→ July 17, 2019
→ By

G.

John Berger’s G. won two of the biggest literary honors in the Commonwealth after its 1972 release, taking home the James Black Tait Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize; at the ceremony for the latter, Berger tore into the sponsoring company, Booker-McConnall, for exploitative practices, then gave half the prize money to the British Black Panther movement. G. was just the fifth winner of the Booker Prize and was considered “experimental” for its time, just as Berger, an outspoken Marxist, was seen as a sort of curiosity. Perhaps this book was revolutionary in its time, but nearly a half-centiury it feels dated and irrelevant, more notable for the author’s prurient obsession with women’s genitalia than for anything that happens in the book itself.

G. is the book’s protagonist, set on a dissolute course from childhood – he’s the illegitimate son of an Italian philanderer who made his money in canned fruit, but was raised by a mother who refused to let his father have anything to do with the boy – and growing into a heartless, wanton libertine who seduces women just to have them, even for a single tryst, with no regard to what happens to them afterwards. His escapades culminate in the simultaneous pursuit of two women in Trieste on the eve of World War I; he inveigles a Slovene servant girl into coming to a major, upper-class ball as his date promising her his fake Italian passport in return, so that he can also jilt the wife of a major local official, a move that, unbeknownst to him, marks him as an Austrian agent (which he’s not).

The novel was sold as a picaresque, which it certainly isn’t. If anything, it’s a thinly veiled commentary on the class structures of western societies that existed prior to the first World War and, with some obvious changes in who’s in the upper echelon, persists today. It is a scene from the class struggle, told about an idiot who was born into privilege and keeps failing upward until the war finally stops him. It’s also wildly out of date: We still have class distinctions, but where once a person was born into a class, now the distinctions are more of income inequality, or race, or their intersection. The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts are gone, replaced by other families, but their names lack the power of the earlier leading families; it is their money that speaks, and their money that explains the different treatment they get at every step in their lives.

Berger comes off as a Marxist, for sure, but he comes off even more as a pervert. The book is replete with descriptions of genitalia, primarily women’s, but in a gynecological way, not an erotic or even pornographic one. It’s as if Berger was obsessed with and disgusted by a woman’s sex at the same time, so he describes the vulva and vagina in the basest way to try to diminish the women themselves. Indeed, the women G. pursues here are mere props in the story; G. doesn’t care about them and Berger doesn’t give the reader any reason to care either.

I’d enjoyed a bunch of more recent Booker winners, which led me to decide to read most or all of the previous winners, but some of the pre-2000 titles just aren’t that good. I bailed on James Kelman’s How late it was, how late before I reached the quarter mark, as its stream of consciousness prose was maddening, the main character hadn’t moved more than about half a block in all that I read, and the heavy use of the c-word was really grating. I read but never reviewed Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, about an author of romance novels who has fled some embarrassment in England and takes a room at a seaside hotel in Switzerland where she meets the usual cast of eccentrics and learns things about herself. It’s a trifle, not as funny as it would like to be and nothing you haven’t seen before (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont covers similar ground, and better). I’m not sure who was picking Booker winners before this century but I’m at least glad they’ve upped their standards.

Next up: Like a moth to a flame, I’m reading another Booker winner, this time Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.

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→ May 22, 2019
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Killing Commendatore.

I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami’s two peak novels, the dreamlike The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and similarly surreal Kafka on the Shore, but have found some of his earlier and especially his later work disappointing, as if he’s trying to recapture the spark that lit those two novels but can’t find it. His newest novel, Killing Commendatore, might be the last straw for me, as it’s not just a disappointment – it is awful, lacking any of the magic or creativity that Murakami showed in the first half of his career, with a boring plot and some outright creepy details that someone should have told the author to cut.

The novel is narrated by its main character, a painter and portrait artist who is never named, and who begins the book by talking about his wife leaving him for another man, a shocking announcement that unmoored him and led him on a winding path to living in the disused house of his friend’s father, a well-known painter named Tomohiko Amada. (The narrator mentions in passing that he and his wife have reunited, one of many throwaway subplots in the book that has no fulfilling qualities when it’s resolved.) While there, the narrator discovers an unknown painting by Amada called Killing Commendatore that depicts a violent murder from the opera Don Giovanni; multiple characters in this painting come to life over the course of the novel, notably the Commendatore himself. Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy, handsome loner named Menshiki, who lives nearby in the mountains, shows up and asks the narrator to paint his portrait, but has an ulterior motive involving a young teenaged girl, Mariye, who lives nearby and might be Menshiki’s daughter.

