PUNCHLINE

by Paul Fenton
Kindle Edition

Review by Maria Bustillos

Let's begin with the obvious: Paul Fenton's Punchline has got a marvelous one. And though I'd had it in the back of my mind that a revelation of some kind must eventually be forthcoming, the nature of it caught me completely by surprise, and added a great deal of depth and richness to what had already been a very entertaining ride. This is a really fun, good novel, though fairly harrowing in bits. Relax! It's just a (moderately horrifying and unnerving) story.

Luca Pope is an aspiring novelist, as yet unpublished, with maybe a little more self-loathing than even that bleak description usually entails. The hilariously effective black comedy here rescues Luca from what might have been too bitter a cocktail of despair. Most of the book consists of Luca's interior monologue, and in the hands of a less skilled writer, the nearly uniform point of view might have grown rather claustrophobic for the reader. But Fenton's prose is elegant and compact, he has superb comic timing and delivery, and in general he handles the whacked-out inner world of Luca Pope really beautifully. There is a multilayered noir plot and a cast of truly bizarre characters, a tumultuous love (or at least sex) story, some wonderful set pieces and a pleasurable amount of murder, drunkenness and mayhem. Beneath all that, though, there are hints of a deeper message – about the torments suffered by would-be artists and the soul-crushing nature of modern life, and office life in particular; these big-picture moments are where the book really shone, for me, and I am hoping to see Fenton take this kind of writing farther still next time. It's a very good question, really: what exactly is this mysterious urge that drives a person to write, or even just to want to "become a writer"? A person who could otherwise spend those limitless hours of study and scribbling and revising and hand-wringing doing anything else, such as rollerskating, lovemaking, playing with the cats, or baking cookies?? I ought to know, since I am a fellow-sufferer, but even after all these years I'm not really any closer to understanding that weird compulsion.

Punchline is at bottom the familiar story of one man against the world. Fenton creates in Luca Pope an anti-Everyman who calls forth by turns sympathy, revulsion, laughter, and, I daresay, a certain degree of identification, particularly for anyone who has ever fancied himself a writer. It's a novel of alienation rather than a straight-up crime novel, following in the footsteps of Kesey, Vonnegut, Kafka and Orwell more than in those of Elmore Leonard. As in this passage, where Luca's self-reflection takes a turn, either toward the darkness or the light – we're always kept guessing.

“I have not completely lost touch with reality. It's like when you have a toothache which comes and goes, sometimes bad and sometimes not so bad, and you know there's a cavity in there getting worse with every day you don't see a dentist, but you convince yourself you shouldn't worry about it until you actually do see a dentist, and so you carry on under that subtlest of delusions.

“Not a psychotic break. More of a psychotic sprain.”

Punchline is a no-holds-barred investigation of the darker recesses of the creative mind, written in a funny, fresh, original voice. It would make a really splendid movie too. I'd go on, but I daren't, for fear of spoiling the joke.

JUST KIDS

by Patti Smith
320 pages, Ecco

Review by Maria Bustillos

Those of us d'un certain âge who remember the career of bad boy of the New York art world, Robert Mapplethorpe, and that of his sometime lover and best friend, the poet and singer Patti Smith, are likely to enjoy this memoir very much. It is a touching and affectionate portrait of the Manhattan art scene of the late 60s and early 70s, and of the tenderness of the relationship between the two artists. Just Kids won the 2010 National Book Award.

The difficulties faced by the two, who were just twenty years old when they met so fortuitously in Brooklyn, are lovingly rendered here; poverty, romantic troubles, drug troubles, all the uncertainties faced (then and now) by every broke and ambitious young artist on the make in Manhattan. These things take on a romantic cast viewed forty years on by one who succeeded--and survived. The Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, the Automat where Allan Ginsberg famously tried to pick up on Smith, mistaking her for a boy: these are the stories one expected to hear. But Smith is more affecting in the everday details of her struggle, as when she slips into the argot of bookscouting; this was one of many ways in which she eked out a precarious living before forming her first band. A 26-volume set of Henry James, picked up for a song, provides just enough dough to pay for the new loft where Mapplethorpe came into his real metier, photography. The tissue guards intact, the etchings crisp. No foxing.

But by the time I'd finished I had altered my original views of the book quite a lot. It didn’t seem as candid or as naive to me as it had seemed at first. There is a great deal of whitewashing that goes on after the fact in anyone’s life, of course. Mapplethorpe’s typically lapsed-Catholic attraction to “dark” things was so common during that time; he aestheticized a lot of subjects that had been taboo in a way that was useful and helpful to many, exploding old fears and furthering the cause of individual freedom. Though it must be said that those of us who were younger found his work really obvious at the time, not especially inspired. One wondered, also, how much of Mapplethorpe’s success was the result of the patronage of a rich lover. How much of that dismissiveness was just taking for granted what in fact cost this artist a great deal to achieve? The story of Mapplethorpe's relationship with his family alone provided me with much new food for thought, and made me feel a bit ashamed of how "easy" I'd thought his work as a kid.

Still, it bears mentioning too that the “decadence” of the 1970s (that was such a catchword that it appeared on the cover of Time, as I recall,) an era of permissiveness of a kind that would be unimaginable today, caused a lot of harm. This is an unfashionable view. But I can't help but conclude now that some of Mapplethorpe's preoccupations were thought to be dark for good reason. So many of my own friends succumbed to AIDS, to drug problems. And so the romanticism and tenderness of Smith's memoir are ill suited in a lot of ways to the realities of the case: in truth, Mapplethorpe suffered for his sins like something out of Bosch. (By this I refer obliquely to the fact that he was raised Catholic, and was even an altar boy.) He died very dreadfully, an early victim of AIDS, and his lover, Sam Wagstaff, died before him ... there was so much grief and pain in those days. So this book left me with a very melancholy feeling, both sweet and sad, both for what is said therein and what is not.

