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0374181179
| 9780374181178
| 0374181179
| 4.06
| 62,494
| Oct 05, 2021
| Oct 05, 2021
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2024 reads, #70. DID NOT FINISH. Back at the start of this millennium, I was as big a fan of Jonathan Franzen as they came, a master of Late Postmoder
2024 reads, #70. DID NOT FINISH. Back at the start of this millennium, I was as big a fan of Jonathan Franzen as they came, a master of Late Postmodernism who wrote one of the all-time greatest Late Postmodernist novels, 2001’s The Corrections, a churlish and pessimistic book that nonetheless engendered so much lasting goodwill that even nine years later, no less than the President of the United States was caught begging a bookstore while on vacation to please sell him an early copy of Franzen’s next novel, Freedom. (How much goodwill did it engender? So much that Franzen became the first artist in history to publicly insult Oprah to her face, and even she had him back on the show when Freedom came out.) But as I spent this week reading Franzen’s unpleasant newest novel, 2021’s Crossroads, which made such a non-existent dent in the public zeitgeist that I didn’t even bother reading it until three years later, I suddenly realized that the thing that made Franzen such an unstoppable force 25 years ago is now the exact same thing that’s made his career collapse, which is that he’s so thoroughly a product of Postmodernism that it’s impossible for him to write any other kind of story, which is a huge problem in a world where Postmodernism was replaced an entire generation ago by the cultural movement that superseded it. Society hasn’t yet given this cultural movement a name, even though it’s almost 25 years old at this point, ever since Postmodernism died the exact moment the planes smashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001; in my own writing, I’ve been alternatively calling it “Sincereism” and “Wokeism,” although I suppose you can call it whatever you want. Whatever the case, like all artistic movements in history, it’s largely defined as a rebellion against what came before it; so while Postmodernism was all about cool irony and self-hating cruelty, Sincereism is about earnest eagerness and plainly-understood emotions being worn on one’s sleeve, a world full of happy little dancing TikTokkers that has no room anymore for mean-spirited stories about families of academic leftist intellectuals who are generally pieces of shit, and who spend most of the story’s page count being awful pricks to each other and the world at large. That’s unfortunate for Franzen, because that’s seemingly the only kind of book he knows how to write, and 20 percent into Crossroads I realized that this is essentially a cookie-cutter copy of both The Corrections and Freedom, yet another Tolstoy ripoff about gently miserable families of middle-class liberals, full of “quirky” people who do “quirky” things for no particular reason at all related to the story being told, merely because “quirky” was hot during Postmodernism and so “all quirky all the time” shall these stories be. And while I’m not a member of the Wokes myself, certainly I too now find my patience for this kind of story dangerously thin, which is why I quit this book before even getting a quarter of the way in; and that’s because Franzen’s PoMo blueprint was eventually so popular and so pervasive that it essentially birthed an entire wing of indie-movie type at the end of the Postmodernist era. Whether or not you know it, pretty much every movie around the year 2000 that’s predicated on a quirky family full of precociously quirky people (the older or the younger the quirky character, the better), living quirky lives full of quirky moments, is essentially a direct ripoff of Franzen or one of his literary contemporaries, whether that’s Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite or The Squid and the Whale or Captain Fantastic or pretty much the entire career of Wes Anderson, yet another poster child for Late Postmodernism whose work isn’t holding up nearly as well here a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Like most everyone else, I eventually grew tired of and then completely burned out on these uber-quirky stories about mean-spirited families; but it wasn’t until trying and then giving up on Crossroads this week that I realized that Franzen is the proverbial tree of life that all these movies come from, and that this thus means that I’ve become completely burned out on Franzen’s work too. It all reminds me of something I regularly come across in my hobby as a rare-book collector, which is that the start of every new cultural movement is filled with the last projects of the now elderly members of the previous movement -- for one good example, all those stuffy, barely readable final novels by the titans of Modernism that came out at the beginning of the Postmodernist era in the late 1960s, all those Thornton Wilders and Sherwood Andersons who were still cranking out their delicate character dramas well into their seventies -- which had their fans among the similarly aging academics of that previous era, and even would regularly win literary awards, but that were roundly ignored by the current generation of young people, and then completely fell into forgotten obscurity just a year or two after they came out to no fanfare and no sales. (And note that this doesn’t automatically have to be the case -- just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, I was talking about how the latest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, once just as much a poster child for Late Postmodernism as Franzen, really impressively embraces all the hallmarks of the Sincereist era in a way I didn’t think Ellis had in him.) I’m still a fan of Late Postmodernism as now a historical moment that no longer exists, but it turns out that even I as a snotty little dyed-in-the-wool Generation Xer can now no longer stand brand-new novels written in a Late Postmodernist style; and so that leaves Crossroads out in the cold for me, to say nothing of the other two books in this proposed trilogy that’s still to come (in which we watch the current churlish, mean-spirited teenaged children in this 1970s family eventually grow up and become churlish, mean-spirited adults to an entire new generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in the 1990s, then presumably eventually even these teens becoming the parents of yet another generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in our own 2020s times). Just describing that wears me the fuck out, much less the concept of reading another half a million words devoted to it (for those who don’t know, Crossroads is infamously a 200,000-word novel, or in other words even longer than the first three Harry Potter novels put together), so I suspect that I’m done in my life with Franzen for good. If you too found yourself dragging your feet while reading this book, and thinking things to yourself like, “Yeah, but why does everyone have to be so freaking mean to each other?”, might I humbly suggest that perhaps you too are getting burned out on Postmodernism as well, a fact that seemingly everyone but Franzen himself seems to understand at this point. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Nov 18, 2024
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Nov 18, 2024
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Hardcover
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059353560X
| 9780593535608
| 059353560X
| 4.00
| 34,011
| Jan 17, 2023
| Jan 17, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but
2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but that I’m just now getting to, that he’s one of the few authors out there I’m a legitimate completist of, meaning I’ve read literally every novel he’s ever written. Technically I suppose that should make him appear in my Great Completist Challenge I regularly add to here at Goodreads, about two dozen writers strong at this point; the problem, though, is that I’ve read very few of Ellis’s novels since joining Goodreads way back in 2006, so I didn’t have a reason or an outlet for writing reviews of any of those older ones. My love for Ellis in fact goes all the way back to my freshman year in college, September 1986, the exact same time the paperback version of Less Than Zero was published for the first time, which I picked up on a lark* and was immediately bowled over by. And with Ellis being only five years older than me (he famously started writing Less Than Zero in high school, and got it published by a major press as an undergraduate, because of growing up rich in Los Angeles and so already having footholds in the industry), I deeply connected with his themes of Generation X undergraduate alienation that lay at the heart of his writing, and especially two years later when he published the much more college-focused The Rules of Attraction, when I was now a junior in college myself and had finally had some of the “do too many drugs on a Saturday night, sleep with a stranger, avoid them in the dorm cafeteria Sunday morning” drama fueling that book. *I’ve told this story several times now, but my freshman year in college, I bought every single contemporary novel chosen as a staff recommendation at my university’s bookstore that school year, and every album chosen as a staff recommendation at the hipster Streetside Records, which inundated me with great legitimate indie projects for the first time in my