The fundamental problem with Killing Commendatore is that Murakami doesn’t seem to give a shit about what’s happening in the book, and as a result, I didn’t either. In nearly 700 pages, only one tangible thing happens with actual stakes, and everything else is a mystery that Murakami can’t even be bothered to resolve. (I’ll warn you now that you don’t find out if Mariye is Menshiki’s daughter.) There’s a pit and a bell that seems to ring by itself, which is a mystery of sorts but not a particularly interesting one – and is also poorly resolved – while Menshiki’s own backstory is shrouded in another mystery that didn’t grab my attention. Eventually, the characters from the painting appear and Murakami’s trademark magical realism shows up, but it’s a relatively minor part of the book – this is my personal view, but I think magical realism needs to be suffused throughout a work of fiction if it’s there at all; a little bit just feels like a cheat – and the connection between the characters and their roles is extremely tenuous.

Murakami’s lead characters tend to be stand-ins for him – at least, they share a lot of personality quirks and interests with the author, often working as creatives with loves of classical music and cooking. The painter-narrator here has all of that, as well as the passing knowledge of baseball that shows up in many Murakami novels, so it’s fair to wonder how much else of the narrator’s character also applies to the author – especially because the narrator is kind of a creep. He’s completely obsessed with the growing breasts of pubescent girls, referring both back to his sister, who died of a heart defect in her teens, and again to Mariye, who is herself obsessed with her changing physique, with an excessive attention to their busts. It goes nowhere in the plot, and it doesn’t seem like anyone around the narrator is the least bit perturbed by this – including Mariye, who you would think would be uncomfortable talking to an adult male she barely knows about her breasts, or hearing his thoughts on the matter. The result was just gross to read.

But wait, there’s more! Murakami’s prose has never bothered me before, but this translation feels like a mess – his prose is wooden and his sentences awkward and terse, sometimes even broken into fragments. It feels like an unedited manuscript at far too many points. One of the translators, Philip Gabriel, has translated several Murakami works, including Kafka on the Shore, which I loved; while the other, Ted Goossen, translated Men Without Women, which I found generally inert. In neither case did Murakami come across as an amateurish stylist, however, which is an overwhelming sense I got from Killing Commendatore from the very beginning. It’s harder to get lost in a plot when the prose keeps jarring you out of the reverie, and the story here didn’t absorb me the way some other Murakami novels did anyway. When you add the the main character’s failure to evoke any interest – he seems totally disconnected from life, but there’s no explanation of why – you get a complete dud from an author who has shown he’s capable of so much better.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Homegrown, Alex Speier’s forthcoming book on the building of the 2018 Red Sox.

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→ April 17, 2019
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The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance Of Loss, a slow-burning tragedy set in the Darjeeling district of northeastern India, near the border with Bangladesh, that covers distinctions of class, gender, and language, but never establishes a single compelling or central character anywhere in the novel’s 350-odd pages. It’s an oddly dispassionate novel given how much the passions of individual characters factor in the story.

The most central character in the novel is Sai, the suddenly orphaned daughter of an Indian engineer who is killed while in Moscow training for the Soviet space program; she arrives, without warning, at the home of the judge, a curmudgeon who has distanced himself from the rest of his family, living on his estate with the man known only as the cook. The cook’s son, Biju, has gone to America to make his fortune, but instead works his way through a series of entry-level jobs in various restaurants in New York City that rely on undocumented labor to run their kitchens.

These stories play out against the background of the rise of a Gurkha self-determination movement in the district that continues today. The Gurkhas, Indian natives who speak Nepali, have been agitating for their own state within India for over a century, and a more militant group, the ominously-named Gurkha National Liberation Front (styled after numerous insurgent groups, nearly always with communist leanings, around the developing world), sprang up in 1986, leading to a lengthy general strike depicted in the novel. Sai falls in love with her tutor, Gyan, who joins the GNLF and who makes a decision that affects their budding if likely forbidden romance as well as the lives of the judge, the cook, and other family members who have lived in privilege in a region where the ethnic majority has been subjugated.

