EVERYBODY’S FOOL

by Richard Russo

496 pages, Knopf

Review by Anthony Barker

If you have escaped a meaningless life in a dying town in upstate New York, you might hate Richard Russo's latest novel, “Everybody's Fool”. Still, you'd have to laugh. That's how good a writer Russo is.

In this version of small town America, the characters from Russo's “Nobody's Fool” are ten years older, the men even more feckless, the women still grimly capable, still despairing (some of them in and out of the madhouse at Utica, and no wonder).

Like the Greeks at Ilium everyone is subject to the random torments of the Gods (these days, called 'luck'.) Sully, the unhero of 'Nobody's Fool' (played by Paul Newman in the movie version) has become rich through no virtue of his own, while the venal building contractor, Carl Roebuck (played by Bruce Willis) is now poor.

Otherwise they are the same as they were. Sully still a loiterer in life, hanging around, no use to his family, no longer appealing to his former lover. He's dying, and suffering (fleeting) regrets for the damage he has more-or-less unintentionally done, in his unintentional life.

Roebuck is also unchanged, an incompetent contractor, a chiseler and cheat, but now his ex-wife is gone, after taking all his money. He has remained behind in Bath, a city suffering from an inferiority complex. The mayor, a former academic (by definition, incompetent) has hired him to restore and repurpose an abandoned spa. The building is a relic of a previous era of hubris when Bath, whose springs dried up, tried to copy the success of nearby Schuyler Springs, a sparkling place where tourists 'take the waters', watch harness racing, and do whatever the just must do in heaven.

It is somehow reassuring to find Sully and Roebuck still at it, although, as in real life, the heroes of one story are the subplot of another.

This story belongs to Police Chief Douglas Raymer, a man who ran for office on the humiliating, misprinted slogan, “We're not happy until you're not happy.” He is grieving the death of his wife Becka. In her haste to leave him last year she slipped on a throw rug and tumbled downstairs 'like a slinky'. He found her folded up on the bottom step, neck broken—together with a note urging him to forgive her and to try to 'be happy for us'.

He's possibly the only person in town who doesn't know which 'us' she meant.

He hopes to find out. An electronic garage door opener was found in her car—an opener for somebody else's garage. The problem for adulterers, in Bath as elsewhere, is not so much time and opportunity, as discovery. Small town neighbors are likely to recognize your car, notice that it's parked on the wrong street, and draw the correct conclusion. Solution: borrow your lover's garage door opener and dash inside when nobody's looking. 

But can the Chief of Police go around town trying the opener on everybody's garage? Not very dignified, maybe not even legal. And what good would it do? The right garage might not even be in Bath. The Chief's assistant, a typical Russo female, sensible, intelligent, sympathetic and devious, suggests Schuyler Springs. Alternatively, she says, the same opener might work on a dozen garages. Becka's dead, she says. Let her go. Get rid of the opener.

It's a dilemma, and dilemmas were never Chief Raymer's strong point, even before he was so depressed and confused. Did things get worse when he fainted at the funeral of the local Judge, falling into the grave, losing the opener under the judge's casket? Not really.

Did they get better when he persuaded Sully and Carl to dig up the grave to find it? Of course not, things always go from bad to worse in Bath.

There's lots more. There's an ex-con with impulse control issues, and a hand-printed list of people he needs to pay back—including BITCH (ex-wife), MAMA BITCH (former mother-in-law) N*GGER COP (Officer Jerome Bond, or as he likes to introduce himself, 'Bond... Jerome Bond') SULLY himself, and OLD WOMAN (a former teacher, ten years dead, who haunts the men in the story, by asking them to think).

There's Sully's friend 'Rub' – a man barely includible within the definition of human, yet filled with longing and devotion, and his counterpart, Sully's dog (cruelly, also named 'Rub') who may be the world's most disgusting canine.

There's murder and mayhem.

Any reader who has made the hard slog from Bath to Schuyler Springs might spend most of the book as confused as Chief Raymer. Not because you can't go home again—it's more a question of 'Why would you?'

Except ... it's so funny. 

INTELLIGENCE:

A Novel of the CIA

by Susan Hasler
320 pages, St. Martin’s Press

Review by Anthony Barker

‘Normal’ is a relative term. Heterocephalus glaber (the naked mole-rat) is a species almost too repulsive to contemplate. Hairless and misshapen, they spend their lives groping through deep tunnels, eating whatever tidbits they happen upon and having sex with any of their kind who do not bite back. They survive without much oxygen, and having evolved underground they may actually require the pressure of the surrounding earth to keep themselves from coming apart.

Susan Hasler’s book, Intelligence, brought them to mind.

Writing about intelligence agencies has evolved over the decades. The masterful James Bond was a figment the fifties and sixties. The dusty, professorial George Smiley, sifting through old records to detect past treachery, evokes the cynicism of the seventies and eighties. Hasler, a retired CIA analyst, shows us the dedication (and the frustration) of analysts searching for needles in haystacks of miscellaneous reports, trying to detect a terrorist plot.

Hasler calls her fictional agency ‘the Mines’, but the building they work in is surprisingly similar to that structure in Langley, Virginia which bears the ironic inscription, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ We can safely presume that the windowless cubicles, the miles of subterranean corridors, cramped conference rooms, claustrophobic security, and especially the irritable, paranoid and depressive personalities of the analysts, are a faithful representation of place and personnel.

No wonder. They are under immense pressure—pressure unrelieved since 9/11.

It need hardly be said that most of them are women—for whenever a tedious, low prestige job requires care and diligent attention to detail, most of the workers will be women. Nor need we add that their obtuse, hypocritical, manipulative bosses are mostly male.

And yet, while holding the moral high ground, the analysts feel guilty. They were implicitly blamed for the 9/11 debacle (‘massive intelligence failure’) and are certain to be blamed for the next one, no matter that they are working 15 hour days on the impossible task of predicting the future. They are neurotic, overstressed, sleepless. Their dreams are splattered with bodies. Unable to attend to their broken marriages and impaired children, they substitute co-dependent relationships with pet rabbits, possums and stray cats. It is not a pretty sight, and yet it seems plausible, and (sometimes) kind of funny.

I will not reveal the plot except to say that the author follows a developing terrorist attack through the viewpoints of team leader Madeleine James, PhD., and other members of her search team. Hasler also grants us an occasional glimpse into the brain of the jihadist. This makes for tense, fast moving chapters and keeps various sub-plots separate from the main story. The method works well given that the search involves different skills and personalities. 

I did not find Ms. Hasler’s writing about love or sex particularly persuasive. Only the most geriatric, inhibited, hypocritical, or otherwise unlikely characters seem to attempt it. But what do I know about love in Fairfax County? I’m going to give her a ‘pass’ on that as she writes so well about the procedures and problems of the intelligence community. And let’s be fair—no matter how much women boast about multi-tasking, it’s probably hard to pursue orgasms and mass murderers at the same time. 

SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT

by Robert Hellenga
342 pages, Bloomsbury USA

Review by A. J. Barker

In his latest novel, Snakewoman of Little Egypt, Robert Hellenga addresses (among other things) the subject of innocence. His protagonist, Professor Jackson Jones, is an anthropologist, an observer by temperament and training, passive, detached and uncritical—and on a downward curve. He is suffering from Lyme disease, and dreaming of a return to ‘Eden’, which he locates somewhere at the headwaters of the Nile. He did his field work there, years ago, among the Mbuti people, and his reputation rests (in part) on a popular memoir of his life among them.

If he is emotionally engaged with anything human it is the Mbuti—pygmies innocent of reading, writing or arithmetic—they have almost no politics, economics, or social hierarchy. Three or four hours of hunting and gathering a day provide everything they want. They haven’t heard of guilt or shame. Jones longs especially to see Sibaku, who for reasons of her own (curiosity? novelty?) picked him as her lover. Barely adult when she came to him, she is the mother of a daughter he has never seen. In his dreams his daughter calls him back to Africa. He’d like to go, but the Mbuti forests are a war zone and he is persona non grata.

