→ August 25, 2009
→ By

The Hunter and Heavy Weather.

Cape Cod League top 30 prospects: 30-16 and 15-1. I’ll be on ESPN 1000 Chicago’s 9-11 pm program, but we’re taping it beforehand so I don’t know exactly when I’ll be on.

—

Richard Stark’s The Hunter is a different sort of hard-boiled novel from the ones I usually read. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about good guy private eyes who were tough and comfortable with moral ambiguity but rarely strayed into darker territory. The Hunter revolves around a thief named Parker who is hellbent on revenge against the girl and guy who betrayed him during a big score, shooting him and leaving him for dead.

The story starts with Parker catching up with the woman, then jumps back to tell us about the score gone wrong, then shifts focus to Parker’s other prey, the onetime partner who masterminded the betrayal but realizes that Parker isn’t dead. Where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe would knock a guy cold, Parker kills him – he kills for revenge, he kills for leverage, he kills to send messages. He shows remorse for one death he didn’t plan, but otherwise reasons away every kill (when he reasons them at all) as justified. Stark’s style is dry and efficient, short sentences, minimal details. It moves, and I found myself pulling for Parker despite the fact that he’s a nasty piece of work.

The Hunter was a ripping read until the last five pages, when Stark (actually a pseudonym for the prolific Donald Westlake) has Parker, normally a meticulous planner, make an uncharacteristically sloppy mistake, perhaps just for the purpose of sending him on one last major score in the final few paragraphs of the book. It seemed out of character and forced for a story that was an effortless work up until that point. It’s absolutely worth the read, but I found that ending to be a letdown after 98% of the book was so strong.

—

I don’t devote much time to P.G. Wodehouse books for two reasons. One, I’ve flogged his stuff relentlessly enough that if you were ever going to try him, you probably already have. Two, his books more or less share the same plot but with different gags and twists to get to the same ending. Heavy Weather, part of the Blandings Castle series and a direct sequel to Summer Lightning, gets a mention here for the wrong reason: It was dull and not that funny. It has to be the first Wodehouse novel I didn’t enjoy, and I kept waiting for the comedy to kick in; it’s just a continuation of the plot of Summer Lightning, picking up just a day or two after the previous novel ends, and it lacked both Wodehouse’s typical silly situations and wisecracks and his trick of weaving multiple seemingly unconnected plots into one pat solution.

—

I’m writing this on a plane and they’re showing the chick-flick “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I looked up to see Matthew McConaghey destroy a wedding cake because he pushed the cork out of a champagne bottle instead of holding it and twisting the bottle. Really? Does anyone actually open a bottle of champagne by letting the cork go flying? I will say this, though: Whoever the casting director was, he clearly had a good time with this film. That’s a lot of good-looking women in one movie. Otherwise it looks like the kind of flick my wife would watch when I’m traveling.

—

Next up: William Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ August 17, 2009
→ By

No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

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→ July 3, 2009
→ By

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Recent radio: My first-ever appearance on the BS Report; today’s hit on our Seattle affiliate; yesterday’s hit on Mike and Mike in the Morning (complete with goofy custom song).

I’ll be on KTAR Phoenix tonight at 7:10 pm local time, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago at 9:40 pm local time.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is the second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, which started with Legs (which I didn’t like) and continues with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. Legs was a fictionalized story of bootlegger Legs Diamond’s rise and fall in the Albany underworld, but the use of a real person limited Kennedy’s ability to craft an actual plot, leaving him instead to fit his words around actual events. In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Kennedy can create something from whole cloth – the story of the title character’s unwilling involvement in a major Albany kidnapping, his fall from grace, and his surprising redemption.

Although the setting is the 1930s, evoking thoughts of hard-boiled detective novels, Kennedy’s style is more expansive than the typical dry hard-boiled writer’s, from longer sentences to allusions to music, novels, and poetry, such as this passage where one character, a playwright, quotes Yeats:

Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

The passage is a memory of Martin Daugherty, a friend of Billy’s and the second protagonist in two plot lines that intertwine throughout the book. Martin’s is more introspective and sentimental, while Billy’s has more action, relatively speaking, although the bulk of the big action takes place off-screen. Both characters face existential questions, revolving around family, both real and the constructed “family” of the McCall crime organization.

