The Factual Opinion

The ___ Dies At The End

I went on a beach vacation. These were the books I finished during the trip. I had to make an emergency trip to the store when I finished the ones I had brought with me and wasn't bored with reading yet. What follows is in no particular order.

Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper
Published by Mulholland (Hachette), 2023

This is a pitch black contemporary mystery set in Los Angeles. It features sexual assault, extreme violence, corrupt LAPD guys, a tortured romance, multiple narrators, powerful, evil men and a bunch of cameos by famous people. So yeah: it's a book that is aware of James Ellroy, and no, it's not as good as a book by James Ellroy. (Except for the books by James Ellroy that are bad.) The stuff in here that is bog standard is done effectively, but without enough spice or originality to be that impressed by--a teenage girl getting pregnant with a rich creep's baby, a never seen rich crimelord who people talk about in hushed tones--nor are the two leads as cynical and cruel as they probably should be, considering their status in the world (a junior fixer at a Hollywood publicist crisis management joint, and an ex-cop who now labors in a guy-who-beats-people-up kinda job). But I still was impressed by how completely nihilistic and terrifying the cops are in this one--despite not being a huge component of the book, their behavior at a tattoo parlor and a later nightmare beatdown serves as to be so frightening that it nearly overwhelms the book's actual narrative. They're a hostile, cruel force, completely loyal to one another, in service only to one another, and sidestepped or appeased by their financial betters, irregardless of how this shapes the plans or goals of those who control the world. In previous books like this, corrupt cops are often in service to some type of crime overlord, but here, Harper depicts them purely as an end to themselves: a band of roving killers that exists to maintain the environment of power and death, and it is this psychological environment that they are beholden to. It's their job just to make violence and the control violence allows part of the landscape, to give fear a stink and texture that's unforgettable, so all within understand: this is where you live, and this is what is in charge. When any other form of power comes up against them, no attempt is made to bend, break or hire them: they are to be avoided until they find another outlet to exert their punishments. From the unseen perspective of the book's larger criminal and social enterprise (which the characters outside of the LAPD call "The Beast"), the roving gangs of cops are like spots of wildfire on a map. Drive around it. It's somebody else's problem, and there's no money to be made in fighting it. This book's darkness reads like an infestation.

Snow Falling On Cedars by David Guterson
Published by Vintage now, Harcourt then, 1994

This was made into a movie that I have to imagine was pretty, but boring, and I'm pleased to say I had that thought before I read a handful of contemporary reviews that described it as such. Regarding the book: I remain unsure, even now, if I read this book for the first time on my trip or if I have read it before. The cover, a pleasant picture that reminds me of one of my twenty favorite scenes in Without Limits, has always jumped out at me, as has the general curiosity I have for any book that was hugely popular upon release, even more so when said hugely popular thing is the only thing that the person involved ever did that achieved that level of breakthrough success. While reading it, I was struck over and over again how familiar it all felt--a courtroom drama that doles out the story of a death and the man on trial for murder, the war veteran reporter covering the trial, still in love with the accused's wife, the historical treatment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Lots of details about fishing boats, all of it written in that way that's engaging enough to pay attention to, believable, but never interesting enough that you'd be tempted to question it, look into it, care--it all smacks of accuracy. Who knows if it is? Did people question how the characters on Friends paid for those apartments when they were nine years old? A meaningless exercise. There's a chapter on storming the beaches of World War 2, but I've already given the copy away so I couldn't tell you if it was D-day or not--it doesn't make a difference. Everything in this book is an engine that gets you to the next part, the conclusion--which involves not one, but two Encyclopedia Browny deductive leaps that had me grimacing both at how stupid they are and my own initial reaction, which was that I felt the lazy satisfaction indistinguishable from immersion into a lukewarm pool. It's the very definition of a vacation read, which is probably why it is the only one on this list that I've already handed off to someone else: because she had a trip coming up.

Witch Hat Atelier 1 By Kamome Shirahama
Published by Kodansha, 2019

I put together a panel on manga for a conference, and one of the more charming parts of it was when the group of experts all spontaneously gushed about how much they enjoyed this series and how it was a great gateway to manga. It was one of those always pleasant moments when a bunch of pros are being genuine with one another onstage in front of a bunch of (mostly) strangers and you can tell they'd be talking the same way if they weren't onstage at all. I didn't buy the book right away (comic's very own Bill Kartalopoulous did, although I don't know if he liked it), but I did get around to it eventually. Shirahama is an extremely detailed illustrator, or their studio is--one aspect of manga coverage that has lessened my enthusiasm for talking about it in any detail in the last few years is the general opacity of which of these are auteurist psycho production machines and which are rooms full of production machines, with a psycho in charge--but however it is getting onto the page, there's just a lot more of it in a fashion that makes her US output (mostly for Dark Horse, I think) less of a surprise. It doesn't look like super-hero, but it is clearly genre, reminiscent of Promethea, or an advertisement for 90s Sandman sometimes--long, elegant figures, beautiful buildings, the rare natural scene that could fit with any magic-adjacent garden scene. The actual meat of the story is pure set up--a young girl loves magic, discovers its secrets because she's a chosen one type, sees her mom semi-permanently immobilized, and heads off to magic school, where she meets a funny little girl with a good heart, a mean snob girl who is extremely skilled and doesn't like the protagonist, and a general implication that there's some kind of coming conflict which our lead will be an important factor in. I can see the appeal, wish I felt it myself.