Life at a Midwestern college is oddly similar to field work in Africa. He lives in an isolated house at the edge of a forest. A few hours of work a day provides for all his needs. Women come to him without his initiative. A former girl friend, Claire, now married to an Episcopal priest, pokes and prods at his life. She tries to fix him up, bringing him things he has not asked for (possible girl friends, stock market tips, adulterous occasions.) He is not unfriendly. He cooks for Father Ray and the proposed girl-friend, and later, on Claire’s motion, makes love to her (each of them thinking they are doing the other a favor.)

This rather tepid stew is stirred by the release from prison of Willa Fern Cochrane, a miner’s daughter married at 16 to a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher. She didn’t quite kill him, although she may regret it. According to Brother Earl, she was running around with other men (she says: ‘…and to tell the truth, he didn’t know the half of it.’) In a drunken rage he tests her innocence by forcing her to put her hand into a rattlesnake cage. If the snake didn’t bite she’d be innocent. The snake ignores her hand, but he pokes at the cage until it bites. The matter is settled, but Earl carelessly turns his back and, instead of shooting her, is shot himself. She is convicted when Earl (‘a respectable preacher’) tells the story differently.

Free after nearly six years, Willa Fern is determined to be happy. She renames herself, ‘Sunny’. She has earned her GED in prison. Her uncle Warren, the tenant of a small apartment over Jones’s garage, has enrolled her in college. Warren dies before she is released, but Jones has agreed to pick her up, and let her use the apartment for awhile. Claire invites herself along. Warren has left Sunny all his savings. She’s 35 years old, and a college freshman. She feels ‘rich’ and ‘new’. Her only problem is being married to Earl. Well… Claire might be a problem. She knows she shouldn’t be jealous of Claire—but still, she hadn’t expected another woman.

Jones tells her that Warren wanted him to ‘look after her’. She rebuffs the offer, “I don’t need anyone to look after me… But maybe you need someone to look after you.” He does indeed. Instead of moving to a dorm, she stays in the apartment and helps around the place. Not too much later, when out driving, she pulls into a motel. She asks, “You’re not going to turn me down, are you?” Once again, Jones accepts what is offered, but making love to Sunny is not a joyless reiteration. She is a new person—for her it is a new ‘first time’. Afterward she tells him, “It felt like my whole body was on fire… It was like being struck by lightning. It was a pot of raspberry jam boiling over…”

Jones’s joints begin to heal. He starts to take an interest in life, and in his career. His African field notes have been milked dry. He needs something new and different.

About this time Earl discovers that Sunny is out of prison. They’re still married and Earl is still mad. But now Sunny has Jones between her and evil—and just to be sure, she has him buy her a pistol. When Earl comes for her the pistol persuades him to be reasonable. Jones convinces Earl to agree to a divorce. Earl lets Jones study their religious exercises … and warns him not to turn his back on Sunny.

From this point the lives of Jones and Sunny, which so far had run parallel, begin to diverge. There are irritations. Claire seems to want something from Sunny, and remains a distant threat—the woman Jones should have loved. Over Sunny’s objections, Jones has begun studying Earl’s ‘Church of the Burning Bush’.

Sunny too has new interests. She is fascinated by her biology course, and by Professor Cramer, a demanding and dogmatic Darwinist, a kind of Anti-Earl. For Cramer, snakes are not incarnations of evil. They’re just a research subject. She likes this reductionist approach. He likes her enthusiasm for science, and her fearlessness. She becomes a student member of the herpetological society.

Christmas. Domestic irritations. Jones and Sunny disagree about how to celebrate. Claire moves into the garage apartment for a second try at novel writing.

New Year’s Eve, 2000. They hold a party. Sunny has a thrilling vision of herself as hostess, the first public acknowledgement of her relationship to Jones. She wears a French outfit she bought while shopping with Claire. It’s not a good choice. Her French teacher tells her the costume is out of season. Cramer scolds her, saying it looks ‘phony’ and ‘whorish’. Alone in the kitchen, she pours wine on the blouse, deliberately spoiling her outfit so she can change into something Cramer approves. Also, the dog eats the dessert, and Earl calls, worried about Y2K. He’d like them to get right with God.

February, the new term. Claire has finished a draft of her novel, Jones has written a grant application for his study of the Pentecostals. He tells Sunny he has tickets for a trip to France in June. She declines, preferring to go to a meeting of herpetologists in Baja. Jones is astonished. He had imagined proposing in Paris. He proposes then and there, but she replies, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Things have taken a bad turn. Sunny spends more and more time at the lab. She and Cramer are attaching radios to rattlesnakes, in effect transforming them from dangerous reptiles to data transmitters. Jones is going the other way. He returns more and more frequently to The Church of the Burning Bush—increasingly fascinated by snake symbolism, and drawn to snake handling. His Lyme disease, which had been better, begins to worsen.

There is always a lot to think about in a Hellenga novel. I don’t believe I have revealed too much. Still to come are the herpetological conference in Baja, Jones’s last encounter with the Pentecostals, an exciting murder trial, and much more. It’s all great stuff.

What’s not to like? Maybe the herpetological data dump—but I thought it was justifiable because it is interesting to Sunny, the budding scientist.

And I wasn’t much attracted to Professor Cramer. But I’m a guy. In his defense, he shows some initiative in love, handles his share of the logistics and doesn’t make unwarranted assumptions. Surely the largest (and most difficult) lesson in this story is that guys should not attempt to dictate what women can want, or believe, or do.

It’s always futile…

… and sometimes fatal.

RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE

by Donald McCaig
512 pages, St. Martin’s Press

Review by Anthony Barker

Is it strictly necessary to have read Gone With the Wind in order to review an “authorized” novel based thereon? I hope not, for like one of those guys testifying at the Watergate hearings, “I have no specific recollection of having done so.” Nor do I specifically recall not reading it. I have vivid impressions of the story, and I recall that Rhett ultimately didn’t give a damn, but they almost certainly weren’t from reading the book. The movie has become the book. Vivien Leigh will always be Scarlett, and Rhett will always look like Oil Can Harry. There’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Donald McCaig is a skilled novelist with a thorough knowledge of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I was reading his novel, Canaan, (wherein an interesting collection of characters were being moved by subtle increments toward the disaster at Little Big Horn) when I set it aside, temporarily, in order to see how he worked within the constraints of Ms. Mitchell’s “authorized version” of the Civil War—a story so iconic that angels should fear to tread upon it.

For the most part I liked Rhett Butler’s People—and I believe I liked it better than Gone With the Wind. Maybe it’s because RBP is a masculine book. It isn’t so much a difference in the amount of swash or buckle, but in point of view. For example, Scarlett appears in her green velvet gown, but the dress is not symbolic of her determination, renewal and growth. It’s just a dress—a passing glance at a good-looking woman dressed in green.

Rhett’s story is central, and we learn here (in case you wondered when you read GWtW) how his relationship to an over-bearing father, and various other events before and during the war, made him more realistic about the South’s prospects and more cynical about its “ideals”. He is portrayed, here, as dubious of the planter aristocracy, quite sympathetic to slaves and free blacks (one of whom becomes the captain of his blockade running steamship.) Happily, he has not been neutered so far as to conform to 2010 standards of political correctness. He breaks both Confederate and Federal laws, he duels, he mocks Scarlett, he laughs at Ashley, he runs blockades in an over-powered steam vessel (some good scenes there) he’s a war profiteer, spends time in jail, owns and operates a whore house, etc. He not only drinks to excess… he smokes. All jolly good fun. Perhaps his busy life makes his love for Scarlett seem somewhat unlikely, but it is plausibly portrayed as the obsession of an older, worldly man for a much younger, almost uneducated, country girl who shares some of his buccaneer qualities.

