Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza for a week-plus because I’m not sure how to sum it up. It’s a strange book with one clever literary device but an odious protagonist and a philosophical vein that, frankly, bored me.

I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.

The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.

Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.

Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.

I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.

Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

The Dud Avocado.

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

Funny words coming from an author (speaking through her semi-autobiographical protagonist) in the middle of her first novel, but Elaine Dundy wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers or flout convention. Her debut (and by all accounts best) novel, The Dud Avocado, was a critical success and was popular in its day, but has fallen out of print at least once since its original publication and just returned to print in mid-2007, less than a year before Dundy died. The book earned her plaudits from Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Groucho Marx, who wrote to Dundy:

I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don’t know how on earth you got through it.

The novel follows American ingénue Sally Jay Gorce as she tries to make her uncertain way among the Bohemian set in Paris in the 1950s, “tries” being the operative word, as Sally Jay is hapless in just about every matter that matters, foremost among them love. She enters a tepid affair with a cartoonish and quite married Italian diplomat, falls in love with a smarmy American from her hometown, and goes on a mistake-prone jaunt with a man she’s never met but who has developed a crush on her after seeing her on stage. She has a tremendous knack for wearing the wrong thing, and is developing a habit of saying the wrong thing. Oh, and she loses her passport during a night on the town.

Dundy said in later letters and in the afterword to this most recent edition of the book that all of Sally Jay’s bad decisions mirror her own from her time in Paris, which I would imagine was a lot less funny to live through than it is to read about. The intimate connection with her scattered protagonist clearly helped Dundy infuse the character with the spirit for which she and the book are praised, but also a self-awareness that Dundy probably didn’t have as she lived through these misadventures:

Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?

There is an interesting plot beyond Sally Jay’s bad-luck-in-love escapades, and aside from the coincidence that drives the book’s final chapter or two (perhaps a comment on the inescapability of one’s destiny) the story is very tight. But it’s the humor that carries it into a class with Scoop, Lucky Jim, and your better Wodehouse novels.

Sorry to be rushing through these a bit, but I’m still two books behind what I’m reading; I’m probably a day away from finishing Rabbit, Run, after which I’m looking at a re-read of Catch-22.

The Quiet American.

Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Graham Greene’s works are often divided into two categories which I believe were his own suggestions: his serious novels and his “entertainments,” the latter usually coming in the form of spy novels. My favorite Greene works seem to be the ones that blend elements of both styles; while The Heart of the Matter is probably his best-regarded work (it’s appears in the “second 100” in The Novel 100, made the TIME 100, and was #40 on the Modern Library 100), my favorite Greene work is Our Man in Havana, an entertainment that also satirizes the Cold War maneuvering of the great powers. The Quiet American (#67 on the Guardian 100) also straddles the line between the two forms, with a plot built around international intrigue during the Vietnamese war for independence that also poses two different questions around moral relativism.

Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, was, in life, anything but quiet; the title is twice ironic, both because Pyle was a talker and meddler and also because he’s quiet on a more permanent level when the book opens. The story then rolls backwards, told by English reporter Thomas Fowler, who recalls his first sighting of the American economic attaché:

I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm.

Fowler becomes caught in two nets woven by Pyle, one as Pyle attempts to steal Fowler’s mistress (Fowler is married to a woman who won’t grant him a divorce, whereas Pyle is willing to marry Fowler’s mistress), the other as it becomes clear that Pyle is up to no good in his clandestine duties for an ostensibly economic mission in Vietnam. Fowler’s moral conundrum – what to do as he realizes Pyle might be dangerous – is further complicated when Pyle saves his life during a guerrilla attack on a tower where they seek refuge after their car runs out of gas.

Greene has Fowler eventually make a decision – circumstances all but force him to choose – about Pyle, but avoids casting Fowler as any sort of hero or even protagonist by making him a serial adulterer and a user of (at least) his Vietnamese mistress while having him owe his life to Pyle along the way. Even when Fowler does act, it’s passive, almost a hands-free approach that robs him of the benefit (or satisfaction?) of making a clear, morally unclouded decision.

