36 posts tagged “books”
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, BILL BRYSON
In which Bill Bryson shows that he wasn't a complete little turd of an abomination when he was growing up in the Iowa of the 1950's. Psych!
I'm not entirely sure why I keep reading Bill Bryson. He's smug, priveleged, and snide without the saving graces of being particularly funny. Also, I finish every book wanting to punch him in throat. The problem is, great men have mulled over the peculiarities of growing up in the 1950's, and Bryson is not one of them. He covers the same topics (pornography; Our Friend, the Atom!; bad food; refrigerators), uses the same humor (Nyuk nyuk nyuk, you see the joke is that hiding underneath a desk WOULDN'T protect you from 500 megatons of sheer atomic power. Nyuk nyuk nyuk, that's what makes it so FUNNY!), and tops everything off with a thin, tenuous sheen of racism, sexism, and classism. Nothing is overt, but it's a bit like spending fifteen excruciating afternoons with your Sassy Grandma who doesn't understand why you keep on wincing when she uses the word "coloreds." This is made all the more worse by Bryson's acid nostalgia for the Good Old Days Where We Would Party At Woolworth's and his hackneyed insights into the Cheapness of Modern Day Life.
Otherwise, Bryson is a reliable mash-up of Dave Barry, Dave Sedaris, and Debbie Downer - and a caricature of Stuff White People Like. Dear Bill, Let It Go. Also, come here, I've got to do something with your throat.
* PROTIP, BILL. Your repeated claims that the Blacks That I Knew were so Athletic. And Strong. And Great at Sports. And Did I Mention That I Once Shook Hands with a Black Man? Does NOT make you sound any more racially sensitive. Please stop, lest thou protest too much.
Hijinks: (1) Boisterous or rambunctious carryings-on; (2) Carefree antics or horseplay. SYN: Wodehouse, PG.
Galahad has neither the same efficient, godly gravitas of Jeeves (who must have been some breed of genie in his past life) nor the good-humored, drink-sodden cluelessness of Bertie, but he'll do. He'll do. Galahad at Blandings is light, frothy, and funny. My only complaint is that Wodehouse sometimes lets his pen get the best of him, meaning that we occasionally have to trod through pages of something resembling Stephen Fry's 'The Letter' before we can reach the simple conclusion that Galahad is, in fact, sitting on a comfortable armchair and pretty surprised. But excessive floridity aside, Wodehouse is still very, very funny, and I appreciate his profound underlying message of SISTERS = SUXXX!!!
FLASHMAN: A NOVEL; GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
Introducing the shining beacon of the Queen's Empire and a true Crown Jewel of England! Flashman is what Forrest Gump would have been if Forrest Gump were a pompous, shameless, endlessly horny homunculus of a nit instead of an inbred Arkansas charity case with the IQ of a dog. In other words: interesting and splendid in its awfulness.
The novel revolves entirely around its namesake: Harry Flashman who is, essentially, the antichrist. Flashman's facebook interests would probably alternate between: being boorish, being racist, being screamingly mysogynistic (rape 4 lyfe!), and BEING DRUNK. KAR-KRUNK BABY. Oh yeah, and England wot wot. But for all of his many* flaws, Flashman is a wonderful narrator. He is cunning, witty, and acerbically honest. He operates under no delusions about himself nor anyone else, which allows him plenty of operating room to cruelly deflate all the pomp, circumstance, and blatant incompetance surrounding the British military.
And as a personal point, gold stars and wet kisses to Fraser who truly goes out of his way to gut Flashman of any of the cloying virtues of a reader-friendly anti-hero. Flashman is one of the true, balls-out, unabashed snakes of literature. At no point does his cowardice waver towards any breed of courage, at no point does boning acquire any tinge of epic romance, at no point does Flashman ever turn towards decency. Even his intelligence is a primeval sort - born more of the spinal cord than the brain. Harry Flashman remains stubbornly black-hearted and unchanged, which is - in a way - a wonderful fuck-you to the bland moralizing and eventual redemption of so many other neutered anti-heroes. Stay rotten, Flashman. Stay rotten.
In general, even without Flashman, the story itself would be pretty solid; it's
brimming with Empire! Country! Battles! Hot Foreign Babes! Epic ruin!
But adding Flashman gives the novel fangs and a wicked, wicked sense of
humor.
IN CONCLUSION: Rule Britannia and God Bless Flashman!
* Many, many, many, many, infinitely many.