Did GWtW conclude with their marriage—or did the ‘happily ever after’ part follow from his not giving a damn? I don’t remember. Maybe I never knew. In McCaig’s version they marry. They have a little girl (a charmingly innocent reiteration of Scarlett.) Did Ms. Mitchell’s Rhett have a sister Rosemary? Again, I don’t remember—in McCaig’s version he does (the only woman he cares about until he meets Scarlett.) There are many such differences of detail and point of view, but the interactions of Scarlett and Rhett follow the scenarios of GWtW—as is to be expected in an “authorized” novel using somebody else’s characters.

Just as it is interesting to see how different poets handle a standard form, part of the interest of McCaig’s book lies in the fact that it is not a “sequel” but a separate novel, whose time-frame and characters overlap GWtW. It is perfectly readable on its own. Of course it would not have been written (or not in this particular form) if GWtW had never been written, but by focusing on salty Rhett instead of sugary Scarlett, a modern reader can stay up late and read big chunks, without suffering a hyperglycemic coma.

I’ll get back to Canaan next week.

IMPULSE AND INITIATIVE

by ‘Abigail Reynolds’ (pseudonym)
390 pages, Sourcebooks, Inc.

Review (plus a teaser for another book) by A. J. Barker

My wife has gone to Seattle this week, to supervise our grandchildren—a task she finds easier (and more rewarding) than supervising me. In her absence I have eaten bacon twice and ice cream three times (once for breakfast.) This is a geriatric form of infidelity. I have also read two more-or-less trashy, more-or-less Jane Austen-ish books.

As they used to say in New Orleans, ‘Let the good times roll!’

I will pass over Under Enemy Colors, a slightly Austen-ish (via Patrick O’Brian) sea saga by the ambiguously named ‘Sean’ or ‘Thomas’ Russell (S. Thomas Russell on the cover, but Sean Russell to our local librarians.) It has the usual tyrannical Captain, and the heroic First Lieutenant who saves the ship, saves the day and is (finally) rewarded with an independent command. There is also an acerbic surgeon who comes out of the ‘orlop’ from time to time to explain things. Russell does a nice job. O’Brian readers may find it a bit milk and watery. Never mind. They’re beating up Napoleon. That’s the main thing.

Impulse and Initiative, the ‘Abigail Reynolds’ book is a different kettle of Austen. It deliberately rings the changes upon Pride and Prejudice, wherein a sadder and wiser Mr. Darcy returns for a second, more successful, run at Miss Bennett. ‘Reynolds’ has written other versions as well, perhaps intending to explore each alternative universe wherein Miss Bennett encounters Mr. Darcy. This is an interesting experiment, and (here is the trashy part) I loved the comically repetitive ‘deep kissing’, manly bulging, button popping, nipple tingling, post-Harlequin, wetness of it.

It has been years since I read P & P. I do not quite remember what happened. Maybe I never reached the end—for I used to be so fastidious I’d abandon any book likely to end happily. I do not, however, recall much erotic imagery there, and (even if Jane had had the necessary experience to describe them) she surely wouldn’t have permitted Mr. Darcy so many pre-marital liberties, nor would Miss Bennett have ‘arched her body’ for them. One can almost hear Austen’s editor, “Jane, honey, you’re gonna have to ramp it up for the current market.”

Luckily, ‘Reynolds’ is a doctor. She understands hormones. It’s what Miss Bennett needed, and shows us the heights Austen might have scaled if she had read Nora Roberts.

On the downside, the book ends about eight months and three weeks into the realm of ‘happily ever after’—a gentle reminder (to YA readers, perhaps) that body-arching loss of impulse control has consequences whose happiness (or not) depends on whether Mr. D. goes through with the wedding, as promised, and actually has 10,000 Pounds a year.

THE INFINITIES

by John Banville
273 Pages, Alfred A. Knopf

Reviewed by A. J. Barker

The ancient poet, Hesiod, claimed that before time began (and again when all else is swept away) there remains the eternal conflict of Desire and Necessity, an annoying itch in non-space-non-time from which are descended the generations of gods, with all their works. Or to put it in terms we understand, there is an instability in ‘nothingness’ that triggers Big Bangs, and all the ‘thingness’ that flows therefrom. (You do understand that, don’t you? O.K. Me too. Let’s move on.)

When you have ‘things’ you have interactions—things bounce off other things. There are consequences—causes have effects, effects create more causes. Was it necessary? Or was it random? Or have the gods been interfering with cause and effect?

In a truly deterministic universe not only would larger fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, but these lesser fleas (who have smaller fleas, etc. etc.) would not act at random (much less by choice) but strictly in accordance with their individual destinies. Each flea would have its particular nemesis whose note in the grand symphony of cause and effect was determined at the beginning of time in accordance with the inscrutable will of the Composer.

Or maybe some other way. Who knows?

We can’t know, really. Mortal understanding, celebrated for encompassing ‘everything’ from quarks to Big Bangs, is marvelous only relative to the comprehension of garden slugs, or domestic cats—both of which species know exactly what they need to know to be what they are. And we know just enough to be human beings, a species that craves understanding, but must make do with explanation.

Some explanations are more satisfying than others. The jittery motion of a particle in a fluid, is said to be ‘random’—but ‘randomness’ (as an explanation) is just a way of throwing up our hands—an admission that there are too many causes and too many effects. Something can be said in statistical terms—about the jittery motion of all the particles—but that’s a different explanation of a different question.

We can only perceive, comprehend and retain, so much—and lacking critical facts, which may be entirely outside our purview (or, if noticed, may have been misinterpreted—or perhaps judged ‘irrelevant’) we are likely to miss the point entirely.

And worse, just when we get a handle on the data, Galileo looks at Jupiter’s moons with his new telescope. Whoops! The whole explanation changes. That’s embarrassing. But although the explanation was changed, the truth remained the same—and remains slightly beyond reach. There’s a lot of ‘Dark Matter’ out there. Could it be Necessity? And all that Dark Energy? Desire?

All of which is prologue to confronting The Infinities. Not the actual infinities, which mortal man may not usefully consider, but the peculiar subset of infinities in John Banville’s book. The book has been extensively reviewed and universally approved. I agree. It is a wonderful book, full of lovely English sentences. (English is often improved by Irish writers.) Better still, it deals with two of my favorite themes: modern cosmology (Hugh Everett’s thesis, and its eleven dimensional offspring—as thrilling to modern physicists as angels on pins were to their predecessors) and: the Olympian gods, whose lusts, whimsies and spiteful tricks are another (perhaps ‘the real’) explanation for why things go wrong.

Adam Godley, mathematician, lies dying in his isolated farmhouse in Ireland, an Ireland similar to ours, but not quite the same. The shabby, ill-smelling house, its dank rooms connected by unexpected corridors, is the ‘universe’ of his final days. It lies ominously adjacent to a train track that doesn’t go anywhere in particular. His family (wife, son, daughter-in-law and daughter) all variously damaged by life, are in attendance. His retainers (a maid, and a ‘cowman’) are in and out. The god, Hermes, orchestrates the action and serves as narrator. Zeus is there, seducing Adam’s daughter-in-law, and Pan will be along later to upset the inevitabilities. Oh, and let’s not overlook Rex, Adam’s faithful dog, who shares some of the attributes of the gods.

As Hugh Everett tried to solve the quantum riddle by arguing that each choice we make creates a new universe, so Godley has, literally, created this world. His equations have solved the riddle of Time, opening the door to that infinity of universes, where everything imaginable becomes possible, and everything possible becomes inevitable. But, no matter that access to the Infinities is similar to entering heaven (or joining the gods on Olympus) nobody is anxious to pass through the door.

