The Factual Opinion

No Pictures: Let's Not Talk About The Fact That We'll All Look Better In Khakis

Murphy
By Samuel Beckett, 1938

There's a huge amount of Beckett's flavor that comes from him writing initially in French despite English being the language with which he got rolling in the first place, and it would be interesting to know if his decision to change his working method grew out of wanting to break away from the Joycean influence, an influence that stemmed both because he worshipped Joyce for awhile, and becuase he had a depressing, horrible affair with Joyce's daughter. That's not a subject I'm qualified to deal with, having only read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist and some gossipy shit that was in a brochure they gave away at Beckett's old apartment, but it's there. What I can say is that Murphy has what seems to be an overuse of location specific notations, and any social criticism gets muted by the book's absentmindedness, the way it trips between mysterious, unknowable characters (like Murphy himself) and more abstract caricatures (most of the women are ciphers), making for a book whose best bits are whenever a characrer is granted a purpose with which to act. Murphy at a mental hospital, a landlady discovering a mess...these are the moments when Beckett seems almost unwillingly swept up in literature, when the words just pour across the page. It's a really good book, I just wish I liked it more than I do. 

The Map and the Territory
By Michel Houellebecq, 2010

Although it doesn't posess the most exciting lead character of all time, the opportunity to watch Michel Houellebecq ruminate on the business of creation is an interesting one, even if the only maxim the book eventually rests on is "be really good". Featuring himself as an important supporting cast member, The Map and the Territory is Houellebecq treading some familiar ground (relationships are tough when your favorite person is yourself, dads are difficult) while also dipping a toe in crime fiction. It's a pleasant, fast read that gets really strange when you hit the plot twist, and then reverts back to form when the author realizes he doesn't have an ending. The pleasures of Houelllebecq are rarely his plots, it's in the nature of his sentences, the way he encapsulates the brutality of self-destruction, lust, sociopathy--that's what makes him such a nasty pleasure to read, and the brevity with which he delivers his amoral musings prevents the experience from becoming as self-centered as most descriptions might initially sound.

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Edited by Sanford Schwartz, 2012

My feelings regarding Pauline Kael and this book in particular have been covered on this site's film podcast, but if you don't have the time, the Cliff's Notes are these: I find the experience of reading Pauline Kael to be an absolute pleasure. Sanford Schwartz seems to prefer Kael when she's at her most ponderous and positive. Getting that side of the woman is in no way a disappointment, even if it does mean I'll need to grab a separate book when I want to watch her tear into the terrified flesh of Sound of Music. If anything, seeing Kael at her more charitable makes me as a reader more negative, considering how much further down things have gone since her departure from the scene--not the quality of film, I don't think that's lessened at all, one thing all of Kael's criticism suffers from is that time period's lack of accessibility to anything that isn't American--but the quality of the audience and that audience's criticism. Nobody working at the top is as good at all the nuts and bolts of writing as she was, and very, very few people working online have her weirdly exciting taste level. 

Hollywood Nocturnes
By James Ellroy, 2007 

A bunch of stories, almost all of which could be mixed into either the LA Quartet or the Underworld Trilogy without too much tinkering. Each chunk is satisyfing, and one--two cops going full Die Hard against an entire town of scumbags--wouldn't have been harmed to have gone double the length. Brevity doesn't hurt Ellroy--take a look at the way he writes an action passage in any of his books for evidence of that--but it does lend these stories a bit of ambivalence that doesn't show up in his longer works.

The Baby Sleep Solution
by Suzy Giordano & Lisa Abidin, 2006

I finished this book, and it's the only book in this part of the bookstore I can say that about and not be lying. I liked it. It's very firm and direct, and extraordinairly specific to the point of obsession, which is also something I have a tendency to gravitate towards. It's about what it says it's going to be about in the title and it takes less than thirty minutes to read. I have no idea if it's claims are factual or if its program works; based off what I have heard from many, many people, most of them strangers, it is a book, and therefore "doesn't know what the fuck it is talking about."

