→ January 3, 2010
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Dominion (board game).

Dominion, the most recent winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award, is a card game for two to four players in which players build a deck of cards through which they’ll cycle repeatedly, using money cards to buy new cards that grant the player more actions, more buying power, or the victory points used to win the game. It’s one of the hottest games going right now among fans of German-style games and ranks sixth on boardgamegeek’s master ranking of games, determined by user ratings.

A turn in Dominion comprises three basic steps: play one or more action card from your hand, buy one or more cards from the supply, and clean up the mess you just made in front of you. You end each turn by drawing the top five cards from your deck, and those cards constitute your hand for your next turn; when your deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile and begin drawing again, so except for a few special cases when you acquire a card it’s yours to keep.

There are three major card types: money, actions, and point cards. You can use money cards to buy any type of card on the table, including more money cards (copper cards have buying power of 1 and cost 0; silver have buying power of 2 and cost 3; gold have buying power of 3 and cost 6). Your total buying power on any turn is determined by which money cards are in your hand, so you can have plenty of money cards yet be unable to buy on a turn because you didn’t draw them, leading to two strategic considerations – the ratio of money cards to other cards in your deck, and whether it’s better to have lots of copper cards or to concentrate your buying power in silver and gold. You need point cards to win the game, but they have no active function during the game and thus drawing one is a wasted spot in your hand.

The action cards, shockingly, are where the action lies in the game, although more action cards is not necessarily better. Dominion comes with 25 different action card types, but in any particular game you only use 10 of these, which may come from a predetermined set or be chosen at random, leaving you – assuming I did the math right – 3.2 million different combinations, meaning that the game need never be the same twice if you so desire. That in turn means that you can’t approach Dominion with a single strategy, because some games will be more skewed toward action cards that provide you with additional buying power when played, while others may be heavy on cards that grant you extra actions (fun, but not always practical unless you have a deck full of action cards), and so on. Some cards’ value is fairly straightforward; for example, the Village card grants you two more actions and the right to draw a card, but since you have the right to play one action card every turn, the net result is just that you get to take an extra action, which might be useless if you’ve got four money cards in your hand. Choosing the right action cards, including the right mix of action cards and then the right mix of action versus non-action cards, is the key to the game, but the variety of setups mean that there’s no single right answer, and even within one specific setup there will usually be multiple ways to win.

The artwork is nice enough, but the names of cards typically have no connection to the benefits each card provides (why would a village allow you to draw a replacement card and take two more actions?), so you’re not building a “dominion” as the game’s description implies – just a deck. There’s less imagination involved in playing this game than there is in Stone Age or The Settlers of Catan, although I’m sure that’s only a drawback for a limited number of players. Setup is simple if you use the tray and guide to put the cards away after each game, but that in itself is a process so you’re going to lose some time in either setup or cleanup whenever you play. Two-player games take us under an hour; having the third player added a little complexity with the small number of “attack” cards in the deck by increasing the incentive to buy and use such cards, but we can also now say with some certainty that it’s a quick game to pick up, since all three of us grasped it quickly.

The lone negative I can see in the game is that there is one very simple attack that works most of the time if you’re the only person executing it – spend the vast majority of your turns buying silver/gold cards and, when you’re able, buying the Province cards (which cost 8 units) that give you 6 Victory Points apiece. When the pile of Province cards is exhausted, the game is over, so if you buy more than half of those, it’s extremely difficult for anyone to beat you through the lower-value point cards. The strategy won’t work if multiple players chase it, and the Gardens action cards throw a wrench in it, as can the Thief action cards, but it’s simple and straightforward enough that it almost felt like a hack. Against experienced players, it would be worthless, but it could really mess up a casual game night. Beyond that objection, I strongly recommend Dominion, especially if you find games like Settlers of Catan or Stone Age intimidating.

Speaking of Settlers of Catan, I came across an article from Wired, written in April of 2009, on the game’s rise in popularity so long after its initial release, unusual in any business but even more so in one as seemingly dormant as boardgames, with notes on the history of the game and why German-style games are becoming more popular. (It also includes a great phrase for deriding older, “classic” board games: “roll the dice, move your mice.”)