Instead of increasing our satisfaction, the certainty that everything will happen, and all will be understood, has diminished the human world. It was a mistake, Banville suggests, to envy the immortality and omniscience of the gods. They’re bored. They’ve been bored for aeons. They’re petty. They play cruel tricks and practice deceitful seductions. We resemble the gods, but it’s not necessarily a good thing. In fact, the more godlike we become, the worse we are.

And beneath it all, they envy our mortality and limitations, for it is only in worlds that can be snatched away by death, that the poignancy of love, the intensity of regret, the glory of light and the immanence of dark can be experienced. Life is not life without its looming opposite—that creepy shadow lurking in the corridors, that only Rex can see. We wanted to be them, but they (who know better) want to be us.

There are lots of ‘references’ in the story—fun for the literary minded. For example: the daughter-in-law is an actress, currently playing the role of Alcmene. Zeus makes love to her disguised as her husband—the same trick he played on the ‘real’ Alcmene, who became the mother of Heracles. Why? Zeus hopes, by seducing women, to learn something about human love, one of two things that the gods cannot experience. He is convinced that there is a relationship between love and death, that ‘…one conduces to the other…” But why the disguise? He’s a god—his seductions are bound to succeed. Wouldn’t they succeed just as well without the trick? Who knows? Banville, it seems, likes the story of Amphitryon and Alcmene—and it’s his book.

And, it’s a fine book—only the length of a midsummer’s day, but frequent flashbacks make it a full round day—and if I have made it sound a bit gloomy, remember that the gods also bring comic relief. The earthy Pan, Adam’s frequent companion in life, visits him at his deathbed to arrange a cheerful postponement for all concerned (for happy endings are only possible sometime prior to the actual end.)

The final pages remind us of the last scene of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream—everyone as happy as the Bard’s lovers, celebrating an ingeniously contrived ending.

“The trees tremble talking of night. The birds, the clouds, the far pale sky. This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.”

Like Adam, we don’t appreciate it sufficiently.

That breeze might be Pan laughing, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

THE MALL OF CTHULHU

by Seamus Cooper
235 pages, Night Shade Books

Review by Anthony J. Barker

H. P. Lovecraft’s stories illustrate that ‘voice’ is almost all you need to be a (reasonably) immortal author. His stories, intended to evoke horror, strike us now as just plain silly, but his ass-backward sentences, with their archaic nouns, neurasthenic verbs, and slithery adjectives, are actually quite marvelous. He was a bit of a racist, so mix together a cast of vaguely threatening (brownish) degenerates (‘Lascars’, half-breed ‘Esquimaux’, whatever turns you off) and throw in monsters whose excessively consonanted names are an affront to Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and you have ‘The Call of Cthulhu.’

Wonderful stuff—meant to be read under the covers, by flashlight. And how about the cover art? Jeez, don’t let mom see it!

But unimaginable horrors don’t raise contemporary hackles. ‘Nameless terrors’ sound positively cheerful compared to what people have actually seen and done since Lovecraft died in 1937. Old Japanese movies have turned monstrous sea creatures into a joke, and a game-piece Cthulhu, whose awesomeness is expressed in ‘hit-points’, isn’t scary at all.

Still, anything worth reading is worth joking about, and in ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ Seamus Cooper gives it his best shot. For good measure (or maybe because his editor wanted something book-length) he takes other shots at other absurdities—mall culture, national chain coffee houses, vampire literature, lesbian romance literature, over-caffienated FBI agents, geeky computer-gaming vampire-slaying barristas, angry white males, Homeland Security, etc., etc. In short, a politically correct commentary on political correctness (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”)

It begins in 1993 at an evening rush event at the Omega Alpha Sorority. Potential pledge, Laura, is about to be kissed, or bitten. Omega sisters don’t drink tea, or even beer. Their beverage of choice is human blood, and initiation is for keeps. Laura is attracted to sister Camilla, and when Camilla asks, “Do you want it?” she assumes the “it” referred to is the same “it” that “kids in dorms all over campus were getting at exactly that moment.”

Luckily, geeky friend Ted intervenes, wielding an axe soaked in holy water. So much for Camilla, also for Bitsy, the undead rush committee chair, and Omega house itself. Ted sets it on fire—thereby ridding the campus of lesbian vampirism.

Ten years later, Laura has worked her way through Law school and FBI training. She is assigned to the Boston office, reviewing ATM surveillance tapes. It’s boring, but not as bad as Ted’s job. His campus heroics have ruined his life. He has bad dreams, he wakes up screaming, he can’t hold a real job, or get a date—at least, not a second date, once he has confided the story of his life. Laura is the only woman who understands him. He has followed her to Boston where he works as a barrista at ‘Queequeg’s’.

Laura finds Ted annoying and pathetic, but she isn’t having any luck dating, either, and she can’t forget that she owes him her life. They hang out together, sexually mismatched, but co-dependent vampire survivors. Ted brings her lattes during his morning coffee break. Yes, barristas have coffee breaks.

Returning to work, Ted trips over the bloody body of his boss. Dead customers litter the premises. A gun-toting angry white male is demanding a half-soy half-caf Mochachino. Instinctively, the former vampire slayer flings a pitcher of steaming milk, followed by an urn of Decaf Sumatra. Without checking to see what effect the boiling liquids have had, he runs from the shop, soaked in the blood of fellow employees and dead customers, not forgetting to pocket a CD dropped by the scalded customer. Are you with me so far? Let’s skip forward a little.

Ted is looking for answers in Providence, Rhode Island, the Mecca of Lovecraft studies. He is being hunted by Cthulhu worshipping white males, who take exception to his treatment of their Boston colleague. The cultists are also searching for a buried copy of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, thought to contain the chants required to bring Cthulhu back from his ‘non-Euclidean’ dimension. This is most likely to happen near places of mystic power, where the boundaries between dimensions are weakest. Ted traces the cultists to an abandoned Masonic temple, next to a shopping mall. Get it? ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’?

Everything is topsy-turvy. Cthulhu worship, formerly the province of brown skinned degenerates, has been co-opted by Angry White Males. The FBI, which used to be a reliably white-male bastion of goodness and rightness, has been infiltrated by frustrated lesbians, and the only hope for survival of contemporary mall culture is a wimpy coffee bar employee, who has (at last!) hooked up with a pierced and tattooed beauty. Her real name is Jennifer, but she has renamed herself ‘Cayenne’. Yes, she’s hot—and a good thing too, because she and Ted will be spending decades in that alternative dimension where Cthulhu sleeps, waiting for his worshippers to bring him back to earth.

Unless Laura can figure out how to rescue them…

Well, who knows what the future will bring? Surely Lovecraft did not expect to be immortal. But he is—and it is just possible that eighty years from now an equally misunderstood Seamus Cooper will be revered as the St. Paul of Cthulhu—the man who resurrected His worship, reclaiming it from loser degenerates to the righteously dominant (white-male) culture of 2090. Here’s your chance to get ahead of the curve.

Or, wait—won’t it be the other way around? Isn’t the whole point that Ted and Laura save us from Cthulhu, making the Mall safe for democracy? Who knows, it’s a bit diffuse, and like all cult literature, subject to various interpretations.

Or we could assume it’s just for fun. There are funny things to be found here. I especially liked the idea of a secret federal agency for the suppression of vampirism, werewolves, and (during the Clinton administration) Ozark Mountain succubi.

Of course, that would only be funny if it weren’t true.

_____________________________________________________________________
A review copy of The Mall of Cthulhu was sent to Booksquawk member S. P. Miskowski, author of really scary stories and insightful reviews. She passed it along to me. One of the delights of books with a material existence is the frequency with which they fall into the wrong hands. In the coming age of electronic publishing, will books be subject to a master toggle switch, so that only the ‘right’ people can read them?

Don’t let it happen. Support books with pages.

DUTY AND DESIRE AT ONEIDA

Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir
by Tirzah Miller and Robert S. Fogarty, Ed.
204 pages, Indiana University Press

Review by A. J. Barker

At our house all genders are equal, but one is more equal than mine, so I was obliged to take notice when ‘She Who Decides Stuff’ decreed, “That memoir you’re reading is weird.”