life, all at once at eighteen. In fact, it’s fair to say that Ellis eventually became known precisely for this cool ironic Generation X blase attitude about the world, in fact became somewhat of a spokesperson for it, especially when he published the notorious high point/low point of this Tarantino-esque ironic cool world-weariness, 1991’s American Psycho -- a book that disgusted a lot of people, got initially dropped by its first publisher under pressure from moral crusaders, eventually had its reputation changed by Mary Harron’s sly film adaptation that recasts it as a black comedy about ‘80s white-male Reagan excess, but was never really meant by Ellis to be a comedy, but rather a pinnacle of the cold nihilism Generation X had become known for by this point. So all these years later, that’s what makes The Shards so remarkable for long-time readers like me, even though it’s something that might miss more casual or newer readers of his (we’ll see -- I’m going to start reading everyone else’s reviews right after I post mine); for in his late fifties, Ellis has finally and fully embraced the earnestness and sometimes weepy plain emotions that are now a hallmark of the artistic movement going on right now, the one that started replacing Postmodernism in the early ‘00s (let’s call its start September 11th, and the date it was fully the new force in the arts Obama’s first election in 2008), which you might call Sincereism for lack of a better cultural term. (Susan Sontag, where are you when we need you?) That’s right, Bret Easton Ellis shows sincere emotions in this novel, and the results are in fact quite good indeed, as if you took a novel like Less Than Zero and gave it to someone now to write a contemporary Woke version of, but still set in 1981. That’s the first thing to know here, that it’s yet another one of those slippery novels that have peppered Ellis’s career, where he himself seems to appear in the novel as his true self, but with weird and intense fictional genre things going on in the story too, like vampires or werewolves or serial killers or whatnot. Namely, it’s set in Ellis’s senior year of high school, in the tony areas of 1981 Los Angeles, but framed in the prologue as if real-life 59-year-old Ellis here in the 2020s is thinking back on those days, both telling us the story and analyzing the events from the perspective of the much older, sadder and wiser late-middle-ager he now is. Given that the similarly autobiographical Less Than Zero is set only one year later, during the Christmas break of the Ellis stand-in character’s freshman year of college (and actually written back when the events happened), this is essentially a changed, softer Ellis looking back on roughly the same events covered in his first novel, but now with a much different eye and both a compassion and damnation for these stupid little fucked-up kids he and all his friends were that’s lacking in the earlier novel (indeed, what made the earlier novel famous to begin with). That’s mostly what this novel is about, and I encourage fellow readers to enjoy it at its fullest by essentially accepting all the non-fantastical stuff as probably true, because it probably is, and I personally think that this is why Ellis probably wrote this novel at this point in his life, because he wanted to look back on a rather tumultuous period of his life with clear eyes and a willingness to call out his own bad behavior. Namely, what a huge portion of this novel is about (and what you could argue even the entire novel is about, even the fantastical part, but more on this in a bit) is Ellis’s burgeoning gay sexual identity in his late teen years when hitting the peak of puberty, how he used a lot of subterfuge to hide it in a pre-queer ‘80s, how he deliberately hid it from some of his best friends and ended up causing a lot of hurt and damage, and especially how he hid it from the girlfriend he had at the time, even while physically exploring more and more with the various boys and men in his life who he got “the vibe” from. In this, the issue of what “in the closet” exactly meant in the ‘80s, versus who was willing to have a dick in their mouth or ass, is one of the more complex and therefore interesting parts of this novel, in that Ellis describes a whole series of situations he was in back then (if, that is, you accept that most of what he’s writing about here is based on true stories, of course) -- such as this weed-dealing loner at his high school, for example, essentially living by himself in the guesthouse of his parents’ estate, who Ellis is pretty sure isn’t actually gay, but is just a horny teen boy who will take any sloppy stoned sex that falls into his lap that he can get. Or the friend slowly turned lover who in a post-closet world Ellis probably could’ve had a very nice romantic relationship with, but who instead has a tension-filled and ultimately traumatic time with since they were still living in a world that required them to be in the closet. Or the male best friend who he’s had since childhood, but during puberty he developed a sexual crush on, which turned into a messy threeway Freudian fantasy situation in his head when the guy started dating one of his female childhood friends, one he’s always been close to and who have asked each other over the years why they’ve never tried dating, anyway. It’s the ongoing domestic dramas of the people I just described that takes up 80 percent of this novel (or maybe I’ll say 80 percent of why you should read this novel), and the complex pushes and pulls they all go through as they’re thrown to and fro by hormones, the stress of pre-adulthood, and unwise parental decisions to let them all have easy access to liquor and cocaine. That stuff is very interesting; and while I’ll let the ending remain spoiler-free, I’ll say that it ends in tragedy, and that it’s thoroughly Ellis’s (the character’s) stupid fucking behavior that causes it, which is perhaps the most interesting thing of all. This feels like Ellis really getting a lot off his chest forty years after a bunch of traumatic things happened in real life when he was a teen, especially when he makes it clear in this book that the main reason he ran off to Bennington College all the way across the country was precisely to get away from all these people back in LA he’d deeply hurt, and that the reason Less Than Zero is about the awkward, tension-filled high-school relationships of a college freshman, as he returns to LA for Christmas break, is that this was what his freshman year of college actually was like, including losing the friendship for good of almost everyone involved. Oh yeah, and there’s a serial killer. Did I not mention that? Because of course there is -- this wouldn’t be an Ellis novel without the inclusion of a horror-film staple! Usually, though, these characters are sort of complexly and obliquely woven in to the “real” universe of Ellis’s novels; but here, though, he makes it extremely clear that we’re supposed to see the newly arrived transfer student Robert Mallory as a symbol and not a legitimate part of the story, not the least reason of which is that he has Robert literally say directly to Bret (the character) during an early tense conversation, “Everything bad you see in me, you see in yourself.” Although high-school Bret strongly suspects Robert as the secret identity of a “Zodiac Killer”-type murderer on the loose in LA at the time, his friends (all of them growing closer and closer to Robert themselves, including his childhood female friend starting an affair with him) think that it’s Bret who’s actually thinking crazy. And indeed, as the book continues, this becomes more and more of a serious possibility; and in this many will see shades of Ellis’s 1998 conceptual epic Glamorama (which the author has stated before is his personal favorite of his career), from the mysterious beige van that starts following Bret to the freakish encounters he starts having with a Manson Family-type cult in the area, the narrator suddenly turning unreliable with no notice, the difficulty he has understanding anymore what actions he is doing versus him watching one of the other characters do it, starting to obsessively list celebrities at a party, so many and so famous that it can’t possibly be true, etc. But unlike the sorta surreal saga he meant Glamorama as, it’s clear (at least to me) that here Ellis means for Robert to be much more metaphorical, basically the Imp of the Perverse when it comes to the young, stupid teenaged Ellis’s closeted gay status; that is, he’s the external manifestation of all the damage Ellis psychically does to a lot of people around him, by having sex with strange men under strange circumstances while also trying to live a publicly straight life that involves the intimacy and trust of a lot of people. I think this is a very valid way of interpreting this book (and again, I’ll be interested in seeing what other reviewers have to say), that the “serial killer” here is Ellis’s own real-life inability to come out of the closet in these years, throwing himself into a series of stupid sexual opportunities simply because he could and ending up damaging the lives of a whole circle of people around him. All the people who get injured and/or die in this book because of the serial killer, after all, are the same ones who get deeply hurt by Ellis’s behavior as a closeted gay man; that’s a hard thing to misinterpret, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, I’m not coming out of left field here; Ellis has been talking in the last year