HALF A LIFE

by Darin Strauss
204 pages, McSweeney's

Review by Maria Bustillos

The sad title of Darin Strauss’s memoir Half a Life refers firstly to the fact that at age thirty-six he began writing about the accident he’d been in at age eighteen. Strauss was driving a car that killed a schoolmate on her bicycle; she simply swerved into the road right in front of his car; no one ever learned why. Secondly, it refers to the strange blightedness of his life since that day.


It appears on the surface that Mr. Strauss put his life back together after the accident reasonably quickly and well. He was just a kid, after all, just graduated from high school; you can feel the adults around him “focusing on the positive” and wishfully thinking, “young people have marvelous powers of recuperation.” He went to college just a few weeks later, went to grad school, fell in love: “made a life for himself.”

But the truth turns out to be just what you feared when you first learn what happened to the author as a boy: scarcely a moment passed in his life that wasn’t affected by memories of the accident, or by the awful fallout from it. He describes very vividly and accurately the helplessness and horror all around him; the victim’s parents, particularly, are like people living in a bomb crater. You might have seen this if you’ve ever known people forced to deal with the disaster of a child’s death; people come round with their mannerly shock and grief but then “life goes on”; nobody will be living in the crater with them.

Since he’d survived apparently unharmed, Strauss seems to have felt he had no right to any pain or grief of his own. He never let himself off the hook for one iota of his own self-pity, egotism or cowardice, as if only the constant exercise of the most vigilant, unforgiving conscience could atone for his having been the cause, however blameless or unwilling, of someone else’s death. So the book is largely a document about this gentle kid failing, obviously failing for years and years, to come to grips with something so terrible that it would tinge every moment that remained. When the secret guilt and pain would let up even a little, would fail to tinge, if things seemed to be going well or if they got a little easier for him, then his conscience would step in to freshen the stain.

This tendency to push self-reflection to the point of self-flagellation is curiously common in our contemporary writers, particularly the guilt-prone white male ones. In the case of Half a Life, the author displays fidelity to both these contemporary notions of brutal honesty, and to his own harsh self-judgment. In order to feel halfway worthy to himself, every minute weakness of character has to come under the klieg lights of principled scrutiny. The impulse that drives this tendency is manifestly natural, unfeigned, unflinching. Still, though, I couldn’t help recalling Nietzsche’s remark, “The man who despises himself still respects himself as he who despises.” Maybe there is a better way to deal with this kind of sorrow, I could not help wishing. Should our first responsibility be to despise ourselves? So much energy goes into all this self-criticism, self-loathing even. But how to restore half a life to a full one?

Strauss’s writing is spare and workmanlike, free of flourishes. His book might come off as self-involved, if it weren’t so raw and open. His rigorous, absolute candor pre-empts any possible accusation of vanity. I found this story so gripping and so touching that I read the book in a single afternoon; I was very much moved by it. Giving books to people in crisis can be an awkward business, but I believe this one could be very helpful to someone who is grieving.

The terror of death that we are all of us keeping at bay is in ordinary circumstances kept well hidden from American adults, let alone teenagers. Anyone who’s ever spent much time in a hospital or looked after someone very ill or dying knows the impenetrability of the wall between “ordinary circumstances” and real ones. The saddest thing among the many sad things about Half a Life is the clear depiction of our culture’s total inability to deal with the implacability of nature, particularly regarding accidental death, and more particularly the death of a child.

In the end, there’s nothing else for Darin Strauss to do but tell the story. And nothing else for us to do but listen, in the hope that that might amount to at least a partial shouldering of the author’s burden, which is to say, everyone’s burden.

LORD LIGHTNING

by Jenny Brown
384 pages, Avon 2010

Review by Maria Bustillos

I first reviewed an excerpt of this book on the old Authonomy website a few years ago and FINALLY got to read the ending today. Ms. Brown, I am happy to report, does not disappoint. Lord Lightning is a superb example of the romantic novelist’s art from start to finish. I had no doubt after reading that first bit that this book would find a publisher, and here it is!—in properly produced bodice-ripping format complete with half-clad lover in a steamy clinch, and gold lettering against a starry sky.

The most common faults of the modern Regency romance are two. The first is that Regency English is quite tricky to get right. It is not enough to have everybody going on about Gambling Hells and Rakes and Strumpets and whatnot. There are a lot of details in the language itself to get right. This author has done her homework here. One does not require one hundred percent accuracy in a book written for the modern reader, but there are none of the howlers that so commonly present themselves in a work of this kind.

The second defect commonly found in Regency romances is a boring, run-of-the-mill hero. Just as lesser writers content themselves with sprinkling a few Regency phrases around in order to evoke the language, so do they imagine that a title, a bit of Mechlin lace and a coach and four swift horses will suffice to set off the charms of the Regency hero. Ms. Brown’s Lord Hartwood possesses all of these, naturally, but he has also an interesting and believably tormented character; most of all, he has real wit, the gift that cannot be faked; no matter how often a weak writer may insist that his hero is witty, only a genuine display of that rare quality will ever persuade the reader.

