→ October 7, 2013
→ By

The Killer Inside Me.

I’m off to Arizona for some Fall League scouting this week, so barring a rainout there won’t be a chat or podcast, and dish posting may be sporadic.

I’m a huge fan of noir films and novels, starting with the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but, having finished both of their canons, moving on to darker crime novels like those of Jim Thompson, whose The Killer Inside Me is the third and most unsettling of his novels I’ve read so far. The basis for a 2010 movie starring Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba, the novel delivers exactly what the title promises: It’s a first-person account of a sociopathic deputy sheriff whose solution to almost every problem is to kill whoever’s causing it.

Lou Ford is the narrator and killer in question, a cliche-spouting officer of the law who has a troubled background that has limited him to low-level police work, even though he has the intelligence of his father, a successful doctor who may have recognized that his son was mentally unstable. Ford’s narration is of dubious reliability, and he only gives us glimpses of his history of violence, but is more transparent when describing his predicament when an attempt to exact revenge on the town’s wealthy industralist backfires on him (in part through his own duplicity). Every solution he conceives involves violence, usually committed by him but pinned on someone else. After a few deaths too many, however, the facade he’s constructed starts to crumble as he realizes his bumpkin act isn’t fooling the powers that be any longer.

Thompson utilizes violence as a literary tool, as a window into “the sickness” inside of Ford and as a physical manifestation of the character’s inability to properly process negative emotions such as frustration or insecurity, largely avoiding lurid descriptions of Ford’s actions. Thompson largely avoids the question of a first cause, other than a hint that Lou may have been abused when he was a teenager, and focuses instead on the character’s almost robotic responses to difficult situations. He’s the pre-Anton Chigurh, but with a complexity that McCarthy’s arch-villain lacked, showing glimpses of emotions directed at others (through the lens of his own well-being, of course) and a wry sense of humor in between the spasms of violence.

The Killer Inside Me functions as a perverse character study, but its main appeal is its suspense – will Ford continue to kill with impunity, or will the various authorities stop him – and if they do, what kind of fight will he put up before he’s caught or killed? Ford even confesses to another murder he believes he has to commit – whether for practical reasons or due to “the sickness” is unclear – well before it takes place, then takes his time getting around to it, as if he’s enjoying toying with the reader’s emotions, or merely enjoying reliving the murder in his own mind.

The hazard of any novel that uses first-person narration where the narrator is the central character (and probably an unreliable narrator too) is that other characters become two-dimensional because we only see what the narrator sees, or what he wants to tell us. Thompson conveys the sense of a net closing in on Ford in part through the sheer number of characters whom Ford suspects have figured out his ruses, yet none of them has any depth because of the limitations of Ford’s own perception of others and their emotions. Ford is textured and at times opaque, but Thompson gives us a character who doesn’t describe other characters well because he can’t understand their emotions other than fear.

I didn’t enjoy The Killer Inside Me as much as the similar pop. 1280, which is more nuanced in its portrait of a ruthless killer, or The Grifters, which revolves around confidence men double-crossing each other in a study in sociopathy. Thompson’s ability to portray these half-people, consumed only with themselves and unable to feel anything for others, is disturbing in its realism, but that darkness is an essential ingredient in noir and, I admit, part of what I find so compelling in his novels.

Next up: I’m about a third of the way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and knocked off Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native last week.

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→ July 29, 2013
→ By

The Dinner and more.

Two new breakdowns for Insiders – on the Jose Veras trade and the Scott Downs trade. More to come as we get more trade action.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner made it on to my to-read list about a year and a half ago after I caught a very positive review in the Guardian, a left-wing British paper that has one of the stronger arts sections I’ve come across. I finally picked the book up last month and … well, it’s a strangely mixed bag of bad writing and fascinating character study.

The story revolves around two couples having a dinner out where they are supposed to discuss the fact that their sons have committed a grievous crime, caught on CCTV that isn’t clear enough to identify the boys publicly but makes it clear to the parents who the guilty parties are – with the stakes rising when the video appears on Youtube with a telling detail at the end. Paul, the father of one of the boys, narrates the book; the other father, Serge, is a prominent public figure. The book’s path is nonlinear, with flashbacks and wobbly narration, but the slope of the plot line is negative, as one secret after another is revealed and it becomes clear that Paul’s narration isn’t as reliable as he’d like us to believe, while Serge, depicted from the start as something of an asshat, isn’t the root of the boys’ evil, either.