“It’s unusual, for sure,” I agreed.

“It’s weird!”

We could leave it there (perhaps the shortest, and most definitive, review in the history of Booksquawk) but if you are interested in incorrect opinions, read on.

What’s ‘weird’? I thought. Depends on what’s ‘normal’.

It really would be weird if a woman who studied at three famous American universities (and has continuously flown the banners of Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and Reproductive Rights) had sex with her uncle because (he said) God wants it.

But a woman (an obviously intelligent, passionate woman) raised in an isolated religious community, free from the doubts and skepticism of the present age, accustomed to revere and obey a charismatic ‘prophet’, might easily suppose God wanted her to have a child by one of her uncles, and that He especially approved sexual relations with another uncle (the prophetic leader of the community.) She might think it was a good thing to be the prophet’s favorite lover, and that having children by a couple of other ‘suitable’ fellows was a religious duty.

Why not? It is all a matter of what you’ve been raised to expect. And this was the expected portion for Tirzah Miller, whose Memoir (just a journal, actually) was published by Indiana University Press (edited, with an introductory essay, by Robert S. Fogarty, under the title “Duty and Desire at Oneida”.) Yeah, it’s weird (of course it’s weird)—but it’s also poignant, even ‘heart-wrenching’, and the fact that it was not intended for our eyes makes it all the more so.

What we see is a woman struggling, against her heart’s wish, to remain faithful to what she has been taught. All around her in 19th Century New York, millions of (despairing) women were trying to fulfill themselves in monogamous marriage, ‘forsaking all others’ no matter how tempting. Tirzah’s problem was the reverse, how to remain true to the doctrine of ‘complex marriage’ (a sort of modified ‘free-love’) when she would have preferred monogamy. (Well, O.K., ‘serial monogamy’, but still, an exclusive relationship, potentially more tender than the bed-hopping prescribed by Oneida doctrine.) It is a book of revelations, showing how an earnest and sincere woman can persuade herself to do what her upbringing requires, while twisting and squirming to reconcile duty to desire. The usual marital problem, upside down.

John Humphrey Noyes, a recent Dartmouth graduate with a promising legal career ahead of him, was swept up in the Evangelical movement of the 1830’s and 40’s. Noyes dropped law, went to theological school, and eventually adhered to the doctrine of ‘Perfectionism’, which held that you either were, or you weren’t. If you were ‘Perfect’, ordinary concepts of sin and crime were irrelevant. Not surprisingly, the stodgy (vastly imperfect) folk of Putney, Vermont opposed Noyes’ doctrine. When things got difficult, he led his people to the frontier to build an ideal ‘communist’ society, practicing such non-Victorian novelties as ‘complex marriage’ and rigorous birth control.

Tirzah Miller, the daughter of Noyes’ youngest sister, was about three when her father and mother followed Noyes to Oneida. Her father died soon after, and Noyes became her surrogate father. By the time the memoir begins (1867) she is 24, and ‘Father Noyes’ has become her spiritual and moral guide, confessor, lover, mentor in journalism and the social director of her sex life.

It is widely known, though often forgotten, that the Devil quotes scripture. When appropriate, he quotes Darwin. The Origin of Species was published about the time the community switched from total birth control to ‘eugenic’ experiments, employing ‘scientific crossings’, hoping to create increasingly Perfect human beings. The science was a bit dubious. When his younger brother proposed having a child by Tirzah, Noyes agreed that two redheads would make a good combination.

There is a gap of four years in the memoir, during which she bore that uncle’s child. Unhappily, ‘Uncle George’ died (perhaps raising some doubt as to his Perfection.) Tirzah then became the favorite lover of the senior Noyes.

Notwithstanding the title, this book is more about love than desire—for it is clear that Tirzah loved Noyes, and that he (in his fashion) loved her—but Oneida doctrine prohibited ‘special love’—all belonged to all, and duty required that they should also love other members of the community. She tried hard. Too hard, sometimes. She records a bit of pillow-talk. Noyes: “…your sexual nature has been abused by your entering into sexual intercourse without appetite.” Tirzah: “It is true… I have slept with men without any appetite, and a good deal lately.” She then complains that her many duties have taken the romance from her life, leaving her “… with no appetite for intercourse with men whom I love, and have always had splendid times with.” [p. 60]

It was difficult to live up to the requirements of ‘complex marriage’, which not only required a degree of promiscuity, but prohibited ‘special loves’. On three different occasions Tirzah showed a decided preference for individual men. Reading between the lines we can see how Noyes reacted. The first of them, Homer Barron, was essentially exiled. Tirzah never got over wondering “Why?” although, in principle, she agreed with the ‘communist’ ideal. The second, Edward Insley, was the father of her second child. She had mixed feelings about this part of the eugenics program (when she first realized she was pregnant she wrote in her diary, “My death warrant”) but came to have ‘special love’ for him. Later, however, when Noyes discouraged their relationship, Insley quit Oneida, and demanded custody of the child. The diary is full of the tumult that resulted. The third was James B. Herrick, a former Episcopal curate, who fathered her third child, and whom she married after the collapse of Oneida.

So much ink has been expended on the history of the Oneida Community that one might suppose it was important, but compared to any ten pages of General Grant’s memoirs it is a trifling fragment of our history. Tirzah Miller’s journal is but a tiny fragment of that fragment, ultimately irrelevant. That may be one of the reasons we feel so uneasy violating her privacy. And yet, in the pages of her journal we detect a truly magnetic personality. We long to touch her—which was, of course, the problem.

THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC

by Richard Russo
Random House, NY 2009

Review by Anthony Barker

Richard Russo writes of ordinary life with consummate skill.

Ordinary life is mostly about marriage and work—the vehicles in which we invest most of our psychic capital, and from which we expect to draw bonuses of ‘meaning’ and ‘satisfaction’ that would stagger a Goldman Sachs director. Well… good luck.

Russo plays with us a bit. A screenwriter and writing professor writing a novel about a professor of screenwriting who wants to write novels, he blithely violates various sacred rules (e.g., beginning the story with main character waking up in the morning.) He changes points of view at his convenience (‘head-hopping’) and thumbs his nose at other ‘no-no’s’ he may actually have preached as a professor. More subtly—the story of screenwriter Jack’s life follows the conventions of movie scripting—the Accord is the ‘treatment’ or ‘concept’—the rest of it, the creation of characters, the continuity, the careful placement of conflicts, the jokes (his mother’s annoying phone calls that pursue him even after her death) and above all, ‘the revelation’ are all part of the ‘working out.’

In work, as in marriage, people bring different gifts. His script-writing partner, Tommy, is better at the ‘the big picture’—but can’t make it happen without Jack, who excels at the ‘working out’. Together they’re good at it, and paid well, but Jack, infected by his mother’s snobbery, can’t help thinking he ought to be writing books.

Jack’s parents were disappointed in life. They thought their Yale PhD’s entitled them to brilliant careers in the Ivy League—or failing that, at some sanctuary of privilege (Northampton? Haverford?) on the East Coast. Instead, they have jobs at a state university in Indiana. What could be more awful, they repeatedly ask, than to live eleven months of the year in ‘the mid-fucking-west’?

It is a question that might evoke some sympathy if they weren’t equally bitter about the rest of their lives. Their colleagues are inferior, their students inadequate, and their marriage (even aside from its competitive infidelities) frightful. Their son is a ‘pill’, boring and irrelevant. The sole redeeming feature of their lives is their annual vacation on Cape Cod. Each year, as they cross the Sagamore Bridge, it seems possible that things might work out—until they must re-cross it in the direction of reality.

Jack can’t stand them, and takes their phone calls in another room to protect his own marriage from their interference.

