyal to the country. He doesn't seem to obsess over it much, except for periodic reminders that I feel are more authorial intent than anything. So why not?

Campbell never really gives me a good answer to that, in the pages I read, and I felt no need to read further. THE SPY WHO SAT AND WAITED is the kind of bad popular book that is sometimes mistaken for good. On some level it's very carefully written: it's a pro's job, the scenes are very carefully delineated, I wouldn't say the prose ever really distinguishes itself but it's fussy in a reliable craftsmanlike sort of way, intelligent as far as it goes, you won't hate yourself reading this. But taken as a whole it's a badly written book, and that's because the whole idea is, to put a fine point on it, stupid. It's a stupid premise. I could never suspend my disbelief that it could ever work, and the bad choice of viewpoint character ensured that the whole setup was just insane. When you're sneering at the book's main character that's not a good sign.

THE THREE JUST MEN – Edgar Wallace

THE FOUR JUST MEN is that rarity, a political thriller which is literally about politics – that is, about the ways we organize, decide, and conduct ourselves politically. It's a very unique book and if there's only one Wallace you read, it definitely should be that.

The sequels really do not match it. THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE is a political thriller in the more standard tradition of the time – “basic action thriller with political overtones that skews conservative and does have some fascist overtones, frankly, like it or not”. BLACK GANG sort of stuff. While not nearly as snazzy as THE BLACK GANG, COUNCIL is good on that level and worth reading. THE JUST MEN OF CORDOVA I don't remember a gosh-durned thing about, except that it's set in Spain and Wallace apparently really liked Spain. I wouldn't take my failure of memory as a recommendation. THE LAW OF THE FOUR JUST MEN is a collection of stories, and they vary in quality as most short story collections tend to do. I would describe the book as “pleasant, but minor”.

Leaving THREE, the last one. And apparently Wallace decided to leave the characters with a bang. We're pretty far afield here of the mysterious grim men of FOUR, here the remaining three (one of 'em dies in FOUR...oh crap, is that a spoiler?) have been pardoned and actually work a detective agency in their spare time, where, as this book opens, they are apparently just sitting around waiting for the plot to start.

Yes, this is a straightforward pulp adventure novel, and on that basis it's quite entertaining. It has all of the standard Wallace elements: damsels in distress, a corrupt member of the aristocracy, a fiendish plot to defraud said heiress, a mysterious murder full of mysterious mystery, and best of all a memorable villain. The problem with turning the Just Men into just pulp heroes is that they were most effective in narrative terms when they were mysterious – Wallace, to keep the series going, ultimately had to characterize them, and while he did a professional's job they do lose some of their luster in comparison.

But accepting that, it's very entertaining. The best thing Wallace does here is two fine villains – a henchman who on the run from ahem “certain unspecified things” in Germany and, when he's not a psychopathic killer, is a master of disguise, and, best of all, the lead bad guy, Oberzhon, a guy who's just a marvelously entertaining collection of tics: he only sleeps in a chair; he rarely eats solid foods – there's a reference to him boiling down an entire ox and sipping that and there aren't enough exclamation points in the universe to indicate how awesome that is; he relaxes by reading the lesser Germanic philosophers (extra special points to Wallace by making sure we understood – the lesser.) There's a priceless sequence where he attempts to court a woman he, uh, kidnapped (don't ask) and he does it in a ponderous Germanic way which is the kind of thing they really gotta film, it's crying out for the movies.

Add to that a good-for-the-time mystery, for once; some cool stuff from the Just Men; and one really excellent fight sequence – we've spoken here before about how hard it is to do action properly, the fight with the snakes in the cellar is really masterfully done, very well choreographed. Not a necessary book like FOUR JUST MEN, but if you like Wallace this is one of his better efforts, and is the only other installment of “the Just Men” series that I would recommend.

THE HEIGHTS OF RIMRING – Duff Hart-Davis

Earlier we talked about one classic kind of bad book, THE SPY WHO SAT AND ATE A HOAGIE or whatever it was called, which was “the character study that springs from false assumptions, and thus is unbelievable on it's face”. RIMRING is another classic kind of bad book, “the thriller which is really a travelogue”.

The bio in the back of the book tells me that Hart-Davis spent time in the Himalayas, which I guess accounts for his setting, yo. He obviously loves the area, and the descriptions are nicely done. But this is all done in the service of an extremely hackneyed thriller plot: The Ex-Spy Who Is Roped Back Into The Business, The Evil Commie Opposition, The Simple But Good Natives, The Evil Cutthroat, The Love Interest, The Secret Idol, etc. The intent, I'm pretty sure, was to do a classic adventure, but you don't do a classic adventure by forcing the tropes of a classic adventure onto a modern setting: this ensures laborious stage-setting (where you're carefully told how sheltered the native populace is, how rural the environment is, where the Improbable Throwback From Another Era is carefully placed, etc.) and in general just makes the whole thing seem as contrived as it really is. Instead, you need to just move the tropes into the modern era. They're hardy things, they can stand them. To not do that is to betray a lack of faith in your story telling ability proper, it suggests that really you don't think you can TELL a good adventure story by itself, that you gotta rely on the old tropes to stand in and deliver for you. (Ie, the Mysterious Idol is now code for “the prize”, instead of being, well, the prize.)

There's two ways to look at a book like RIMRING. Either the thought was “hey, man, you know the Himalayas and that's a classic setting for an old timey adventure story” (that's what I think happened) or “I want to tell a classic adventure – hey, I know the Himalayas! – wait, where's the typewriter...” (the old “tell what you know” fallacy). Either way it results in bad books, and any given installment of Edward S Aarons's “Assignment” series, which almost always took place in exotic parts of the world that he knew only through the local library, is simply superior to this kind of well-intentioned mediocrity.

Emile Gaboriau - THE MYSTERY OF ORCIVAL

2011-01-29T23:23:00.002-05:00

THE MYSTERY OF ORCIVAL (1867) – Emile Gaboriau

I want to show how to approach an older book properly, and I'll use this as my model, partly 'cause I've just finished it and it's great, partly because some of the great things about it directly relate to Doyle and some of the point I raised with him, partly because it's a good model to talk about how to approach books like these aesthetically.

Gaboriau is a forgotten author nowadays, but it wasn't always the case. He was once so famous that in A STUDY IN SCARLET Holmes feels like he needs to measure himself in part against Lecoq, Gaboriau's detective hero. He's dropped as a peer of Poe, for Chrissakes. And I ought to take the moment here to acknowledge that some of the things I laid at Doyle's feet last time I was wrong about. I implied that many of the shifts in tone in Doyle were there because basically he didn't care much for the mystery part of what he was writing, that wasn't where his action was. I still think that's at least partly true, but there's a much simpler explanation for it as well – one that ironically shines a much harsher light on Doyle.

He's simply copying Gaboriau. The structure of many of the Holmes stories, particularly the longer stories, apes the structure of things like ORCIVAL, where the detection is contained and then there's a flashback explaining what the hell happened. Sorry, Emile.

Doyle owes a hell of a lot to Gaboriau, in fact, which we'll touch on in a sec, but for now all I want to point is that this is an early detective novel, arguably the first one (it came out the year before the usual contender, Wilkie Collins's THE MOONSTONE). I think this endless chasing of who's first is ultimately counterproductive, aesthetic ideas tend to just be in the air, the detective novel is as good an example of it as any, but it IS interesting that I can go into my failing-Borders and buy a copy of Collins (actually his complete output, including now unreadable novels like ARMADALE) in classic additions, whereas Gaboriau is forgotten to all but the hardest-core mystery fans.

Anyway.

I picked this up free for my Kindle app on my personal computer. I remain convinced that right now the best function of ebooks is old titles like this. There's no financial incentive for most presses to reissue them, the print on demand or old stuff is pricey. Why not? (I do try to support places like House of Stratus who are reissuing in nice pb editions guys like Wallace, or R. Austin Freeman, or Orczy.) I didn't have overwhelming expectations for it, I had read in the past Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, which I remember generally liking but not thinking was all that. That's a big book, though, with an entire second volume devoted to “why it happened”.

This is an extraordinary book on a number of levels. Without overdrumming the historical stuff to death, it ought to be said that ORCIVAL contains, at least in embryonic form, the following tropes which would reappear in mystery fiction for years to come:

a murder at a country house
a detective who is a genius, associated with the police but in some ways is not “of” the police. (Lecoq almost seems like a police organization within a police organization, he has his own men, investigates crimes his own way, has his own enemies, sees himself as a seperate force that can sometimes act autonomously, to the dictates of his conscience.
In very embryonic form a Watson, a helper who's the readers gateway into the world of the story.
The mystery novel used for social criticism.

WARNING, STARTING TO GET INTO SPOILER TERRITORY

a femme fatale
a noirish plot (second section of book) that feels transposed directly from, I kid you not, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE.
A concentration on police procedure, on the “how catch 'em?” question
A meditation on the difference between “law” and “justice” (a common theme of the crime novel)

And that's just off the top of my head. Now, mind, none of this makes the novel good – but it sure makes it interesting, and for this reason alone this book and author deserve to be rediscovered alongside Collins.

So we acknowledge the historical importance, but we put that aside. Does this book work as a novel? And amazingly, the answer is yes.

Doyle is an important comparison here. Reading ORCIVAL makes me regard the Holmes stories in an even darker light, Doyle quite evidently owes Gaboriau a hell of a lot, not just in plot structure but in characterization as well. Holmes now feels to me like a transposition of Lecoq with the personality removed.

But anyway. Compare the structure of ORCIVAL alongside SCARLET and we immediately see the structure pays off for Gaboriau in ways it just doesn't for Doyle. If there's a theme to the book, it's something like “things are not always what they seem” and the structure of the book is that of an onion, there is a concerted effort to peel things away, layer by layer, until we get at the truth. That's the plot as we the reader experience it: the plot as the viewpoint character understands it (ie, the story's timeline once all the pieces are known) is that of a circle: he fails to take an action, is sent on a nightmarish journey, and ends failing again to take the same action, although this time the figure who prevented him now aids him.

I'm talking elliptically because I don't want to spoil any of the pleasures of this very good book, but let's just say it is very cunningly plotted, and things that seem somewhat awkward at first have a reason for being where they are. It's also unified: the second section is told in flashback, but there's a reason for it to be told that way, and the audience still participates in the story even as the backstory is being told to them. Similarily the final layers of the onion do not fall away until the final pages, there are final motivational revelations in the concluding chapters of the book.

Lecoq is a genuine stab at a character, too, which already makes him more interesting than the jumble of neurotic tics which is Holmes. He's self-pitying at times, boastful, proud, quick to anger when certain sore subjects are brought up, capable of making mistakes and willing to fess up to them.

And there's some genuine suspense in the book. The section where Lecoq reconstructs the murder is as good as this kind of thing gets, the fact that it was written in 1866 is a revelation. The second section has a doom-laden, noirish atmosphere and while the ending is never in doubt, there's a twist there that I didn't really see coming and rather enjoyed. The third section, more police-procedural, even has it's moments, it leads up to a final confrontation in a rooming house that's very well orchestrated.

All in all, a great book even if it had all been done before, I think. The fact that it hadn't makes this a classic, well worth anyone's time.

Lawrence Schoover: THE BURNISHED BLADE

2011-01-22T23:26:00.000-05:00

Lawrence Schoonover – THE BURNISHED BLADE (1948)

The next big push after Doyle will be a bunch of once-bestselling, now fairly forgotten authors of historical fiction. This was a genre that was once so associated with “bestseller” that when Chandler needed to create a bestselling writer for THE LONG GOODBYE he made him a historical fiction writer.

We'll be looking at Samuel Shellabarger (CAPTAIN FROM CASTILLE, PRINCE OF FOXES, LORD VANITY); Thomas Costain (probably THE BLACK ROSE)' Frank Yerby (THE GOLDEN HAWK, ODOR OF SANCTITY, either FOXES OF HARROW or JUDAS MY BROTHER, depends on what I can find); one of the big female writers of the era (either Kathleen Winsor's FOREVER AMBER or Anya Seton's DRAGONWYCK, probably DRAGONWYCK if I can find it inexpensively), and the most lionized of the bunch, Kenneth Roberts (NORTHWEST PASSAGE, ARUNDEL, RABBLE IN ARMS). I don't know if I'll do a whole big post on any of these just yet, I don't know if the subject allows for it, although Yerby is an interesting writer to look at and Roberts maybe, just by virtue of his success.

But anyway, Schoonover. If you read online reviews of this book (at Amazon, or wherever) you'll read a lot of indications that essentially it's bowdlerized, that the publication date indicates Schoonover couldn't be as, er, “frank” about the era as he might've wanted.

Eh. Yeah, there's no graphic sex scenes or disembowelment scenes, if that's what you mean, but I wouldn't exactly say the book wasn't, you know, “up to speed”, like all you crazy kids say nowadays. There's a graphic bit about the hero's parents being burned in a fire, an unstated, but very real bit where he gets laid by a slut, a reference to what we'd call now a serial killer (and the implication that he's also a pedophile), and the whole tone in general is sort of hand-me-down hardboiled, that is, it has a feel of light cynicism about it all (the tone taken toward nobility, religious authorities, etc.). I mean, given it's era and all, it doesn't feel to me especially cloistered.

The other criticism I've read of this book is that it's very pulpy, and there you might have something, although I think it's useful to step back and explain what you mean by it. It is very pulpily plotted, if that's what you mean, although if you say that you're relying on a very limited definition of “pulp” that not many people use anymore. That is, the classic pulp “plot” is “this happened, and then this, and then this, and then this” a string of beads continued until the somewhat arbitrary conclusion. (A lot of Burroughs, particularly the Tarzan books, are plotted this way.) .

There's no denying that this kind of rough-and-ready storytelling is a hallmark of “pulp plotting”, although you can just as easily find complete fully formed novels in the “pulp” world (just about all of the Gold Medal guys, for instance), as well as a lot string of beads plots in middlebrow books aiming for the big time (THE CARDINAL, say.)

It's not like it's restricted to pulp fiction and so hardly a characteristic of it. Maybe it'd just be better to call it “a rough form of plotting” and leave it like that.

The other big aspect to pulp writing, it seems to me, is that the incidents have to be evocative, they have to be sensational and capture the reader's interest straight out. Like Sax Rohmer, say. Even Rohmer's best books are full of nonsense – killer insects, killer fungus, mind control, evil black sabbaths in the pyramids at midnight, etc. This seems to me to be a primary aspect of pulp fiction, the constant attempt to keep the reader entertained. Such is not the case with Schoonover, this is a pretty tepid book for a'that, like a lot of historical romances it's a big tease, a lot “happens” but not a lot actually happens, the actual number of incidents in the damn thing is quite low, and while you might grab a copy thinking you're gonna get a lot of adventure, you're not. I hate to tell you this, but you're not.

So not recommended, although I have hopes that the movie version is better. Because they'd, like, put some exciting scenes in it.

Other things I've been reading:

Edgar Wallace – THE LAW OF THE FOUR JUST MEN (1921) – I like Wallace, and have been reading a fair amount of him lately, currently the Four Just Men series. The first remains the best, and is a genuine oddity, if it's anything it's sort of a philosophical story couched in thriller terms. It's a classic and highly recommended. THE COUNCIL OF THE JUST is not as good but is not bad, these guys become relatively straightforward vigilante heroes ala Sapper's THE BLACK GANG, albeit not as well told. I don't remember much about THE JUST MEN OF CORDOVA, except that it wasn't all that good and that Wallace obviously liked Spain.

And then there's this one – this is a collection of short stories, about half of them recast the remaining just men as amateur private detectives, with middling success (this is not a strong suit of Wallace's) and half of them in the older vigilante form (which work much better, with a lot of “biter bit” sort of payoffs). I think Wallace is actually better in other venues, but LAW is not bad, and worth reading for anyone with a tolerance for this sort of stuff.

Guy Boothby – A BID FOR FORTUNE (aka ENTER DR NIKOLA) (1895) – I really wanted to like this, as the setup – early decadent supervillain ala Fu Manchu, Victorian themes, wildness, globe hopping, is pretty much crack to me. He even has a pet cat he has unnatural relations with. (I kid.)

This is really almost outrageously bad, though, almost written at a rough draft level. Stuff that you would never countenance today – outrageous coincidences, longwinded digressions, a lack of payoff, a lack of suspense, convenient plotting, you name it – is countenanced here because, well, it's old, man, huh?

I find this fandom worship disconcerting and disheartening: I have a taste for this genre because I like it but looking to the past doesn't relieve you of your critical precepts, my friends, and if you excuse the manifold faults of FORTUNE because you just like the idea of this kind of stuff, then you're not a true admirer of the work, you're just a fetishist.

If the work can't stand up today it's not good. No amount of excuse-making will change that salient fact.

Doyle -- the books

2011-01-22T23:25:00.001-05:00

IN WHICH I SPEAK OF DOYLE AS A WRITER

Let's be brief, because as is often the case the time lag between the last post on him and this one is a bit much, and the inspiration is a little flagging.

Sherlock Holmes: I don't hate these stories, but I do think they're flawed and grossly overpraised. As my last two posts have pointed out (let's recap!) I think their reputation really rests on two fallacies: (a) their historical importance (too often conflated with quality), and my sense that what people really like about the Sherlock Holmes stories are not the stories themselves, but rather the consensus universe of “late Victorian England” that surrounds them.

Doyle is always acting against himself in these stories. They're presumptively mysteries but they're not, in essence. In essence they're romances, and have much more in common with THE PRISONER OF ZENDA than they do THE MOONSTONE, say. This is the secret why half of A STUDY IN SCARLET and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR are adventures that have only the most tenuous connection to the main plot; this is why Doyle gets rid of Holmes for about half of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, because he flat out could care less; this is why so many of the stories are structured with Holmes as the framing device around an actual story-story, the flashback (see, oh, “The Adventure of the Crooked Man”). This is why so many of the other “mysteries” are not really mysteries at all, but rather adventure tales, see say “A Scandal in Bohemia” or “The Final Problem”.

Again, that doesn't mean they're awful or the reader will find no pleasure in them I just think that this internal tension is detrimental to the work's effect as a whole. Stories should be what they are. When they are actually two completely disjointed things at the same time, that's a problem. Aesthetically.

There's “Complete” collections all over the place, most quite cheap – pick 'em up and decide for yourselves. For what it's worth, my absolute favorite Holmes stories are the first part of “A Study in Scarlet” (introduces the character, who seems quite fresh here) and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (more for the setting, Victorian Xmas). And maybe “The Naval Treaty”, just because I like the joke at the heart of that one. The rest I can more or less take or leave; he's not a necessary author for me the way Chesterton is.

THE LOST WORLD and THE POISON BELT: I actually think, along with Doyle himself, that his real reputation rests here. Easily my favorite Doyle work – by far – is THE LOST WORLD.

For one thing it's more clearly what it's supposed to be, if that makes any sense: it's not a romance cut by mystery, or (as we'll see in a second) history, it's just a straight Haggard-like adventure to a, um, “Lost World”. Challenger is far more believable than Holmes, I think: a more straightforward Thoughtful Man of Action. Albeit comically portrayed – the point is he seems like a real person. (Holmes never has to me, sorry. Holmes is a slapdash collection of tics. Holmes is so much over the place that the definitive portrayal of him, Jeremy Brett in the BBC series, turns him into something like a quivering neurotic.) The ability to step away from the mystery plots that evidently bored him to tears allowed Doyle to do the stuff that he obviously really liked, which is adventure writing (some very nice setpieces in WORLD) and some really nice descriptions (there's a final sequence in LOST WORLD which is absolutely classic in this regard, and in fact in my humble opinion is the single best stretch of writing Doyle ever did.) POISON BELT is less known and less interesting, as it's an early “it's all coming to an end, man” armageddon tale, but is still worth a look for some truly evocative descriptions of London after the “apocalypse” (which isn't quite that, Doyle wussed out although there are problems with writing about the end of the world with a viewpoint character, I would suppose. They're usually bound togeter.

THE EXPLOITS OF BRIGADIER GERARD – This is fairly obscure historical fiction, short stories written from the French point of view during the Napoleonic Wars. Of course, as a loyal Brit Doyle couldn't ever really have a character be a completely believable Frenchman, which would in this context necessitate a hatred of the British. So it's kind of compromised from the outset. The other big thing about it is that it's obviously the major inspiration for Flashman, all well and good except Flashman is better because (horrors of horrors) Fraser was just a better writer than Doyle, and knew how to handle this kind of device much better. Plus, to be fair, the debut novel FLASHMAN appeared at a more fortuitous time, the anti-establishment Sixties.

THE WHITE COMPANY and SIR NIGEL – These were the novels that Doyle actually thought were his best. They are “young hero comes of age” kind of things, very long, and set in the Middle Ages. They have their moments, particularly Doyle's knack for description, although I think both books suffer from the same thing that Schoonover's BURNISHED BLADE suffered from, which is the “string of pearls” kind of plot, where the story is really just a succession of incidents in the narrative. These kind of books really lack internal narrative drive, you spend half your time looking up and around wondering exactly why you're reading the damn thing. Something of a minor classic, although I bet it's just the Doyle authorship more than anything being particularly good about the novels themselves. Well described, I guess, and you might actually learn a little history if you read these, but I know of another place you can learn about history. It's called “history books”. Don't tell nobody, no, it's a big secret.

More on Doyle: The Second Aesthetic Trap

2010-11-27T20:10:00.010-05:00

My second post on the aesthetic traps people fall into that Doyle embodies won't be as long as the first, because I think it's something that most people at some level recognize anyhow, even if they don't phrase it the way I phrase it or to the extent I do. In fact, it was first suggested in a comment by my long time reader “anonymous” – and a very astute anonymous anonymous is, too.

Anyway, anonymous anonymously yet very astutely (okay, I'm done) pointed out that it was the movies that made Sherlock Holmes big. Well, yeah, sorta, although I want to develop this a bit, 'cause I think it's a bit bigger/more interesting here than, say, Tarzan or James Bond. (Full disclosure, not an admirer of Edgar Rice Burroughs although I think he had a wonderful imagination; I do respect Ian Fleming a great deal, though.) Your general populace's idea of Tarzan or James Bond is taken pretty much direct from the movies, so much so that a favorite technique of the geek is to sniff haughtily and remind said populace that they'd might be surprised to learn that Tarzan was an educated British Lord in the books, say, or that Bond pursued hedonism as a way to distract himself from his empty lifestyle. (Like this is some rarefied experience known only to the few, not the province of anyone who can cough up $7.95 for a paperback edition of TARZAN OF THE APES or CASINO ROYALE. Sorry, pet peeve.)

I don't think that's exactly the case with Holmes, for while there's certainly been many movie/tv versions of Holmes down over the years Holmes as a phenomena wasn't created by the movies, in the way that Bond certainly was and Tarzan kinda sorta was. The only thing I'm sure that Hollywood really bestowed upon the Holmes series was Watson as a dumbass – think back to Nigel Bruce and his constant sheepdog look – although especially in recent times that 'tradition' has been observed more in the breach as it were. (It never made much sense, anyway. Why would slick brilliant gentleman Basil Rathbone be hanging around with a guy who, um, ah, is a little slow, to be kind about it? What does he bring to the table? Other than comic relief?)

But they still make movies of Holmes, you know. There was that Xmas thing last year with Robert Downey Jr., and on streaming Netflix right now you can watch YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES, although I'd really recommend that you don't. So what's the constant appeal, then?

My thought is that people aren't attracted to Holmes himself, per se, they're attracted to the world. They're attracted to that gaslight world of late-period Victorian England: top hats, canes, horse-drawn cabs, country manors, royalty getting into trouble, Jack the Ripper, mist-strewn streets, British Imperialism, etc.

Now the whys of that are a long complicated subject certainly outside the scope of this post (and hell, maybe of this blog). For now, let's just state that it exists. People are drawn to Holmes not really because they're drawn to Holmes, they're drawn to that world, in the way that people are drawn to the Wild West, or Shogunate era Japan, or whatever you want to cite. People are fans of an environment.

It explains a lot. Next time I'll finally talk about Doyle's work as a writer, but for now let's just suggest that it explains why Doyle has kept such a large fanbase, even though his work in the mystery field does not provide the reader with the presumed pleasures he or she would presumably want. It explains the persistence of Holmes in popular culture – the repeated movies (with versions of Holmes often at wild variance to what's in the work), the games, the cartoon characters, the pastiches, the clubs, etc. Holmes is best understood, I think, as an early, smaller version of something like “Star Trek” or the STAR WARS series – it's a consensus universe. Like these things you have people doing “scholarship” in Holmesiana, like these things you have a persistent cult fanbase, like these things you have ongoing contributions to the world., and so on.

This is mistaken for appreciation for Holmes as a character or Doyle's work as writing, and I understand why that is, but I think this is the best explanation of his continued persistence. It's really not about him at all. What makes Doyle interesting in this regard is (a) he was the first to experience this, I'd wager and (b) unlike, say, “Star Trek”, a created universe, Doyle's work is at least presumably based on actual reality – ie, there really was an England during that time. Seems a very simple point, but it's worth pondering – I'm ducking the question I raised up above as to why we focus on this era, but we obviously do, especially visually – there's something appealing to us, especially visually, about late-period Imperial Britain, and we derive pleasure from watching simulcra of it.

In that respect, yeah, Anonymous, you're right. It was the movies.

Other things I've been reading:

“Sapper” – THE THIRD ROUND (1924)

I'm beginning to think these Bulldog Drummond books are really built around “peaks”, as it were. I'm beginning to think Sapper had part of the story pretty much firmly in mind, went with it, and then basically vamped his way to fill out whatever needed filling out.

#1 had a great first 2/3, sort of died at the conclusion. #2 oddly went the other way, it took about a 1/3 to get going, but once it did it just romped like crazy, with a fantastic slam-bang conclusion.

#3 is more like #1. It has a wonderful start: an old doddering scientist type discovers a process for making artificial diamonds indistinguishable from the real ones, and foolishly tells this to the diamond masters of London, who of course promptly arrange for his death. The first two thirds of this are really great: Carl Peterson is in it again, is brought in believably and the coincidence is accounted for satisfactorily (The fact that he keeps bumping into Drummond becomes an actual plot point and characterization element.) And we for once get a serious glimpse into his psychology (this is the best portrayal of Peterson so far). The plot is ridiculous but absolutely believable in it's ridiculousness, if that makes any sense – I mean, do you really doubt that if someone actually developed something like this, he wouldn't be killed? There's a lot of very amenable back and forthing, as someone said somewhere Sapper knew how to tell a story and given that not a tremendous amount actually happens in THE THIRD ROUND, it's amazing how compulsive reading most of this is.

And then we hit the final third, where Sapper vamps. I won't give anything away, but despite the big slam bang conclusion not really being all that slam-bang, it suffers from two major devices that wouldn't fool a senile chimp on holiday, let alone a master villain.

So it falls apart at the end, as thrillers often do. I can't put this one at the level of the first two, mostly because it's curiously uneventful in a lot of ways and the one big event in it doesn't make any sense. But it's good, so far all of the Sappers have been well worth reading. Make allowances and you'll like this one too.

Neil Albert - THE JANUARY CORPSE (1991)

Routine PI novel that I picked up in a used bookstore because somebody somewhere recommended it. Not very good, with paint-by-numbers plotting you've seen a million times, me most recently in an episode of “Bones” I caught in the laundromat a ways back, and ham-and-eggs prose typical of millions of recently published popular novels (I don't know quite when the rot in popular literature set in, but it was certainly locked in place by 91, that's for sure.) The only real interesting thing about it, in fact, is that it has a twist ending.

A few words on twist endings. It might be enjoyable to do a whole post on these, one of these days, but one kind of twist ending you want to avoid is “writer introduces an edgy piece of information into the reader's world”. Why? Because yesterday's edgy is today's blasé, and this sort of thing dates very badly. Spoilers for a couple of novels follow, if you care about such things.

…...

Okay?

So, like, here. The setup is “PI looking for mysterious missing man.” The answer is “missing man has actually become woman” – ie, sex-change. Well, that's a twist! But nowadays it just seems cheesy, we're a lot more amorphous sexually, for better and worse, than we were in 1991, even.

Not that it's limited to relatively recent novels. Howard Browne's HALO IN BRASS, one of his Paul Pine novels, ends with the revelation that it's a lesbian affair we're talking about here. Again, that must've been really wild stuff in the mid-Fifties, when the book was written. Now? Not so much, eh?

Edgar Wallace – THE BLACK ABBOT (1926)

I've been reading more Wallace recently, and enjoying them. I got a list of recommended novels from an old Usenet post lurking out there somewhere – thank you old Usenet poster out there wherever you are, your words reverberate into eternity.

Anyway. Wallace is a good example of how popular fiction has degenerated, he was the closest thing to the James Patterson of his time but he remains very readable. He wrote a clean, straightforward prose line, he could build suspense with a relative modicum of horseplay (always a hard thing for writers of this era, they were sort of inventing the thriller genre as they were writing it and it wasn't always clear to them how best to string the reader along), and best of all his books – at least the ones I've read so far – are all very different. THE FOUR JUST MEN and THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE are straight-up “race against time” thrillers with a political edge to them. JACK O'JUDGEMENT is a “crime syndicate taken down by a masked vigilante” sort of thing. And this is frankly a Gothic, complete with a forced marriage, unscrupulous blackguards, hidden treasure, ruined abbeys, and the ghost of the Black Abbot himself, now seen parading around. I shit you not. It's great, highly recommended if you have a taste for pulp literature of this era. I can understand why Wallace was the monster seller he was, his books are ridiculously readable, he could play the conventions of his era masterfully. But be warned, it is what it is, and it does have all of the faults inherent in that word “pulp”: it's feverishly melodramatic (although I pretty much consider that a feature, not a bug), it relies overmuch on coincidence, there's a bit of vamping here and there. It doesn't have Sapper's inventiveness or Buchan's fundamental seriousness. But it ain't bad, and Wallace deserves another look.

Edgar Wallace , THE CRIMSON CIRCLE (1922) – Like, say, here: this one is a “search for a Jack the Ripper” type, which is fairly routine except it has an absolute killer twist toward the end. (One of the few I think worth preserving, so I ain't tellin'.) I'm an old hand at such things and it caught me off guard (I had considered the possibility, but dismissed it as outlandish); I think those who are less jaded – including presumably his entire audience at the time – would've been/would be rocked completely by it.

Ib Melchior, CODE NAME: GRAND GUIGNOL (1987): Not very good WW2 thriller shows the defects of the simple-minded suggestion “write what you know” or the slightly more complicated “go out and experience life and then write about it”, because by all accounts Melchior did just that, he actually was an actor associated with the Grand Guignol theater troupe, and he actually had WW 2 experiences with the OSS, and yet his book is still awful, written at about the level of a Forties Superman comic (complete! With a lot! Of exclamations! What fearsome terror awaits those who would dare cross the forbidden threshold?! Would Marge and Stevey escape Lex Luthor's clutches?! Can Superman destroy the killer Robots of Alpha Centuri and bring back their leader to face justice?!). It seems a simple point, but the simple points are always those worth repeating – you gotta have talent too, y'know.

PD James , AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN (1972) – Most famous probably as one of the first female PI's – there were others, of course, the Honey West series in the Sixties, say, but this one is probably the first of the modern era. I think James is much better with women than men and Cordelia Gray is appealing as the lead, but this novel suffers from the same faults that James's works all tend to suffer, this odd artificial portentiousness which inflates the relatively grubby murders she chronicles with a gassy self-importance. I am not sure, honestly, that the classic mystery form (the pure whodunit) is capable of the kind of weight James wants to put on it: the obvious inspirations here are Marsh, Allingham, and Sayers, but at their utmost ultimate best they're really not much more than gifted social novelists – not that that's a bad thing, of course it isn't, but it ain't THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV either. It would be interesting to ponder why and how Hammett and Chandler avoided that trap. (It may have to do with them actually creating the form themselves; certainly later PI novelists have had much the same problem as Ms. James, although there are differences between the two genres that protect the PI writer, somewhat). The more insular worlds of Christie and Carr, the pure puzzle, start to look much better seen in that light. Anyway, there's one other James novel I'm curious about, INNOCENT BLOOD, and I'll check that out sometime here.

George MacDonald Fraser, FLASHMAN AND THE REDSKINS (1982): Most interesting I think as yet another example of Fraser experimenting within the formula of Flashman, here we see history as a force within Flashy's own life, as things he does in the 1840's West come back to haunt him in the 1876 West. Very ambitious novel is trying to tell a story of the American West in general, with the short period related here suggesting the actual sad briefness of the American West's heyday. Fraser is also trying to introduce real depth to Flashman, suggesting here a man who's become haunted by his earlier misdeeds. While I respect the intent, I'm not at all sure it works: for one thing Flashy as a character is something of a slender thread to hang this kind of tale on, and on more pragmatic grounds I'm not sure I buy him at the Battle of the Little Big Horn: I mean, Fraser tries, and does a pretty solid job of laying the groundwork (one of the best of the Forrest Gump style historical novelists – yeah, I guess you gotta call him that – because he always strives for plausibility, in his own oddball way), but it still feels kind of off. And maybe that's because I'm not sure I buy Flashman in the American West at all: the temptation must've been unbearable for Fraser, but the American West is the one historical moment of that century that's widely known, putting Flashman in there directly makes this a Western, which inherently calls to mind all of the other Westerns one has seen, and implicit comparisons are inevitably made.

I suppose that's my biggest problem with it, really: as ambitious and admirable as it is, in some ways, I just don't think it was a good idea. It's a cross-pollination that probably sounded better on paper; I would've been much more interested in Flashy at the Civil War. Still, by no means a bad book – there are no bad Flashman books, as far as I know.

Currently reading: THE BURNISHED BLADE, Lawrence Schoonover; DR. NIKOLAI, Guy Boothby

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pt. one

2010-10-02T19:34:00.005-04:00

When you're talking about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle you're talking about Sherlock Holmes, first and foremost, which I think is a mistake right out of the gate because I think his best creation by far is Professor Challenger, not Holmes. But I'll get to that later. More importantly, the moment you say “Sherlock Holmes” a bunch of associations will, as if by magic, appear in your head – see, it happened just now, didn't it? – and I think we need to pick these apart right from the get-go before we get to the meat of things, as it were.