and a half during interviews and on his podcast about how it’s only now, in his late fifties and after publishing this book, that he feels that he can really come out publicly as fully just a gay man now, versus the rest of his adult life when he’s been pretending to be bisexual (but being very loud about it, and especially the gay parts, because this too fit into this Tarantino-esque “white males behaving badly” paradigm of ‘90s Gen X arts). He wouldn’t be saying that if he hadn’t worked through something while writing this book (which he began during the pandemic, and originally released as chapters of an audiobook performed himself for his podcast), so I feel like this is all a fair way to interpret this novel, as Ellis really coming to terms with his sexuality for the first time by going through this trial by fire where he had to acknowledge and then forgive himself for a lot of youthful transgressions (which, if we assume to be true, legitimately are pretty horrific in some cases, making it easy to see why Ellis chose a serial killer as his “id monster” here). That’s a welcome surprise -- one of the architects of the White Male Postmodernist Generation-X Tarantino 1990s Arts Patriarchy, now embracing sincere emotions and Complex Feels for the first time in his career, and turning in an incredibly insightful, entertaining, and sometimes legitimately chilling story because of it, one that superbly examines the infinite drama that comes with being teenage and gay in a setting where they can’t be public about it. It comes strongly recommended to one and all for these reasons, and I can absolutely say that it will be making my annual “Best Reads of the Year” list coming in another couple of months. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 21, 2024
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Oct 21, 2024
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Hardcover
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0385491050
| 9780385491051
| 0385491050
| 3.45
| 27,584
| 1972
| Jun 1998
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #64. Wow, has it really been five years since I last took on a Margaret Atwood title for my Great Completist Challenge? That has to change; because the more I read of this fascinating Postmodernist veteran, one of the few to successfully transition into the Sincereism / Wokeism / whatever-you-want-to-call-it times of right now, the more I’m realizing that she’s one of the greatest writers of our generation, the rare treasure who can jump back and forth between the world of academic literary fiction and commercial genre fiction while keeping both audiences happy at the same time. By now here near the end of her career (she’s still alive as of the day I’m writing this, a spritely 84 and the recipient of pretty much every literary award that exists), she’s of course infamously known more for the genre side of her career, and especially the one book she’ll undoubtedly be remembered for the most after her death, 1985’s nearly perfect feminist dystopian science-fiction nightmare The Handmaid’s Tale (which we won’t be getting to in this Completist Challenge for a while); but as we examined last time in her very first novel, 1969’s The Edible Woman (my review), when younger she was pretty much forced to be known exclusively within academic literary-fiction circles, because with few exceptions these were the kinds of books young pretty college-educated women like her were “supposed” to be writing, Peyton Place-style domestic dramas about failed marriages and unfulfilled yearning out in the stultifying suburbs (of Toronto in the case of Atwood, who has made Canadian national identity another running theme of most of her books too). And indeed, in this second novel of hers from 1972, we’re back in the same territory, which is why she was largely thought of at the start of her career in terms of being the next Sylvia Plath, before she started churning out all the dark, violent, conceptually brilliant sci-fi, fantasy and horror books of her middle-aged years. But just like The Edible Woman, in Surfacing we can already see hints of this darker, weirder material, the territory Atwood wanted to wade in from the start but felt at first that she couldn’t, because it wasn’t the kinds of things “proper” women wrote about and therefore she would never find a publisher. It’s the story of a daughter in her late twenties, forced to return to her childhood cabin home in the rural wilderness of a Canadian island in the middle of nowhere, because her elderly estranged father has gone missing; with her is her current boyfriend, who she’s in a drearily unhappy relationship with, and two mutual friends who are a couple themselves, the kind of grating, obnoxiously middle-class mouthbreathers who Atwood displays such piss and vinegar for throughout her entire oeuvre. Like most literary fiction, not much actually happens here -- the foursome spend about a week at her childhood cabin, systematically exhausting all their options for tracking down her father, as the two relationships gently unravel in real time and we get an unvarnished look at all four personalities at their worst under a moment of large stress. But with this being Atwood, there’s more going on here than that, which is why even from the very start of her career as a novelist, she marked herself more than merely an academic MFAer churning out domestic dramas; for as the story continues, our protagonist finds evidence that perhaps points to the fact that her dad went insane out here by himself for so long, but finds compelling counter-evidence that he didn’t, so now must decide whether he’s sane and therefore likely dead and they can all go home (because a sane person wouldn’t be away from shelter and food for so long), or if he’s alive on the island somewhere and they need to keep looking, but is now suffering from dementia and is therefore purposely hiding from them. It’s worth remembering that Atwood was already a celebrated, award-winning academic poet before she ever started writing fiction in the first place, and at the point of writing Surfacing already had something like six books of poetry published; because you can see that quite clearly in the complex, heavily symbolic prose of her early books, and especially here in Surfacing when she discusses our unnamed hero and her complicated relationship with her parents, what it may or may not mean for her dad to perhaps or perhaps not be a raving lunatic currently roaming the Canadian countryside, and whether she may or may not be going crazy herself out there in the wilderness, as she attempts to take the subtlest of clues around here and try to infer her way into a solution to this mystery that’s way over her head. And so in this, the book title Surfacing is as poetically symbolic as The Edible Woman was in the last book, another sign of Atwood’s background as a poet; it refers not only to the prospect of her father hopefully resurfacing into civilization again soon, but also to the fishing trips the foursome regularly take during their week at the cabin, as well as a dizzyingly intense scene where our hero keeps going diving into a deliberately flooded lake, in an increasingly unhinged attempt to see whether there are Native American paintings in a cave now located deeply under the waterline, which if there would mean that her father really had been doing sketches of them in his notebook on behalf of a fellow scientist, or if there are actually no paintings there, meaning that her father had truly gone insane and was now filling notebooks with doodles and gibberish. In none of the books by Atwood I’ve now read in my life (today is my seventh) are the women in the center of our stories particularly heroic, particularly even likable; they’re complicated, contradictory, often infuriating women, who behave in ways that sometimes seem obtuse and obsessive by their friends, dissatisfied with everything around them but with no suggestions for what to replace it with. (Or in other words, Ottessa Moshfegh fans should be reading Atwood’s early novels as soon as they possibly can.) And it’s worth noting as well that another one of Atwood’s well-known running themes in her career is on display even here in her second novel, the same as her first, an element that I personally feel is key to her having such a large and feverous fan base; the idea that the patriarchy actually doesn’t have to do that much for men to perpetually stay in power, because there is seemingly always women willing to stand up and do the work of belittling other women on behalf of the men, here seen mostly plainly in the frisson between our protagonist and her college female friend who’s along on the trip with them, who acts like a goofy tease to the men’s joshingly misogynistic behavior and ultimately goes along with anything they tell her to do, acting like our hero is somehow stuck up for not going along with it too. In other words, despite being an unambiguously feminist author, there are no tidy Sunday school moral tales being told in Atwood’s novels, but rather big and messy stories about a big and messy humanity in which nothing is ever black and white but rather endless shades of gray. We never know how much we’re supposed to be rooting for our protagonist in Surfacing and how much we’re supposed to be shaking our heads and muttering, “You’re goddamned insane and I gotta get the fuck out of here;” and that makes Atwood a fascinating storyteller, and the reason she’s still a household name where a thousand of her fellow, simpler ‘70s feminist authors are now completely forgotten. Although she’s certainly still in Bell Jar territory here, just like her first book, you can even more easily this time see the dark, weird shades that her writing contained even then, and why even in these years she started picking up more and more super-fans who intensely loved her in the way one would love a cult leader (no, seriously). That simply increased more and more with each new book she put out throughout the rest of the ‘70s, where she converted more and more from an academic author to a commercially popular one; next, for example, we’ll be looking at 1976’s Lady Oracle, which very similarly to John Irving’s The World According to Garp from these same years is a metafictional tale, about a popular author whose real life is actually much weirder than the stories they write. I promise, it won’t take another five years next time! Margaret Atwood books being reviewed for this series: The Edible Woman (1969) | Surfacing (1972) | Lady Oracle (1976) | Life Before Man (1979) | Bodily Harm (1981) | The Handmaid's Tale (1985) | Cat's Eye (1988) | The Robber Bride (1993) | Alias Grace (1996) | The Blind Assassin (2000) | Oryx and Cake (2003) | The Penelopiad (2005) | The Year of the Flood (2009) | MaddAddam (2013) | The Heart Goes Last (2015) | Hag-Seed (2016) | The Testaments (2019) ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