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 2, 2010
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The Mating Season.

I’d rank P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season as perhaps my favorite Jeeves/Wooster novel for its extraordinarily high degree of silliness and slightly more convoluted plot (although Wodehouse’s plots, at least the Jeeves/Wooster ones, are nearly all alike), but above all because Bertie Wooster has a little more character than normal in this novel, as opposed to the many books and stories where he’s a highly amusing fathead.

The story involves, as usual, couples whose intended marriages are either forbidden by forbidding relatives or split up by squabbles, four such couples in this case, including Wodehouse regulars Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle and his aristocrat flower-child fiancée, Madelyn Bassett, who believes the stars are God’s daisy-chain … and that Bertie is hopelessly in love with her, which makes him her backup plan should Gussie fail to deliver the goods. Of course, Gussie does fail to d. the g., while a brother-sister tandem finds their hoped-for nuptuals on hold due to the presence of five forbidding aunts at Deverill Hall, where Bertie arrives pretending to be Gussie, only to have Gussie later arrive pretending to be Bertie, which means that Gussie (as Bertie) gets the use of Jeeves. There’s also an angry dog, a village talent show, some dancing on chairs, and a very inappropriate dinner-table joke.

The plot does bring some narrative greed – you know everything’s going to work out fine, but seeing how Wodehouse (through Jeeves) works his way out of the mess he created for his characters is always a pleasure, and Season doesn’t disappoint. But what draws me back to Wodehouse is his dry wit, which infuses prose and dialogue alike and leaves him without peer among comic novelists. I won’t spoil the dinner-table joke, but I also enjoyed his droll description of a dog chasing a cat while he’s chased by his pudgy female owner:

It was the cat who eased a tense situation. Possibly because it had not yet breakfasted and wished to do so, or it may be because the charm of Bertram Wooster’s society had at last begun to pall, it selected this moment to leave me. It turned on its heel and emerged from the bush with its tail in the air, and the white, woolly dog, sighting it, broke into a canine version of Aunt Charlotte’s A-hunting-we-will-go song and with a brief ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo’ went a-hunting. The pursuit rolled away over brake and over thorn, with Madeline Bassett’s school friend bringing up the rear.

Position at the turn:

1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Madeline Bassett’s school friend

The leaders were well up in a bunch. Several lengths separated 2 and 3.

Interesting to no one but me: Apparently I’ve read The Mating Season before, but I didn’t recall it at all, which means I probably read it in 2001 or 2002 when I first discovered Wodehouse and read many of his Jeeves books in a short period of time. Also, this marked my 86th book read in 2009, a new personal best for a single calendar year (although I suppose you might argue that I’m playing the Arbitrary Endpoints Game with myself). I may be obsessive, but I’m diligent about it.

A few of you have asked me where to start with Wodehouse. The book that got me started is now out of print, but you can still buy it through amazon under its UK title, The World of Jeeves: A Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus. It contains two collections of short stories plus one Jeeves novel.

Next up: Pedro Páramo, a surrealist novel by Juan Rulfo, spurred by a question from reader Kirby in April of 2008.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ December 30, 2009
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Stone Age.

Santa was pretty good to me in the board games department this year, and our favorite so far is Rio Grande’s Stone Age, a 2-4 person game with some shades of Settlers of Catan but without the initial-placement phase that plays such a huge role in determining who wins in Settlers.

In Stone Age, each player has a small civilization and has to use his five “meeples” to gather resources (food, wood, brick, stone, or gold), build tools to improve resource production, develop agriculture so he gets additional food “free” on each turn, or make more people (but you have to deploy two of your people to that space to make another person – dedicated Stone Age players call it the “love shack”). The goal in Stone Age is to accumulate as many “victory points” as possible through constructing buildings, which you buy through the four non-food resources, and through game-end bonuses for the number of people in your civilization (you start with five and can end up with ten), your food production rate, the number of tools you have, or additional bonuses for your buildings. Of course, you have various constraints at work, including the need to feed your people each turn, the limited number of people you have, and other players competing for the same resources. On each turn, only one player can occupy each of the spaces that add to free food production, make a new person, or build a new tool, and later in the game there’s competition for buildings with high point values or “civilization cards” that increase game-end bonuses while also offering immediate benefits like free resources. There are also only seven spaces on each of the four non-food resources, and since each player has five meeples at the start of the game, it’s possible that you’ll end up boxed out of a resource you want to produce on a specific turn.

