Feb 23 2012
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Review

Donald Westlake’s “The Comedy is Finished”

Crime media often require the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Television shows like CSI, NCIS, The Mentalist — basically most CBS prime-time programs — can credit their success to their viewer’s willingness to do this — to understand that, yes, it is 8:48 pm and there are only twelve minutes remaining in the program; for them to be aware that there will probably be a commercial break at 8:50, a return at 8:53, one final swerve at 8:54, a clean resolution at 8:57, and the credits at 8:59.

This routine does not become at all monotonous; instead, quite exciting! As much as the characters are under duress to solve the case or catch the killer, so too is the audience, counting down the minutes. It’s a weird little meta-exercise. How will they catch the perp? There’s only nine minutes left before Undercover Boss! This formula is so formulaic because it’s oft-repeated, and it’s oft-repeated because it works.  Not just on television, but in books, movies, etc.

Donald Westlake was a crime writer. When he died in 2008, he had over one hundred publications to his name — some published in pseudonym — and some impressive awards. Wikipedia tells me that Westlake was named a “Grand Master” by the Mystery Writers of America; the same source calling that honor the “highest honor bestowed by the society.” (And, that information aside, award names don’t really get more honorable than “Grand Master,” do they?) Continue reading →

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Feb 17 2012
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Recs

#fridayreads

So it was my (Marnie’s) birthday this past weekend, and I got what will forever be known as the Cleverest Gift Ever Given: my best friend was flown in to Boston as a surprise! I was knocked onto my ear, or whatever the expression may be. I was very surprised. And while the weekend was consequently spent not reading a single word of Christopher Hebert’s The Boiling Season, which we’ll be reviewing at the end of the month, I did manage to pack plenty of celebration in, often even of the vaguely literary persuasion. While getting our pedicures in Beacon Hill, for example, I had the whole salon listening in on my synopsis of Ramona Ausubel’s No One Is Here Except All Of Us, admittedly a far cry from the stacks of Heidi Klum-related reading material provided near the foot dryer. (Seriously, though, I am sorely missing my subscription to People out here in Boston. How am I going to know if a hardscrabble town finds its hero in a mother of five who stuffs backpacks full of school supplies for underprivileged fourth graders?!)

Beyond that, it’s been a week of post-birthday celebration, Valentinular celebration, and subsequent 50%-off-all-chocolate celebration. And, as ever, trying to ignore these awful new memes. As a general rule of thumb, if someone posts something on Facebook and captions it “LOL SO TRUE,” there’s a good chance it’s not not nearly as true or amusing as the offending FB friend has claimed. But maybe I’m just embittered by years of false lawling and trigger-shy from a history of rickrolls.

But here’s a link that’s NOT a song about never giving you up. Scholastic Parent & Child Magazine has announced (via a really cool interactive bookshelf interface) their list of the 100 Greatest Books for Kids. I’ve read 38 of them! How about yourselves? The choices are clearly the product of a well thought-out selection process that accounted for an even spread of ages, demographics, authors, genres, and eras, and made the sound decision to choose only the best of the best of beloved authors’ books so as not to inundate the list with multiple titles. It’s Friday; treat your adult  selves to the nostalgia party that is Scholastic.

Now, to fly to Washington, D.C. Three-day weekends FTW!

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Feb 14 2012
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Review

Kwasi Kwarteng’s “Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World”

There is a lot to learn from Kwasi Kwarteng’s Ghosts of Empire. The text itself serves as a wonderful example of a historical work that can be palatable for the masses without sacrificing academic rigor or scholarship—exhaustive in detail and citation, but written in plain language. On a political-slash-historical level, Ghosts of Empire is proof of a certain self-awareness on the other side of the pond that will hopefully make its way over soon: the citizenry’s understanding of their country’s past mistakes, acknowledged without fear of public admonishment.

