→ September 14, 2011
→ By

Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ August 24, 2011
→ By

Up in the Air.

The more I thought about Up in the Air after watching it, the more I realized what a terrible movie it is. It was pleasant enough for the first two-thirds or so, mostly because the three principal actors are all excellent in their roles, but one insanely stupid plot twist just exposed how many other holes there were in the script to that point.

George Clooney – who seems to be morphing into Cary Grant as he ages – plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant who flies around the country and fires (or, really, lays off) employees whose bosses are too cowardly to do it themselves. He’s also a straight-up mileage whore who has set a life goal of becoming the seventh flier ever to reach ten million mileages in American Airlines’ AAdvantage program. (The film doubles as an extended infomercial for American, Hilton Hotels, and Hertz.) And Ryan moonlights as a hired motivational speaker, praising a life of independence from both physical possessions and interpersonal relationships. Then, of course, he meets the perfect woman and has to change his entire philosophy, all while toting around an overconfident and highly naïve 23-year-old Cornell grad (love the stereotyping of the Ivy Leaguers – remember, kids, it’s bad to be smart!) while they teach each other Big Important Lessons about life and love and psychology.

Clooney, Anna Kendrick (as the Cornell grad, Natalie), and Vera Farmiga (as Ms. Perfect) are all superb, extremely convincing even when their roles turn out to be paper-thin (Kendrick’s) or internally contradictory (the other two). There’s an effortless chemistry between Clooney and Farmiga that makes his transition from one-night-stand to budding romance not just believable but almost invisible – before you know it, he’s falling for her, even though we’re missing a bunch of steps in the story. You might watch the film just to see these three actors, all nominated for Academy Awards for their performances, do their thing, but I think you’ll want to punch the screen before it’s over.

And the reasons are many. One is that we never learn why Ryan is so afraid of commitments. He came from small-town Wisconsin, but this isn’t the budding urbanite in search of culture beyond his homogenous, provincial upbringing. His sisters are his only family, and he’s mostly abandoned them until one of them gets married, but there’s no obvious reason why – both characters, in bit parts, are sweet and care for him even though they don’t seem to have much in common. Another is that Natalie ends up something of a prop for Ryan to play off rather than a fully-developed character in her own right – she changes as the plot needs her to change.

(This movie was, on some level, ruined for me beforehand by Will Leitch. Will’s become my go-to movie reviewer for after I’ve seen a film, because I find his observations are often so spot-on that they influence my interpretation of the movie. He nailed Up in the Air, especially on the glaring inconsistencies in the script, although I think he went easy on the plot twist, which I’ll get to in a moment. But you’ll notice I’m saying a lot of the things he said, and I’m sure that’s not an accident: He set me up. So now I read him after I’ve seen a movie and want an expert’s opinion, using Roger Ebert as my go-to guy before I choose to see a film.)

That plot twist – big spoiler alert here – is a killer, though. Alex (Farmiga, who by the way looks like what I expected Claire Forlani to look like at this age) is Ryan’s female analogue, another road warrior looking for NSA sex in high-end Hiltons but not much more than that, until the two start meeting up a little more often and then spend more quality time together at a conference, where he asks her to be his date for his sister’s wedding, to which she agrees without much debate. There they have the classic Hollywood falling-in-love weekend, and you might think they’re headed for happily ever after … until he surprises her at her house in Chicago, only to discover she has a husband and two kids, after which she berates him as if it’s his fault that she hid this significant life detail. (“I’m a grown-up.” No, sister, you’re a raging narcissist, and possibly a sociopath as well.) Alex is two completely different characters that have virtually no crossover, and the idea of this independent, too-perfect paramour also being a loving mom who also is willing to abandon her kids for a romantic weekend with the guy with whom she says she only wants casual sex is such a farce that it blew up the whole movie and made me realize how badly I’d been bamboozled by everything that had come before it.