So let's start here, later I'll get to the books themselves.

Doyle carries with him two of the great fallacies of art appreciation. They're often not thought of as such, but they are, believe me boyo, and if you can get your head around these two you'll already be 50% ahead of everybody else. This post will deal with the first one. Ready?

Some things that are historically important in art are not necessarily good. There's a different between understanding art and appreciating it.

This is a big one that some people never get past, especially those who paid too much attention to their teachers in high school English. But the actual concept ain't all that hard to grasp: some things can be historically important in art without being all that intrinsically interesting in themselves. Art develops, and it has a history behind it's development. The first color movie (I have no idea what that is, just an example) is historically important, and if you were in a class about the history of movies you should definitely watch it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good movie though, yo.

Holmes is historically important, you can't gainsay that. It was Holmes that really drove the idea of a private detective into popular consciousness, along with a lot of the tropes we now take for granted in traditional mysteries but at the time were rather new: the “Watson”, the intermediary for the reader (actually, Doyle's finest achievement in the Holmes series, I think); the private detective as odd, withdrawn, somewhat apart from society; the notion of people coming to see him looking for help “outside of normal channels”, with the implicit social commentary that brings (this would later be better developed by the hardboiled gang in America, but I think it pops up here first); the notion of a master criminal opposed to the detective that is, in some sense, a reflection; the notion that there's some kind of competition between the detective and the police. And probably fifty trillion other things, these just occurred to me right now.

But all that said, that doesn't tell you anything about whether you should read The Valley of Fear. (Short answer: no.) It just tells you Doyle was the first. It sort of implies that because he was the first he was obviously pretty friggin' good at all of this stuff, but I assure you that these are unexamined assumptions.

This is going to be a hard argument to make in some ways, because it's not really an argument, it's based on my knowledge of the genre during that time, which is hard-earned knowledge I got one used Dover pb at a time and is pretty much purely experiential. If you've never read Ernest Bramah's "Max Carrados" series of mystery short stories you won't immediately nod your head in agreement with me when I tell you that in many respects they're better than most of the Holmes tales.

But all that said, the truth is the truth and will out. There were mystery writers before Doyle: Poe of course but consider, I dunno Emile Gaboriau (Monsieur Lecoq, etc.) There were certainly a bunch of writers doing the same thing around the same time, too – no doubt inspired by Doyle's success, but arguably just as good if not better: I'm thinking particularly of Bramah's Max Carrados series, and maybe Jacques Futrelle's “the Thinking Machine” (“The Problem of Cell 13”) and maybe Gaston Leroux (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, The Perfume of the Lady in Black) . And others – I would have to look up the timelines to see who did what when, the point is there were predecessors, and contemporaries, and the fact that Doyle hit it big while these guys (and one girl, I'm fond of Baroness Orczy's "The Old Man in the Corner") only had modest success isn't a testament to Holmes's innate quality, it's just a testament to the troubling, yet nonetheless enduring (alas) fact that history is a motherfucker, and that monster artistic success in worldly terms is more akin to hitting the lottery than the rising of “innate quality”.

If Doyle had never existed some other figure would've taken his place, the threads in Western culture were too strong to be denied. Eugenie Sue and Dumas were playing with the concepts in mid-nineteenth century France, as was Dickens and Wilkie Collins in England. Read any good history of mystery fiction, you'll see what I mean.

Later, when I'm talking more specifically about the stories I'll talk more about where I think these guys shine and Doyle fails, but for now I'd urge anyone to poke their nose around and try some of the contemporaries for themselves -- they're all over used bookstores and a lot of this stuff is free online -- and see for themselves what the tradition Doyle was operating in really was. (Again, it's always useful to think of art in terms of traditions, of ways of expression that develop over time. Doyle didn't spring fully-formed out of the head of Zeus, he came out of and participated in a certain "folkway", if you like, a certain way of telling certain kinds of stories.)

(Actually my favorite of this era is probably Hornung's Raffles, the "inverse Holmes", although he really deserves to be considered by himself.)

Other things I've been reading:

Emilio Salgari – The Tiger of Momprasan: I think if I'd have hit this at, say, 12 or 13 I would've loved it. I read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs around that time and loved it then. But, like with the Burroughs (and I don't say this really happily) I've gotten to the point where a straightforward kid's adventure tale really can't hold my interest by itself. I need something...really better writing, to be honest, although it's maybe unfair to say that of this stuff since it was translated from the Italian. Nonetheless, this is melodramatic as all get-out: I've always thought I had a high tolerance for such things but this was a bit too much even for me.

This is the start of a long-running series of adventures about a South Seas pirate fighting the English and Thugees and Lord knows who else. It is most memorable, to my mind, in that the guy seems like a functional psychopath, always running around one hair's breadth away from hacking everything to pieces with his scimitar. Like I said, at 12 or 13 I would've eaten this stuff up – now? Not so much. Suggested for bright shy preteens, though.

John D. MacDonald – Bright Orange for the Shroud: I think nowadays I need at least Travis McGee level of sophistication in my adventure tales before I can buy 'em. I'm not saying this is the peak by any means --if they can do better, great, but they gotta at least be able to do this.

The McGee series means a lot to me sentimentally, I read these books compulsively as a teenager and they really served the role that earlier generations probably filled with Tarzan or Doc Savage. Just one of those odd things.

This is an above-average entry in the series which revolves around con men and a crooked land deal in South Florida (many of MacDonald's books are about crooked land deals, the details of which he always lovingly describes and which I can never figure out). For fans, this episode is best remembered for one of MacDonald's best villains, the atavistic throwback Boone “Boo” Waxwell, who basically dominates the story the moment he opens the door of his house “holding a shotgun like a pistol”. MacDonald took innumerable cracks at this type throughout his career, it was a type he was obsessed with. They vary in quality, this isn't his best portrayal (who is? Maybe Dirty Bob in Free Fall in Crimson) but it's up there. The title is very sadly ironic.

Current Update

2010-08-22T19:05:00.003-04:00

Yay, I'm back.

Yay!

F. Paul Wilson – CONSPIRACIES (2000) – There is such a thing as a “house American style” in popular fiction nowadays. I don't know if it's ever been catagorized as such, but it exists, and boy, you know it when you see it.

Some aspects of it include:

A kind of carefulness with the plotting, as though the writer was following a very detailed recipe for crepes suzette or something, and wanted to be sure he got just the right amount of baking soda in there and not a touch more.

A very simple, plain style that reads like a vanilla pudding pack tastes – that is, it goes down easy but doesn't really leave much by way of memories.

Always careful to throw in modern cultural references, this is a lesson learned from Stephen King, who back in the day was criticized to hell and back for it. Your hero drinks Heineken, eats at Taco Bell, wears Old Navy painter's pants and Doc Martens.

Always careful to teach us a little something about something, we learn in “Popular Fiction 101” that the reader likes to learn a little something while he's reading. Best if it's germane to the plot, but if not toss it in anyway, it's the fact of the lesson that counts.

(Its generally an American thing, incidentally. Bad British popular fiction I've read generally tries to ape tough-guy Americanisms, and is frankly pretty silly – see Reginald Hill and Peter Lovesey – or just kind of drones on and on in a monotone, similar to the above I guess but much greyer and wetter, like a cold November rain after a snowstorm and before another one – see [and I know it's not the mainstream opinion] P.D. James.)

CONSPIRACIES is like this. It's part of a series, an attempt to establish a pulp hero in Repairman Jack, who goes around essentially fighting for truth and justice while all the while battling scary supernatural creatures and the like. It's not awful, it's obviously selling well (judging from the books I saw at Borders) and people are obviously digging it.

But to my mind it's just intolerably blah, and that's death to this kind of thing. You read this thing and you feel embarrassed by the fact that you're reading it, like you're wasting your time in the kind of brutal serious way that only, I don't know, an all-day marathon of “Everybody Loves Raymond” can. It doesn't stick, there's nothing there. It feels like product: entertainment, like a computer spat it out somewhere as a simulcrum of what humans do. There's no distinctiveness to it, no personality...Repairman Jack likes junk from the Twenties/Forties, is really something of a geek, but that seems planned too, like the computer program that wrote this thing had to input that just there – “Insert lovable quirk to humanize hero”.

Look, pulp gotta be interesting. It can be great or awful in every other respect, but the one thing it can't do is bore you. I read into some of Sax Rohmer's BAT-WING (1921) and I found it pretty incoherent, tell you the truth, but the one thing Rohmer is not is boring, and his books are intensely distinctive – once you know Rohmer's style, you never miss it for anything else.

Not the case here, you'll forget about CONSPIRACIES ten seconds after you read it. Like I said, Wilson is evidently making a living at this stuff – there's even a young adult novel about Repairman Jack, LOL, but my prediction is that he'll never make it out of the midlist. Why? It's rough to say it bluntly – he's just not good enough.

“Sapper” - BULLDOG DRUMMOND (1923) – Now, see, this is what I'm talking about. As straight ahead pulp as anything F. Paul Wilson puts out, and really for it's time pretty much of it's time as well, but you'll remember it a hell of a lot more.

It's a lot of fun, if you have any toleration for Thirties pulp of this era (the Saint, Edgar Wallace, even Lord Peter Wimsey, really) you'll like it. It is written very, er, “archly”, one eyebrow cocked, like a lot of popular fiction of this time, and I could easily imagine wading through a lot of it back then and just getting sick of the preciousness of it all. But it works nowadays, if only by way of contrast. And whatever else it was it was definitely a style, something extra you were getting, man.

This is the first of the series, I ain't gonna summarize it, go look it up in Wikipedia if you're interested. The current slap against ol' Sapper is that he's a racist an anti-Semite, which is no doubt true, I don't know, I've only read two of the books (this one and THE FINAL COUNT) and neither of them did, that I can remember, anyway. These are, though, legitimate things to point out in popular fiction of this time, my own take is just to say that it was in the air, it has whatever power you want to lend it. I am more interested in the story mechanics than anything else, so it doesn't particularly bother me. Of course I'm a white male Protestant, take that for what it's worth as well. I don't feel impassioned enough about the subject to really berate anyone who feels strongly enough about this sort of thing to avoid it; I think it's a mistake to be a contrarian and praise stupid racism/anti-Semitism/whatever just because the PC contingent is voting against it, as well. I think you're missing out if you let Chandler's racism ruin FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, one of the most beautiful books ever written, but on the other hand maybe I'm missing out too somehow for not letting it bother me, either. Fair point.

That's all I'll ever say about this sort of stuff.

For me the fun of BULLDOG was the fact that this is the most unimaginative hero ever. No tricky plans/escapes for ol' Bulldog, unlike the Saint or Richard Hannay – basically he just does the obvious straightforward thing, and screws everybody else up as a result. There's something deeply winning about this, the cool awesomeness of Common Sense and stellar British virtues – gussied up with a “hip” sheen for those crazy kids of the Twenties, but you know what I mean. Anyway, a great book, the ending falls apart a bit as these things tend to do but mostly a stellar performance throughout. Check it out.

Marc Olden – POE MUST DIE (1978)

This is a Forrest-Gump style book, which is probably the most tiresome of historical novels, generally. In a Forrest-Gump book, the protagonist interacts with historical figures, and it generally becomes an episode in trying to keep your sense of disbelief suspended, as really, how many historical figures have you ever met? Or even celebrities? (I have met two minor writers and one minor celebrity in my time, and I actually had to go out hunting for the writers.)

As is often the case I think people misunderstand the work of the real greats, here Dumas. Dumas studs his work with actual historical figures, but it never gets in the way because that was never the point, dammit. You don't go to Dumas to learn about French history, or at least you shouldn't, because he was awful at French history. The historical figures are just there for atmosphere. Duh

Anyway, a Forrest-Gump book too often becomes a tiresome history lesson with the story just kinda sorta attached (Gary Jennings's AZTEC ) or becomes unadulterated hackwork, pure fantasy projection as our hero is deferred to by the greats of his age (Max Allan Collins's TRUE DETECTIVE). But I have read two books of this sort which I do like. One is THE CROOK FACTORY by Dan Simmons, which is actually my favorite book of this type ever, and one which I'll revisit here one of these days. The other is this.

This is a supernatural adventure novel in which Poe's basically shanghaied to help defeat a black magician in 1840's era New York. It has it's faults, basically it never really escapes it's pulp roots. There are points here and there, particularly in the final quarter, where the clockwork mechanisms of the plot are pretty obviously revealed. Also, while Olden is definitely sympathetic to Poe, he never really coalesces the analytic side (necessary to solve the mystery) with a Poe believing in all sorts of occult stuff. Of course, the interest of Poe is that the two disparate sides were joined together in one person (this is why mystery and horror bump up against each other much easier than fantasy and horror), but Olden never really penetrates anything in Poe's character that would explain how this would work.

That said, there's a lot to like here. The picture of 1840's era New York – America does indeed have trouble recalling it's history, and to the extent even knowledgeable Americans think about the period from about 1800-1850 it's probably Poe and Hawthorne and Melville they're thinking about. People forget what this country was truly like, back in the day, and Olden obviously devoted a fair amount of research to telling us.

In fact, the book is well-researched in general, there's also a lot of good stuff on the occult and on Western fighting styles that generally unknown (well, I didn't know it, at least) and interesting reading. It's true, one of the reasons we read a novel is to learn something. It's often handled exceptionally badly by the writer, but that doesn't change the fact.

The characterizations generally work, the main protagonist, the British ex-boxer Figg, is an interesting one, rather older than you usually see in books like this, and Olden nicely implicitly parallels both his and Poe's sense of chivalry. Even the bad guy gets a moment. Like most pulp writers trying to box above their weight the book huffs and puffs after awhile (interesting, it's often thought that pulp work is “training” for the major leagues but it strikes me that there are plenty of pulp writers who never climb above their station) but it's good enough long enough to make it generally recommendable.

JACK O'JUDGEMENT – Edgar Wallace (1920)

I recently downloaded the Kindle app for my PC – it's free! My take on electronic books is that they will not supersede regular old-fashioned printed books anytime soon, likely not within the lifetime of anyone reading this thing. Books, as a technology, are one of the most brilliant inventions of man, perfected over the ages. Sorry, geeks, but some sweaty guy with bad skin and a World of Warcraft complex ain't gonna change that anytime soon.

What they are good for, though, is as a supplement to regular books. They are particularly good at allowing a lot of back catalog stuff that nobody's reprinting to become available. Wallace up above here is a good example. The House of Stratus has reprinted a bunch of his stuff and the titles I'm interested in of Wallace's that they have I'm gonna get from them. On the other hand they didn't do JACK O', there, and so my choice is rather overpriced print on demand things that really just reproduce electronic scans – a used copy the prices of which seem to range from ten bucks to about sixty (ridiculous price, that) – or I can get it on my Kindle for nothing.

Lesson? Ebooks have their place.

Anyway, the title under discussion is an enjoyable piece of Wallace fluff. A criminal gang meets it's end at the hands of a masked vigilante (the aformentioned “Jack”). Much running around trying to figure out who the guy is. Some damsels in distress, a bit of action but really not that much. The book works partly because it's written very clearly and snappily, partly because Wallace is a real master of melodrama and knows how to sculpt his plot. Chapters end on mini-cliff hangers. There's genuine pleasure in seeing a house of cards collapse, it's satisfying, in some primal way, to the human soul. The mystery is silly really (and I'm not sure I buy the reveal at all) but it's handled well. I was surprised, I'll tell you that. There's a bit of action, but very restrained (rather unbelievably restrained, honestly), a bit of love story. It's a highly enjoyable piece of fluff that reads like the wind and is certainly worth the effort it took to get it on my Kindle.

WATERMAN – Doug Hornig (1987)

Small town thriller, a sub-genre I've always been interested in, founders on it's own cliches: Girl Who Wants To Get Out of Here, Hero With Mysterious Past, Corrupt Small Town Cops, Old Man Who Owns Town And Is Involved In All Sorts of Stuff, Organized Criminals Who Go In And Wreak Havoc. Etc. It'd be interesting to read a book like this where the cops are honest, the girls slatternly, the heroes come from the town, the town elders innocent, etc. For one thing, it'd be more believable.

THE RULE OF FOUR – Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (2004)

Oddball attempt to capitalize on Dan Brown was unaccountably a small bestseller, even though it doesn't really have a story at all. A lot of interesting backstory, though, about a strange, real Medieval book that goes into a lot of interesting things about how some of these things were really complicated puzzles, etc. (One of the interesting byways of scholarship. THE RULE OF FOUR is also another example, if you needed it, on how people read novels in part to learn things.)

Unfortunately as a story it's pretty bad, pretty dull and contrived because, let's face it, scholarship ain't all that sexy. Personally this one lost me at the beginning, where it asked me to posit a bunch of Princeton youth obsessed with scholarship, to the extent of taking their summers in Rome to pursue it, etc. My sense of disbelief cannot be stretched that far, sorry. Taking your summer off to follow Tucker Max around, yeah, I'll buy that.

THE BLACK GANG – 'Sapper' (1922)

Well, I said my piece up above about cultural differences in the past and how they are reflected in fiction and what I think about such things (I'm not really interested, personally, though I'm not going to get my knickers in a twist if somebody is bothered by such things.) I do think “experts” in literature need to be more catholic about such things, though – I'm not going to yell at some poor Jewish guy who's offended by the offhand anti-Semitism of THE BLACK GANG, but anyone who claims to some expertise about pulp fiction, or this era of British fiction, needs to make their peace with such stuff, I think. Anti-Semitism pervaded the air, in those days, a critic needs to get their head around such things or they're never going to fully understand what they think they understand.

This is the most notorious of the Bulldog Drummond books, although actually I found the anti-Semitism no worse than all sorts of other examples, to be honest. Often painted as proto-Fascist with it's illegal group of vigilantes going around silencing Commies – and hell, it really does sound a lot like what happened in Latin America in the Seventies and Eighties – it obviously takes it's inspiration from THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, with Drummond as Sir Percy Blakeney. Sapper even goes to all the trouble of saying Drummond's pretending to be an idiot, but it's all just a cunning dodge.

I thought it was pretty kick-ass, actually. It starts out very sloppy, it sounded very much like the first installment, actually, but once it gets going it really starts bouncing along. Sapper was particularly good at action sequences, no small thing for as we've seen prose it not inherently well-suited to conveying action. I particularly want to praise the whole involved bit with the mysterious paralyzing drug and Drummond almost drowning – that's a very old chestnut very well portrayed. The whole fight in the darkness is also very well done, with the prop of the then very-new electrified fence well integrated into it.

I'm beginning to think Bulldog Drummond is a key figure in popular fiction – as much as I like Buchan, and he is to be sure just a better writer than 'Sapper' – “Sapper” seems to be a much more modern creation, much more of our time. If you could jettison the objectionable parts he'd translate well to screen today, honestly.

NEXT TIME: my piece on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wherein I suggest he ain't all that.

What I'm currently reading

Maurice LeBlanc – THE HOLLOW NEEDLE

Dorothy Dunnett – THE GAME OF KINGS (part one of the Lymond Chronicles)

Well, what I've been doing lately

2010-03-20T21:13:00.013-04:00

Hi,

Yeah, I know it's been a long time. But hey, I have the time now, y'know? And I'm getting tired of seeing all these spam comments on the blog.

I'm not sure if I really have time anymore to do full-on considerations of authors, but I do like the idea of this blog as a place where I can work out my thoughts on other writers. So I may shift to more of a diary approach – for the ten of you who read this thing, I know, dry your tears. Life is all about change, eh? Isn't that what DEAD POET'S SOCIETY all taught us?

Anyhow, start out with a recommendation. This blog:

http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/

Probably the best of the New Criterion boys, I stumbled on this blog recently and have been gratefully reading through it ever since. The pieces on the evident Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish mishmash and a very funny evisceration of a take on Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop that posits it's all a big homoerotic love story are worth the effort to pull the damn thing up on your computer by itself.

Professor Myers is not perfect. I admire Charles McCarry as much as anyone and more than most, but I do find curious any appreciation that names the good-but-at-times shrill Shelley's Heart as his best book; I suspect this is a (for the good Professor, thankfully quite rare) instance of his political inclinations overwhelming his aesthetic sense. To my mind the best, by far, of McCarry's books is The Last Supper, although here's a good instance where it helps to read widely both within the author and within the genre. To take the last one first, spy novelists have taken cracks at the “big historical novel that tries to tell America's (or the UK's) story through the story of it's spies” for a good while, this I think is easily the best/most persuasive of the batch, if only because it doesn't have, say, the agenda of Le Carre's A Perfect Spy. As for McCarry's own oeuvre, it's hard not to read The Miernik Dossier and especially The Secret Lovers and not feel like these were test runs for The Last Supper, Supper feels like the culmination of something, and I'm very interested in seeing an author's career as the pursuit of a vision.

Still, decide for yourself. I could be full of crap, who knows. And I am the proud owner of a hb first edition of Shelley's Heart.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/shelley-s-heart-by-charles-mccarry-15147

He also seems to have, well, not exactly a wrong take on George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman, but not exactly the right take, either. He is, I think, correct in positing Flashman here as an antihero who's presence is meant to show up the virtue of others around him. Although I don't know if it's always as complex as that, remember Flashman came out in the late Sixties and a lot of this “war is hell and cowards are heroes” stuff was just in the air, it's what makes so much of that era's work so campy.

I don't think it's any slight to Fraser's memory to posit that he was writing for market, particuarly remember that a straight up swashbuckler in that era probably couldn't have seen light any other way. Again, it's useful to take a writer's work as a whole, it helps you avoid these kind of pitfalls, and by the second volume, Royal Flash (an amusing knockoff of The Prisoner of Zenda) it becomes quite clear that Fraser was just interested in writing classic swashbucklers with a slightly modern touch. Most fans of the series will concede, I think, that Flashy's character softens significantly as the books go on – actually all to the good, I'd say, as I'd get tired of all the heavy-handed “critique” after a bit.

It's not exactly that Fraser wasn't interested in social critiques after Flashman, just that he did them more subtly – better. An interesting volume for instance is Flash for Freedom!, where Fraser very cunningly inserts Flashman in all aspects of the slave trade, from slaver to slave. It's Flashy's resoundingly immoral-but-in-really-a-kind-of-jovial-way nature after the first book that makes the critique work, it's all implication. Actually, as I type this, it occurs to me that's the secret, all reflected light. Compare the superb opening section of Flashman at the Charge (deals with Balaclava) to anything in Flashman and tell me what works best.

Anyhow, here's Myers's take:

http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2009/03/introduction-to-flashman.html

I actually have been trying to read through Fraser's work complete, right now I'd venture to say the best Flashman novel is either Flashman at the Great Game or Flashman's Lady.

What else have I been reading? Some Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner, and it's interesting to compare the two – why do we read Stout still while Gardner is almost assured of being forgotten? (Once one of the biggest bestselling authors in the world, even – ah, the vagaries of literary fame.) I think it helps that Archie and Nero Wolfe are such strong, exaggerated characters – tell me, what is Perry Mason like? I mean, as a person? Once can read a whole adventure and not know. On a general level I'd venture to say Gardner was at least as competent a storyteller as Stout, but there's a kind of distinctiveness in Stout's prose – mainly because there's distinctiveness in the characters, and most of a Stout novel is dialog – whereas Gardner is the equivalent of a fast food meal, eat it and forget it ten minutes later.

I think the big difference between them is that for Stout plots are not a big thing. Yeah, they are nominally “mysteries” but very lightly told/plotted, hell Chandler wrote more complex plots than a typical Stout. (This is one reason devotees of the classic mystery story often dislike Stout, or at least approach him warily.) Plots are a big big thing to Gardner, indeed they are the whole game. You read a Perry Mason for the plot.

But the Masons suffer from the same thing that I think Ellery Queen suffers from, a very glib superficiality. None of the books stick. You don't remember the twists and turns at all. Compare with Agatha Christie – I'm no great fan of Christie's, either, but you remember those plots. Once you read Murder on the Orient Express or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ten Little Indians, you remember 'em. (This is one of the secrets of her success, she was an artist with the mystery plot, if you define “artist” as “somebody consciously manipulating stuff for an aesthetic end”.)

In general, American writers who tried to write classic mysteries (as opposed to hardboiled) failed, though, not because they weren't clever (Queen and Gardner were both quite clever) but because the other main reason we appreciate the Golden Age of Detective Stories isn't for the plot – it's because they're British. Yeah, it's that specific world of small villages, dowdy spinster-detectives, tea, Lords, cads, estates, etc. (This is why Dorothy Sayers is the important classic mystery writer, not Christie – she understood this fundamentally, which is why she signaled the ultimate direction British mystery fiction would take – the world of the social novel.) The best American writer of classic mystery stories was John Dickson Carr – all of his tales are set in Britain and are elaborate Gothics, specifically for this reason, I'd venture. He understood the central unreality of the classic mystery novel, the importance of setting, and played up on it.

But Carr was a smart cookie.

I've read some Harold Lamb, only to decide that there's really nothing there that you're not getting, better, from Robert E. Howard. (Who I am convinced is a great American writer, and thankfully widely available now, in rather expensive Del Rey editions.) And I've started reading some Peter Straub again, and while I'm not sure the generally accepted “good books” (Ghost Story, Shadowland, Floating Dragon) are really all that great (I mean, I don't know, we'll like see, yo. Shadowland isn't too bad right now.) I am absolutely convinced that the later thrillers (Koko, The Throat) are genuinely awful, overwritten straining-for-profundity crap. I think in essence Straub doesn't have the temperament for the mystery genre, he is all about overwhelming Gothic bursts of effect and sweeping romanticism, which is not conducive to a good mystery tale – they are deliberately restrained, almost sentimental in their construct, when they are most effective.

Cleaning Up in 2009

2009-11-29T18:30:00.003-05:00

Hello, it's been awhile. You haven't changed a bit! Still the same as ever, I must admit.

No, okay, it really has been awhile. This blog has not been abandoned, all available evidence to the contrary. It's just been a rough year, folks. A rough rough year, and when you're going through stuff certain things inevitably get put on the back burner.

But I have, among other things, a new computer (let's hope this one lasts at least the three years or so the last one did) and at least some unfinished business before we start 2010 on, I hope, better terms all around. So that's why I'm calling this a housekeeping post: it's a housekeeping post, duh.

We're going to try to gear this thing back up on Jan of '10. We'll be focusing on George Macdonald Fraser (because I love Fraser and this gives me an excuse to reread what I have of him and get what I don't) and either Samuel Shellabarger or Keith Roberts, I haven't decided quite yet though am leaning towards Shellabarger.

But to put a capstone on things read this year:

John Buchan – PRESTER JOHN

Buchan's first famous book, anyway, this details a young man's adventures in Colonial Africa where the natives are getting restless. Interesting for being so standup and traditional, very much in the mold of the classic British Adventure story. Interesting too for having such an interesting villain – the bad guy is genuinely bad, no doubt, but not completely unredeemingly bad, in fact he's portrayed as being somebody with much merit, somebody whom, in other circumstances, would be a hero. This gives the story a certain poignancy that I do not remember in the Hannay novels. Book's biggest fault is that it goes on far too long, clearly missing it's natural endpoint – a long standing weakness of Buchan's, I'd say. (In fact I'd say one of the reasons I think HUNTING TOWER is his best is that's the only example of his I can find where the novel feels fully formed, completely done.) But it's surprisingly good, better than I'd hoped for, frankly better as a book than the Hannay novels, and recommended.

I also tried one last time to read WITCH WOOD, but bounced off it again and have said “Uncle”. There are those – I think Michael Moorcock – who admire this book, I think it made the Best 100 Horror novel list. Not for me, though, I cannot seem to get through it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard

I revisted both of these boys authors this year. Burroughs does not hold up well, in fact it's kind of depressing to read him nowadays. He is very pulpy, in the worst, episodic notion of the term (ie, the episodes of his narrative feel like a string of beads, one after another, connected only by the chain of “and then that happened”). There is no internal drive to reading him at any longer than a few pages, Burroughs cannot seem to derive suspense over the long haul. His characterizations are shallow, to say the least; John Carter is just “adventure guy of that era” and Tarzan is a cross between that and “noble savage hooha we've all bought from that era”. I am not an especial admirer of Philip Jose Farmer, but I do agree with him in A FEAST UNKNOWN that the reality of Tarzan's (and Doc Savage's, although I'd argue Doc is inherently a more interesting character than Tarzan) likely existence has been edited out of the accounts.

The one thing I will say for Burroughs is that he can be quite funny, even sardonic. The best parts of THE CAVE GIRL is Burroughs writing about his hero with his tongue firmly lodged between his teeth. Unfortunately he didn't go further down that root – though I really do wonder if at heart he didn't see himself as something of a social critic ala Mencken.

Howard is quite a different matter all together. I got the two volume BEST-OF set and many of these stories seem absolutely fresh and modern, extraordinary when you contemplate the age in which he was writing. (The Thirties were a long, long time ago, friends.) Howard wrote about doom haunted protagonists who fight seemingly for basic existential reasons – because they can. The stench of their inevitable future defeat hangs over all of them, which gives it all a tragic aura. The general sense is that Howard's characters are in a Lovecraftian universe, which could roll over and kill them all in a heartbeat, if it wished. In a lot of stories Howard's protagonists, despite their action, really come across as almost spectators, see “The Tower of the Elephant”, for instance, where by the end you get the idea that the big story happened somewhere off to the side somewhere, just beyond what you could see.

Howard is for the ages. He's not perfect, despite the insistence of the authors a lot of the stuff he ground out to pay the bills (Steve Costigan stories) are not especially interesting, mainly due to the face that he is not nearly as funny as he's trying to be, and I would certainly have replaced those stories with others. But at his best he is remarkably, amazingly good. A lot of reading Howard is like hearing a lonely man's desperate shriek of defiance into the void. Of course he knew the void would win, eventually, nobody who read him can have any doubt that it would've ended the way it did.

John O'Hara – And we'll end up where we left off, with this guy.

I had reviewed the two “critically approved” novels, finding a mild satisfaction in APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA and mostly grooving behind BUTTERFIELD 8. What was left were the big novels (A RAGE TO LIVE, FROM THE TERRACE, TEN NORTH FREDERIC) and the short stories.

My thesis on O'Hara is this: he's okay, not anything special. Despite periodic attempts to revive his career he's basically forgotten because he deserves to be. That said, if you want to understand American literature (a rather different thing than appreciating it) than O'Hara is an author you need to know, for whatever one thinks of the quality of his work, his influence is huge.

No, seriously, who does? Everyone says they do, of course, but this is just highbrow literary classism at work, nobody really goes around reading these things nowadays. I offer for exhibit one: which among you not in a graduate English program (a) heard of John O'Hara and hell (b) knew that Irwin Shaw was once well known for his high-falutin' short fiction? Yeah, that's right, NONE of you. That's not because you're stupid or ill-read; it's because their work lacks inherent interest.

I cannot remember for the life of me one of these O'Hara stories, like most stories of their ilk that rely on epiphanies and images, well, nobody remembers them. They seemed competently done as these things go, very well observed, but well, the point is whether these things should “go” like this, dig. I believe this whole direction was a bad direction for short fiction, innumerable writer's workshops to the contrary. Life may be best understood as a parade of tedium and ephiphanic moments, hell, who knows, but it sure don't work in art. Ridiculously, Howard will be remember when O'Hara is long forgotten because Howard had actually a more original vision of life, swords and sorcerors to one side.

This is one of the reasons why one must look at writing complete and in toto, free of preconceptions of highbrow/lowbrow. Whatever the trappings of Howard, go beneath the surface and he's just a more interesting writer than O'Hara. Having said all that, though, again, if you want to learn about American Literature you really need to know about these stories, I rather suspect this is the root from which that often dried-desiccated tree grew

The big novels are variations of the endless attempt in American letters from this period to write the Great American Novel Capturing Our Country In All It's Diversity. Crap, no matter how you want to look at it, although they're smoothly and competently done, and O'Hara is a fine observer in minature. You can read along A RAGE TO LIVE and nod and smile and mostly enjoy yourself on a page to page basis, it's just when taken in larger chunks it starts to smell, rather a problem when you're writing a big ol' book that's meant to be taken in bigger chunks. Another way to say it: O'Hara knew his world, but didn't really have much by way of thoughts about it, other than seemingly we'd all be better off if we had better orgasms, the naivete of which continues to amuse. Yes, I believe O'Hara must be the root source of this old chestnut in American fiction.

Does a big fat novel need thought? If you're trying to write a big fat Greatest American novel, then yeah, it sure does.

The one thing I do find interesting about the novels is that they are apparently a root (if not the root) of the modern American bestseller family dynasty kind of thing. We follow a family or a group of people through the years, watching their ups and downs, etc. Could PEYTON PLACE have existed without John O'Hara.

Though I think I much prefer Marquand's novels, as limited as they are often are in scope he's oddly more of an actual novelist.

As for the short stories, these are the Officially Approved output of O'Hara, rare you do not see an establishment critic, when this guy comes up, who does get all misty-eyed about the short stories. I read through most of THE COLLECTED STORIES which I believe is actually better understood to be THE SELECTED STORIES and they're basically “New Yorker” type literary short stories. Very much so, in fact I was rather surprised by it. I was expecting something like a highbrow variant of Dashiell Hammett, I suppose because so many hardboiled writers admire him; when this really is the founding document of Wallace Shawn-ism.

Three Books

2009-06-06T21:24:00.002-04:00

David Karp – HARDMAN

One of the many ways in which the Onion’s “AV Blog” annoys is that its the default authority for hipsters – if you want to know what the Consensus Hipster View is of this or that cultural artifact, that’s the place you want to go to. Its annoying partly because Consensus Authorities are smothering in general, and partly because there’s a lack of self-awareness in the very conception of the Approved Hipster Position. Whatever else a hipster is supposed to be, he’s really not supposed to be Roger Ebert in a finely turned-out leather jacket.

