Spring

Flashman: A Novel (Flashman)

George MacDonald Fraser

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.

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Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh

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.

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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

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.

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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe

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.

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The Kite Runner

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. 

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Unnatural Death: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery

Unnatural Death; Dorothy L. Sayers
Mysterious circumstances and his own curiosity pull Lord Peter Wimsey out of a life of foppish luxury into a life of foppish luxury, grisly tension, and glamorous detective work.

Unnatural Death rides two rails, one populated by P.G. Wodehouse's airy dandies and the other populated by Sherlock Holmes' gimlet-eyed and hard-boiled compatriots, and not entirely seamlessly. The initial transition is more than a little jarring. The flippant moments are often grounded by grim, and sometimes distinctly uncomfortable, undertones*, while serious contemplations are played out with a vaguely inappropriate frivolity. However, after the first few chapters, I managed to settle into the groove, and from then on it was what critics call a tour de force.

Despite accidentally spoiling myself on the ending (I AM AN IDIOT), I spent most of the book white-knuckled and gibbering. Sayers has a healthy sense of humor, but she also has a gift for gruesome and twisty mystery. None of the murders featured in Unnatural Death are especially violent, but Sayers weaves together such a tight plot of near-misses and escalating brutality that the latter half of her novel practically breathes malice and murder*. Unnatural Death starts off light - if morbid - and ends in crashing gothic strings, with huffing melodrama and action. The humor becomes more acidic, the murders draw more blood, our heroes fail more often, and the story is all the more better for it. Sayers doesn't rush her hand, and takes her time orchestrating the tension and paranoia, and the final resolution practically explodes (in a controlled way though. The best kind of explosion.) in the final few chapters.

Unnatural Death, grisly, pitiless, and hilarious through it all, is the best mash-up of Wodehouse and Doyle that the world will ever know. And we're all the better for it! Rule Britannia!

*NOTE: Hola, cringe-worthy racial stereotypes and epithets! I didn't see you coming by a mile. Ha ha ha.
*NOTE THE SECOND: I can attest to the fact that I spent most of that time in a frenzied, sissy state of panic.

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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing; Melissa Bank
Oh chick-lit. Only you could take an otherwise hard-bitten, verbally snappy, prickly heroine and focus all of her amateurish but refreshing waspish animosity at the timeless art of seduction. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is uneven in tone - a little too brittle to fit in with the breeziness of its Sex and the City progeny, a little too single-minded and derivative to be anything else; it can settle for being a waste of a perfectly decent narrator and a sufficiently soothing Step One of Coming Down from the Emotional Beatings of T.H. White.

The Cat-Nappers; P.G. Wodehouse
Repetitive as all get out, and still dandy for it. Wodehouse has found his well-worn niche in literature, and is determined to remain as securely snug for as long as possible. Nothing unexpected, nothing revolutionary, and everything I needed. Wodehouse is my literary penicillin, and I'd be pretty pissed off if someone started screwing around with the formula for something as stupid as kicks. I need my baby full of Twurp's hijinks.

Gosford Park (2001). When I watched Nashville last semester, I managed to fall asleep four times before I walked out of the movie. Thus my expectations were low, but balls to my expectations! This film took me for an absolute ride. Crammed with everything I love best: a sprawling, exquisitely imagined cast (Altman directs every last detail with a perfectionist's tender, exacting touch. This makes the movie one of the rare delights where constant reanalysis is actually a blessing instead of a curse. Go back and watch over and over again to catch those minute details! Watch over and over again just because you can!), a razor sharp screenplay (And despite all the verbal bullets that go whistling through the air, Maggie Smith's Aunt Constance earns the Olympic gold from me. I still feel brutalised from her perfect "Oh, but none of us will see it" line. Earning the silver, Maggie Smith's tireless nostrils.), and all the wonderful trappings of decadent period drama (Once again, there is not a single throwaway detail. It's the Obsessive Compulsive's Masterpiece Theatre!). All its positives are so overwhelming that I'm completely ready to extend a slap on the ass to the somewhat condescending, pre-digested ending. Pander all you want! Helen Mirren, another round of tears! Mama, call the dean. Balls to Premed, I want to be a British aristocrat.