not set
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Oct 03, 2024
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Oct 03, 2024
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Paperback
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0374602638
| 9780374602635
| 0374602638
| 3.93
| 175,114
| Sep 24, 2024
| Sep 24, 2024
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2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for t
2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for the first time right in a row, so that I could get caught up on why she’s such the big Indie Lit Brooklyn NPR It Girl these days; and while I only loved the first book but disliked the other two, I did vow that I would at least continue to read her next one as well, because I liked the first book so much that I’ve been willing to cut her a lot of slack. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t even make it all the way through that next one now that it’s finally upon us, 2024’s Intermezzo which was just released a week or two before I’m originally posting this, so my willingness to check out any of her new work in the future is now starting to drop precipitously low. I suppose it will be satisfying to those who are looking exactly for this kind of book, but I gotta admit that it’s just not my cup of tea -- rambling, precious domestic dramas about the human condition where almost nothing of note actually happens, in which middle-class intellectuals are gently miserable mostly from their own deliberate behavior, written in an overly pretentious style full of incomplete sentences and no quotation marks around dialogue, exactly like the MFAer both she and the most fervent of her fanbase are. I got through the first ten percent, but found it so tedious that I then did my usual thing in that situation and skipped straight to the last ten percent, to see if there’s anything there so intriguing that it will convince me to change my mind and go back and read the full thing; but there wasn’t. (A little tip: If you read the first ten percent of a book and then skip straight to the last ten percent and you can still make complete, perfect sense out of what’s going on, that’s a book whose inner 80 percent is not worth your time.) So that’s it, Rooney! I got 136 ebooks currently on my Kindle Oasis, so I don’t got time to hang in there with a book I immediately grew tedious of right from the start (ugh, so many incomplete sentences masquerading as “personal style,” right from the very first page), so it’s quickly on to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing beginning tomorrow! Sorry, authors of the world, but that’s just the way it is! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 27, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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0802123457
| 9780802123459
| 0802123457
| 4.01
| 128,446
| Apr 02, 2015
| Apr 07, 2015
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2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of
2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of it. Although technically his debut novel, there are a lot of things about author Viet Thanh Nguyen that make it easier to understand why it had such a phenomenal amount of success for a first book (including winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize); for one thing, he actually has a PhD in creative writing and was already a popular and famous professor at the University of Southern California (and a guest professor at Harvard) before writing this, and had also already been writing short nonfiction pieces regularly for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly on cultural and political issues related to him being a Vietnamese immigrant whose family fled the country during the civil war there in the 1960s and ‘70s, which also doubled as a Cold War proxy battle between the US (who supported and sunk billions of dollars into the southern army) and the Soviet Union (who did the same thing with the northern army, which famously ended up winning the war). That’s what this novel is about as well, interestingly told not through the filter of any American soldiers (the viewpoint of almost 100% of every other book and movie ever made in the US about the war), but instead using a double-agent who ends up emigrating to California after the fall of Saigon to take a sweeping look at how the Vietnamese themselves dealt with the massive, complicated after-effects of the war, including over a decade of brutal Maoist-style re-education camps for the southerners who lost but couldn’t get out of the country in time. That’s all very interesting, and unlike most books I give up on, I actually made it halfway through The Sympathizer (or close to 250 pages) before finally stopping; but Nguyen’s PhD bona fides just finally did me in, and his habit of (to paraphrase “The Simpsons”) taking forever to say nothing, until I had finally had just one too many page-long run-on paragraphs of tedium and gave up in frustration. However, I did at least achieve my goal, which was to get a sense of the book and its writing before watching the television series based on it; and that for sure I’ll be doing, because this is a really fascinating story, told from a unique perspective that most of us Americans have never really gotten to see regarding this infamous black stain in America’s history, essentially the first military conflict the US ever lost in its entire history, beginning a downward spiral that many argue we’re just now finally seeing bottom out into the collapse of our country fifty years later. If you can take the hoity-toity prose style, it’s well worth your time; or you can just be like me and watch the streaming adaptation instead. ...more |
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not set
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May 2024
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May 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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0385549970
| 9780385549974
| 0385549970
| 3.85
| 3,255
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entra
2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “true” to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokes” are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes. And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not white”); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing up” his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?”); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself. But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions. And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background. Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. That’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away. But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villain” story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-hero” in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel culture” that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years. It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the year” list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
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Apr 20, 2024
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 113,477
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friends’ parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swiss” (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,” by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. That’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. That’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. That’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Year” list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250786215
| 9781250786210
| 1250786215
| 3.81
| 35,293
| Mar 05, 2024
| Mar 05, 2024
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2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of ang
2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of angry comments. I’d tell you more, but...well, you know.