They’ve recently started to doing a reoccurring series called something like “Gateways to Geekery”, where they try to show you how to enter various cult phenomenon like Japanese horror movies or French cabaret music. Or crime fiction, which brings us to Karp. Or rather, the lack of Karp; I looked at this one and it was full of the same routine choices – Hammett, Chandler, Jim Thompson. Not anything against any of those guys, everyone should read them, of course, but there’s nothing particularly edgy about these picks. This isn’t the sort of thing a crime fiction geek is going to looking to be introduced to.

He’s more likely to be looking at Karp, an extremely obscure author who’s Lion pb originals are in high demand nowadays among the cognoscenti. This one isn’t a Lion, but obscure enough in its own way, and actually the first Karp I’ve ever been able to lay my hands on. A rather traditional “writer makes good/then declines” sort of story, not particularly different from many of its type, although much tighter and a bit better told. It does suffer from the usual problem of shoehorning a romance, of sorts, into it, although Karp does an amusing thing with it (more about that in a second). In general, as I think I’ve mentioned before, writer’s lives are not particularly interesting, and most stories about them have to whip up something to actually just talk about.

What’s amusing about HARDMAN is the Spillaine influence. It is hard for people nowadays to understand this, but in the early Fifties Spillaine was an immensely important and divisive cultural figure. His great success, combined with the type of stories he was successful telling, convinced a lot of people that the end times were actually upon us. Our hero, “Hardman”, is a pure Spillaine stand-in, or at least who a lot of people feared Spillaine was – a sadist who got off on torturing women. The “romance” is all caught up in that, and comes to a fairly amusing end…although I don’t think its intended to be amusing at all.

Poor old Mickey. Actually a straightforward reading of Spillane suggests a diehard Romantic and a guy who’s rather deeply religious. And most of his books hold up pretty well – I think Spillaine is too well-known for this blog, but I agree with Kingsley Amis on him: the fact that you don’t want to live in Spillaine’s universe doesn’t mean that its not well-presented.

As for HARDMAN, not really that great, more an amusing cultural artifact than anything. Although I do very much like this notion that a popular writer can be a screwup, not something you much see in books of this type but probably very true to life.

Joel Townsley Rogers – THE RED RIGHT HAND

This is basically the second best Cornell Woolrich novel Cornell never wrote. Which is only middling praise from me, as I’m not a fan, really, of Woolrich, finding his vision curiously limited and his endless vamping in most of his novels tiresome, after awhile.

For a while I used to think Woolrich was better in the short story form, but I’ve read enough of those now to not really believe that, either: the short stories tend toward the gimmicky twist endings of their time. Woolrich is in a curious position of generally needing length to broaden his vision…but he couldn’t go too long or it all gets repetitive. This is why I think his best work, by far incidentally, is RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, the structure (four interrelated vignettes) cannily works to Woolrich’s strengths, plus for whatever reason this seems to be the purest, darkest expression of his vision.

But anyway, HAND is pretty obviously inspired by Woolrich, it has many of the same notions – the idea that the world is in conspiracy against you, fragility of identity, the notion that love and happiness is fleeting. Rogers manages to vamp it up for a very long time, although the final reveal was a little less shocking to me than I think it was intended to be. Interesting, but I don’t think its worth a tremendous amount of bother to search out.

John Buchan – HUNTING TOWER

One of the ways you can distinguish a good minor writer from a major writer is that they really only have one thing to say – the trick is to get the best expression of it. Its a tricky criteria – I think sometimes the perfection of a minor writer looks a bit better than the sloppiness that you often find with major writers But taken as a whole (I think the best way to approach writers all around, through their career) Dumas, for example, strikes me as a major writer – Lord Knows he had his faults, but there’s a kind of drive there and creativity that’s undeniable. Many of the modern action adventure tropes we value were invented by Dumas.

While Buchan, despite his great merits, really strikes me as a minor writer. A good minor writer, to be sure, but a minor writer nonetheless. Once you get past the puffery (Buchan is often praised for his descriptive abilities for instance, I think JOHN MCNAB retains its readership, such as it is, soley for that, but his descriptive passages, while admirably complete, strike me as beyond tedious – I genuinely am amazed that anyone’s made it all the way through WITCH WOOD, which is all description, very literately presented but not very exciting.) Buchan really had only one thing to say – “Romance still exists in the world, you simply have to look for it” – and as I type this I am reminded that was also one of G.K. Chesterton’s ideas, too. Maybe it was simply in the air in those days? Anthony Hope’s PRISONER OF ZENDA (which we’ll probably get to one of these days) also believed much the same thing. But Chesterton is a major writer, I think, he had a lot more going on than Buchan, who only really has this.

The trick then is to get the best expression of it, and HUNTING TOWER is it. The book is literally a fairy tale, complete with a princess trapped in a tower, a noble knight (actually a couple), a treasure, a scurrilous villain, and a rousing battle at the finish. Buchan had always jabbed in this direction, that’s really what the Hannay novels are intended to be, up to date knight errant romances, but he tends to get distracted there either by political points or by a certain belaboredness. I admire MR STANDFAST, for instance, which I think is a fairly polished piece of work in much the same form as this, but HUNTING TOWER just has a kind of appealing sprightliness that STANDFAST lacks. It may come down to simply Buchan’s willingness to have fun here, while STANDFAST is Very Serious; it may have something to do with taking PILGRIM’S PROGRESS as an inspiration instead of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA; it may just be that HUNTING TOWER is shorter and that helped. I don’t know. HUNTING TOWER is tighter, funnier (the comic relief here is, wonder of wonders, actually amusing), makes it’s points in a much lighter way that ensure they stick better. It even has a better climax and a better ending – like a lot of early adventure fiction writers Buchan had trouble with climaxes but this one could actually be filmed as stated, and has a good bit with dramatic reversals and ironic moments.

Anyway. Recently reissued by Oxford U Press, this is a gem, definitely my favorite Buchan book (pretty much in a walk, actually), and like I said, pretty much the summit of his career, I venture. What you want out of Buchan – a modern day romance, a celebration of the British middle class, evocative locales that don’t overwhelm you, some notions about the magic of life – you’ll find here, without the awkwardness or heavy-handedness that a lot of his books run into. Highly recommended.

Next Time: John O'Hara's Short Stories

John O'Hara - APPOINTMENT IN SAMAARA AND BUTTERFIELD 8

2009-04-23T19:37:00.002-04:00

O’Hara’s a big deal, and there’s no way I can handle him in one post. Well, I could, but it’d be a monster post.

So, we’re gonna break him into threes. Part one is this, his two more critically acclaimed books. The second part will be the big novels like A RAGE TO LIVE; part three will be the short stories. Though I might switch that around. If I’m so inclined.

These two novels are the ones the critics usually chat up, particularly APPOINTMENT. But oddly they’re also the forgotten stepchildren of O’Hara’s oeuvre – the critics want to talk about the short stories, the hoi polloi wanted to read the big potboilers. Yet oddly, too, they’re the easiest books of O’Hara’s to find nowadays, both of ‘em are still in print. The short stories are not so easily available and trust me, you got to hunt around to find the once-bestsellers.

You know why they’re so easy to find? They’re small! Easy to fit on the shelf!

Well, I don’t know that, but I betcha.

APPOINTMENT was the first O’Hara I read and while it has its pleasures, it has all the self-conscious faults of first time literary novels of this era. Its reputation is definitely overrated, and again I’m annoyed by the late John Updike, who more and more seems to me to be the bland consensus voice of Approval that modern American society seems to need in its culture. Do you want to know what the Consensus Approves Of in its highbrow literature? Ask Updike, he’ll tell you. In fact, he’s an ineffable guide to it.

APPOINTMENT is one of those self-conscious "fables" and in fact is rather reminiscent of THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, though a much better book, I think. Still, it’s easy to see why the litterateurs latched onto it: our protagonist’s journey is meant to parallel Christ’s, with a variety of stations of the cross and a dying for our "sins", here presumably the sins of narrow-minded small town conformity. There’s other things to say about that but first let’s just remark upon the gaudy sense of self-importance needed to try and get your protagonist compared to Christ, of all things. You don’t read APPOINTMENT and read a story, you read it and read "a story", with all the precious self-consciousness that inevitably entails.

In fact, once you think about it you realize our protagonist (I’m sorry, I don’t have his name, I’m experimenting with writing these posts during my lunch hour at work, which may help to increase the speed of ‘em but the downside is that I don’t have the books in front of me. Ah well, look it up on Wikipedia.) isn’t much like Christ at all. He’s not a perfect God incarnated in the flesh to take the sins of mankind upon Himself; he’s a spoiled failure who behaves badly and is summarily crushed for it. O’Hara obviously wants us to criticize small town mores, and he brings in the Christ metaphor sort of by the servant’s door in order to give the whole thing a bit more gravitas, but it’s only there to the extent that you want to buy into it. The fascinating fact is that so many tastemakers do indeed want to buy into it – Christianity is always useful as a hammer for the Great Unwashed, apparently.

And it’s odd, because APPOINTMENT is potentially about something much more interesting, the inescapability of fate. BUTTERFIELD 8 is more clear about that, and as a result is a much better book (one we’ll get to in a second) but y’know, that epigram isn’t only there to make the whole book sound spooky – it’s explicitly about the inescapability of fate. O’Hara sort of wants to dance around that fact here, but the book is less interesting as "small town mores crush the soul" (although this is a theme that O’Hara will return to, and it proved to be a very influential theme, see PEYTON PLACE, among others) and more interesting as "people are ground down by circumstance and don’t really have much of a choice or chance against life".

Of course, that’s a pretty bleak vision, and there ain’t going to be a lot of people who want to buy all-in to a vision of the world that tells you life is mechanistic and ultimately futile. Where I think O’Hara ultimately shines – it starts here although you really get to see it later on – is in the small areas, the small touches. It’s too bad I don’t have the novel here in front of me, to quote from – he had a wonderful ear, just a real gift for capturing in writing the way people of all sorts of classes talked. When hardboiled writers state that they admire O’Hara – and a lot of them do – this is the kind of thing I think they like. O’Hara also brought a real sense of place and understanding to his work – his small Pennsylvania city comes alive here, O’Hara really understands how the politics of such places work, how behavior can breach the careful mores of a town, the unstated rules, and how breaches can be dealt with. I grew up in a small isolated Pennsylvania town probably at the last time when such places could really be isolated, and even though that world was dying even then, I can still recognize parts of it in APPOINTMENT. (The amount of deference shown to certain families, for instance.)

That’s what’s valuable about APPOINTMENT. It’s merits outweigh it’s defects and it’s certainly worth reading, although it does tend to be rotely overpraised in some quarters.

BUTTERFIELD 8 is a much better book, and is one that I do recommend wholeheartedly. It’s much clearer about it’s real theme: life sucks and people are trapped and happiness is fleeting and frankly, we’ll all die alone in some horrible miserable lonely way. Which as you might guess doesn’t make it the most engaging book in the world, it is in fact a small masterpiece of despair and depression and in sections can be extremely exhausting to read.

Based on the mysterious suicide of…well, there’s no real modern equivalent of what she was, sadly, "slut" is accurate but too general; "hooker" isn’t quite right. Maybe "groupie" if you extended the concept out a bit. (Back in the day I think "doxy" worked.) Anyway, whatever you want to call her, BUTTERFIELD 8 manages to give you an unrelenting vision as well as small little grace notes, portraits of people and places that just jump off the page. The heroine’s rationale for stealing the mink coat, for instance, rings true, as does her complex sort of "love" (and sadly she can only seem to feel it covered by scare quotes) for the guy, and the rationale of the men in her life. O’Hara also gives us a very nice glimpse of the speakeasy culture of the day, which seems to me at least somewhat different from what you get in the movies, anyway. Not that the movies have ever lied to me about life before.

So O’Hara on the basis of these two books has put himself in the rather odd position that the things that are best about ‘em are not the things that I think he wanted to be best about ‘em. What works about APPOINTMENT are the small little touches, the small pictures of how a town and a way of life work – not the grandiose themes about Morality and Existence, none of which seem anything more than silly, really, today. And BUTTERFIELD 8 – well, I guess you can kinda sorta say it "works" as an unrelenting portrait of despair, but it’s an uncomfortable kind of "works" and probably stretches the definition of "works" to the breaking point. (The guillotine ‘works’ as a way to take care of the crime problem, but I think the criminal might have a point of view on this.) Certainly it’s more likely read now – again – for the small slices of life O’Hara presents, a vision of a different world.

Which leads us next to the short stories. Yeah, I’ve decided. The short stories next.

More of an Update but some stuff on Dumas and Rohmer

2009-04-05T19:33:00.002-04:00

Hello.

No, I haven't given up the blog. I am reading O'Hara's BUTTERFIELD 8, in fact, as we speak, and even though I'm only in the opening pages of it I'm almost ready to say it might be his best novel.

It has been on something of a pause because all of a sudden I had a couple really really crappy things happen in my personal life, which is neither here nor there for the purpose of this blog, except to say that it's hard to get too interested in John O'Hara's gloomy visions of life (basically, we all suck and everything fails) when, well, you're dealing with your own gloomy reality of life. Ultimately my interest in all art, all culture, is in its immersive escapism – its potential to free me from the surly bonds of this world. That's what I want out of a book. That's why I like genre fiction, that's why I have a weakness for populist fiction, that's why I prefer the movies over the theatah, that's why I'm hard on the self-consciously literary or bohemian. It's not the only why, but it's a why. I'm looking for art to take me out of myself; sure, John O'Hara can do it, but when you're feeling down O'Hara ain't the best guy to be reading.

I really do wish that I could post more, but unlike the various blogs I do read, the topic does not lend itself to quickness. I have thought about opening it up to others but decided against it because this blog is really all about me, yo. I wouldn’t be happy unless whoever posted said something I entirely agreed with, and if they did, well, why am I not posting it myself?

Me, trapped in a hallway of mirrors, endlessly fascinated by my own gaze.

Anyhow.

What I have been reading is CHICOT THE JESTER and a lot of Sax Rohmer.

I have come to the conclusion that CHICOT is a minor Dumas classic, and is surely deserving to be back in print. Much more so than the dreary THE WOMEN'S WAR or, for that matter, the rather dreary LA REINE MARGOT. This is going to sound thuddingly obvious, but it's worth repeating for Dumas because a lot of people don't get it – Dumas's best books are the Musketeer saga and COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO because that's where good characters meet up with a sturdy story structure. For all of Dumas's popular success, he was, curiously, something of an indifferent storyteller, and for every COUNT there's stuff like THE WOMEN'S WAR, the plot of which I couldn't tell you if my life depended on it, or LA REINE MARGOT/QUEEN MARGOT, which kind of ambles along from sequence to sequence, until Dumas just tires of the whole thing and kills off his main characters and bawls about it in a Romantic flurry.

It's rare, but it happens in Dumas, that you get a good story with dull characters. GEORGES, I'd argue, is that – a potentially fascinating story of slave revolts, and race, and colonization, all made more interesting by Dumas's own racial background. Unfortunately the hero's an uncharismatic bore and he almost closes the door to you getting involved in the story. I'd still include it in the recommended camp, but GEORGES is really for hardcore Dumas fans, and is more interesting than good.

It's rare, but again it happens in Dumas, that you get a dull story with a great character. CHICOT is that, and I think CHICOT wears a lot better than GEORGES. What's interesting is that CHICOT isn't even really the protagonist of the story – that honor goes to Bussy d'Amboise, a typical noble Dumas hero/soon to be a victim character. I don't know how it's going to end but I already know how it's gonna end – Bussy's gonna get screwed, is how.

Chicot, though, takes over every scene he's in. Illustrating that useful cliché that verily, there is nothing new under the sun, he is a modern anti-establishment hero long before that concept was even conceived of, goofing on the King and his court even as he really, secretly, protects him. And it's shown that it's his very anti-establishment tendencies that make him the King's best protector, as he can see things and understand things that the rest of the court (and the King himself) are blind to.

It's funny – one of the most appealing things about Dumas is that reading him is like reading storytelling talent raw, just whiskey right out of the cask and poured onto the page. You can actually see him lose interest in Bussy and gain interest in Chicot as the character develops. It's a fascinating thing. It can’t be said to exactly make for a great book, no book that works against itself in this way can ever be said to be “great”, but it is quite fun.

As for Sax Rohmer, I remember posting earlier here that I wasn’t sure where all that racist stuff with Rohmer came from. Well…forget all that. I did read some earlier Fu Manchu stuff recently, particularly THE INSIDUOUS FU MANCHU and THE RETURN OF FU MANCHU and THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU and yeah, there’s a lot of stuff there about evil yellow perils. Even – I think this is in INSIDUOUS – a whole bit about “how to you properly evaluate a race of people who sacrifice their female children”, etc.

But the books really are great, especially if you have any feeling at all for popular conventions of the time. I mean, beats there a heart so cold that it doesn’t flurry when they hear lines like this? “Oh my God! Not the Zayat Kiss!” I mean there’s a whole potpourri of secret dens, evil insects, I think in one book killer mushrooms, hypnosis, zombification, mad plans to take over the world with plagues, etc. The Fu Manchu books, particularly the early ones, have that kind of almost oriental baroqueness, the kind of preciousness where Asian assassins can truly be at large in the Devonshire countryside, and good upstanding British men can be swept away by the passion of mysteriously sultry Asian women, and secret dens of unspeakable evil are hanging out on the docks.

I love that sense, the sense that there’s a secret, more fascinating reality just beyond what you can see, and that if you venture carefully enough, you may in fact find it. I think it’s that, coupled with Rohmer’s often mad sense of invention, which has kept him so readable and so memorable for so long. Rohmer does have problems over longer narratives – his early books are fixit novels from shorter pieces and rather the better for it, as their episodic nature enhances Rohmer’s natural talents for the arresting image or idea. The books generally get duller as they go on, more plodding in their craftsmanship, if that makes sense. Rohmer just didn’t think like a novelist. A lot of very good writers don’t.

But I am now interested in tracking down more non-Fu Manchu books from him. Stay tuned for John O’Hara and then Samuel Shellabarger, I think.

Henry Morton Robinson THE CARDINAL

2009-02-03T21:44:00.002-05:00

Henry Morton Robinson – THE CARDINAL

Well, I know nothing about this guy at all. I can tell you that THE CARDINAL was one of the first Reader's Digests Condensed Books, it appeared in the Autumn 1950 volume along with ROOSEVELT IN RETROSPECT by John Gunther, LONG THE IMPERIAL WAY by Hanama Tasaki, and the only volume I've vaguely heard of, YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN by Dorothy Baker (I think this was later a Frank Sinatra movie).

I can tell you it was the number one bestseller of 1950 and the number four bestseller of 1951, which is one hell of an impressive achievement as well as one hell of a cautionary tale – the height of literary fame and how many of you have heard of Henry Morton Robinson?

I can tell you it was later made into a minor Otto Preminger movie starring Tom Tryon (who we've talked about!) as the titular character. Haven't seen it.

I also have this odd fact for you – oddly it's one of the big facts in the short Wikipedia piece on him – Mr. Robinson died when he fell asleep in a hot bath. Not of drowning, mind, but complications afterwards of the resulting second and third degree burns.

Wow. I hate to laugh. But how hot was that damn thing?

As for the book itself – it's harmless. A slice of life novel depicting the inexorable rise of a poor Boston priest to the heights of the Vatican. The kind of novel where a lot of incidents occur but nothing much really happens: our hero's character, outside of a certain naivete that's fully sympathetically portrayed by the narrator until he learns The Real Deal, which is also fully sympathetically portrayed by the narrator, never really advances from where he begins. He starts out as a well-meaning good guy who's serious about his religion and, as far as I can tell (I didn't read the whole thing all the way to the finish) he ends it as a well-meaning good guy who's serious about his religion. It's written in an amiable sort of mushy style that's too bright and chipper to really be called “bad” or even get very angry about, just more evidence that the mediocre of the past was just better than the mediocre of today. (I'm not sure that THE CARDINAL has worn well, exactly, but you can read it without wincing. I'm not sure the same can be said of today's mass novel.)

I do not understand why it was so massively popular. Are there that many Catholics out there? Was it an instance of non-Catholics trying to understand Catholicism and this one came out at the right time? Was it the fact that it “tackled” -- Jesus, what does that word even mean? How about “tried to bring up” a lot of social phenomenon of the time like interfaith marriage and abortion? Would our hero have talked about women in the priesthood if the book had been set in present day America?

I don't think THE CARDINAL is going to tell you anything about Catholicism that you should really trust, and I'm leery anyway of books “that teach you things”, because who really wants that, honestly. If you want to learn about Catholicism go right to the source and talk to a couple of Nuns, they'll clue you in.

All that said there's nothing really wrong with it. It moves along at a chipper pace and while you won't really have any fun reading it, you won't exactly hate yourself in the morning, either. It's just kind of a generic experience. Call it “Book”.

Status Update, or, Where We Are and Where We Will Be

2009-02-01T09:35:00.006-05:00

My accumulation of John O'Hara books proceeds apace, and once I get the other two (FROM THE TERRACE is in the mail and I still need to pick up BUTTERFIELD 8, which along with APPOINTMENT IN SAMAARA is oddly the only O'Hara now easily available) we'll start on him. I may post about him in dribs and drabs, as most of his stuff is quite long – we'll see.

But the point about dribs and drabs is that we'll be talking about other authors beforehand and maybe in between there as well. Next up is Henry Morton Robinson's THE CARDINAL which I'm sort of excited about because this is a test case for exactly what I wanted to cover in this blog – I have no idea who this guy is or what this book is, but at one time it was extremely popular.

After that? I think Helen MacInnes, which a commentator suggested to me, is an excellent suggestion and we'll probably do her. Her books are easily available, too, which is a plus. And then? I don't know, though I'm leaning towards either Kathleen Winsor's FOREVER AMBER or some of Mika Waltari's historical novels. I'm in the mood for something like that.

We'll see.

I haven't forgotten about trying to find information on these writers online, I just haven't found much worthwhile to even talk about. Anyone can find the wiki or kirjasto piece on these guys, I've decided, and there's really not much else out there besides that. You know you're in trouble with Levin when you're heading up the Google blog search on him (most everything else is simply obituaries); I can't find anything worth a damn on Armstrong at all. As for Jack Finney, the only really interesting thing out there is the knowledge – here, I'll save you the time – that TIME AND AGAIN is a cult novel, especially, it seems, among women. I'm really not sure why, I find the book absolutely impenetrable, but there you are. I suspect there's a love story in there somewhere (yes, he confessed, he's never even gotten that far into it), which may be part of it. I think there's also a certain cadre out there who romanticizes/nostalgizes (is that a word? Now it is!) New York City. Honestly, I've never been part of that crew, which might be part of the problem here too.

Still, interesting that it's a cult novel. It's a lot harder to become a cult author than it is to become a cult filmmaker, say. Most books languish unread, a select few are read like crazy. To be a cult author or write a cult book you need to attract a certain select audience – and not much more. Usually that happens more on the highbrow end of the spectrum -- Fred Exley's A FAN'S NOTES is certainly a cult book, for instance.)

Since this is turning into something of a miscellany post, let me say I remain surprised and gratified by the readership I do get here. Considering I don't do much linkages, don't have a blogroll, update infrequently despite numerous promises to the cotnrary, cover only what pleases me, and most of the time grouchily at that.

As for what I'm reading currently, outside of this project I've been mainly interested nowadays in classic heroic pulp fiction/adventure fiction.

I've dropped Doc Savage's name here before – these books have been reprinted recently in some snazzy big-form paperbacks from I think Nostalgia Ventures. (Check your local bookstore, I know the local Borders has 'em.) I took a chance on these and like them a lot, although I have to say they're more effective spaced out a bit – these reprints pair two together and while I understand the concept I think if you read them back to back the second one pales quite a bit. Lester Dent wrote exceptionally well for this genre but he still relied a lot on formula and that becomes apparent here.

What I like about Doc Savage is the concept, which points up one of my “things” -- I think Superman is a boring character as conceived. An alien who can do everything superbly and only has one weakness? You're left shoehorning kryptonite into every conceivable story, trying laboriously to give the guy a challenge, or you're left telling the only other story you can really tell about Superman , “I'm different and cannot connect with you, whom I protect.” Now, that's a good story, but how many times can you really tell it?

Contrast with Doc Savage, who's a superman too, but human. That immediately makes him more approachable, plus there's inherently some drama in just being him. Can he do it? Can he maintain his discipline and strength despite these provocations? Etc.

Anyway, as long as you space 'em out they're well worth reading.

The Spider – these are being reprinted by Baen Books – again, check your local bookstore. Most notable for a body count that defies believe and massive destruction all around. The Spider lives in an operatic world where you can almost hear the violin strings moaning as robot men destroy another city block.

The only thing that seems odd nowadays is The Spider's secret disguise, less fearsome and more funny, I think. (He dresses up like a hunchback with fangs, probably Page got it from a silent picture but just stop a moment and try to picture it...ridiculous, huh? ) These books are also pretty hyperbolically written, but if you're reading heroic pulps you expect some of that. This is probably my favorite of these sorts of series, recommended if you can make allowances.

John Buchan – JOHN MACNAB I finally caught up with this one. It's maybe the cleanest written of all the Buchan novels I've read to date, and I can understand why it has it's admirers. I think it suffers in part from being really very slight: the whole novel is hinged on a modest, albeit interesting, piece of psychology, and I'm not sure it really demanded this length to be told. Also, it's particularly an outdoor hunting and fishing book – I enjoy that sort of thing but I'm not sure I do at the length it's presented here. So, not a bad book at all, but not one of my favorites of Buchan's. I recently ordered HUNTING TOWER from Amazon and I have WITCH WOOD still in a pile somewhere.

Harold Lamb – I may talk about him more at some later date. He's probably the closest thing I know of to an American Dumas, and wrote a series of stories set in Central Asia around 1600 that are fairly remarkable adventure tales, lots of sword fighting and double crossings and armies on the march and the like. Also ordered the third volume of Bison's recent collected edition at Amazon.

Sax Rohmer – And I've been reading a lot of Sax Rohmer recently.

I do not consider him especially racist – stereotypical in his portrayal of Asians, to be sure, but not actively racist. Indeed, one of the fascinating things about Rohmer's stuff is that he obviously rather admires Asians, and was obviously sexually attracted by them. (It is impossible to read the long lascivious – well, for the time -- descriptions of women in Rohmer without picking up on it.) Of course you could argue such feelings aren't incompatible with racism, but that's a good way to start forgetting about the books themselves.

I do think his work suffers in part from a “fix it up” quality: a lot of his books started out as independent short stories that were knitted together...and they feel like that. The experience of reading THE HAND OF FU MANCHU is like feeling little peaks here and there – but it never really coalesces into a complete work.

All that being said, there are some real pleasures to be found in his books. Strange Venomous Poisons Unknown To The West? Ancient Secret Societies Devoted To Death? Hidden traps? Hidden dope dens? Mysterious Women on Secret Errands? Strange Death Traps? Beats there a heart so dead that he doesn't thrill to this sort of stuff? Rohmer, at his best, gives you the impression of a whole world lying just beneath the civilization you take for granted, a world frankly much more fascinating than the one you know. It's immensely evocative and frankly, Rohmer is rather criminally unread nowadays, almost certainly for PC reasons. (It's even getting difficult to find Rohmer titles.)

Quick Thoughts on Charlotte Armstong

2009-01-26T22:28:00.002-05:00

A Dram of Poison
The Witch's House
Mischief
The Dream Walker

It was opportune to stumble into Ms. Armstrong – she sums up a lot of where we've gone so far on this blog.

For instance:

The Literary World is ruled by Authority.

Before I started this blog I had the half-assed idea that critical judgment was important in the “highbrow” world, that it was there that opinions were formed, consensuses were reached, and judgments were levied that affected the reputations of various authors – but that it mattered much less in the “popular” world, which, I felt, was governed mostly by fans.

I don't think that's true at all, anymore, and Charlotte Armstrong is a good example of why. Anthony Boucher in the 1950's rather idly compared her to “Cornell Woolrich and Shirley Jackson”, presumably because she wrote thrillers and those were the first two names that dropped off his tongue, and amazingly that reputation has stuck, with Ed Gorman somewhere mouthing the same opinion as though it were received wisdom on high or something.

Except that it's not true. Armstrong doesn't resemble Woolrich at all – Woolrich wrote basically poetic paranoid pieces, there's no paranoia in Armstrong's work. Most of her characters are just ambling along until an anvil drops on their head, metaphorically speaking. As for Shirley Jackson – an interesting writer who I may deal with here at some later stage – well, she's female, yeah, and wrote some stuff that maybe you could call “thriller”, if you really stretched the point (although I don't think a reader today would class Armstrong and Jackson in the same genre at all), but Armstrong doesn't have the distance that I see in Jackson's work, the impersonality of it. If anything, Armstrong is rather resolutely maternal.

It strikes me as odd that nobody, in talking about A DRAM OF POISON, has mentioned what is the rather obvious influence, which is G.K. Chesterton. Not the Chesterton of the Father Brown stories so much as the Chesterton of the (to my mind) rather middling novels, especially THE FLYING INN and THE BALL AND THE CROSS. For one thing, it relies (as those books do) on paradox – the situation that is presented turns out not, at all, to be the situation as it really is. For another, there's a certain beneficence at work here, a certain notion that people, despite their certain differences, really at heart are very similar. As with Chesterton it's a very optimistic view of the world and of life. And most of all, the novel sets up a situation that essentially resolves itself into a theological debate, with various characters acting as spokesmen for varying points of view.

Chesterton is not read as much as he should be nowadays, and I can to some extent understand how currently people could miss this. I'm less clear how Boucher, who presumably knew what the hell he was talking about, could miss it. I am also interested that Boucher's claims were simply repeated as though they came from on high, without anyone taking the time to look at the matter themselves. Again, all literary worlds are ruled by authority – somebody's authority. Maybe – likely – out of inertia, why establish a viewpoint of your own when there's a preformed one waiting for you to put on? Here Boucher's opinion simply became “the” opinion, presumably because he was Anthony Boucher.

Never trust the critic who tells you critics don't matter – he's being disingenous. Critics always matter, especially for posterity.

As for DRAM itself, rather too redolent of Chesterton for my taste.

It's Not Who Has The Idea First, It's Who Does It Best

Knowing Stephen King like I do, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that he absorbed THE WITCHES HOUSE at some early point only to spit it out later in MISERY, as the basic premise (innocent guy laid up and imprisoned in crazy older woman's house) is exactly the same. But it also ought to be said that he just does a better job with it – this is one of his best later books, and he works in a very neat looking-glass sort of effect here, as the book is that rare thing, a thriller that actually is something more, a kind of inside look at the process of writing that it quite original. But this is a commentary on the Armstrong book, not the King, and the point here is that all the while I read this all I could do is think about the King, even though this is a smooth professional job. Such is the way of things in the popular world: like it or not ideas do matter here, and if you're especially trying for the shock of novelty as an effect, know that it all depends on what the reader encounters first. There are plenty of popular “classics” out there that have simply lost their effect because so many writers have copied them. “But I was there first!” they argue, and correctly so. Unfortunately that's just not enough.

There Is Such A Thing As A Woman Or Male-Oriented Book

By which I mean there is such a thing that is possible to have a quite good book that is so written from one sex's perspective that it's impossible for the other to get into. I think this doesn't happen all that often, more rarely than you might think, in fact, but it does occur – and I think it's the kind of thing only the other sex can really speak to. Which is a long-winded way of saying that as much as I admired and even respected MISCHIEF, a book about a crazy babysitter (it has one of the more convincing depictions of insanity that I've read in some time – the girl here is both completely pathetic and completely terrifying), it is so focused on a particular female instinct – the maternal instinct, and the feelings that involves and the threats one has to face down to protect one's cub – that I think it's just closed off for male readers. Yes, of course men love their children too, but I don't know how to put it into words...it's just conceived of in a different way. This is peculiarly a female book, and I would be very interested to hear female takes on it.

To not give every Armstong a down opinion, I very much liked THE GHOST WALKER, a peculiar little book that very cannily understands the media bubble of today's world, and what kind of threats it poses. A beloved Washington eminence (is there such a thing nowadays?) is threatened by a smear campaign who's essential pointlessness and banality makes it all the more plausible, at least to these jaded eyes. Also does a good job of that old standby “I hate you/no I love you”, and there's a really wonderful climax here, which is carefully plotted and foreshadowed and is all the more effective for that.

All the above suggests I on balance dislike Armstong – but actually I don't. MISCHIEF and THE WITCHES HOUSE are not bad books, they're simply unlucky books, one by being limited by sex, one by being limited by time. A DRAM OF POISON is, in fact, sort of a mediocre book (of course it won the MWA award that year) but it's interesting in some ways nonethless. I certainly would check out other Armstongs, and would suggest you do as well.

Oh, and contra Boucher, who's lazy opinion of Armstong's work has irritated me all through these short notes. I haven't read widely enough yet to really sense all of Armstong's influences, but I would lay money more on people like Mary Roberts Rinehart (humble women in peril), Dorothy Sayers (to my mind one of the great unacknowledged literary influences of the twentieth century, so much comes from her – in particular her use of mysteries/thrillers as a device to make social commentary, as is done here) and maybe a bit of Daphne Du Maurier (the slow turn from sensible domesticity to...something else.)

Status Update, some words on Herman Wouk

2009-01-02T20:22:00.006-05:00

Hey,

Well, a happy new year to the twenty eight people who read this thing.

The original plan was for me to do Wouk next -- I've changed my mind, though. I had a mini-epiphany where I suddenly realized that Life Was Short and It Was A Long Cold Night Out There and that I Didn't Want to Spend It With Wouk.

So, first of all a sketch on how it's really gonna go - then a minute or two saying what I want to say on Wouk. The next big "literary" writer will definitely be John O'Hara, and I'm not just saying that this time -- I finished APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA over the holidays. We're also going to be looking at A RAGE TO LIVE, BUTTERFIELD 8, TEN NORTH FREDERICK, FROM THE TERRACE and some kind of collection of his short stories.

The problem here is that most of these will be massive to read -- I just got A RAGE TO LIVE today and it's squatting on my pile of books malevolently, like a toad you find in a Mexican cave. So I'm probably going to space things out with an author or two from the popular side of the spectrum, just because I want to be sure to keep the updates here reasonably regular. I'm actually going out to a used bookstore tomorrow, we'll see. Two ideas that occur to me are Charlotte Armstrong, absolutely forgotten today but in her day a well known writer of suspense novels, and Henry Morton Robinson's THE CARDINAL, which I know nothing about except that it was, apparently, pretty damn popular in 1950 and that it's about, uh, a Cardinal.

