A Literary Life

I really liked Chabon’s Cavalier and Klay, although I criticized it a little for its boisterousness. But now having read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I think I better understand that the whimsy and almost unbelievably absurity I sensed are just Chabon’s style. I certainly appreciated the style this time around. Chabon’s language is humble but incredibly visual and often zany, and the premise of this novel is just great: What if after WWII, the Jews set up their new homeland in Alaska instead of Israel, as was once proposed? In this alternate reality, Meyer Landsman is your hyper-stereotypical hard boiled detective working for the YPU, trying to solve the murder of one Mendel Shpilman. Mendel, it turns out, is the son of a powerful mobster rabbi and is rumored to be the savior returned to Earth. (See what I mean about semi-unbelievable absurity?)

[E]ven as a kid, Mendel Shpilman seemed to intuit the messy flow that both powered the Law and required its elaborate system of drains and sluices. Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel saw all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark surge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life.

After his death, all hell breaks loose for Landsman and his investigation snowballs into one clue or adventure after another.

Mendel’s funeral:

For an instant the crowd, the afternoon, the whole wide world of Jews breaths in and forgets to breathe out again. After that it’s madness, a Jewish riot, at once violent and verbal, fat with intemperate accusations and implacable curses. Skin diseases are called down, damnations and hemorrhages. Yelling, surging black hats, sticks and fists, shouting and screaming, beards fluttering like crusander flags, swearing, the smell of churning mud, of blood and ironed trousers.

(I just love that at the end, the ironed trousers.)

It’s certainly over the top. I understand that Chabon is being playful with this alternate history and I appreciate that. However, there were points where I thought maybe he’d gone a bit too far, especially in regards to the detective stereotyping. The hard drinking, divorced, go-with-his-gut, insubordinate yet gifted detective is oh so familiar, and there were points where I felt like he was relying on that too heavily at the expense of the character and the story. But on the whole this was a really good read, one I’d recommend as heartily as Cavalier and Klay.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

After more than 600 pages, I should have something more to say than, “Eh.” But in response to this book of historical fiction — beginning with a Brit seeing the Paris revolution of 1848 and ending in a varied group of characters mining during the California gold rush of the same year — I have little else to add.

With the size and scope of the work, you’d think I would. The author arranges for the characters to bump into most of the important people of the day: Charles Darwin, Count de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, John Jacob Astor, John Fremont and more. And the characters also dip their feet into so many issues or philosophies of the times, including republicanism, the opium trade, the creation of Utopian communities, the rise of Mormonism, the speeding up of society thanks to technology, the gold fever, and etc. and etc.

In the end, it’s more like the characters are witnesses to all of the history going on around them, but they don’t actually DO much themselves. They’re just along for the ride, rather flimsy foils for the real character, which is the time period itself. The cover quote calls it “a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American,” and I would agree. But perhaps the author gave the horse a little bit too much freedom, not reigning the story into a smooth, compelling plotline. Certainly entertaining in places, the novel sludges to a boring stop in others, and it seems the real action didn’t begin until halfway through the book!

I made it through to the end and found the experience not unpleasant, so there’s that. But I also wouldn’t recommend the lengthy tome to friends. I’d recommend it to a good editor, who would cut 200 pages.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

I liked the first book in this series, I think because it felt pretty original and I was in the mood for a lighter read. But if the first was light, this one was fluffy enough to blow away with the breeze from my snorts of disbelief and mild annoyance. We’re still in the world of Reading, where fairy tale characters live side-by-side with humans and chaos naturally ensues. But now the author is chasing a mass-murdering gingerbreadman, making corny, meta asides to the audience, as in: Can you believe we’re using this hackneyed and unbelievable plot twist? Well, Mr. Fforde, no. No, I can’t.

Perhaps this book was flung together in a more haphazard way that the first one, or perhaps there’s just only so far you can stretch this world before it shatters like stale taffy. (Dorian Grey is NOT a fairytale character!) Whatever the reason, I struggled to finish this novel and would recommend to anyone who craves a dose of whimsy to stick with the first book and move on. Nothing more to see here.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

This 1969-published book was rereleased and available at The Gazette book sale for 10 percent of cover price, and I like the Henry VIII story, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It claimed to tell the story from Katherine’s perspective, which I thought could be interesting. Instead, however, I found a general telling of the popular saga, rather dry, not much interior monolog of the queen’s thoughts, no new perspective.