It turns out that the plot isn’t actually the most important aspect of The Dinner, but is a vehicle for Koch’s studies of multiple characters, which all seem to be wrapped up in a greater examination of the latent sociopathy of modern middle-class parents. Koch never quite labels anyone a sociopath, but his scorn for such parents and their willingness to subvert their own morals to protect their children is evident. Even when one of the parents appears to want to do something resembling the right thing, it’s from base motives that do credit to neither parent nor child.

Koch is playing the fabulist here by creating parents who are more caricatures than realistic characters, bearing elements we might recognize in our friends or neighbors (or, heaven forbid, ourselves), but with wholes that feel flimsy. I’m avoiding too much discussion of specific characters to avoid spoiling anything, as Koch peels back the onion of his story over the course of the book’s 300 pages, but none of the four parent characters felt remotely real to me, and the two fathers are both drawn with sharp edges yet without internal shading. Koch created these characters so that they’d have to speak and behave in specific ways to achieve his desired outcome – and while the outcome itself reveals much about his characters, and at least will provoke readers to think about how close these actions and words come to reality, this artifice detracted greatly from the entire exercise for me.

Koch also made some curious decisions with the screen time granted to his four main characters, spending too much time with Paul and Serge while largely leaving their wives in the background. Clare, Paul’s wife, deserved far more attention, but her actions are largely on the periphery and mostly in reaction to Paul – although it’s unclear whether she views him as a partner or an antagonist to be managed. Babette, Serge’s wife, spends half of her scenes in tears, and only develops as a character in the final scenes, so late that her true motives are never apparent at all.

I don’t know if Koch is simply a clunky, awkward writer, or if the translation is poor, but I found his prose very weak and phrasing choppier than rough seas. (I’d offer examples, but the book is in Delaware and I am not.) The narrator is not entirely stable himself, so I’m willing to cut Koch some slack in this regard as a character like that shouldn’t think in clear, fluid sentences, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

Yet despite this laundry list of flaws, The Dinner does do two things very well. The suspense created by Koch’s decisions to hide most details from the reader at the beginning, unfurling everything in discrete, small steps, creates tremendous narrative greed that led me through the book at high velocity until it ended. And if his intent was indeed to explore or expose the banality of evil in middle-class families, he at least begins the excavation process, especially with Paul and Serge. It’s more fun-house mirror than looking-glass, but the picture staring back at us isn’t pretty.

–

I’ve also been moving through more of the Bloomsbury 100’s classics, including Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Disraeli’s legacy as a politican is stronger than his legacy as a writer, but Sybil holds up well as a work of political fiction, a furious rant about growing inequality in 1840s England and the aristocratic class’s refusal to acknowledge the issue or make any accommodations to address it. Disraeli grafts a romance on to his polemic, where a manor-born lord falls for the sweet, pretty daughter of a working man and socialist agitator, but the purpose of the book is clear – to stir up indignation in the hearts of the readers, against the country’s caste system and in favor of workers’ rights and a stronger social safety net. While many of his arguments are dated, the book’s core message about income inequality and the chasm between capital and labor feels just as relevant today. He even cites the often-heard argument that the lower classes are better off today than they’ve ever been, which is true but doesn’t mean they’re objectively as well-off as they could or perhaps should be, even if the issues Disraeli covers have been replaced by matters like lack of job security or spiraling health-care costs.

Hogg’s book reads today like a proto-novel for numerous genres – it’s a supernatural mystery, a gothic horror story, a religious parable, very early metafiction, and, most of all, it’s creepy-weird. The sinner of the book’s title is raised to believe he’s one of God’s elect – the novel is a clear attack on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, now a quaint relic – and, in the process, becomes one hell of a sinner. The first third of the novel is a lengthy prologue, leading into the “memoir” itself, where the sinner tells of the extraorindary stranger who leads him down the road to perdition, a stranger whose true nature is never fully revealed to the reader. The satirical elements will likely pass by a modern reader, but it was a fascinating read for how it presaged so many subgenres of fiction and likely influenced later novels like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (#12 on my all-time novels ranking).

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→ June 9, 2013
→ By

pop. 1280

My draft reviews are all up now – full recaps for every NL team and every AL team, plus my chat from early on day two, my day one recap, and Friday’s Behind the Dish podcast where I talked a bit about day one.