Kennedy’s prose is strong, and was markedly improved over that of Legs. He provides just enough imagery to set the scene and evokes that hard-boiled feel with text that’s one step above sparse. Billy Phelan’s also has more comic elements, and Kennedy is certainly not above a bit of slapstick or even bathroom humor, including the book’s funniest passage, one that has nothing to do with the main plot:

And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

After fighting my way through Legs, I tore through this book, and was even satisfied by the unconventional (and slightly ironic) ending.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Henry Green’s Loving, part of a three-book volume that includes his earlier novels Living and Party Going.

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→ February 28, 2009
→ By

The Simple Art of Murder.

Playing catchup on the reading list a bit here … Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite authors in any genre, wasn’t an especially prolific writer; he published nothing until he was in his forties and his total output was seven completed novels and (according to this Chandler bibliography) 25 short stories, some of which he expanded into novels years after they were published in pulp magazines. The Simple Art of Murder includes eight of his short stories as well as his famous essay from Atlantic Monthly that gave the collection its title. That essay is a spirited defense of the detective story as a literary art form while also serving as a criticism of the degeneration of the genre through what Chandler seems to have considered hack writing, including contrived plot details and unrealistic motives.

The short stories seemed to lack the crisp writing and brisk pacing of the Chandler novels I’ve read, but the constant change of detective characters and milieus means that if you like the genre at all, you’ll probably find a story in the collection that hits all the high notes for you. It’s more a matter of taste than quality, but I enjoyed “Pearls Are a Nuisance” with its main detective’s stilted language and light parody of bad detective stories, and the closing story, “Nevada Gas,” which had a faster pace, higher stakes, and a slightly more intricate plot than any of the other stories. None of them can match The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye for character or tension, so if you’re new to Chandler I’d recommend you start with those novels and save Murder for later.

Worth checking out: The Raymond Chandler fansite I mentioned above is the best resource I’ve seen on his works. You can read the full text of the essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 25, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part three.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

60. The Secret Agent, by Josef Conrad. Conrad is highly esteemed within the literary world for both Nostromo and Lord Jim, but I prefer The Secret Agent for its readability and the presence of some real, bona fide narrative greed. It was adapted, loosely, by Alfred Hitchcock for his 1936 film, Sabotage. (Conrad’s best-known work, Heart of Darkness, is too short for this list.)

59. Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. The first third of an unfinished trilogy, usually sold with the surviving fragments of book two (destroyed by the author about ten days before his suicide), Dead Souls is a dark comedy about serfdom in czarist Russia and the buying and selling of the rights to recently deceased serfs. Its publication and success mark the beginning of the Russian novel and one of the most fertile periods of great literature in any culture.

58. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Like so many novels on this list, The Leopard is the only novel written by its author. In fact, it was published posthumously by the author’s widow, and eventually became the first best-seller in Italian literature. It tells the story of the decline of a noble family during the unification of Italy, based loosely on the own author’s family history.

57. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Billy Bones, pieces of eight, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho!

56. The Small Bachelor, by P.G. Wodehouse. Not part of any series, this one-off book encapsulates the Wodehouse novel’s form perfectly, with two couples kept apart by circumstances, an incompetent artist, an efficiency expert, a policeman bent on becoming a poet, a female pickpocket, and the usual dose of misunderstandings and chases.

55. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The book is a must-read; the movie is a must-see. It’s probably considered the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written … but there’s one I rate higher.

54. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Haunting yet beautiful, desolate yet hopeful, Housekeeping shows how much a skilled author can do with just a scarce supply of characters and limited dialogue.

53. 1984, by George Orwell. The ultimate dystopian novel as well as the most scathing attack on totalitarianism in literature, 1984 wins out over Brave New World for me because the polemic is built around a deep study of the main character, Winston Smith. Irrelevant note: The best paper I wrote as a student was a comparison of the way colors and light are described in 1984 and Brave New World. Where Orwell saw “yellow,” Huxley saw “gold,” and so both authors created vastly differing pictures of their dystopian futures.

52. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. The Great American Novel? Not for me, but certainly a great American novel, featuring thinly-veiled versions of Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac himself, criss-crossing the country, with inventive phrasing and a dialect that defined the Beat Generation and two generations that came after it.

51. The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington. Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Tarkington’s best-known novel tells of the rise of the United States – both the growth of its economy and the democratization of its society – by depicting the gradual decline and ossification of an aristocratic family. It also became perhaps Orson Welles’ least favorite of his own films, as the studio forced him to change the ending and cut significant chunks of the finished film; the original footage is lost.

50. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien. A silly novel that was meta before meta existed, with a novel within a novel that sees its characters revolt against their fictional author. It also spawned the greatest endorsement in the history of the novel, from Dylan Thomas: “This is just the book to give your sister … if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”

49. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Full review. A great comic novel about a mostly-normal professor at a small English college who is surrounded by wackos and manages to get himself into increasing quantities of trouble.

48. I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves. A tour de force of historical fiction, told from the perspective of Claudius, the slightly lame and (as we learn) totally insecure man who survived decades of political intrigues and murders to become first Caligula’s consul and later an exalted Emperor of Rome.

47. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A protest novel and an affectionate portrait of the title character, whose name has sadly been misused as an intra-racial insult by people who do not appear to have read the book.

46. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I often vacillate on the question of my favorite Vonnegut novel, so I’ve punted and gone with the experts’ pick. Although I can almost certainly say that this wasn’t my favorite, it is one of his most coherent, and at the same time has enough wackiness and weirdness and Kilgore Trout to be undeniably Vonnegut.

45. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père. Filled with a chewy nougat center … um, and lots of adventure, with a pair of villains, plenty of treachery, a young man seeking to become the fourth musketeer … and a smooth milk chocolate exterior.

44. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. So simple in style that it reads like a fable meant to be told through the generations, with an unflinching message about the effects of colonialism on Africa’s culture and its people. Its sequel, No Longer at Ease, is also worth your time, even though it runs over similar ground.

43. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. A comic novel in a serious setting, Cuckoo’s Nest always struck me as the dissection of a power struggle between two people and a statement on how leaders, and perhaps governments, attempt to sway the hearts of men. The pickup basketball game remains a personal favorite scene of mine.

42. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A novel of serious moral questions, of Dostoevsky’s own philosophy blending Christianity with existentialism, of redemption, and most of all of the power of rationalization.

41. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien. One ring to rule them all.

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→ June 24, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part two.

Part one (#100-81)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

80. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. An extremely easy read, despite the references to some characters by roles (“Mother’s Younger Brother”) rather than names, with rolling, twisting plot lines and text that takes you into another era.

79. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. Full review. A classic gothic mystery, which also led to Alfred Hitchcock’s only non-honorary Oscar.

78. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy. Overlooked now, probably because of the rather unflattering depiction of a Jewish character, it’s a fast-paced and tense adventure story that deserves to be read by readers who understand its historical context. (And it’s hardly the only book on this list to take its shots at Jews.)

77. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. Full review. Morrison’s second-best novel, the story of a black family divided through two generations and of one of the sons, Milkman Dead, who is searching for his own identity in the world.

76. A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa’Thiongo. One of the best and most important novels written by an African author, Grain depicts a Kenyan village divided by the white colonial authorities, who use their power to split and oppress the people whose land they rule.

75. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Beautifully written tale of good and evil with an uncomfortably high level of violence.

74. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. A novella in the ruined-woman genre, The Awakening takes the story of Anna Karenina, transfers it to New Orleans, and condenses it to focus strictly on the woman, her choices, and the society that boxes her into a corner.

73. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. An under-read Russian novel, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, Fathers and Sons captures a generational clash that threatens the traditional way of life in Russia, while introducing the then-chic philosophy of nihilism to the broader public.

72. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. Hosseini’s second book wasn’t quite the tear-jerker that his first was, but still had power in its subtlety, with the occasional burst of drama to keep you alert.

71. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe. Another straight narrative without breaks, Moll is a picaresque novel and a twisted morality tale that follows a woman of uncertain scruples through her entire life, from her birth in a prison to her life as a prostitute to her eventual rise to wealth.