Layered on top of the Fowler/Pyle plot is the broader and less morally ambiguous question of what the hell France and especially the United States were doing in Vietnam in the first place. Pyle stands in for the domino theory foreign policy of the United States; he’s an idealistic innocent, full of ideas he learned in school or from books (largely from his ideological idol, York Harding, of whom Fowler says, “He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea”) and devoid of both real-world experience and any practical understanding of the people and culture of the country he’s supposed to save. Phuong, Fowler’s paramour and later the object of Pyle’s affection, represents Vietnam in a less than flattering light – naïve, opium-addicted, in need of protection (according to Pyle) or of economic assistance (according to Phuong’s sister), controlled by outside forces, inscrutable to both Fowler and Pyle.

It is nearly impossible to read the book now without seeing it as a powerful indictment of the U.S. war in Iraq, even though it was written fifty years prior to the 2003 invasion. (The 2004 edition, marking the centennial of Greene’s birth, includes a foreword by Robert stone that makes this connection explicit.) Greene inveighs against the involvement of a western nation in a part of the world it doesn’t know or understand where there is no direct relation to the western countries’ national interests, which parallels many arguments against U.S. involvement in Iraq. Greene oversimplifies or just misses one major argument for indirect engagement – forcing the Soviets to ramp up military spending on multiple engagements increased the strain on their economy, and may have led to the regime’s collapse in the 1980s – but is on stronger ground when he argues against grafting western mores on to non-western cultures, or when arguing that the assumption that our interests and those of local people in these foreign countries are aligned well enough to justify any military action we take or military support we provide.

I’m off to California this evening to see a high school showcase event at the MLB Academy in Compton (insert N.W.A. joke here) but should be free for one dinner in Los Angeles, so if anyone has a must-hit suggestion (sushi is always welcome – I could go to Koi, but it’s a bit out of my way) I’m all ears.

All the Pretty Horses.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses is an almost straight-up western novel with a slightly hackneyed romance plot layered on top of it. Other than his affinity for the polysyndeton, McCarthy writes very readable prose while still managing to craft the quotable and memorable lines.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, decides to leave home with his friend, Lacey Rawlins, and head south into Mexico after his parents’ divorce becomes final and he realizes that the ranch on which he grew up is going to be sold. The two boys meet up with a runaway, calling himself Jimmy Blevins, who is a few years younger and both impetuous and immature, standing in as a metaphor for John Grady’s dying (or dead) innocence. Blevins loses his horse in a storm and in the process of stealing it back from the villager who took it in kills two locals and a law officer, after which he himself is killed in what one might loosely call an extralegal proceeding. The brouhaha enmeshes John Grady and Lacey, who had been working on a ranch where John Grady fell in love with the daughter of the hacendado. If this sounds convoluted, it is, with the romance subplot sitting on top of the more traditional western story of outlaws, corruption, and occasional gunplay; the way the romance ends, in predictable fashion, and is never revisited for the last fifty pages of the book gave it the feeling of a second story added after the fact to flesh out the main plot and give it a broader appeal. I doubt that’s actually how it happened – McCarthy doesn’t seem to be an author concerned with commercial success – but there’s a disconnection between the two plot lines that was never satisfactorily resolved.

The core plot line would have made for a short novel, but it’s well-written (of course) and has several amazing passages, particularly John Grady’s quixotic effort to obtain justice for Blevins at the end of the book, encountering first the corrupt captain responsible for Blevins’ death and John Grady’s incarceration, then an amusing episode in front of a judge after he’s accused of theft, and then an encounter with another man named Blevins as John Grady attempts to return Blevins’ horse to its rightful owners. John Grady’s paramour has little interesting to do or say, but her protective aunt – speaker of the quote up top – offers several insightful if slightly verbose thoughts on history, both of humanity and of individuals, and how we are shaped by it and often live in reaction to it.

I’ve got a few other books from my vacation to write up – Greene’s The Quiet American and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado – and am now about a third of the way through Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza.

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.

I’m only doing a brief writeup of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, in part because I’m a little pressed for time, but also because there’s so little to say about a book with no plot. The best description I can offer is that it’s an Algerian feminist Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and while I didn’t quite hate it as I hated the Joyce book, I was never remotely invested in Djebar’s words or characters.

The core theme is the difficulty of being a woman in an Islamic society, particularly one born into a somewhat liberal home environment within a generally conservative society. A woman could write a pretty good book about this, but Djebar tries to intertwine that thread with one about the French invasion and occupation of Algeria, and another about the narrator’s experiences as a supporter of the Algerian rebels during the war of independence; in fact that main thread about women in Islamic cultures is dropped for a good chunk of the book, so that when it’s reintroduced, you’ve lost the plot, literally.