The heroine of Lord Lightning is an astrologer, Eliza Farrell. Hers too is an original and arresting character with authentic Regency charm. Ms. Brown’s loyalty to Jane Austen is evident in Eliza Farrell—in her unconventionality, and in her fatalistic, clear-eyed penetration into how things really are, rather than how we might like them to be. The crowning touch of inventiveness here is the thorough treatment of astrology. Ms. Brown’s expertise is manifested in exquisitely accurate (but never boring) detail. Even the star-crossed lovers’ astrological charts are real ones, with the time and place of birth and notes for each provided in an appendix.

Lord Lightning features all the hair’s-breadth escapes, steamy love scenes and third-act revelations any Regency fan could desire. In particular I will heartily recommend this book to anyone who wishes to write a fine scene of carnal knowledge. It really is the sexiest thing I’ve read in ages. Somebody ought to give a copy to Jonathan Franzen, actually.

En bref, a smashing book. Highly recommended.

I WAS A TEEN-AGE DWARF

by Max Shulman
Bantam

Review by Maria Bustillos

Max Shulman (1919-1988) is one of America’s greatest satirists. He is chiefly known for having invented the amorous teen sitcom hero, Dobie Gillis, of whom we will be speaking today. However, I urge all comers to read his more serious works as well (though they don’t seem all that serious at first blush, they really are the most blistering social commentary of the postwar period, cleverly disguised as loopy B-movie type satire.) The best of these is The Feather Merchants, though I have a soft spot for the magisterial Sleep Til Noon, which begins with possibly the greatest opening sentence in American letters:

“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life.”

The TV show based on Shulman’s Dobie Gillis stories was a marvel, featuring all sorts of memorable characters, notably the beatnik Maynard G. Krebs, played by the magnificent Bob Denver (later Gilligan of “Gilligan’s Island.”) Warren Beatty played Dobie’s rich, handsome nemesis, Milton Armitage, and Tuesday Weld played the luscious and unattainable Thalia Menninger. The many other loves of Dobie were played by a bevy of young beauties who would go on to become celebrated actresses, including Barbara Bain, Marlo Thomas, Michele Lee, Ellen Burstyn and Sally Kellerman.

The subject book, though, which is why we’re here, turns out to be even better than the TV show, because it too bears a deep message along with the hilarious jokes. It is, as one of Dobie’s flames would say, “Crazy, dad!” Anyone who loves that special flavor of postwar American humor will be completely smitten. I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf follows Dobie’s progress as a junior Casanova beginning at the age of 13 (“Girls: Their Cause and Cure”) and follows him into adulthood (“The Costly Child.”)

Just one little quote from this remarkable book will illustrate the great-hearted, wise and undeceived character of its author. Here, Dobie expounds on the many virtues of his inamorata, Beans Ellsworth, who is far taller than Dobie.

Anyhow, Beans and me are almost exactly the same age—only two days apart—but she has always been the leader of us. I don’t mind admitting it It’s no disgrace to follow a leader when the leader happens to be a genius, which is what Beans happens to be. Why, would you believe she was only fourteen years old when she built her first hot rod?

Which goes to show you that in 1959, enlightened minds like Shulman’s had already utterly transcended all the thorny little problems of gender politics that would preoccupy so many for so many decades to come. And not only transcended them, but turned them into the frothiest, loveliest comic tableaux. Plus, rock and roll lyrics!

Well I got a gal, her name is Esme;
I will kiss her if she le’s me.
Well, I love her in history, I love her in science;
If she was a lawyer, I’d bring her some clients.

Ooblee
Ooblee ooblee wa da

In short, the gentle, delicate genius at work behind these goofy tales has much to teach our relatively puritanical and humorless age, and is sidesplittingly delightful to read besides. Highly recommended.

THE GREAT FIRE

by Shirley Hazzard
326 pages, Picador

Review by Maria Bustillos

A beautiful novel, dreamy, romantic and moving, that won the author the National Book Award. Though The Great Fire is a romance, the book is wrought with taste and intelligence. Hazzard’s kind of old-fashioned refinement is so rare in modern letters as to be doubly welcome to this reader, but there is a detachment and coolness to her style that I can well imagine wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Hers is passion of the stiff-upper-lipped variety; passion that keeps itself in check, that expresses itself in lines of poetry and glances fraught with meaning.

The prose here is also unusual, idiosyncratic and some might say affected, but I found it very enjoyable. The author was born in Australia, but has lived for years in New York, England and Italy. So this is going to sound a little weird, but I believe it would be safe to say that if you enjoy Irish writers—I’m thinking of Flann O’Brien and JP Donleavy here, as well as Joyce—you’re liable to like Hazzard, whose cadences are similarly clipped, quiet and meditative, and who takes similar delight in a rich vocabulary. Here’s an example:

“The hill above the tiny town was gravid in the way of that landscape, its grassy garment stretched like soft cloth over an imagined anatomy of ancient, unremembered walls, graves, and ditches; a tumid rise, over which you might mentally pass your hand.”

Set in the period immediately after the second World War, mostly in the area near Hiroshima, the novel’s overarching theme is the impossibility, and also the absolute necessity, of negotiating a meaningful personal life in the face of human suffering, grief and folly. Hazzard has said that the heroine of the book, Helen Driscoll, is modeled on herself and her own early life. The world of The Great Fire does seem to be seen through the eyes of a precocious, poetical teenager. The parents are almost like panto villains; the noble, terminally-ill brother Ben is all attractiveness, wit and indulgence. He dies offscreen, with great elegance. So yes, there is melodrama here, and also great beauty.