-Tucker Stone, 2013

No Pictures: Thinking 'Bout Kirby

Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby
By Charles Hatfield, 2012

While it isn't the smoothest reading experience, due mostly to Hatfield's apparent disinterest for the sort of stylish flourishes that can make dryer subjects more exciting, leaving one in the position where every sentence could work as a final one--the book essentially stops rather than reaches an end--there's far too much original thought put into Hand of Fire to dismiss it for problems that revolve around ease-of-use. Over and over, Hatfield goes to Kirby's comics with an eye for both exploration and explanation, and if some of what he describes is familiar, none of it is discussed without care. From looking at the extensive list of cited works, it's clear that an extensive bit of synthesis is on display, and yet Hand of Fire never feels like a game of hopscotch amongst fanzines and thesis papers; if any title is necessary, it's easiest to call him a cartographer. Ultimately, this isn't the book that will convince doubters of Kirby's value--if Kirby's work can't do it, I have a hard time imagining what kind of book would--but it is an excellent primer for those of us already living in the temple, but incapable of turning wonder into words.

Black Dogs
By Ian McEwan, 1992

This is about as terrible as a smart, well-written book can get, a listless cruise through the shitty marriage of a couple of selfish intellectuals, courtesy of their obnoxious son-in-law, one of those personality-vampires that populate these sorts of novels. McEwan can do unlikeable people in wholly fascinating ways, but this time around he forgot to give them anything to do but complain about one another--then again, even at his best, McEwan seems incapable of playing the smart and self-righteous for laughs, which is really the best possible way to handle those people. For those interested in seeing how the multiple award winning movie adaptation having guy got where he is now, there's little evidence of it here, but I would still recommend this to the me that lived alone in Jersey City back in 2002. That depressing asshole would have binged on this bland sophistication and begged for more: oh that we can't go back and kill him now!

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: He's Not Been Back To Oxford Town

All Souls
By Javier Marías, 1989

I bought this years ago after The Believer published a long article about the writer, upon which it immediately slipped through the cracks. Picking it up on a lark, I found it difficult to put back down again. It's a short novel about a Spanish professor who takes on a two year gig as a visiting lecturer at Oxford, and while a good bit of the plot focuses on the affair he has with the randy wife of a milquetoast local, Marías seems most interested in just letting you see how funny intellectuals--a group he happily considers himself a member of--appear. Academic takedown books are probably a dime a dozen, only bested in quantity by overly inspirational films where professors help young men find truth, maybe pussy; that being said, there's nothing cliched about the way Javier goes about delivering his acerbic stab at how the overly educated go about their daily lives. The portion where his narrator delineates to a bored woman why she should bail on her marriage for a romantic adventure that he's idealized to the point that it's more reminiscent of the board game Candyland than anything that might occur between two people is a personal favorite, but really, there's nothing in here that isn't a positive delight. Few things are quite as funny as listening to eternally single intellectuals explain how relationships are supposed to work to someone who is in the process of breaking up with them.

Long Ships
By Frans G. Bengtsson, 1941-55

Similar to All Souls only in that it utilizes humor so subtly and efficiently that it starts to feel like the author is in the room while you're reading, making you laugh purely with wry glances and abashed shrugs, Long Ships is a series of Viking stories built around the tumultuous life of one incredibly likeable individual named Red Orm. While there's a lot of action, all of it increasingly more interesting as the book barrels forward--the best being the non-stop fighting that take place in the chapter entitled "How King Harald Bluetooth celebrated Yule"--this is a series of stories heavily tilted towards the adventure side of the equation. Bengtsson doesn't so much gloss over the more brutal aspects of the culture as he does present it in bald celebration, making for a book that leaps, chapter by chapter, from seafaring to skull smashing with nary a whiff of self-analysis. Like most books of this ilk, there's an excellent romance pulsing throughout; like almost none of them, the final 100 odd pages of the book go deep into that relationship's decrepit years, making for such a meaty subplot it threatens to steal the reins entirely. This is an immensely satisfying book.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: A Girl Totally Might Be Willing To Kill Her Make Believe Lover