In the introduction to the American edition, Kwarteng, a Tory MP since 2010, explains the relevance of his subject to Americans whose interest in the British Empire itself might only be passing. Addressing the argument put forth by Niall Ferguson and others for Pax Americana—basically that in the absence of a civilizing power like the British Empire, America must use her resources to quiet the world’s most troubled areas—Kwarteng offers his general view of colonialism. Empires, he argues, “through their lack of foresight and the wide discretion they give administrators, lead to instability and the development of chronic problems.”

(Let’s set aside Ferguson’s blatant and awful moral relativism and [cultural] superiority complex, as any discussion of his power in pop-history makes me want to lobotomize myself.)

This “wide discretion” given to various colonial administrators is central to his argument, that the Empire itself cannot be viewed as a broad thing, that it was a flimsy and foundation-less structure built upon the whimsy of a few men—some of whom were bright and well suited to the task, some of whom lacked poise enough to tie their own shoes—and that this lack of order or purpose contributed to the issues faced by these territories after British departure.

In other words, these postcolonial growing pains are not accidental, but can be traced back. Continue reading →

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Feb 10 2012
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Recs

#fridayreads

There should be a point in every too-smart young man’s life when he realizes he is more man than young man–this realization, ideally, pairing up nicely with the seventeenth or eighteenth birthday–and ought to, therefore, stop being mouthy, or immature, or petty, and instead start giving fellow man the benefit of the doubt. This would be for the broad benefit of society. Additionally, it should also benefit the man himself, as being a mouthy, immature, or petty grown-up renders this man eligible to the sort of societal punishment doled out for such on-the-grand-scale-small-but-insufferable-in-real-life meanderings: a real ass-kicking.

I’m an idiot. And I tend to act as though I’m still somewhere between thirteen and fifteen, those landlocked years that featured only one benefit: being able to say pretty much whatever I wanted to non-psychopathic folks, those who wouldn’t dare punch a thirteen- or fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid in the face because, really, that’d be kind of stupid.

So I spent these years sitting in the bleachers section at Wrigley Field during Cubs-White Sox games, extolling the Southside in victory or just occasional run-scoring, without fear that any of the drunken adults around me would stoop to commit the crime of assaulting a minor. Because, at the end of the day, I’m just a kid!

If my son or sons turn out remotely like this, I’ll send them to military school. Continue reading →

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Feb 07 2012
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Review

Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”

Nathan Englander applies for your readership, offering his new work What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. He tenders the following readers for reference: Michael Chabon, Téa Obreht, Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Geraldine Brooks, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Richard Russo, Gary Shteyngart. A list of highly regarded blurbers so exhaustive that The Millions felt compelled to research the very history of the blurb.

It’s quite surprising to see such praise for a collection that offers few genuinely new stories—most of them appearing in various forms in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, or The New Yorker before 2011. Chabon, Franzen, Egan, et al. probably had no trouble blurbing pieces they had read over the course of a decade.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for focusing so much on these blurbs—there’s a point here. The praise for Englander, I thought, might inoculate me to whatever true greatness exists in “What We Talk About…”

But that wasn’t the case here, not at all. And now that I’ve got that out, I feel comfortable enough to say that I agree with the capital-W Writers on the back cover: “What We Talk About…” is hilarious, brave, energetic, and downright original. Instead of rolling my eyes at the blurbs, I feel compelled to go down the list, putting check marks and page numbers where I agree. (Jonathan Lethem…hilarious, √, p. 162; McCann…provocative, √, p. 89.) Continue reading →

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Feb 03 2012
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Review

Ramona Ausubel’s “No One Is Here Except All Of Us”

Ramona Ausubel's "No One Is Here Except All Of Us"

The old world seemed to have left us alone. No one had floated by in a boat, trying to sell us a canteen made from a sheep’s stomach. No Gypsies had passed through, rattling their wine bottles and singing their songs. Was it because we had succeeded? Because the new world was real? Perhaps. Or maybe it was because, day by day, there were fewer and fewer people left in the countryside. We had not seen the Official Gazette, which published thirty-two laws, thirty-one decrees and seventeen government resolutions against us. We did not see crosses drawn on all the doorways where Christians lived, while Jewish men were made to dig huge trenches in the cemetery. The world was emptied. Anyone who thought about it would have assumed we were long dead or on our way to death. We were forgotten and we were lost and, because of that, the world we made was allowed to go on.