I came to love the hero, Aldred Leith, whose purely English steadfastness and reserve seem the result of a lifetime of careful observation, the cultivation of an awareness of history. A man who sees his own life as an infinitesmal speck within that larger story, but a speck with a conscience, a speck that is inflexibly determined to acquit itself well. I’ve known a number of Englishmen like this, and I found this character both credible and very finely drawn. The book is the story of Leith’s life, really, an analysis finely balanced between the poles of intellect and romance, between the historical and the personal, between love and war. Recommended.

DESPERATE CHARACTERS

by Paula Fox
176 pages, W. W. Norton and Company

Review by Maria Bustillos

A lot of writers hang out here, so permit me to recommend the recent Norton edition of this classic, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen. But don’t read the Franzen bit until after you’re done.

This influential novella, first published in 1970, is a darling of the whole New Yorker/MFA fiction junta. So you might gather that it is quite bleak and serious, an upper-middlebrow kind of book, and you’d be right about that. The very heady blurbs, studded with such words as “masterpiece”, “perfect”, “brilliant”, “brilliant”, “brilliant, “a revelation”, etc., come from Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, Shirley Hazzard, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Walter Kirn, with the cover blurb courtesy of The New Yorker itself. So you won’t perhaps be surprised when I say that for years I have avoided reading this novel like the plague.

Fortunately, Desperate Characters turns out to be an absolutely great novel! I enjoyed it just hugely, and I have to admit, it really is brilliant.

The desperate characters of the book’s title—well, the author seems really to mean to include the whole human race in there. But the central ones in the book are Otto and Sophie Bentwood, a proto-yuppie married couple who have been suffocated by the demands of married life, of civilized society, and of the human condition in general. They’re so civilized, so controlled, that the reader too begins almost at once to feel their claustrophobia. The book is about the many scary, uncontrollable things that are roiling underneath all that control.

Fox’s prose is wrought with the most consummate grace and economy; reading it is like watching a ballet dancer’s total control, and total economy of movement. Even more dazzling is the fact that she is able to make me feel absolutely breathless and disturbed about these people who in real life would drive me just crazy. It is a tremendously empathetic book. And finally, despite all the artistry with which the book is constructed, you just catapult straight through the thing because the story is so suspenseful. It’s a (harrowing) afternoon’s read, and just amazingly instructive from a craft point of view. The Franzen essay, which, as I was saying, you are advised to read afterward, is a marvel of literary criticism, plus a valuable meditation on the craft of fiction. Highly, highly recommended.

TRAP FOR CINDERELLA

by Sebastien Japrisot
translated from the French by Helen Weaver
176 pages, Harvill Pr (1962)

Review by Maria Bustillos

“... like Simenon proof-read by Robbe-Grillet” -- Figaro Litteraire

There’s a little bookshelf in the lobby of the lovely Santorini hotel from which I write, containing a motley collection of novels mostly in English, with some French and German ones. I could not resist the above jacket blurb, and I’m so glad I didn’t.

Sebastien Japrisot is the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Rossi (an anagram!) He had a long and successful career as a novelist, screenwriter and director. His best-known work is the novel A Very Long Engagement, from which the film was made. M. Japrisot has been called, according to Wikipedia, the Graham Greene of France. But I don’t think Mr. Greene ever wrote such a smashingly creepy thriller as the subject volume.

The situation borders on melodrama: an arsonist’s fire; two girls, one an heiress, the other a bank clerk; one of them survives, a victim of amnesia, so badly burned that her face must be reconstructed. Which one is she? Japrisot’s treatment of this absurd situation is surprisingly absorbing, though—really gripping, in fact, because his story focuses entirely on the psychological, on all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, betrayals and counter-betrayals, at a pace so cracking and wild that the reader is liable to read the whole thing in one gulp, as I did.

The structure of the book is also deceptive; it’s far more complex than a (necessarily) bolting-down reading would make evident. There’s great craft in Japrisot’s refusal to bring the narrator’s pov into sharp focus. The exposition of past events is handled very deftly, and new characters brought in to reveal new details with a maximum of cliff-hanging shock and suspense.

Sadly, we no longer have the luxury of this fantastically crazy, creepy plot, because of that pesky DNA testing!! So the upcoming film of this story (! dir. Iain Softley; it was already filmed once, in a French version that I can’t wait to see) is going to be a period piece, I guess like The Talented Mr. Ripley? The period settings and costumes did wonders for that movie, to be sure. I do hope the remake comes off! For Trap for Cinderella is likewise a very stylish 60s thriller, rather reminiscent of those chic and rather depraved French movies of the period, e.g. ‘Blow-Up’. I love the style of Helen Weaver’s English prose, too, recalling as it does all manner of glamorous things of that vanished world: Cap d’Antibes, bouffant hairdos, Fernet-Branca, baccarat, tiny convertible cars, etc.

In any case, this is a perfect summer read. So pick one up before you go off on your next vacation ... or alternatively, there’s a copy in the lobby of the Anemoessa Villas here in Santorini.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END

by Joshua Ferris
416 pages, Little, Brown

Review by Maria Bustillos

This tender, funny, wonderfully wrought debut is a comedy of office life, and I suspect that most anybody who has ever worked in an office will find its themes and vibe almost weirdly familiar. We already have a lot of popular stories on the office theme, from Something Happened to Babbitt to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit; on the other hand, we also have The Office, Office Space, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Then we Came to the End hews far closer to the ethos of popular television shows about office life, with their wacky-dysfunctional-family atmosphere, than it does to the often savage, bitter treatment the subject has more commonly received in American novels.