Inverted World
By Christopher Priest, 1974

This is not the Priest who wrote Black Panther comics, this is the Priest who wrote the book The Prestige was based on. If you care. I sort of care? This book is science fiction, according to the first part of John Clute's afterword, it's classified as "hard" SF, but I'm not sure why, as Clute's afterword lost me pretty much immediately after it started. He seems like a fine writer, but his afterword is one of those that assumes way too much about his audience's awareness of the nuances or history of a branch of writing that has always been, almost by design, somewhat obscure. On the other hand, Inverted World is also one of those books that has a back cover blurb written by somebody who should be slapped repeatedly in the face, because they fail to grasp that the book they're spoiling the pants off of is heavily dependent on rolling out its information in a very specific style at very specific times so that it can be made more obvious to the reader that the plot's construction is mirroring the plot's content, that you are supposed to discover information at the same moments the characters discover it instead of knowing it going in there. That being said, Priest doesn't seem to care about expanding upon why his characters feel the way they do, he just likes to depict them doing and perceiving thing--which means you have sections where seemingly important sequences are passed over in sentences like "they figured it out" alongside interesting (albeit dry) pages describing the, for example, deterioration of one's sense of vision. It's an impressive, intelligent book, but it's also incredibly cold.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: VIOLENCE VIOLENCE VOLLMANN

Rising Up and Rising Down: Volume 1
By William T. Vollmann, 2003

Subtitled: "Three Mediations on Death", "Introduction: The Days of the Niblungs" and "Definitions for Lonely Atoms", this is the first book in Vollmann's seven volume magnum opus. The book is an attempt to define a "moral calculus" for violence: what it is, when it's necessary, the ethics of it, and more in the same vein. It's the product of decades of war reportage, quite a bit of which seems not to have been for magazines or newspapers but just to have been, an obsession for explanation. This first volume is the work of someone using the tactics of the geek culture fan to look at death--think of the cosplayer type, the guy who learns Klingon, someone who paints their body Giants blue--that's the level of commitment Vollmann brings to the study of violence. This first volume doesn't go deeply into the specific places and the specific conflicts he will bear witness to, instead it introduces some of the theories Vollmann will be dealing with--namely, when we can kill, when we should, shouldn't and how--as well as touching upon the basic "why I'm doing this" aspect. "Touch on" isn't arbitrary word choice: Vollmann doesn't go very deeply into the why, and his glancing acknowledgements that he's holding something back leaves one assuming that the reasons didn't start coming to him until after he'd already put in some years traveling to places many of us have no wish to go to. If that makes it sound like Rising Up and Rising Down is a response to a late night fevered stare at a passport stamped with genocide zones, well, fine. The work here is strong enough to merit attention either way. Of course, there's something else too, the only reason most need, and that's the personal. Friends blown to shreds and a dead lover--both come up throughout these first few hundred pages, and it's likely one can hang the writer's motive on them. It's the job of genius to struggle with questions that have no answers, and Vollmann's definitely someone who qualifies.

Flashfire
By Donald Westlake, 2000

I spent some time down in the rich part of Florida once, working with this company on a hotel my boss was building in Costa Rica. It was the only time I ever liked being in Florida, a state for which I harbor as much distaste as I'm capable of carrying, which is no small or trivial amount. Part of it was the way Florida is just easier to deal with when you're classed alongside the laborers--you don't have to participate in anything else, you're invisible things that lurk alongside the edges of the machine's vision. You just work until you're done, and then you're gone. It's way more honest than most of the things I can recall doing.