...more
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1
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not set
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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Hardcover
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0300093055
| 9780300093056
| 0300093055
| 4.05
| 41,944
| 1956
| Mar 01, 2002
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Dama
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Damascus (my review), then remembering that I had always meant to sit down and read his most famous plays, after doing so a decade ago with his peer Tennessee Williams after my brother moved to New Orleans and I started making regular visits there myself. Written in 1939 but not publicly premiered until 1956, right after his death (thankfully betraying his original wishes to not have it produced until 25 years after his death, in 1978), I'm simply not going to have as much to say about Long Day's Journey Into Night than I did about his other magnum opus, The Iceman Cometh (my review), because there's simply not as much to say; smaller in scope than the other play, it's the story of a single middle-class family over the course of a single 16-hour working day, as they start the morning with the kind of bland, pleasant interactions you would expect from such a family, but by midnight have turned into a bunch of screaming, irrational monsters clawing at each other's throats, greatly fueled by an entire day and evening of substance abuse (alcohol in the case of the father and two grown sons, morphine in the case of the mother). This makes it much clearer than Iceman why O'Neill is considered one of the three founders of American Modernist drama, along with Williams and their mutual peer Arthur Miller; because much like Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miller's Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey primarily concerns itself with a deeply dysfunctional middle-class family, one which will never be able to solve its problems because the family members are incapable of acknowledging that they have a problem in the first place, and are too much of weak moral cowards to ever be able to directly confront their own dysfunctional behavior and bring a stop to it. And all three of these plays came out right in the middle of the post-war Mid-Century-Modernist period of the 1940s and '50s, when an ascendent American military-industrial complex was attempting to sell the idea to a war-weary, shell-shocked American public that the concept of the bland "nuclear family" was actually the pinnacle of enlightened, civilized society, as most notoriously seen in the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, which represented one of these post-war nuclear families in its perfect ur-form. Now, don't get me wrong, decades of data have now conclusively proved that a society full of bland, happy middle-class families really does prevent the rise of radical politics and its inevitable degradation into violent authoritarianism (either fascism from the far-right or communism from the far-left), as we're unfortunately seeing in our own age, when the rapid disappearance of the middle class has left us with a country with no other choices left but the MAGAs or the Wokes, essentially the Hitler and Stalin of our own times; in fact, business guru Peter Drucker was expressly preaching this message in all his early books from these same 1950s years (but for more, see my review of his classic The End of Economic Man), and he turned out to be exactly right, which is what made him such a hugely influential figure in post-war politics and economics. But there are three big problems with this theory, which not by coincidence are the exact three problems addressed in these plays, which is why they were so passionately loved by 1950s audiences: being a bland middle-classer is a soul-killing experience; such a society tends to turn conformity and a rigid adherence to rules into an all-holy religion; and most importantly, sometimes it simply doesn't work, and you can do all the things society tells you to do in order to be happy and prosperous and still end up a miserable failure, the exact subject of Death of a Salesman, which is why Miller's play is far and away the most powerful and successful of all three of these. As much as a post-Holocaust American society wanted to believe in the power of the bland middle-class, they were smart enough to be able to sniff out the bullshit that often lies underneath this pretty fairytale; and that makes it easy to see why they went so crazy for plays like these when they first came out, because all of them take the unspoken anxiety about post-war promises and makes them explicit, a rightly nagging worry that fixing the world after a planet-destroying war was going to be a lot more complicated than simply giving the Beaver a stern talking-to. Like with the other plays, that makes Long Day's Journey much more interesting now as a historical document than as a contemporary piece of drama to be enjoyed for simple pleasure; but as a historical document, it's a fascinating one, a brilliant record of the exact things the entirety of American society was worrying about in these years, which makes it all the more astounding that it's actually an autobiographical play based on the relationships his real family members had with each other during O'Neill's youth in the 1910s (thus explaining why he didn't want the play produced until long after the death of everyone who knew his family). It should be read with this mindset, that it's no longer exactly a powerful story unto itself (like Williams and Miller, there's an awful lot of stagey melodrama and other "THEATAAHHHH!!!!" moments going on here, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five), but rather a powerful reminder of just how shaky American society was in the years after the war, when everyone agreed that they never wanted another Hitler and Stalin again, but didn't quite yet know what would replace them. ...more |
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2
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not set
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Mar 08, 2024
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Mar 08, 2024
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Paperback
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0300117434
| 9780300117431
| 0300117434
| 3.90
| 9,964
| Jan 01, 1946
| Aug 28, 2006
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this. It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room." It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize. But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time. That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then! But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation. It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash." But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence! See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character. And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more |
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed
2024 reads, #12. I mentioned a few months ago how I had recently heard from writer Joshua Mohr, one of the indie-lit artists of the 2010s I championed back in my own indie-lit days. Of course, it's been a while since my own indie-lit days, and I learned then that Mohr has actually published an additional three books since I first lost track of him; so after first tackling his equal parts hilarious and harrowing memoir about being a reckless drug addict in 1990s San Francisco, 2021's Model Citizen (my review), I decided to go all the way back to the oldest book of his I missed the first time around, 2011's Damascus, put out by the admirable indie press Two Dollar Radio ("admirable" = "one of the only indie presses of the 2010s to have its shit together enough to still be open in the 2020s"), the first of Mohr's novels to start getting him press and notice from the mainstream world (I believe it's his first book to get reviewed by the New York Times, for example, who called it "Beat-poet cool"), eventually leading to his current position in the roster of the storied mainstream press Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Unfortunately for Mohr, the type of novel he's written here was to fall profoundly out of favor during the rise of the #MeToo movement just a few years after this was originally published; written in the style of Charles Bukowski, it's about a young straight white man who owns a dive bar in the early-2000s Mission District of San Francisco, mostly as an excuse to feed his alcoholism, with Mohr using the milieu to tell a series of interconnecting stories about the lumpen proletarians who count as the bar's barely surviving regulars, giving us moments of sublime poetry that shine through the endless pile of shit, grime and semen that mostly makes up the tales in this book. Of course, as a fellow straight white male who spent a lot of his twenties exactly in these kinds of venues, I loved the book; and I'd also argue that this novel is actually much more similar to Eugene O'Neill than Bukowski, and in fact will strongly remind people who are familiar with it