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The Once and Future King

This book is magnificent. It is everything a fairy tale, legend, and story could ever wish to be, and it is like that because of T.H. White. T.H. White is an odd, cruel, and perfect choice for the narrator of the Arthurian legend. He is engaging, vivacious, sly, and witty, whether he is making you laugh until you weep, or just plain making you weep. He has a perfect grasp of all the characters, and all their barbarous, contradictory, and most of all human motives, and he exploits it mercilessly. White is sadistic in the way he ruthlessly and bluntly bares all of his cast's many flaws, yet heartbreakingly tender in his careful, hopeless affection for them. He is, in effect, an emotional and psychological heat-seeking missile with a conscious.

The Once and Future King revolves around its characters; earlier renditions of the legend all seem to center on various quests and betrayals and jousts, with Arthur and his court functioning as elaborate puppets, but that is because all the earlier authors were complete brutes incapable of human thought or emotion. T.H. White 4eva and ever, amen. White on the other hand focuses his laser attention on all the knights and ladies, major and minor, taking meticulous care to dissect and expose all their complicated, ticking emotions. The effect is devastating; White sows seeds of heartbreaking sympathy in every character, which means that the entire read is a sort of literary equivalent of being drawn and quartered. And while this would be bad enough in a regular, pat fairy tale, the Arthurian legend is notoriously depressing. Arthur and White are a painful and perfect fit, made all the more poignant by White's stabs at humor, which never sugarcoat his more vicious emotional stabs but rather highlight them. The sort of apple covering the razor blades, to use a clumsy but apt metaphor.

White - mercifully - finishes his story before illustrating the full downfall of Arthur's court, but nevertheless, I am still drained and catatonic, and my brain feels like its been pitted with a snow shovel. Suffice to say, I am going to run into the arms of Wodehouse and unbearably embarrassing chick-lit for a while.

This is my favorite book of all summer, and up there on the all-time list.

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Magnolia

Jacob Have I Loved

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After the epic horror that was Dune, I turned to Wodehouse to coax the gun out of my hand. And after the vaguely slimy Jacob Have I Loved, it's Wodehouse again with his sure-footed and jubilant command of the English language.

The Return of Jeeves has all the hallmarks of a proper Wodehousian romp: a tightly knit, slightly incestuous, cast of upper class British nobility, anarchic and wildly improbable hijinks, clever schemes, idiotic but well-meaning schemes, and deus ex machinas in spades working overtime to pull chairs out from underneath Lords and Ladies as well as knitting together all the (many) loose threads with a satisfying, if completely unrealistic, bang of a closing chapter. It is, in essence, Looney Toons with the nobility of her Royal Majesty, and it is wonderful in its anarchic and cartoonish joy. Pure, unadulterated, and perfect fluff, and the perfect remedy for a sour summer.

Now while both The Return of Jeeves and Sunset at Blandings are similar in theme and tone, I prefer The Return of Jeeves - with a few reservations. First of all, there's the unfortunate fact that Wodehouse had the misfortune to DIE before completing Sunset at Blandings which means that it - ah - isn't quite done. Second, The Return of Jeeves has Jeeves as a well-needed straight man and anchor for the rest of its woolly-brained cast. Sunset at Blandings has no similar character, and you can feel little bits of the plot drifting away as the novel progresses.

However, Wodehouse does venture a little out of his element. In the previous books I read, all of Wodehouse's blue-blooded playthings were wealthier than the Queen of Sheba, and the question of finances never really arose. Here, Wodehouse peeks into the world of Post-War England - which I don't know much about, but which has apparently has reduced all the knights and damsels into working the day shift. Something about that is... more than a little off, and the new economic setting threw me at least for a bit of a loop. It's not exactly enormous distracting, but it is a bit of a thorn in the side for the rest of the novel. 

Mystery buds

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