And, most frustratingly, lots of typos and strange punctuation. Especially commas:

I am offering you a choice that I think no girl in your situation has ever been offered, before.

Or:

The princess who was to be his daughter-in-law, had arrived.

Also a few instances of “an” where “and” was meant. That kind of thing. Tres annoying for a grammar nazi, you know.

Frankly, I’ve heard the tale inside out and I’m not interested in rehashing what I know. If you have something new to offer — like the mostly historically accurate Tudors series, with its powerful sensuality and handsome Henry — I’m all ears/eyes. But life’s too short and busy to struggle through something I’m not really liking. However, if someone else wants the book — which I got for the low, low price of $1.50 — you’re welcome to it.

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars – Unfinished business

New book club. Yay! It’s always great to find a new book club, but especially so to attend one that featured a restored, vintage Vespa scooter in the living as sculpture and some nice ladies I look forward to getting to know better. However, I have to say that without the carrot of the club, I don’t think I could have finished the book, and the Vespa was certainly the highlight of the experience.

Cruel? Yes. Snobbish? Probably. But what can I say? I’m a writer myself and I take my reading seriously, and in my opinion, this first-time novelist doesn’t share either trait. Stilted dialog. Flat and unknowable characters. A long-winded book that doesn’t end up saying much of anything, meaning there was very little physical and environmental description and it contained a relationship — the focal point of the book — that had no spark. Not that it’s Horan’s fault, really. (Read on.)

This is the story of Mamah Borthwick, the mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright and the woman for whom he built Taliesin. The woman who was splashed across the pages of the papers due to the scandal and then vanished into a footnote in the great architect’s biography. (If there was such a scandal, where’s the passion, huh?) She’s a feminist and a free thinker, especially considering the time period, but it doesn’t seem like there’s enough information to draw upon to do her story justice. Most first-hand evidence of her life, like her journals and correspondance, was destroyed, and the author was forced to draw upon the newspaper articles and the few letters she could scrounge. So no wonder the story seems light and insubstantial, a skeleton without meat or humanity. Either fabricate a little more and have the guts to flesh the poor woman out, or stick to a straight non-fic telling of her life. But in this bare-bones manner, it does Mamah’s memory poor service.

Poor woman. To go through so much hell for love in the age before readily available divorce. To be such an aspiring feminist and writer, and yet to procrastinate and doubt away your time, and wind up with no work to your name. I do see why Horan wanted to take a crack at her life. Nice crack, but unsucessful. Wanna know how I got through it? The lovely lady who invited me to the club told me that the book ends with Mamah’s death, and an interesting and untimely death it was. Save that for your own carrot if you want to read the book. If you want to know the secret, click here.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars – Mediocre

As the title promises — and as I sorely needed — we have here a whimsical and airy romp, which shifts between the remote past when ancient gods peopled the forests to what is more or less the present day, between the quest for the freedom of life eternal and the boring, uninspired way toward death. And as the book vacillated, so did I in my opinion of it.

As I said, my prescribed dose of whimsy was over due (all blindness and murder lately), and the irreverent and playful tone of the historical scenes were up to the task:

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home.

Charmingly meta, unique, like finger painting with words: I loved the tone. And the sex! Nothing wrong with a little historical randiness with the god Pan. For about half the book, my belief was suspended and I was flying high, riding the ferris wheel.

But sheesh, as we continue along our journey, we lose all focus, snowballing into long dialogs in badly written accents (see below) and conjectures about how flowers killed the dinosaurs, the human’s “flower brain” and how perfume can stave off death. Suddenly, not so much fun. Belief unsuspended crashing to earth.

We’ve got ourselves stuck in a cyclic system that makes true freedom, true growth impossible. In the arts, a period o’ classicism is followed by a period o’ romanticism. Then ’tis back to the classical again. ‘Tis as simpleminded as a bloody pendulum, and for me, at least, it robs art of any real meaning. Same thing in society. A conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, then a conservative cycle again. Action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. As long as we’re trapped in these cycles, we can’t expect much in the way o’ liberation, we can’t even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more.