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns
Published in 1959, Back in action thanks to NYRB, 2003

True confessions of stupid motherfuckers: I spent the first third of this book going "yeah, vet's daughter", thinking abstractly that at some point this war veteran's service was going to come up. And that thought also popped into my head, like a bobble head wandering through the background of my mind palace, throughout the last 2/3 of the book. Here's the thing: this is a book about the daughter of a veterinarian. At no point in the book is that not 100% clear! And yet, no matter how many times my critical brain would address those thoughts and say "hey--he's the other kind of vet. That's why there's all the animals and sequences where he's helping the sick animals", I still happily shit that thought out every time I picked up the book. 

At times, this reminded me of a fairy tale, or an abbreviated, meta-take on Dickens where a young woman ends up in a bunch of shitty situations due to poverty and abuse, is shuttled between some colorful characters and cliches, all the while uninterested (or unwilling, or incapable) of caring enough regarding the back and forth to take any real agency in these potential relationships, with the momentary exception of one hot guy who takes her skating and she lowkey stalks him for a while. She sees it all as a waste of time, less an obstacle to be fought or engaged with, instead to be avoided. By the end of the book, when the strange fantasy element becomes reality, I wondered--where is this going? Is it really gonna work out for this dour champion? Spoiler warning: nope!

Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh
Published by Penguin, 2022

Boy, this book has some whiny ass reviews out there. Some professional book reviewers better hope they never run into a book that's legitimately disgusting. What the fuck happened to grown ups? It's a book set in a medieval time period, of course it's gonna have a certain degree of gross to it. Those people didn't have toilet paper, their life expectancy was like 33 years old! So it's gross! Okay. So it has no "likeable characters"--this is also true, there's no characters to root for, no characters you'll miss when they go off a cliff. I imagine that if books are a checklist of life improvement squares that will push your human potential forward by decreasing your stress levels (through abstract, self-focused pleasure) or teaching you something about the world (like a piece of trivia about history, or the origin of a favorite word) while avoiding unpleasantness, then this book is a flop. I didn't care that much for it because I thought it was a little one-note in its hostility towards our modern age (it's a Covid era book, the local medieval ruler is really stupid, greedy, and infantile) and it got boring after a while, waiting to see which character was going to die next, and how. There's a banality here that wouldn't be repaired by making any of it more palatable. She got the stink right, and for that, give her praise.

The Guest List By Lucy Foley
Published by Harper Collins, 2021

Woof woof! Reese Witherspoon missed her calling as an oatmeal critic.

Copra Round Seven By Michel Fiffe
Published by Image Comics, 2023

Great, obviously. I'm working on something about Copra so I'll get to it then.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Published in 1963 in Germany, back in action thanks to New Directions, 2022

One of the best of the bunch, a truly ass kicking book with one single science fiction element--an invisible wall has come down, separating a woman from the world around her. From what she can see from her remote Austrian location, all living things on the other side--people, animals--are dead, just shut down like retired machines. On her side are a cow, dog, cats, deer, and enough of a headstart on food to survive, if she can keep her shit together. The book is a journal she's written after some time behind the wall, and it takes most of its page count to figure out how long that is, and it consists of both the minutia of survival--her food concerns, shelter--and her relationships with the animals. It's a wild, fascinating book that would be remarkable if only for the seamless perfection with which she isolates the variety of behaviors of the animals--you don't relate to a cat like you do to a dog, or a cow, and the nature of these relationships, and the chosen interdependence...it's truly fascinating stuff. There's a level of interiority captured here that is miles beyond most writing about interior life--at times, I felt like what I was reading was an actual diary of someone having this experience, but not because it was "realistic", but instead because it felt like I was experiencing text that I had written myself, in a journal of my own thoughts, as if my mind was writing it out in front of me as the thought occurred. Tremendous work.

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child
Published by Penguin Random House, 2009

This is the third time I've read this one, and the second time I've read this copy, which belonged to my father-in-law. I wish I had been into Jack Reacher books when he was still alive, because I would like to know what he liked about them. Over the last few years, I've read his old copies when I visit my mother-in-law, and while not all of the books are there, my favorites--this one, Enemy, Persuader, and the first one--all are. My father-in-law and I only spoke a bit before dementia made that a challenge, but the reality is that finding topics that interested him before he became ill was not easy either. It would have been fun to talk about this one--it's the one where Reacher gets some final revenge for 9/11, and the one where you find out Jack's thoughts on knife fighting. (He doesn't like it.) I bet I'll read this one again next summer.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Published by Knopf, 2021

I've actually never read Ishiguro before, but after reading this one--which I got on a lark, after picking it up multiple times only to reject it to a total disinterest in its subject matter--which is AI, in a very "episode of Black Mirror" fashion. (I actually like most of that show that I've seen, it's a clever piece of genre entertainment mostly harmed because it's not enough anymore to watch something and just go "hahah, that was fucked up", you're supposed to make a big deal out of its "emotional resonance" and "man's capability to mirror trauma"--no thanks pal!) Anyway: I did pick this up, and I'm glad I did. The trick to it--and I mean trick in the kindest way, I mean trick in the sense that Ishiguro gives himself a challenge, to swerve left instead of right--is that it's not about what makes us different than robots, but about what it would take for those different from us to just describe us, our choices, our moments, our lives, without access to the messy disorganization of our thoughts. It's a book that examines life without a soul, but not without a spirit, and as the pages and moments within it accumulate, and as a system of understanding is build off of a system that misunderstands, the story of a life gets designed and told. You're never given true access to people in this book, and by the close--which is both too upsetting and endless to truly consider, but at the same time, too simple and honest in the telling not to have some sense of beauty all the same--I found myself genuinely moved. A succession of moments and choices and risks taken. It's a life lived well, by a thing that never lived. 