(If you're curious what I'm reading right now, well, it's Doc Savage in THE GOLDEN PERIL/DEATH IN SILVER, which is pretty kickin' because Doc Savage is pretty kickin', truthfully. I also got G.K. Chesterton's THE EVERLASTING MAN -- I like Chesterton, particularly his nonfiction apologetics like ORTHODOXY. Neither really would fit into this blog, though.)

Wouk does, and let's finish up this brief post with my thoughts on Wouk. I couldn't face trying to read THE WINDS OF WAR/WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, as I was a kid when Robert Mitchum starred in the TV miniseries -- which I also didn't watch, actually, but reminds me of what I would now call a Forrest Gump type tale, where our heroes meet influential people and are in important places of their particular historical period. I absolutely loathe Forrest Gump type historical novels, a subject to which I'll no doubt return in another post sometime. There was DON'T STOP THE CARNIVAL, which is supposed to be funny but then again this is Wouk we're talking about , Earnest is his middle name. So I have my doubts. Although Jimmy Buffet either did or tried to put on a musical version, and that really is funny.

I do like YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE, which is one of those "young writer with a dream" type of books, probably because I'm just a sucker for "young writer with a dream" type of books. It is, as I remember, a pretty good picture of publishing in the Forties and Fifties, and worth reading if you're an aspiring author, or just interested in literary culture of the time. Wouk was always good at getting the details right. It suffers from the rather banal fact that writer books are usually spiritual books about the life of the mind, if they're about anything at all, and Wouk isn't really comfortable about that so he shoehorns in some bullshit soap opera plot just to keep all the interesting reportage moving. I also seem to remember a lot of labored symbolism -- the pen that fails, anybody? Still, if you like this sort of thing, "writer makes good", this will be the sort of thing you'll like, trust me.

I remember glancing at parts of MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR. Again, a lot of good reportage, this time of small time theater in the Thirties and Forties. This time I remember the soap opera stuff is rather better focused -- although it amuses me/depresses me that a lot of women seem to gravitate to this book for Marjorie's freedom, only to come crashing down when Wouk decides that the only thing Marjorie really needed was a good husband and a place in the suburbs. Wouk is a good example of how ideology can kill storytelling -- in Wouk often you can literally feel him stomping on the brake in the narrative and wrenching the damn thing to where he thinks it should go. It's that dislocating.

(And note, I say this as somebody who would generally put himself in Wouk's camp philosophically. You can't just criticize ideologically based fiction when it's ideology you don't like. Well, you can, but you'll end up looking like a hack. This is a common fault among conservative critics, who ably see the motes in their neighbor's eyes and ignore the beams in their own. Wouk deserved alot more grief than he generally got for this stamping on the brake, for one of the virtues of stories is their independent nature, their creation of a world seperate even from the intentions of the author. It's one of the miracles of life, actually, and Wouk seemed never to be able to accept it.)

Which leaves THE CAINE MUTINY, which I've actually read twice and don't really feel a pressing need to ever read again. And again, we have excellent reportage, this time of service on a nowhere boat during the early stages of the war. (Wouk really took that "write what you know" stuff to heart.) And this time we have an effective thriller plot, which is probably why this is the best remembered of Wouk's books. And again, we have that stomp/swerve feeling in the narrative, where the story Wouk wants to tell (service in a war requires self-abnegation to a higher cause, no matter how inconvenient) is at odds with the story he's actually telling ('bad guys" in war can lie under your own banner). I wonder if post-Modernists interested in looking at how narratives undercut themselves ever check out Wouk, 'cause he's pretty much the poster boy of it.

Do you need to read Wouk? No. Putting aside YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE, which is more a personal pecadillo thing than anything else, the only novel even of interest is CAINE MUTINY, and this is a case where the movie's as good or better. After all, you get Bogart as Queeg there, and it's no small thing to watch him move those damn red balls around in hand? Remember? That whole click/click thing? Awesome stuff.

Wouk is the rich man's Leon Uris, with all that entails. His strength is reportage, and it's very good reportage, very comprehensive and interesting details about whatever. It's no accident that the first half of his books are generally better, that's where the scene setting stuff really shines. Wouk was a better writer than Uris, but his problem actually is pretty much the same -- he's kind of clunky with the story aspects of things. Which, you know, is why we're here and all that.

Ira Levin

2008-12-06T21:29:00.002-05:00

Ira Levin was a clever writer. That is his outstanding characteristic. His best book, ROSEMARY'S BABY, is one of the most clever popular thrillers ever written, just a masterpiece of the plotting art, and that's why, I think, a lot of popular writers, especially those who came up in the Sixties admire it so. It is the pleasure similar to the kind of pleasure a pizza man must feel when he chances on somebody else making a really good pie. He knows how hard it is, it's the smile of recognition of another craftsman succeeding at a difficult and demanding trade.

Levin is sometimes praised as being somebody who could capture the zeitgeist, but I think his success in this area is overrated. ROSEMARY'S BABY certainly did, and it's one of the reasons that's his classic, it has a depth the others lack. But the others really do lack it, is the point. Many would cite THE STEPFORD WIVES but we'll get to that, I'm not an admirer. Oddly enough SLIVER really did, but that book will never get any props from anybody.

I'm skipping over A KISS BEFORE DYING, mainly because I irritatingly can't find it here in Philadelphia, although I do remember a time when the damn thing was everywhere, in that Matt Dillon/Sean Young remake tie-in addition. My quick take on it was that it was a decent Hitchockian thriller typical of it's time, with the great plot twist buried neatly about three quarters of the way through it, in a way a forerunner of the kind of games Levin would play later. So check it out, if you're interested.

(I'm going to these books out of order because honestly I just feel like it. Anyway, to reveal my punch line early, the only book of Levin's you really need to read is ROSEMARY'S BABY, that's the book that's going to last. The others? Not so much.)

SLIVER, like I mentioned above, does not and probably never will get any respect from anybody, and reading through it is a tired experience, the feeling of an old pro being shanghaied to do something he really doesn't much like for dismal reasons – our pizza pie man forced to work at Domino's, say. He might still make a pretty good Domino's pie, given the limitations in front of him, or at least a distinctive Domino's pie, but would it be as good as he was capable of?

Actually my analogy comes crashing down right about then as in fact one of the problems with SLIVER is that it's trying to be a sordid NYC sex thriller and it's remarkably bad at it. Read a lot of Levin and you'll see exactly what I mean – he was rather, ah, “gentlemanly” about the fairer sex. He's not the guy to be writing how his 38 year old divorce heroine is masturbating in the tub, sorry, that takes a certain kind of something that he, to his credit or not, just didn't have.
What SLIVER did do is oddly something that's not much talked about – Levin absolutely nailed the coming age of voyeurism. His bad guy spies on the members of his apartment building with great enthusiasm, a webcam watcher before there were such things. Levin was also clever in forecasting the seductive appeal of this kind of thing, at least to some people, and even offers a plausible reason why (basically the thrill of learning secrets). It doesn't capture the notion that many people would be equally pleased to star in productions for other people to look at (ie, the flip side of voyeurism) but nobody ever seems to have gotten that, so I can't blame Levin, really.
Not a good book, something of a tired performance from Levin, actually, making me wonder if he was short of cash or something. Made into a movie I've never seen with Sharon Stone, supposedly quite hot. The sex scenes, I mean, not Stone particularly, although she was at her hottest around then.

THIS PERFECT DAY – Actually, when I started out with Levin, this was the book I was most curious about, as I vaguely remember looking at it a bit when I was kid and being freaked out (I know, by a book? I was a strange kid). It's a sf book, and seems like a strange entry in the Levin oeuvre, as there was nothing before it that presaged he was interested in such things. But maybe for authors of that period classic sf was so much in the air that you just did one, once you got established, just because you could. I mean, Lawrence Sanders did a SF novel too – no one remembers it but still.

It's an oddly earnest book, without (for the most part) the kind of lightness that usually characterizes Levin when he was on. It really wants to tell you something. It really really really does.

What it wants to tell you, unfortunately, is a lot of digested Ayn Rand crap (her influence on popular culture is unmistakable, unfortunately). Levin paints a pretty much by the book dystopia where culture is controlled from womb to tomb and a few brave rebels want to be free. There's a lot of stuff here about the meaning of freedom, it's virtues, etc – nothing I really disagree with but it's pretty plodding and moralistic, another sign, incidentally, that someone's sipped tea with Ayn Rand. The plot progresses in a pretty basic way, although there's one priceless twist...

...so priceless I'm absolutely convinced the Matrix guys ripped it for the second movie – the one good thing in that movie, the big twist, that the rebellion was itself part of an overarching master plan, a form of containment in and of itself – essentially a combination safety valve and recruitment exercise.

Ie, freedom is prison. It really is a brilliant idea – a plot twist that epitomizes the Orwellian theme. It is, dare I say it, cleverness taken to an art form.

The rest of the book doesn't go anywhere, but I do respect Levin for this.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL – The first part of this, and I mean just the opening, ranks with ROSEMARY'S BABY as some of the best writing I ever saw from Levin. The great bit in the Japanese restaurant in Brazil, which manages to humanize all of these guys (Mengele!) without distracting from the fact that their Nazis, for pete's sake – it ranks with the witches in ROSEMARY'S BABY, and points out one of Levin's great themes, that evil is just the guy or gal next door. (I actually don't believe that at all, but it's one of HIS themes.). The consistent sly joke that this is a story about old men (I suppose a Nazis surviving story in the Seventies would have to be about old men), the sense of a vivid, real world – the opening of this really is pretty good.

Unfortunately the rest of it is rather dull, because outside of this one pretty good idea it doesn't have anywhere to go, really, except to tell a story of Nazi plots to build the Fourth Reich and to be honest, guys, Levin's hearts not in it. There's a lot of stuff here about cloning and nature/nuture arguments, and there's the sly joke left at the end that our hero's sentimentality may have gotten them all killed – but it all feels rather wan and tired at this stage. Again, basically hackwork, although Levin had more substance to him than Sanders, and so obviously wasn't enthusiastically hacking away.

THE STEPFORD WIVES – THE STEPFORD WIVES is a book that feels forced, not to put too fine a point on it. It feels like a very common occurance with authors – a guy who took all the wrong lessons from the success of his previous book (which we'll get to in a second, I promise.)
Let's say you took the success of ROSEMARY'S BABY to mean “I'm interested in parables of modern times clothed in a loose genre framework”. That's not all of what BABY has to offer, an obvious point if you consider how it's lasted past it's moment (how many other Sixties parables really have?) but let's say that was the case. Then, you might say, the natural followup is the same – but more, intensified.

And that's the case here. It's interesting, for instance, that it's much shorter than ROSEMARY'S, more compact in it's telling. That immediately suggests “parable” to me. Also interesting is how the book, unlike ROSEMARY'S, doesn't really hang together as a genre story at all. I'm not talking about the impossibilities of lifelike robots and all that, that goes with the territory of these kind of stories, after all, part of the fun. I'm talking about the central fact of the story – the notion that robots replacing people is inherently scary.

Well, it really isn't – and yeah, I mean that objectively, on it's face. I mean, stop and think about this for a second. This isn't like some kind of possession story or infection story where people become different, where the horror sense is the sense that somebody is now DIFFERENT. This is a story about somebody being replaced by something else – and the obvious rejoiner is “where's the real person at”?

You see what I mean? I don't get what's “scary” about STEPFORD. The best part of the book is the very subtle way the Alan Alda type turns into Just Another Man, but that is very restrained and in the background. The main story is the “scariness” of the feminist types confronting their opposites, and...it's just not scary on it's face. It feels more like a pulp story, like something Doc Savage should be nosing around in.

And that wouldn't be a big deal, really, except that the whole premise of the parable rests on the fact that it IS scary, what's happening. “How are they changing?” and all that. Since nobody's really “changing” at all, there's no real critique here, unlike ROSEMARY'S, which used Satanism as a way to critique what Death of God folk really result in. What seems like a critique of patriarchy, or perhaps a critique of feminist demands against the patriarchy, falls apart due to that hoariest of cliches, a not very good plot. (I won't even get into how the critique isn't even specific but blurred, except to say that that isn't a sign of sophistication, rather it's opposite.)

ROSEMARY'S BABY – Which leaves us with his best book, the one he'll be remembered for. Like a lot of books I cover here this is a minor classic – I make no great claims for it, but in it's small world it reigns supreme.

I'm not going to talk overmuch about it – a lot of it's plot effect (ie, it's paranoia) is better discussed in King's DANSE MACABRE, and a lot of it's sociological effect – overrated as it is – has been discussed by just about anybody who's talked about Polanski's movie, which is, as the press says, very faithful to the source material. What I would like to mention is that it's a masterpiece of plot construction, and one of the reasons that writers, in particular, are fond of this book. Everything fits, it's like clockwork. Even small things...my favorite bit is the bit where, right at the beginning, Rosemary and her husband tour the apartment recently vacated by the now comatose former resident. There's a bit where she sees a letter saying something like: “I thought this was just a mild diversion, now I can't continue” and it trails off. The more we learn about what happens, the more this fairly offhand incident (and it's treated with superb offhand offhandablility) takes on sinister connotations.

Moorcock and friends named this one of the best horror novels, and he has good taste. Worth it.

Scattered Thoughts

2008-10-19T16:46:00.006-04:00

I know, I know, not Ira Levin. What can I say? Would you believe that it's actually somewhat hard to find his lesser known titles in the used bookstores in Philadelphia? I finally found most of ‘em, although I still can’t find A KISS BEFORE DYING, which annoys me as it’s one I particularly want to revisit and I know it was reissued in a bullshit movie tie-in edition during the mid-Nineties sometime.

I know, I know, I could order 'em online – but part of the point of this project is that I don't want to go to extremes for them. They should be easy to pick up. Well, I'm making a big pass through the Philly/Main Line bookstores, we'll see if I can't pick KISS up somewhere.

So instead, a few brief thoughts on what I've been reading. All mysteries, most of them fairly recent, at least by my lights. After this will definitely be Herman Wouk, and the next more self-consciously “literary” guy will probably be John O’Hara. I’m not sure what will be the more self-consciously “genre” stuff, although I definitely do want to intersperse something; we’ll see.

Peter Dickinson – THE GLASS-SIDED ANTS NEST and THE POISON ORACLE. Very idea driven books – these are essentially explorations of linguistics in a mystery setting, and while well written, the both of them, what they reminded me of more than anything was the kind of idea-driven science fiction that you used to be able to spot in Analog magazine and the like. Which makes the books strangely unsatisfying – they feel like thought experiments, sort of, and while you might just maybe accept that in sf (I'm not at all sure you would or should there, either, but at least there's an argument to be made that methodology is a lynchpin of the genre) here it just feels odd, like I'm reading a story but really there's something else going on the whole time – that I'm being conned in some way, basically. Another way to say it -- are you really interested in having your mind expanded by serious linguistic inquiry? If you’re not, I’m not sure Dickinson is the way to go.

Reginald Hill – RECALLED TO LIFE. This is the first Hill I've ever read, bought I think on recommendation from Nick Fuller, who has a good website up on classic mystery authors here (http://www.geocities.com/hacklehorn/index.htm). I really disliked this, though, and won't be trying another. It suffers from three cardinal sins of mystery writers nowadays.

It's too long. For perceived market reasons most modern mysteries are too long, and could be profitably cut by a third. Certainly the case here, the book reeks of overpadding.

It's written in a very glib, overly-workshopped/overly-massaged sort of prose that one sees a lot of, when one reads a lot. Basically pulp/hack writing for the present day, although at least the pulp writers of the past had some distinctiveness. I would call it very mediocre thin gruel stylistically. It won't wear well. (One of the signs of our illiterate age is that the mainstream gruel of the past just reads better than the mainstream gruel of today. Erle Stanley Gardner was no great shakes as a stylist either, but even the lamest Perry Mason just reads better than the shuck and jive of today. Why? Because Gardner came out of a different, more word-conscious age, and the mediocre of that age was just better than the mediocre of today. )

Finally, this is true only of British writers, but there's nothing more lamentable than when a British writer tries to write hardboiled prose. I know of very few British writers who've been able to handle that type of thing successfully and Hill is not one of them. What do tough guy neologisms sound like in the mouth of a Brit? Typically? Cute. They sound cute. And unbelievable.

Easily one of the most overrated mystery writers now on the scene today – though I suspect the TV version of these characters is not too bad – this reads like something that would transfer better to film.

Gladys Mitchell – WATSON'S CHOICE My second attempt at Ms. Mitchell and I plead surrender, I can't get into her.

There was in the past (not sure if there still is) a mini school of British mystery writing that was highly literate, took to mysteries as a kind of refined intellectual game, and wrote very erudite examples of the genre. That sounds great, I know, but I don't like anybody I've encountered from this school – Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin, Ms. Mitchell – as all of their books seem to me nervous twittery things, all fussbudgetty and the wringing of hands and the coining of the subtle joke, to the detriment of what we're all presumably here for. I actually have not been able to finish a novel by any of these three writers.

Peter Lovesey – THE LAST DETECTIVE. And finally this, which I just finished today. As a good example of how bad the Hill is, stack this book up against the Hill and tell me which is just the better, more ably written thing.

My problem here is that while it's far subtler in it's contrivances and manufactured thingness, it is still essentially a contrived, makework piece of product. Far better and more ably written, but it feels like a British psychological drama to which an unlikable, and rather unbelievable, detective is thrust. They're almost two different things, the elements of the book do not go together and end up pulling the thing apart. The very best classic traditional mysteries have a sort of inevitably about them – only this detective could solve this case at this time, that all were inextricably intertwined. Only Wimsey could solve MURDER MUST ADVERTISE; only Dr. Gideon Fell could handle THE THREE COFFINS. Etc. That's the great pleasure of the traditional mystery – not the puzzle itself (for if so Ellery Queen would be the great traditional American mystery writer and he's clearly not, he's already starting to be forgotten, mainly because it all seemed like an excuse for the puzzle) but the puzzle as an outgrowth of a world (excepting Carr, who's really unique in all sorts of ways, the great traditional American mystery writer is probably Rex Stout and why do we read the Nero Wolfes? Not for the puzzle so much as the puzzle as a reflection of and aspect of Wolfe's world.)

This sense of union, of belief, is just not here. I actually suspect strongly that the thriller plot came first, and then, when it was decided to make it a traditional mystery, the annoying detective character came later. The domestic drama parts just feel more real to me, more believable. There's not enough weight in the lead character to get me to care about his predicament.

Short takes on Various books

2008-09-19T23:19:00.006-04:00

No, I’m not dead yet. Nor have I given up this blog. You know how it is, I just got busy, blah blah blah. Plus with things a little stressful at work, it was hard to reapportion my time properly.

I think I might be back more or less for good now, though. Part of the problem is that I have to read these things before I talk about ‘em to my satisfaction, and there’s always the bother of trying to accumulate the books first, of course. Next up to bat is Ira Levin, for instance, but I’m having a hell of a time finding A KISS BEFORE DYING and THIS PERFECT DAY and even SLIVER. So far. I will, though. Stubborn cuss, I am.

(After Levin comes Wouk: THE CAINE MUTINY and YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE for sure, after that? Probably MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR and DON’T STOP THE CARNIVAL, unless somebody somewhere can really give me some persuasive reasons why I should read the WW 2 duology.)

What I plan to do is come in here from time to time in between the big stuff and do a short take thing on what I’m reading now. These are not meant to be the more serious considerations of an author’s career ala the big stuff, frankly a lot of these authors I either already have opinions on or I don’t have much new to say outside of the consensus.

Anyway:

John Buchan -- Well, I’m halfway through my Buchan period, and I’ve read all the Hannay novels (THE 39 STEPS; GREENMANTLE; MR. STANDFAST; THE THREE HOSTAGES). Amusingly I was reading the big Godine collection on the Philly subway one day when a gentleman in a rather ridiculous looking safari hat and butterfly-hunting shorts complemented me on my reading choice. That doesn’t happen all the time, especially with guys who look like Pnin. Brothers in arms -- except I don’t look like Pnin (ahem).

But anyway. My take on Buchan to date is that he had great ideas, and wrote great books, but rarely in the same breath. Of those four novels, the two most interesting to modern sensibilities are certainly THE 39 STEPS and THE THREE HOSTAGES. 39 is the origin of the “innocent man sucked up in a conspiracy not of his own making and has to go on the run for it”, which is a clichéd trope in thriller fiction now but as far as I can tell Buchan invented it, and THREE, though far lesser-known nowadays, seems to me to be an early incarnation of the James Bond-style super villain, intent on taking over the world. (Yeah, I think that notion really begins with Moriarty, but after having read a lot of Fleming I really think the major influence on him, anyway, was Buchan. Note that Fleming’s bad guys are all freaks in some basic sort of way -- the same hold true for the bad guy here. Also, while Moriarty is a super villain, he doesn’t hold the same kind of apocalyptic ambitions that Buchan’s and Fleming’s do. Doyle‘s incarnation of this figure -- as seen by the popular fiction he probably read, ala Dumas and the like -- is semi-demonic, frankly, while Buchan‘s is, too, but in a more explicit political/global power sense.)

That said, those two books, while worthwhile, aren’t as well-rounded or complete feeling as GREENMANTLE (which presages recurrent jihads troubling the West) or MR STANDFAST (I think probably Buchan’s best Hannay novel considered as a novel, it marries the thriller form to a voyage of spiritual self-discovery while neatly presaging home front ‘distrubances’; both of these books are extremely interesting to read in light of current events today.) Still, neither of these, as satisfying as they are, have the zip of 39 or THREE.

And so it goes. A very interesting writer, Buchan, I have more to read before I make a final pronouncement on him (PRESTER JOHN, JOHN MCNAB, WITCH WOOD, and maybe one or two others, I think.)

Alexandre Dumas -- This guy fascinates me in many many ways, I think he’s as pure an example of a “writer” as you can pick, in fact, but one of the reasons he’s so interesting -- and one of the reasons so much of his stuff is out of print in the states, alas -- is that his work is so inconsistent.

The Musketeer saga ebbs and flows like the tides -- I actually think the second volume, TWENTY YEARS LATER is the best in the series, the most put together as a whole, but taken as a series it starts high, peaks, hits intermittent notes with VICOMTE DE BRAGGELONE (inexplicably a favorite of Robert Louis Stevenson’s), almost collapses with LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE -- then reaches it’s fascinating, tragic peak with the majestic THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, which unfortunately you really need the background of everything else in the series, yes, even the dreary LOUISE, to fully appreciate.

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO similarly has passages which rank with some of the best sheer storytelling I’ve ever read, anywhere (this is in translation, too!) and passage of sheer unadulterated tedium. Yes, I understand Dumas was writing for serials and yeah, I understand how that would affect the work -- but so what? We need to see how Dumas reads now.

From what I can gather from dipping into other Dumas volumes, what seperates the lesser works from the Musketeer saga and COUNT is that they’re even more inconsistent. Right now I’m reading CHICOT THE JESTER, the second volume of his “medieval” trilogy, and it seems to be holding up to the same level of quality of LA REINE MARGOT -- some passages of utmost jaw-dropping brilliance, some workmanlike passages, some hoohaw, some tedium.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that the system essentially worked with Dumas: I’ll continue reading him because I’m a fan, but I’m convinced his best work is his most famous work. I do question why we’re being graced with translations of minor Dumas efforts like THE WOMEN’S WAR and not, say, JOSEPH BALSALMO. Or even CHICOT THE JESTER.

(As a side note I also read Arturo Perez-Reverte’s THE CLUB DUMAS, solely because I was interested in how he would work in the Dumas references. In fact the first third or so of this is really good, an inventive mystery/thriller with some Dumas appreciation and some spooky occult references worked in. The second half…not so much. Too much in contextual horseplay around, and I detect the smell of Umberto Eco in the corner. And he smells like a fat old man who just got up.)

William Marshall -- I am not a big fan of police procedural novels -- I don’t really care much about the police per se, and am not really interested in either the details of their personal lives or the intricacies of “how crimes are really solved”. I think that after you’ve read a few Ed McBain novels and maybe Wambaugh’s THE BLACK MARBLE you’ve read basically the best this very limited subgenre has to offer.

The more interesting police procedural novelists are not really police procedural novelists either -- they don’t care much about the intricacies of the form themselves. Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels are “police procedurals” I guess, if you’d have to pigeonhole them, but essentially they’re about “being French” -- the point is the snapshot of French life in various locales, not the “mystery”. KC Constantine (who I suspect was heavily influenced by Simenon) is essentially doing the same thing -- albeit with him it’s Rocksburg PA (a stand-in for Greensburg PA, a town I’ve actually been in a few times).

My all-time favorite police procedural novelist is William Marshall, whose Yellowthread Street series of books are pretty indescribable…imagine, though, maybe, a novel that uses the police procedural as a kind of springboard for metaphysical speculation. That’s basically what they are, though even describing them as such seems to diminish them, to me. For one thing, they’re immensely entertaining: very tricky novels with a legitimate mystery at their heart; careening back and forth from the most outrageous sort of slapstick to heart wrenching pathos.
There’s usually an absurdity at their heart, too: in WAR MACHINE, the last one I read, ancient Japanese soldiers from WW2 emerge from underground in Hong Kong to finish off one last burst of violence. Just an eye-catching scenario on it’s face, and what’s better is that Marshall sells the absurdity. In FROGMOUTH a slaughter of animals at the zoo becomes one of the more heart wrenching tragedies I’ve ever read in the genre. In THIN AIR the seemingly inexplicable death of a vanful of people on a highway becomes a meditation on mortality and the inexplicability of fate itself.

Just great, great stuff. Grossly underrated writer -- much much better than most writers plowing this field, maybe because he doesn’t really care all that much about police procedure. Track down any William Marshall book you can find and read it.

John D. Macdonald -- One of my pet peeves in the mystery genre is this strange notion that while Macdonald was best known for his Travis McGee books, his real achievement is his non-McGee novels. This pov is promulgated all over the place, and is basically the consensus: I would recommend Ed Gorman and Dean Koontz as especially good exponents of it.

I think it’s a load of crap. Macdonald became famous for the McGee series because that’s the best thing he ever did. He wrote a lot of non-McGee novels, and they’re all over the map in terms of quality, but none of them, I assure you, hit the heights of, oh, THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE, A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD, PALE GREY FOR GUILT, or THE LONG LAVENDER LOOK.

Part of the reason was that Macdonald had real limitations as a writer -- the series format happily shut them out but outside of the series he was free to indulge them. Read enough Macdonald novels and you’ll run into all the same characters -- I just finished MURDER IN THE WIND and it’s as good an example as any: The Weak Man Who Puts Up a False Front of Machismo; The Failed Woman Redeemed by Sex; The Strong Man; The Strong Woman Who Will Subordinate Herself to the Strong Man; The Seemingly Low Class Wheeler Dealer Whose Sins Are Obvious; The Atavistic Throwback; The Slut Who’s Almost Childlike. He also relies on the stock scenario of The Crisis that Throws These Disparate Characters Together ala Grand Hotel. That doesn’t make the book bad, exactly, but it does make it rather pompous and not “good”.

In these early “classic” period books MacDonald tended not to have much compassion for his characters, either. That irked me in WIND. In Macdonald’s mind there’s just winners and losers, and if you’re not one you’re the other, full stop. Only later did his vision seem to expand to include the failures -- later novels like A FLASH OF GREEN and ONE MORE SUNDAY are much more rounded, and the better for it.

And I think that’s because of McGee. McGee taught him compassion, not the other way around. By restricting him to one viewpoint and one pov, McGee forced him to inculcate differentiating viewpoints and the ups and downs of life in a way that the other books simply didn’t. Read a lot of Macdonald’s non-McGee’s and the constantly shifting povs start to seem neurotic, a case of a man not willing to really test his assumptions about people and see where they go. Or, maybe, a man with the end clear in sight, and no truth will obstruct him from that flow. Read a lot of McGees and you’ll see that the requirement to stick to a single forced him to create -- hello! -- a genuinely real, felt life.

Look, there’s no question that Macdonald will be remembered for the McGee books, full stop. There are good things to be found in the rest of the oeuvre -- and loads of puh, too. Thou hast been warned.

Jack Finney

2008-07-22T21:32:00.003-04:00

Hello.

No more books -- from now on this blog will just be about fashion! What’s up for Fall 2008?

Naw, just kidding. I’m pleased that a few readers still find their way to this site, as I don’t update that often, discuss books that few people read anymore, get surly about the ones I do discuss, usually, and link to nobody.

(Ah, the World Wide Web. Interestingly, a lot of people from Korea are interested in Arthur Hailey, of all people, at least according to my little tracker thingee. I would love to know why. )

Part of the lack of updates relates to my seemingly-congenital inability to budget my time properly, but some of it involves the fact that I have to read these books, you know, and then think about ‘em and all that good stuff. All on my own time. So bear with me, some titles are easier to find than others.

You’d think that Jack Finney, tonight’s victim, would be easy to find, for instance, but aside from TIME AND AGAIN the answer is “no”. I had a paperback copy of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, which is what signed him up for this , uh, examination, but it took me forever to find the 3 BY FINNEY collection, which at one time was omnipresent on the bookshelves here in Philly.

There’s also a short story collection out there but I’m not going to read it, because frankly Finney gives me the heebie-jeebies. The best way I can describe it is that reading Finney, for me, is the written equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard.

Part of it is thematic; part stylistic. It’s easier to talk about themes, so let’s hit that first. Finney is one of those deeply annoying people who are always looking backwards, thinking that the late 1800’s were a great time, or an alternative NYC which doesn’t have the problems of your current one was a great place (THE WOODROW WILSON DIME) or the town you grew up in was better than that big bad city you're stuck in now (INVASION). It’s crap, not to put a fine point on it. Nostalgia is crap. Everyone gets at least one good line in their life, and here’s Billy Joel’s

“The Good Old Days weren’t all that good; tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

Truer words were never spoken. Nostalgia is a lie, because of course the good old days sucked as much as today’s -- ask those guys dying of TB in 1880, huh? It’s also anti-life in a very real sense, since the nitty gritty problems of today’s world are never gonna be able to compete with some romanticized gauzy version of the past you’ve cooked up in that head of yours and instead of spending your time engaging with the world in front of you you're looking backwards. And really, when you get right down to it, it’s pretty lazy, just another excuse to get the old coot in the corner a’grumblin’.

This would be okay though -- at least, I could handle it -- if it weren’t for the fact that Finney’s style is so godawful. Everything is written in a very arch, brittle, pseudo-”with it” kind of style, the kind of thing that inspires nothing in me so much as a heavy punch in the mouth.

I mean, here’s a snapshot from the first of the three novels in the 3 By Finney collection, THE WOODROW WILSON DIME, which is some piffle about a guy who finds one of these nonexistent dimes and enters a parallel universe where he’s not a schlub, only to miss his ladylove back in schlubland. Didn’t Nicholas Cage do an inverse of this in some bad movie?

She sat down next to me, fitting herself to my right side like spray paint. I felt the column of her breath, essence of a thousand springs, press my cheek -- and Hades, not hot and sulpherous but cozy and perfumed -- yawned at my feet. My fists up at ear level, I had the evening paper clutched in both hands, almost wrapped around my head. “Good God, they’ve torn down the Brooklyn Bridge”, I babbled.

It’s worthwhile to spend a little bit with this paragraph -- pulled absolutely at random from this novel -- to explore how bad Finney’s writing really is. First of all, note how brittle the whole passage is, as though if you sit on it long enough it’ll crack beneath you. The self-conscious exaggeration, the elaborate self-mockery -- it’s enough to drive a grown man to kill.

But let’s look at it a bit in detail. The first sentence is nonsense -- the Romans knew that if you couldn’t illustrate a metaphor, find a better one. And indeed, paint has no motive qualities, so spray paint can’t be described as “fitting” itself to anything. “Sealed”, maybe.
The “column” is I think meant to be steam, like Old Faithful. But if it’s “essence of a thousand springs” it could hardly be said to “press” against my cheek, unless you mean something like “send me tumbling tenpins”. I’m not sure “Hades” was either hot and sulpherous or cozy and perfumed, if Finney means “Hell” he ought to say so, if he wants to say her breath was Hellish even though it was “cozy and perfumed” he ought to say that, although he’d have to set that up a bit, since you just can’t make that kind of reversal of norms without explaining yourself. If he really has the paper up at his ears, almost wrapped around his head, how does he have enough room to “babble” anything? Etc.

And I picked this paragraph literally at random, just opened the book to it. The novel is full of this crap. Basically, I think it’s a misinformed attempt to write “bright” “funny” writing ala I don’t know, the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? or something. But funny is hard to do in writing, and one of the reasons is that writers who try it end up verbalizing their jokes, which never works because we, the reader, can’t hear your verbalizations. That’s the problem here, I think.

Also humor is a truly subjective thing. The number of books that made me laugh I can count on one hand, and this ain’t one of ‘em.

Everything else Finney did falls more or less into this framework, and I think it’s all pretty bad. Must to avoid, no matter how much you like the Invasion of the Body Snatcher movies. They’re better movies.

Fred Exley - A FAN'S NOTES

2008-05-25T21:47:00.002-04:00

When I started this blog, it was mainly so I could have a place to put down my thoughts about certain specific authors that I didn’t see getting talked about on the web. That’s still the point -- but unfortunately the early bunch of these have been authors that I already know, and one thing about me is that I’ll wrestle to figure out my aesthetic opinion of something, but once it’s done it’s done. I don’t really reconsider my judgements all that much -- except maybe to somewhat downgrade something I used to hold in high esteem because of Youthful Folly (ie, Catch-22).

Now you might say, why don’t you read some new stuff, then, Jesus, quit whining about it. And I will. But I have a lot of old stuff that’s suitable lying around, and I better get rid of that first. Waste not want not, as Al Gore would say.

