Dirty White Boys
By Stephen Hunter
PRH, 1994
This is the second book in the Bob Lee Swagger franchise, set at an unclear time and only touching upon the Swagger character by way of his dad, who was such a great man of violence in Hot Springs (the first book in this franchise that I have read, which I discovered because it was recommended via an algorithm after I started watching the Shooter television show, which was based on the character of Bob "The Nailer" Lee Swagger and was previously made as a film starring Mark Wahlberg by the same name. Dirty White Boys mentions Earl Swagger once--he's the cop who killed one of this book's main characters father--but even if it didn't, you'd know whose world you're in. Stephen Hunter is super into guns, way more than he is into things like characters that have long term goals, and he's super into men, in this very broad strokes heavy boy way. This book follows a sociopathic murderer who breaks out of prison with his giant mentally handicapped (and indestructible) cousin and a young failed vaguely femme artiste in need of a father figure. The trio proceeds to kill their way across a couple of states. In pursuit is another real man type, and in keeping with the demands of morons, he's a "flawed" hero, an aging State Trooper who is wearily cheating on his wife with his cowardly partner's hot young wife. The book circles around gunfights and destruction, multiple moments where tough guys tell weak men how to be tough guys in this fashion that sounds sometimes like the author is talking to himself, which is something I can understand while not feeling very sympathetic towards in the slightest. It's a book where the action is cruel, sloppy and still extremely engaging--people get their faces torn off upwards by gunfire, but continue on via the power of insanity, extensive boring explanations (which are probably technically accurate) for how birdshot functions explain how a character can survive point blank damage...it's a white trash thriller, and it reads like one. The first sentence is a racist line about how big the character's penis is, a sentence that got reproduced in a Deadline article about the movie adaption that is apparently in production, and the book is one of those cases that probably leans on a contempt-for-your-feelings argument about realism for the never-ending stream of racial slurs that populates the book. I liked the (two) farmhouse shoot-outs, would have had higher tolerance for the rest of the book if I'd read it twenty years ago.
The Vintage Mencken
By HL Mencken, Edited by Alistair Cooke
PRH, 1955
I read this on a cruise ship, which is a pretty solid environment for reading about Mencken's disgusting descriptions of crowded, sweaty political conventions. He's got a lot of that-didn't-age-well comments about black people in here, even when he's talking about how awful some actual blood-on-their-hands racists are, and all of that is--hard to get through implies something I don't like, it's still just reading--it's tiresome and stupid and it makes it hard to take him seriously when you're reading the parts that aren't like that. The stuff where he talks shit about moralistic Puritan types holds up though, less so hs fantasy of an aristocracy to rule us all though--i'm unclear about how that embrace of a master race of high culture fits with his general worldview that it is up to people to engage with the world beyond their own comfort, to embrace the inexplicable. How does that fit with asking for a better boss? Aren't you still just climbing back into a cage? Based off the writing in this book, he's a terrible literary critic, it's functionally impossible to know what he's talking about in the Dreiser section.
Billy Bathgate
By E.L. Doctorow
PRH, 1998
All of these books were originally published by other companies that are now owned by PRH. I could credit their original houses, but I want to remember them as coming from one monolithic company for the sake of upset. Billy Bathgate is a category of book that is so massive that it really deserves a pungent name: books where old men write books where young boys lose their virginity while learning to become men at the feet of violent dudes. I guess you could boil everything down to its essence for the purpose of dismissing it--in a way, the above sentence covers Henry IV? And there's something in the sauce, I guess: there's a reason I've chosen to read enough of these books that i've gotten tired of these books (as well as their older cousin, books about old writers who fuck their grad students). Write about what you know, they like to say, and old guys spend enough time remembering a time period when they had multiple erections in a day that memory can be a Masterclass. This book is bad, except when it's not. The stuff about crime and the city is a dream, and it reads well, but the part where the kid fucks a lady in a swampy forest and she doesn't get grossed out by all the mud and sludge that is going inside of her is just--ah. I'll forget about the parts of this I liked--the parts where they explain a long game of jury tampering--will fade from memory, but I'll always remember the part where the girl didn't say "hey, clean all the mud off of your penis before you stick it inside me".
Agent In Place
By Mark Greaney
PRH, 2018
Here's an interesting fact about the PRH imprint "Berkley Books" that should tell you something about this (not good) book:
Following its publication of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October, Berkley Books became increasingly interested in publishing military fiction and technothrillers. The publicity campaigns at military bases were part of the success of Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog.
Makes sense! You can still make a lot of money off of Tom Clancy, I do believe--they've gone back to that well a million times. After all, you're not just monetizing a type of writing and a particular narrative, you're weaponizing a personality that already exists: Tom Clancy type-a-guys, both true believers like Clancy look-a-likes with the scrambled egg hats and guys like me, with a distaste for the military only exceeded by our distaste with ourselves and our feelings, who like to read books about hard lines and the hard men who straddle those lines. That's a lot of people who are willing to buy books, and they tend to be the kind of people who will read as indiscriminately as is possible--we read a category, and while we'd prefer it be as charming as Day of The Jackal or as cool as Jack Reacher, we'll still give quite a few of them a chance off of the most basic of recommendations.
Case in point: Agent In Place, the seventh in Mark Greaney's Gray Man series--there is no connection to the Gray Man that appears in the Spencer novels by Robert Parker, nor the character who used to show up in the Giffen/DeMattheis Justice League comics. Oh that it was! The idea of a depressed soul-collector with megalomaniacal goals and God-level powers on loan from the Lords of Order who followed up a successful career assassinating people in Boston with an even more bloodthirsty career as a rogue spy/mercenary/justice doer certainly sounds appealing. Alas: this is just the last part of that equation, the part where an unkillable guy wanders around being unkillable, gets referred to consistently as "The Violater" in a fashion that has me convinced that Greaney thinks that sounds cool and will broke no disagreement, despite it being clearly obvious that it isn't, like, ever, going to be. I haven't read the first six of these books. Based off the recap moments that pop up in Agent In Place, the character of The Gray Man/The Violator who also goes by the name, sweet jesus, kill me now, "Court Gentry", he used to be a badass for the US government, got annoyed with them for sending something his way that violated his moral code, went rogue and is thought of/talked about as some kind of dark Satan of assassination but is in all likelihood extremely moral and never accidentally does anything bad to anyone (his nickname is The Violater! There should be rules for having that as a nickname! The first rule should be that you don't have a moral code!), and eventually started doing random jobs for the US government again, who i'm convinced in this book is always on the side of justice excepting a few bad apples that the Gray Man gets to kill, which leads us (again, i'm guessing) up to this book, where he's recuperating from meeting a woman who knocked him for an emotional tumble. Agent In Place is about him being better at everything than everyone who ever lived, invading Syria all by himself, showing off what scumbags "military contractors" are, and playing moral shrill to a bunch of weak-kneed academic and Deep State types, none of whom survive the book, all of whom die with "The Violator's" smug told-you-so attitude hanging over them. The action in this book is few and far between, and just when it starts to get cool and interesting, Greaney finds someway to say "The Gray Man wasn't scared, like, at all. Not even a little bit. So cool, this Gray Man was." This would wear on any reader, regardless of their tolerance, but when it's coupled with the way every secondary character reacts when the Gray Man calls them on the phone--which is that they usually spill their drink, have an icy chill go down their spine and galvanize their sphincter, or basically do any manner of monocle squirting idiocy. It's a stupid, bad book. No big deal: lots of books are stupid and bad. But they can still be fun, and at no point does this manage to clear that bar. Would not bang: 1 out of 10.
Ed vs. Yummy Fur
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