-Tucker Stone, 2023

No Pictures: Brian Evenson's Collapse of Horses

A Collapse of Horses
By Brian Evenson
Published by Coffee House Press, 2016

I can only guess at what Brian Evenson is compared to, having never seen a review of his work (because I haven’t sought one out, i’m sure there’s plenty of terrible writing about him), but it’s hard to imagine it being names one finds alongside Stephen King in the airport section at whatever imaginary bookstore nobody but example-makers goes to anymore. Evenson’s work doesn’t telegraph reality in the way that what gets categorized as horror so often does—it’s just too weird a place for one to pretend that the people who populate his stories are the sort of people you might meet in life. They’re too determined to stop and talk to you, for one, they’re not readers, for another. They’re not “likable” in any sort of use of that term, but that isn’t to say that they’re hateful rogues—they’re just there, human detritus in full grown skin. It’s not often that you come across them expressing concerns about jobs, love, money. It’s all survival and fear, but most of all, it’s confusion: that’s the one most salient thread that binds these stories together, a confusion with the situations that the characters are presented with or drowned in, confusion that kills them, confusion that terrifies them. The language the stories are written in—an English that feels cut in leather and shape, sentences that end with a Beckettian immediacy and paragraphs that pulse with worry—is fast and muscular, but it isn’t masculine. These are stories that read like they were written by an animal, something with speed, a creature whose body evolved by design to perform a function. Nothing is left to decay by its leavings, the bones rest in the sun, stripped and ready to be bleached by time. It’s not a narrative. It’s an archive. Excellent work by someone who seems incapable of producing anything else.

-Tucker Stone, 2016

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No Pictures: Eleanor Catton's Luminaries

The Luminaries
By Eleanor Catton
Published by Victoria University, 2013 (Little, Brown in North America)

A startlingly well-received work of balmy tripe, The Luminaries is the sort of book that seems destined to exist so that people who want to claim there’s no difference between literary fiction and decently written YA will have an example of dumb literary fiction to point to. It’s long but rarely tedious, yet it’s pretentious, and dumber than a golden retriever, which it also resembles in the way it implores you for attention, constantly nuzzling your crotch every couple of pages, imploring you to acknowledge how hard it's worked for your attention. After spending 300 pages introducing all of the characters and their various interlocking mysteries in a literal drawing room as they explain themselves to a complete stranger who will later turn out to be an excellent crime solving lawyer prone to genius cross-examinations (luckily, at the exact moment when such a character is required), the book cruises its way towards a giant courtroom scene so that our hero—who, like all the white male characters in the book, is about as human as a drawing of meat, and can only be picked out of a line-up because he has a different name from the other drawings—can whip the town into a frenzy of forgiveness for the by-then-revealed-to-be-star-crossed-lovers, which is followed up by a tedious flashback that takes up the final third of the book. Said flashback unpacks every nook and cranny of the book’s “mystery”, no matter that the mystery had been completely unraveled during the courtroom scene, and mainly serves to institute new, even more juvenile coincidences, like revealing that the star-crossed-lovers share the same birthday, or that one time one of the two chinese guys walked into the sheriff’s office and asked him for a nickel and got a sock full of quarters instead. Did I mention that one of the star-crossed lovers is a whore with a heart of gold? Or that she actually wears clothes filled with secret treasure, like some kind of living fairy tale character? I had hoped I made myself successfully forget that. This is a book for children, but they won't like it as much as they would James Marshall.

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No Pictures: Kerry Howley's Thrown

Thrown
By Kerry Howley
Published by Sarabande, 2014

Although there's a few brief moments of beautiful, intoxicating contempt delivered upon the heads of sportswriters in this one, it's impossible to buy them outright--or at least, not to chalk them up as the venomous darts we aim at our closest rivals. Kerry Howley may not crave the claim, but if ever there was a book to be placed alongside the greats of fight lit, it's Thrown, a wonderful travelogue/fight diary told at a breakneck pace. Supposedly constructed out of journals full of notes intended as a graduate study of true experiences in philosophical phenomology, Thrown traces Kerry's "space-taking" immersion into the world of MMA fighting and her personal obsession with two fighters--the should've-been-a-contender Sean Huffman and Eric "New Breed" Koch, a young fighter at the onset of a potential-filled career. Like any smart writer schooled in contemporary profiling, Howley doesn't skimp on the documentation of perception, the little moments of weirdness that demystify one of the few sports still capable of mystification. It's that solidity of form--that awareness of what we need for these narratives to contain and compel us forward--that serves as Howley's truer focus though, one that seeks to pierce exactly what it is that's occuring in those shining moments when their bodies enact violence, when skin swells, splits, tears. In hands of lesser purpose, Howley's mention of how these men speak, the way they respond to request, the look in their eyes when they listen, their weird demands and weirder requirements--all of these things would be gloss upon the room, cheap minutatie to fill the mouth of the brains color commentary. In hers, the trivia becomes another bone, one that one of her fighters would use as handle. We find purchase just the same.