Hmm. I think this character is trying to talk about shedding the bad habit of surrendering to death without at fight and saying, “I quit!” However, I more thought that he was talking about the stagnating plot — or maybe American politics. But at that point, I really didn’t care anymore if the “base note” of the immortal scent was beet pollen, or how beets symbolize the human condition. (Seriously, people.) And the ending? Nothing happens, or nothing too interesting. It’s as if the author reached a certain word count and put down his pen.

Mr. Tom Robbins has a voice that appeals to me, that’s for certain, enough so that if I run across his other books, I’ll gladly take another whirl of whimsy. But I think he fought the plot and the plot won on this one, leaving both parties the worse for it.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

It’s been a while since I read Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but I recall a few major details: the runaway slave Jim, the widow, Huck’s hero status among the other boys. But above all, yes indeedy, I remember Huck’s father Pap, who steals him from the widow’s in an attempt to get at Huck’s found money. When a boy cuts a pig’s throat in order to fake his own death scene, it sticks in the gears, you see.

Obviously, the character of Pap stuck in Jon Clinch’s mental turbines, as well, so much so that he created this carefully crafted, earnest and deep novel to tell Finn’s story, the story that came before the story of his offspring that we all know and love. We don’t know Finn — he’s an unknowable man, even to himself — and we certainly don’t love him, or even like him in portions of the tale. Just as he is the roguish boy’s dangerous father, Finn’s story is starkly adult where Huck’s a whimsical, dark where Huck is light, heavy as the river water that Huck floats upon so light-heartedly.

This place has been here from the beginning and it will be here in the end: Adams County, hacked from the wilderness by naming’s brutal baptism long before Illinois was a state or a territory or even so much as a dream.

A primitive landscape and a primitive man, Finn’s life consists of exchanging fish for whiskey, of committing acts he thinks are sinful and berating himself for his actions afterward. He’s a drunk and a slob and a bully and maniac, yet we also get to see the man as a spurned son, a struggling father, a man trying to keep his head above water and his demons in the closet.

Bit by bit he descends to the level of drunkenness that he had attained previous to arriving home and then he proceeds beyond it, venturing into territory that the boy has seen before only on occasions when the fish have been especially plentiful and the harvest of whiskey has thus been particularly bounteous. For a man who enjoys his drink he permits it to make him miserable. He rages against the blacks and the government and the law, all of which he insists have conspired to bring him to ruin. Something about his drunkenness gives him the idea that he must stand up in order to orate properly, and every time he attempts to do so he loses his balance and falls, spilling his drink and catching himself with his sore left arm. This only fuels his wrath and his urgent sense that remaining successfully upon his feet is essential to his thwarted purpose and so he rages against the table and against the chair and against the tub of salt pork over which he takes a tumble for they too just like the blacks and the government and the law have been laying for him since the day he was born.

“Finn” is not a prequel to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and it’s not an addendum. Certain revelations, however, made in the novel make you rethink the character and perspective of Huck in the original book, including the true identity of Huck’s mother: a black woman and a former slave who Finn treats as a common-law wife and his property, both in turn.

Whu? Huck Finn is a … yes, that’s right. At least in this fictional universe, that is.

Is there a certain point in human history where we run out of stories to tell? I once wondered if, because there are only a finite number of musical notes, there were a finite number of original songs. Lord knows that Hollywood wants to simply remake or re-imagine a previously successful story or set of characters every three years or so, or is able to churn out sequels like they’re going out of style. (Please, why can’t they go out of style?)

In terms of novels, I’ve read a few — “The Hours” comes to mind — that make me think the remaking and re-imagining are entering the world of literature. And considering how much I liked both “The Hours” and “Finn,” I’m thinking that such revisitation might not be so bad. With the talent, calculation and passion Clinch brings to Finn, he added depth and mystery and humanity to my memory of Twain without changing the classic tale. He made the literary world that much more of a complex and downright interesting place to be.

(Sorry to the book club I skipped because I hadn’t finished the book yet. It was a solid choice, and I’ll be sure to get on the ball quicker next time.)

Rating: 4.5 stars – Hardcover book club selection

I liked this book. I did.

TENSE CHANGE: I am liking this book. I am. However, I had to put it down in order to start on a novel for a book club, a more pressing obligation seeing that there’s a firm deadline. (Not that I made the deadline — the election got in the way. Geez, I’m a failure.)

All moaning and self deprecation aside, I *will* pick it back up again. As for when, who knows?

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars – Unfinished business