There’s some beautiful imagery in the book and some recurring metaphors that would probably be worthy of a deeper dive – vapors appear in various forms from the first page onward – if I cared one iota about any of these characters. I’ve generally enjoyed fiction from South Asia, whether translated or originally written in English, probably because the setting is so different to me and because that part of the world has an ethnic and cultural diversity that lends itself well to complex stories, with many writers with south Asian backgrounds incorporating myths or magical realism into their works. Desai’s style is dry in just about every way; the prose is uninteresting, the characters unmemorable and unlikable. The judge’s back story, for example, explains his grim, misanthropic exterior, but in a way that will make you loathe him for his cruelty. There’s a parallel between his upbringing and what the cook hopes for Biju, certainly, where Biju chooses family and emotion over the sort of materialistic ambition that defined the judge’s life. Perhaps I would have felt more invested had Biju’s story resolved a little sooner, but Desai has us watch his debasement a little too long before anything of consequence happens in his story, and the novel ends before his story gets any sort of answer.

I still can’t decide what Desai was trying to depict in The Inheritance of Loss or what aspect of life she wanted to explore, which could be my failure as a reader rather than hers as a writer – but whatever it was, I didn’t get it, and that’s a pretty rare experience for me at this point in my life. I may not always like novels I read, but I’m rarely this flummoxed. That puts this towards the bottom of the two dozen Booker winners I’ve read so far, at least.

Next up: I’ve just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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→ February 12, 2019
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The Finkler Question.

I have no idea why Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize; it’s not just unworthy of the honor, but it’s an aggressively bad novel, hard to read (despite some strong turns of phrase), full of unlikeable characters, and populated with bad stereotypes of Jewish people and, worse, Jewishness as a whole. It is a blurry facsimile of a Philip Roth novel; it is to Portnoy’s Complaint what the new Greta Van Fleet album is to Led Zeppelin IV.

The novel revolves around three men – Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler, and Libor Sevcik – who socialize from time to time in London. Finkler and Libor are both Jews, and both somewhat recently widowed. Treslove and Finkler were schoolmates, and Sevcik was their teacher at one point. Treslove is a Gentile, and not a widower but unable to maintain a relationship, with two sons by women who’d already left him before they found out they were pregnant. And for some reason, Treslove becomes obsessed with Jewishness – not Judaism the religion, but the Jewish culture, identity, and experience. He does so just as Finkler becomes involved with a group he renames the ASHamed Jews, anti-Zionists who express their disdain for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and seems to be renouncing some of his Jewish heritage.

Treslove begins referring to all Jews as Finklers, which … seems problematic. It’s unclear if Jacobson meant this synecdoche as some sort of clever gimmick, but it comes off as a kind of bad stereotype, as if Finkler himself is representative of all modern Jews. Jacobson himself is Jewish and has spoken out against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, especially that within Jermey Corbyn’s Labour Party, so it seems wrong to ascribe a malicious motive to Jacobson here, but the device does not work in the least – it is both grating and problematic.

And I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one who thinks this – in looking for a Guardian review of the novel from when it came out in 2010, I found this editorial that expresses my feelings on how the book uses Jewish identity as a sort of running punch line to no purpose. It feels dehumanizing on the page, which makes the book a worse read both for its inherent unpleasantness and because the characters become so much less interesting.

The story itself is also just not compelling at all, with Rothian obsessions with sex and genitalia, including a bizarre passage about an older circumcised Jew trying to create a new, faux foreskin for himself. (Don’t ask. Really, just don’t ask.) Finkler was serially unfaithful to his wife, who cheated on Finkler with Treslove. Treslove himself probably can’t maintain a relationship because he can hardly distinguish between sex and intimacy. He does meet his match, which is bizarrely foreordained by a fortuneteller at the start of the novel in a plot element that just drops off the page once the prophecy is partly fulfilled, and manages to screw that up too, in large part because he becomes obsessed with her Jewishness and can’t see her as anything but Jewishness incarnate. Treslove and Finkler are both insufferable in different ways, with Finkler a bit worse for me because I have met a couple of people of whom he reminded me, but must we quibble over degrees or flavors of insufferability? You can’t anchor a novel with two nitwits like them and then expect the reader to connect with what’s happening on the page.

Yet it won the Man Booker Prize in what looks like it might have been a weak year of candidates; I had only heard of one book on the shortlist, Emma Donoghue’s Room (the basis for the movie starring Brie Larson), and one other author, Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice already. I don’t know what the judges saw in this but I think it’s just plain dreadful, even if you give it a few points for Jacobson’s intelligent yet stolid prose.

Next up: Reading an out-of-print Graham Greene short story collection, after which I’ll read Philip K. Dick’s Our Friends from Frolix 8.

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→ January 14, 2019
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Hearts Beat Loud.