70. The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett. An early and now somewhat-overlooked picaresque novel by one of the first great novelists and translators in the English language.

69. Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I struggled a little bit with this one; it’s a children’s novel, but it’s not. It’s more of a modern epic, a fable about a warren of rabbits who find their home threatened by human development, with one rabbit emerging as a hero through his own wiles and personal growth. The book is so good that it violates two of my core rules, that a book with a map or with a glossary should be avoided.

68. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Criminally overlooked for decades, Eyes has become a classic in the growing canon of African-American literature. Its use of dialect cleared the path for Alice Walker and the grandmaster of the genre, Toni Morrison.

67. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. One of the leading dystopian novels with Orwell’s 1984, which is coming up on this list. Huxley’s depiction of a world overrun by technology was both prescient and paranoid, and perhaps rings more true than Orwell’s work given subsequent developments.

66. Monarch of the Glen, by Compton Mackenzie. Full review. Brilliantly funny. Currently out of print in the U.S., although it remains in print in England.

65. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is half of the pair of leading lights of the hard-boiled detective genre, and The Big Sleep was his best work, with sleuth Philip Marlowe as the pensive star, with dry wit and filled glass and a very clear moral compass.

64. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.Full review. The fictionalized story of the rise and fall of Huey “Kingfish” Long, told almost as the backdrop for the story of the narrator, political crony Jack Burden.

63. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. Full review. A novel of feminism, of religious ideologies (and fascism!), told with an unusual and effective back-and-forth narrative style and a dose of humor.

62. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. A scathing indictment of early Hollywood culture and its pernicious effects on those who chase its rainbows.

61. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. Far more enjoyable than the self-loathing of Herzog, Henderson employs humor and a touch of the absurd to explore the meaning of life and one über-successful yet spiritually unfulfilled man’s search for it in the hinterlands of Africa.

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→ April 27, 2007
→ By

Cortázar, Hammett, and a nonfiction book.

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a bizarre novel; the first 56 chapters represent a complete work, a single story with a single protagonist and enough pseudo-intellectual pablum to make this Virginia Woolf hater want to light the book on fire. The last third of the book comprises interstitial chapters which may be added to the story proper if the reader wants to read the longer work. A few relate to the main narrative, a few more are of the newspaper-clipping style seen in a lot of other works, but most are just nonsense. The book is quite acclaimed – someone named C.D.B. Bryan is quoted as saying it’s his favorite novel, although why I’m supposed to take the opinion of a man with three initials in place of a first name seriously I have no idea – but it was a slog, and even slowed down towards the end. The core storyline is somewhat directionless, and doesn’t really conclude in any conventional sense; the main character needs a smack upside the head, both to get him to stop talking nonsense and to get him to do something with his life. The “freewheeling adventures” promised on the book’s jacket don’t even begin until the book is two-thirds finished, and they’re not freewheeling, not terribly adventurous, and are by and large extremely boring. (Exception: a bit of chapter 51, where the main character begins working at an asylum, a scene which sparks a few laughs.) So I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one.

Cleaning up a few books I read in March: Dashiel Hammett’s The Thin Man doesn’t exactly need my recommendation. Hammett’s one of my favorite authors, with a spare style that conveys so much more than Hemingway’s more-praised sparseness (which often struck me as a bit sing-song). That said, I’d probably send Hammett first-timers The Maltese Falcon, and for readers who want a lot of action I’d recommend Red Harvest. The Thin Man is best-known for the characters it introduced to the world, Nick and Nora Charles, but the book didn’t have quite the same tension as the other two I mentioned.

Ingrid Rowland’s The Scarith of Scornello was a fun, short read, telling the true story of a simple hoax orchestrated by a teenager in 16th-century Tuscany that turned into an elaborate academic fraud and ended up altering the course of the kid’s entire life. It’s billed as a bit of a mystery, which it isn’t, because the back cover of the book tells you that the whole thing was a hoax, and it turns out that some of the teenager’s contemporaries knew it was a hoax all along, while others were more than happy to believe in artifacts that appeared to increase the glory of their region in ancient times.

Filed Under: Literature, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,