-Tucker Stone, 2014

 

No Pictures: Private Universe, Boxing, Jim, God

Home
By Marilynne Robinson, 2008

An unusual sequel to Robinson's 2004 novel Gilead which sees her returning not just to that novel's characters, but to that novel's story, now told from the point of view of those living in a house not but a few minutes away. Marilynne Robinson's works of fiction--there are only three of them--deal initially with parent/child relationships, but this is essentially by necessity. What they really become is a kind of theological praxis, a laboratory where Robinson can work at answering questions of faith that would become stilted or confused if she were to stick to talking them out in a more non-fiction setting. (In both books, Robinson's characters consistently acknowledge that their theological debates are essentially circular conversations, and that forward momentum towards conclusion is not to be found. It's not addressed within the text that those sorts of debates are, by the nature of their subjects, impossible to conclude, but by the way all of the characters are depicted it is clear that their theological knowledge is implied. "I'm not going to make nonsense out of a mystery" is a phrase that pops up as the book struggles toward conclusion, but it's not the struggle of a writer who doesn't know where she is going. It's the purposeful slog of people trying so hard to wring the fabric of truth out of what they feel and what they mean that the very ground gapes to draw them low. 

The Devil and Sonny Liston
By Nick Tosches, 2000

Tosches seems to have found himself on the disapproving end of the post-blog era, amongst that class of writers whose common thread is that a bunch of people on the Internet hate them for a multitude of contradictory reasons, and the theory that maybe it's just because they were the last batch of people who got decent paychecks and research budgets to write about music is dismissed in favor of pointing out how unaware they are of copious signifiers from the last three months. That's not to give Tosches' critics a blanket condemnation--his novels have deserved most of the disgust they've received--and his tendency to prioritize his brand over his points has always a nuisance. But there's a thing he does, or did, that has immense, inarguable value, and that's the gruntwork. His books--specifically his non-fiction books, of which this is one, the others being mostly music biographies--aren't built from pontification or enthusiasm, they're built from work. Like Steve Coll and Dostoyevsky, a Tosches book expects you to remember the names, to pay attention to the job titles, to keep up your end of the bargain. And while Coll will grant you the rich syrup of gossip for your labors, Tosches goes for wild-eyed poetry, for paragraph long breaks where he rhapsodically idolizes what it must be like to have a gigantic penis, or coldbloodedly explains what the spiral of drug addiction feels like. He forces himself into a corner, opening by saying that Sonny was murdered (a long standing piece of gossip that remains tantalizingly unprovable), only to conclude by saying he's glad he said that, but he doesn't believe it anymore. It's the sort of work we have too little of, a work that admits and admires unanswerable complexity, a book as opposed to disgusting behavior as it is to the idea that that behavior should be responded to in kind. There's nothing wrong with hate, venom, foul language or bile: but in the world where the children of Tosches now rule, it's worth recognizing that they're best left to the professionals.

 
A Hell Of A Woman
By Jim Thompson, 1954

The story of a man, a woman, and money that doesn't belong to them: that's the plot of a bunch of Jim Thompson books, but few of them go as nightmarish in the final pages, and that's saying something when you remember...oh, just about anything else he wrote after the first three books. There's a temptation when reading a book like this to fly through the words just to see in what specific way this one will go wrong, but if you can slow down, do so. There's just so much here that's worth savoring, even if every bit of it is drunk with blood and mean as hell.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
By Steve Coll, 2012

This isn't the first book that long-time journalist and author Steve Coll has written about oil, but Private Empire--Coll's years-in-the-making examination of the Exxon corporation--does have a wiry sense of newness to it, a general feeling that, for the first time in years, Coll's carnivorous ability to drain sources whole might have run dry. Whereas his previous string of books has seen Coll structure entire passages around knockout quotes--many of which often turn out to be rollicking strings of hilariously creative expletives--Private Empire leans quieter, with chapters that empty out slowly, like a listing laundry bag. It's a quality that might be, at first, difficult to embrace, but as the pages flit by, it becomes more and more clear: the book can only read like this, a taciturn list of events and decisions, because the subject won't have it any other way.

Coll opens the book in the only way history could ever allow, on that morning in '89 when the companies name became forever entangled with Valdez. Holding back from pat surprises and cheese, his ability to recall that event's feeling--the way the world just seemed to stop and hold its collective breath as so many political consciousnesses were born--makes for an experience rich with feeling for anyone who might remember those events first hand. By the time Coll's starts introducing colorful side characters--the best and first being Admiral Paul Yost, a Coast Guard commandant known most at that point for banning beards amongst all his men, ensuring a legacy of disgust, the book seems like its going down the road so many others have before: courtroom battles, funny lines, the late-night legal revelations popularized in movies.

And then it doesn't. Instead, it chases a company, its hard-as-nails chief executive, and a near-robotic system of discipline that does more to explain why men become libertarians then any political theory ever will. There's a toxic, undeniable logic to this book, one that you can almost sense Coll struggling against. This is a story of a fortress of intelligence and income, of people who have gone further down the road of profit than almost anyone in human history. After decades of writing and reporting about these sorts of people--Coll's previous books have been on the reach of the CIA, the incredible financial success of the Bin Laden empire (as well as the dark monstrosity of its infamous son), the fall of massive corporations and the destruction of the AT&T empire--you can't blame him for the shadow of wonder throughout the book. Exxon is an unusual place, an unusual beast, and at its highest level of staff, there isn't a real comparison. These are men--and it is all men, for reasons the book explicitly details--who dismiss Vladimir Putin publicly, who humiliate Hugo Chavez in New York courts out of a weird sense of fairness, men who respond to an offer of help from then-President George W. Bush with a startled sneer and a violent shaking of heads. And they do it less out of ego--which is what onlookers wrongly assume--then they do it of a faith in efficiency and the cold pursuit of success. As an "aw-shucks, what can you do" Bush put it himself, when an insulted head of state asked the President to put the company in line, "Nobody tells those guys what to do."