The book’s greatest charm is in the warmth and attention to detail given to the development of a richly imagined group of characters. The action takes place in an advertising agency; we meet Joe, the enigmatic, bike-riding workaholic whose office wall has been mysteriously defaced, Lynn, the crisply confident boss who can resolve any crisis, but whose own world is full of secret sorrows; Benny, the office wag, whose endless stories mesmerize his officemates as hypnotically as they do the reader. There are many more; really a ton more, and all of them clearly, crisply drawn. Mr. Ferris’s treatment of this motley crew is optimistic and forgiving, though he is quick, too, with a well-placed laconic barb.

A second strength is his keenly accurate portrayal of the “dot-bomb” world’s colossal hangover ca. April 2001, when the boom went bust. Having had a front-row seat at that sad series of events myself, I can attest to the blurry sense of disbelief, the sort of neverending slow-motion trainwreck we endured as millions of hopes and plans and jobs and dollars disappeared as if they’d been vaporized off the face of the earth. Ferris’s depiction of that mess is particularly bittersweet to read now, when things have grown a good deal worse in a lot of ways.

There’s a draggy bit about two-thirds of the way through that veers too near the maudlin for me, but Ferris recovers neatly by the end with some clever and moving touches that left this reader well content. It’s just about the perfect book for summer travel—light, airy, smart and captivating.

YOU LOOK FINE, REALLY

by Christie Mellor
256 pages, William Morrow

Review by Maria Bustillos

Christie Mellor’s rise to fame began with that classic of real-world parenting, The Three-Martini Playdate. The nation’s beleaguered parents have long been thrilled with Mellor’s deliciously lighthearted POV, for she actually advises parents to relax a bit on the Raising Perfect Children thing. What a relief from the “My two-year-old just won a Nobel Prize!”-type pressures of raising our young in this enlightened age. Better still, The Three-Martini Playdate encourages, in its giddy way, equal respect for all the members of a family, rather than requiring everyone to focus on just the children’s needs. My own kids are pretty much grown up (whew!) but I still enjoy this charming and wise little book a lot.

In her new book, You Look Fine, Really, Mellor’s undeceived, hilarious worldview shifts over to another legion of sufferers in equal need of relief and enlightenment: women “of a certain age.” I am a member of this very group, and I am pleased to report that this gifted author has not failed us. The chatty, conversational style of You Look Fine, Really makes it a book to dip into for fun, and often, so leave it around in the kitchen or somewhere you can just pick it up for a minute and have a good laugh now and then.

Mellor’s style recalls the great genius of Ruth Eleanor “Peg” Bracken, a similarly matey and lively author of the 1960s, who good-naturedly poked fun at all the stiff conventions of those begirdled days. And yet there is a serious message under there, as there is in Mellor’s books: a deep vein of sublime melancholy runs through the philosophy of both. This is a great part of what makes these books so perfect for women past forty; we have been around the block, and we don’t want to hear a lot of bushwa about how to be Fabulous! because we have learned that that is not really what life is about. So, where Bracken has, “Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink,” Mellor gives us the sublime, “I can’t imagine running for an entire hour unless I was actually being chased, and the person/monster/alien chasing me would have to be heavily armed and/or breathing fire.”

In closing, let me add that this lovely, funny little book will make the perfect birthday or mother’s gift for any woman approaching or over forty, provided of course she’s got a sense of humor.

CANDYFREAK

A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America
by Steve Almond
288 pages, Harvest Books

Review by Maria Bustillos

Steve Almond is gloriously obsessed with candy, but Candyfreak isn't really about candy. It's more like a series of essays about (1) obsession and obsessives and (2) the sad state of our corpocracy. But these topics are sweetened with an absolute ton of candy.

Almond's style is super modern, self-deprecatingly confessional in the manner of Franzen or Wallace, rather than in the more stand-up, Sedaris way. Those who like this sort of thing will be pleased, and those who don't, won't. I myself love Almond's discursiveness, his candor and hyperbole. He's very funny, and thoughtful; and though one grows rather tired of rants against the Evil Corporation in general, it can't be denied that the candy industry has been decimated by these same villains, as what hasn't?

The biggest treat here, surprisingly, is Almond's near-miraculous gift for food writing. I'm a dedicated cookbook collector and a pretty keen home cook, and for serious, this guy's food writing is quite up to the standard of Jonathan Gold or Ruth Reichl. I am very serious about this. He is so good that I hadn't even finished the book before going online and ordering a ton of the candy he describes, I kid you not. Here's an example:

Her bite was smooth and concerted--there was an obvious density at play here--though interrupted by two muted snaps, both of which caused her a quarter-moment of anguish, followed by a twinge of delight, registered as a flushing upon her cheeks. She moaned. It was a lovely thing to hear.


This reaction was, in my view, restrained [...:] There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate [...:] The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the buttery dissolution of caramel ...

(Are you hungry yet?)

ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF

A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
by David Lipsky
352 pages, Broadway

Review by Maria Bustillos
[reprinted from The Awl, 3/22/10]

In 1996, Rolling Stone sent David Lipsky to accompany David Foster Wallace on the last leg of the book tour for Infinite Jest. The piece never came out. Instead, many years later, David Lipsky wrote a book about those five days. During the time they spent together, Lipsky couldn’t have known that Wallace was largely concealing a heart-attack-serious history of depression, drug abuse, hospitalization and ECT; they couldn’t discuss Wallace’s real involvement with 12-step programs (see Tradition, Eleventh) or the medication he was taking the whole time they were together; couldn’t address the real fragility of his recovery. Wallace took his own life twelve years after the events described. These lacunae, filled in by the modern reader, provide a dizzying, scary undertow to the book, tingeing the whole with dread, the if-they’d-only-known feeling of stories like “Jean de Florette.”

A sound drubbing should be administered to anyone who attempts to compare the film My Dinner with Andre to this book, as many careless readers doubtless will. It’s not about one wild, brilliant, look-at-me performer and one bemused, scholarly audience-member. It’s a road picture, a love story, a contest: two talented, brilliant young men with literary ambitions, and their struggle to understand one another.

I can’t tell you how much fun this book is; amazingly fun, even for a Wallace fan who is still devastated by his death. You wish yourself into the back seat as you read, come up with your own contributions and quarrels. The form of the narrative, much of which is a straight transcription of the interview tapes, together with the wry commentary of the now-mature and very gifted Lipsky, is original, and intoxicatingly intimate.

They were so much alike, these two, right at the threshold of what they’d spent long years hoping would be distinguished careers. Long-haired, smoking, keen on girls, books, TV and movies. Writers both. One of them had just hit the cultural jackpot. You can imagine the tensions here, and Lipsky doesn’t shrink from addressing them. There is professional jealousy vs. professional caginess, wariness. The desire to be liked; the desire to be a “success” as a writer, when one had so clearly “made it” and the other, not quite yet; there was a lot for them to overcome in order to reach one another.

DL: How’d it feel, though: “As if the book is a National Book Award winner already”?

DW: I applauded his taste and discernment. How’s that for a response? What do you want me to say? How would you feel? I can’t describe it; it’s indescribable. You speculate and I’ll describe.

[Slightly mean/clever smile]

DL: I’d feel I’d known all along it was OK, and here was someone actually saying what I’d hoped to hear said.

The younger Lipsky felt a little bit outgunned sometimes by the success and the teeming intellect of Wallace, though he gives as good as he gets; most of all, Lipsky has in spades the one thing that Wallace always valued most, that elusive thing he used to call “authenticity.” Both the young Lipsky and the older, wiser one who put the book together have it. He is never afraid to say just what’s on his mind, even when he knows it’s going to cost. I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect that what was also going on was that Lipsky (stable, elegant, and confident as he appeared) never knew, maybe still doesn’t know, that Wallace must have been as jealous of him as he was of Wallace. As irritated at him for being smart, as annoyed at him for being handsome.

So it’s very satisfying, that way, in terms of offering many, many interesting avenues of conjecture.

And when they finally are at ease together, after a whole lot of edginess and caginess of the type that will be very familiar to intelligent, ambitious young people everywhere, when they forget about the risk and come out from behind their respective barricades, it’s exhilarating. There’s a glorious discussion of television, including the respective parental curbs put on the boys’ TV time, growing up. Wallace was only allowed two hours per day on weekdays; Lipsky says, “I preferred my dad’s house over Mom, one reason, because no restrictions on TV at all.” Boy it is good, that part. The book just takes flight in this developing pleasure of mutual understanding and trust. It brings Wallace down to a human scale, in a penetrating and evocative way. Not like bringing down a Goliath, though; what you have is just the two Davids.

If anyone says that David Lipsky’s personality obtrudes too much into this book, I can only say that such a person must not have known Wallace or his work too well. Well, no. I can also say that I am willing to come over and punch such a person in the nose. Wallace was the opposite of a monologist. I saw this at his readings, over and over, an inexorable demand for dialogue. (This, incidentally, is the main reason why Infinite Jest is so “difficult”; the author needs you to work, to come his way.*) Invariably, instantly, Wallace would start asking any interlocutor the questions. Some might have seen this as a way to regain control of the wheel, but I thought it more like a way of getting his balance, because he obviously loved conversation but he was very shy, too, didn’t care for curvetting before the public. Didn’t see himself in any way as a dispenser of wisdom. So he draws Lipsky out, bit by bit, and, well. I had a massive crush on both of them by the end, and I’m sure I won’t be alone in that.Infinite Jest. It will make IJ incalculably easier to understand, more so than any other commentary or analysis I’ve yet seen.

(This book will make the most phenomenal movie, by the way, Hollywood!)

There is quite a lot more here to unpack but please, we can do that after you’ve read the book. So just go, take a sleeping bag, camp out at the bookstore. I’ll be here when you get back.

*Because it articulates Wallace’s position vis-à-vis his work so well, Lipsky has provided with this book a really splendid introduction for any reader who is thinking of tackling Infinite Jest. It will make IJ incalculably easier to understand, more so than any other commentary or analysis I’ve yet seen.

THE JOY OF COOKING

by Irma Rombauer
Bobbs Merrill Co., Publisher

Review by Maria Bustillos

The edition of the venerable Joy of Cooking which I am recommending is the 1953 one, though I do not doubt that the versions published by Mrs. Rombauer in 1931, 1936, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1951 and 1952 are all equally entertaining and informative. It's just that I've had a 1953 one for ages, and it is an old friend and companion.