Decline and Fall; Evelyn Waugh
Terrible things happen to Paul Pennyfeather, testing his stiff British upper lip and endless supply of Valium.
Decline and Fall is light, frothy social satire, and utterly impossible to review. The novel moves at a quick, blithe clip - full of nudges at the British school and class systems - with wit and charm, but the actual events themselves get steadily and noticeably gloomier (goodbye expulsion, hello penal system?).
This is not the problem. I love grim and gloomy! They can be my Valentines! The problem is that Decline and Fall never actually acknowledges the turn in its subject matter, and narrates the entire book in the same chirpy, removed tone. Tea and mild social ostracization or shanking and White Slavery? It's all the same to Paul Pennyfeather! All of the events roll off Waugh's back, and I'm not entirely sure whether or not this military adherence to lightheartedness is supposed to be Damning Social Commentary or Jolly Social Satire.
Whatever the aim, in the end, Waugh's detached, glib voice injects the novel with its smooth humor, but it also ultimately sands off all of the edges of the plot and makes Decline and Fall difficult to remember. Let's call it enjoyable (very enjoyable!), but forgettable.
Also known as the day I realized that I AM ABSOLUTELY SPINELESS.
I Am Legend; Richard Matheson
I Am Legend is a short piece of clockwork terror. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is the last man on earth (or so it says on the back cover). And he is not having a good time of it. Neville is frustrated, crippled, and devastated by wild swings of mood and desperation; he is also our only guide into a terrifying apocalypse. Neville is neither reliable nor very sympathetic, but he is very effective and his foibles are very refreshing.
I Am Legend has none of the hallmarks of a classic horror story. There is no main hero, and there are no real solutions. Neville survives out of doggedness and tenacity but he is essentially a brute with no pretenses of sophistication. The other paltry characters are buffeted about by the whims of the plot. There are no real explanations. Patches of science and a few meager memories dart through the narrative, but more often than not, they're quick glimpses yielding little illumination. When they do appear, they're frequently clouded by frustration and terror. And finally, the terror is a different breed. Slow, strangling, and unrelenting, the tension builds, existential and unabated, through the end of the novel; there are few staccatos of action or gore.
There are a few faults: I suspect that my biology professor has donned a sack cloth and is now bombed out on Listerine, and Matheson's writing belies a sort of nervous, undisciplined energy, punctuated by descents into unrepentant pulp. However, in short, I Am Legend, is a strangely poetic and gimlet-eyed look into a real world with real people plagued by an ancient superstition. A final round of applause for its ending, which is very grim and completely (tragically) inevitable.
No Country for Old Men (2007). Locates your heartstrings with surgical precision, and takes its wicked, wicked time snipping them one by one. No Country is very, very quiet, very, very methodical, and very, very dangerous. It breathes with a terrifying, unstoppable confidence, and thrums with unhurried tension, unbridled by histrionics and glitz.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to buy myself a pacemaker off of eBay.
Guess who decided up up her reading-fu in the one week before her Life-Deciding, Five Hour Long Decathlon of a Standardized Test? I DID. Was it wise? NO NO NO. What are the primary feelings now that Five Hour Long Decathlon of a Standardized Test are finished? VAST, FATHOMLESS OCEANS OF POUNDING REGRET.
Slaughterhouse Five; Kurt Vonnegut
Allow me to introduce this by saying that Kurt Vonnegut and I do "not get along." Interpersonal relationships are involved and said relationships are rotten. I first attempted to read Slaughterhouse Five in tenth grade. In tenth grade, I was callow, acne-prone, and felt a resounding thrum in my heart every time Dire Straits came on the radio. I also had a livejournal and abused the words "random" and "awesome"*. I was, all in all, not the best judge of literature.
Slaughterhouse Five was neither kind nor sensitive to my failings. Slaughterhouse Five, in general, is neither kind nor sensitive to those with a linear sense of time. I had, and still have, a militarily linear sense of time, which meant that my initial exposure to Kurt (Can I call you Kurt?) was less a deep and searing examination of the condition of man and more of a WHAT IS HAPPENING WHAT IS GOING ON ALIENS NO I DO NOT LIKE THIS RIDE PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN I WANT TO GET OFF NO DON'T GO BACK TO DRESDEN, YOU BELONG IN NEW YORK NO NO NO. Attempts to settle my wracked brain with SparkNotes did not help and led to further steaming rage.