It's in the way the company handled climate change--or rather, how it refused to handle climate change--that Coll is most able to shake off the allure of the company's massive success, because it's there that the company is most wrong. It's also there that Coll might have missed an opportunity to write more about the contemporary addiction with the wholesale fabrication of belief that so diseases today's corporate empires, the way that governments and focus groups and gigantic corporations decide their side and then invest all energy into proving its veracity. Year after year, billion after billion, ExxonMobil so thoroughly fucked up what had once been a straightforward issue--humans have culpability in the Earth's changing climate--that a generation grew up believing the debate's origin was in science, when it actually came straight from the bank. 

---What follows are some key passages I found interesting. I apologize for not expanding this review into the larger piece the book deserves.

Page 309: "Hardly anyone outside of the industry truly grasped the gargantuan scale of global energy production. Titanic changes in the patterns of energy use over decades would be required to create even modest changes in fuel consumption patterns."

Page 418: During the Khodorkovsky arrest, the Bush administration decided to go after Putin a bit, to fuck with him for embarrassing the US, and they offered this service to ExxonMobil, essentially saying that they'd help put the metal to Vladimir during a contract renegotiation he'd just called for. ExxonMobile sneered back and said "no thanks, not necessary." The implication being that the US governement doesn't scare Putin, which, in light of the last year, seems to be completely accurate.

Page 448: ExxonMobile didn't mess around with subsidized businesses, as a rule, for two reasons: because subsidies could dry up, making it costly, and because one easy way to please voters would be to figure out which subsidized businesses ExxonMobile was in and then take that business away.

Page 472: "It's hard to get used to the fact that Nigerian officials will lie to you straight up".

Page 502: One of the things that makes it hard to understand ExxonMobile's profits is because people don't really understand how big they are. One number he threw out was this: 4000 dollars a second, in taxes. 

Page 548: If the US does decide to restrict the sale of Canadian tar sands oil, then ExxonMobile will just sell it to Asia. That's how oil works. The US can't do shit.

Page 615: "The public demanded protection from reckless airplane operators and pushed airline companies into compliance--crashes repelled customers."

Page 617: Every time that the end of oil gets predicted, it's been wrong. Also: Mongolia probably has 152 billion tons of coal, which is enough to run power plants in China for another 50 years.

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Do The Movies Have A Future?
By David Denby, 2012

David Denby has carved out a decent place for himself in recent years as the staunch defender of blockbusters of above average quality, a place he ended up in part because he seems mostly to prefer writing about movies that are seen by millions of people, as long as they aren't based on comic books. This, after all, is the guy who got actual death threats for pointing out that the Dark Knight marketing team should hold off on promoting their Keysi fight choreography until they hired a cinematographer who could shoot it in a comprehensible fashion, ever since, superhero movies will find him loaded for bear. He's also somewhat well known amongst internet types for what is reportedly one of the worst books ever written on contemporary culture, "Snark", a book about how you shouldn't make fun of things, ever, unless you're David Denby, who does it the right way, because he's...older than you? It's not an argument that makes a lot of sense.

That's who he is--and yes, some of that old marm-ishness does come through in this 2012 collection of his movie reviews. He never whips out a full on tsk-tsk, but like many old guard critics who remember what it was like before Ain't It Cool came along, Denby has a tendency to play his age a little too expressively, consistently hinting at a time when things were a little bit simpler and entertainment was a little bit smarter. Even when you agree with him on the dwindling of the American movie star or the merchandised megalomania of corporate transmedia intellectual property farms, it feels a little too obvious, a little too stale. "Corporations suck" is something you write in sharpie on a skateboard, it's a little too short to be a thesis past those years. Better to focus on what you like, David. You don't seem to have an actual case against the things you don't.

The Dinner
By Herman Koch, 2012

A creepy book about a family with a dark secret that is slowly revealed over the course of one flashback-full evening, each neatly parseled out amidst that evening's titular meal, The Dinner reads like it was composed to perform an industrial function. It's got some genuinely shocking twists, but even those shocks feel like they've been inserted to fit a structural need, as if Koch could tell that the audience was starting to slip away. (To be honest, I was.) It's a problem possibly attributable to Koch's choice of shock--focusing on a lead character who is gradually revealed to have a severe form of mental instability--as the book feels like you're being rambled at by a dopey psychotic even before it's explained that yes, you actually are being rambled at by a dopey psychotic on an erection-imposed meds vacation. The brief moments of black humor that humanize the characters never lasts that long, and the actual innocents on display are portrayed as being so weak and ineffectual that it's impossible to imagine a circumstance where the regular world's day-to-day difficulties wasn't going to destroy them anyway. In the end, it's a book that never really says anything (beyond generalities like "do brutes deserve love, aren't mothers are committed, which one of us is REALLY crazy"), choosing instead to lay all of its bets on the form it chooses to ramble them in. It passes the time, sure, but it's not like time needs the help.