Mrs. Rombauer's sunny, enlightened presence has, alas, slowly faded from modern versions, and, even more sadly, from the world at large. There may in fact be no one left like the original Rombauer. With what relish does she describe the disastrously inedible meal she first cooked her husband as a "young bride", for instance! (Martha Stewart, one feels sure, would never admit to so much as a stray peanut-butter cookie inadvertently scorched at the age of seven.) Mrs. Rombauer wears her mantle of greatness so lightly, so easily. In this 1013-page behemoth of a cookbook, the doughty authoress does not shrink from steaming brains with you, nor drawing wild birds, nor squirting paper cornucopias full of icing into daisy shapes (“although the botanist might not recognize these structures as such.”) Her giddy bonhomie never fails her. Our own neurotic age has lost the graceful art of tempering competence with humor and self-deprecation. For that reason alone, this is an illuminating, philosophical book--gentle, wise, and, occasionally, hilarious.

“My roots are Victorian,” Mrs. Rombauer writes in the Foreword, “but I have been modernized by life and my children.” Modernization in Mrs. Rombauer's case extended to mysterious and newfangled contraptions such as the home freezer (“Excess air within the frozen food package is a real enemy”), but her chapter on Frozen Foods is still the most detailed, useful primer on this confusing subject I have seen anywhere, and best among its many virtues, it begins with one of the most charming passages in modern letters:

“We are indebted to an Arctic explorer for the following Eskimo rule for a frozen dinner:

“Kill and eviscerate a medium-sized walrus. Net several flocks of small migrating birds and remove only one small wing feather from each wing. Store birds whole in interior of walrus. Sew up walrus and freeze. Then two years or so later, find the cache if you can, notify clan of a feast. Partially thaw walrus. Slice and serve.' Simplicity itself.”

The loveliest thing about this formidable recipe is Mrs. Rombauer's tacit acceptance of the fact that one might easily lose track of a frozen walrus in the space of two years; another ineluctable fact totally excluded from the dream universes of Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour and many other arbiters of taste in the modern world. Real cooking is full of such accidents; Mrs. Rombauer understood this, and rejoiced in it.

ACT ONE

by Moss Hart

456 pages, St. Martin's Griffin
Review by Maria Bustillos

The relative oldsters among us may recall that Mr. Hart was married to Kitty Carlisle, the star of “What's My Line” and other bizarre 60s TV shows. This rare and wonderful book is dedicated to her, “the book that she asked for.”

Mr. Hart confines this hefty work to the very first chapter of his illustrious career, and it reads more like an Indiana Jones cliffhanger than it does a stage autobiography. Living in abject poverty in Brooklyn with his family, he struggles manfully through play after rejected play; supporting them all by working as a stage manager in summer Catskills resorts of the kind depicted in (yuck!) Brighton Beach Memoirs. Mr. Hart evokes this world with painterly vividness. An exhausted producer suggests to him that he might try his hand at comedy (something that hasn't yet occurred to the twentysomething Hart, so enamored is he of the Theatre and Ibsen and Shaw and stuff like that.) Next thing you know, he is sitting at the feet of his hero, George S. Kaufman, hobnobbing with the likes of Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. His chance at The Big Time has arrived: a collaboration with Kaufman. But there is a serious snag ...

They made a movie of this with George Hamilton in the lead role; I haven’t seen it, but I can’t imagine that Hamilton was the right guy, because it would take someone whose soul is starving and blazing at the same time, and surely Hamilton has spent his whole life in a glossily handsome and laid-back state(?) So, here is another wonderful book crying out for a new movie version.

Hart may have been more famous as a playwright than as the author of this book, but his prose is simply divine, sparkling, so full of energy and wit; as a memoirist he is perfect, too; his candor is engaging but not too much; he is modest about his triumphs, but not too modest; he whines just the right amount when things go wrong. He becomes your friend, confides in you, and shares the most exciting rags-to-riches story I think I've ever read.

Recent biographies have reported that Hart was gay, and unhappily so; he spent many years in therapy struggling with his homosexuality. These revelations add a terrible poignancy to Act One. You can sense a lot of depths in this troubled man that remain unplumbed in the book, but the way he’s chosen to tell his own story speaks to so many interesting questions of personality; what we can and cannot choose to be. It's a very noble work, written by a great-spirited and troubled man.

I shan't give any more away. I hardly remembered to breathe during the last hundred pages. One of the best things about this book is that an awful lot of people agreed with me about how great it is when it was first published in 1959. It came out in a huge book club edition, and I think every thrift store in the US must have at least two copies.

KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS

by Ernest Bramah
240 pages, Dover Publications

Review by Maria Bustillos

Literature as Ornament

Ernest Bramah Smith is the nom de guerre of a mysterious Englishman who wrote detective stories in the early part of the 20th century. Being a slavish admirer of Kai Lung (whom I will get to, eventually), I once tried out one of these detective stories, and found it mildly disappointing; in the story, Bramah's blind detective, whose name is Max Carrados, was able to read the newspaper using his fingertips. Now anyone who has ever held a newspaper, even an English one from the 'teens, knows that the ink wicks right into the paper and thus the characters thereupon couldn't possibly be so descried, not even by the most sensitive fingertips.

Improbabilities such as these, however, cannot disturb the enchanted reader of this master's greatest works, the Kai Lung books (there are several, of which I would recommend Kai Lung's Golden Hours as an introduction). The eponymous hero, an itinerant Chinese storyteller whose ready wit and noble heart have more power to charm even than his bizarre, deliciously wrought rococo speech, inhabits a world where the impossible is merely fated. I hesitate to call these stories fairy tales, although some might be so tempted; rather, I would say that Kai Lung is the literary equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion, with all its fantastic spires and domes, its luminous enameled dragons and forests of egregiously fake bamboo. Just as the Brighton Pavilion transcends all its absurdity and elevates the visitor to new and dizzying heights of aesthetic and historical conjecture, so Kai Lung can waft one instantly from the ridiculous to the sublime, in his own inimitable, gravity-removing manner.