Flashfire is set in those kinds of places, places where the rich pimp each other while primping themselves, and if it's cliched as all hell to say "they have no idea what's coming", it's also untrue: they know, fear of it is why they retreated to these gated communities where the only degeneracy and greed is their own in the first place. Thankfully, there's never a hint beyond Westlake's bemusement with their hobbies that this is a politically tinged narrative--if there's one thing Parker doesn't care about, it's theoretical bullshit and intellectual preening. We can still get a fringe kick though, even if our killer spends most of his time laying down, as the peacocks get plucked clean.

Firebreak
By Donald Westlake, 2001

This one hurts a little more than most, maybe it hurts the worst. It isn't a bad installment. It hurts because it's so fresh and contemporary that the sting of Westlake's death comes across stronger here than the others, because it forcibly reminds one how recently he was here, and how disappointing it is that he's gone. Not in an ungrateful sense, that gross contemporary fetish some proudly wear where an artist is merely a content production facility, and their mortal conclusion is at first considered sad, then personal failure, and finally little more than a changing of the guard. Just in the sense that the man was still such an active, vital creator, that his mind and skill displayed no obvious sluggishness. He was old when he wrote this book, with its dot-com millionaire and ego blasted hacker, but Parker doesn't show an ounce of wear. A job is a job, and while the one here seems, at times, to be a little more convoluted than necessary, it's hard (and unrewarding) to argue with results.

The Big Nowhere
By James Ellroy, 1988

The book where he figures it all out--three leads, rotating points of view every chapter, each of them trucking in a massive story of their own. There's more than one moment in The Big Nowhere where the emotional volume jacks itself loud, where you chase the doomed, tragic characters down tunnels painted with horrifying realizations and disturbing, unnatural truths, only to catch them blown to oblivion right as conclusion escapes their grasp. Mid-novel, one young alcoholic man, terrified of the biological twist that he considers a beast inside him, tells a curious girl that he isn't hunting a killer, but a monster. By the end of the book, when that monster stands revealed as yet another in the horrible string of victim, it's almost too much to throw oneself back and remember that fallacious moment. It's the ravenous quality of the truth, after all--the reaving things inside that try to stay hidden, the stuff of life that these guys hoped to keep at bay, and the torture those choices wrought--that tears flesh from bone.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: If Oakley Hall Had Written The Bible, The World Would Be A Much Cooler Place

The Roaches Have No King
Daniel Evan Weiss, 1994

Unusually graphic sex, considering that the protagonist is a cockroach. This is the story of a lopsided war between two forces, one of which is an oblivious human couple. Daniel Evan Weiss's novel has all the trappings of one of those psuedo-sophisticated books that get overly praised by post-high schoolers--it's slick filth, misanthropic and pretty weird--but the later third of the book is so jam-packed with detailing the strange, hypnotic world that the roaches have created for themselves that the book surpasses initial stereotypes. Rewarding? Sure. This is a rewarding book about a cockroach religious/survival movement set amongst a rebound relationship. That has some hardcore sex and scat play.

Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens, 1848

It would have been best to document my initial feelings about this doorstopper of a novel (800 plus pages, this one), not because I've forgotten the story, but because those initial passions always interest me more than these calm, late night attempts at intellectualism. It is a lovely book, I can say that with all surety. It's also one that I carried with me for months, pausing it often to read at least twenty others, this story "of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall". The first 218 pages are like an orchestra tuning up, featuring the introduction of nearly all the major and minor characters who will populate the remaining 600 pages, all of which will be pumped full of momentum and motivated by the heartbreak that occurs on page 219. The final pages--like most of the Dickens books I can remember reading--delivers cymbal crash after cymbal crash, the conclusions of so many lives. I read this guy and start to wonder: is this why Western culture has so much a lust for closure? Was it Dickens who made us believe that was a real thing? Under his hands, I find myself almost swayed.