Nick Offerman is one of the few celebrities I follow on Twitter, and any movie or TV show becomes much more interesting to me if I find out he’s one of the stars. After seeing the trailer for last summer’s Hearts Beat Loud a few times, with Offerman playing one of the two leads and a father-daughter story around the hook of indie music, I couldn’t have been more jazzed to see it. I finally caught it this weekend, now that it’s streaming on Hulu, and it’s cute and kind of sweet and, to my surprise and chagrin, kind of boring.

Offerman plays Frank Fisher, a widowed father and former musician who runs an independent record store (as in vinyl) in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, and lives with his teenaged daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons), who is a few weeks away from heading across the country to UCLA to study pre-med. The store is failing, in part because the landlord (Toni Collette) has raised the rent beyond what Frank can afford, and there’s added financial pressure from Frank’s mother Marianne (Blythe Danner), who is experiencing some cognitive decline but still lives on her own. In one of Frank and Sam’s regular jam sessions (“jam sesh,” as Frank calls it to annoy his daughter), they write and record a song called “Hearts Beat Loud” that Frank likes enough to upload on to Spotify, where it has a little success and attracts interest from a local agent, which spurs a minor conflict between Frank, who wants to pursue it, and Sam, who thinks it’s a fantasy and by then is days away from heading to school.

The film has modest ambitions and modestly hits them, which works by keeping the story realistic but also means the stakes in the story are consistently low. The story is more slice-of-life than traditional narrative; the film ends when the store closes – so I suppose there was a chance they’d have the song save the store somehow – and Sam heads off to school, which does give a poignant moment when she breaks off her budding relationship with girlfriend Rose (Sasha Lane, great as always). Frank is a bit of a screw-up, which works in some ways – he’s not great with money, he drinks a little too much – but not in others – we get the Dawson’s Creek shtick where the kids are smarter than the adults.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw in the film is the lack of development or insight into Frank’s relationship with Sam, which would appear to be the heart (no pun intended) of the story. There are hints of Frank’s reluctance to let Sam leave New York for school, but no exploration of how he accepts that this is what she wants to do and that it’s right for her – the script skips right over that part, moving from a feel-good moment where the two play a mini-concert the night the store closes to a point after she’s already left. The backstory of Sam’s mother could give some insight into his hope that the band, which Frank titles We’re Not a Band after Sam gives that non-answer to his request for a suggested name, becomes a way to keep Sam both home and closer to him, but it’s scant and disappears from the narrative partway through. There’s a sideswipe at amazon, a fun cameo from a popular indie musician, a bunch of dumb weed jokes, and some nods to Brooklyn hipster culture, all in service of a goal I couldn’t identify.

Offerman is understated here, not in the Ron Swanson way but more in a way that underutilizes his comic gifts; there’s an early scene where he’s playing the cool dad trying too hard to annoy his daughter that was both very familiar (I’ve done almost the same thing and gotten the same reaction from my daughter) and a better use of his talents. He’s apparently quite a good guitar player, but that’s not a draw – there’s one scene where he uses a Boss Loop Station pedal to write and record a riff that they later work into a song, but the scene seems to go on forever, because watching someone write music is, unfortunately, not good cinema. Clemons is a breakout star, though, and has quite a singing voice. Collette and Ted Danson, Frank’s stoner bar owner friend, don’t have nearly enough to do. I wanted to like Hearts Beat Loud for so many reasons, but the total is so much less than the sum of its parts.

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→ November 18, 2018
→ By

The Wife.

The Wife, based on novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer, has received early acclaim primarily for the performance of Glenn Close as the wife of the movie’s title. She delivers a solid performance, as you might expect, but the movie is dreck, the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers, with moments so big and predictable that I actually walked to the back of the theater at one point to message a friend about how bad the movie was.

Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) who, as the film opens, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; the story takes us with Joan and Joe to Stockholm for the ceremony while giving us flashbacks to when they met and through the development of his career and their marriage. Joan was a student in Joe’s writing class at Smith, with Close’s daughter Annie Starke playing young Joan and Harry Lloyd hamming it up as young Joe, and they start an affair even though Joe is married and the two are teacher and student. Their romantic relationship also involves a professional partnership, as Joan is a gifted writer in her own right, but subverts her talents because she believes there is no market for a female novelist, while she can help Joe turn his writing into something that can succeed critically and commercially. Back in Stockholm, Nate (Christian Slater) is hounding the family so he can write a biography of Joe, while their adult son David (Max Irons) is there to sulk, smoke pot, and yell at his father. Of course, the tensions build over the course of the film to a melodramatic climax where we learn the truth about Joe’s work while Joan makes some major decisions about the rest of her life.