When they married, his wife bought into his vision. He persuaded her to honeymoon on the Cape, where they crafted The Great Truro Accord, a plan for the lives they thought they wanted, including the writing of books, and a nice home somewhere in New England. Meanwhile they’d work in the film industry and enjoy life in California (far from their families.)

All goes well, but as we should have expected (but didn’t) beneath their happiness, they are unhappy. Jack (who can’t imagine loving one’s parents) cannot understand that Joy misses her family, that she wants to visit them on holidays, that she doesn’t view her father’s offer to ‘help-out’ as interference.

Fast forward to the ‘now’ of the story. No longer a young screenwriter, but a writing professor, Jack has driven from their rural Connecticut home to the Cape, to attend a wedding. He and Joy have had an argument, but she’ll be along later. Afterwards they’ll scatter his father’s ashes.

He’s been schlepping those ashes around for months, unable to decide what to do, or how to do it. They are a reproach to him, stirring reflections on how he and his parents have lived their respective lives. Astonishingly, he has recently seen his wife weeping. She meant to conceal her unhappiness (and he respected her intention by sneaking away unobserved.) But how could she be unhappy? She has created exactly the home and the life they agreed to thirty years before.

Women always have better reasons than men for doing what they do (or at least, reasons which are more persuasive to them.) No matter that a wife may accede to her husband’s wishes, these reasons remain valid, like coals under the ashes, so that all he can gain by reopening a discussion is to risk being burned. True of Jack’s father, it is as true of Jack, although he is too self-centered to notice.

In yet another argument, Joy accuses Jack of being ‘congenitally unhappy’. From this choice of words he guesses that she has recently spoken to his old partner, and suddenly understands that Joy’s ‘meaningless’ flirtation with Tommy, decades before, has had a lifetime of consequences. Griffin never noticed when the game got serious, and as Joy has remained faithful to their marriage and their life plan, he never understood that leaving California, and starting their ‘real’ life was not so much the fulfillment of their dream, but a means of distancing herself from her desire—a choice she might still regret.

She confesses to it, and they separate. The downward spiral that followed his parent’s divorce seems about to be duplicated in Griffin’s life. It is conceivable that by stopping here, and perhaps cutting back on his mother’s phone calls, Russo could have written a French movie—a sort of marital 400 Blows, rueful, ironic, symbolic, the great ‘revelation’ even more agonizing (and no doubt post-mortem.)

Happily, Russo is an American writer. American lives, however ordinary, are in technicolor, and among us, marriage is always followed by ‘happily ever after’. In a spectacular display of comic writing, Russo rescues his characters from their ‘second act complications’, disposes of those pesky ashes, gets their daughter safely married (for now) and brings the old lovers (nursing wounds incurred at a Marx Brother’s wedding rehearsal) back across the Sagamore Bridge to Reality (and the sunset) reconciled to the past, and to each other (more or less.)

It takes a special writer to write ordinary lives.

That Old Cape Magic

WICKED PREY

by John Sandford
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2009

Review by Anthony Barker

Minnesota is far from the known world. It is thought to be somewhere below the flight plan from New York to Seattle, but there is doubt whether it actually exists. Never-mind. Crime readers cherish Minnesota (even more than New Jersey) as the place where the really rude criminals hang out—the blessedly scary jurisdiction of Lucas Davenport, Chief of the ‘Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’.

Sandford has written 21 novels featuring his hero, Lucas Davenport—two novels about one of his investigators, Virgil Flowers, and for variety, four others in which the main character (‘Kidd’) is a cyber-criminal. I haven’t read them all, but I have tracked Davenport’s career intermittently as he rose from city detective to his present glory as head of the state’s law enforcement system, a job that involves not only the detection and suppression of crime, but the damping of ‘situations’ likely to embarrass the Governor.

In ‘Wicked Prey’ Davenport confronts the Republican National Convention. Thousands of delegates are in town, with fat wallets and trophy wives—the women festooned with diamonds, a pickpocket and mugger heaven.

Davenport has anticipated some of the ensuing trouble. He has recruited extra police from other jurisdictions to patrol the convention center and its environs. The FBI is there (interfering with local law enforcement as usual) and the Secret Service is in town to protect the candidates. The problem is not the lack of security, but the cleverness of the murder gang that has found its way past all the security to get to the corporate lobbyists and their suitcases full of money—millions of dollars in small, untraceable, bills, the green lubricant of the American political system. It really would be embarrassing to the Governor if anything bad happened. Bad things will happen.

To complicate matters, there have been reports of a former sniper with a specially made fifty-caliber rifle—last seen leaving Oklahoma in the general direction of the Twin Cities. The Secret Service is distressed.

Sandford always gives us our money’s worth in suspense and confusion. Aside from the main plot and the sub-plot, a meth-crazed, paraplegic pimp, whom Davenport busted in a previous novel, is hoping to get even by snaring Davenport’s ward, Letty West. Davenport rescued Letty in yet another earlier novel when she was a precocious 11 year old. She’s 14 now, and about to be adopted by Davenport and his wife. She imagines herself entirely self-sufficient. Since dad is busy, she decides to handle the matter herself, operating under the general teen-aged assumption that what dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him. When a friend reminds her she is only 14, she replies, “When it comes to trouble I’m 28.” (...out of the mouths of babes...)

To grossly over-generalize, American crime novels typically don’t involve much mystery. An American crime that depended on a train schedule would be ludicrous, and we seldom concern ourselves with non-barking dogs. The question for us, often, is not WHO done it, or HOW, but whether or not the hero will figure it out before something worse happens—not mysteries so much as thrillers.

In the real world crime is not thrilling. The motives are trite, the execution is pedestrian. No reconnaissance, intelligence or planning is required to shoot a convenience store clerk. An occasional bank job is clever enough to make the evening news, but for the most part, we see little in the way of forethought and planning. Things are different in Minnesota.

Sandford’s crimes are thrilling. In this case, the robberies and systematic murders involve a complex plan, scoped out months in advance, played for enormous stakes, by ruthless criminals, facing determined and intelligent opposition from law enforcement. The forces of good and evil are approximately balanced, with the element of surprise on the side of the criminals, while the edge in logic and methodology goes to the cops.

Sandford’s criminals are not merely evil—they have interesting personalities and back-stories. In Minnesota, you can not only ‘smile and be a villain’—you can be a genius sociopath with the skills and experience necessary to work intricate plans and to modify them on the fly. And lacking a conscience is a positive benefit when it comes to inconvenient witnesses.

We need not concern ourselves unduly about the lobbyists. Whatever they get will be richly deserved, and whatever they lose never really belonged to them. But what about that sniper—is he there to take out McCain?

And if you’re a parent, imagine your insouciant teen-aged daughter riding her bike down the back streets of Minneapolis—messing with weirdos.

I won’t spoil the plot by describing how the gang separates the lobbyists from their suitcases, or how Davenport and his team gradually box them in and eventually bring (most of them) to justice (a very rough sort of justice) while sparing the Governor any serious embarrassment. Let’s just be grateful that the author is (as far as we know) committed to law and order, for he is a regular Moriarity when it comes to imagining crimes.

What a crime writer John Sandford is. He deserves to have a whole state to himself—he’s earned it.

THE WAR AFTER ARMAGEDDON

by Ralph Peters
Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
New York, 2009

Review by A. J. Barker

It is surprising that those of us who survived the 20th century should still read apocalyptic literature, much less for fun and relaxation. But then, ‘The End of the World as We Know It’ has amused and delighted people since Ur of the Chaldees, and perhaps it was because early monastic life was so boring and austere that the Fathers of the Church tossed Revelations in among the canonical books. (“And now for something completely different…”)

There is nothing so satisfying as visiting imagined havoc, chaos and destruction upon one’s imagined enemies. But it’s best if they are not too imaginary, for as Tolkien demonstrated in Lord of the Rings, the slaying of Orcs is a dreary business (and the same ‘ho hum’ applies to zapping George Lucas’s action figures in white plastic suits.)