The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy, 1987

At times, it seems like Ellroy doesn't have his shtick totally figured out in Black Dahlia, but the moments that he does--like the moments when obsession with the unsolved torture/murder of the Black Dahlia begins to drive even the side characters into sorrow, degradation and annihilation--are worth the investment. A trip to Mexico that ends in hostage taking and government-empowered blackmail, the guy who almost gets drowned in pasta, when the knife enters that fucker's eye; all of it described in a staccato prose that Ellroy was still teaching himself how to write. There's so many worse ways to spend one's time, and many of them are people trying to imitate this guy right here.

Warlock
Oakley Hall, 1958

"I feel drained by an over-violent purge to my emotions, that has taken from me part of my manhood, or my humanity. I feel scraped raw in some inner and most precious part. The earth is an ugly place, senseless, brutal, cruel, and ruthlessly bent upon the destruction of men's souls. The God of the Old Testament rules a world not worth His trouble, and He is more violent, more jealous, more terrible with the years. We are only those poor, bare, forked animals Lear saw upon his dismal heath, in pursuit of death, pursued by death.

I am ashamed not only of this execution I myself have in part ordered, but of being a man."

It can never be said enough: the people who work at the New York Review Books Classics are doing the Lord's good work. The book that Thomas Pynchon started a fanclub for (and wrote a blurb for, if you can believe that), Warlock is a comet, a four leaf clover, a one-time-work-of-genius from a writer who (apparently) only got mad enough to go great this one time. Using the legends of Wyatt Earp, as well as the brutal history that killed the Native Americans, laid down a border, and built the railroads, Oakley Hall wrote down everything that was wrong with the McCarthy era and called the end result a Western. He was playing coy, don't believe it for a second. This is a parable as potboiler, a violent string of men and death, and Hall uses them to lay down argument after argument, crying out to make a case for whether a society deserves what it needs, or what its earned. There's so much to be unpacked and handled here, so many frenzy, and there isn't a drop of waste to be found. This was the greatest book I'd never read.

Carrie
Stephen King, 1974

It seems unusual for an early novel to have so many tricky delivery choices, like shifting narrators or interview excerpts, but if King's famous anecdote is to be believed--he'd written a good bit, threw it away, and his wife later fished it out of the trashcan and forced him to continue--then maybe being weird is just the book's birthright. It's a good story, but just an okay book, mostly reading like the transcript of something overheard, a secondhand idea. Still, confidence--which King eventually earned for real--can be compelling even when it's faked, and there's enough here to propel you through the brief story of Carrie, who was forced to kill her way through her prom because girls are mean and puberty.

The Damned Don't Die
Jim Nisbet, 1981

Nisbet's Lethal Injection is a more unusual a book than this one, but don't let the boilerplate "ex-cop turned private investigator" plot above the door drive you too far away: there's more here to this one then the generic basics indicate. That doesn't mean there aren't a few cliches to get through, like a detective getting knocked unconscious a couple of times, a woman who jumps deep into a caregiver/fuckbuddy role after some eye contact...okay, maybe there's a lot of cliches, but they're all well handled, and you never get the sense that Nisbet is padding the narrative. And when you get to the end, there's a final paragraph waiting for you that hits like an oven mitt full of lead, right in the fucking breadbox. This book is all meat.

In The Woods
Tana French, 2007

While what probably should be considered the guts of this book--the murder mystery part--are intermittently interesting, the majority of its bestselling pages are devoted to the most obnoxious protagonist in recent memory, an irritation who goes by the name "Rob Ryan", because why the fuck not? (Even better: his real name is Adam, he just goes by Rob to hide his Adam-ian identity.) The rules haven't changed: an audience that needs its lead characters to be "likeable" will forever miss out on some great works of fiction, as they should, because they're five. But there's a line that can be drawn between unlikeable and irritating, and the best place to draw that line is in a circle around characters like Rob, henceforth to be referred to as the most irritating milquetoast motherfucker you're going to find until they start making crime novels featuring Madeline. At every twist of the plot, Rob goes as wrong as possible, up until the point where constant idiocy has forced him, by the sheer fact that he's done absolutely everything possible except what he should have, to happen upon the proper solution. Even French seems to have realized what a dead end the guy was, as her next book focused on Rob's hardluck partner, a young woman of the tough-as-nails variety. In The Woods: this should never be anyone's first choice. It was a shitty present, and I rescind my thank you.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: Where My Trash At, Sucker