The hackneyed story runs through a series of coincidences, clichés, and outright groaners that destroy any suspension of disbelief because you can’t possibly accept anything this stupid as remotely realistic. Joe’s about to kiss the stunning young photographer who’s been assigned by his publisher to take pictures of him in Stockholm when the alarm Joan set on his watch to remind him to take his heart medication happens to go off at that precise moment. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics is supposed to be there for comic relief but is just an unfunny caricature of the overbearing, bragging parent, and of course we later find out that his kids are messed up. Nate is an even worse caricature of a mercenary writer, unctuous enough to soak the audience in grease, even dressed to depress with a cheap leather jacket and jeans while everyone else is attired for the occasion. David is the brooding young author and his fractured relationship with his father is overwrought and undersold. The scene with the walnut in the hotel room is insultingly trite. And if you can’t see the ending coming with all the clues the film positively throws at you from the beginning, the little plastic castle must be a surprise to you every time.

Close’s performance in The Wife has garnered substantial praise and she’s considered very likely to earn a Best Actress nomination, both for her performance and because the subject matter is clearly Oscar bait. Close is … fine. She gives a good performance in a role that is just not all that interesting – Joan’s character is just not that remarkable and the confines of the script do not give Close all that much room to stretch out. Joan says she doesn’t want to be seen as the long-suffering wife, but that’s just what she is, and we’ve seen this character a thousand times before. Close does what she can, but there’s no new thing under this sun.

Pryce is a scene-chewer by nature, although he deserves credit for how spot-on his Brooklyn Jewish accent is; he gives Joe a little charisma so you can see how women might still be interested in him despite his gruff manner and bombast. Irons scowls his way through the film, although the script gives him little else to do, and Elizabeth McGovern, whose bizarre diction was a constant distraction on Downton Abbey, tries to deliver some sort of weird 1950s dame voice to match an overblown speech that alters the course of Joan’s life.

The groupthink around this film just flabbergasts me – this is a badly written story with two competent performances at its heart, neither of which can elevate this movie beyond the level of dreadful. Even the few laughs are forced and the jokes frequently obvious. If Close gets a nomination over Rosamund Pike (for A Private War) or Melissa McCarthy (for Can You Ever Forgive Me?), it might be more a career achievement honor than a reflection of their respective performances.

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→ March 11, 2018
→ By

They’d Rather Be Right.

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather Be Right won the second Hugo Award for Best Novel and is widely regarded today as the worst of all of the 66 winners of that prize. It was later reissued with two related short stories appended to the beginning of it and sold as The Forever Machine, which is the version I read, and the main story is not improved any but the inclusion of those two extra bits. I couldn’t get over what a shame this entire book was, because there’s a germ of an idea at the heart of it that is actually quite relevant today – what might artificial intelligence do for us, and how it might be able to change civilization if we’re willing to let it.

Two professors, with the help of a natural telepath named Joey, build a ‘cybernetic machine’ they name Bossy, which operates quite a bit like today’s backpropagation AI programs do, but with the unstated condition that, in the world of this novel, P is actually equal to NP and thus all problems that can be verified quickly can be solved in polynomial time. Bossy can answer anything and somehow can reverse aging and make people immortal. The media gets stirred up against Bossy at first, so the professors have to dismantle it, take it into hiding, and rebuild it in a flophouse in San Francisco, eventually gaining the help of a local industrialist who controls major media outlets and enlisting some help from the military to protect it. When their first patient reverse-ages about 30 years and starts talking like a Buddhist who’s achieved nirvana, the uproar threatens to engulf the project and potentially end it.

There’s a decent premise in there, and the title comes from a funny exchange about whether people would give up their most cherished beliefs and preconceived notions in exchange for a life of immortality, wisdom, and peace. One of the inventors of Bossy says that given that choice, most people would reject what Bossy was offering, saying “they’d rather be right” than gain everything there possibly is to gain. But my word is the execution here terrible. The three main inventors, all men, are paper-thin and boring; even Joey’s telepathy is just a crutch, not really important to Bossy’s development, but a way for him to control other people the way Second Foundation experts in Isaac Asimov’s series use mentalics. The woman who becomes Bossy’s first success story, Mabel, is the hackneyed hooker with a heart of gold, and about as interesting as paste even before her transformation – and she’s worse afterwards.