No, there’s nothing like whacking the traditional enemy. And what enemy could be more traditional than the one ‘the West’ has been fighting, off and on, for 600 years? The War After Armageddon describes the final battle between Christians and Moslems.

The book begins with U. S. Lt. General ‘Flintlock’ Harris pondering a battle just beyond his horizon. He can’t see what is happening because (as he had so often, and so presciently, predicted) the excessively high tech equipment sold to the U. S. Army by the military-industrial complex, has been rendered useless by electronic jamming. General Harris is a ‘straight-up’ guy, not very imaginative, conservative in his military opinions (hence the nickname) but a thoughtful and competent commander, loyal to the Constitution, and to the Army. Unfortunately, he’s not in charge.

For reasons that may have been made clearer in an earlier book, the world lies bleeding and exhausted. Dozens of major cities, including Teheran, Jerusalem, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, are uninhabitable radioactive sites. The U. S. Army has been also been destroyed, not so much by the enemy as by politicians. A supine Congress, afraid of the evangelical right, has turned most of the military over to an independent entity, The Military Order of Brothers in Christ (MOBIC) under the control of charismatic General Sim Montfort, Harris’s long-time career rival.

Harris’s much smaller command is one of the few remaining constitutional units. He is fighting two wars, an unskillful effort against the politicians and evangelical conspirators who are continually directing him to turn over additional units to Montfort, and a measured and competent fight against the jihadists.

He can see that the remaining Army and Marine forces are being wasted (as are the MOBIC forces) in an effort to seize ‘culturally important’ sites (Megiddo, Damascus, etc.) with no strategic value. He knows that the weak President is under the control of an evangelically tetched Vice-President, but he is a ‘good soldier’. He accepts the validity of orders that come through the chain of command.

The reader aches to see him rebel—to have him ‘take out’ Montfort and restore some common sense and decency—but it’s too late for that, and Harris is no conspirator. He’s inculcated with traditional West Point values (although a graduate of Virginia Military Institute) unwilling to substitute his own judgment for that of his lawful superiors. Besides, no matter that Harris and his men think of the MOBIC forces as ‘pukes’—they remain ‘our own’—better our pukes than the jihadist alternative.

Perhaps not so oddly, the command structure on the ‘jihadi’ side is quite similar—an apocalyptic, end-of-the-worlder, Emir-General Suleiman al-Mahdi is in overall control, and has a more thoughtful professional soldier, Colonel al-Ghazi, as his principal subordinate. Like Harris, al-Ghazi can see where events are trending—but just as loyally, continues to follow orders. And, just as on the ‘Western’ side—the treacherous and hypocritical rule, while the honorable suffer from resignation and apathy, but remain determined to do their best for their own side, if only as a parting gesture.

Perhaps I have already said too much—the reader can guess where this is headed, even before Harris realizes that the MOBIC forces are being drawn into a trap—a trap that only a military historian like Harris might recognize. Beyond Megiddo (the historical Armageddon) lies ‘Kefar Hittim’, anciently known as ‘Hattim’. It was at the ‘Horns of Hattim’ that Saladin scored his greatest victory against the Crusaders.

As overwrought as it is, there is much to be pondered in this book. Peters is a retired intelligence officer, formerly an enlisted man. He has apparently distressed his former military superiors with unsettling strategic opinions, has worked as a journalist, and has written numerous other books. The military ambience, the relationships among enlisted personnel, non-coms and officers, the language, the sense of what has to be done in a given circumstance, etc. will seem strikingly familiar, and totally convincing to anyone who has ever been there—and the mix of admirable, mundane and despicable motivations seems quite plausible.

Since we are determined to read apocalyptic literature—why not go with the good stuff.

I recommend The War After Armageddon.

THE ILLUSTRATED VERSION OF THINGS

by Affinity Konar
FC2 (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)

Review by Anthony Barker

I will not start by mentioning that Affinity Konar’s The Illustrated Version of Things [sic] is a ‘first’ novel. The story is so adeptly written that I feel confident that there is nothing ‘first’ about it—surely there is a drawer in her file cabinet filled with progressively better unpublished novels. (May they rest in peace.)

Nor will I try to ‘out-Konar’ her odd sentences and word games, as other reviewers have (unfortunately) been tempted to attempt. Words take surprising, often delightful, turns in this story.

Set in the present, and intentionally ‘experimental’—the book is a curious throwback to a Dickens novel insofar as it deals with society’s losers, particularly the narrator, an unnamed 18 year old girl, recently discharged from a mental institution. She was raised in foster homes, hardly attended school, was sexually abused by her mother’s pimp, turned tricks for quarters, was sent to reform school and afterwards to a mental hospital. She sometimes appears to have the mental age of a 12 year old (and at other times to have earned an MFA at Columbia.) She is addicted to, or afflicted by, drugs, both legal and illegal.

Despite her unhappy back-story, there is no Dickensian sentimentality, no direct appeal for the reader’s sympathy, nothing smarmy in her narration. Her expressionless telling illustrates the deadening impact of her past. There are no tears, no whimpers, no rage, but oddly, no apathy or cynicism. Instead, she exhibits a nutty optimism that once she finds her mother (who seems to be in prison) everything will be O.K. This quest supplies what little plot the novel contains, and is sufficient to keep us wondering “What happens next?”

But it is not the story that holds our attention The fascination lies in Konar’s use of language, and her way of imagining an impaired human being. Mostly, it works—the narrator appears to be genuinely confused—her insights plausibly upside-down. For example, offering a cheerleader to her mother’s ex-pimp:

“I brought you something,” I tell my tutor. … I bring out his watch and wave it before her eyes. [to hypnotize the cheerleader, as the pimp/tutor hypnotized narrator in her childhood] It’s not so much that I want to control her. It’s just that I want her to do as I say…(37)

At a racetrack with her father:

…Everywhere it’s a sure thing. There’s a perfecta of horses, a payoff of saddles, gangs of white backsides hoisting themselves into the air… they’re all hoping here, and for that reason they’re the happiest people I’ve ever seen. I tell Dad so.

“You just wait and see,” he says.

As the race is run:

… The hoping crowd is no longer so hopeful. Some get happier, they whistle and high their fives. Others hide in their hats…

Her father tries to teach her not to gamble by making her gamble to excess. She has backed ‘Patriarch” (a loser) while her father has backed ‘Love of My Life’:

Dad gets excited. Veins mount his forehead.

“Love of My Life.” He shouts, “don’t let me down now.”

…my father yells, “you owe me. You owe me big… You took all my money. I guess it doesn’t matter. You left me lonely and childless. I guess you had your reasons. You made a joke of me, Love of My Life. I guess I’ll live.”

And then Dad turns to me, just as the end is near.

“I’ve had enough,” he says. (77)

His horse wins. He spends his winnings teaching the narrator not to drink by making her drink to excess.

They also try learning not to lie, by making up stupendous untruths. Her father breaks down when he hears her story of how she and her mother came to leave him:

And I explain to him that sometimes we have to do things in excess in order to never do them again’

“Sob faster,” I say. (81)

The presence of the author, as the Wizard behind a curtain, is sometimes jarring—but as with a puppet show, it is possible to enjoy both seeing it work and seeing how it works.

The final chapters, leading to a reunion with her mother, are increasingly surreal (and maybe symbolic—I don’t know much about symbols.) An interesting book, a bit outside the mainstream. It may be more interesting still to read her next book—assuming the lords of publishing grant her a second experiment.

LYING ON THE COUCH

by Irving Yalom, (PhD)
384 pages; BasicBooks (HarperCollins)

Review by Anthony Barker

It’s my view that Reality is unexplainable. Fiction is the explanation.(1)

Our species lacks both the data,(2) and the requisite smarts,(3) to make valid judgments about Reality. Nor can we readily communicate what little we discover.(4) If the truths we take to be self evident are often wrong, then the explanations based thereon are bound to be iffy,(5) especially if the subject is ‘Psychology’, a ‘science’ whose important hypotheses cannot be tested, and whose ‘data-base’ is dreams, fantasies and memories.

