→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ August 21, 2019
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the second of Milan Kundera’s books I’ve read, along with The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, and … I don’t get it. I admit this of my own free will: I don’t understand why his books are revered, but revered they are, with literature professor Daniel Burt including Unbearable Lightness on his revised list of the 125 greatest novels ever written at #112.

I do understand the core theme of this book, at least, since it is spelled out in the title and Kundera makes frequent references to it in the text. In direct contrast to Nietzsche’s idea that anything we experience just once might as well not be experienced at all, Kundera subscribes to the believe that we live just once, and that everything that we do and undergo is thus unique. He describes life in terms of contrasts, and how you can view life as having weight or, in the case of the title and most of his characters, as being unbearably light. It is as if he’s saying life is so nasty, brutish, and short that we might as well try to enjoy it in spite of ourselves.

His characters do seem to get after it, at least; Tomás, the main character, is a philandering asshole who refuses to keep it in his pants even when he belatedly realizes that his bed-hopping is making him miserable and that he actually loves his paramour Tereza, for whom he flees the communists of Czechoslovakia and, almost inexplicably, then follows her back into the authoritarian state even though he knows he will lose his livelihood and possibly his freedom for doing so. One common criticism of horror movies is that the plots require the characters to do dumb things so that the bad stuff can happen. Kundera makes Tomás do a dumb thing – really, who defects from a police state and then un-defects? – so he can move the story along too. He does have a bizarre philosophy to rationalize his womanizing, but I found it unconvincing.

Tomás is a man of principle at work, despite his utter lack of scruples when it comes to women or his one son, custody of whom he gives up to the boy’s mother so that he doesn’t see his own child for about twenty years. When Tomás is asked to renounce an essay he’d written for a newspaper about the meaning of Oedipus Rex because the Communist puppets in charge of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring find it subversive, he declines, even though he knows it will cost him his job as a surgeon, eventually leading him to increasingly menial jobs and out of the city entirely. It’s the contrast Kundera outlines in the first part of the book, although I found it hard to reconcile the two sides of Tomás’ character, since the area where he acts amorally involves causing pain to many other people.

These two are connected with another couple, Sabina and Franz, via, what else, Tomás’ affair with Sabina. Sabina is an artist who loathes kitsch, a term that Kundera takes from its normal denotation of tackiness in art to some broader connotation across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, that nearly put me to sleep. Franz is the least defined of the four major characters – the dog, Karenin, might have more depth – and I never quite understood why he ended up in a protest march in Cambodia alongside publicity-seeking American celebrities.

I hated this book – not so much while I read it, but when it was done and I realized how little I’d gotten out of it. Perhaps it’s a function of my lack of any philosophy education whatsoever – I probably got more from Monty Python than I did anywhere in school – but I didn’t take anything away from the book other than Kundera’s extreme materialist attitude towards life; his characters are inscrutable and unlikeable and they do and say things that feel unrealistic. I know a few of you mentioned absolutely loving this book, but it did nothing for me whatsoever.

Next up: I’ll be reading Wolf Hall for a while longer.

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→ July 17, 2019
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G.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ May 22, 2019
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Killing Commendatore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ April 17, 2019
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The Inheritance of Loss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 12, 2019
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The Finkler Question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 14, 2019
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Hearts Beat Loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 18, 2018
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The Wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 11, 2018
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They’d Rather Be Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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Moriarty.

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

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

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

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

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

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