The Third Reich
By Roberto Bolano, 2011

It's essentially a warm-up book, in that the best bits (like the weird rhythms of male friendships that can ultimately make the "bad times" indistinguishable from the "good times") all eventually made it into Bolano's later, better books. It's totally understandable that the Bolano translation squad want this older, less polished material out there, but good God, it really is unnecessary stuff if you aren't a grad student. Featuring an obnoxious, role-playing-game obsessive as he goes through a coming-of-age experience way too late in life, Third Reich's only local claim to fame is that it provided this reader as a graphic, painful reminder of how incredibly irritating it is when self-righteous prigs yammer incessantly about their geeky hobbies. Udo Berger--the jackass at the heart of this novel--never stops telling people about the dice and paper war game he's so awesome at, and he never stops believing that the only thing preventing people from caring is an all-encompassing "they just don't get it" If you ever wanted to experience the serious literature version of cringe comedy (without any comedy to lessen the sting), then this one's for you. Otherwise, just knuckle down and start 2666 all over again.

Zone One
By Colson Whitehead, 2011

I came to this one with the expectation level set a bit too high, and that's not fair to Whitehead. However, I still found this book was ultimately a failure, as it's attempts to toss some "ideas" at zombie fiction ended up being no different from the type of commercialism critique that George Romero pulled off in Dawn of the Dead, and Whitehead's seemingly bottomless disdain for action sequences became impossible to stomach. It's totally fine, and maybe even laudable to throw a forearm up in the face of genre's continued advance, but doing so within the confines of a zombie novel? It's absurd, and yet that's exactly what Whitehead does, over and over again, with nearly every scene featuring a battle strip mined of anything approaching excitement or human feeling, with the absolute worst portion being the sequence near the end where its happening to one of the only two characters that Whitehead has built up enough for us to care about. As with almost any genre story, one is so starved for endings that it's hard not to finish reading the thing, but that's more the luck of the field than it is any skill on Whitehead's part. At this point, an Intuitionist sequel no longer seems too much to ask. Please?

Cain
By Jose Saramago, 2011

On paper, Cain sounds like it would be a stunt book, an insubstantial trick--the Old Testament, retold from the point of view of what 2012 calls "snark merchant" and what Adam called Son. But with Saramago at the helm, the experiment takes on heft, and all that serial under-casing stands without a whiff of pretension. More than anything else, it's just funny--not on every page, but consistently enough so that the narrative never flags. Short, but excellent.

Do The Work
By Steven Pressfield, 2011

Complete nonsense, but pleasant nonsense. This is not really a book, it's a hardcover collection of a guy poking you to finish projects and follow your bliss, but in a masochistic, manly way that will appeal to people skeeved out by A Course In Miracles and The Artist's Way. The most interesting thing about is pure speculation of the Faked Moon Landing variety, and that's this: the book is published by something called the Domino Project, which is some sort of Amazon funded enterprise, and if there's one place that would love for more people to churn out nonsense that other hopeful nonsense-churners will buy cheap eBook editions of, it's Amazon. I couldn't prove it (and won't be trying, because that would ruin the fun) but I would be that the primary consumer of shitty first-draft e-published novels by wanna-bes is, hands down, other shitty first-draft novel producing wanna-bes. At least, that better be true. My future children's health insurance is depending on it.