We make stuff up as we go—the ‘internal movie’ of our individual lives. I glance out the kitchen window. The neighbor’s baby daughter toddles across their yard. Age seven: she goes to Disneyland. She waves as she walks to middle school, an armload of books clasped to her budding chest. Last week she left for college. A completely serene and uneventful childhood. God only knows what life-story she has constructed, or how it might be reconstructed in therapy. Either way, it’s fiction, two different ways of making sense of randomness.

I keep these opinions to myself. I don’t know a damn thing about Psychology.

Another way of making sense of inadequate and random data is the intentional fictions of writers and other artists. What they create largely depends on what they see from where they are. Leo Tolstoy looking down on Russian history? Awesome! Woody Allen looking sideways at New York? Hah!

Or how about Irvin D. Yalom, MD ‘...crossing the line from psychiatry to fiction... ’(6)

In Lying on the Couch, the author tracks the decline of the Freudian canon. It is the 1990’s about sixty years after the great man’s death. The discipline is fractured and disintegrating. Starved by the health insurance industry, poisoned by psycho-pharmacology, prey to malpractice lawyers, it continues an enervating fight against the great heretics (Jung, etc.) and the California whimsies (Ikebana therapy, etc.). Worst of all, the profession must confront novelty and schism, some members preaching new revelations—others intent upon excommunication.

Dr. Ernest Lash has come late to psychoanalysis. Overweight and overanxious, his eagerness to please is exploited by his seniors who use him to destroy a rival, and clear some room at the top. Dr. Seymour Trotter has been charged with sexual touching of a female patient. Lash makes his investigation and testifies as expected, with the expected result.(7) Nevertheless, he is moved by the therapist’s eloquence and cannot shake off Trotter’s plea that the ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’ involved was as therapeutic for his patient as for himself.

Dr. Lash switches from drug therapy to talk therapy, vowing never to make Trotter’s mistake. But like Trotter, he becomes progressively more creative and experimental. Time passes. Lash engages in a lengthy and unproductive consultation with Justin, a man too timid to leave his awful wife. Lash tries to build him up, but Justin will not act. When finally Justin’s new girl friend tells him to move in with her, he does so, blaming Lash for five wasted years and $80,000 in fees.

Meanwhile, Justin’s wife, Carol, concludes that husband and doctor have been conspiring against her for five years. She wants revenge, and decides to become Lash’s patient under a pseudonym, seduce him, and put him through the same miseries he inflicted upon Dr. Trotter.

Under psychoanalytic rules, Lash must be ‘supervised’ by a more senior therapist who reviews his cases, and psychoanalyses him. Dr. Marshal Streider, is Lash’s opposite in temperament: doctrinaire, manipulative, a careerist, envious of the wealthy, and a retailer of hackneyed interpretations.(8) His approach to students, patients, colleagues, and himself, is essentially disciplinary.

He and Lash do not agree, but afraid to confront Streider, Lash often withholds information, and sometimes lies, about his consultations. Similarly, Carol begins her treatment with lies, trying to coax Lash into a compromising intimacy. Streider, too, is fooled by patients with ulterior motives, who take advantage of his various weaknesses.

The characterizations, complications, revelations, plot twists, and their resolution, are extraordinarily deft—and as readers we ‘get’ what is happening before the ‘smart-guy’ psychiatrists. It’s quite satisfying.

Does it tell us much about the present state of psychotherapy?

It must. Yalom obviously knows his subject. On the other hand, it’s fiction (of the intentional sort) so it’s possible that an entire book full of patients intending to outsmart their clinicians is an exaggeration. Parts of it are a bit frenetic, like an up-tempo production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Perhaps that’s the line that Yalom mentioned—between psychiatry and fiction.

Or maybe it’s the part where lawyers actually listen to counselors, and counselors accept from lawyers advice that they would scorn from another psychiatrist.

Well, but, is it any good?

Yes. It’s humane, sometimes poignant (even sharp enough to hurt) trenchant, articulate, witty, even wise.

Cool and refreshing.

But mainly…funny.

AJB

(1)Or, you could say, “Explanation is fiction.”
(2)Our sensory capabilities are too restricted—we don’t have the ‘bandwidth’ to detect anything close to the full range of cause and effect.
(3)Even if we could download the data, we lack the computing power, or the programming, to process it.
(4)Words are inadequate. Equations help some people, sometimes—but dismay the rest of us. Eye contact is good but hard to come by. Tears? Laugher? Useful but often misleading. Pheromones? Who knows?
(5)For example—the Ptolemaic explanation of why Venus goes forward, then backward, then forward again, in its circuit around the earth—an explanation so elegant and ingenious that it fairly boggles the mind—but which would only be correct if Venus were, in fact, circling Earth.
(6)“Wouldn’t that be an invisible line?” I asked, “How can you tell which side you’re on?” (It took me awhile to realize that this was Yalom’s joke, not mine.)
(7)Trotter is drummed out of the corps—but by an ingeniously comic plot twist, Love (perhaps) conquers all.
(8)After silently listening to an hour of childhood memories he offers: “... the toy truck that melted when you stuck it in an electrical socket was your own ‘truck’ which you wanted to stick in mommy’s socket.”

POISONVILLE

by Massimo Carlotto and Marco Violetta, Europa Editions, N.Y. 2009, translated by Anthony Shugaar

Review by Anthony Barker

According to the book jacket, ‘Massimo Carlotto is more noir than even the toughest American noir.’ Are we going to take that lying down? No way, José!

I hereby certify that Poisonville is not as noir as Pulp Fiction. Not even close. Also this fairly dull witted reviewer solved the ‘whodunnit’ part somewhere around page 60, making the remaining 162 pages an extended anti-climax.

But there are other reasons to read it.

This may be one of those mysteries where the reader is supposed to ‘get-it’ much earlier than the protagonist, and then squirm around waiting for the main character to catch up. Those sorts of mysteries are good for the reader’s ego.

As a cross-cultural experience it is interesting to compare Italian motivation for (literary) murders (family, honor, status, betrayal) versus what American readers accept as plausible.

On almost any three hour flight, this book will be better than the in-flight movie.

Poisonville seems to have been ‘made for TV’. While most of it is written from the point of view of the protagonist, (probably the work of Carlotto, the novel writer) the rest was evidently written for an omniscient camera (perhaps by Videtta, the screenwriter.) Head-hopping is a considered a great sin these days—but once you accept abrupt changes of viewpoint as lawful ‘cinematic cuts’ it is blessedly liberating not to be stuck in the head of the protagonist.

Francesco, a not overly bright Italian lawyer, is about to be married. The morning after his bachelor party he finds his fiancé (also a lawyer) drowned in her bathtub. It’s murder—and there is other unpleasant news. She’d had a lover (her body contains a DNA sample.) She’d also been about to expose crimes involving (a) her employer (b) their corrupt upper-class clients (c) an evil corporate power structure, and (d) diabolical connections to an anti-environmental waste disposal ‘mafiosi’ (actually the Camorra.)

Francesco is the initial suspect, not only because he is the person closest to her, but because his alibi witness denies that they were together at the critical time. His father, justifiably concerned about the DNA sample, makes a sub rosa deal with the prosecutor, whereby that evidence disappears. Other evidence eventually clears the protagonist, and once cleared, Francesco pursues the truth about her murder on his own initiative, sometimes interfering with the official investigation, and sometimes risking his life to discover the connection between his lover’s murder, and the Camorra.
As indicated above, a moderately astute reader will have guessed who the killer is long before Francesco’s penny drops, but discovering the connection between her death and the other story elements is worth the read.
AJB