I said that I would read again when I Grew Older and had More Relevant Experience, but I did not mean it. Lo and behold, thanks to my HAHA STANDARDIZED TEST IN TWO DAYS? I HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST! induced marathon, combined with the fact that the only other books I seem to have in my house are The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Principles of Biochemistry, I decided to give Slaughterhouse Five another go. I can't say that I still completely understand it, but I can appreciate more of the themes and the prose.
The biggest problem to me personally is that reading Slaughterhouse Five is like viewing a gorgeous and brilliant work of genius through five inches of frosted glass. You grasp at the glimpses and clasp the fleeting moments of understanding, but all in all the end result is hollow and frustrated. Slaughterhouse Five is an epiphany waiting on the tip of a tongue, with no way to ferret it out. My one hope is that I'll be able to pick this book up at age 50 and finally have a thunderclap revelation. Brilliant! I'll say. Oh my god, I was an idiot! This is magnificent!
But as of now, I'll take what I can get. And for you Kurt, is a gold star for a beautiful and complex view of fatalism!
* Which may or may not have been turned into JAWSOME or PAWSOME. I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS NOW.
I would like to preface this by saying that my copy of The Last Unicorn had a cover emblazoned by a blaring, Lisa-Frank drawing of an enormous fucking unicorn gazing wistfully into a peaceful forest pool. I was mortified and clutched it face down at ALL TIMES so that no one would look at me with the eyes of judgment. The eyes of judgment being all "Jesus Christ, STOP GOING TO RENN FAIRES." Now with that out of the way:
The last unicorn, her incompetent and quarrelsome posse, and a quest.
Lyrically written and a thrumming with a love affair with lush, delectable description, Beagle's The Last Unicorn is a complicated book, that twists its way around all the tropes of the fantasy genre. The story is lovely and rich* and swimming in what are either contradictions or full-blown schizophrenia.
Personally, I prefer the latter half of the novel; the first half rests a little too handily on Creatures of Magnificent Beauty, Complicated Resolutions, and Heroic Emotions That I Will Not Explain At The Moment Because What Are You Dumb? Which sounds like a book by David Eggers and NO DO NOT WANT. Things that are on notice: stunted characters and cruel morality. Peter Beagle, if you are reading this, I will have you know that I LIKED THAT WITCH and I think it was balls of you to stomp her like that.
However, the second act, with King Haggard is beautifully tempered with a sympathy and uneasy tension missing from the first half. Beagle's tendency for soaring elegiac description is curbed by the humanity of his characters, and the added complications introduce a beautiful undercurrent of uncertainty and wistfulness**. However, the novel as a whole ends on a (relatively) upbeat note, in that the villain is vanquished, the unicorns are free and fabulous, the gayness marches on, and (mostly) everyone's alive! Take this in comparison to The Once and Future King, in which The End is basically preceded by EVERYBODY DIES, BALLS TO WIZARDRY.
* Reading through a few chapters of The Last Unicorn is a bit like eating your way out of a vat of delicious, buttermilk custard.
** A plusses especially to Beagle's unsparing but tender depiction of King Haggard. Little known fact: King Haggard can kick Holden Caulfield's ass any damn day.
The Bonfire of the Vanities; Tom Wolfe
New York City, 1980's. The city is broiling, heated by years of racial and socioeconomic strain. Investment banker Sherman McCoy and his chin stand shakily on top of a teetering metropolitan tableau, and should have switched to Geico. His hit-and-run accident punctures a tiny hole through New York's calm facade and the city's seething, repressed, unrelenting anger comes rushing out. Thankfully, Tom Wolfe is on scene to record the fall-out.
I loved this book. Wolfe absolutely vivisects his city, and he is magnificent. I'm still in the preliminary stages of recovering from the aftershock*, which means I'm rocking back and forth, incoherently muttering 'That was so good. That was so good! I... It was pretty great!'. We have to fall back on bullet points
- The Characters. When was the last time you read a novel about real people? People who weren't mere characters or traits, or quirks, or grand metaphors, or simple plot vehicles, but people of their own, controlled by their own wild and illogical impulses. Say it with me, it's been too long. Well, Wolfe has heard your cry and Wolfe promises to deliver; Bonfire of the Vanities is stuffed to the brim with complicated people. And by pitting all these people and their ambitions against each other, Wolfe recreates the achingly complex struggles that define a city. The brawls aren't always pleasant and the company not entirely wholesome, but it's a novel that actually populates the beating heart of a battered city, and does so with magnificent sympathy cut with biting clarity.