No One Is Here Except All Of Us  is not a book for those who take much of anything for granted.

It’s a novel that stitches you to the heart of what matters within and without it. And when the threads of these prosaic, timeless characters tie you up and ensure you’re secured there, that What Matters floods and falls and the wind is kicked out of it. And if you want to end that story for the evening, if you would rather delight in the relief of the century that surrounds you — the one that hasn’t invited this horror to our door, at least not yet — closing the cover on Ramona Ausubel’s literally stunning debut won’t be enough. Because despite this book’s overarching theme of isolationism, its resulting effect on us as readers can only be the opposite: now that we’ve been told the story of 102 Zalischik Jews who sealed themselves off from the war-torn world with an airtight creation story and their collective imagination alone, we ourselves cannot extract it from what we know to be true. If isolation and belief in the warless New Genesis ever worked, for Zalischik or any other Elsewhere, then who’s to say those villagers are not still tucked someplace that war has never reached? Who’s to say the story isn’t powerful enough to sustain them? Does it change what history we know? And if all of this is true, has Ausubel extended a hand toward untouchable territories – and has that had any hand in their unraveling?

Continue reading →

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Jan 30 2012
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Review

Colin Winnette’s “Revelation”

During my sophomore year at Knox College, a favorite history professor of mine presented the class with a simple proposition: retell the Troglodyte fable from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, but repurpose it for the people who founded our college’s small town—Galesburg. This was a great assignment; an opportunity to touch on the many interesting facets of Galesburg’s founding—Calvinist preachers, abolitionists, the college—and color up the old story somewhat. My version of the “Galelodyte” fable was pitiful, a pull-and-plug story seemingly engineered for the mere communication of Usbek’s lesson from the Letters: a society built on virtue—and not wealth or arbitrary power—will always flourish.

It was boring, ultimately panned by the professor. By moving the scenes from Persia to the middle of North America, I’d done nothing but merely adapt the Troglodyte fable for a new time and people, without exploring less broad, more interesting questions.

Adaptations or retellings of old fables or stories or tales can go other ways, of course. Writers can explore the modern implications involved in the time-place shifting, or abandon the fable context altogether for awhile, using the adaptation more as a theme than a frame.

To wit: Colin Winnette’s Revelation, an adaptation of the biblical apocalypse tale. Except the main characters—Tom, Colin, and Marcus (the protagonist, of sorts), all of whom we follow from age ten to eighty—are less concerned with the kind of supernatural shit that’s going on all around them than with your regular human stuff. There are the fires and the locusts and the dead fish and the four horsemen, but there’s also the next cigarette, or a grueling breakup letter from a teenage girlfriend. There’s the end of the world, but there’s also the grueling feeling of getting old and being sore. Continue reading →

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Jan 27 2012
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Recs

#fridayreads

It’s a busy season, winter. We’re up to our necks in upcoming reviews, and couldn’t be happier about it.  Our book pile has gone from a stack to a heap to a tower and is now wobbling precariously on its supports of Kwarteng, Hebert, and Winn Scotch, in an array whose subject matter is as far-flung as its authors.

In addition to digging into all of that, we’re trying to make our last-minute decisions on what books we should, respectively, give out on World Book Night.  (We’re running the gamut from Friday Night Lights to Oscar Wao at the moment. Any thoughts?) The deadline for requesting titles is February 1 — five days away — so don’t forget to sign up and participate in this amazing inaugural U.S. event.

Finally, a word on what we’re reading this weekend:

Ramona Ausubel’s No One is Here Except All Of Us, a haunting and beautiful debut about a tight-knit Jewish community that chooses to isolate itself as the horrors of World War II are made clear to them. Ausubel’s voice is so dense and narratively rich that readers can open to virtually any page and find passages that speak a heretofore unconsidered truth about love and the nature of war. Our review of this one is sure to carry mostly a tone of awe.