I also have to question the quality of the translation. Djebar makes a point of saying that she’s writing in French (her second language) and abhors metaphor and florid language, but the translation is full of bizarre and at times fabricated vocabulary – perhaps she’s the Algerian Chabon, but more likely we have a literal translation rather than one that considers the usage patterns of the two languages.

Next up: I’m about 40% through Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and I’m headed out on vacation on Wednesday, with five books in the suitcase, including Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Suck.

I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I can hardly decide where to start in listing what I disliked.

    • The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
      The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
      The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.
  • The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.

    I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, by Assia Djebar, named one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2001.

    The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

    Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, is a clever, sprawling novel about two young cousins who become almost overnight sensations in the world of comic books, helping to launch the genre’s golden age leading into World War II.

    Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Prague who flees the Nazis in a most unusual fashion, and Sammy Klayman (who adopts the nom de plume of Sam Clay), his American cousin with whom he goes to live. Sammy has a knack for storycraft but isn’t much for art, while Josef, in addition to being an experienced magician, is a skilled and meticulous artist. Seeing the success of Superman, the two cook up a new superhero, The Escapist, and convince Sammy’s novelty-selling employer to publish a comic book as a way to sell more useless gadgets to kids. The Escapist is a success, but after a few years of glory, the two cousins’ lives take rather sudden turns for the worse.

    Chabon’s mind and typewriter appear to ignore boundaries and guidelines, resulting in a book that often lacks direction and needed cuts both to its prose and to its scope. There’s an entire section, depicting Joe’s time serving in Antarctica during the war, that is superfluous and insanely over the top (Joe survives carbon monoxide poisoning that kills almost everyone in the camp, then survives a plane crash, then survives being shot … come on). The major plot events are usually out of the blue; the first chunk of the novel revolves almost entirely around the development and publishing of the cousins’ comic books, with side stories about their two romantic entanglements, when, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Chabon suddenly shifts direction, hitting each cousin with a separate, shocking, tragic event, and turning the book dark as if he’d switched off all the lights.

    The prose suffers similarly from the lack of editing. His vocabulary is immense, including a handful of Chabon neologisms, but he uses a number of words that will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers and would have been better replaced by more common terms. Does he really need to describe an after-lunch event as “post-prandial?” Why would he add the last two words to the sentence, “Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.” Why refer to the “ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs” instead of referring to their temper or peevishness or (if he wanted to use a fancy word) choler? These words may all be perfectly cromulent, but it doesn’t mean they were the best words for Chabon to use in his prose. He’s clearly a man in command of the language – referring to an expanse of Antarctic water as “this grievous sea,” calling a dictionary simply “the unabridged” – but his verbal brake pads appear to be worn through.

    The first two-thirds of the novel, before it turns dark, is witty. Chabon is deft at writing quick dialogue and providing dry, almost Wodehouse-ish observations (“He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly near-sighted.), adding the occasional flourish of grin-inducing detail, as in the footnote that tells us that the compendium of one character’s pulp-fiction works was found a half-century later in an IKEA store “serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model ‘Hjörp’ wall unit.” But those occasional footnotes are another symbol of Chabon’s expansive vision and unwillingness to narrow his scope for the novel’s own good; whereas the miraculous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is fully committed to the novel-cum-historical-document approach, with copious footnotes and consistent use of fictional reference works, Chabon is a footnote dilettante and gives only splotches of fictional history as it suits him.

    Kavalier doesn’t fare well in comparison to Jonathan Strange beyond their different approaches to adding realistic historical notes and details. Susanna Clarke created two flawed but compelling main characters, putting them in partnership and then in conflict, giving the reader incentives both to support and oppose each character in response to individual thoughts and actions. Neither Kavalier nor Clay is as fully-formed as Strange or Norrell; Sammy’s character, in particular, is only briefly explained by an odd chapter about his odder father, and Clay’s homosexuality is there almost as a plot convenience, with little exploration at all of the conflicts a gay (and mostly closeted) man would have faced in that time. Sammy is gay because it allows Chabon to mess with him twice in crucial plot points that wouldn’t have worked if he was straight. When he’s finally outed, the consequences are almost nil, which doesn’t seem remotely realistic for the time period.