The point of all this is, these entries are going to necessarily be lighter than the real new stuff, as I don’t have to deal with the shock of the new -- I’m already pretty sure about what I think about these books; I’m just setting my thoughts down by way of duty, more or less.
So. Fred Exley. Despite the weaslely “this is really a novel” proviso Exley inserts at the beginning even Yardley admits in the preface to my Modern Library edition that it’s a lightly fictionalized memoir, so it needs to be appreciated on that level. Ie, it makes no sense to talk about characterizations, or even plot in something like this, since this is really the guy’s life, or a somewhat idealized (I know how that sounds to fans of the book, but stick with me for a second) version of it, or at least his understanding of it. So let’s get that out of the way. (It irritates me when people talk about FAN’S NOTES like it’s a novel. A novel how, exactly?)

That said, I think this is an absolutely amazing book for the most part, a work of genius. Exley is almost the paradigmatic one book author, because where else would he/could he go after this?
A FAN'S NOTES is awesome in that it makes art of the absolute miserable qualities of Exley’s life -- his utter failure at absolutely every standard available. And it’s important to understand that he’s a failure -- he’s not, say, a secret “success” that’s misunderstood by American society. One of the best things about the book is that Exley is as unforgiving about his own life as we are, or should be. He’s not self-regarding. His willingness to really judge himself puts this in the first rank of memoirs. (How can we really escape our own narcissitic traps?) Exley is perfectly willing to admit here that he’s a drunk, crazy, self-destructive, and willing to sabotage every decent thing in his life (jobs, relationships) for a chance at fame so fleeting and ephemeral it’s not a “chance”, really, just a dream and not a particularly persuasive one at that.

Still, it holds it’s sway over Exley. Maybe it was the experience of growing up with his father, a local legend now forgotten, of course. Or maybe it was the brief experience of knowing Frank Gifford, back in the day when that actually meant something. (I have always been curious of what Gifford thought of Exley, especially since, as well as known as he once was, the only place future generations are likely to think of him at all is here, through the lens of a hopeless idolater/envier. What does Gifford think of the fact that he’ll best be remembered through the lens of a FAN, with all the complexity that entails?) Somehow Exley derived the notion that fame was the gateway to a meaningful life in modern America.

I think a lot of American men feel the same way. So much so that if I were to assign a syllabus on “the modern American male”, this is definitely one of the required texts -- it explains so much, not the sports stuff per se as the vicarious living and the resulting neglect of real life, the desperate attempt to try and grab meaningfulness in a sea of meaninglessness. As such, Exley’s final sorrowful notion that he would always be a fan is one of the emotional high points of post WW 2 American literature.

It is often a mordantly funny book, and I am puzzled by reviewers who don’t see it. It’s a black sort of humor, to be sure, a lot of whistling past the graveyard, but it’s there. The whole bit with the traveling salesmen who was constantly curious about cunnilingus is proof positive of that alone. It also has moments of real class and style, particularly the final pages, with it‘s final haunting image of Exley running, pointlessly.

Highly recommended.

This is the best post I found on Exley, and pretty much summarizes his appeal:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/09/a_fans_notes_fans_notes.html

Short Takes: Robert Marasco's BURNT OFFERINGS

2008-05-08T21:40:00.003-04:00

Well, first of all, to all the people who came in because I linked to Steyn, I'm quite shocked, as I had no idea anyone was paying attention to this thing. As for Steyn himself, I'm rather an admirer, and certainly feel his "America Alone" thesis is an important one. I also think he's fighting a very brave fight up there in Canada.

I just don't think he's much of a literary critic. Conservative critics tend to fall into the same sorts of traps, a common one being a kind of clubby "we're all boys here" sort of thing, which is mainly what that Amis piece is. Amis is an interesting writer but he's most interesting to those who can keep from swallowing the bait, basically.

As for Mr. Max Allan Collins, who got snippy with me on another blog because I dared suggest he was what he in fact is, a blah workmanlike writer, I hereby announce an occasional feature put here soley to amuse myself -- Max Allan Collins huckster watch! Watch as Max Allan Collins relentlessly googles his name to remind us of various products he has for sale or soon will have for sale!

We're waiting for you, Max! Don't let us down!

As for Marasco's BURNT OFFERINGS, this is something of an unrecognized book, surely better than the Farris stuff we waded through recently. In fact, it's better than Tryon's stuff too, albeit not as well written on a line by line basis and not as imaginative or inventive. Marasco is a good solid thoughtful writer, but he doesn't have the kind of lyricism that Tryon, at his best, could pack into his prose. There's nothing here that equals the giddy final pulling back of the drape in THE OTHER, or the sheer careful chutzpah of the house of cards in HARVEST HOME.

So how's it better? It's just better realized, man. It's better thought through. First let's get the obvious out of the way -- THE SHINING owes a lot to this. The story presupposes a house which seduces one parent into the "caretaking" function away from her proper familial "caretaking" (THE SHINING obviously borrows a lot from this); which on some level feeds on discord and rancor (I mean, it really does, doesn't this sound like The Overlook?), where the unearthing of the past as seen through things is seen as a perilous undertaking (man, gimme a break, huh? Jack with the scrapbook); finally the house itself is "the character" and succeeds by sucking up, essentially, the family's lives. THE SHINING is basically a rewrite of this notion; catty comments about King's originality to one side he just does a better job with the concept. The outside world is dreamy and inaccessible in Marasco; King will make it literally inaccessible. The notion that the house is the prime mover itself is hinted at in the book -- King will be quite clear that it's the Overlook itself who's the antagonist. Ideas that are blurred over in Marasco -- perhaps because he's often writing from a female pov and isn't wholly comfortable with it -- are quite sharp with King, because this is mostly from a male pov and King brings in very sharp observations about masculine insecurity, etc.

But never mind King for a second -- compare Marasco to Tryon and while Tryon is the more natural novelist, and probably the more interesting talent, Marasco's playwriting experience paid off and he's built a much more secure structure here. The more I think about it, it feels a lot like a play -- a limited cast of characters, very careful scenes, the outside world deliberately dreamy and far away, a pistol in scene one will eventually be fired at the end of the play, etc. It just works better, and I admire it more than I admire Tryon's work because I'm not constantly in the position of picking flaws with it.

I'm not sure I'd always want to say that about every book -- I don't think I want to reduce this to a critical precept. Sometimes the novel of incredible highs and lows, broken as it can be, is better than the well-made mediocrity. But there is a satisfaction to be found in BURNT OFFERINGS that's not lightly dismissed -- a well made thing of any kind is a treasure, as so much isn't.

Very highly recommended -- if you have any taste at all for Seventies horror, you'll like this. Effectively downbeat, too.

Next time, Exley's A FAN'S NOTES.

Farris and Gardner - information

2008-04-27T20:34:00.003-04:00

I decided to try to put this housecleaning to an end today. I'm gonna skip over both Mary Stewart and Joseph Heller, both of whom do not lack for a presence on the web. (I'm all for discipline, but one must engage one's common sense at points, anyway.)

Again, my take on Stewart is that The Crystal Cave is a fine book but the trilogy steadily loses interest from there; and my take on Heller is that Catch-22 is a great classic but to my mind something of an intellectually dishonest book, while Something Happened, while nowhere near Catch-22's class, is more likable, in some strange ways.

For Mr. Farris. I understand they're going to remake The Fury. I gotta see the original one of these days.

Here's his website, which doesn't look like it's been updated in awhile. Interestingly favorable piece from David Schow -- as always, I'm amazed at the people who plump for this guy.

http://home.earthlink.net/~blackleatherrequired/home.html

Here's a piece from the esteemable Mystery File:

http://mysteryfile.com/blog/index.php?s=John+Farris

In answer to why nobody's ever heard of Farris, well, he kinda sucks, Mr. Lewis. And honestly your review is well meaning, but suggests a lot of special pleading here, too.

This is an interesting piece from Crider on Farris's early stuff. One of these novels will be republished by Hard Case -- I'll probably check it out because I'm an idiot, but, well, my expectations are low.

http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2008/01/gold-medal-corner-steve-brackeen.html

As for Gardner, there's stuff online about him, but I felt like digging for some info on what I think is easily his best book, The Sunlight Dialogues.

Here's something from NPR. I didn't click the link, but apparently you can hear Gardner's son read a passage from the book:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10530224

Here's a wise man agreeing with me as to Sunlight's qualities:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article/853/feature/
book/standing_by_words

This is an extremely nice piece on the novel, suffering only from an odd willingness to be taken in by the Sunlight Man's folderol. Part of the point of the book, after all, is that underneath the two extremes of Clumly and the Sunlight Man lies only chaos, and that's true even if you are a hippie taking it to the man. Outside of this odd blind spot, though, this is a very nice piece, particularly good at pointing out how well everyone's sketched in the novel. (An aspect of the book not well known, for some reason -- it's extraordinarily readable.)

http://bostonreview.net/BR31.6/johnson.php

Another nice quote from the book:

http://planetfool.blogspot.com/2008/02/primer.html

That's enough.

doug

Kingsley Amis -- information

2008-04-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

My take on Amis is that he's a typical late Twentieth Century writer -- that is, rather good but not really great, and certainly overrated in many respects. Lucky Jim is a lot of things, including sporadically amusing, but it's not exactly the comic masterpiece it's represented to be, for instance. (Much like Peyton Place, though, it's historically important and influential, and probably deserves to be read for that alone.) Most of Amis's other "serious" books are equal parts sexual obsession and self-loathing -- personally I think his best effort, and maybe his best book, is Girl, 20, where he manages to get outside himself, for a bit, but in a manageable way unlike say Take A Girl Like You.

His genre pieces are more formally experimental and more engaging to read; I think his other "best book" is The Green Man, his take on the traditional English Ghost Story. Again, anything that kept the self-involvement down is generally good with him -- I haven't read them but suspect he was quite a fine essayist.

A very nice Wikipedia piece:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis

Steyn on Amis. Steyn not good on Amis. Steyn has big talent, but me no think literary criticism one of them.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/03/the-old-devil/ (You gotta register to get the full piece of this.)

An example of the endless apologetics certain folk -- in the UK especially -- make for this guy. I rather like his boorishness myself, but at least I understand that's a weakness in my character.

http://www.tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2576533,00.html

This is interesting only in that I graduated from Williams and I think I might've had a run-in with this guy. (I had a run-in with almost all the literature people there.) If I remember right, it was a novel survey course, some of it good -- he was good on Tom Jones -- some of it not. This particular piece is notable for it's dullness.

http://www.williams.edu/English/faculty/rbell/scholarship-and-criticism/AmisIntro.html

And this is interesting for a mention of Paul Fussell writing on Amis, I am very curious what a contrary appreciation might look like. Oh, and that he liked Flashman -- that's the kind of thing that would endear any man to me.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-5,00.html

There's others, including what looks to be a big glossy article on Kingsley and Martin Amis, but I didn't really feel like poking around any further.

Grace Metalious - information

2008-04-26T20:14:00.003-04:00

Here's a typical piece of puffery on Peyton Place. The kind of thing aspiring writers do to pay their dues before they get to be big and important and on the Huffington Post and stuff like that.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/08/
finally_a_return_to_peyton_place/?page=2

A nice picture of Ms. Metalious, staged in that way that has passed looking "fake" and now looks "quaint".

http://www.meekermuseum.com/peytonp.html

A variety of links:

http://www.meekermuseum.com/literacy.html

I remember reading this some time ago. It's a very good piece on the whole Peyton Place phenomenon, and makes me want to see any biopics of her that might be made.

http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2006/03/peytonplace200603

Expect more when they finally do the movie.

James Jones -- Information

2008-03-29T20:55:00.008-04:00

Yeah, I know, I promised once a week and then I promptly skipped a week. Disclipine! I must learn discipline!

Anyway, before I get to the above. The general plan for this blog is to get up to date on the information. Once that's done -- if you're reading ahead! -- this is what we'll tackle:

Robert Marasco - BURNT OFFERINGS

Fred Exley -- A FAN'S NOTES

Jack Finney -- various, certainly INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS but I'm really interested in the ones that ain't that, like THE NIGHT PEOPLE

Herman Wouk -- THE CAINE MUTINY, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE, and probably one more, probably DON'T STOP THE CARNIVAL as the only way you will ever get me to read THE WINDS OF WAR is if you point a gun at my head and keep it there for the duration.

Still, Wouk's just the kind of author this blog was put here to address.

As for what I'm reading right now that's not part of the 'official' blog:

Georges Simenon -- NOVEMBER

I like Simenon, or better I admire him. I think the Maigret books are perfect of their kind, although I find them completely tedious and rather look askance at anyone who wouldn't. (Maigret basically solves his crimes by "being French".) Still, they admirably do what they set out to do.

NOVEMBER is not a Maigret novel, and seems a bit more lively right now, although I wonder if a lot isn't lost in the translation -- the prose here is ridiculously stiff. Alas, one of the things I've decided I won't do in this lifetime is learn to read French.

G.K. Chesterton -- various

An odd duck -- little of his work is truly satisfying, but none of it's truly awful, either. Even the worst of it has it's moments of really terrific insight; wheras even the best has terrible moments of tedium.

He'll be best known for THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, which I reread and which has it's moments, but after steeping myself in the guy's work seems to me more a dramatization of his ideas than anything. It's not bad, mind you -- and it's a beautiful picture of Edwardian England -- but I don't hold it in the high regard that others do. I prefer some of the "Father Brown" stories -- there's good ones sprinkled throughout, actually, a surprisingly consistent performer, Mr. Chesterton -- and HERETICS, which is his commentary on various leading lights of his age and in many respects seems greatly ahead of it's time. I've also read ORTHODOXY, THE BALL AND THE CROSS, THE FLYING INN, and some short fiction; the one I still really need to get is THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, although I might spring for MANALIVE if I see a copy somewhere.

Anyway, James Jones. A dreadfully self-serious guy in the style of that time, although I do have me a weakness for Hemingway wannabes.

Here's the Paris Review, which I haven't read because I'm not that interested in him:

http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4779

My take on Jones is that he had talent but was deeply unfocused and undisciplined as a writer -- as heavily edited as rumor had it he was, he wasn't edited enough. One wonders if the success of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY essentially ruined him for serious work.

But anyway, there's a literary society, too. Dig that snazzy droop of the cigarette:

http://rking.vinu.edu/j.htm

Here's a good brief bio from the esteemable kirjasto website:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jjones.htm

Here's an audio interview from 1975. Unfortunately it requires Real Player to run, and I hate Real Player. http://wiredforbooks.org/jamesjones/

That's all the useful stuff I could find off the top of the bat. If you try googling for him yourself, be sure to do "James Jones + writer" or some such thing, as there's fifty kazillion James Jones's out there, including someone who plays basketball in Phoenix and someone who prays in Canterbury.

Walker Percy - Information

2008-03-16T19:51:00.008-04:00

One thing I'm gonna do on these "off weeks" is catch up on some of the author's who I didn't do the "information" page for. So, first, off, Percy.

Well, there's the Wiki, of course, a rather bare bones for him, surprisingly. But from that I got to this:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=9F 07E5D81238F937A3575BC0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

Which is a review of one of Percy's "Conversations" volumes by Roger Kimball, of all people. "Of all people" because I just got through reading his recent column where he says even the typeface of the Times sets him on edge nowadays. Ah, well, we've all changed, huh? Grown, even.

Still, Kimball was making sense even way back in 1985. Here's a good quote:

The pieces collected here vary widely in quality. Some are earnest, thoughtful interviews that attempt to extend our knowledge of Mr. Percy's art, influences and significance; but a good number are hardly more than chatty bagatelles - glib, occasional products meant primarily to boost his most recent book.

And here's a better one:

How many times do scholars have to accompany interviewers on a trip to this writer's home in Covington, La.? How many picturesque descriptions of Mr. Percy's picturesque, chateau-style house do they need? And how many glasses of iced tea must they sit through? There is a lot of iced tea in this book.

Here's the website of a 501(c) devoted to Percy:

http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy

My take on Percy is basically this. There are two kinds of "idea writers": writers who think they have ideas, and idea men who try to tell stories to popularize their notions. Neither are all that great, but between the two, the second by far is the way to go, and Percy generally falls into this camp. Of course, it also generally means that most of his novels are pretty weak things -- one always feels with Percy that the storytelling is a tiresome chore he's putting himself through to get to the fun ideas. Anyway, if you want to read Percy, it pays to read the nonfiction stuff, THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE and especially LOST IN THE COSMOS.

Here's an early "First Things" that tries to vaguely critical of the guy, but gets all nervous and twittery instead:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5112

And one last one -- for as I said in my first post on this guy, there's a lot of Percy on the web.

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features/ceolson_walkerpercy_nov04.asp

Percy, as you might expect, gets a lot of attention from Catholic writers. As is usually the case, though, the focus is on the ideas, not the works considered as fiction, which is why they generallly tend not to be useful. I say unto thee again, there is nothing in Percy you can't get from MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE or LOST IN THE COSMOS, if all you're interested in is the ideas.

Joseph Heller's SOMETHING HAPPENED

2008-03-09T16:36:00.006-04:00

As you can see by my housekeeping post, I've decided to rejigger things slightly here. Future posts should be a bit closer to the mark regarding when I've actually read the damn thing. So forgive me for this being the last of the old way stuff.

This is the book that was closest to Heller's heart. If you want to read only one Heller novel, by all means read Catch-22 -- that's the great classic he had in him. But if you want to understand Heller as a writer, this is the book to read, because it's purer and clearer than Catch-22, obviously closer to his themes and what he wanted to do.

It's a book about office politics, and the close minded repressive systems they engender. It's also a book about the costs to individuals in them -- how, to succeed in such an environment, one must basically destroy oneself, become an automaton.

It does have humor but it is not the laff riot Catch-22 was. The humor here is very black, very sardonic, and mainly directed at the protagonist himself, uncomfortable jabs which also point up the dying spark of humanity he still has within him. Unlike Catch, too, nothing really happens, which is something of the point: it's a book about dreariness, boredom, the soul-grinding monotony of life in this world. The narrator is unappealing, deliberately so, though not exactly unsympathetic -- a Heller achievement, I think. It is by design a book of stasis -- something indeed does happen in this book, eventually, but the obvious thing is easily missable unless you're looking for it, and the unobvious, more pervasive thing is everywhere but again, easily missable unless you're looking for it (or are sensitive to it.)

I recommend this book highly, it is a great, great novel. It is not an easy read, though -- it is something of a downer, and often a grind, and while that is the point, well. It is the pure unadulterated Heller vision, and I much prefer it to Catch -22, which feels much more compromised to me, but, well. It is a grind, at times, to get through. I don't think it's quite the book Catch-22 is: I think the pleasure principle is important to art and Something Happened is just not as much fun to read as Catch, and yeah, I think that matters.

I think I've just said in that above paragraph four times that the book can be slow and rough going; so be it. It's also extraordinarily insightful, particular about the mixed feelings of the ambitious, and the way that a cubicle society can impose it's own hierarchies. It is also one of the more complicated interior portraits I know of in post WW 2 American lit, and heads and tails above similar efforts by guys like Marquand, say. Heller was not a sentimentalist, and Something Happened is not a sentimental book, it's one of it's great strengths that it's not.

A movie like American Beauty likes to present us with ideas of what could be, or might have been, or alternative choices not taken. No such luck here -- Heller, more realistically in my estimation, shows that this is all there is. (A nightmare vision only hinted at in Marquand's Point of No Return. And one less adulterated than Catch-22.)

Brief Housekeeping Post

2008-03-09T16:14:00.002-04:00

First of all, I wanted to direct people to http://www.quidplura.com/, which is all about medevial writing and thought and the like. The first time I ever noticed anyone putting me on a blog roll. Since I created this thing really mainly for myself, the idea that anyone else at all would take any kind of interest is odd and kind of flattering.

One of these days I'll do a blogroll of my own; for now, go check that out.

But the main reason I interrupt your normal scheduled programming is to talk about how I plan on rejiggering this blog from here on out. This blog was primarily created as a way for me to talk about books that don't get a lot of discussion elsewhere online -- that's still going to be it's main function. But the length of time it takes me to read through an "abandoned" author's oeuvre takes time -- especially with some of the guys I want to talk about. Herman Wouk is looming on the horizon and have patience with me, dear reader. This conflicts with my desire to try to get this thing on a regular schedule and to try to build some kind of readership outside of people looking to cheat on their college papers. (Yeah, you know who you are.)

So I plan on varying things up a bit. I'm gonna try to post every Sunday. When it comes to an actual author, I'll talk about the books as I read them -- when I do the last one I'll also try to assess his/her career as a whole, try to tie the whole thing together. But I'll intersperse things with general looks at the author's availiability online (I'll catch up on that), on notes on what else I'm reading (not anything deep, and right now a lot of G.K. Chesterton, thank you for asking), and general observations on the literary scene based on what I've read online (something I haven't exactly wanted to do, but feel I really should.)

And maybe occasional housekeeping posts like this. Next up, brief thoughts on SOMETHING HAPPENED. The next book on the list for you guys reading along -- Robert Marasco's BURNT OFFERINGS.

Joseph Heller Part One - Catch-22

2008-03-02T16:17:00.003-05:00

Well, this is part one of two -- I'm gonna try to get on a schedule with this blog, and Something Happened should appear next week (which is all you need to concern yourself with re Heller, incidentally.) I would like post more, but I gotta read the damn things, you know, and that takes time.

Anyway.

Me and Catch-22 go a long way back. It was, in many respects, the first “adult” book I ever read -- I had 11th Grade AP English and the teacher wanted us to do five book reports. I had been fascinated by the adult section of my local library (the Rebecca M. Arthurs Memorial Library in Brookville, PA) but had not grabbed anything from there. I took a deep breath, screwed up my courage, and got it.

Yeah, I know. Scared to get a book? I was a strange kid. But anyway, I loved it. The teenage years are a good time to hit Catch-22 -- the humor will go over well, if you haven’t been inundated with the hippy-dippy nostrums that came afterwards by way of imitation it will seem very fresh and exciting, and dangerously edgy in a kind of way. I have subsequently reread it several times -- this is probably the last time. I have come to the more sober conclusion that it is a great book, a genuine modern American classic written during a time when there wasn’t a lot of them -- but that it will never be a favorite of mine.

Let me digress a second. This is one of the great epiphanies of art appreciation, and it’s a stage that a lot of people never get to -- or don’t even seem to understand. It is quite possible to love something dearly, even while admitting it’s flaws. I bow to no one in my love for John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, to take the first thing that pops into my head, even though the books, to be kind about it, vary in quality. I think a lot of people understand this idea -- witness the notion of the “guilty pleasure” and all that.

But what a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that the converse is equally true -- the work of art you can appreciate, but simply doesn’t relate to you. And yes, I guess it follows from this that I think there’s such a thing as objective quality in art, although one generally has to be quite attuned to the form in order to sense it.

(I suppose a true realization of this necessarily diminishes art's power -- it puts it in it's proper place, makes it important but not IMPORTANT, not something that can be subsituted for worship. Odd and interesting, that.)

But anyway.

I acknowledge Catch-22’s greatness. You could write a whole essay -- a long one, with footnotes and the like -- on the structure of the thing alone: a swirling vortex, a nightmare with the evocative image of Snowden freezing to death in the plane, with the paper scraps billowing about him. Books tend to be reportorial in nature -- the more I read the more I’m convinced the old “show, not tell” adage is simply wrong, writing by it’s very nature cannot help but report, that’s what it does, and so any attempt to convey visual images is problematic at best. But Heller’s book really does have some of the trippy effects of an art house movie, with it’s diffracted timeline and it’s editorial tricks to prove a point. The fact that this was all written before our age of media saturation makes the achievement even more remarkable. Years later I saw part of Mike Nichol’s movie version on tv, and it was remarkable to me how much of the structure of the book was lifted intact. But again, Catch-22 is almost cinematic before cinematic, if that makes any sense.

And there’s the schtick, which is often very funny -- Catch-22 is one of the few “comedy” novels that will genuinely make you laugh -- and which, by counterposing it with scenes of unendurable blackness and bleakness (the terror of men in war; the death of Snowden; the bombing of the men by their own men) really created a kind of American black comedy that I’m not sure had been seen before. I’m no expert on the subject, but it seems to me this idea of pairing borscht belt vaudeville with some of the grimmest themes on record (we’ll get back to this, but mark, this is a book suffused with despair) was I think something genuinely new. Which accounts for the many many imitators of it through the years. (The hippies loved it, of course. You can blame "M*A*S*H" on Catch-22.)

So I do admire it. I think Catch-22 is a legitimate classic, a genuinely great American novel and one of the must reads from the second half of the Twentieth Century.

That doesn’t mean I actually like it.

It’s a cold book, for all that. I think the humor attracts a lot of readers, which get surprised when they progress to Something Happened and see something more straightforwardly bleaker and less funny. This was simultaneous Heller’s great strength and weakness -- he did something genuinely new here in Catch-22, but it’s clear to me that people didn’t understand what exactly he did. This isn’t a “war book” -- ironically the best American novel about WW 2, maybe, has very little to do with the war at all. This is a much deeper critique of Western society itself, the war is merely a microcosm -- ultimately a deadly but pointless exercise, something of a charade.
This is a book that attempts to criticize all of Western civilization itself -- at least modern Western Civilization -- as essentially a soul-destroying monstrosity. This isn’t a variant of The Caine Mutiny, this is 1984 played for laughs. This isn’t From Here to Eternity, it’s more Brazil. The only choices are to be bowed under by it or opt out, ala Yossarian. No heroes here -- just victims.

And that’s just cold. One can respect such a thing without admiring it. Does anyone, for example, really “love” 1984? Once you’ve read it, are you really wantin’ to dive back into that world? No matter what you thought of the book

I thought so.

My other problem with Catch-22 is that, though it’s set in WW 2, it’s not really about WW 2. Not really. It’s about systemic problems in Western civilization, which sounds more boring than it actually plays out in the narrative, but the point is the war is just sort of a pretext. Heller could’ve easily done it on Kiwanis memberships, or Hospital auxiliary money raisers, or fundraising for the high school band. Or on office politics (which he did in Something Happened, a very interesting book, I hope to get to that next week). And that’s fine -- except I can’t help but feel disquieted about it, because of course WW 2 wasn’t just “something that happened” it was an extremely important event in which a bunch of people fought and bled and died for things that meant something. This seems rather obvious, but somehow it gets lost in the shuffle whenever discussion of this book come up. The logical inference from Catch-22, after all, is that WW 2 wasn’t worth fighting. I don’t think Heller really agrees with that, I think, assuming we could dig him up and shock him back to life he’d say that WW 2 isn’t the point of the book at all, but yet there it is, the fat girl in frilly underthings, stuck in the corner trying not to be recognized. Another way to say it is that by tying his vision to WW 2, he ends up undercutting it, because no matter what one thinks about Western society, the only ones who think WW 2 wasn’t worth fighting are surnamed Hitler and Mussolini, and well, who cares what they think, eh?

This is the fundamental flaw of Catch-22 -- the setting jars with the narrative. This is why the hippies fell all over this and made sure to transplant into Vietnam or Vietnam surrogates -- it just made more sense there.

Next Sunday -- gonna try to get on something of a regular schedule for these -- Something Happened, or “where did all my fans go?”

Talkin' bout JOHN FARRIS and a bit o' JOHN GARDNER

2008-01-12T23:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, I know I promised a second part on John Garder, but life got in the way, as it will tend to,, and now it’s a bit past it’s due date . So to speak. I did leave a comment on www.quidplura.com that deals a bit with GRENDEL as well as some other stuff about Gardner. But in deference to the six South Koreans who read this site faithfully, you want to know my rundown of Gardner’s novels? Here they are in brief:

NICKEL MOUNTAIN. Didn’t read it. Had my doubts about it, frankly -- it’s praised as an epic realist novel and whatever else he was, Gardner wasn’t a realist.

GRENDEL. Go over to that site up top. Overrated. Another piece of dross the Sixties forced down our throats.

MICKELSSON’S GHOSTS. Interesting try at combining the Academic novel, the ghost story, and Gardner’s typical concerns. Suffers because Academic novels are fucking boring, what can I tell you. I’m not a huge fan of Kingsley Amis’s LUCKY JIM, but one thing I do have to say for that book is once you’ve read it, you’ve got academic novels down cold, yo. Everything else afterwards starts to sound like LUCKY JIM; I quit MICKELSSON’S GHOSTS halfway through thinking that it wore it’s Amis a little too broadly.

THE SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES. Easily Gardner’s best book, and probably one of the best American Sixties novels, especially in subcategory (a): “Hipsters take it to the man.” Gardner’s heavy-handedness doesn’t feel near so heavyhanded here, mainly I think because the Sixties were a heavyhanded decade -- or so says the Jokerman to the Thief -- and so Gardner really had found his niche. I also like how Gardner was able to stand a little apart from the calvacade -- sadly rare for writers during that time. He manages to present a fairly balanced portrait of the conflict -- both sides get their say and both have their points. Anyway, it’s a great book, that rare thing, a good novel of ideas, and it really earns it’s epic length, check it out.

Final summation: Gardner is a minor American novelist, because he’s so trapped in amber in his era, but THE SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES is a minor classic of it’s time and worth reading.

The real purpose of this posting today was to a bit on John Farris, who I was reading in between working the ungodly hours I was working toward the end of the year.

God, Farris’s stuff is awful. And I genuinely don’t get it, because a lot of people who’s opinions I genuinely respect seem to plump for this guy. It’s like one of those weird Twilight Zone kind of stories where pigs are beautiful and beautiful people are pigs. Or an elaborate punking.

Is this an elaborate punking?

I mean , you got David Schow, who I always thought was pretty cool even if he did say he liked the art prog band UK in THE KILL RIFF, positively creaming his jeans over the guy on a website; you have John Pelan, an acre of sanity in the thickets of the Internet, opining that the dreadful SHARP PRACTICE is in fact one of the great horror novels of our age, and you have Stephen King, who I have complicated feelings about but who I always did feel knew his popular fiction singing Farris’s hosannas in an early forward to Farris’s dreadful WHEN MICHAEL CALLS. And that’s just off the top of my head -- I see, for instance, that Hard Case is planning to reissue an early Farris book, for God Alone knows what reason.

It may just be that Farris is a nice guy who’s been around awhile. I call this the “Joe Gores effect” (Joe Gores is a terrible detective novelist who has a certain reputation in mystery fan circles ... because he’s been around awhile.) It’s like that guy in high school who hung around, never really part of the in crowd but after awhile he was curiously accepted, just because he wore y’all down.

A brief rumination: when I started thinking about writing about books and fiction, I wanted to do it the way computer game reviewers reviewed games. I really liked that style of writing, which at it’s best manages to be funny and edgy and still concern itself with aesthetics, of a sort. The best computer game writing is fresh and interesting in a way that book reviews can only hope to be.

I still think this is a worthy goal, but the transfer doesn’t fit smoothly, in part because it’s a lot easier to come across like a meanspirited prick when you’re talking about an author. After all, I didn’t have to buy an expensive rig to read Farris, or pay exorbitant sums (hell, most of them I traded for, honestly I didn’t pay anything) . Nor am I attacking a faceless group of developers or Capitalism itself. It’s one lonely guy throwing his efforts out on the wind, and on some level you have to respect the courage it takes to do that. Whatever you think of it.

Nonetheless, we don’t solve reality’s riddle by not acknowledging the truth, and however a nice guy Farris may be in real life, it does no one, least of all him, a favor to elide the truth -- that his books are awful. Writing is supposed to be something of a calling, for pete’s sake, there’s not enough money in it to be anything less. And if you don’t have the calling you’re not doing anyone a favor by pretending you do.

Let’s see. I read a batch of Farris this time out -- nobody can say I didn’t give the blighter a chance:
WHEN MICHAEL CALLS
SHARP PRACTICE
CATACOMBS
SON OF THE ENDLESS NIGHT
WILDWOOD (I think it was called)
ALL HEADS TURN WHEN THE HUNT GOES BY

The only major novel of his I skipped was THE FURY, but I read that years ago and remember it sucking too, so no great loss.

The main thing one realizes, looking over this list, is the sheer amount of unadulterated hackwork on display. We are definitely in Lawrence Sanders land, here -- CATACOMBS is Farris’s stab at a Crichton; SON is Farris’s requisite “Exorcist” clone; WILDWOOD is his King clone, etc. I am immediately suspicious of any writer who continually shifts his style and themes, because I immediately suspect him of simply trying on different suits, looking for the one that will help him sell best. And I think there’s a fundamental dishonesty in that -- even the biggest pulp hound, if he cares about what he’s doing, isn’t in it just for the money -- no matter what he says. Mickey Spillane didn’t write no damn gothic romances.

But Farris is even worse than Sanders, who at least seemed to try to put in a professional job. with whatever projects he had. SON is built on a premise so stupid that Farris doesn’t even try to make it plausible (a trial to determine the Devil, essentially); CATACOMBS robs us of the only reason to read the thing, an set piece with the scary monsters inside the mountain. SHARP PRACTICE reveals the killer very early when we suddenly learn, in a matter of fact way that I guess is some kind of lazy man’s version of psychology, that the brother and sister are incestuous lovers and that she’s still into it, even. (Ah, the Seventies.) I will personally pay five dollars to anyone who fails to spot the killer in WHEN MICHAEL CALLS about five minutes into the proceeding.

And so it goes. There’s no reason, here, to talk about structural choices, or uses of language, or how themes are deployed through character. Or even the ideas, ala Ludlum (who, as amateurish as he is , looks a hell of a lot better by way of comparison). All we got here is pretty blatant commercial crap, no different than the cliché of popular fiction the literati hit us with. And a must to avoid.

I think, ultimately, that’s what makes me angriest about Farris. It’s not him, so much, it’s that his work contributes, in a small way, to the coarsening of writing generally. People who are told Farris is good, and then who actually read one of his shitty books, are left thinking that either people who read this kind of stuff are idiots, or that somehow this stuff really is good. And then it’s praised…and so it goes. The mediocre drowning out the interesting, and we're in the curious pickle we're in now.

I don’t care if Farris is likable. He doesn’t take what he’s doing seriously -- why should we?

Next up: Joseph Heller -- CATCH-22 and SOMETHING HAPPENED, though I’m probably mainly going to talk about SOMETHING HAPPENED.