The Fun Stuff
James Wood, 2012

A good rule of thumb is that a critic who claims that it's "easy" to write negative reviews is a critic who can't write negatively very well (and about half the time, can't write positively either), and despite his high profile as the New Yorker book critic many are eager to please, James Wood has sort of become one of those guys: he can write about the good stuff, but when he's steamed up, back away. (This wasn't always true, but in recent years, it does seem to have become the case.) Properly then, you'll find mostly positive pieces in this collection of book reviews and the like. That's partly by design--"The Fun Stuff" of the title refers to Wood's reverence for the Who's Keith Moon, a man well known for his love of hedonistic pleasures--and partly by desire. When Wood is enthused about someone, be it Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis or "solving" Ian McEwan--he's at his absolute best, unleashing paragraphs of prose that are both exuberant and toiled over. It's like seeing a proud mechanic roll out his latest contraption, built from the sturdiest of equipment and polished to a shine. Wood's ability to quote a book and capture a moment's essence is intimidating, and not just to writers who marvel at his ability to parse out meaning, but to a reader, who fears that their own exercise just isn't good enough. If there's any flaw to Wood's method, it's probably that he never quite brings you along in a way that convinces you that there was a way you could have discovered it on your own, and while that may be true, the job of the explanatory critic--which is what Wood prefers to be--is to trick you into thinking that you're smart enough without their help, and that they're merely saving you time.

Bay of Souls
By Robert Stone, 2003

If there's one particular plot that has a tendency to write itself whether anyone wants to read it again or not, it's the one where a man cheats on his wife with an unbelievably sexy woman who transitions from an almost feral cool to 100% freakshow crazypants right around the time he decides to fully bail on his marriage. One doesn't even have to seek these sorts of books out, they just bubble up everywhere, like a sunburn on a redhead. You wade through them, tolerating the portions where he impotently struggles with whether or not he should pretend to feel guilty, waiting for the part where he makes some terrible decision to sneak a weekend away with his perfect little time bomb. What will the confrontation be like? How will his young son react to the news of his father's choices? In the hands of a great author, this sort of tedium can be skillfully redeemed by the characters, the setting, even the prose itself. It's heavy lifting, but it can be done, and Robert Stone is a heavy lifter. 

This one seems to have gotten away from him. There's moments--blips, really--where the terminology of international espionage miscelleny and alcoholic journalism expand the pages outward into a better story, as if they were an old fashioned fireplace bellows of seriousness. Snuck in by characters that ring of cliche--a cocky reporter or a death-drenched cartel kingpin--you'll sense a tale of more depth, but it leaves as abruptly as their behavior was introduced. The finest portion of the book, where Charles Dicken's Madame Defarge is recast as a voodoo priestess who is also, somehow, the long arm of druglords, isn't even graced with an ending, it's just abandoned. You're stuck riding around in the back pocket of another cranky professor-type with a 40-something hard-on lost in a world his academia didn't prepare him for. If you aren't tired of those yet, fine. But if you aren't tired of those yet, you probably don't read that much in the first place.

The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen, 2001

Reading this again having finished Freedom is an experience worth recommendation, and yet it was the hubbub that arose over the publication of this piece of writing that saw this reader pulling Franzen's 2001 game-changer off the shelf. I love The Corrections, I do. Maybe it's because I've never read anything else that comes so close to accurately capturing the disintegration effect dementia has on an old man, or maybe it's the no-escape, no-quarter way it forces one to experience how neurotic and demanding love can twist a family apart. I love this book, no matter how mechanical that part about the guy quitting his job to keep his daughter's name from being dragged thru the mud feels all these years later. Blue cheeks, you son of a bitch!

Beloved
By Toni Morrison, 1987

Unchanged by time or reverence. Different moments leap out and take root--"your love is too thick" "thin love ain't no love at all" lacerate as much now as the passage describing the sawblade, the birth--but the general sense of significance that blisters the page remains the same. By comparison to 12 Years A Slave, a recent film that's representation of slavery quite nearly matches Beloved in terms of violence, Morrison's work splashes out its vision on a larger canvas. It's not just the lashing, it's also the way it lasts, the way the horror lives forever, how it's almost as bad to sit and witness the way a body makes itself survive the twenty years that follow something it shouldn't have had to experience once. A wound can only physically heal, and that is not enough.

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Books of 2013: Elliott Holt's You Are One Of Them

You Are One Of Them
By Elliott Holt, 2013

A story of tying off a wound, of "closure", that neatly ignores the cheap seats temptation to play itself to the teeming masses that would embrace such a tale, You Are One Of Them is a sneaky book--and as it's a novel mostly set during the Cold War's division of trust and fear, the trait fits like a glove. It's so tight it's almost too neat, but the book's more emotive passages keep the feeling of cuteness at bay. There's not a lot of rawness here--our narrator is too experienced in managing the demands of an emotionally crippled parent for her feelings to dictate mood--and therefore the moments when it hits are hard to escape. When Sarah describesher and her mother "locked together like two magnets, the grief pulsing between us", it's impossible not to take her mother's more extreme passions seriously, and the following line--"It's our job to make the world a safer place"--resonates throughout every action the woman takes, even as it's made clear that her motives work in tandem with a need to exert control on an existence that has been stripped of it.

Sarah's mother isn't the books lead, and Holt smartly avoids leaving the book too much in the shadow of that relationship, but there's a hardiness to the sections that feature those two. Their relationship offsets and motivates a good bit of the rest of the book--Sarah's an expert at handling a specific, unusual environment, but that expertise translates to a young woman both unused to allowing her emotions out and a woman who just takes things a bit too seriously. All her feelings are tied up in one specific loss, a tragedy that hit when she was extremely young, but it was that loss that has enabled her to do so much. It's a neat idea, and in all honesty, it's a believable one--if you've got a name for the cavernous wound where all your hurt comes from, you'll never be surprised by it. And of course, it also gives you license to tell the story of what happens when that wound is put to the test, when the truth is called out for the lie. A lovely--and somewhat painful--book
.