- The Detail. You know those petty little maneuvers you make when you're in Good Company? They're small and pointless and piddling, but at that moment in time, so unbelievably important? Wolfe knows them too, and he knows how you feel. That, of course, doesn't stop him from mercilessly turning the floodlights and the hounds on our individual social vanities. It's difficult to see the awkwardness and the sheer stupidity of our jousts at social oneupsmanship***, but it also adds a marvelous thoroughness and texture to the book. The situations are your situations; these people suffer from the same drives and little wants and small desperations; they are, in short, real, and Wolfe has enough love and enough hate for them to record them as they are - in full regalia, warts and all. Cheers, Tom!
- The Plot. To be crude, Bonfire of the Vanities doesn't exactly contain a lot of derring-do in its plot; it simply records the reverberations of a mistaken hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Any other novel would read like a back episode of Law and Order, but Bonfire takes its meticulous time picking apart the entire incident, and feeding it through the perspectives of characters in all different rungs of society. What emerges is a metropolis, ugly but palpable. And Wolfe never makes the mistake of pandering to our easy desires. The gap between the rich and the poor is a prickly issue; race an even thornier one, yet Wolfe never takes the simple way out. None of his characters are saints, yet none of them are villains. They are principled men, who believe in and fight for a standard, but still struggle with their spasms of doubt and selfishness and an unerring human gift for self-deception. And it is this duality that generates the surge of energy that pours through the novel. The book ends with a cyclone brewing on the steps of a courthouse, the afterword filled with corruption still festering and still rewarded, but it also ends with people still fighting and idealism still alive.
- The Writing. Let's get it out of the way. Tom Wolfe has no restraint. Multiple exclamation point skitter across entire pages, italics twist every other word, characters - and the unseen narrator - bellow in ALL CAPS when they say VERY IMPORTANT THINGS, and Strunk and White shudder and roll in their graves. And yet, everything is utterly effective. So much of this novel is streamed through a person's uncensored thoughts, and Wolfe's herky-jerky style matches up perfectly with the electrical flashes in our own minds. After all, when was the last time we measured out our own internal thoughts with careful diction and effective rhetoric****? While initially jarring, it's Wolfe's unencumbered, direct style that helps us submerge into the dankest thoughts of his New Yorkers.
In conclusion: Tom Wolfe mounts and stuffs New York like a master taxidermist, and all is good. I... need to go lay down.
* HINT: It involves a lot of soft jazz and pudding. **
** On second thought, THAT MAKES ME SOUND TOTALLY GROSS.
*** I speak as a reader who makes a habit of hiding in the bathroom stalls to avoid being that uncomfortable fifteen minutes early to a meeting. It.... I'm WORKING ON IT OK.
**** SUCK IT, E.B. White and all you articulate bastards.
In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.
Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.
Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).
Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.
*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting
Wonder Boys; Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon's memo to the world that writers have as much sex, drugs, and rock and roll as Mick Jagger. They just do it in tweed, with the lights out. And with a lot more self-loathing contemplation.
It's difficult to read Wonder Boys and not make petulant comparisons to Richard Russo's Straight Man, a novel that I still gaze at with sheep-eyed adoration. Both deal with small towns in decline , third tier colleges, and professors who are not your daddy's professors, but instead small-scale supernovas of sexual infidelity, substance abuse, family issues, and sexual infidelity. Both of the narrators in Wonder Boys and Straight Man are burnt out, unhappy, self-destructive, and are generally not the glittering bad-boys of academia that their bosses would very much like them to be. However, while Russo's William Henry Devereux Jr. takes a rather dismissive view of his sad-sack, one-hit-wonder career, focusing instead with manic devotion on emotionally eviscerating his fellow man and ramming a Volvo through his personal connections, Chabon's otherwise cynical and pot-addled Grady Tripp has a starry-eyed love affair with writing. And therein lies the gaping distance between the two books.
Grady Tripp, while swaddled in great clouds of ganja, cowardice, and bad decisions, is a dedicated romantic. He waxes eloquent on the Writer's Midnight Disease, the Writer's Doppleganger, the great meta-angst of being an author, which while beautifully articulated, clashes with the nastier aspects of his personality. Wonder Boys' otherwise hard-hearted and cynical trajectory is riddled by pulses of these great, dewy-eyed and tortured analyses that belong in a freshman English packet with similar passages by Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Meanwhile, Russo's Straight Man is satisfied with a full schedule of snickering, sneering, and sniveling. I've got to say that I personally prefer Russo, if only because Chabon's operatic passages feel a little foreign and out of place - a copy-paste version of sentimentality to soften the edges of an otherwise truly pathetic character. And it's this anarchistic beatnik version of romanticism that permeates through the entire novel.