John Gardner -- part one: On Moral Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist

2007-09-02T19:31:00.001-04:00

I’ve been reading Gardner and originally I was going to do a monster post on everything, but decided instead to break it up into two parts. For one thing, reading Gardner takes a while -- I really liked The Sunlight Dialogues, for instance, but it took a couple of weeks to get through it, and October Light looks to be the same.

But another reason is that Gardner is best known nowadays not for his novels, which are the most interesting things about him, but rather these two, to my mind rather silly, books. (Well, and Grendel, to those High School students unfortunate enough to be forced to read it. We’ll tackle that one next time.)

Gardener is known in the literary world mostly as a teacher, and these two along with another book, The Art of Fiction, are distillations, apparently, of what he taught. (I’m skipping over The Art of Fiction because I read it once in the past and it seems to me now to basically be On Becoming a Novelist with a bunch of exercises -- ie, duplicative in effort. ) On Moral Fiction apparently was so controversial when it came out that Gardner actually got invited onto the “Dick Cavett Show” to defend it, and that it (apparently at least Gardner thought so) adversely affected his career

It goes to show you how times have changed -- in 1978 this nervous, halting critique of the status quo obviously was some kind of bombshell. But now? It seems nervous and halting.
Gardner obviously means well. Who could disagree with this?

The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifiling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality…. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy

We meet that early in the first chapter of this and I agree. I particularly agree that the various avante garde fripperies only exist in the wake of serious, traditional art, and that art is, essentially, a serious sort of business. Gardner also deserves credit for saying these things right in the middle of the Seventies, when people still cared what John Barth thought, for instance.

But Gardner never goes beyond it. Did you read that quote? That is On Moral Fiction, sorry to spoil it for you. The rest of the book is hesitant critiques of Pynchon and Barth -- again, Gardner gets full props for launching these critiques before it was cool -- and a lot of backfilling to try to justify a semi-religious view of art without actually invoking God’s name. This involves long, labored readings of Sartre and mythology and philosophy to justify things that seem pretty obvious me -- Gardner’s critique essentially is a religious one, one that seeks to invoke the transcendent and values that which celebrates and partakes of it.

The fact that Gardner tries to do that without actually getting religious makes On Moral Fiction pretty silly, frankly. Artists are not generally good thinkers -- to the extent that they’re good artists, anyway, they tend to be incoherent thinkers. Such ideas that are here are better presented in The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light.

On Becoming a Novelist is probably better known, maybe because there’s an ever-present audience in this country for “how to make it as a writer” advice. That’s a subject worthy of an essay or three in and of itself, and I might just think through that one of these days. Add to that Gardner’s previous teaching post, and the status of his students (my edition has a preface from Raymond Carver, of all things), and we account for it’s current prominence.

It’s a pointless book. Writing is such an ineffable thing, the ways people achieve however they define “success” so varied, that I’m immediately skeptical of writing advice books -- either they’re not general enough (Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which mainly suggests lifestyle issues that few people really seem to raise is a good book for this) or not specific enough (I still look for a book that really, in a nuts and bolts way, handles the intricacies in storytelling like Robert Graves’s esteemable The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writer’s of English Prose handles the intricacies of clear style). Gardner simply relays his experiences, fair enough but I see no particular reason why I should consider them applicable to my life, or my problems. I’m not in a writing class, for example, don’t intend on going to one, and am bored by labored justifications of them. Chapter one is a very long chapter outlining Gardner’s ideas of what a writer needs, only to conclude that if you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it, no matter what anybody says.

Are you kidding me? Even if I’m supposed to take this as some kind of self-deprecating bit of humor, who’s gonna pay me for the time I wasted reading that chapter, trying to get something out of it?

Avoid this. Gardner’s importance to art lies in his art, not his ideas about art, which are as typically incoherent and confused as, well, artists’ tend to be. Read the best of him, not this tripe he did to pay the bills.

Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy

2007-07-10T22:01:00.001-04:00

I don't want to spend a lot of time on these books, they have the virtue of
pretty much speaking for themselves. The trilogy is The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment. Stewart will almost certainly be remembered for these, although she had quite a career prior to Cave writing what at least looks to be romantic suspense. I have a suspicion that these earlier novels are probably pretty good -- life's short and you have to make choices on what to concentrate on, but nothing I say here should push anybody away from reading, I don't know, Touch Not the Cat.

There is a noticeable dip downward in quality between Cave and Hills, and it gets much worse between Hills and Enchantment. This is interesting to me, especially after reading this interview I found online:

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/stewart.htm

where she confesses that the only one she felt impelled to write was Cave, that the others were more or less afterthoughts (she doesn't phrase it exactly that way, but that's the gist of it.) It feels that way to me. Something, some kind of spark, leaves these books after Cave, although Hills has it's moments here and there. In general, though, the trilogy feels very dutiful to me after Cave, more like very well-crafted homework than an actual breathing living thing.

Let me digress a second. I've been reading a lot of John Gardner (not the Bond book guy, the "he died on a motorcycle" guy, he's next up) and it's been making me think about what it means to read as an artist, not a critic, what the essential difference of the two roles really is. I think you could fill up several essays and have a midnight snack or two on that subject, but the main thing I've come to realize -- and this blog has been a big tool in that for me-- is that for me the prime purpose of serious reading is to sense the "fire" or "spark" or "talent" or whatever you want to call it. Learn to recognize it, learn to see it ebb and flow through a work. Ultimately everything else is secondary. There are other reasons to read seriously of course: to study effects and learn how they are accomplished, to experience the story itself, to try to place the book in context of it's time, or literary history, or both, and I suppose a thousand others. (To impress people at snobby parties, perhaps.) But to me the prize is simply to understand what's burning and what isn't.

There's no way to talk like this without sounding like a mystic or a fool or both. Yet I think the further you go into fiction, this is your one inescapable destination point. If you really "get" fiction, I think you're left searching for and appreciating talent, because in the end that's the only thing that really matters about the enterprise.

I think humility ultimately comes into play, too. This, for instance. These are sturdy middlebrow books, they were not meant to be literary masterpieces and the reasons why Cave is so much better is probably fairly obvious (the story of Merlin's early life is lesser known, or unknown, which gave Stewart more freedom for her talent to flower and fill in the cracks). Still, that statement is reductive, while true it doesn't match the actual experience of reading these books in succession and feeling the dropping off point. And that's what it finally is, a feeling -- not an emotion, exactly, something more complex than that, but something like that.

Ultimately all that somebody can say is that it's there, and then it isn't. I think humility is needed when you get to that place.

(One corollary of all this is that most things suck, because most things don't hit those levels of talent or "burning". And indeed I have not liked most of the things I've read on this blog, at least to date. Another is that it's perversely more easy to talk about failures than it is about sucesses. I could go on and on about Stewart's cliched devices or how the pacing on Hills is all off, but its hard to talk about why Cave works so well.)

Well, anyway. Get Cave, once you're through dip into the others if you like, although their rewards are much slimmer. Although I am curious about The Wicked Day -- a novel mostly about Modred. Not spoken about much, does not have a high reputation, but based on that interview above I wonder if it might not have some of the freshness that Hills and Enchantment lack.

Budd Schulberg

2007-06-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

Schulberg’s great theme is the “why” of success, both on the upside and the downside. He’s certainly a very good observer and reporter of various worlds: Hollywood, Boxing, the Literati.

His books really aren’t what they should be, though. My problem with them all is well-stated by a Mr. Ethan Cooper, who wrote a review for Amazon of What Makes Sammy Run? (giving it four stars, yet):

I liked this book. But I disliked Al Manheim, the narrator of "What Makes Sammy Run?", much more than Sammy Glick, a person Al considers a total sleaze. Al drinks too much, he's puritanical about sex, and uniformly condemning of Sammy, even when Sammy does something -- such as starting a newspaper column about radio (The book is set in the 1930's, folks) that is actually a brilliant business move. Also, I found Al's newspaperman pose -- curt, cynical, seen it all -- dated and annoying. Plus, the critical Al was basically passive and stuck in the bar, crying in his beer, while Sammy grew a career. Sammy Glick is definitely an unethical opportunist. But he was often no worse than those he competed with. My advice: Give a guy a break Al, and stop your whining!

I agree completely, Schulberg interposes a narrator who tells/interprets the story for us, and this guy is much less interesting than the world he’s relating -- here it’s a serious flaw that Sammy Glick is just more appealing, despite being an obvious shark, than the narrator. One feels like somebody trying to enjoy France in the company of an annoying uncle who insists on lecturing you about the Euro exchange rate, you’re being subjected to something pretty much beside the point. Secondly, the morality is uninteresting, there’s a lot of tut-tutting here that’s unconvincing (after all Schulberg writes of Sammy with such relish) and unenjoyable. Read What Makes Sammy Run? and tell me who you’d rather have a beer with, Sammy Glick? Or perpetually whiny Al Manheim?

This isn’t a small thing -- I’m suspicious of morality in fiction, especially when the writer obviously is a secret sharer in what he’s creating. Schulberg wouldn’t do Sammy so well if he didn’t understand, and on some level relate, to Sammy -- so where comes all this disapproval?
Still, for all of it’s problems What Makes Sammy Run? is probably the most enjoyable of Schulberg’s novels. There’s a real snap and patter, especially early on in the book, and Glick comes across as one of those American types that people do tend to like, the guy who’ll put one over on you with but keep a glimmer in his eye while he’s doing it. The novel had it’s roots in short stories, and that’s probably why it’s best in sections -- as it goes on it seems less interesting, and in particular at the halfway point there’s a long excursion in the origin of a Hollywood Writer’s union -- honey, I could care less, truly.

It picks up a bit again toward the end, where we see Sammy’s final fate. It’s an interesting ending -- Glick is successful but isolated -- and rings true. I’m not sure how much of a tragedy it is, though. As enjoyable a character as Sammy is, he’s still kind of one note (probably a legacy from his magazine days). He doesn’t earn tragedy, and the attempt to foist some on him seems…odd to me, honestly. Glick is a cartoon, an interesting one but a cartoon nonetheless. The schizophrenic nature of What Makes Sammy Run? is that Schulberg tried to make him something more; this inability gives the novel it’s constant feel of heavy lifting.

I’m going to dispense with The Harder They Fall reasonably quickly, which is probably a bit unfair but it seems to me to be a very dated novel. Schulberg takes on the boxing world and discovers that hey, it’s a pretty corrupt game. You don’t say? Who knew? On the plus side, the irritating better-than-everyone-else narrator is less clearly on the side of the angels, indeed it’s made clear that he’s as much a part of this world as anybody else. On the minus side it doesn’t have the pure pleasure of Sammy, although some of the boxing world’s more colorful characters are amusing, in small doses. (Though too often we have to hear Lewis sneer at them.) One does finish reading wondering what the point of all this is -- and to be sure there is some lesson to be learned, that’s why we have the interposed narrator there. Boxing is a dirty game. As this paragraph began, you don’t say?

Much more interesting is The Disenchanted, Schulberg’s depressing fictionalization of Fitzgerald’s final washed-up years.

I am of very two minds about this novel. In some ways it’s finely done -- easily the best written of the three books. Schulberg once and for all dispenses with his Mr. Know It All narrator -- the book is split between the Schulberg stand-in viewpoint and the Fitzgerald stand-in viewpoint and we coast between them pretty freely. Fitzgerald is seen as spending most of his time in the past, so we flashback pretty freely, too.

It is a hard book to read. The ending is foretold, and it’s a dismal race to the bottom. That isn’t a strike against it, but it ought to be mentioned: it’s hard for me to believe that anyone outside of the most rabid Fitzgerald fans would enjoy reading this.

I don’t know enough about Fitzgerald to know whether The Disenchanted is accurate, or to what extent. I’m not even sure it’s important. Schulberg chose to write a novel, not a memoir, I think it needs to be judged on those grounds. As for the “artistic truth” of the thing, well, I’m not a big obsessor on the Fitzgerald myth -- more a Hemingway man, myself -- so don’t know if I’m in a particular place to judge that, either. Fitzgerald, to the extent I’ve thought of him, has struck me as that classic case of burnout; stick around long enough and you’ll see others. Burnout is certainly represented on the page here -- whether it has the tragic oomph it’s meant to have is hard to say. (I don’t know if I’d say I’m not interested in the situation of the artistic flameout -- I will say that this is so tied to a specific personality that you have to pass judgment on both.)

I think in the end I’ll have to just reserve judgment. Not every book is for every reader -- sometimes there’s things out there that you’re just not the audience for. I just think I’m not the audience for The Disenchanted. As far as it goes, it seems to be at least a well-meant, worthy endeavor, but I confess to simply being deaf to the notes it’s trying to sing.

(Which raises an interesting point, to me, about what I’m doing here versus critiquing in a formal sense. For the most part this blog, at least right now, is an ongoing conversation with myself about what works and what doesn’t work for me in fiction, and why, with the focus on books I might not normally gravitate to. It’s meant to be something more than just a review, as I’m mainly writing for myself, but not exactly a critique either.

Which is to say I think I could, if I wanted to, sit down, force myself to read The Disenchanted, and, whether or not I was actually sympathetic to the story -- I’m not, again -- evaluate it according to my critical standards. The fact that I don’t has everything to do with the fact that that sounds like work and I don’t think the prize is worth the effort, at least in this case. I can imagine coming across a book here that I might treat in that way, though.)

There’s an entire website devoted just to What Makes Sammy Run? I don’t know why, either:

http://whatmakessammyrun.net/index1.htm

An interesting interview in The Guardian, complete with a Hemingway story. I love Hemingway stories:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,849771,00.html

There’s some stuff about his movie work, too. He’s also known for naming names at HUAC.

Robert Ludlum

2007-06-16T09:03:00.000-04:00

There was a time when that name really meant something. Ludlum was one of the most popular writers in the world, and the notion of a big beach thriller called “The [Adjective] [Noun]” was almost a cliché. Now? Does anyone really cop to being a Ludlum fan anymore? I see his books are still in print, but I don’t ever see anybody buying them or reading them. Maybe they do, and they just hide them whenever I pass by. I’m a terrible snob that way.

Certainly he seems to have cast no real influence on thriller writers -- the stuff that can be generally classed as “espionage” today either falls into variants of Ambler/Le Carre, Tom Clancy-esque “look at my gun”, or, most interestingly, hardboiled-ish stuff (Lee Child, say). To the extent Ludlum is remembered at all nowadays, he’s probably remembered for the Bourne novels, but that equals “being remembered for the movies” -- like Peter Benchley’s Jaws, our sense of these things come from the film, not the story.

On the other hand, if there’s going to be a time for a Ludlum revival, it’s probably now. We live in a conspiracy-saturated age, and obviously the notion of sinister cabals masterminding things is comforting, in a weird sort of way, to a lot of people. If that’s what you’re looking for, Ludlum will provide it to you in spades.

Reading through a raft of this stuff recently, the thing that struck me hardest about Ludlum was that he had great ideas. Seriously great ideas. He played the “what if” game as well as any SF writer. What if you woke up one morning and discovered you were James Bond? (the Bourne books). What if the Ivy League saved itself in the Sixties by dealing drugs? (The Matlock Paper). What if somebody kidnapped the Pope and held him for ransom, one buck from each Catholic (The Road to Gandolfo)? My all time favorite book of his remains The Matarese Circle, just because of it’s killer premise. What if all terrorist groups were controlled by a shady organization intent on taking over the world? Wait, that’s not a good premise, that’s kind of corny clichéd. But wait again! The good part of it is: what if this group was a bunch of mad Corsican bandits right out of Dumas?

Yeah, you heard me. Corsican bandits.

The Matarese Circle just comes this close to be the great pop thriller epic, an ungodly smashing together of the spy story and the Dumas Romantic epic. The conception is so delightfully nutty on it’s face that I’m smiling now just writing about it.

The problem with Matarese isn’t the idea, it’s the execution. Look, Ludlum has dropped out of favor in part because the writing really blows. Or, rather, not the writing itself, which is hardly stellar but passable/serviceable enough in a pulpish kind of way. The storytelling blows. The Matlock Paper has a fun idea, but takes itself really serious in that ridiculous, now-campy late Sixties/Seventies kind of way (this is a story that somebody should really remake as a comedy) and suffers from the fact that the bad guy is ridiculously obvious. Gandolfo tries hard to be funny and is lighter in tempo to most of Ludlum’s writing, but it ain’t that funny. Matarese unwisely kills the story momentum about halfway through, splitting up the novel’s odd couple and descending, once again into preachiness. (One of the great myths of modern writing is that bad books are empty-headed, when in fact often they’re bad because they’re full of ideas -- just not very good ones. How much would’ve I paid to have Ludlum just shut up and blow something else up or do another grotty sex scene! How much! Instead lengthy descriptions of “why can’t we all just get along”, blahblahblah, all very earnest and well meant and deadly dull.)

Like many of the folk we talk about here, Ludlum was an odd duck. A popular novelist who frankly, missed his calling. This is an idea man -- he should’ve written for the movies.

There's a lot of Ludlum on the web -- if you want to read gussied up ads. They're still flogging his stuff long after his death -- and of course ghostwriters have gotten into the act too. I can't find it now, but there was a really good post out there on a blog somewhere about the ghostwritten Ludlum and whether that represents a "rip-off" for the reader or not. I've seen some of these books, and while I think they could do a better job of hinting at the reality of the situation (a lot of those Gold Eagle books put the real author's name on the dedication page, for instance) I hardly think it's something to get exorcised about. I would suspect even the Ludlum fans who are buying these books -- well, they're probably foggy about whether or not the guy's alive, but if told he was dead and it was ghostwritten? I doubt most of them would care.

Here's some weird webpage detailing how many times Ludlum used "archives" in his books:

http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~mattison/ficarch/ludlum.htm

And here's a fun page where you can generate your own Ludlum title:

http://tleaves.com/?p=844

Short Takes: Kingsley Amis

2007-05-16T21:41:00.000-04:00

I have nothing against Amis at all, these are all fairly decent to pretty awesome books. But you have to think that some of Amis’s current reputations rests on his personal history as a raconteur and amusing dinner companion. And how long is something like that really going to last?

In addition to the novels mentioned below, I have read, in the past, Amis’s The Alteration, which is an “alternative world” SF novel and not bad, as I remember -- it posits a world where the Reformation never happened and it’s hero, if I remember right, fights bravely but fails against his ultimate fate/future of being a eunuch. (This is Amis, remember, who’s two big topics are sex and self-loathing, and whose best books manage to smash the two about.) I’ve also read Colonel Sun, Amis’s hack at the Bond series, which I remember being not bad but a bit stuffy and not quite fitting Fleming’s style. (Fleming was far more of an aesthete and sybarite than Amis, far “looser”.) And I think sometime in the past I dipped into Amis’s really great book on drink -- he councils a kind of “milk punch” in the morning, I remember, made of frozen milk ice cubs and brandy. He said it would be good first thing in the morning, before one flew.

I tried it. It wasn’t It’s still a great book, though.

Lucky Jim is the one that everyone calls a classic -- probably is, at least if you want to think about it in historical terms. It’s unusual in that it has something of a happy ending, something Amis’s books mostly avoid like sin. (Although none of his characters avoid sin! Hah! Good one!) It’s charming and often humorous, although I didn’t exactly bust a gut laughing. Whenever you read about “comedy” in books I personally would adjust my expectations down a notch or two or three. What’s most interesting in Lucky Jim is the notion of socialism as a kind of young man’s revolt from the stifling confines of society -- this explains a great deal of the leftism of Bohemianism in general and of the post-war period in particular. Although I still think the primary reason for it is a kind of “revenge” against the society that most artists feel shut out off. The Sex Pistols and Malcom McClaren, in one of his brighter moments, are on point here, all that stuff about “in a society that precludes adventure, destroying it is the only adventure left” etc.

Worth reading? I dunno. Do you want to say you’ve read it? One of those kind of books.

I prefer One Fat Englishman, which is about two hundred pages of self-loathing, not exactly a great novel but a really impressive thing to experience, nonetheless; Girl, 20, I think all in all Amis’s best book, where his themes of sexual selfishness and general societal loathing coalesce in a real gripping downer, capped off with one of the saddest endings I’ve read anywhere recently; and The Green Man, I think Amis’s best stab at a genre piece, a ghost story that again, unites self-loathing and sexual selfishness in a really interesting way -- who knows what Amis thought, but the protagonist of Green Man is rather what I assumed Amis was, and his last sort of hopeful wish for death as an escape from himself seemed to ring very true, like it was coming from somewhere deep. (Somewhere in all this was Take a Girl Like You, which is Amis writing from the female point of view. Despite all the obvious sweat and effort that went into it, I couldn’t get into it, as it were. Amis writing from a female point of view? Much like Chandler, he’s just too defiantly masculine -- in his own way -- for that to work.)

I haven’t forgotten the whole “let’s see what’s online” thing, it’s just that the last few writers surprisingly enough had some stuff online. Plus I’ve just been trying to kickstart this thing again in general. The next one’s Robert Ludlum, and we’ll definitely do it for him.

Short Takes: Grace Metalious

2007-04-24T21:08:00.000-04:00

I read as much of this as could keep my interest. There’s a recent spark of interest in Metalious again, partly because some (sigh) feminist press recently reissued Peyton Place, partly because Sandra Bullock is apparently going to play her in a biopic.

Peyton Place is not exactly a good book. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing to try and reestablish her reputation, nowadays, but it all sounds kind of fake to me, a lot of protesting too much. There’s a small group of people -- Ed Gorman comes to mind -- who legitimately seem to think this is a great novel. Well, nostalgia is a powerful thing.

It’s not a bad book. It’s rather well written, and has moments of real power: the drunken nightmare in the cellar is a good bit, as is the stepfather coming on to Selena, as is the Principal’s arrival in town. Like a lot of episodic novels (The Young Lions; From Here to Eternity) it’s most powerful in episodes. Metalious wrote with a kind of freshness and frankness that seems perfectly current now, though she surely blew a lot of minds back in her day.

But a novel of episodes is just that, a novel of isolated incidents, and Peyton Place falls on the same rocks that a lot of others do -- James Jones, for instance. There’s just no sense that this trip is ultimately going anywhere, that it has some kind of greater meaning. It clops along, one Revealing Moment after another, until it just sort of kinda stops. This is a fault of not approaching the book as a completed intrinsic work -- one begins to suspect it’s a fault of trying To Report Life In All of it’s Truthfulness. Because let’s be frank, life doesn’t have that kind of neatness we want or need from stories. Life tends to be episodic, moving from bead to bead on a necklace until we just kinda sorta stop. And that’s fine with life, because after all we’re living it. But it sucks for stories.

Stories are not life. Stories are fashioned things, and they provide us with things life cannot.

Peyton Place fails the further it goes, as these kind of things tend to do. For whatever reason, these type of novels tend to shoot their load early, giving us all the effective incidents in the first part. It also gets more shrill as it goes on: these sorts of books That Try To Reproduce Life In All of It’s Truthfulness generally have missionary leanings, and that’s particularly true of Peyton Place, which in the end boils down to that tired “if only we were more frank and open about sex life would be better” bit that apparently sounded so fresh in the Fifties.

But while I can’t recommend it as a piece of fiction, it’s interesting to read if you’re interested in the history of fiction, particular in how American popular fiction has gone in the post WW II period. Metalious’s vision of small town life: a hotbed of repression, a wandering omniscient viewpoint, an episodic style, a reportorial vibe with an implicit point of view -- this has been profoundly influential in American fiction. It’s hard to think of ‘Salem’s Lot, to pick a novel off the top of my head, without Peyton Place. Whether that’s a good thing or not is a matter for another piece, though.

I also think Metalious’s life is interesting, especially for writers. She embodies a lot of the hopes and nightmares of the American writer: she struggles, suffers setbacks, hits it incredibly big, becomes very rich, blows it all, can’t ever reproduce her original success, and dies regretting it all. There’s something almost parable-like in her life -- hell, this may be one of the few biopics I actually go to.

Worth cautiously dipping into, I’d say.

Jones online

2007-04-15T18:53:00.000-04:00

This is a reasonable piece on Jones, albeit rather more adulatory than I would be. It does talk, interestingly enough, about Some Came Running, a book that's almost impossible to find nowadays but one I'm very interested in. I have generally come to the conclusion that the books writers feel are their best usually are their best. Especially if the writer is worth any salt to begin with.

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/i/ice-cream-headache.shtml

David Foster Wallace has listed The Thin Red Line as one of his favorite books. It's sandwiched between Red Dragon and Fear of Flying:

http://howithappened.com/2007/03/foster-wallaces-top-ten-books.html

There's some other stuff out there, but I don't feel like chasing it down right now.

Quick Look: James Jones

2007-04-15T18:35:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this thing. Hey, I was sick.
Anyway, Jones. I read From Here to Eternity -- at least as much of it as I could get through -- and The Thin Red Line -- ditto -- awhile back. I found Jones a frustrating experience.

He’s frustrating because he’s so damn good in miniature. Parts of both books are just extremely good, so good that you can’t quite believe you’re reading something that good -- but it just fails to cohere as a whole.

Since my rhythm’s all off this is going to have to be shorter than I intended, as I don’t even have my copy of From Here anymore to refer to. Originally I intended this to be a rather long piece, as I think Jones, while by no means a good writer, is an extremely interesting writer to look at, particularly in an historical context. But well, hell’s bells and all that. We work with what’s given us.

From Here has a drive and push and an authenticity which feels wholly lacking in somebody like Irwin Shaw, who’s The Young Lions, while it has it’s virtues, does feel like an upscale Boho’s feeling of What War Must Be Really Like. In short bursts it’s a wonderful book -- the scene in the bordello, the fake marriage of the officer and his wife (see, I don’t have the book here, I can’t even remember their names), the slow torture of Prewitt when he refuses to join up the boxing brigade, etc. This is all great stuff.

But it’s all in the service of this: “Will Prewitt join the boxing team or not?” Yes, I know Jones tries to imbue this with some kind of mythic significance, that it’s some kind of eternal battle writ small. Yeah, yeah, I get it. That doesn’t change the primary fact that in the “real world” of the book, we’re asked to participate in an epic about Whether or Not Prewitt Will Join the Boxing Squad. I mean, a lot of fuss and bother about not much of anything.

And yeah, I get the idea that the eventual Pearl Harbor attack makes this all sort of meaningless, too. But that just butresses my point: I’m being asked to devote almost a thousand pages to pointlessness, when you get right down to it, and at the end of the day I’m asked to celebrate the giant waste of time this involved.

It’s frustrating. It’s like being roped into a club being promised Live! Naked! Girls! and discovering all you get is a Borscht Belt comedian. It’s like staying up late to watch a Shannon Tweed movie but she doesn’t get naked. All tease, no follow-through.

I’ve been reading a lot of novels from this period (immediate post WW2) and I plan on reading a lot more, and I’ve become absolutely convinced that the besetting sin of this era was the English Class attempt to write The Great American Novel. A hopelessly middlebrow project, and writers inevitably crashed on the shoals of this mirage. People were so interested in writing something meaningful they lost their focus on writing something good.

From Here to Eternity would’ve worked much better as a series of short stories, this is a collection of small ideas that is simply afflicted with hardcore bloat.

The Thin Red Line actually has a storyline all wrapped up and handed to it -- it’s about the battle of Guadalcanal, or as near as dammit, anyway. And it’s better than Eternity, at least it’s about something real and important. And as always, Jones’s view of the army, and of war, and of what men do there seems dead-on accurate. I also particularly like Jones’s use of pov here: there is no one set protagonist -- the brigade itself is the protagonist -- and Jones travels like God over all of them, dipping into their minds when he needs to. It’s quite smart, and rather more sophisticated than the rather off-the-rack structure of Eternity (which even features two straightup love stories, one done reasonably well, one shoehorned in and, well, not so much.)

But I ended up giving up on this one, too. It seemed to me that Jones has his say in about the first hundred pages or so -- and after that it goes on, and on, and on, restating the same damn thing over and over again. It too suffers from bloat, just not as much. Line would’ve worked better as a novella, I think. (Or novelette. Do they still call them that?) I would’ve ended things after the attack on the Elephant, myself.

Jones was a small talent trying to conform to the market and sociological realities of his day; he’s an interesting example of how an artist who doesn’t really understand himself can be subsumed by the world around him. There are nuggets of value in these books, but I think in general Jones has to be considered a failed writer. His vision feels too compromised.

Short Takes: Walker Percy

2007-02-10T21:31:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about doing a long piece on Percy, but really, what’s the point. A somewhat interesting, though very weird thinker (an oddball cross between Catholic apologetics and semiotics, of all things, check out either The Message in the Bottle or Lost in the Cosmos if that sounds interesting to you) his novels are good examples of the problem of the "idea novelist", which is basically that unless you’re the one in a million guy who can both relate ideas and tell stories, the whole thing’s going to be out of whack. And it usually works out to be on the story side of things.

The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award for some reason in 1961, has one good idea (moviegoing as a metaphor for the mediated life and the problem of existence in twentieth century America) embedded in a narrative that goes absolutely nowhere. Ditto for The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, both of which have a lot of interesting ideas -- ideas you will better appreciate in either Message or Lost.

Percy seems to have had some sense that his story skills were lacking, and on a couple of occasions, Lancelot and The Thanatos Syndrome, actively tried to dramatize his ideas. He succeeded, sort of, in Lancelot, which is probably his best book considered as a novel. A confession of a man who kills his wife, his wife’s lover, and a couple sundry other folk, it has a kind of internal drive that a lot of Percy’s books lack, and, like Shaw (and I suspect a lot of writers) the chance to actively create an evil character -- or try to -- freed him up somewhat from the rather lugubrious characterizations that you find in, say, The Second Coming. (Lancelot is much more of a person, in other words, much less of an illustration of an idea). The book still suffers from being overly-weighed down by Percy’s hobby-horses, though, in particular an odd obsession with sexual perversion as sin. One can’t help but feel that Percy decided somewhere along the way that dammit, he had to say what he had to say, whether it threw his book off-balance or what. Thanatos is a stab at something along these lines, although it lacks the push of Lancelot and seems a lot more ham-handed all around: the book equivalent of watching your Dad try to appreciate your Slayer records.

You can probably just go without, although if you must I’d go for the two nonfiction books: Lost in the Cosmos, in particular, almost functions as an introduction to semiotics and, as such, of postmodern thought.

There’s plenty of stuff online about Percy -- knock yourself out.

Short Takes: Thomas Tryon

2007-01-19T22:32:00.000-05:00

Thomas Tryon was a fascinating writer, if only an intermittantly successful one.

Tryon was a closeted gay man, and for many years had a modest, but real, career as an actor . (He's probably best known nowaday for I Married a Monster From Outer Space.) These experiences -- particularly the acting experience, I think -- give his books interesting resonances.

The Other, for instance, is in large part of the fear of acting, the fear, more fundamentally, of make believe itself. A sensitive kid in a small town learns to empathize with and mimic the behavior of other creatures -- essentially he learns to act. Unfortunately he actually does the same thing with the "spirit" of his evil dead twin brother, who drowned in the well while he was strangling the cat. (Very nicely, it's left quite ambiguous what the kid's doing. Is the evil twin "alive" in reality? As an aspect of the "good" twin?) We learn this, and after the reveal the rest of the book is a really interesting meditation on the horrific consequences of acting, as the kid, in avoiding reality (communing with the dead?) loses himself (becomes possessed?).

I suspect one of the major influences here was Something Wicked This Way Comes, based partly on the nostalgic-small town-with-horror-within feel, and partly on the lush, occasionally poetic language. And indeed in spots it's rather beautifully written. But...well, I just don't think it works on a basic technical level.

I really admire The Other in a lot of ways, and I wish I could like it. But I just don't think it makes much sense as a crafted story. The pov is all over the place, and sometimes you can get away with that but when it's something like this, which mainly depends on it's effect by manipulating the pov, well you got issues. Sometimes we're attached to the kid. Sometimes the grandmother. Sometimes other characters. Sometimes it's omniscient. Sometimes it's wryly commenting on the action. Sometimes it's the kid, but later, supposedly telling us the story. And it just doesn't make sense, we can't believe that the kid looking back would tell the story in the same way that the story is actually told. This is almost a model of pov problems, a textbook of how things can go wrong.

Harvest Home is a longer, more conventional novel. A bourgeois NYC family moves to one of those strange small villages you're always reading about in these kind of books, this one in Connecticut. They soon discover that the women in town are flatout pagans who, among all sorts of other things, commit human sacrifice.

I think Harvest Home is a reasonably good book. Not a great book -- some structural weaknesses show up here and there. In order for the ending to work the circumstances have to be exactly right, and often it feels like Tryon is leaning a bit too hard on the contrivances here and there -- most notably, it takes forever for the narrator to catch on to the central reveal, even though it's been screaming itself hoarse in the reader's face for pages. (I do think the final surprise climax is quite well handled, though, and genuinely shocking if you're not prepared for it.)

I like the setting of the town, which I think is far better handled than the occasionally gloppy The Other. In fact, this strikes me as that relative rarity, a true picture of small town life, with all of it's glories and pains. There's more control here with the gothic imagery and especially the pov: Tryon seems to have learned the lessons of The Other, which is always gratifying. And while I don't really think it's a "good" thing, there's a very interesting misogynistic streak here. In Harvest Home all of the women are in on the plot, or at least are susceptible of being in on the plot, and all of the men, no matter what their pretensions, are ultimately their victims.

I haven't read other Tryons, but am curious if he continued to grow as a writer -- my guess is that he did to a point, although I wonder what he did once he exhausted his immediate inspirations: acting, small town life, etc.

Couldn't find much of anything on Tryon except for the wiki -- I"m getting tired of linking to these wiki pieces, go ahead and search for it yourself.

Go on, you can do it.

It's one of the better wikis, actually, fairly detailed. I rather suspect somebody who knew Tryon was involved with some of it -- how else can an interesting (albeit minor) writer get this level of coverage while Dashiell friggin' Hammett gets suchs a crappy wiki entry? Other than that, though, nothing. Although there was apparently another Thomas Tryon, a famous early proponent of vegetarianism in Britain. The things you learn online.