with the former's crowning achievement, 1946's The Iceman Cometh, in that this is not just stories about noble but terminal drunks (Bukowski's forte) but about terminal drunks who aspire for something more than this, but whose own moral cowardice gets in the way of them ever doing the right thing, a topic that O'Neill made an entire Putlizer- and Nobel-winning career out of. That said, I understand why these kinds of "tortured straight white male alcoholic is actually the greatest hero in history" stories have fallen profoundly out of favor in the 13 years since Mohr first wrote this, and so I'm happy to acknowledge that this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and can even partially agree when people react to books like these anymore with an angry sigh and a terse declaration that "that Bukowski shit" isn't for them. I get that, and I'm happy to wait patiently until the Woke Generation's kids are in their twenties, at which point they'll rebel against their own parents and suddenly these kinds of stories will be hot yet again, just in time for me to be a hip and wise grandpa; but until then, if you're ready to go against the grain and actually embrace a story about a bunch of white male assholes who should know better but simply don't, this is a great example of it to pick up, a book that many will find both deeply relatable and horrifically cringe-worthy in equal measures. If that sounds to you like the compliment I mean for it to be, then by all means pick this up; but if it simply sounds like an insult, probably best to stay far away from this short, delightfully nasty book. ...more |
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
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| 3.89
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2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professio
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "Jack!" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's Karen from Will & Grace). Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it. ...more |
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| 3.77
| 2,478
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2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels
2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels I can get my hands on that share the "what if" concept of the Nazis actually winning World War Two. I have to admit, though, that my main interest in this subject is in finding action-adventure thrillers set in this world, very similar to Robert Harris' Fatherland (a murder mystery set in a mid-1960s Berlin full of skinny-tie-wearing Nazis), and that Daniel Quinn's After Dachau is most certainly not this kind of alt-history novel, but rather a slow and boring academic character drama that uses this alt-history setting merely as a gimmick to instead share the pedantic and platitude-filled message of "WHITE PEOPLE BAD!!!!," a particularly popular type of academic novel in the late 1990s when this was first written. Ostensibly it's the story of an employee at a nonprofit in the early 2000s devoted to tracking down as many verified cases as possible of true reincarnation, a career that has so far been almost entirely filled with liars, cranks and con artists, and the story itself hinges around a person he meets who seems to have really gone through a reincarnation, supposedly as first a black woman in the 1940s. It's only then, though, that we discover the big gimmick behind this story -- that it's actually set in the year 4000 AD by our own calendar, that the world reset the calendar back to 0 after the Nazis conquered the planet in 1945 (after the decisive Battle of Dachau that gives this book its name), and that in the two thousand years since, the planet of white people who eventually became the global Nazi Party has managed to successfully kill every non-white person who ever existed, so thoroughly and so long ago that people in 4000 AD now generally believe that people of color never actually existed, and instead were fanciful inventions of fantasy authors like elves, dwarves and trolls are. That's an interesting concept, I admit; but like so many badly written alt-history novels, Quinn's book here is all concept and no plot, with the storyline being basically a 300-page investigation to eventually learn the premise I just mentioned above, then with the story suddenly ending once he learns this information. Instead, the whole thing seems to just be an exercise in reminding people that white people are shit, that they will kill every person of color on the planet if ever given the opportunity to do so, and...uh, the end. That will have its fans, I'm sure (looking up his Wikipedia page now, I can see that Quinn is well known for his radical liberal politics, and I'm sure the usual MFA/NPR crowd ate this book up when it first came out); but as someone who is looking for "Nazis Win The War" alt-history books primarily to read genre thrillers, this snoozer fell flat on its face for me, a book I read the first 50 pages of and then skipped straight to the last chapter when I could see how molasses-slow the story was going to be. Fellow alt-history nerds will want to take all this into serious consideration when deciding whether or not to read the book themselves. ...more |
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| 4.29
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| 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift co
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift copy of his newest book, the absurdist fairytale Farsickness that he co-wrote with his small daughter during the pandemic. That made me remember that I had lost touch with Mohr's career ever since my small press closed in the late 2010s, after being so impressed with his first couple of books on the exquisite small publisher Two Dollar Radio; and after scanning through his bibliography, I realized that what I really wanted to read next of his was a memoir he published just recently in 2021 called Model Citizen, concerning his time as a drug and alcohol addict and general lover of chaos back during his youth in the gentrifying '90s Mission district of San Francisco. I just got done with it this week, and it's as powerful as you would expect from someone who's made an entire career now out of stories about the world's druggies, petty criminals, and other lumpen proletarians; for it turns out that Mohr's real life is very similar to the sometimes desperate lives of his characters, with the hipster scene of the '90s Bay Area being not particularly helpful to this son of an alcoholic who had already started drinking himself by the age of ten, and who by his thirties was now regularly injecting fentanyl and ketamine, and who purposely cultivated chaos-embracing friends who would encourage him to do things like mug drunk guys just for kicks, or have contests over who could shoot more staples into their skin without flinching after getting good and fucked up. This is easily the best part of the book, the unflinching and unsentimental way he approaches his years of darkness, neither condemning the behavior nor Tarantino-glorifying it, but simply acknowledging that this is what his life used to be, and that in some ways it was like this precisely because this is the way the entire Bay Area artistic community was back in those years, a sort of "late-stage Byronism" of doomed romantic artists that Generation X perfected in a way no other generation had, until the next young generation entirely rejected it (like they have with most Generation X things) and now treasure their artistic lives of health, wellness, earnestness and financial security. Of course, this being Mohr, the book is also incredibly insightful as well, which in good MFA style is centered around a compelling framing device that just naturally makes you want to learn more; namely, after being sober for years, now married and with a toddler child, he discovers that the occasional moments of physical numbness he sometimes experienced while an addict were actually a series of strokes he didn't realize he was having, and that doctors have now determined that he has a hole in his heart (talk about MFA symbolism!) that will require surgery to correct, and that they plan on knocking him out using the exact same fentanyl he used to be addicted to. Will this "freelapse" eventually knock him off the wagon again? Will his love for his infant daughter be enough to keep him on the straight and narrow? Mohr uses the event as basically an excuse to do a "plain-language Proust" digression-filled look back at his entire life, examine the crippling self-esteem issues from his damaging childhood that led to the breakup of his first marriage and the constant doubts he has about his second, and pontificate in a clever, knowing way about how actual sobriety stories often don't fit the neat, tidy three-act structure that Hollywood wants them to when making inspirational Oscarbait films about the subject. And indeed, although this book made me laugh out loud sometimes, unnervingly see myself at other points (I was part of Chicago's arts community in these same years, which shared a lot of the same dysfunctions as San Francisco's), and just plain ol' openly weep in the middle of public