It’s also never really clear why the public rages against Bossy early in the book and then clamors for it later. Yes, public opinion often goes against new technologies or scientific progress if a large portion of the population doesn’t understand it – GMOs are the best modern example – but that’s not well set up here at all. If someone invents a Forever Machine, what fool wouldn’t take it? Even if I told you that it wouldn’t extend your lifespan, but would remove any effects of aging and protect you against cancer and autoimmune diseases and more, and also gave you greater intelligence and inner peace, you’re still saying no? People spend billions of dollars on useless supplements to try to get a little healthier. If someone invents Bossy, they’ll need an army to keep people away from it.

I’ve got a few more Hugo winners to review here that I’ve already read, and right now I have just four left: C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen; Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky; and the second and third novels in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Vinge’s book I’ll read soon enough – it’s just long, but I do find his books interesting, even if they move a little slow. But those Mars books … given how awful Red Mars is, and yes, it’s a more painful read than even this dreck, I’m in no rush to read them just for the sake of finishing a list.

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→ August 23, 2017
→ By

Moriarty.

I’m on record as saying Anthony Horowitz’s Foyle’s War is my favorite television series ever, although I admit I’m sort of stretching the boundaries – like many British series, Foyle’s War is more like an ongoing sequence of made-for-TV movies, with each episode running about 90 minutes and with a completely self-contained story. The mystery series, starring Michael Kitchen as the marvelously taciturn DCS Foyle, ran for eight seasons across fourteen years, with 28 episodes set from 1940 to 1947. Horowitz wrote most of the episodes himself, crafting memorable three-dimensional characters along with tightly-plotted mysteries worthy of the greats of the genre.

Horowitz is also a successful novelist and has the distinction of being the first writer authorized by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle to use the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson characters in a new work of fiction. (The characters are in the public domain in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, so any author can use them in his/her works.) The second of his two novels in the Holmes universe, Moriarty, doesn’t actually include Holmes or Watson, but instead builds a new mystery around some secondary characters, including the titular villain who himself only appeared in one Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” where the two tangle at the Reichenbach Falls and appear to drop to their deaths. In the wake of that event, a leader of American organized crime appears to be moving into London to fill the void left by Moriarty’s death, and it is up to Scotland Yard Inspector Athelney Jones and Pinkerton detective Frederick Chase (who narrates) to try to track the killer down.

Moriarty doesn’t seem at all like Conan Doyle’s work; it’s fast, breezy, light on character, and frankly loaded with silliness, both poor work by Inspector Jones and overuse of graphic violence by Horowitz. Holmes is legend because he’s charming in his aloofness and impressive in his deductive powers. Neither Jones nor Chase brings an ounce of charisma to the book, while the various tough guys they encounter are garden-variety bimbos who could have left the pages of any pulp noir story to make a few extra bucks by appearing here. We even get the ultimate cliché, the scene where the protagonist (in this case, both of them) gets knocked unconscious and wakes up in captivity, to which Horowitz brings nothing new whatsoever.

To the extent that Moriarty works at all, it’s because of the Twist, and it’s a big one. Without that, this is a bad mystery or a bad detective novel. With it, well, it’s something. It might be a clever puzzle, but I felt like I’d been conned. The reveal includes references to some of the clues you might have picked up on earlier in the book, but not only did I not see them, nothing even tipped me off that I should be considering the possibility of a con. You can write an entire novel in the first person, and then open the last chapter with, “Whoops! I lied,” but that doesn’t make it a good novel. Give me a fair shot to figure out the truth and I won’t feel cheated when I fail to do so. Horowitz always did that in his TV work, but left that element out of Moriarty, ruining the work for me.

Next up: I’m still several books behind but am back on the Pulitzer trail with Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary, which won in 1929.

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→ May 4, 2017
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Toni Erdmann.

My first book, Smart Baseball, is out now!

The German film Toni Erdmann (amazon • iTunes) was critically acclaimed all over Europe and here when it first appeared last year, winning the German equivalent of the Oscar for Best Picture and earning a nomination here for Best Foreign Language Film (which it lost to The Salesman). The 165-minute movie has been widely described as a comedy, but it is anything but. It is a truly unpleasant movie to watch, an extended, pointless exercise in misanthropy and the humiliation of its characters.