I will give Up in the Air credit for one thing, however: Someone involved in writing the story at least grasped the world of frequent flyer/guest point accumulation. Ryan is absurd in that regard, and his underlying motivation is murky, but the absurdity of the portrayal is the source of its humor. Either you’ve been a heavy traveler and understand using every trick possible to max out your points, or you know someone who has. I’ve never traveled as much as Ryan has – I’ve never been above the first level of “elite” status on any airline – but I do it enough to make me a mileage junkie, with affiliated credit cards and one eye always on promotions that might boost my miles or bump me up in status. That nod to people who fly as part of their jobs was a cute touch – but it added virtually nothing to the strange, unfinished plot about Ryan Bingham’s life choices, and when Sam Elliott makes his Coen-esque cameo as the pilot on the flight where Ryan reaches the ten million mile threshold, it’s like we’ve been airlifted into a separate film entirely. The worthwhile parts of Up in the Air could have been aired on a flight from Chicago to Milwaukee, but I like to get a little farther off the ground than that.

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→ December 7, 2010
→ By

Edward Trencom’s Nose.

I’ll be writing up every significant trade or signing over on ESPN.com, including Adrian Gonzalez, Jayson Werth,, Marcum/Lawrie, Mark Reynolds, and
J.J. Putz.

—

Before moving on to the last two thirds of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, I read the first novel by Giles Milton, whose nonfiction works include one of my favorite books in that genre, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. The novel, Edward Trencom’s Nose:, looked right up my alley, promising in its subtitle a tale “of history, dark intrigue, and cheese.” A historical mystery/detective story revolving around food, by an author I’ve read and liked? Sign me up.

You might infer from the introduction that I did not care for Edward Trencom’s Nose. That is an incomplete inference. It might be the worst novel I’ve read in the last five years. Milton’s sins are many. The book has zero suspense – you don’t find out what’s going on until the final few pages, and the way Milton unfurls the story yields no dramatic tension. The relevance of the food to the plot is minimal, and it seems more like a chance for Milton to flex some cheese knowledge than anything else. The protagonist is an aloof, self-centered idiot, and there is no three-dimensional character to be found in the book’s pages. And while the book’s jacket and reviews promised a funny book – the marketing copy on the back calls it a “mouth-watering blend of Tom Sharpe and P.G. Wodehouse,” for which the Wodehouse estate should sue – the book is terribly unfunny, crowded with obvious, futile attempts at humor and some of the worst descriptions of sex I have ever seen in any book. (Sex in Milton’s world appears to be a foul, violent act; he actually uses the word “pummeled” to describe one particular bout of coitus.)

So, since that book sucked, let me use this space to talk a little about Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, a book I can actually recommend to you without hesitation. The book is the history of that titular spice, one that was once the most expensive foodstuff in the world (an honor that I believe now falls to saffron, at least on a per gram basis) and that played a heavy role in European colonization of the western hemisphere and southeast Asia. When doctors in seventeenth-century England claimed that nutmeg was the only reliable cure for the plague, the spice – itself the dried seed of trees of genus Myristica – became more valuable by weight than gold, spurring a rush to obtain and trade in it … if only anyone could figure out where it came from.

Nutmeg at the time was found only in the Banda Islands (in the Maluku archipelago) of present-day Indonesia, and its best source was a tiny island called Pulorin (or Puloron) by its natives but just called “Run” by Europeans of the time. It was hard to reach, hit twice yearly by powerful monsoons, and populated by unfriendly locals. The Portuguese visited the Spice Islands nearly a century before the English reached Run, but had no luck with the natives and could do little more than trade with middlemen. Beginning around the year 1600, the English and Dutch – who came to Indonesia loaded for bear, and stand accused in this book of some unspeakable acts of violence in the name of securing their nutmeg supply – began a decades-long dispute over Run Island, one that wasn’t settled until the 1660s.

Nathaniel Courthope was a factor in Borneo who led an expedition in 1616 to Run to try to break the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. The islanders warmed to Courthope and the English, only to find themselves subjected to a brutal siege by the Dutch that lasted nearly four years, a feat Milton credits largely to Courthope’s cunning and bravery. The Dutch won the battle eventually – I won’t spoil how – but lost the larger war, eventually securing their hold on Run and all of the Banda Islands in an agreement with the English that ceded New Amsterdam to the occupying English forces. That is, we speak English today in large part because the Dutch wanted a 3 km long island in Indonesia that was the world’s main supply of nutmeg. And, in a bit of a last laugh on the Dutch, to recapture Run after the British briefly held it in 1664, the Dutch pulled a General Sherman on the island, nearly killing their own golden-egg-laying goose.