cafes at yet other moments (prompting all the people around me to check out what book exactly I was reading that had moved me to such an extent -- you're welcome, Josh), what I liked and appreciated the most about this book is that Mohr has the courage to make it a messy story, one that doesn't hit the usual three-act beats and that he refuses to force into that pattern, which I bet he was under an immense pressure to do, since this was his first of his then five books to actually come out on a mainstream press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), after having the usual indie career before this of prestigious but tiny destinations like Two Dollar Radio and Soft Skull. That makes the book much more interesting than usual, which makes it much better than usual, and I was really glad to see Mohr make such a strong commitment to telling the story he knew he needed to tell, even at the expense of the feel-good wrap-up most people are looking for when they read clean-and-sober books like these. As he demonstrates by the end of the book, even the term "clean and sober story" is a misnomer in the first place, one that leads to manipulative memoirs instead of intellectually honest ones, after his freelapse makes him realize with a lot of terror just how close all addicts are all the time to their head sinking below the water's surface yet again; and that makes for a much more interesting and enjoyable read than simply another Lifetime movie told the same exact way for the ten thousandth time again. Unfortunately, the end kind of falters a bit, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 from me; it becomes pretty clear in the last third that Mohr simply ran out of things to say, so he starts glomming on more and more to the typical infuriating MFA tricks at that point, especially his habit of writing very artsy run-on sentences when he doesn't have much of a point to make. Or sometimes single paragraphs that last for two or three pages, which like all three-page single paragraphs you can entirely skip over without missing even the tiniest important thing to the story. (Also, Mohr very badly and very often makes both of the general mistakes about storytelling that almost all humans know, whether or not they're writers themselves -- that no one wants to hear about the dream you had last night, and no one besides you is interested in the randomly adorable thing your kid did yesterday, stories of which start taking up more and more and more and more and more of the book's final third.) That said, these problems weren't enough to stop me from loving the book, just like I've loved everything of Mohr's I've now read (think of my 4 stars here at Goodreads as actually more like 4 and a half stars, if I could award half-stars here); and that's made me realize that I have some backlog reading to do now, in that Mohr has actually put out another three books between my early years as a reviewer and now, and I want to read them all. Next up will be his 2011 Damascus, the novel that first started getting him mainstream notice and that began lifting him out of the indie-lit ghetto, so I hope you'll join me here again in early 2024 for that. For now, though, I can confidently state that this will be making my "2023 best reads of the year" report I'll be sharing on the social network Mastodon at the end of December. If you can stand queasy stories, pick it up with no delay. ...more |
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2023 reads, #56. So I have to confess right away, Steve Saroff's "MFA* crime thriller" Paper Targets is the type of book I just naturally don't care f
2023 reads, #56. So I have to confess right away, Steve Saroff's "MFA* crime thriller" Paper Targets is the type of book I just naturally don't care for, and that I likely wouldn't have done a review or even read it at all if the publisher hadn't specifically asked me to; so that makes my writeup today problematic, because the very things that its fans will love about the book are the exact same things I sometimes intensely disliked, and so in many ways fans of this book should pretty much assume the opposite of whatever I say here, which is a weird thing to have to admit at the start of a book review. For one good example, this being an MFA crime thriller instead of a pulp crime thriller, Saroff only carefully and rarely doles out the actual crimes and thrills, as if they're precious gems that are costing him thousands of dollars every time he puts one in; then he surrounds these little pulpy nuggets with just pages upon pages of overwritten prose describing nothing happening (get ready for entire chapters of people driving down abandoned highways and staring at mountains), which as someone who greatly prefers plot development over character development is simply not my cup of tea, although with it easy for me to admit that others will like this kind of prose a whole lot more than me. [*And to be as fair as I can, after reading Saroff's bio I don't think he actually has an MFA; it's just that this novel reads like one that was written by someone who has an MFA. But Saroff hangs out in that Montana academic writing community I've been obsessed with for a long time, and in fact was the co-creator of one of the most popular pieces of academic literary software that exists, the lit-mag submission app Submittable, which would easily explain why he might not have an MFA himself but ended up writing a book that feels on every page like he does.] Also, I have to confess that I was just really uncomfortable with the protagonist's love interest being a first-generation Asian immigrant who, despite apparently having studied English for years and years at the point we meet her, still speaks in the kind of barely understandable (but certainly artsy) kind of English you would expect more from a small child who's just started learning the language, and whose behavior is pretty much entirely defined by the kinds of bizarre random nonsensical acts you might expect from a space alien who's never actually interacted with humans before, which added together makes her come off as a mentally challenged woman-child whose strangely toddler-like yet sometimes highly sexual demeanor simply feels icky when coming from the laptop of a late-middle-aged straight white male like Saroff. And she's a huge part of this book, so that's something else that made it difficult for me to really get into this. Ultimately I ended up finishing and enjoying this book, but there were just so many little problems that kept adding up more and more, the farther I went along. Like, for a book with the literal subtitle "Art can be murder," there's not actually very much art in it (instead, it's mostly about white-collar criminals who use computer code in a startup app in order to take advantage of a multinational corporation that has recently acquired the app, which means the subtitle should actually be more like "Ruby On Rails can be murder"); and I never did understand why the protagonist ever agreed to participate in the white-collar crime to begin with, given that at least half a dozen times in this book he claims that he doesn't care about money or power, and wants nothing more than to go back to being the blue-collar drifter he was in his twenties; then I further didn't understand why he kept getting so shocked when, after the baddies threatened to harm his friends if he didn't continue helping them commit their white-collar crime, he stopped helping them and they indeed hurt his friends (I mean, c'mon, if you're going to write a crime thriller, give me a hero who's at least a little street-smart); plus, as someone who now edits books full-time for a living, it drove me a little crazy to come across what I considered an unacceptably high number of spelling mistakes in this book, the kind of stuff that can be rather easily caught by a human but not by software such as Grammarly ("council" instead of "counsel," "cubical" instead of "cubicle," etc.), which leads me to believe that this is exactly what they did, just ran the manuscript through Grammarly and then slapped a cover on it, which always disappoints me. Without all these problems, most of which occur in the second half of the book, I would normally give a novel like this three stars; but with all these problems, I really have no other choice but to knock it down to two stars, something I hate doing to indie presses but unfortunately is my honest assessment here. There will be fans of this book, and I encourage you to check it out if what I've described sounds like it'll be up your alley; but you'll have to work hard to be a fan in this case, and be ready to forgive the author for what I considered too many problems for me to be a fan myself. Keep it all in mind when checking it out yourself. ...more |
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0063251922
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2023 reads, #51. DID NOT FINISH. This entire book is written in the vernacular of a poor Southern dialect which is...not for me. Gave up on this on pa
2023 reads, #51. DID NOT FINISH. This entire book is written in the vernacular of a poor Southern dialect which is...not for me. Gave up on this on page 2, which has to be a new record for me and Pulitzer winners.