Winifred is a divorced and apparently retired German man, probably around 70, who appears to be unable to stop himself from playing juvenile pranks on people, most of which involve the use of a set of false teeth. His daughter, Ines, is an ambitious, hard-working management consultant who is working in Bucharest on a difficult project involving a Romanian oil company. Winifred tries to connect with her for some quality time, showing up in Bucharest unannounced for a weekend, but the effort fails as she prioritizes work over her father. As a result, he decides to play a huge prank, posing as Toni Erdmann, a life coach to the oil company’s CEO, with an utterly ridiculous shaggy wig of black hair and those same false teeth. Every plot description says he’s doing this to spend time near his daughter, but I think he does it because he’s a giant asshole who doesn’t care what damage he does to anyone else as long as he gets a laugh.

I said as long as he gets a laugh, because we don’t. This movie isn’t funny, and I don’t think the script was trying to be funny most of the time. I suppose the brunch scene at the end may have been intended as humor, but it is so unrealistic that it doesn’t even get the cringe comic effect of the excruciatingly awkward. If Toni Erdmann had some charisma – say, as a platitude-spouting new age thinker, or a parody of the consultant who borrows your watch to tell you the time – he could have been hilarious. Instead, he’s just constantly in the way, and the script is totally unable to achieve the comic effect of the bumbler or the walking satire.

It doesn’t help that neither Winifred (outside of Toni) nor Ines is a particularly sympathetic character. We’re almost forced to believe that Winifred misses his daughter, but without any context for their past relationship, it’s hard to imagine why she’d suddenly want to be closer to him when he’s still unapproachable. Ines’ character is written as the woman who has to work twice as hard as the men around her to get the same respect, and has the awful habit of deferring to men in meetings even when they’ve disagreed with her or even undercut her points, but the script gives us nothing to hang on to in support of her character – no evidence of inner strength, or even something to explain her sheer competence, some reason to root for her against the dimwits and chauvinists around her.

(I also felt that the look of Ines, played by Sandra Hüller, didn’t work. Here’s a character who, again, we’re supposed to accept as a strong, hard-working, sharp woman in a male-dominated workplace. Yet she’s almost sickly looking at times – her hair, makeup, even her clothing all work against the character, and Hüller being so pale unfortunately plays into it as well. It was a chance to reveal something more about Ines by exaggerating her physical appearance. Perhaps this is a woman unconcerned with her appearance, but that would contradict a scene near the end where she seems overly concerned with it instead.)

So much of this movie just does not work on screen, in ways it’s hard to fathom would have worked on the page. What begins as an unconvincing sex scene between Ines and the coworker she’s sleeping with turns into an utterly gross non-joke, as if she’s playing a bizarre prank on her partner (who may have had it coming – but I liked almost no one in this movie anyway). Somehow Ines and Winifred end up at a Romanian family’s Easter dinner, where Winifred volunteers Ines to sing a song, which she does, and then runs off, after which the whole event is simply forgotten by all participants. At one point, a few of the characters, including Ines, do lines of coke, which seems completely out of character for her given everything that came before. And the brunch scene … well, without spoiling it, I’ll just say the whole thing was so preposterous I couldn’t buy into any aspect of it.

I tend to think that English-language remakes of foreign films always lose something from the original. But with word coming that there’s an American version of Toni Erdmann in the works starring Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig, I wonder if it could be any worse than the German film; if nothing else, it will at least be shorter, as there’s no way they could expect American audiences to endure nearly three hours of this. And Wiig is truly too funny for the original script. I can only hope they rework it from scratch and see if there’s actually something good to be found in this premise.

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→ February 11, 2017
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The 13th.

Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th, available for free on Netflix, aims high, trying to tell the history of mass incarceration in the United States while tying it inextricably to the history of the oppression of African-Americans post-slavery. DuVernay assembles a formidable group of pundits, activists, and politicians – not all black, and not all from the left – to examine the arc of American prison culture over 150 years through an narrator-less stream of commentary. It is almost guaranteed to disturb anyone who sees our racial divide for what it is, in social and economic terms. It is also an infinite loop of anecdotal fallacies, so light on hard evidence to support any of its many assertions that it is unlikely to convince the unconvinced of anything at all.