Nobody's Perfect
By Anthony Lane, 2002

Second time all the way through this brick, which consists mostly of Anthony Lane's movie reviews. Tom Spurgeon has tried to convince me that Lane isn't all that great due to the man's feelings toward the Speed films: my apologies, but it'll never work. Nobody writes as sublimely as Lane, with the only exception to that "nobody" being the wonderful Joe McCulloch, who could probably teach me to love I Am Curious Yellow, which would be no mean feat. Alongside Ignatiy Vishnevtsky, Lane is the writer who I most fervently wish I could someday become, if only because theirs are the tastes I find myself most closely sharing, to say nothing of how much more passionately I find their writing.

This time around, I was able to look past the stylistic twists and specificity of the various value judgments a bit and see that one of Lane's most laudable habits is his total unwillingness to permit the personal failings of the artist or author to derail his feelings toward the work itself. It's a challenge that seems to have become far, far too prevalent in discussion today, with critics and artists scanning twitter and facebook constantly to confirm that neither side is getting too out there with their political or social commenting. Lane dispenses with it constantly in this collection, essay after essay, displaying patent refusal to allow the likes of Evelyn Waugh's shitty personal behavior to ruin the sentences he created, and Lane''s able to do it (and this is the hard part, I think) without letting each instance turn into a treatise on why you have to do that. (To be specific, he never even tries: he just tells you he doesn't care, and then he continues forward.) It's a tough act to pull off, to tell us you aren't going to care without forcing us to decide whether we care too, and then lead us back to the work that matters in the first place. The best example is his essay on Harold Bloom; coincidentally, there's no better example of a man whose longtime critical work has been stuck on the rocks of responding to his critics (while criticizing other critics at the same time, like a caged animal laying waste to those who are only trying to help free him) instead of focusing on the work that got him there in the first place.

It's a difficult path to follow, what Lane's doing. He's here to talk about the books, and yet he's got to address the problem that the author faces--in Bloom's case, it's how impossible he finds it to ignore the cries of sexism, amongst others, that land upon his back--without the entire essay becoming a study in those conversations. It's a tough trick, as sexism is like super-hero comics or "least favorite tv shows", in that its a subject that tends to dominate the conversation the second it enters the room, with everyone striving to have the last word. Lane manages it with grace, but I'd be goddamned if I could tell you how he does it. The only thing I can confirm is that it's a trick he's mastered, as he pulls it off everytime he needs to.

Honestly, I thought I might grow out of this guy. Ten years later, I'm delighted to find out that will probably never be the case.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

No Pictures: Richard Stark Knew How To Take Down Somebody With Nothing More Than A Metal File Drawer, Which He Hit Them In The Face With

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
By Josh Wilker

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who is going to argue for the film supremacy of the Bad News Bears In Breaking Training, and that hard press will continue here: I imagine the film is not that good. Having read every single sentence of Josh Wilker's excellent book examining the film, it sounds like the sort of thing that a certain kind of person would respond to a description of its pleasures with the smugly delivered retort "I guess you had to be there", and as a card-carrying smug piece of shit sure to die by my own hand at some rapidly approaching point, I have to cosign that, if only for a bit. Liking this movie sounds exactly like the sort of thing you had to be there to do, and yet, by the conclusion of Wilker's text--actually fuck that, by the conclusion of the section "Unstoppable Decline" on this book's 16th blistered page--you can't help but feel the rising tide of envy for what it would have been, to be there, then.

Wilker's book isn't like the other books in the Deep Focus line. (We know it's been abandoned, yes? Unceremoniously shut down? It has, just to be clear. Put your Lethal Weapon dreams on ice, for now. Soft Skull has more shit to foist upon the seven people interested in books about zine culture who don't understand how to use the internet). Wilker is lyrical, hyperbolic, at times unsubstantiated, insanely personal, and violently masculine in a fashion that mysteriously sneaks past 2011's dominant trifecta of man-boy, misogynist, and creepy-asexual-feelings-geek towards something that feels more truthful while still weirdly patriotic, as long as you understand we're talking about the America of baseball cards, which also happens to be Wilker's primary mode of expository camouflage. There's no more fitting example of the mistake Soft Skull made in this line's cancellation than this: a book dependent only on a singular writer's commitment to an idea absolutely no one else could have had in such detail. Back to the micro audience, it seems. If only they'd let them play!