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0593420314
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| 3.82
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**spoiler alert** 2023 reads, #50. DID NOT FINISH. I knew I was in trouble with Hernan Diaz's new Pulitzer winner Trust literally around page 5 or 10,
**spoiler alert** 2023 reads, #50. DID NOT FINISH. I knew I was in trouble with Hernan Diaz's new Pulitzer winner Trust literally around page 5 or 10, when the narrator mentioned that the reason our book's protagonist (Gilded Age tycoon Benjamin Rask) enjoys investing because it allows him to have fun and accomplish his goals without having to worry about how his actions affect the "little people" he can't stand being around. That sent up a big signal flare that this was going to be an RPB novel, by which of course I mean a "RICH PEOPLE BAD!!!" novel, which I have to admit right away I can't stand. I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree that rich people are bad; but that's an insight any random five-year-old child can give me, and not something I would expect from a book that's just won the US's most prestigious literary award (or, well, in this case co-won it with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which I'll be reading next). Unfortunately, though, that's the level of discourse we have in our country anymore, where the radical wings of both political parties have completely taken over our national culture by now, and so we literally now hear such cartoonish things in public as one side declaring, "Slavery is bad!," mostly because the other side is so reactionary, they immediately respond with, "No it's not! Slavery is good! Fuck you, snowflake! SLAVERY NOW, CUCK!!!" I acknowledge (even if I don't like it) that such troglodytes and mouth-breathers have completely hijacked the tattered remnants of what used to be called "intellectual discourse" in this country; but that's why I turn to literary fiction in these times, because that's supposed to be one of the few places left in the US where we can actually have nuanced, complex, sophisticated conversations about the issues affecting society in any given year. But man, if they're now giving out Pulitzers to "RICH PEOPLE BAD!!!" novels, we're all fucked, and surely a violent and protracted Civil War II ("This Time It's Personal") is just around the corner. To be as fair as I can, at least Diaz attempts a clever structure to his RPB story, which I suspect is the main reason it won the Pulitzer; it's only the first quarter of the book that's written in the style of an Edith Wharton novel, supposedly published during the Great Depression, while part two is a section of an autobiography by the supposed real person behind this supposed fictional novel (the fictional-to-us but real-to-this-universe Andrew Bevel), talking about what a great guy he is and how the novel totally gets things wrong, while part three is a memoir by the woman hired to write that autobiography, revealing that Bevel's actually much more of a monster than either book makes it seem, while the concluding part four is an excerpt from the private journals of Bevel's wife, revealing that no, seriously, Bevel's a serious monster, I'm not kidding, because did I mention that RICH PEOPLE BAD???!!!!!1! That's clever, I admit, which is why I stuck in there with this book for as long as I did; but ultimately none of these four sections do anything but continue to make the RPB case over and over, with less and less subtlety with each passing page, until by the end we're watching Bevel cooking and eating puppies in front of their child owners while giving an evil cackle and asking for his special ketchup made out of human tears and blood (or at least presumably -- I didn't actually make it that far). That's simply not for me, and in an ideal world it wouldn't be for you either; but in a world that condemns billionaires in one breath and then in the very next breath makes Succession literally the most watched television show in the country, I'm not holding out hope that things will change anytime soon. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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Hardcover
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0316404055
| 9780316404051
| 0316404055
| 3.93
| 11,884
| Jan 01, 1963
| Aug 05, 2014
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2023 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) Pulp author Jim Thompson is one of the few writers in this Great Completist Challenge I'm not reading in chronological order; and that's because I only started reading him in the first place to read the specific novel Pop. 1280 from late in his career, then got mostly interested in reading the books that have been made into famous movies, such as After Dark, My Sweet and The Getaway. Today's title, 1963's The Grifters, is another one of these titles turned into Hollywood adaptations, but in this case I've actually seen the movie, in fact multiple times because of it being a favorite back in my twenties, making me accidentally a Thompson fan long before I was consciously aware that I was one. And how can a noir fan not love this book, I ask you? A nasty, nasty little tale about three petty con artists and the various sick, twisted ways they all use each other and are used by the others in return, it's both dark as fuck and filled with fascinating, quirky, easily rootable characters, doing sometimes despicable things but always in a way we eventually seem to forgive, or at least enough that we remain interested in seeing what eventually happens to them. That's really what makes Thompson so superlative in this genre, I'm quickly learning now that I'm getting more and more of his titles under my belt; the pulp genre relies on prurience, on transgression, not just people being bad but doing so in a way that legitimately shocks and disturbs, and Thompson's as good as it gets when it comes to that specific subject, even if his actual prose skills sometimes remain at just the pedestrian level for big chunks of his books. (Let's not forget, he was an unchecked alcoholic cranking out a book every three months just to make ends meet, so there's a reason he never really rose to the level of more disciplined and measured peers.) As seen in his books, the humans of the Thompsonverse are as prurient as they come, not hesitating even a moment over behaving in the most cruel, decadent, inhumane ways a person even can, a long wallow in the dark and deep end of the moral pool for those who want their stories as dark and bleak as a moonless night in a Lovecraftian forest; and that's exactly what we noir fans want, a face-first plunge into the darkness, tied to a clever plot and a spare, sometimes poetic prose style. Thompson excels at that here, which is what makes him like crack to a genre fan, by which I mean they'll easily forgive him his other literary faults since he so intensely delivers the thing that actually gets them high. So, just to get it out of the way, I think next I'll take on arguably the most well-known title from Thompson's career, 1952's indelible The Killer Inside Me, recently made into an amazing movie by the always excellent Michael Winterbottom. In fact, I've seen that movie already, so I know the novel's bound to be a disappointment, because I'll already know so much of the story in advance; but still, if this is to be a true completist read, I do need to get this one under my belt as well, especially since I'm sure there will be at least small changes between the book and movie that are worth noting and examining. After that, then, probably back to one of his early middling novels, back when he was trying to be a New Deal-funded social-realist "serious" writer like Steinbeck; next on the list for those is 1946's Heed the Thunder. Talk with you again about those soon! Jim Thompson books included in this review series: Now and On Earth (1942) | Heed the Thunder (1946) | Nothing More than Murder (1949) | The Killer Inside Me (1952) | Cropper's Cabin (1952) | Recoil (1953) | The Alcoholics (1953) | Savage Night (1953) | Bad Boy (1953) | The Criminal (1953) | The Nothing Man (1954) | The Golden Gizmo (1954) | Roughneck (1954) | A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) | A Hell of a Woman (1954) | After Dark, My Sweet (1955) | The Kill-Off (1957) | Wild Town (1957) | The Getaway (1958) | The Transgressors (1961) | The Grifters (1963) | Pop. 1280 (1964) | Texas by the Tail (1965) | South of Heaven (1967) | Child of Rage (1972) | King Blood (1973) | The Rip-Off (1989) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 13, 2023
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May 13, 2023
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Paperback
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0374282277
| 9780374282271
| 0374282277
| 3.80
| 91
| Mar 14, 2023
| Mar 14, 2023
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2023 reads, #46. DID NOT FINISH. I'm not sure why I was under this impression, given that I just read its synopsis again and realized it doesn't descr
2023 reads, #46. DID NOT FINISH. I'm not sure why I was under this impression, given that I just read its synopsis again and realized it doesn't describe this book that way at all, but when I first heard about Laura Adamczyk's Island City and decided to put it on reserve at the Chicago Public Library, I thought it was going to be a crime noir story. Turns out, though, it's just another Dreary Plotless MFA Novel, about a woman whose father was an alcoholic who eventually got Alzheimer's, who's now a middle-aged alcoholic herself who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's as well, and is recounting her story to an unnamed bartender in a dive bar in the small town where she grew up. That'll be fine for people who are into those kinds of books, but I'm not one of them, so after 50 pages I ended up giving up rather quickly. If you don't like the absolute slowest titles of the already glacially slow genre known as "literary fiction," then you should stay away as well.
...more
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Notes are private!
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not set
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Apr 29, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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my rating |
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4.06
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Nov 18, 2024
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Nov 18, 2024
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4.00
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it was amazing
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Oct 21, 2024
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Oct 21, 2024
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3.45
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it was amazing
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Oct 03, 2024
not set
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Oct 03, 2024
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3.93
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Sep 27, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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4.01
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May 2024
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May 01, 2024
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3.85
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it was amazing
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Apr 20, 2024
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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3.68
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it was amazing
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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3.81
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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4.05
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really liked it
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Mar 08, 2024
not set
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Mar 08, 2024
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3.90
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really liked it
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Mar 02, 2024
not set
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Mar 02, 2024
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3.98
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2024
not set
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Feb 10, 2024
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4.25
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
not set
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Jan 22, 2024
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3.89
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Jan 18, 2024
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Jan 18, 2024
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3.77
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Dec 18, 2023
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Dec 18, 2023
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4.29
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really liked it
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Oct 24, 2023
not set
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Oct 24, 2023
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4.16
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it was ok
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Jul 08, 2023
not set
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Jul 08, 2023
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4.48
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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3.82
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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3.93
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it was amazing
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May 13, 2023
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May 13, 2023
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3.80
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Apr 29, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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