Courthope makes an ideal hero for a nonfiction book, right up to his hero’s demise, and the story of Dutch brutality against Englishman and native alike should not be lost to history just because now they’re nice people and cheer really loud for their long track speed skaters. Milton sprinkles the story with the history of nutmeg itself (and a little on its poor sibling, mace, the dried aril that covers the nutmeg seed, lacking the potent flavor of the nutmeg proper) and the prior history of the Banda Islands, but the star of the show is Courthope, giving the book some of the narrative greed that I particularly like in my nonfiction reads.

So start with Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and skip the cheese course entirely.

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→ July 14, 2010
→ By

The Unconsoled.

New blog entry on some Red Sox and Mets prospects in the NY Penn League is up. My hit from this afternoon with Colin Cowherd is also online. I’ve filed my reaction to the Blue Jays/Braves trade, so it should be along shortly.

—

One of you warned me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, but I believe I already had it on my shelf at the time and I’m pretty stubborn about at least trying books once I’ve obtained them. And it was a pretty quick read given its heft. But not only is it my least favorite of the four Ishiguro novels I’ve read, it’s just a conceptual mess that takes an interesting premise reminiscent of Philip K. Dick and forgets to flesh it out into a complete story.

The plot revolves around Mr. Ryder, a renowned concert pianist who has just arrived in an unnamed Central European town for a performance, only to find himself sidetracked by an endless series of errands and other unfinished business, because the town is populated by people he’s met before, even including a girlfriend and a sort of stepson, but he doesn’t remember any of this. Time bends in odd ways, people act and react strangely, and monologues go on for pages and pages. And the town seems to define its identity by the status of its best musicians, having cast one aside when his style fell out of vogue and a new star arrived, only to find the latter to be a broken man and a drunk.

It seemed clear to me from early on in The Unconsoled that Ishiguro was writing a realistic novel within the world of dreams – the abrupt transitions from scene to scene, the fact that two buildings on opposite sides of the town turned out to be one and the same, the way items could change within a room over the course of a conversation, and the frequent situation that should be familiar to all of you of Ryder’s inability to get to someone he’s left behind or forgotten about or just needs to reach. If that was the author’s intent, he was successful, as I was off balance almost the entire novel because various conventions of the realistic novel no longer applied.

But the execution suffered in two ways: One, Ryder’s actions became extremely frustrating. He’d fail to say or do obvious things to alleviate bad situations, such as the time a childhood friend wants to show him off to her snobby friends who doubt she knows Ryder, only to have him come along but do nothing to reveal his identity. He’s rude and even cold to the boy, Boris, to whom he is something of a father figure, and often leaves Boris on his own inappropriately. It was maddening, even more than in a novel where the main character is simply unlikeable. In this novel, he’s unreadable.

Two, the end of the novel does not answer the key question: If this is all a dream for Ryder, what on earth does it mean? Are all of these people real, or merely manifestations within his brain of stages of his life? Stephan, a young pianist, can’t seem to satisfy his parents through his music, as they insist on seeing him as a disappointment; is that Ryder’s own experience as a young man? Why does Ryder spend much of the novel fretting over the arrangements for his parents, who are coming in to see the performance, only to find out (or be reminded) that there’s no evidence they’re coming at all? Why are there at least four or five of his friends from his youth in England living in this small Central European town, all acting like little time has passed? I read the book expecting some kind of a resolution at the end, either an explicit one (e.g., Ryder wakes up) or an implicit one (e.g., Ryder starts to identify some of the parallels between the dream-world and his own past), but I got nothing, not even hints at Ryder’s pre-visit life to help me make the connections myself.