Short Takes: Richard Adams, WATERSHIP DOWN

2007-01-01T20:39:00.000-05:00

Pity the man who writes one great work and never matches it again, for he will always be competing with some ever-fainter remembered moment of his past. Adams is still alive, I think, and no doubt is still plugging away on something somewhere, but nobody cares about Traveller or Maia. They care about Watership Down.

This was the fourth or fifth time through this for me. For those of you who don't know it, Watership Down is a modern fantasy classic, the story of a group of rabbits who flee their warren before it's decimated, and the adventures they have in establishing their new home on, well, Watership Down.

This time through a couple of things struck me. One is that it's really a classic adventure tale in the British mode, with Hazel as the epitome of a certain kind of British masculinity (there's a great bit late in the book where Hazel tries to parlay with the Efrafra warren -- he's seen as being very quiet and unassuming and seemingly nothing very special, another expression of the British ideal of the competent man who takes care of business in a quiet way); Bigwig as his loyal sergeant, all muscle but needed Hazel's firm leadership; Blackberry as the Idea Guy; Dandelion as the Artist; etc. You could imagine this squad of rabbits as a squad of soldiers in, say, Europe around World War 2 -- a lot of what they're doing is much like a classic British war film, with a squad in hostile territory executing missions, etc. I'm curious what Adams's experiences in World War 2 were, actually.

But there's a couple of other elements in here that really set this apart from the typical anthropomorphized animal tale. People often talk about how the rabbits are always discernably rabbits, and not, say, Commander Carruthers and his squad in fancy dress. They also talk about the world that Adams builds around his merry band, most notably in the really great folk-tales of El-Ahrairah, but also in the little details -- what they swear by, how they count, etc.

That's all true, and all worth noting. But the aspect I like best is the character of Fiver, definitely my favorite character in the book. This is a British war movie, essentially, except for Fiver, who feels dropped in from a completely different, much darker sort of story. Most of the fantasy elements in the story come from Fiver, and he has a kind of charisma, which in literary terms essentially means an intrinsic fascination. He suggests a darker, more complicated world lying just behind the events of the story, stranger unsaid possibilities. And it is that which is really what pushes Down into the fantasy realms.

My favorite chapter in the book is "Fiver Beyond", which is a straight-up mystical vision. Watership Down is generally very well written in that quiet assured kind of British way, but this chapter is something very special. Check it out. Oddly Fiver isn't discussed as much as other elements in the novel -- don't ask me why.

Unlike a lot of the authors I've been talking about here, Watership Down is talked about a lot on the web. There's even a roleplaying game out there called "Burrows and Bunnies", believe it or not. I am a fluffy bunny rabbit! My primary skill is lettuce chewing! My secondary skill is being eaten! I have +5 eyes of cuteness!

Here's the wiki, most interesting for it's shot of a first edition of Watership:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down

Here's a standard, but good, take on the novel, from some rpg site:

http://ww2.wizards.com/books/Wizards/default.aspx?doc=main_classicswatership

Here somebody has tracked down a bunch of links, so I don't have to. Warning: a lame spelling of "cool" contained therein:

http://isisweb.8m.com/watership/links.htm

And here's an interesting page talking about variations in the edtions. Scholars love crap like this:

http://www.helsinki.fi/~peuha/english/watership/

That's enough for me, though there's more out there, including a Yahoo discussion group.

Robertson Davies -- Information

2006-12-24T19:35:00.000-05:00

Here's the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Davies

Pretty standard stuff, though apparently some alternative band quoted Davies once. This chimes in with my own experience: I was reading World of Wonders outside of a Whole Foods one day and a tattooed hipster said something like "Dude! Great book!" Who knew Davies would become hip, of all things?

A general collection of links, saving me from doing a lot of it:

http://www.athabascau.ca/writers/rdavies.html

Here's an authentic Robertson Davies page. Best for the reproduced interview from American Way, absurdly one of those inflight magazines. People interview writers in inflight magazines? Huh? I thought they were filled with ads for overpriced stuff at the airport and things like " ten wines that will stretch your budget":

http://www.amk.ca/davies/

And here's an interesting piece from First Things, although I think it's mainly interesting for being exactly wrong on the guy, up and down the pike:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=501

Robertson Davies part two

2006-12-15T23:01:00.000-05:00

Davies’s one genuine classic is Fifth Business. It’s a masterpiece, and the only book of his I really recommend wholeheartedly. It’s the one time that all of his forces: Anglophilia, a sense of comedy, polymath erudition (you’ll learn a lot about hagiography here), and the notion of a man’s life as a spiritual autobiography that can reflect all of our lives (Davies’s interest in Jungian archetypes begins here) was held perfectly in balance.

As is often the case, it’s harder to talk about a book you love than a book that you hate. I would say that Fifth Business has an actual plot, with a very impressive ending, which helps things a lot. Davies is also a lot more tightly reined in here: his flights on hagiography make sense in term of the character of the protagonist, who has become obsessed with the sense of the miraculous in the mundane. Also, and it’s kind of sad, given the amount of attention this kind of stuff is given later in Davies career, this is the only place I know of where the mystical enters the mundane world with just the right sort of impact. Like many an academician, Davies had a real tendency to over-explain everything – and this is the sort of thing that doesn’t bear the weight of much explanation. This is the only time I really think he hit it right.

Oh, and A Prayer for Owen Meany owes a hell of a lot to this book.

Davies never hit that peak again, although the two immediate follow-ups have their moments. The Manticore, most of it, anyway, is Davies best stab at a spiritual autobiography using Jungian archetypes. As I said to a friend, it’s one of the best examples I know in literature of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately Davies gets our hero off the couch for the final third of the book, and it’s a mistake – the ending is rushed and lazy and just not worth getting into. World of Wonders is another one of Davies spiritual autobiographies of an artist – here a magician. The first part, dealing with Magnus Eisengram’s adventures with carny folk, is really first rate – Davies puts a lot of his varied learning to good play here, the carny stuff is incredibly interesting – it turns out a Dickensonian take on the carnival, which when you see it in fiction is usually presented in a hardboiled way – is the rarity, a fresh look. Unfortunately World soon shifts gears to the theater, and while Davies is enthusiastic, I found the whole thing a pretty dreadful slog. Davies is to theater writing what George Will is to baseball writing: he tries hard, but, well, you’d rather not.

After that it’s all a pretty dreadful slog. Some people do like the Cornish trilogy: I personally find The Rebel Angels tedious (and not especially an accurate picture of academia) and The Lyre of Orpheus just absolutely awful, Davies at his worst, all out of control with his musings on gypsies, sex, cuckoldry, uses of myth, uses of art, the ways art plays into myth, how an artist is formed, what he/she needs, etc. I know, it sounds fascinating, but it’s not, it’s tiresome, a crank’s opinions strung out interminably. This is what happens when you have no discipline; yeah, verily, this is what happens when you don’t have an editor.

These two novels buttress What’s Bred in the Bone, which has it’s admirers but is not one of my favorites, mainly because Davies here is excessively taken with the notion of counterfeiting as an artistic stance, essentially. Certainly would make an interesting essay, not so much an interesting novel -- the drum is beat mercilessly for it. We also see a final sort of perversion of a device that worked reasonably well in The Manticore: a Socratic dialog in which one person is all-knowing and the other one’s a putz, and the dialog is really there just to point up how putzy (is that a word? Now it is!) this guy really is. That’ll work when you’re looking at psychoanalysis, since that’s essentially the dynamic that’s taking place, but life ain’t psychoanalysis.

I read online a critic quoted saying that when you first look at Davies, you think you see a lake miles across, but when you dip a toe into it, you’re shocked to see it’s only an inch deep. That’s a bit harsh, although there’s something to the snark: Davies is really like John Dickson Carr in a lot of ways, he apes classic British writing so well you expect you’re going to get classic British breadth, but in point of fact both men’s reach was quite short. It matters little with Carr, who never wanted to be anything more than an updated Gothic writer, I think, but Davies is trying to play on a bigger court, and there it shows. Reading a lot of Davies back to back points it up, too -- but hell, you could say that about anybody.

What I would say is that Davies really only had one story to tell after the journeyman/prepatory work of the Salterton trilogy: something like “a spiritual autobiography of a kind of creative man who learns lessons and experiences mythic occurances both extreme and subtle that bring light to us all”. Something like that. And he tries it again and again and again and he got it just right with Fifth Business, and thereafter never balanced the seesaw properly. But hey, if any of us can cough up a Fifth Business we’d be lucky men, so let’s not sneer too loudly.

Generally overrated, but he had his moments.

Robertson Davies

2006-12-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

I’ve talked elsewhere here about how one of the things that people want out of a book is knowledge. People want to learn things – it’s the only way to explain the popularity of somebody like Arthur Hailey.

Let’s push this a bit further. I think lurking at the heart of this is the notion, deep in the reader’s soul, that the writer has wisdom. (The way that there’s a deep, almost unacknowledged sense that the musician or, to a lesser extent, the artist has passion). Now, of course a moment’s sober reflection is enough to bring to mind countless foolish or silly writers. Yet the notion continues. I think deep in Western civilization’s soul lies this idea that the writer, if not exactly a better person than the common Joe or Jane, is at least a different sort of person, set apart in some kind of fundamental way.

Thus the higher end version of somebody like Arthur Hailey, who tries to teach you how an airport works, is somebody like Robertson Davies, who tries to teach you how to live.

Davies was once well-known – so well-known that he was seriously bandied about for the Nobel Prize. Nowadays – not so much. Although a cult-like following persists, and I rather expect some of his books, most notably Fifth Business, will survive.

Davies was an Anglophile, and like a lot of these sorts – John Dickson Carr leaps to mind – he was more British than British. Although theoretically taking place in Canada, you could change the place names to English ones and it wouldn’t make much difference. For all of his fussing about Canada and what it is and what its people are like, none of his books feel exceptionally Canadian to me. Of course, considering I’ve actually never been to Canada, don’t know any Canadians, and have not even really thought all that much about Canada, you might fairly ask what I think “authentically Canadian” really is. And honestly, I don’t have an idea.

But I know this ain’t it.

Davies’s reputation is based on three trilogies. He started out with the very cautious Salterton trilogy: Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, and A Mixture of Frailties. These are small city comedies in what I suspect was intended to be the Trollope mold: that is, while they have their humorous moments, they’re mainly meant to be gentle meditations on life. There’s a happy ending, but you’ll get some painful moments too – that kind of thing.

They’re basically early efforts, Davies learning his voice and craft. Tempest-Tost centers around a small-town production of, um, The Tempest. A lot of interesting details of how one puts together this kind of production, and some good pictures of the local townsfolk, but it doesn’t have much by way of a story. Leaven of Malice actually has a plot – it even ends with a marriage (or at least an announcement of one) – but it’s not a particularly interesting plot, and it’s not hard for the reader to detect the locus of authorial interest and energy in the accounts of a smallish newspaper, sort of the sideshow of the thing.

The most interesting of the three is A Mixture of Frailties, which is the first appearance of the “biography of the artist seen as a spiritual exploration”, a kind of thing Davies would tackle again (What’s Bred in the Bone, most interestingly in World of Wonders). I think Davies is pretty good as this notoriously hard-to-manage kind of thing, and I think the secret is that he focuses on the performing arts (magic, acting, singing, interestingly, connoisseurship). This enables him to dramatize the kind of things that, for an artist, are usually pretty internal. And, more basically, these kinds of people just generally get out and do more interesting things, inherently.

I don’t think Frailties is a great book, it still feels hesitant to me (like this whole series, actually) and female characters are not Davies strong suit, but it’s the best of the Salterton Trilogy and would most clearly show Davies’s path.

End of Part One.

Louis Auchincloss - information

2006-12-07T19:07:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of special pleading for Auchincloss. Here's the very best example I found, Bruce Bawer (who should write on books more often):

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/auchincloss-review.html

But even he has to carefully delinate and circumscibe everything: yeah, he only deals with a certain subsection of America, yeah, his concerns are limited, etc.

This is the more unreflective kind of special pleading. This is the kind of thing that made me cancel my New Criterion subscription:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/16/oct97/tuttle.htm

This is also the kind of thing that makes people treat conservative critics less seriously. One has the sneaking feeling Auchincloss is admired mainly because he's talking about "our" kind of people.

Here's the other typical assessment of Auchincloss, just sheer goggle-eyed amazement that the poor bastard is here doing what he's doing at all:

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/10790/

Which may be the most honest reaction, actually. His books aren't really interesting, but he is.

Louis Auchincloss

2006-12-03T09:45:00.000-05:00

Auchincloss is primarily a short story writer. In his introduction to his Collected Short Stories, he genially says that he thinks some of his best work is in the short form. But in fact even his most famous novel, The Rector of Justin, isn't a long form story so much as it's a series of shorter works, with the main character the connecting thread.

It is extemely interesting that Auchincloss once had a bestselling book, with Justin. Nowadays, to the extent that one thinks of him at all, one sees him as a nice grandfatherly type relegated to the back pages of The New Criterion, sipping sherry and writing notes on Edith Wharton. Hard to imagine Auchincloss as young. My copy of Tales of Manhattan had a picture of Auchincloss with presumably his kid. It was forty years ago and he looks old there.

Auchincloss is plowing the same field that Marquand did, and many others have -- "the decline and fall of the gentry", with "the gentry" being variously defined. Marquand was obsessed with the reality of the notion itself; Auchincloss more or less takes the decline for granted, as a jumping off point. This gives the writers varying strengths and weaknesses. Marquand meant it so damn hard that much of his work has the humorless thudding feel of a tract.. Yet when it works, as I think it mostly does in Point of No Return, it has an undeniable power. Auchincloss is a much better, much more consistent line by line writer than Marquand ever was, and his work has a sprightliness,, a bounce and a sense of humor that's often sorely needed in Marquand. On the other hand, a lot of Auchincloss feels like a genial waste of time. The poor old duffer would probably keel over if I told him this, but a lot of his work feels to me like very highbrow Judith Krantz. It has the same sort of voyeuristic peek into the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the same sort of "secret sharer" mentality that pervades a lot of this kind of writing. Of couse, Auchincloss is more acerbic and ironic about it than Krantz, but I'm not really sure that equals out to "depth", Henry James references or no Henry James references.

So I think he's basically skippable. You're not going to get much bang for your buck here. Auchincloss is usually pretty good with scene-setting, and he usually tosses in some interesting reflections about character along the way, but I don't know if that makes up for actually having to plow through The House of Five Talents, say. Again, it's interesting Auchincloss was once a bestselling author. Times were certainly different in the mid Sixties.

What's really needed is a sympathetic editor who can go over Auchincloss's complete work and pull out the best bits. If there was ever an author who's screaming for one of those "Portable" anthologies, it's Auchincloss. As I said, even his novels are really short story cycles in drag, it's not like you're going to miss much by way of context. In the meantime, if you really must, The Rector of Justin is easily available and fairly representative of the kind of thing Auchincloss does. Charting the life of the founder of an exclusive private school, it is quite readable, very evocative, and often very wise and knowing about humans and their frailities. One does finish it, though, wondering what the hell all the fuss and bother was for.

Irving Wallace

2006-09-24T17:54:00.000-04:00

After all that highbrow stuff I thought it was time for something decidedly trashy. At first glance it would be harder to get trashier than Irving Wallace – take a look at that picture of The Fan Club and you’ll see what I mean.

But actually, Wallace is kind of dull. This is the odd part about trash – a lot of it isn’t nearly as trashy as it could be, or should be. People really need to get their priorities straight: nobody wants to read something like The Chapman Report to really learn about the academic study of sex. People want to read these things for the lurid details.

That seems painfully obvious to me, although somehow people have missed it along the way. I think there are aspirational issues here: nobody wants to be the sordid smut purveyor, apparently. Even though he provides a humble but real service, while the boring guy trying to make something more out of it is just, well, boring.

I picked four novels from him: somehow it’s impossible to find a copy of The Seven Minutes cheaply, or I would’ve picked that up, too. I think I hit the high spots: Wallace’s dalliances with pre Dan Brown Christian Conspiracies in The Word didn’t interest me, nor his attempt to hook up to the Watergate Conspiracy bandwagon with The R Document. I have fond memories of The Second Lady, which I read when I was an impressionable teenager – it’s a ridiculous spy story where the First Lady is replaced by the Commies with her identical copy, and features a lot of First Lady sex. Probably best that be left a hazy, warm memory, though. After Barbara Bush, no one wants to think about that.

The Chapman Report is roughly based on Kinsey: a sex researcher (or sexologist or whatever ridiculous term they’ve coined for themselves nowadays) goes to an American suburban town to report on what the housewives are doing behind closed doors. Much talk talk talktalktalktalk. Not enough sex. A touchingly naïve belief in the therapeutic power of The Orgasm in between all the talktalktalktalktalk. Really dull.

The Prize – A bunch of ridiculously hot-to-trot Nobel Prize winners have a bunch of ridiculous adventures prior to claiming their prize. Absurd premise might be fun, but it's weighed down with a lot of dreary lectures describing the history of a prize nobody gives a shit about anymore. Avoid.

The Man – through a miracle of screwed-uppedness, somehow an African-American becomes President. Enormous bestseller is truly a case for the existence of God, as it would not have been nearly so successful if it hadn’t appeared in 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights era. I rather like Drury’s Advise and Consent, but he has a lot to answer for, as his novel inspired a ton of dull imitators, including this one. And at least Drury understood Washington, whereas I have no feeling Wallace does.

The Fan Club – This was the most interesting of the batch Its also not a very good book, but I’ll explain why it’s interesting before I explain why it’s not very good.

The novel details a plan by four “average American males” to kidnap and repeatedly force their attentions on a sexpot movie actress who they all idealize. They actually accomplish their aims, and the rest of the book describes the mind games the woman plays with the men and vice versa., before she finally escapes.

This is actually a very interesting idea, and in the hands of the right writer – I’m thinking Hollenbecq – one could use it to have a lot to say about masculinity in the post-Sixties age, the was sex has become commodified, the morality of love, inequities, etc. Tart it up a bit – make her a porno actress, say – and you can imagine Martin Amis giving it a go, too.

Unfortunately there’s a lot lacking in the execution. The men are a little too obviously types. Wallace indulges repeatedly in his unfortunate penchant for speechifying. The book resolves itself into a standard genre thriller, in the most banal kind of way, whereas the setup cries out for a heavy French “Eeet is soo meaningless” kind of vibe.

So not good either. But somebody should take another crack at this idea.

Here's the wiki on Wallace:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Wallace

Dig that cover for Fan Club reproduced there. You want to know what the Seventies were all about in publishing? That's what it was.

Here's the kirjasto piece, rather more literate, although rather more kind than Wallace than probably makes sense:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/iwallace.htm

You can also see Wallace's grave online somewhere, although my slow connection can't load it properly.

Irwin Shaw -- Information

2006-09-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

Here's the kirjasto piece:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ishaw.htm

It's basically the party line on Shaw: esteemed, not much read nowadays. Personally I think Shaw would've preferred to be a little less revered and a little more read.

Look, I'm not saying Shaw's short stories are bad. They're well crafted, esteemable attempts at what he tried to do. I just don't think his goals were that interesting. "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is a well wrought, even fussily wrought, piece of nothing, ultimately.

Speaking of "Girls", if you google Shaw you'll find a link to read that story online. I have my doubts the Shaw estate knows and approves, hence my not including the link. But in the interest of the free flow of information and all that.

Here's a tedious review of Five Decades. Hackwriters indeed:

http://www.hackwriters.com/Irwin.htm

Mr. Schneider alternates between plot summaries and the usual airy nothings that get written about this kind of fiction. See? This is where non-engagement ultimately takes you.

The Paris Review is very nicely putting out all of their old interviews online for free. Here's the Shaw one:

http://theparisreview.org/media/5157_SHAW.pdf

He comes across quite nicely, in a humorously curmudgeonly kind of way. Outside of the no-doubt inevitable romanticization of his past, I thought he had a lot of wise things to say about writers and failure, writers and success, how one thinks about writing. He's also (unusually) wise about his own writing -- I quite agree, Shaw is anything but a moralist. Miss that and you miss him completely.

And finally, the best is saved for last. I introduce you trembingly to the great Ramesh Avadhani, who's living and loving it up in Bangalore India.

http://livingandlovinginbangalore.blogspot.com/2006/05/irwin-shaw.html

I think this is going to be a regular stop for me from here on out.

Irwin Shaw Part Two

2006-09-23T15:38:00.000-04:00

Shaw wrote a lot of novels, and I’ve read a few of ‘em: The Top of the Hill, Two Weeks in Another Town, part of Acceptable Losses. None of them were especially good, and really it doesn’t matter, because the two novels Shaw is known for are The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man.

A writer like Shaw generally shines when he’s given a prefab storyline: all of the nuts and bolts of plot development are pretty much a given, and he has the freedom to display his gifts in the best possible light. So a big World War Two novel from him seems in retrospect really like a given, and I would venture to say The Young Lions is one of the better of that group.

You may have seen the movie, during one of its interminable plays on American Movie Classics, during the days when it actually was a decent station. The book, a sprawling epic, follows three men throughout the war: one an idealistic German who’s gradually corrupted by Nazism; an earnest, idealistic young Jew; and a cynical entertainer who sees the war as a kind of redemption.

I think this is mostly a pretty good book. The Nazi sections are exceptionally good: as was always the case with Shaw, the emotional distance seems to have done something for him aesthetically: I truly think this is one of the better portrayals of a Nazi in American fiction. Christian (the irony is a little heavy) starts out the war as a Nazi, but also as an idealistic young man who sees in Fascism some kind of hope for his country. By the end of the story he’s a war-ravaged mess, given over soley to killing. James Salter, who was always a sap, got it exactly wrong: the real emotional crescendo of the book isn’t Noah’s (the saint manqué ‘s) death, it’s Christian’s exhausted flashback, for a second, to the man he once was. I just reread it again, and it still packs a punch.

The second storyline – Noah’s – and the third storyline – Michael’s – aren’t as powerful, but both have their moments. I get a little sick of Shaw’s ridiculous Heroic Ethnic Jew, but despite that some of the early basic training sections of Noah’s have their moment. Shaw also gives us a glimpse of his pop potential: it’s important to understand Young Lions was not originally thought of in those terms (and still isn’t, hence the U Chicago reprint and Salter’s intro.), but the romance here is sentimental. In a good, satisfying sort of way. I also like some of Michael’s early scenes which showcases very wisely the ambivalent posture of the leisure classes in America before the advent of the War.

Shaw’s reliance on the “true plot” of WW Two carries him through most of the rough stuff – with, again, Christian’s sections packing the most punch. The book falls apart near the final quarter, when the plot demands suddenly slam down hard on the narrative. This, I think, tends to be an abiding weakness with writers of this sort: they’re unfamiliar with plot, and so when they have to exercise it they overcompensate. Marquand, who slogged along for many years in the pulp underground, would never have gotten so heavy-handed at the climax.

So not perfect. An unfamiliarity with plot and a curious reluctance to fully commit to the most interesting character of the book (this book would’ve been much improved if it had centered on Christian), is a problem. But it mostly works, and allows Shaw to show off his talent for minature scenes while pairing them up against a storyline of real power and import, the kind of thing I think his short fiction too often lacks.

Rich Man, Poor Man was Shaw’s big hit: it was one of the first mini-series (maybe the first) with Nick Nolte and I think Peter Strauss. I don’t remember watching it, a tad before my time, but I vaguely remember the ads. It’s a popular take on that old standby, the sweeping family saga – we watch our family as their destiny ebbs and flows through the years.

The book has the same basic flaws that The Young Lions had, but worse. Whereas Lions only really fell apart in the final quarter or so, I’d say Rich Man's second half is mostly pretty shabby all around. Family sagas aren’t interesting in and of themselves, you know, except maybe to the participants concerned. They’re only interesting if they actually do something interesting, and while Shaw gives it the old college go, he’s not a good enough plotter to make the second half of Rich Man interesting. (A lot of things happen, but none of it has a lot of weight. It’s a lot of incidents strung together – here we see Shaw’s primary weakness of writing in minature.) It’s a strangely dull book, for all of the contrivances these poor saps fall into.

There’s also a curious unwillingness to fully explore the unpleasant characters: the two most interesting of ‘em are the father and the “bad” son, but the father dies off quickly and the bad son gets more complicated and less interesting as time goes on, and we spend too much time on the dreadfully dull, self-involved sister.

Some of the early sections do work, especially the “bad’ son’s odd semi-incestuous class rage on discovering his sister’s dalliance with the local richboy lush, and the father’s death, which has a genuine grim kind of power. But there’s better stuff out there than this shambling failure.

I am curious about the mini-series, though.

Irwin Shaw

2006-09-14T22:08:00.000-04:00

When I was talking about John P. Marquand, I was talking about “directed” writers, writers who are looking to tell the reader something, who sit down not just with pen and paper, but with a definite theme in mind. I contrasted that with “non-directed” writers, who care more about the other aspects of fiction: characterization, scene-setting, and the like. Yes, admittedly this division is somewhat arbitrary, but people who read a lot know what I mean. It’s not hard to tell the difference.

It’s not a value judgement, though it might seem that way at first glance. Yes, I guess all things being equal I would prefer to see writers who care about the art of fiction, not a message. There’s nothing entertaining about somebody preaching to you. But it’s very easy to think of great writers who were “directed”, and lousy writers who were not. And it should be said that at least a directed writer isn’t going to waste your time. Good, bad, or indifferent, you’re at least sitting down and standing back up and something’s been accomplished in the interim. Whereas non-directed writers, the one’s who suck, anyway, do tend to make one weep out of tedium.

Irwin Shaw is a good example of a non-directed writer. He had real talents, but they tended to be in minature – it’s not a surprise that to the extent he’s remembered at all nowadays he’s remembered as a short story writer. His novels tend to fall apart, especially when the plot demands kick in. Yet he grew rich and famous off of these books: Rich Man, Poor Man was the source material for one of the earliest mini-series. Unlike Marquand, who’s success I still see as something of a puzzle, it’s not hard to understand why Shaw became famous. People love big books you can just drop into and disappear. I do, anyway.

But for now the short stories. Are they any good? Well, do you like the typical sort of New Yorker short story? The one where all the action is revolved around a kind of epiphany for the main character? Shaw’s stories all tend to follow that formula. I personally am skeptical of that kind of story, mainly because for it to work the writer has to really have an observant take on the human condition, and Shaw doesn’t strike me as having anything especially important or interesting to relate. I read through the Five Decades collection and some themes do tend to repeat themselves: a mistaken notion that ethnic Judaism is in and of itself interesting; a mistaken notion that athletics, especially football, have something to say about the human struggle; a notion that defeat lies in the heart of even the happiest moment, which I guess is true more or less but seems rather banal to me.

They’re not badly written by any means. They’re smooth and they bop off the page nicely and the whole thing’s carefully crafted to showcase the epiphany in the best possible light. I just think it’s an uninteresting thing to try and do.

“The Eighty Yard Run” is probably his most famous story: A football hero has the highlight of his moment in a big college game and it all goes downhill from there. Every painful moment of his slide is carefully and painstakingly presented, with every last bit of empathy carefully wrung out of the situation, but in the end it all seems pretty meaningless to me. Nobody’s on top forever – this is profound how, exactly? It doesn’t help that our protagonist is so unlikable at the start of the story: One spends one's time sort of hoping the guy would fall, and fall hard, just to get that smug self-assurance off of his face.

(One of Shaw’s peculiarities is that he’s rather better at writing unsympathetic characters than ones he obviously feels something for. We’ll touch on this later with The Young Lions, but for now I’d like to point out that he obviously clearly identifies with his faded sports hero, and seems to take for granted a kind of identification that in fact he needs to earn.)

Shaw did write one short story that I really like, and would recommend to anybody. In “Sailor off the Bremen”, a group of men and a woman take a violent revenge on a sailor who had seriously wounded one of theirs. It is more Hemingwayesque in tone than many of his others, and all the better for that . But more, it transforms Shaw’s general feelings about the endless cycle of pain and loss in life into something active. It’s always better when you can dramatize a feeling, rather than crystallize it into an epiphany. Stories should flow, move. “Bremen” is also worthwhile for showcasing one thing that Shaw does very well: writing about violence and its effect on men. This was something Shaw understood first hand.

END OF SHAW PART ONE

Short Takes: A. J. Cronin's THE CITADEL

2006-09-03T13:33:00.000-04:00

A. J. Cronin was one of those writers that your grandmother might've read, assuming she read anything, of course. A testament to the ephemerality of fame, he was once an extremely well-known writer with a bunch of best sellers and sales to the movies. Now nobody really reads him anymore, although a Catholic press is trying to resurrect The Keys to the Kingdom. I have my doubts, but hey, who knows.

I probably should've gone with Keys, as it's First Things recommending them and they're more right than wrong, typically. Instead I went with The Citadel, which was the only one of his I ever heard of, mainly because years and years ago Masterpiece Theater did an adaptation of it, with Ben Cross as the upwardly striving Dr. Manson.

(Back in the day, boys and girls, Cross was a well-known actor, with Chariots of Fire just behind him and the world at his feet. Now no one remembers who he is, either. Lord, this whole post is an object lesson, huh?)

Cronin's book is a quiet melodrama-cum-social protest novel, as we follow Manson starting out his practice in a repressive Welsh mining town, faces ignorance and prejudice, fights nobly for scientific advancement, suffers nobly, almost loses his soul to Mammon but recovers just at the brink...only to punished and vindicated within a few pages of each other at the climax.

It's pretty blah. Although rather better written than later examples of its type, like most novels of its type it gets pretty shrill in spots. The kind of book where people stand up and give self-conscious speeches Expressing The Point.

You'll be able to predict the twists and the turns of the thing rather easily, too, and the poor things that are done to the long-suffering wife in order to fulfill Cronin's Grand Plan makes me weep for the fate of such doomed cardboard characters.

It's not an awful book: Cronin had a certain degree of literacy that later popular writers mining this lode didn't, and it shows -- the style burbles along well and it isn't insulting to read. He's particularly good with sketches of the Welsh countryside and the small incidents of a doctor's life. I've encountered worse.

Here's the First Things piece on Keys:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=306

I dunno. I respect First Things, it's an intelligent publication, but this seems like a case of special pleading to me. Still, adventurous souls can check it out. I think the notion of Cronin as a skillful hack is essentially right on the money.

Here's the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.J._Cronin

Our man looks pretty dashing here, I think. Like a young Richard Attenborough.

And here's the always literate kirjasto entry:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ajcronin.htm

John P. Marquand -- information

2006-08-22T21:42:00.000-04:00

Here's the Wiki on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Marquand

A friend of mine asked me what I thought about Wikipedia. I think it's admirable in scope, a little less admirable in depth. I wouldn't trust it for anything controversial, or for the most part for anything complicated. Still, though, you got to love a reference source that has articles on both John P. Marquand and noted adult film actress Crissy Moran.

This is not one of the better Wikis out there -- it's less information and more talking points. And it doesn't even have all the information. The only two things I knew about Marquand before I did my search was that he was a hardcore alcoholic and that one of his wives drowned in the bathtub, a decidedly unpleasant way to go. You won't find that here.

Here's a better biographical piece, from a site that's all about notable American Unitarians. Hey, you know who else is a notable American Unitarian? Glenn Danzig.

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/marquand.html

Nah, I'm kidding. Glenn Danzig is a notable Rotarian.

The bio is a transcript of a speech his grandson made to some kind of something. It's earnest and likable enough, if a bit dull. It does point out the autobiographical basis for both Wickford Point and Point of No Return. Which is interesting in that those are probably his two best books. Much better though are the pictures, including a priceless one of Marquand getting ready to go up in an Air Force jet. I want to do that myself sometime.

Here's the Yardley piece that started the mini-Marquand boomlet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32907-2003Feb19

Yardley is a likable guy and writes well in passages here. He gets it exactly wrong, though: the interesting thing isn't that nobody reads Marquand anymore, the interesting thing is that somebody once did. What does a housewife in Schnectady, trying out a new Jello recipe, know or care about Mr. Pulham's painful-because-they-were so-painless compromises? Yardley tries to locate Marquand's character's struggles in the depths of every human heart, but I think that's giving Marquand rather too much credit. Certainly he never saw things that way: for him the point was that this was a localized phenomenon. He was describing a region and a certain type who inhabited it.

Here's a much much better piece from The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200405/spaulding

And here's a self-satisfied one from a no-doubt aging editor at the Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/10/31/the_great_george_apley/

Indicative of that kind of received wisdom I find so tiresome.

John P. Marquand

2006-08-19T20:37:00.000-04:00

Here's the formula. Amusingly, it comes from Wickford Point, which isn't about this kind of stuff at all:

There was something which they did not see, an inexorable sort of gentleness, a vanity of effort, a sadness of predestined failure.

The narrator's talking about New England, and how nobody really ever gets it right, and how this was the "truth" of the countryside. Wickford is a very autobiographical novel and I'm pretty sure this is Marquand addressing us directly. Like a lot of writers, Marquand couldn't resist romanticizing himself even as he downplays himself: although his protagonist feels that a "serious novel" built around that idea would always be beyond him, Marquand built his "legitimate" career around essentially this very idea. He improved as he went along, mostly by incorporating the better lessons of his pulp and slick past.

The worst of the batch is The Late George Apley, which of course garners all the praise and the rewards. There are a fat quintillion reasons why books are inexorably overpraised: I'm not sure why it was so back then, but am convinced now it's a simple matter of laziness. People praise Apley out of pure received wisdom -- it's not like anyone really reads it anymore.

Apley is that tiresome thing, a fable. It’s a high modernist piece – it might not be immediately evident as that, but that’s the foundation – where Marquand is carefully climbing up on his high horse in order to tell us something. And what he wants to tell us is the unexciting news that you can gain the world but lose your soul, a notion that was cutting-edge around Jesus’s time, maybe. He also wants to tell us a little bit of what’s up top there, the notion that there’s something oddly heroic about people giving in to sterile conformity and the deadening of their dreams. But that’s not true. “Tragedy” in the classic sense described the notion of great men being ultimately undone by intrinsic flaws in the forces that made them great in the first place. There’s nothing “tragic” here because there’s nothing “great” here. You can pity men like Apley, but that’s about as far as it goes. And that doesn’t make for much emotional engagement.