Grady Tripp is a softer man than Hank Devereux Jr with softer enemies. While Russo's entrenched, unwilling chair tore through his fellow man like fire ax, Grady Tripp paws softly and blindly towards misanthropy, unsure in his dedication to meanness and with the occasional accidental cruel bullseye. He wavers between action and inaction, striving towards great, Kerouac visions of benevolence, a modern day Robin Hood, with his misfit friends. And while I can appreciate his kinder sides, I miss the gimlet-eyed, gratuitous emotional cruelties of Russo. Because in order to create this softer world, Chabon relies a bit too heavily on his (small) case of stock villains - the rich, stifling, if ambiguous, relatives of the fragile artist, and the pompous, emotionally-detached Chairman of the college. And while Chabon fills his other characters with hopes, dreams, talents and misplaced angsts, he deprives these few people of any real qualities, redeeming or otherwise, leaving them flat, toothless, and pathetic. Russo, meanwhile, envelopes all of his characters with a brutish wit that makes every skirmish a fairer and more entertaining one.
This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Wonder Boys; I did. Very much so, even with the occasional uneven driftings into meta-fiction, and its occasionally, uncomfortably stiff side characters. Chabon's writing is clear and beautifully evocative, and his sharp sense of irony hits deep when it connects. I just... wish everyone was meaner. Because I am a Nazi.
The Kite Runner; Khaled Hosseini
"A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about cliches: "Avoid them like the plague." Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought cliches got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the cliched saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as cliche. " - The Kite Runner
And there you have it, The Kite Runner in a nutshell. Despite all the ecstatic critical praise (the university librarian was effusive when I told her I was trying to chase down a copy of the book), The Kite Runner is plagued with many, many faults*, with the two main sticklers being:
1. THE FORMULA. For all its darling status, The Kite Runner seems to be little more than a rote collection of shameless literary cliches. There are childhood betrayals - as you've read before. There are daddy issues - as you've read before. There are heartfelt tales of immigration - as you've read before. And there are redemptions, traditions, braveries, brutalities, and the dimming of lights, cuing of the orchestra at the last scene - all of which have been recycled from bigger and better novels and movies. All of Hosseini's legwork consists of air-lifting his big ole box of cliche into Afghanistan. Reading through The Kite Runner is 20% Hosseini, 10% "Anderson Cooper looked really good talking about this", and 70% "Dang, didn't I see this on SVU where Ice-T got his hate on"? The entire plot is a mash-up of family drama, political fiction, and burly, man-chested humanitarian work, with the story sometimes straining itself to accommodate all these different factors.
2. THE DUDE. God knows I love a flawed protagonist. The more degenerate, the more pitiful, and the more hideous, the better. But patheticalness (a real word according to dictionary.com. I know! I'm just as surprised as you!) in and of itself does not a character make. Hosseini overloads his narrator with so many disparaging traits - apparently mistaking imperfections for real, genuine depth - that it's a little difficult to feel any sort of empathy for him. Not because he's particularly evil or disgusting, just that his sense of self-pity is so... overwhelming that it swamps any stirrings of sympathy. Furthermore, Hosseini makes the mistake of turning some of his characters into patron saints, sapping them of any human feeling. They wander around the novel, pure, admirable, and inhuman to the end. There is little middle ground, and The Kite Runner swerves between these two extremes so often that it can be a little uneven.
And yet, despite my apparent fervent disdain for... everything about the book, The Kite Runner is very, very effective. The old cliches are powerful cliches, and even when you can spot the plot pages, chapters, miles away, they still manage to pull on a few heartstrings. I guess in a way, because Hosseini sets his sights on so many targets, he's bound to hit at least one of the soft spots. And I have no shame in admitting that he clawed at my underbelly from time to time. FAMILY TIES + SELF-LOATHING = INSTANT TREMBLING OF THE LOWER LIP.
*Granted, I might be a little harsher than usual because putting a gushing New York Times review on the cover is akin to painting a glowing neon target on Khaled Hosseini's chest.