Because of the game-end bonuses for tools, farming, and meeples – in a 4-person game where 200-250 is a typical winning score, you can earn 96 extra points if you max out on tools and bonus points, 70 points on people, and 70 points on food production – as well as the potential bonus of 9 bonus points per building (we’ve never had a player reach 10 buildings, although it is theoretically possible to do so), there are a few basic strategies for winning at Stone Age, although competition in 3- and 4-player games will usually require each player to adopt a hybrid approach. All strategies require players to collect civilization cards, which can be purchased for 1-4 resources but must be claimed with meeples that can’t be used to produce any resources on that turn, creating an additional arena for competition on the board. Some cards represent civilization “skills” like art, weaving, or transportation that have no function within the game but add bonus points at the game end, with each player receiving points equal to the square of the number of unique skills he has, with a max of 64 points. There is a so-called “starvation” strategy that involves avoiding food and taking point penalties for doing so – you don’t lose any meeple for failing to produce enough food – although it seems to be a the consensus among fans that this is a flaw in the rules rather than a legitimate strategy.

Although the number of main strategies is finite, each turn presents the player with myriad decisions. The first is where to place the meeples – on production spaces, on any of the three “special” spaces to produce tools/farms/meeples, on buildings, or on cards. The second is the order in which to resolve each of the meeples’ spots – do you roll for gold or wood first, or buy a card that might earn you an extra resource? The third is when to use your tools to round up die rolls on resources, although this becomes easier as the game goes on if you’re accumulating lots of tools as your core strategy. You also have the option to play a limited amount of defense by blocking opponents from resources they might need or buildings/cards they might want, and since one condition for ending the game is the exhaustion of any of the piles of buildings for purchase, you might place a meeple on a building but pass on buying it simply to keep the game going another turn or two.

There’s a modest amount of luck in the game, but it’s still a strategy game at its core. Players roll dice to determine resource production, so it’s possible to place several meeples on a resource (especially stone or gold) and walk away with little to no output, although a player can use more meeples on a resource and/or deploy his tools to smooth that out a little and largely eliminate the risk of a zero-output roll. The order of civilization cards and buildings that appear for purchase is also random, and there are certain cards (especially those that permanently add one farm or one tool) that are more attractive than others. It’s enough randomness to keep the game different each time out, like Settlers of Catan, but the fundamental strategies are always the same and you’re not completely at the mercy of the dice. The main benefit of the random element is preventing a player from having a fixed strategy before the game starts – seeing the first set of cards and what spaces you can occupy in the first few turns helps determine which strategies will be most effective in that particular game.

Stone Age is more family-strategy than hardcore-strategy; what you’re producing is generic, with no purpose to buildings or skills beyond the points they provide at the end of the game. A typical game takes just over an hour once every player knows the rules, and we found that after one game everyone was up to speed on the rules and concepts to play competitively. My wife insists that I mention that the artwork is excellent, with vivid colors and great detail – this will be more relevant after I post one of the upcoming reviews. And outside of Settlers and Ticket to Ride I don’t think we’ve been as into any game right out of the box as we have been with Stone Age.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 29, 2009
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A House for Mr. Biswas.

Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace.

Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul first achieved critical acclaim with A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears at #72 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) TIME 100. As you might imagine, the novel details the lifelong desire of Mohun Biswas, an Indian man born to expatriate parents in Trinidad, for a house of his own, as much for what it represents (independence, status, success, dignity, masculinity) as what it provides (privacy, stability, an escape from his insane in-laws). But Mr. Biswas is no up-from-nothing Horatio Alger hero – he’s petulant, immature, and incredibly self-centered to the point of all but ignoring his brilliant young son until the son’s academic efforts promise to shine respect upon his father.