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Joseph Anton
By Salman Rushdie, 2012

This one is tough, but before I get to that: man, people don't like this guy! I can't remember the last time I read a book that earned such visceral, unsolicited negativity--subway, bookstore, polite conversation. "I would never read something like that" is a response you expect to certain kinds of YA genre stuff and absolute trash like the Turner Diaries, but I heard that phrase twice, both times from people who are about as liberal as you can be before you can't leave the house for fear of hurting the grass with your feet. So much venom! The book itself is actually pretty engaging for a good long run, as you watch the balancing act of a ridiculously nerdy guy trying to maintain a normal life while being surrounded by men of supremely intimidating violence. Moving around from lair to lair, trying to keep a relationship going (he's terribly unsuccessful, more on that in a second), trying to remain creative, trying to be a father...it's an unusual existence, living in secrecy and under protection, and one that doesn't normally receive this kind of documentation. Eventually, however, the interest wears off and becomes a repetitive novelty, and its right around that point that Rushdie's failings as a husband (and his pettiness as a jilted lover) feverishly pick off what enjoyment is left, all while there's still pages to go. He doesn't deserve an ounce of what happened to him, but it's not like any sane person was making that argument in the first place.

Both Flesh And Not
By David Foster Wallace, 2012

This collection of essays is as up and down as you would imagine for a book produced by the editorial brainiacs who put out the call for "whatever hasn't been reprinted in a book before". You're going to get off on some of them (the Terminator 2 and Federer pieces) while wishing others had been reworked when Wallace was older (the enfants terrible piece has some great stuff in it, and would have benefitted immensely from acknowledging the direction Bret Easton Ellis' career has taken). Others--the review of math books, for example--will be as difficult to get through now as they were when they were written. It seems besides the point to mention that this is a book for Wallace fans only, but what the hell: consider it mentioned.

Mr. Peanut
By Adam Ross, 2010 

The most unheralded and best of the meta-hybrid novels, Mr. Peanut takes a whole bunch of things that would be twee and unmoving anywhere else--like a book that incorporates an old television show's plot, internet computer whizzes who don't understand love, unholy idealizations of gorgeous woman, and an tricky you're-reading-what-they're-writing shtick--and turns out one of the most intense and unsettling books about masculinity and long-term relationships I can think of. It's so contemporary that parts of it already feel a little dated (you probably need to have grown up having seen The Fugitive and fuzzily remember the dot com boom for certain parts of this novel to really kick your ass, but that's possibly untrue), but that's part and parcel of a book that zeroes on so intensely on the nature of a few men and their relationship with the women they've been with the longest: they have to be grounded in a present, and the present goes stale immediately. There's stuff in here that isn't easy to handle, and that's why its weird novelistic take on being a crime/horror thriller works to its benefit--its a lot easier to acknowledge what you're doing wrong if the message gets delivered via a talking banana.

Eagle On The Street
By David A Vise and Steve Coll, 1991

Could've been better, honestly. It seems like Coll and Vise at one point considered having this be about how SEC chief Shad's personal life kept him off the reservation, which might have worked (gross as it might be) and if that had been combined with the disturbing spousal abuse going on at the enforcement level, there was a general thesis that the various 80's banking scandals--which arguably set the groundwork for today's financial dificulties--was directly tied to the collapse of personal relationships and the emotional chaos that ensued when a bunch of guys tried to buck up and go to work despite the fact that they were emotionally unfit. That thesis would have made for a pretty interesting (albeit massively difficult to research) book. Instead this is just a collection of facts and anecdotes, pieced together by chronological order. It's an interesting collection of footnotes, but there's not enough of a book here.

Brotherhood of War: The Lieutenants
By W.E.B. Griffin, 1982

Lovely melodramatic trash set amongst military types, a book that's most specifically interesting in the way it concerns itself almost wholly with absurdly perfect coincidences (one of which involves an affair of the heart), while able to acquit itself as knowledgeable mostly because of its hyper detailed background.

Brotherhood of War: The Captains
By W.E.B. Griffin, 1982

It's sort of incredible that the guy got two of these out in one year, but then again, I had a hard time closing the door on Craig Lowell myself. Everybody calls one dude "the little Jew" to themselves, immediately, even when they aren't being portrayed as bigoted. Is that what you do? All the blacks are "very big, very black." This was the one where I started to feel like the guy who wrote these churned them out in one sitting.

Brotherhood of War: The Majors
By W.E.B. Griffin, 1983

This one doesn't even have a war in it, just some part where a few of the major characters get shot down in Indochina and have to kill their way out. Instead, the book chooses to follow the Army's off-model decision to arm helicopters, which violated an agreement they had with the Air Force, who Griffin paints as being somewhere between an indignant ROTC unit and a club of mentally handicapped Cub Scouts. The best parts of this one are the parts with the sex, as Griffin gets to tell in detail the story of alcoholic marriage sex and the umpteenth first-time-for-both-of-us two minute stuff. "Are these still your favorite teats" is a line. That's a line. Good line! 

Windeye
By Brian Evenson, 2012

I've always been a fan of reading sentences where people describe a genre as being "calcified", but I've also become keenly aware in the last ten years that too many of the opinions I held were ones I purchased without consideration for their accuracy, and one of those opinions is that there's nothing to be found in the horror genre that can't be better found elsewhere. To give myself an out, I'd lay part of that on the generally accepted criticism that what we now label as horror is actually better known as a more grand guignol variation on thriller, and it's the existence of something like Windeye--which could unironically be called "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, But For Serious Adults"--that puts all those psuedo-shit to bed. This isn't a vehicle for slice of life black humor or page-turning timekilling, it's a collection of work that does its best to remind one that the word "unnerve" shouldn't be thrown atop every random book that has a dead kid in it. Windeye fucks with ones sense of safety and sanity, it's a book that worms itself into your skin. The collection of stories here share mostly a similarity in tone, and yet they function as a piece, and by the close, you just want to walk in the sun, away from the world that Evenson creates. This is absolutely great writing--unique, intelligent and predatory. Highly recommended.