Other things that have our jaws dropping: how good Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, and that we’ll now have to see advertisements that attach the words “Academy Award Nominee” to the name Jonah Hill.

 

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Jan 24 2012
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Review

Katherine Stewart’s “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children”

I won’t beat around the bush.

The reason the world perked up and paid attention to Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 is the same reason that the world should now, 105 years later, snap to attention and read Katherine Stewart’s latest nonfiction book, The Good News Club: it awakens us to something we may previously have known nothing about, but which is under our noses every day, is active in our communities nonstop, and is potentially damaging to us all, and well into the future, too, if gone unnoticed. Stewart’s findings can’t afford to be ignored, for the same simple fact that made Sinclair’s expose crucial: whether the book calls you to action or not, you are inarguably worse off not knowing what’s detailed within it.

I had the occasion to read this book back in July 2011, for reasons I don’t think I’m allowed to detail here. At any rate, I read the then-confidential volume (concealed in a white paper cover) on the beach on the Fourth of July. I read about U.S. public schools caving, silently, to the demands of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, among other insidious religious groups that infiltrate America’s education programs and curricula with innocuous-sounding “Good News Clubs” and “Spirituality for Kids,” evangelist and scientologist organizations, respectively. I read about these groups’ systematic flouting of every restriction in place designed to keep them a separate entity from the classroom itself, and to uphold our nation’s separation of church and state. When you read these ugly findings on a sunny beach full of raucous children, an eeriness sets in: how many of them have had a Good News Club come through their town, encouraging them to “be a missionary every day,” and to consider any non-member of the club an irreparable sinner? How many have informed their fellow elementary classmates that they, the Others, are destined for fire and brimstone? Moreover, how many of the kids on that beach had been told as much by their classmates? After all, Stewart’s research estimates that 3,410 Good News Clubs alone are currently in operation at elementary schools around the country, to say nothing of the countless other groups that have found loophole after loophole to strong-arm their way into the schools.

Continue reading →

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Jan 22 2012
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News

Passing Some Stuff Along

Courtesy of the Financial Times, a very thoughtful essay on American fiction and its relationship with sport. While he eventually focuses on Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding—a debut we received well—Jason Cowley covers a bevy of recent American classics, from Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to John Updike’s Rabbit series.

The Art of Fielding is once again in the media focus, getting its UK pub this week. If you’re wondering how British outlets would receive a book about baseball—which I was and kind of still am—the Financial Times’ review is an indication that it’s a bit puzzling, the FT turning to former Major League Baseball shortstop Ron Darling for a test-of-authenticity sort of review, a write-up that seems focused on how much Harbach nails the baseball experience; artfulness not being Darling’s concern, naturally.

Other British reviewers, however, seem captivated by the book itself, not concerned with the fact that it’s about a game that has no footing in their culture. Nat Segnit, writing for The Independent:

As Affenlight jokes to Owen, reading is “a dangerous pastime”, inimical at some level to the cognitive blank of true sporting genius. At its best, when its pattern-making responds more organically to the characters’ realities, The Art of Fielding is very good indeed. In an early, game, we learn that the Harpooners’ “aged scoreboard” is missing a letter: “WESTISH 6 VI ITOR 2″. Four hundred pages later, when the Harpooners are competing against swanky Amherst in the nationals, it’s noted that one of the opposing team’s cheerleaders has failed to show up, so that their “oversize purple T-shirts… spelled out A-M-H-E-R-T in white letters.” Again, the missing S, for Skrimshander, the Harpooners’ absent hero: it’s a lovely, subtle, moving touch.

Another batch of Art of Fielding reviews means more opportunities for newspapers to run clumsy baseball metaphors in the subheads, The Telegraph calling it a “home run” and the FT referring to it as “pitch perfect.” Well done, chaps.

In other news, we’ll be posting a review of Katherine Stewart’s forthcoming The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children on Tuesday. Don’t worry, we’re not getting too political.

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