—

When I reviewed Jim Thompson’s The Grifters a few weeks ago, a reader said I should read his Pop. 1280 next, as it was his best work. It’s much tighter, definitely funnier and yet in ways far more fitting of the “noir” label, setting up the reader again and again for twists that turn a situation that seemed almost silly into a vision of paranoia and sociopathy.

Nick Corey is the narrator and protagonist of pop. 1280, the apparently hapless sheriff of the sparsely populated county of Pottsville in an unnamed state (probably Texas). Corey finds himself disrespected by the local criminals, including the two pimps at the town’s whorehouse, and verbally abused by the haughty sheriff of the more populous neighboring county. His manipulative, domineering wife Myra rules the roost at home, where they live with her simple-minded peeping-Tom brother. Nick presents himself as the amiable dunce, but the reader learns quickly that he is anything but friendly or a fool, and is either coldly rational and without empathy or is delusional and psychotic.

Thompson’s portrayal of the character is skilled and precise, crafting boundaries and expectations for the reader and then knocking them down as the character develops before the reader’s eyes. I don’t know if Nick is actually a sociopath – he might have a personality disorder, like narcissistic p.d., although that’s a better question for a psychiatrist who likes to diagnose fictional characters with mental illnesses – but he commands your attention. I found myself hanging on his words; I was eager to read what happened next, because he was unpredictable and his schemes were clever, but also because I wanted to hear what he said next because his words were less predictable than his actions. One by one, Nick identifies his problems and “solves” them, without significant regard for the consequences because he seems to believe that the rightness of his actions will protect him from any negative results.

One question the book didn’t and likely couldn’t answer was whether Nick’s standing in the town was a function of the public’s fear of him – did they recognize how dangerous he was, and leave him in office out of fear? I couldn’t view Nick as a reliable narrator, but at the same time we receive no other information beyond what he tells us, leaving us with no choice but to accept his version of events. Myra manipulates Nick, and cheats on him, and yet there are times when her demeanor towards him changes from condescension to fear, as if she’s witnessed a change in his personality from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. He’s one of the most interesting antiheroes I’ve come across in any genre.

Next up: Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir Yes, Chef.

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→ June 11, 2011
→ By

Fight Club.

Am I allowed to talk about Fight Clubicon?

This one has been sitting in the Netflix queue – which we don’t use enough anyway – for years, but I knew my wife would never watch it with me, and having seen it I have to say even if she’d consented she wouldn’t have stuck it out. Even I found some of the fight scenes tough to take, although I don’t see how you could make the film without it. The film is based on the book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk.

As with The Big Lebowski, I’m assuming most of you have seen this before I did. The basic plot, for those of you who haven’t (and I’ll warn you I am going to largely spoil the ending below): Ed Norton’s unnamed narrator is a 1990s version of Camus’ Stranger, a white collar worker who exists to work and consume but has no emotional attachment to anything and suffers from insomnia. On a business trip, he meets the charismatic soap-maker Tyler Durden, and the two form an underground “fight club” that becomes a national movement for the disaffected, eventually morphing into an anarchistic terrorist group called Project Mayhem.

The inevitable first question will be whether I liked the movie; I did, and I didn’t. I think it tackled big themes, although I’m not sure how well it did in addressing them. Most of the film was riveting, but sometimes it was simultaneously revolting. Although the narrator has an everyman quality, the film never fully gets at the causes of his alienation from society – that alienation is a symptom, but of what we never begin to learn. It’s anchored by several terrific performances, even in some of the smaller parts. I thought the final scene was cheap. I thought the twist was clever, even if they gave it away earlier in the film.

I keep coming back to the question of what exactly Fight Club means, as I can’t accept this as just some anti-consumerist (did this film coin that term) manifesto that presents nihilism as an equally valid and equally abhorrent alternative. The film also tackles – sometimes literally – the question of reduced masculinity in late 20th century western civilization, from the narrator’s wandering into a support group for testicular cancer sufferers, where he befriends a man named Bob who has grown breasts as a result of his reduced testosterone levels. Through sheer violence and the spilling of blood, are the men in Fight Club suddenly self-actualized through a return to primitive roots?