Bring The Noise: 20 Years Of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip-Hop
By Simon Reynolds, 2009

While most of the conversation about Simon Reynolds of 2011 revolves around his Retromania book, America also got a chance this year to see this, a curated collection of his writing from the last twenty years originally published two years ago in the UK. It's a no-bullshit fascinating attempt by one of the best music writers imaginable to codify his own twenty-year response/reaction to a whole measure of cultural questions. Race, innovation, what the responsibility of the artist is or might someday be--Reynolds plays it a bit loose when it comes to proving that's what he was always asking after in the heat of it, but you'd have to just hate the guy completely to deny the clear consistency of his curiosity.

That's the thing about Reynolds that sticks the most, actually; and what makes him more valuable then the quadrillion consumption junkies and ocd isolationists that populate so much of contemporary music writing. He's up front about what he's doing, what we should be doing, which is figuring it out, asking after, searching for why. It's a book that fails to answer almost all of the questions it posits. By the end, the reader should have figured out why that is.

Butcher's Moon
By Richard Stark, 1974

Butcher's Moon is the 16th Parker book, and while the pr guys are absolutely right--you can read these books in whatever order you'd like and not miss a bit--there's a great satisfaction to be found in having read the prior 15 before you take the plunge. Being a direct sequel to Slayground, Butcher's Moon circulates around Parker's pursuit of the cash he left behind, the men who kept him from it, and the waste of salted earth he'd left when he'd broke from these men last. It's nothing like the other Parker books, and yet it's the nearest they come to those text's logical conclusion. The broken families of crime and the violence he brings to their feet, the hideous display of emotion that he experiments with and embraces, having shown so little for the last 15 books--this is the book where Parker witnesses what might be his own bastard creations, and he sets himself as executioner for them all. This is vile perfection, and it should be earned. No one did this better.

The Sins Of The Fathers
By Lawrence Block, 1976

*That is one fucked up drawing of the female face. "Very Superior" indeed!

The only thing you ever hear about detective character Matthew Scudder is that he's a recovering alcoholic, and that's because "recovering alcoholic" is the main thing that distinguishes Scudder from all the other ex-cop turned private eye characters that show up in crime fiction. And honestly, there was a time when Scudder's recovery was a novel, notable trait, a time when alcoholism mostly showed up in the more precious strands of serious lit-fiction. Getting drunks sober--now that's a television story, one that people never seem to tire of. But Block's depiction of slow-burn long-term sobriety (albeit one heavily dotted with near-misses and threatened relapse) was relatively unusual for the genre. Does it make the books any better? No.

Not even a little bit.

Comeback
By Richard Stark, 1997

This is the first Parker book Stark wrote after 1974's Butcher's Moon, and it's got some of the best violence--and most immersive writing you'll find depicting the mechanics of one man taking out an entire room--that anyone has ever put to paper. There's a whiff of repetitive perfectionism in Comeback's recreation of the Parker Versus A Horror Movie conclusive structure, with Westlake locking the character up in a reverse home invasion, but the experience is so incredibly satisfying that it's impossible to criticize.

Backflash
By Richard Stark, 1997

Coming so soon on the heels of Comeback, it would have been totally understandable for Backflash to suffer by comparison. And it does. Make no mistake: it's a great piece of Parker arcana, a smart, weird heist featuring some fo the best non-Grofield back-up players. But Comeback is so good--so violent, so aggressive, so weirdly human--that it's impossible not to feel like a little of the air has been taken out. There's a lot of brilliance to be found watching Westlake struggle against self-imposed restrictions--Parker's workshop mentality makes it hard to do emotion-driven exception. My advice is to let more than a few days go by between when you start this one, and whenever you finished the last.

-Tucker Stone, 2011