I love Ishiguro’s prose, but in The Unconsoled his dialogue was out of control, with the aforementioned long monologues (one lasted at least five pages, with not so much as a paragraph break) and very frequent repetition of phrases or meaningless points. His prose was far more in control in The Remains of the Day, and after The Unconsoled he wrote another altered-reality novel that was tighter and much more compelling, Never Let Me Go.

Next up: Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 31, 2010
→ By

Island.

About to leave Arizona, but my parting shot was an appearance on Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report podcast today, talking about the upcoming season, some interesting rookies and young starts, and why RBIs and pitcher wins suck.

—

Island was Aldous Huxley’s last novel, his own counterpoint to his most famous novel (#72 on the Klaw 100) Brave New World. The latter was a classic dystopian novel, while Island follows the model of utopian novels by laying out its author’s personal philosophies for a greater, more progressive society in the most stilted, boring way possible.

In Island, journalist Will Faranby is part of a conspiracy that revolves around a coup on the peaceful island of Pala, where a utopian society has grown over the previous 100 years with little interference from the outside world. Faranby ends up on the island by accident, and ends up in the Palanese medical system, meeting most of the local leaders, and learning about their classless society, their community-based economy (socialistic, but not purely socialist), their Buddhist-influenced spirituality, and their use of the psychedelic drug moshka (the book’s analog for LSD, which Huxley used in his later years and promoted for its “mind-expansion” benefits). Along the way, Faranby compares and contrasts what he finds in Pala to what he remembers of Britain, and Huxley is unsparing in his criticism of all aspects of modern British life, such as its system of education:

“You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?”
“In the school I went to,” he said, “we never got to know things, we only got to know words.”

Utopian novels are, as a rule, difficult reads because they’re so busy describing their utopias that they dispense with plot, and Island is no different, as there is virtually no story and absolutely no tension. Huxley set up the coup story but largely drops it until the last five pages of the novel, which read as an afterthought added because he had to end the book somehow. If you’re interested in a 350-page sermon on Huxley’s idea of a paradisiacal society, I would recommend Island, but I found the book a chore, and for the rest of you I’d recommend Brave New World instead.

Next up: James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted into a famous musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 6, 2010
→ By

Game Six.

I received a review copy of Mark Frost’s Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime in October, but just got to it now because my book queue at the time was running around 3-4 months. (Thanks to Ulysses and Christmas, it’s now closer to six.) I started it right after finishing Mrs. Dalloway (more on that book later) and put it down before I got to page 20, because it is garbage – florid prose with huge, unsourced, inaccurate statements on baseball would kill even a great story, which I’m not sure Game Six even offers. The phrase that killed me was in a fanboyish passage on Fred Lynn: “what was beyond dispute the most sensational rookie season of any player in the history of pro baseball…” If Frost wants to argue that Lynn had what was – to that point, I assume – the greatest rookie season in MLB history, I suppose there’s a case to be made, and he could probably weasel out of an argument behind his bizarre choice of “most sensational,” which now joins “most feared” in the pantheon of phrases the innumerate like to use to try to argue their way past the stats they don’t understand. But “beyond dispute” set off alarm bells – in a book with no stats or sources, it’s like saying “check my work” – and it didn’t take long to cook up a dispute:

Player Year Age OPS+ wRC+ wOBA
Ted Williams 1939 20 160 168 .464
Dick Allen 1964 22 162 167 .403
Fred Lynn 1975 23 161 163 .427

(OPS+ from Baseball-Reference; wRC+ and wOBA from Fangraphs.)

So Ted Williams – who, by the way, played for one of the two teams in Frost’s book – had 37 points of wOBA+ over Lynn despite being three years younger during his rookie season. But it is “beyond dispute” that Lynn’s season was the “most sensational” ever by a rookie? Okay, sparky. I’ll just put the book down now, because when I read a baseball book, I want it to at least get the baseball stuff right.

That quote wasn’t the only problem I found in the first fifteen pages; Frost is clearly out to lionize his subjects, including the reporters who covered the game, and he prints inner monologues from long-dead people that have to be his own interpretations or creations, which had me questioning every statement that wasn’t backed up by an actual quote from someone involved in or covering the game. If this was a book about a famous soccer match, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed these inaccuracies or errors and just kept right on moving, but knowing a little about the game and even knowing some of the people mentioned in the book (or at worst being two degrees away), I found it unreadable.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ November 11, 2009
→ By

The Case of the Missing Books.