Mr. Biswas is partly a comedy, with Naipaul mining some humor from small bits of dialogue and the minor calamities that befall the title character. Mr. Biswas goes to work for one of the smaller newspapers in Port of Spain, and receives some pointed and slightly obnoxious feedback from the paper’s harried editor:

‘”Considerably” is a big word meaning “very,” which is a pointless word any way. And look. “Several” has seven letters. “Many” has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning.’

And Naipaul’s ear for dialogue down to the minutiae of conversation is very strong. But the core theme, that Mr. Biswas perseveres despite continued misfortunes, strikes me as less a celebration of human dignity than a mockery of how some people can’t get out of their own way – or perhaps that people can achieve their goals despite screwing up left and right for twenty or thirty years. Almost everything that goes wrong for Mr. Biswas is his own fault. He rushes to marry a girl of whom he knows nothing, then he keeps knocking her up despite the fact that they have no money and mooch off her extended (and crazy) family). He blows a month’s salary on a dollhouse for his daughter; he buys a house he can’t afford without even bothering to see it in the daylight; he’s rude to everyone, including his wife, and then acts surprised when he gets nastiness in return. By the end of the book, I was half-hoping he didn’t get the house after all, even though it was promised in the prologue that he did.

Naipaul receives tremendous praise for his prose, which is effusive and heavy on descriptive language, reminiscent of Dickens’ prose … but of course, Dickens wrote in serial form and was striving to fill pages and stretch stories out over more issues, making him the bane of English and American schoolchildren for over a century now. The book appeared on the TIME 100, compiled in 2005, but received a less-than-flattering review in the magazine in 1962 when Mr. Biswas was first published; the reviewer praised the colorful patois of the Indian expatriates in the novel and their melange of old and new customs, “but Naipaul’s House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; ‘economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.” A verbose author can be a pleasure to read when the plot moves quickly or the novel is short, but neither was the case in Mr. Biswas, which runs 560 pages in the current paperback edition and lacks any major narrative thread to pull the reader to the finish.

Next up: Back to Wodehouse – sort of a Christmas tradition for me – with one of the few Jeeves novels I’ve never read, The Mating Season.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 25, 2009
→ By

Top ten musicals.

Just one more sleep till Christmas, at least for those of you in the western hemisphere, so this post is an early present of sorts. For those of you who celebrate this particular holiday, have a safe and Merry Christmas tomorrow. And for those of you who celebrated Hanukkah, I hope you thought of me when you fried up some jam doughnuts.

—

We got The Sound of Music DVD for my daughter for Christmas – not among my favorite movies, but she loves all the songs the kids sing, and I have to admit that the bonus feature with all seven child actors reunited for the 40th anniversary of the film is awesome – but that spurred me to post a list I’ve meant to throw out there for a while: My own ten favorite musicals.

You’ll notice the absence of Judy Garland films, because I can’t stand her – not her voice, not her acting, nothing. And Meet Me in St. Louis was a stupid movie anyway. I also didn’t include West Side Story, which was ruined for me by the first scene; street “toughs” who run around New York dancing in tights are not tough and nothing they do afterwards will convince me otherwise.

Films that didn’t make the cut included The Muppet Christmas Carol (not enough of a musical), Brigadoon (good movie but the songs didn’t grab me), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (too long by half). One movie I have not seen that makes all of these lists is Cabaret. You’ll also notice that fatherhood has influenced this list quite a bit.

10. Mary Poppins. Probably my daughter’s all-time favorite movie, to the point where she heard a Julie Andrews song from the soundtrack of Camelot and shouted, “That sounds like Mary Poppins!” There’s enough humor for adults here and some strong visual effects, as well as a few songs that you still know by heart whether or not you want to, plus a performance from Arthur Treacher as the Constable, which makes me laugh just because of the fast-food chain that still bears his name. Best song: When my daughter was smaller, I’d swing her all around to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”

9. Moulin Rouge!. It still amazes me that the huge success of this movie didn’t spur a new run of musicals from Hollywood, but apparently only Baz Luhrmann has the balls – or the good sense – to capitalize on the market for musical films. I thought the movie was incredibly creative in its reworking of pop songs into key plot elements, with lots of silliness and some very good performances by Ewan Macgregor, Nicole Kidman, and several of the supporting players. Best song: “Your Song.”