    Kavalier is worth reading for Chabon’s sheer vision – he researched his topic thoroughly and created a paean to the golden age of comics that also covers the Holocaust – and some of the book’s more successful inventive ploys, but the disjointed story and incomplete characters left me disappointed and unaffected at the close.

    Next up: Another Pulitzer winner, the oddly out-of-print The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. About a quarter of the way through it, I’m not impressed, although I’ll save the biting commentary for the writeup.

    Summer Lightning.

    “Have you ever tasted a mint julep, Beach?”
    “Not to my recollection, sir.”
    “Oh, you’d remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars.”

    I’ve waxed poetic about the joys of P.G. Wodehouse before, but I think I’m due to push those of you who haven’t dipped into one of the greatest comic writers in the history of the printed word to do so. I’ve actually started to change my opinion on Wodehouse; after years of seeing the Jeeves/Wooster series as his masterworks, I’m coming around to the Blandings Castle series as the funnier books.

    Summer Lightning is the third novel in the Blandings series (although there are some short stories set in between the second book, Leave it to Psmith, and this one), although they don’t really have to be read in sequence. It might be the funniest one of the six I’ve read, because it includes all of the key characters – the Efficient Baxter, Lady Constance, Galahad Threepwood, and, of course, the Empress of Blandings – and provides enough other plot strands to move the story beyond the typical Wodehouse framework of two couples whose engagements are blocked by the poor financial prospects of the would-be groom and an eventual misunderstanding that causes one party to break it off.

    The Jeeves/Wooster novels and stories are brilliant, but the Blandings Castle series’ ensemble cast gives more opportunities for humor and also avoids overtaxing characters that might seem a little thinly drawn if given too much stage time. In addition, the presence of a true villain in Lady Constance Keeble, who disapproves of every match, despises her brother Galahad and looks down on her other brother Lord Emsworth, gives the Blandings novels more narrative greed than the typical Jeeves story, where the biggest question is usually how Jeeves intends to extract Wooster from impending nuptials, although Roderick Spode and the pilfered cow creamer do stand as counterexamples.

    Next up: As many of you have begged me to do, I’ve started Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

    Legs.

    William Kennedy’s Legs, the first of his “Albany” novels (one of which, Ironweed , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984), is a fictionalized biography of the Prohibition-era bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond, using a number of other real people in Diamond’s orbit as characters to give a picture of the life and culture of upstate New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a period piece, it’s very successful, but as a novel, it’s less so.

    The novel opens with a discussion thirty-odd years after Diamond’s death, leading into a series of remembrances of Diamond’s life from his emergence as the main bootlegger in the Hudson Valley until his murder. Kennedy evokes the era by using the vernacular of the time and threading alcohol through every scene (did people drink more during Prohibition, or is that just in the literature of the time?), and I admit that I’m a sucker for books written in this time period. From Fitzgerald to Hammett and just about everything in between, I’m riveted by books about the Roaring Twenties and life under the Volstead Act, so I enjoyed Legs on a superficial level.

    By posing as a biography, Legs loses something in the way of plot. Diamond is simply careening from one event to the next – a shooting, a trial, a tiff with his wife (Alice) or mistress (Kiki) – without any clear cohesiveness or upward trajectory to the story. Jack’s character doesn’t develop at all, nor does that of the narrator, Marcus, who remains as detached at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. It makes for an interesting read, but in the last few pages, I found myself wondering what the point was.

    If there’s any point at all, it revolves around Marcus, who begins the novel as a successful lawyer on the rise in Albany circles, with an eye towards a career in state government. A chance encounter leads him to become Jack’s lawyer, and he becomes a consigliere to Jack up to the gangster’s death, all the while telling Jack he doesn’t want any part of this scheme or that plan while going along with them. Is Kennedy trying to tell us that we all have the capacity to talk ourselves into going along with something we know is wrong or is a bad idea? Is he detailing the journey of a man disaffected by success and society who looks for a more dangerous path to bring some excitement into his life? These feel like stretches to me, since neither theme is all that well explored with Marcus telling stories about Jack that often don’t directly involve him.

    Next up: A brief nonfiction read, Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World.