Why is this book so lauded? Who knows. One might speculate that originally everyone jumped on something that could knock capitalism but good. Nowadays it’s probably a matter of upper class WASP types who hate their lot and are looking for rationales to assert that somehow all the pointlessness was worth it, somehow. Apley is as directed a message along those lines as you’re going to find.

Somewhat better is Pulham, which consciously, I think, tries to put the Marquand “message” in a more naturalistic context. It’s basically the same message: guy is born into a certain New England class, just a little more aware than other members of his class, flirts with rebellion, understands that he can’t really break his chains, and then looks back on his past with a kind of sadness mixed with regretful acceptance. It’s just put into a context that at least seems identifiable as a naturalistic recreation of the world. Marquand’s real gifts as a writer had nothing to do with his “ideas”, which frankly are silly when they aren’t clichéd. His gifts are all related to other factors: his smoothly flowing style, which is a positive joy to read, and his really fine sense of place. Nobody can really build a sense of place like Marquand.

The problem with Pulham is that the story values, the things that make Marquand interesting as a writer, cut against the dynamics of his argument. Another way to say it is that the better he tells a story, the less interesting and persuasive he makes his argument. And vice versa. This is the central problem with “idea” fiction: except at the very highest levels the story values tend to cut against the idea values, and vice versa.

Point of No Return is the best of the three, because here the story values predominate. Unlike in the other books, for example, the protagonist is active, not just a victim of circumstance. Point has something of a hopeful ending, at least for Marquand, which puts it heads and tails above the sad sighs which end books like Pulham. Most interestingly, Marquand is actually treating his formula as stuff to be molded, as artistic material. And it pays dividends: Point is easily his most readable book in this style. Marquand even expands his ideas outward: this is the only novel of his I know of which suggests that there is no “escape”, at least not in the rather naïve way he seemed to frame the issue earlier. His protagonist leaves his earlier cage for only another, more sophisticated one, and Marquand seems to understand that’s what passes for a “happy” ending.

But the book still seems forced to me, still hobbled by Marquand’s hobby horse. Actually I think Marquand’s best non-Moto book – certainly my favorite of his – is Wickford Point, which has nothing to do with his big message at all.

Well, unless you want to look at it like the dynamic’s reversed. If his other books are all about compromises with conformity, here the novel’s “about”, to the extent that it’s about anything, the need to compromise, the need to fit into society on some level. But that sells it short, kind of, its real pleasure lie in the style, and the setting, and the personality. It’s the most autobiographical thing of his that I know of, and could probably be faulted for that, but I found the ride fairly worthwhile. Wickford is a loose grabbag of impressions, speeches, ruminations, various vivid characters bouncing off each other, and a warm portrayal of a setting that obviously meant something to Marquand personally. Odd that his best book is “non-directed”, more about the trip than the destination, but then life’s funny that way.

John P. Marquand

2006-08-19T20:23:00.000-04:00

First of all, a couple of ground rules. We won't be talking about Marquand's Mr. Moto books, although the one I read I remember liking quite a bit. These are best discussed in their own context -- especially since Marquand himself saw these books as something "apart" from his serious work.

We're also going to be talking about Marquand's books a bit out of order. Most people, when they talk about Marquand, usually mention The Late George Apley, Wickford Point, "something else" (I'm going to be talking about H.M. Pulham, Esq., although you could substitute others of its type) and Point of No Return. Well, I'm going to talk about Wickford Point seperately. I don't understand why it's constantly mentioned in the same breath as these others -- well, I do understand, it's laziness, basically -- but it very much exists as it's own thing.

There's a lot of interesting things to say about Marquand. His struggles to be accepted as a "serious" writer even while becoming famous and rich through his popular fare embodies a certain kind of struggle that a lot of American writers, particularly writers of the immediate post WW Two generation, suffered. (And hell, still suffer, although it's not what it once was). The brief flurry of interest in Marquand a couple of years back is also interesting: I suspect that was driven almost completely by a piece Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote on him. The fact that one voice, even one as "esteemed" as Yardley, could push Apley and Wickford back into print says something about where "high" literary culture is right now.

But I want to talk about Marquand's goals, and what he was obviously trying to do and how that contrasts with other writers of his ilk who are looking to do something else. Call it, for now, "directed" writers versus "non-directed".

You can divide up writers in fifty gajillion ways, but one good way to do it is to think about writers who are driven to "tell" you something, and are using stories as a way to do that, versus writers who are interested in other aspects of storytelling: stylistics, characterizations, some kinds of experimentation. (Some kinds of experimentation are actually full square "directed", it kinda depends.) It's the difference between trying to get to a destination and enjoying the trip.

Sometimes all a writer is "driven" to do is tell you a story -- that's actually a fairly rockin' description of pulp, in fact. What is pulp? Pulp is writing where story subsumes everything else -- where there's nothing but the plot. At a higher level, though, it's all about relating the theme through the story.

Sounds pretty high schoolish, huh? Well, it is, sort of, although these things can be done with greater degrees of sophistication and subtlety, of course. I'm really not trying to make a value judgement here -- most anybody can think of good books like this. What I am trying to say is that you know this kind of thing when you encounter it.

And you encounter it with Marquand.

Marquand wants to tell you something. The best way to understand Apley, Pulham, and No Return is to see the progression as Marquand's gradually increasing artistic development within his formula, which he set up to try and tell us something. He's thus a very interesting writer to examine, you can almost feel him growing as you read along.

Here's the formula. Amusingly, it comes from Wickford Point, which isn't about this kind of stuff at all

Continued next post

Short Takes: Gavin Lyall's THE SECRET SERVANT

2006-07-29T23:38:00.000-04:00

They've tried to inject the Le Carre sort of spy story -- spying is a dirty bureacratic business that tarnishes everything it touches -- with action elements ever since Le Carre plopped onto the stage. One of the better cracks at it is Lyall's Henry Maxim series, which I think debuted with the evocatively titled The Conduct of Major Maxim. It's more energetic than a typical Le Carre book, without robbing the story of a moral seriousness.

I've sadly only tracked one Lyall down, this one. Here's my notes on this one:

The first 3/4 of this is very well done indeed, the best fusion of Fleming and Le Carre I've stumbled across yet. The top European arms negotiator has a secret that could destroy him; the man to save him is Major Harry Maxim, a somewhat mysterious, recently widowed army officer on loan to British Intelligence. Astutely told and very quick-moving, extra kudos for making the goals here very small and reasonable (our heroes aren't trying to save the world, merely one man who might give the West a somewhat small edge in some ways). Falls apart at the end, because unfortunately the big secret, once revealed, turns out to be not that shocking or interesting. (Although it's rather touching Lyall thought it was.) Interesting, and despite it's flaws worth reading

I actually kept a spoiler from myself in my own notes. What's up with that? The big secret

SPOILER COMING

is that the negotiator is a homosexual. See? Kind of naive.

Here's the wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Lyall

He died a few years back -- I didn't know.

Here's an okay review from Mystery Guide that touches on some of the same points I made (although I think the idea that Dick Francis, rather than Ian Fleming, was an influence is better than mine). It ends rather stupidly by suggesting that the British are innately better stylists (they aren't, except to yahoo American ears), but the first part is good.

http://www.mysteryguide.com/bkLyallServant.html

Here's a blog entry by the esteemable Bill Crider.

http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2004/12/gavin-lyall.html

And here's a dismissal of Lyall's Midnight Plus One from some yutz who's a little too old to be playing with Live journal, you ask me.

http://community.livejournal.com/dopersread50/195891.html

Daphne Du Maurier -- Information

2006-07-29T22:57:00.000-04:00

The main thing you have to say about Du Maurier fans is that they seem just so gosh-darned nice. Swell old gals, the kind who might slip you an extra mince cookie or two. Or maybe you can even con them into breaking out the apricot brandy.

Unlike most people I'll be talking about here, Du Maurier actually has her own website.

http://www.dumaurier.org/

I'm not sure how well it's updated, and it seems to lack comprehensive coverage, but dammit, it sure is nice.

From the link page we find out that if you ever wanted to go to Manderly again (somebody's missed the point of Rebecca) you can go here

http://www.rebeccas-tale.co.uk/

Why do people write these godawful fan-fiction sequels? Or prequels or whatever this is? And why do people want to read them?

Here's the kind of guileless, earnest book report that's impossible to sneer at, though it is what it is:

http://www.wildapple.co.uk/writers/icons/du%20Maurier.htm

For once the wiki article is pretty weak, although it did link to this decent interview.

http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/daphne-du-maurier.htm

She seems quite nice! The kind of hostess who'd give you a big breakfast with fried eggs and blood pudding or whatever they eat out there in Cornwall, then maybe you get a brisk walk out along the cliffs. And then shoot a pheasant or something. And then tea with crumpets. And that really good strawberry jam, not that weak Smucker's crap you get here in the States.

Daphne Du Maurier Part Two: ECHOES FROM THE MACABRE

2006-07-20T21:27:00.000-04:00

I mainly want to use this second part to talk about “Don’t Look Now”, which I think is a genuinely great short story and easily the best thing du Maurier ever wrote, but first let’s clear away the underbrush.

The House on the Strand, if I remember aright, is all about a guy who takes some kind of mumblety mumble secret potion that enables him to silently travel back in time, where he observes a family go through a story in the Middle Ages that I never have had the fortitude to find out much about. This novel has a strange reputation in some circles – I first heard about it in one of Neil Barron’s excellent annotated bibliographies – but I think it’s a perfect trifecta of dullness. An uninteresting narrator with uninteresting modern problems encounters an uninteresting historical story he can’t influence. Well, maybe by the end he somehow can, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to stick it out to the end.

The Scapegoat. A reoccurring theme in Western literature, especially popular literature, is the notion of the “double”. Often the double takes the place of somebody who’s just not quite up to snuff and does a better job of it – whatever “it” is.

The Scapegoat came out in the late Fifties and is, I suspect, influenced by a nifty book that nobody remembers anymore which came out around the same time, Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar. There the impostor settles into the bosom of his new family and discovers that the “original” was likely murdered: while somebody like Cornell Woolrich might use this notion as a springboard to one of his paranoid nightmares, in Tey’s book the realization is an opportunity for the protagonist to really rise to the occasion, become better than he thought he could be. It's a murder mystery variant of The Prisoner of Zenda, but an appealing one.

Du Maurier does something with this same idea, although there’s no actual murder here. There is a patented du Maurier sense of “a ghost story without a ghost”, as our protagonist is haunted by his doppleganger’s presence throughout most of the novel. I found the book mostly rewarding and interesting until the final few chapters, where I think du Maurier tries to force an ending that isn’t justified by what came before. Technically it just doesn’t work: in the ending all of our assumptions are overturned, without any especial evidence, in order I think to force a certain kind of emotional epiphany that du Maurier wanted to give the reader. This is actually a fairly common flaw in books: the writer who’s over-possessed with her idea, so much so that she’s forgotten what the story thread is actually demanding. That is one of the great wonders and mysteries of storytelling, of course: the ultimate realization that the story is beyond anyone’s control, even the author’s, and has a life of its own.

But I wax spiritual. And I digress.

Echoes from the Macabre is du Maurier’s selected story collection, and they range from some pretty forgettable stuff (“The Old Man”), to okay-but-not-as-good-as-you’d-think (“The Birds”, which isn’t much like the Hitchcock movie) to “Don’t Look Now”, which is a seriously great short story.

It is kind of a ghost story in reverse, maybe du Maurier’s definitive statement on the subject. A couple trying to recover from the death of their child are in Venice. The wife stumbles across a couple of strange old women, who are spiritualists and say that they’ve seen the spirit of the child. Then they say that the couple should leave the city – or something bad will happen. At the same time the husband starts to see visions of a small child – that looks something like their deceased child – running through the streets of Venice.

This is one of the great supernatural stories in English, I think. It works so well in so many areas – the sense of place, the unexpectedly brutal ending, the tricks with time (done in a phenomenally interesting way), the terrific, absolutely terrific introduction of the child-figure. It admits to all sorts of possible readings without ever pinning itself down to one. In the context of du Maurier’s work, as I said, it suggests itself as the definitive “non-ghost story” ghost story of du Maurier’s. It turns out that the belief in the supernatural is more “realistic” – indeed survival-oriented – than a superficial materialism. The materialist reveals himself to be so much more gullible, ultimately, than the “believer”. A ghost never clearly shows herself anywhere, yet somehow the tale is smeared over with its presence. Remarkable.

I feel I’m not doing this story justice. In the future I’m going to be doing these analyses a bit closer to publication time, so that if I do stumble upon a genuine literary classic like “Don’t Look Now” , my thoughts will be fresher and I’ll be better able to talk about it cogently. For now, read it.

Daphne Du Maurier Part One: REBECCA and MY COUSIN RACHEL

2006-07-09T20:45:00.000-04:00

Du Maurier was one of the writers I thought of when I conceived of this project. It’s striking to me that she could, at one time, be so famous, and now be virtually forgotten. There’s still Rebecca, of course, although I’m not sure how many people really read it anymore. And occasionally there’s reissue projects: some feminist press reissued a bunch of early Du Mauriers, I seem to remember, and U Penn did a few of her more, I guess “famous” isn’t the right word anymore, “known” books.( I have their copy of The Scapegoat, actually). But she doesn’t occupy the place in the popular consciousness she once did.

There’s a lot of Du Maurier out there, and it was harder here than it has been to pick “representative” books. Rebecca and Echoes of the Macabre, which have her two short stories “The Birds” (yeah, the basis of the Hitchcock movie) and “Don’t Look Now” (which became a famous Seventies flick) were easy, but other than that? I decided to skip her straight novels like The Parasites and (for the most part) her historicals like Jamaica Inn, although you can make a good case for both, and I’d be interested to see recommendations along that line.

I decided instead to concentrate on the “uncanny” side of Du Maurier, which meant the aforementioned books, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, and The House on the Strand. Most of these don’t work – but she does have her moments.

What’s mainly interesting to me about Rebecca is not so much that it’s a Gothic. Quick working definition of Gothic: stories which play around with supernatural explanations but ultimately have rational explanations. (Yes, I know you can define “Gothic” other ways. This is just for here.) I’ve been reading a lot of John Dickson Carr, the Golden Age mystery writer, for example, and he’s a Gothic writer– rather a classic one, in fact. He sets up explicitly supernatural situations that have explicitly rational explanations: it’s a very canny update of Ann Radcliffe and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

What’s interesting to me about Rebecca is that it’s a reversal: it’s an explicitly rational story that yet, kind of, is a supernatural story. It’s a ghost story without an actual ghost – yet that doesn’t make the ghost any less real. Sort of. In a way. Du Maurier walks the tightrope very neatly here through most of this, playing this vibe of “not a ghost/ghost” as long as she can. She’s a real master of atmosphere, and allows the reader to slip from tedious ‘reality’ to something out of a grim fairly tale effortlessly, and you need that in a story like this, which is really nothing BUT the atmosphere. It’s a damn hard thing to make essentially “nothing” work in a story.

The problem with the book is that once you get the major reveal, that Rebecca was loathsome, not wonderful, the energy just deflates, like a balloon losing its air. Maxim’s subsequent efforts to avoid getting nabbed for Rebecca’s murder just aren’t that interesting – all of a sudden we’ve stepped into another, lesser story. The last bit of Rebecca is not good, although the very last scene is haunting and memorable. So, not a perfect book, I think it falters at the end, but a near-masterpiece in its way.

My Cousin Rachel is essentially Rebecca told from Maxim’s point of view. It’s too derivative to be very interesting, although it is sort of interesting as a commentary on Rebecca. One aspect of Rebecca that’s not much thought about is that we only have Maxim’s word for the awfulness of Rebecca, and he’s not exactly the most reliable of narrators. Try looking at that story again, with this in mind. Or try looking at it with the sense that the unnamed narrator herself is not reliable – at least, not in all respects. She's insecure and jealous, and it's interesting how eagerly she falls into the conniving at the climax.

Ah, well. You can go on like this forever, it's the glory of the book. Rebecca is really just a magnificent achievement in many respects – a story built almost completely out of whispers and echoes and unstated implications and wisps in the wind.

NEXT TIME PART TWO OF DU MAURIER

Short Takes: Ouida's UNDER TWO FLAGS

2006-07-01T20:27:00.000-04:00

Once famous adventure novel from a once famous writer was, I remember, dull dull dulldulldulldull. I like adventure/swashbuckling novels from this period and can take a lot of the conventions (the languid pace, the snobbish fixation on the aristocracy, the florid styles, etc.) but even I skimmed large sections of this.

There is an argument -- or really it's more vague than that, call it a point of view -- that popular literature of the past was just better than it is today. I'm sympathetic: I think it's fair to say that the average novel of 1867 (when Flags came out) is better than the average novel of today.

Unfortunately that's about worthless as anything more than a feeling. "Literature" is a generality that's meaningless except as it relates to this book or that book; it only has meaning in the examination of individual works. And it's not hard to pick out great books from today. Or crummy books from the past, like Flags.

It might not have helped that I read this in conjunction with PC Wren's absolutely masterful Beau Geste, a superior novel in every respect. Geste has a lot of the same conventions -- a sort of veddy British acceptance of Empire main among them -- but it's big advantage is that it's much more sharply written and told, with an admirable bluntness and drive. (Wren is actually an author who needs another look: I'm curious if other novels of his hold up. ) Even the introduction to my Oxford UP reprint ends up reluctantly talking about Wren before getting to Ouida herself (although John Sutherland -- I don't know either, some academic -- rather sniffily rates Wren an "inferior novelist").

(Actually it's pretty funny: this is the first time in a long time I've seen the Sutherland intro and I've forgotten the amount of apologies the poor bastard makes for Ouida. After a lengthy discussion of the text's history he eventually admits that Flags is "one volume too long". Ha!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouida

The Wiki article, most interesting for the Punch caricature. I don't get the joke, though. Oh, obviously 'Ouida' was a pseudonym (real name Marie Louise de la Ramee).

A great sniffy excerpt from some ancient literary encyclopedia. God, they knew how to write 'em in those days. You can almost hear the guy harrumphing.

http://www.bartleby.com/223/1320.html

You can read Flags online through Project Gutenberg and some other sites. Since I don't actually want you to read it, I'm not going to link to any of that. It's out there, though, if you must.

That's about it. On a usenet group I found a thread about this novel which has the following long quote:

"With the strength that lay under the gentle languor [!] of his habits and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields of his boyhood, he wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had closed, and with the single straightening of his left arm felled the detective to earth like a bullock, with a crashing blow that sounded through the stillness like some heavy timber stove in; flinging himself like lightning on the Huissier, he twisted out of his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs, and wrestling with him was woven for a second in that close-knit struggle which is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle for life and death. The German was a powerful and firmly built man, but Cecil's science was the finer and more masterly. His long, slender, delicate limbs seemed to twine and writhe around the massive form of his antagonist like the coils of a cobra; they rocked and swayed to and fro on the stones, while the shrill, shrieking voice of Baroni filled the night with its clamour. The vice-like pressure of the stalwart arms of his opponent crushed him in till his ribs seemed to bend and break under the breathless oppression, the iron force; but desperation nerved him, the Royallieu blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for the first time in his careless life; his skill and his nerve were unrivalled, and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off him, and lifting him up - he never knew how - as he would have lifted a log of wood, hurled him down in the white streak of moonlight that alone slanted through the peaked roofs of the crooked by-street."

I rest my case.

Lawrence Sanders -- information

2006-06-25T13:04:00.000-04:00

There's really not a lot of stuff on the web about Sanders, aside from the 320 fan reviews of McNally's Migrane or whatever.

Here’s the Thrilling Detective page on Sanders.

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/sanders.html

A little too much cheerleading here, but you sort of expect that from Thrilling Detective, and aside from that there's a lot of interesting information, starting with Sanders using a pseudonym a couple of times. I did not know that. Apparently Sanders really was a straightforward professional, spending many years as second-tier kind of journalist. He achieved his success in later years, which is always heartening to hear, too.

This looks like a fairly complete bibliography.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~embden11/Engels/sanders.htm

A good blog entry where some guy ruminates on his sixth grade reading material. Hell, he sounds precocious – I think I first read Sanders a bit later. (Interesting reference to smutty Sanders sex books, too. Maybe an update? Although of course you never find THOSE in the thrift stores. And actually, really, Sanders doesn't exactly have a reputation as a smutty sex novelist, which suggests these are all lacking that ineffable something that makes that kind of thing really work.)

http://doublearticulation.blogspot.com/2006/05/autobibliography-meme-unpacking-my.html

Interesting review of Sanders’ sf novel The Tomorrow File, which is another one of those books I’m vaguely curious about but not so much to really dig up. Sounds dystopian in a hip-Seventies kind of way.

http://www.cloggie.org/esseff/millennial-12.html

And that’s about it, at least of interesting stuff I could find. A good example of a popular writer who’s not much discussed online.

Lawrence Sanders

2006-06-24T21:30:00.000-04:00

Lawrence Sanders is the kind of writer sometimes charitably called a journeyman, sometimes not so charitably called a hack. Maybe a nicer midpoint would be “professional”. A shorthand description of a “professional”: someone with some writing talent who applies it to the popular genres of his day, in the interest of making some $$$.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with making money, of course. But there’s a difference between hoping your books sell, or trying to market them so that they sell, and writing for markets. It’s a difference in emphasis, subtle but real, and it involves the market dictating to you. Time travel romances hot this year? Better grind out a couple. No, wait, it’s women PIs and a bit of sex. No, wait, horror’s back. Etc. And a dedicated, er, “professional” will fill any gap out there he’s told to fill.

This is the Writer’s Digest school of writing, and Lawrence Sanders is the logical endpoint of what that kind of school will produce: slickly made, occasionally diverting, but mostly empty books. All of the authors we’ve talked about before, good bad and indifferent, meant it. (Even Arthur Hailey believed in what he was doing – his books certainly have, for better and worse, conviction. )

With Sanders, no. The books all have a curious facelessness: the faux downbeat style of First Deadly Sin is nothing like the faux giggles of the McNally series, which is nothing like the faux hb stuff in Sixth Commandment. Read a lot of Sanders and you’ll have the impression of a man wearing a lot of masks. The man underneath seems unknowable.

Now, that doesn’t mean Sanders books are without interest: some of them are fairly enjoyable. It just seems kind of sad to me, like Sanders in some sense just missed the point of the thing. I suspect his books will be forgotten fairly quickly, and probably properly so, because they don’t really offer the reader anything new. They just fill existing needs. And there’s always “professionals” out there to do that for the new season, and the new needs.

Sanders came to prominence in the early Seventies with The Anderson Tapes, a half-interesting/half-routine caper novel most notable for its oddball structure: it’s an epistolary novel, told in (mostly) surreptitious tape recordings. This structure does nothing for the plot and just sort of sits there as an irritating overlay on the whole text. But, well, it was the early Seventies, and paranoia was hot.

The First Deadly Sin is quite a different thing, a big brooding police procedural about the hunt for a serial killer. It’s alternately suspenseful and dreary, insightful and banal, moving and crass. Not really a good book, but an intermittently fascinating one that’s worth a look, especially to fans of the sub-genre. (In particular it showcases an odd gift of Sanders’, a knack for making the most outlandish situations plausible. I think his popularity is mostly attributable to that.) I also like The Sixth Commandment, which has an extremely pulpy plot about mad scientists, dangerous experiments, cowed townspeople, brooding henchmen, and sexy femme fatales. It’s made about as plausible as these kind of things ever get: in fact if anything it’s a little too plausible – the books suffers mainly from a surprising stifled sneeze of a climax.

Sanders is now probably best known for the execrable McNally series, the popularity of which I would someday like someone to sit down and explain to me. I tried McNally’s Secret and had a compelling urge to punch the protagonist hard in the mouth.

Those are probably his most famous books. There are other Sanders books out there – he wrote a lot, as professionals are wont to do – but I haven’t been interested enough to check them out.

Joseph Wambaugh -- Information

2006-06-17T10:27:00.000-04:00

Well, like I said last night, to my mind the most interesting thing about Wambaugh is that Ellroy was influenced by him. Drop that tidbit the next time your book circle meets to discuss American Tabloid -- maybe you can get an extra brownie or something.

Here's the Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wambaugh

I actually grew up in Western PA and I have no idea where "East Pittsburgh" is. According to this article Wambaugh's almost seventy years old -- which actually makes him a little older than my Dad, for Pete's sake. It's hard to believe, I think because he's always had such a boyish look. Google his image sometime and you'll see what I mean.

The wiki article is also interesting for pointing up Wambaugh's connections with "Police Story". Like I said, he's really a creature of the Seventies.

A fairly bland summing up from a site devoted to hardboiled fiction:

http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled/Wambaugh.html

Wambaugh isn't a hardboiled writer. I don't care how many Grandmaster awards he gets from the MWA, writing about crime doesn't in itself make you a hb writer. Even writing about sweaty urban crime doesn't do it, by itself. Writers are generally who they think themselves to be, and Wambaugh was clearly aiming for different sorts of stadiums. I rather suspect Joseph Heller, Paddy Chayefsky, and Truman Capote were more influential than Gold Medal paperbacks.

Okayish interview from CNN:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/13/wambaugh.qanda/

Somebody needs to do a good comprehensive interview with Wambaugh talking about writing, not cops or crooks. There's a real dearth of information out there about what Wambaugh thinks about books and writers. (Wambaugh here singles out The Secrets of Harry Bright -- a'ight, that's on the list too.)

Amusing piece from CrimeTime about how much Wambaugh hated The Choirboys movie:

http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/josephwambaugh.php

Probably he'd have been better off not to have done the screenplay.

That seems to be mostly it -- there's a couple of promotional interviews for a book I never read, and if you're interested in the case there's discussions of Echoes in the Darkness and whether Wambaugh got it wrong or messed about with justice -- the usual occupational hazards of the true crime writer. I have read Echoes, and it suffers from Wambaugh generally not liking anybody in the story but the cops. I agree with an Amazon reviewer: Wambaugh is generally just interested in cops. The reason The Onion Field worked so well is because the crime happened to cops.

Joseph Wambaugh

2006-06-16T21:02:00.000-04:00

Wambaugh's true crime books are beyond the scope of this blog, but I ought to start by mentioning that they're probably the best things he does. I especially admire The Onion Field, a haunting story about the spiritual ramifications of violence that's on a very shortlist of truly classic true crime accounts. If you only read one Wambaugh, that's the one to read. (Wambaugh, to his credit, seems to feel that this is his most important work as well.)

I'm not much interested in Wambaugh's later books like The Golden Orange. I remember it as being a perfectly acceptable crime novel, but you can get that all sorts of places. He's coming out with a new cop novel at the end of the year, Hollywood Station, I'm curious what the reaction will be but not so curious that I'm going to run out and get a copy and get an opinion myself, frankly. I'm sure it will be promoted as a return to form, though.

Wambaugh's peak years were the Seventies and the early Eighties, from The New Centurions to around The Glitter Dome. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I haven't read the first two books that made Wambaugh's career, Centurions and The Blue Knight (which was made into a famous TV movie I never saw with William Holden). I can't say I have any particular drive to search those puppies out -- I read a lot of police procedurals and I've read a lot of Wambaugh and it's hard for me to believe that I'm really missing anything I haven't seen sixty times before. If I bump into them, though, I'll pick them up and do an update or something, for the sake of inclusiveness.

Wambaugh has had less influence on the police procedural genre than you might think. What we think of in America when we think of a police story, either in books or on tv, almost certainly ultimately comes from Ed McBain: the squad/unit as "the hero", seperate storylines, an interest in the various nitty-gritty technical aspects of police work, the notion of cops as humans with human problems and weaknesses, etc. (That's not to say McBain was the first to do this stuff, he certainly wasn't. But I think he codified a lot of disparate strands.) Wambaugh was always more interested in Creating Literature, in Making Grand Statements, in Being Artful. His novels (at least, the novels in this group) can be best understood not as crime novels, but rather attempts to write Literature about cops. The books are full of literary fillips: the playing around with black humor, the speechifying, the introspection, the often downbeat endings.

Wambaugh had one real idea: cops lead lives that are not so much dangerous physically as they are dangerous morally and spiritually. (James Ellroy, who famously admired Wambaugh, is said to have sold blood in his ragamuffin days in order to get money to buy Wambaugh books. You can see this idea at work in a lot of Ellroy's fiction, although love him or hate him Ellroy is far more of an artist, and there's a lot more going on.) In his books you'll see that idea beaten into the ground, dug up, and then beaten down again. Wambaugh in fact is a good case of how ideas, even good ideas, have their aestehtic limitations.

It works best in the novels generally in moments: Wambaugh is great in short snapshots showing the humor/horror of a cops's life, but tends to get a little shrill about it over the long haul. Most of Wambaugh's books are middling successes/middling failures -- one reason I'm leery of Centurions and Knight, actually. A book like The Delta Star is typical: you're cruising along enjoying this or that entertaining bit -- something seems funny, or wise, or funny and wise -- only to be brought up short by A Symbolically Wrought Moment. And then we're back again. Wambaugh had bad weaknesses for speechifying and painful literary symbolism right out of a Frosh 101 class. (One is tempted to say Wambaugh could've used a better editor, although I'm not sure these books as conceived were ever going to be more than middling. )

The one Wambaugh novel that I think really works -- well, more or less, anyway -- is The Black Marble. I think it's mainly because it's a love story, which gave Wambaugh a sense of play he really needed: one reason the books above are so mixed is that Wambaugh took himself Awfully Awfully Seriously (even when he's having fun it's Serious Important Fun). Here it's much looser, Wambaugh is clearly not taking himself so seriously, and that gives him some much-needed distance on his material. There's a bounce here, especially to the characterizations, that you just don't find in other Wambaugh books.

Mostly. Even this gets strained here or there. Still, worth a look. What other book of Wambaugh's has a credible middle-aged relationship? Some fascinating stuff about dog shows, too.

Short Takes: David Anthony

2006-06-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

I keep a book log of everything I've read since 2004. Much of what's in there won't fit into this project, but it occurred to me that some of the authors would. So occasionally I'll raid the journal for some shorter takes on authors.

For a variety of reasons I'm reading a great deal of mystery/crime fiction right now, so expect a lot of that.

David Anthony (pseud. of William Dale Smith) -- I read his novel The Midnight Lady and the Mourning Man, which I think I bought on the recommendation of Pronzini in his 1001 Midnights. Generally not that hot -- my notes call it blah and mention that it was obviously Ross Macdonald influenced. Ross Macdonald was a big influence on a number of PI writers of the late Sixties and Seventies, and most of them did not use the influence well. A great number of PI novels from this period tend to be quiet character studies with the crime almost incidental; a hard thing to pull off if you don't know what the heck you're doing. They're usually extremely literate but oddly lacking in excitement -- one has the feeling of ever-fussier presentations of the same damn recipe. I like macaroni and cheese as much as the next guy, but how often can you eat it?

Here's some info. on the series from Thrilling Detective, a useful site:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/butler.html

It was made into a movie with Burt Lancaster, who also got a writing credit on the screenplay. (!)

William Dale Smith was a movie studio executive, apparently. Irritatingly, he's known as "David Anthony" on the web. This is the best hunk of info. I could find on him:

http://www.answers.com/topic/david-anthony-writer-drama-mystery

Although he merits a one-line entry on a page devoted to famous West Virginians:

http://members.aol.com/jeff560/famousa.html

Did you know Patch Adams comes from West Virginia?

Allen Drury - Information

2006-06-10T18:16:00.000-04:00

Here's the Wikipedia article, rather a good one, I think, if only that it emphasizes his journalistic roots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Drury

Here's a review of Come Ninevah, Come Tyre (gotta love that title, evocative as all hell) and The Promise of Joy by Adam Cadre -- is this the Adam Cadre, the guy who does the great text adventure games? He does one where you play a slutty teenage girl. "Interstate IO" or something like that -- anyway, it's a really great game, check it out. As for the page, well, I rather suspect the particular books under discussion are stupid, too, but Mr. Cadre unfortunately is so snarky and acerbic he actually makes them sound like they rock beyond measure. Some brave soul should decide for himself, I guess:

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/11812.html

One of the reasons it's hard to assess Drury properly is that he's bounced around like a ping-pong ball between liberal and conservative camps. Liberals think Advise and Consent is one of the stupidest books to win a Pulitzer; Conservatives tend to think it's a work of genius unfairly neglected because he's not properly liberal enough. Here's a typical example of that pov, from the Brothers Judd:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1067/Advise%20and%20C.htm

I like the Brothers Judd, but they're not especially good fiction reviewers, and this review has the note of special pleading that I dislike from this camp. Too often conservatives overpraise books just because they're conservative in theme: what's worse is that they're defensive about it. They implicity recognize the authority of the literary establishment (which truth to tell is quite liberal in it's politics) -- why else all the shirty "eggheads may not like it but we sixpack regular Joes do" stuff? Better by far not to play that game at all.

Here's a very nice page, liberal in tone (he's dismissive of the book proper) but he maps out alot of the historical roots of the thing. This is where I found out Drury wrote most of it as a first draft. (NOTE: the quote on the page says that Drury did multiple drafts of the first three sections, and only shorted the final two. I have no way of knowing, just my gut talking, but I doubt that's exactly the case. My gut tells me part three didn't get quite as much TLC as parts one and two. I think it shows.)

http://home.earthlink.net/~dbratman/drury.html

And here's a pretty well-written paen to Advise and Drury more generally, from Policy Review, of all places:

http://www.policyreview.org/oct99/kaplan_print.html

I think Kaplan rather overrates both Drury's skill and importance -- this is another case of special pleading, really, albeit more ornately presented. Actually, give me the Judds blunt talk any day -- Kaplan takes too much space to say the same exact thing.

I've seen other links, but they're dead or behind subscription walls or seem to be the same thing over and over (the usual online obits). Hitchens must've mentioned Drury once, in the New York Review of Books, no less (the Judds linked to a review of McCarry's no doubt amazing Shelley's Heart. Unfortunately nowadays you have to spend twenty six thousand dollars and cut off your left little finger before you can read any archive stuff from NYRB). I'm curious what he said. Terry Teachout also apparently did a piece on him for the Book Review.

More links or info always welcome.