I’m back and online again. I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3 pm EST (and maybe again later that half hour) to discuss the NL Gold Glove Award winners. There’s at least one awful oversight on par with Franklin Gutierrez from the AL awards. Klawchat is on for tomorrow at 1 pm EST.

Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.

For the most part Sansom just borrows gags from other writers or, in the case of all the bathroom humor, from time immemorial. The vegetarian-served-a-meal-of-meat gag? (Saw that in Everything is Illuminated, and it wasn’t funny then, either.) The blue-collar guy with an unexpected interest in classic literature? The driver who can’t seem to keep his car on the road? Jokes about Israel’s name? There was very little original humor in the book, and with a pretty thin plot – halfway through the book, Israel is barely settled in the town of Tundrum, and I wouldn’t say he makes any progress in the case until the final 50-60 pages – there’s nothing left to sustain the book. It’s a quick read because of all the dialogue, and some of the dialogue is quick and snappy, but it raises the question of whether Sansom can write decent prose, and some of the dialogue brings an unnecessary level of detail around ordinary events in Israel’s day.

Next review will be much more positive, though – Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 4, 2009
→ By

Tree of Smoke.

I know the site’s been flaky today. The server is fine but WordPress is hanging up and I’ve had to have hosting company restart it twice.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike in the Morning on Wednesday at 7:40 am EST, after which, I’m going on vacation for a week, so this will probably be the last post here till Veterans’ Day. And – in case that wasn’t clear enough – there will be no Klawchat this week.

So, Tree of Smoke … 614 pages, read the whole damn thing, still have no idea what the point was, why I care about any of the characters or who the main character even was, what any of the threads had to do with each other, and why author Denis Johnson’s prose was so disjointed, mixing florid descriptions with poorly used profanity. (In fact, given that most of the novel is set in Vietnam during the war, I actually expected more profanity.) There’s no plot. Stories don’t start and end; we get the middle, sort of, and then somebody dies, and it’s over. The novel is full of allusions to the Bible, and a few references to other religions, but none of them made any sense to me on their own or in clarifying the point of the book. I thought I caught a few continuity issues in some of the subplots, but it’s possible that I was too bored to remember what was going on.

I could probably do a better job of taking this novel apart, but by the time I finished last night I wanted nothing more to do with it, and besides, this review from the Atlantic does a much, much better job than I could have hoped to do, even if I’d started the book with the intention of verbally lighting it on fire.

Anyway, I actually just finished the audiobook version of SuperFreakonomics, which was fantastic, but that review will have to wait till after the vacation. I will say that the brouhaha over the global warming chapter seems misplaced, and I’m guessing the critics haven’t read the entire chapter.

The reading list for the vacation – I probably won’t read all of these, but I have a minor phobia of running out of books – includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Remains of the Day, The Case of the Missing Books, Cold Comfort Farm, and And a Bottle of Rum.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 1, 2009
→ By

The Secret Life of Bees and Losers Live Longer.

Last night’s hit on the Brian Kenny Show is up. Will be on AllNight tonight (taped), First Take on ESPN2 tomorrow at 11 am EDT, and ESPN 710 in Los Angeles tomorrow at 1:12 pm PDT.

UPDATE: Analysis of last night’s trades is up now.

I had avoided Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees because it looked like chick-lit – not crappy chick-lit like Luann Rice or Nicholas Sparks, just chick-lit with higher ambitions. When I saw the pull quote from the Baltimore Sun‘s review that referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers,” I decided to give the book a shot, since I loved McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Sun reviewer was way, way off base; where McCullers’ work is suffused with sorrow yet written in beautiful, thoughtful prose, Bees is sentimental and predictable with unremarkable writing.