8. Aladdin. I’m not sure if any movie has had me laughing as consistently as Aladdin did on my first viewing, and it’s one of the only movies I’ve ever seen more than twice. It’s also one of the only animated films that had songs I might actually want to hear outside the context of the movie. Best song: “Prince Ali.”

7. Holiday Inn. A sentimental favorite, since I’ve been singing “You’re Easy to Dance With” to my daughter since she was a few days old. The plot is silly – it’s an excuse to sing a bunch of holiday-themed songs, and it features perhaps the worst business model ever depicted in any movie: a hotel that only opens on holidays. There’s also an unfortunate blackface scene that’s woven into the plot, so if you watch the movie without it, a thin story gets thinner and a few lines won’t make sense, but watching the original version will have you cringing. Fred Astaire’s July 4th number is one of his best dances in any film. Best song: “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

6. Royal Wedding. Two iconic dance scenes make this movie: Fred Astaire dancing with a hatstand, and Astaire dancing on the ceiling. He had surprising chemistry with Jane Powell, a new partner for him who turned out to be perfect for some of the slapsticky numbers in the Astaire’s love interest is played by Sarah Churchill, daughter of Winston, although I found the idea that Astaire’s character would be smitten with her a little tough to swallow. Best song: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life,” a rare comic-dance number for Astaire, and later a Muppet Show sketch.

5. White Christmas. A little more story and better music than Holiday Inn, and the film avoids any racist undertones by sticking to an all-white cast. (Lest anyone get the wrong idea, that’s sarcasm.) Danny Kaye doesn’t have Fred Astaire’s dancing chops but is better with physical comedy, and Vera-Ellen was a much better dancer than either of the female leads in Holiday Inn. The film’s climax, while just as absurd as everything that leads up to it, has a lot of heart. Best song: “White Christmas.”

4. Once. A cult favorite that should have been a bigger hit, made on a shoestring budget with a plot that fit on the back of a napkin, it’s carried by two great performances and a heavy emphasis on realistic dialogue. It’s magical without magic other than the magic of music. Best song: “Falling Slowly.”

3. The Music Man. I’ve certainly made enough references to this movie in chats and on Twitter, but I have to admit I thought it was dumb the first time I saw it; it took a second viewing for me to realize how witty the movie is and the way it straddles the line between admiration and parody of the small-town Iowa culture of writer Meredith Wilson’s upbringing. The film’s vernacular is unique and comical – “You watch your phraseology!” – and the use of a barbershop quartet as actual characters in the film (they play the school board) instead of just props who sing was another nice touch. The only negative for me is that Shirley Jones gets stuck with three dud ballads, making her character boring next to all the fun that Robert Preston’s Harold Hill gets to have. Best song: “Wells Fargo Wagon,” although I imagine the most popular pick would be “Seventy-Six Trombones.”

2. My Fair Lady. Take a great play (Pygmalion) by a great playwright (Shaw) and add the most beautiful actress in the history of motion pictures (Audrey Hepburn) and a handful of memorable songs and you have the shortest three-hour movie ever made. Stanley Holloway, as Eliza Doolittle’s ne’er-do-well father, is a scene-stealer and gets the two funniest songs in the film. A remake is supposedly in the works, which strikes me as a brazen money-grab and a terrible idea, as movies like this should never, ever be subject to the indignity of a remake. Best song: “With a Little Bit of Luck.”