The 13th traces the history of the subjugation of the African-American in the United States from the passage of the 13th Amendment (hence the title) through the present day’s Black Lives Matter movements and the overt dog-whistling of President Trump while on the campaign trail. The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery but left a glaring exception within its text:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Did you know that “except” clause was there? I couldn’t have told you that if you’d asked me three days ago what the 13th Amendment said or did; I thought it ended slavery, full stop. What ensued set the stage for the modern era of mass incarceration, according to the various historians and pundits we see in The 13th: The southern economic engine ran on free black labor before the Civil War, so after it, blacks were arrested on trivial spurious charges, imprisoned, and then put to work to keep the engine running. White authorities used jail as a way to quell civil rights movements as well as a source of free or cheap workers, imprisoning nearly all of the major civil rights leaders at some point during the 1950s and 1960s, a practice the film implies ended with the acquittal of activist Angela Davis – a scene I’ll return to in a moment – only to have the system roll back over again on itself with a new tactic. “Tough on crime” politics gave authorities new reasons to lock up African-Americans, especially men, for longer periods of time even on lesser charges. Sentences for possession or distribution of crack were longer than those for equivalent quantities of powdered cocaine. Multiple levels of government enacted mandatory minimums and three-strikes sentencing rules. Many people were locked up simply for their inability to pay fines or post bail, something John Oliver covered well two years ago on Last Week Tonight. Prisons were privatized, and firms like CCA are now paid based on prison populations, so they have every incentive to keep jails full. The film asserts that all of these factors contribute to the ongoing high rates of incarceration for African-Americans relative to white Americans. You’re about six times more likely to spend time in jail in your life if you’re a black man than a white man.

It’s easy to sit here in 2017 and handwave away much of the black-and-white footage in the film as relics of our racist past, but much of what the film covers from Reagan forward should really get your attention. The War on Drugs could easily take up this entire film for its effects on people of color, our system of mass incarceration, and the colossal waste of public funds for little to no public benefit. Decriminalizing possession works in many ways, including reducing usage. Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2000, adopted a recovery-centric approach to helping addicts, and has seen drug use fall while HIV infection rates stayed stable. The Netherlands decriminalized in 1976 and they have so many empty prison cells they’re using them to help house migrants. I thought The 13th could have gone even farther down this road, talking not just about what imprisoning African-Americans on minor drug offenses does to the community (and how it provides free prison labor and supports an entire industry of firms that contract with prisons to provide goods and services, including Aramark), but looking at violence related strictly to the War on Drugs and the effect that has on people of color.

As for Angela Davis, who appears many times on screen to discuss the issue at hand, the movie totally whiffs on her own backstory. The film never explains why she was on trial in the first place, implying that it was a politically-motivated charge to silence her, praising her for dominating the proceedings with her defense, and claiming that the state wanted to give her the death penalty. Davis was actually charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy related to the Marin County courthouse incident, where an armed 17-year-old tried to free his brother and two other men, who were charged with killing a prison guard – it’s a complicated story, so I encourage you to read those links. The assailant used guns purchased by Davis two days prior to the attack. The charges may indeed have been trumped up for political reasons. She was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List while she was on the run, which also seems like it was a political move. And I don’t see how she could even have been charged with anything but conspiracy if she wasn’t even present at the crime. But the film mentions none of this, and it’s pretty damn relevant to that entire sequence. The prosecution of Davis may have had a political motivation, but she wasn’t arrested without cause, either.

That’s a single example of a maddening problem with The 13th: It’s 90% opinion and 10% fact. Do I believe there’s a pyramid of firms profiting off our system of throwing people in jail for nonviolent offenses? Absolutely. But give us some data on that – how many people are locked up for these crimes? How many days or years are lost? Who’s paying for that imprisonment, and how much? In jurisdictions with lighter sentencing, do we see positive effects? Mandatory minimums vary by state; how have states that rolled back these laws fared? How about third-strike laws, which only exist in 28 states? These are subjects of real academic research, but instead of giving us data, or scholars discussing their work, we get circular reasoning, solipsistic assertions, and appeals to emotion. In fact, I thought the most fascinating commentary came from one of the film’s few non-African Americans to speak: Newt Gingrich, who offered thoughtful, intelligent remarks on the failures of the 1980s and 1990s efforts to get “tough on crime” and of the imbalanced sentencing laws on crack and cocaine.

The 13th has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary feature along with Life, Animated; Fire at Sea; I Am Not Your Negro; and ESPN’s own O.J.: Made in America. While it has sort of the political angle the Academy tends to favor in voting, it’s so full of rhetoric without evidence that I couldn’t possibly consider it over O.J., even before considering the latter’s length and vast scope. This is more of a call to action to the faithful than the film to send your “All Lives Matter!” friend to get him to realize he’s being ridiculous. (Better to unfriend him anyway.) It’s a demand for change, but to convince enough people to push the change through in the face of enemies with enormous economic incentives to support the status quo, we’ll need a lot more than The 13th provides us.

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