The story is narrated by Lily, a preteen girl who vaguely remembers a childhood accident when she was four years old where she picked up a gun and shot her mother while her parents were fighting. She’s haunted by guilt and her lack of memories of her mother, and lives with an unloving and occasionally abusive father who appears to want no part of her, handing off the task of rearing her to one of the black peach-pickers on his farm, Rosaleen. When the Civil Rights Act is passed and Rosaleen goes into town to vote, she ends up in an argument with three local redneck racists, which leaves her beaten up and arrested; Lily decides to spring her and they both run away to a small town in South Carolina where Lily thinks her mother once visited or lived. Once there, they run into three sisters* straight out of The Well of Stock Characters, including the most cliched of all, the wise older black woman who dispenses sound advice on matters life and spirit. As you might imagine, someone dies, Lily’s father shows up, there’s a lot of crying, and the end is heart-warming but just a touch ridiculous.

* The wise woman is played by Queen Latifah in the film version, where all three sisters are much younger than their counterparts in the book. What I find interesting is that another sister is played by Sophie Okenodo, who probably seldom finds herself as only the second-most beautiful woman in a movie, which had to be the case here with the third sister played by Alicia Keys. That’s some good casting work.

I couldn’t really get past the vaguely patronizing portrayals of black women in the book, and of course, just about every male character is one-dimensional and the dimension is unflattering. The lone exception is the lone African-American male to get any significant page time, a teenaged boy named Zach who is one-dimensional in how good he is. The dialogue is clumsy and heavy, laden with Big Meaning, Kidd hit only a few notes right for me – I enjoyed her portrayal of the feminist twist on Catholicism that the sisters and their friends practice, and some of the beekeeping information was interesting although the metaphors were a bit obvious – but on the whole it wasn’t worth my time.

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Also disappointing was Russ Atwood’s Losers Live Longer, the most recent release from Hard Case Crime, a boutique publisher of hard-boiled detective fiction, both new works and out-of-print novels that deserve reissue. Atwood put together a strong, tight story with just the right number of characters and twists, but his writing and dialogue were sloppy and occasionally cringeworthy (such as the 40-something white detective who says, “Homey don’t play that” about fifteen years after the phrase was last popular or relevant). He also falls into the trap that Raymond Chandler warned against in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” – don’t make characters do unrealistic things just to push your plot forward. The detective character makes a couple of extremely dumb and obvious mistakes (such as not noticing that a potential client is named “Jane Dough”) that require us to forget that before, he was aware of what was going on around him.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

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→ August 10, 2009
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The Death of the Heart.

TV today – ESPNEWS at 2:40 and Outside the Lines in the 3 pm half-hour, both EDT.

Articles: Preview of the signing deadline. First report from the Under Armour Game. Second report should be up this afternoon.

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart appears on both the TIME and Bloomsbury lists and ranked 84th on the Modern Library 100; TIME‘s Richard Lacayo praised the way Bowen used the main character, 16-year-old ingenue/orphan Portia, to reveal the cruelty of the characters around her: “In the mirror of her innocent eyes, experience will catch a glimpse of its own reflection. It’s not a pretty picture.”

This theme was unmistakeable, as Portia is particularly useful to Bowen in laying bare the selfish, jealous, spiteful nature of Anna, wife of Portia’s half-brother Thomas; after Portia’s parents die, she goes to stay with Anna and Thomas in London, only to find herself tied up in the quiet, seething resentment and anger between them, Anna’s paramours (whether consummated or not isn’t quite clear, although I don’t think it needs to be), and that most essential element in any English novel, the servants. Bowen does infuse some comic elements, but the novel’s greatest strength is in her descriptive prose:

Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered – they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate. You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face – what becomes of the child later you do not know.

Bowen also has a little fun with caricatures, not of whole characters but of little traits, some humorous, some shocking:

She walked about with the rather fate expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…

But ultimately, The Death of the Heart is dull. Very little happens; Portia falls for one of Anna’s beaux, the shiftless, irresponsible Eddie, earning the scorn of just about everyone around her and heading for an inevitable heartbreak at Eddie’s hands. Bowen focuses so heavily on emotions and settings that the plot, while not truly thin, is short, and the novel’s end brought release from the oppressive air of the time period.

Next up: Non-fiction with Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the story of his year in exile in a tiny mountain village in southern Italy.

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