1. Singin’ in the Rain. The granddaddy of musicals, including no end of outstanding dance numbers – the title track, “Moses Supposes,” and “Good Morning” – a great comedy number from Donald O’Connor in “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and an actual plot aside from the standard-issue romance. The silent film era comes to an abrupt end and the characters, mostly silent-film stars, have to adapt to life in the talkies, which proves very difficult for Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont, whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard and who mistakenly believes that the film studio’s marketing angle about a romance between her and Gene Kelly’s character has some basis in fact. Kelly, a raging perfectionist as a dancer, was at his peak here, and while he reportedly drove costar Debbie Reynolds to tears, the “Good Morning” number still amazes me every time I watch it. Best song: “Singin’ in the Rain.”

By the way, if any of you happen to end up with the new Tinker Bell DVD (The Lost Treasure), check out the fake blooper reel called “Scenes You Never Saw.” I still haven’t made it through the entire film proper (although my daughter loves it), but the four-minute outtake clip is hilarious.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ December 23, 2009
→ By

Recent ESPN posts.

Sorry for the lack of updates here, but it’s been busy around the house with Christmas coming and I’m still just halfway through A House for Mr. Biswas (although far enough along to decide that his problems are largely of his own making). If you haven’t seen my latest posts over at the Four-Letter, I broke down the Morrow-League and Vazquez-Melky trades, wrote a brief post on Fernando Rodney, and appeared on ESPN Radio’s AllNight on Wednesday morning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ December 19, 2009
→ By

The Human Factor.

“And yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again … and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.”
“All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.”
“No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.

Castle is a British-born agent who, during a lengthy field op in South Africa, fell in love with a black woman and thus also fell afoul of the laws against interracial relationships during that country’s apartheid era. That woman, the Sarah of the quote above, escaped South Africa with the help of a prominent Communist and now lives with Maurice and her son (his stepson) in a quiet London suburb. Castle’s simple existence is compromised by a spiritual bankruptcy that becomes clearer to Castle as an investigation into a leak from his small department leads to unforeseen consequences and forces him to make a life-altering choice.

Greene’s view of spy games was that they were more mundane than typical spy novels and movies would imply, and the novel has very little violence and nothing you could call action, instead focusing on the individual characters, from the complex Castle to the true believer Percival to the unregenerate South African partisan Muller, and how they view and react to the possibility of a leak. Castle’s position is precarious by definition, as he’s one of only three or four potential leaks in the department, and he has a known connection to the communist faction in South Africa, whose white-led regime was at the time a battleground for the Cold War powers. He’s aware of the investigation, but when he sees how far Percival might go to protect the agency, regardless of the moral or legal implications of his action, he’s forced to act.

Greene was among the best practicioners of the spy novel for his very reluctance to rely on action sequences and overt violence, both of which are crutches for a novelist in any genre outside of hard-boiled detective fiction. Setting that restriction on his writing meant Greene had to spend more time on character development and crafting realistic dialogue and actions for his characters, whether he was writing a farce or, as in this novel, a serious commentary. He paints a bleak picture of intelligence services as bureaucracies filled with men who either have no moral compasses or are willing suppress them for the good of the agency, and in a secondary theme takes more than his share of shots at the apartheid policy of South Africa that was still in effect for sixteen years after The Human Factor‘s publication. But while Greene fleshes Castle out fully – not that he’s all that sympathetic, and it is his spiritual bankruptcy more than anyone’s that defines the book’s lack of a fixed morality – most of his secondary characters get secondary treatment. We see, for example, glimpses of the lonely career man Daintry, but his subplot has no start or finish and he appears in some ways to have wandered on to the wrong set. Cynthia, the primary secretary for Castle’s group, plays a key role in the investigation portion of the plot, but as a prop, not as a defined character. The Human Factor is thus more a story of bureaucratic decay in the intelligence service in pursuit of questionable means aimed at dubious ends than a story of its characters, even though the climax and denuoement are very much about Castle himself.

Next up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 15, 2009
→ By

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

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→ December 14, 2009
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New Insider column + TV.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EST and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight sometime between 10 and 11 pm EST.

Also, I’ve got a new blog post up on ESPN.com (for Insiders) on interesting non-tenders, as well as Colby Lewis, Jason Kendall, and the Rule 5 draft.

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→ December 13, 2009
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A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

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