The Day of the Jackal
By Frederick Forsyth, 1971

An intensely researched book whose detail will broadcast its journalist author's day job before one is halfway through the first chapter, Jackal is a book that both celebrates its classification as Airport & Waiting Room Classic while annihilating the categories implied ease of read. It whiles away the time, sure, but Forsythe's never-ending stream of hypen-heavy upper class names and governmental hierarchies joined with the impeccable taste of our titular assassin are going to demand more of the reader's concentration then the latest let's-slice-up-some-kids from James Patterson and Co. The reward is undoubtably worth whatever re-reading a redeye back-pedaler demands--Day of the Jackal is so easily a classic of the thriller genre that it's easy to start sneering at the word literature, eyefucking whatever imagined border guards are keeping the henpecked Claude Lebel and his monstrous counterpart from the ranks of throat-clearing English study. Then again, considering how miserably dumb that category has gotten--Tana French, anyone?--it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for Forsyth to have gone up to the majors already. Your move, Harold Bloom.

Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West
By Cormac McCarthy, 1985 

One of the greatest books ever written, or at least, that's what everybody says. It's true, but it's still a phrase that feels extreme to write, as it's essentially raw meat for the internet, a red cloth waved in the face of a well hung bull. It's also a well chewed over subject, with teeth marks from some of the smartest people who've ever written about literature, and thus the temptation to toss off a description is almost impossible, especially when the tosser can still wince in memory of the hyperbole that flowed when he first wrote about it (on Myspace, to spur the embarrassement further) while envying the opportunity to read the Judge's speech again, for the first time. The garden of war grew from the field of blood, and there's no purge that could ever cleanse this land. If this isn't hell, it should be.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
By James M. Cain, 1934

Some of the tightest writing ever put down, The Postman Always Rings Twice beats the tar out of you for just a little over 100 pages, but it's a heavy book nonetheless. A drifter and another man's wife--there's only so many ways that story plays out, and Cain concocts one that's as nasty as it is romantic. I don't know about anybody else, but I never wanted to be a Raymond Chandler character, and I never wanted to meet a Jim Thompson one. But I'm pretty sure that I don't get that luxury of choice with Cain--these people are us, through and through.

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Books of 2013: Gabriel Roth's The Unknowns

Books of 2013: Gabriel Roth's The Unknowns

The Unknowns
By Gabriel Roth, 2013

A warts and all examination of a love affair so lacking in surprise that the struggle not to predict what's going to happen--as opposed to letting Roth tell you in his own time--becomes unwinnable more than halfway through, The Unknowns is respectable more as evidence of the completion of a task than it is as a novel. That might not be such a horrendous thing to some; after all, the notion of achievements, of levels, of a life tied up in self-imposed frameworks copied from video games, digital solutions and 21st Century self-improvement archana are internal to the guts of a million Americans, and the public awareness of one's accomplishments make up the dream of millions more. Seeing an American novel in full embrace of that language and fluid in that thinking makes sense. If the imagined life is a contest of accomplishments and goal-setting (as it's promoted to be in the American educational system), then Gabriel Roth did what he was supposed to do after the degree, the wife, and the baby: he got published. Where's your hardcover novel that namechecks old X-Men stories, buster?

Novels aren't dead--you'll notice that this claim almost invariably resides in the platitudes of people who don't read either way, the same way that no digital first proponent has ever been any good at recommending stuff you hadn't already heard of--but there's certain kinds of novels that aren't good at being timeless, and Contemporary Breakup is a classic example. If you want to see a 20-something cringe, have them read High Fidelity now; if you're particularly masochistic, try to re-read it yourself. The problem with giving The Unknowns the contemporary title belt in the she-dumped-me division is that the book itself is already dated, and it does it to itself, setting itself way back in the hoaried days of post-9/11 America, when Rumsfeld and Bush were aw-shucking their way into the invasion of Iraq. God bless him for trying, but on top of that: what Warby Parker wearing Arab Spring quoting reader wants to drink in the escapades of an Ecstasy-using, App-creating millionaire getting savaged by his first real girlfriend? Occupy this, motherfucker!

The Unknowns possesses a certain kind of post 90's male mania that's at times indistinguishable from the puberty-era teenage classics written by Judy Blume (and maybe Beverly Cleary). That those books often feature female characters doesn't give the comparison pause--if there's anything his shy protagonist most resembles, it's the gawky leads that populate teen high school girl fiction. The difficulty with Unknowns isn't that it's lead is too much a woman--if anything, his dextrous identity full of mixed gender cliches is actually the books most unheralded plus--it's that even if you put gender on the shelf, you're never going to mistake him for an adult. One of the charms of Blume and Cleary is in those open endings, the fact that they're books about children, which means we leave those characters before they've reached their prime--what we witnessed was the formative stuff, and outside of a macrabe, White Oleander-style riff, the formative stuff is universal. The life Roth presents--one where the crush of work is brushed off by its protagonists cursory success, one where fear and obsession are valued like postive attributes--is one that may resonate with some, but it's completely unexplored, and too curt to be fully realized. There's a great book to be made about sad nerds who won't grow up. This one isn't even good.

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