The fact that Fight Club and particularly Project Mayhem seem more than anything else to attract disenfranchised men – it’s full of service-workers but seems very light on white-collar workers beyond the narrator – made me think perhaps there was an up-with-the-proletariat message, but the latter group’s all-black uniform seemed more Nazi than communist, and whether or not you agree with Marx’s views (I certainly don’t), his philosophy had an end beyond sheer destruction.

Another possibility was that Palahniuk was describing how numb we have become in a world where basic needs are taken for granted but emotional (or, although the subject barely comes up in the film, spiritual) needs are unfulfilled. The characters’ reactions to getting the tar kicked out of them reminded me of porn star Annabel Chong’s comment from the documentary on her, where she mutilates herself and says that she did it just to feel something (she’s later recanted, although the credibility of the later statement has to be questioned, but that’s another story entirely). They get hit, and they smile, because they felt something.

…spoilers below…

I didn’t think the big twist was that surprising. You can see Tyler Durden spliced into at least two early scenes where he flashes in and out for a frame, and it’s not like they didn’t give you a big fat clue about that. (Second clue: The scene where Ed Norton leaves a building (Marla’s) with the words “MYSELF MYSELF MYSELF” in graffiti behind him. Third clue: Tyler lives on Paper Street.) Catching on to that from the start gives the middle of the film a whole new meaning – I wonder what it would be like to watch it without knowing the real relationship between the two main characters. But watching this essentially as a cult that takes the words of a madman with dissociative identity disorder as gospel was fascinating. And it did have me wondering for part of the film if Marla was real. Speaking of which, she’s basically Bellatrix Lestrange with shorter hair, right?

Despite my general dislike of unreliable narrators, though, this conceit worked beautifully until the final showdown between the two personalities. The idea that he developed this alternate personality in response not to the trauma of sexual or physical abuse but to the abuse of everyday life in our society is incredibly clever. (Speaking of which, that “How’s that working out for you?”/”What?”/”Being clever.” exchange had to be my favorite exchange in the movie.)

And I suppose I’d be remiss – or reminded by you of it – if I didn’t link to the surprisingly funny Jane Austen Fight Club.

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→ September 11, 2008
→ By

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I don’t remember who recommended Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! to me, but I liked the title and have seen a few things on McSweeney’s that made me laugh, so I figured I’d give it a try. The book is funny in places, especially in the first third or so, but as Eggers tries to become more serious (well, I think he was, at least), the book started to unravel for me.

Eggers’ prose is his strongest point as a novelist. He’s got a great knack for descriptive text, whether in analogies (“Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other.”) or just in piling words together – and I do mean piling, to the point of overflow – to create a mental picture. Some of the reviews I found compared the running internal monologue of the narrator to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but Eggers crushes them on readability, and contrasting those monologues to the actual dialogue – what we say, versus what we should say or want to say – gave the book an extra layer of complexity and ultimately of meaning.

Much of the book’s humor comes through the fact that neither of the main characters (Will, the narrator, and Hand, his friend – you could write a thesis on the meanings of those names alone) is all that bright. They plan a trip around the world to all sorts of random countries, without thinking that they might need visas or that there may not be a direct flight from Ulaan Baator to Greenland. Will doesn’t want to bring the heavy Churchill biography he’s reading on the trip, so he rips out the first two hundred and last two hundred pages instead. Hand puts on a pretty good smart-guy act, giving us some clever one-liners:

“The mafia here is organized.”
Here I knew what Hand was going to say – I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting – and I could do nothing to stop it.
“So you might call it … organized crime?”

The novel starts out as something of a madcap quest to travel around the world for a week, giving $32,000 (a windfall won by Will in appropriately silly circumstances) to deserving people. As the two men travel – and often fail to travel through their own incompetence – they find that giving the money away isn’t as easy as they expected; or, perhaps, that they’re judgmental assholes who keep finding reasons not to give the money away. Or maybe both. Will engages in some internal monologues, rationalizing away his reluctance to give money to certain deserving people, and often gives the money away in hit-and-run fashion – here, take this money, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, I’m just going to run away now thanks bye.

The descent into vague self-loathing, accented with small doses of existential doubt and and unresolved but never quite explained issues between the two friends, gets old quickly. Will tells us about their longtime friend Jack, who was recently killed in a bizarre car accident, and it’s possible that this is all a reaction to their sudden loss … but the treatment is superficial, just some scraps that could let us speculate wildly but not enough to let us talk intelligently. A novel that started out funny and clever with great prose ended up dull and slow and almost difficult to read.

There are two versions of Velocity! out there, one of which contains a roughly 50-page addendum narrated by Hand that, among other things, casts doubt on Will’s reliability as narrator. The section was apparently written after the book’s publication and is available on the McSweeney’s site if, like me, you get the original edition of the book. If the additional material is meant as satire – a self-deprecating review of sorts, written by one of the principal characters – then it’s clever and kind of funny. If it’s meant as a serious addition to the book, then I wish I’d never seen it.

Several of you have suggested I read either of Eggers’ other books, and since I liked his prose style, I’m sure I’ll give A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a try.

Next up: I have already started and finished a nonfiction book, Taking on the Trust , about investigative reporter Ida Tarbell and her groundbreaking series about the Standard Oil trust. I’m now into a Brit Lit novel, North and South , by Edith Gaskell.

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→ February 17, 2008
→ By

Atonement.

Warning – review contains spoilers, since there’s no way to discuss the book’s merits without discussing the ending.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a wonderful novel undone in just sixteen pages, the length of an ill-considered epilogue that says the first 95% of the novel doesn’t mean anything like what you thought it meant. It succeeds from a critical perspective, but as a reader, I felt cheated.

The atonement in question revolves around Briony, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Tallis family, and the way she lets a girlish fantasy and her lack of knowledge of adult relations (physical and emotional) spiral out of control, thus ruining the lives of two people close to her. McEwan has to stretch a little to get to the critical sequence where Briony falsely accuses a man of rape, including the use of a vulgarity I won’t repeat here and that would be almost out of the question for the man in question to have used in that fashion, but in general, the way he progresses through the novel’s first 95% is strong. The seemingly omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the heads of the three central characters, and there’s a single jump in time that pushes the plot forward past several years where nothing of direct relevance happens, which turns out to be a solid decision that allows the second sequence of events to coincide with (and create parallels to) the dark opening of World War II. The book’s pacing and prose have the feeling of classic 19th century British literature, and while there’s no confusing Atonement with Jane Austen’s work, there’s no doubt McEwan drew Briony as the flip side of Northanger Abbey‘s Catherine Morland.

McEwan himself is an outspoken atheist, thus the novel’s central theme of a search for earthly redemption without reference to or hope for a spiritual one or one in an afterlife. (To be clear, religion or lack thereof is not an explicit theme in the novel.) Briony’s search for redemption – what she calls atonement, but what really is an external forgiveness from both of the parties she so directly wronged – affects her choices early in life, driving her away from education into a nursing job that takes on importance after the war comes home to Britain during the evacuation of British troops from France in 1941. Thus limited by the need for a redemption in the here and now, she seeks out her estranged sister to try to bring about a reconciliation through admission of her own crime.

Or does she? McEwan throws the entire book into doubt in a muddled, tacked-on epilogue. Is what came before a full representation of the actual history of events? An incomplete one? A complete fiction? Briony tells us how, as an author, she can play God and rewrite events, but can not ultimately redeem them – or herself, or fix the lives she ruined. But what then is the responsibility of McEwan? This is his universe, his reality. He can give Briony the atonement she desires, in full or in part. But he needs to be honest with his readers. In fact, by not telling us until that 95-percent mark that what we have read to that point is a meta-novel, a fictional work within a fictional work, with most details true to the fictional reality (stay with me) but some not, and oh-by-the-way he isn’t even clear in the final pages how much of the preceding novel is reality, he’s dishonest with his readers, using our credulous nature – that we step into a novel prepared to believe its reality, to suspend our disbelief, to accept the characters as real people as long as they’re drawn true to life – to his advantage to pull a nasty trick on us. Instead of a deeper look at redemption, atonement, or just plain old-fashioned forgiveness, McEwan turns the book into a writer’s lament, that one can not undo reality or even find catharsis through fictionalizing real-life events and altering them to suit one’s needs. Well, no shit, Ian.

On page 334, I was prepared to praise Atonement as a clever, well-written work with expertly crafted characters and brilliant descriptive prose. In sixteen pages, McEwan tore that opinion apart, turning the book into a wicked bit of sleight of hand that still has the same characterization and prose but that proves terribly unsatisfying as an actual novel because of the betrayal of the reader’s trust.

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