The chapter titles alone should be enough to sway the doubtful reader in Kai Lung's favor: 'The Degraded Persistence of the Effete Ming-shu' (Chap. III); 'The High-Minded Strategy of the Amiable Hwa-Mei' (Chap. VI); 'The Incredible Obtuseness of Those who had Opposed the Virtuous Kai Lung' (Chap. X). Bramah weaves his plots with Wodeousian intricacy; jokes abound, many of them capable of reducing the reader to helpless fits of laughter months later, on the freeway or in the supermarket; and the author's gentleness, his sense of justice and fair play, his lovely manners and his irresistible sense of humor, will remain long in the reader's mind, like a faint fragrance of jasmine.

PASSAGE OF ARMS

by Eric Ambler
256 pages, Vintage reprint, 2004

Review by Maria Bustillos

This is a wonderful book. It’s not as much of a thriller as the more famous A Coffin for Dimitrios or Doctor Frigo, both of which I am really crazy about; Passage of Arms is fantastic in a slightly different way. But first, a little backstory.

Eric Clifford Ambler was born in 1909. He started life as an engineer, and then went to work as a copywriter for an ad agency. His first novel was published in 1936; he was in the Army Film Unit during the war, and worked with Peter Ustinov on “The Way Ahead.”

By 1957 Ambler was in Hollywood, and he stayed there for over a decade, writing scripts, including the script for “A Night to Remember,” and “The Cruel Sea,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. His wedding to fellow screenwriter Joan Harrison was orchestrated by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. And during all this, he managed to invent the modern political thriller. What a man!

Back to Passage of Arms, which was published in 1959, and written, therefore, while the author was in Hollywood, cranking out film scripts. This book could never have been turned into a movie in 1959, because the protagonist is an ambitious Malaysian guy who learns this big, dangerous secret, and there weren’t any movie stars who could have been cast in the role, or any studio that would have even tried looking for one (I wonder if these things were much discussed by Mr. and Mrs. Ambler?)

Anyway, if things go right for our brainy, quiet hero, he will be able to turn his secret into the sizeable chunk of cold hard cash he needs in order to realize his life’s ambition. There are a lot of scary political complications. Also, a ton of very unscrupulous guys are involved in the deal, each of whom can throw a spanner in the works, or worse. Toss into the mix a pompous, exasperatingly narrow-minded American businessman and his shrewd, pleasure-loving wife. What the heck, you’re thinking! This is going to be a catastrophe. So the story is just riveting. The situation is structured quite like a modern thriller, wheels-within-wheels in a way that was really new to the period during which Ambler wrote. And the book delivers on all levels, quietly but very effectively, just qua thriller.

But what I love the most about this book is what I call its Nevil Shute Quotient. As I mentioned last week regarding the novel Independence by Kate Kasserman, it is very appealing to read a book with very detailed descriptions of arcane subjects. Descriptions amounting almost to a series of instruction manuals. Nevil Shute was a master of this rare skill; he was a kind of precursor to Tom Clancy and John Le Carré, with their very thorough descriptions of sophisticated weapons systems and clever espionage techniques. But Shute, in novels like A Town Called Alice, turned the focus of his observation to quite a disparate range of topics: business considerations involved in opening an ice-cream parlor in the middle of the Australian outback, for instance. The making of a pair of shoes by hand. The courtship methods liable to be employed by a shy, awkward former POW. What you get with a great Nevil Shute novel is not a police procedural so much as a Life Procedural. It is in just this way that Passage of Arms shines brightest. Every time you have a bizarre little question, e.g. –why would the canisters be sealed that way? –what kind of wax did they use, and how come?–you will find it answered in the most elegant, compact and engaging style. This, together with the classic charms of a thrilling tale well-told, make Ambler’s books the best possible source of “a few hours' relaxation, or to while away the tedium of a journey,” in Maugham’s memorable phrase.

THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL

THE classic romance
by Baroness Orczy
first published 1905

Review by Maria Bustillos

The Long Beach library fire was a huge boon to me, I am ashamed to admit. You will be wondering why a booklover should say such a thing, but the answer is quite simple; after the fire, the whole huge Long Beach Public Library was temporarily housed in an annex maybe a mile or two from my house near the Traffic Circle, until they managed to build the new library, which took ages. So I could bike to the big library in a matter of minutes, on my red-white-and-blue Bicentennial Edition Free Spirit 10-speed bicycle from Sears; a hideous contraption, but absolutely the best bike I ever had. I’ve never really gotten over the theft of that bike. Anyway, I believe I spent more time in that cold, pale, zero-amenity, fluorescent-lit barracks among the bazillion books than I did in my own house, ca. 1976.

I developed a game with myself there that I still play, once in a while. In order to play the Library Game, you must first make sure there’s nobody else around. Then position yourself safely at the beginning of an aisle. Now close your eyes, and walk slowly and carefully down the aisle, and when the mood strikes, reach out, or up, or down, and take hold of a book. You’ll have to read it, according to the rules of the game. Being a scofflaw myself, I cheat like crazy, but I know a number of readers will find themselves unable to do so; I suspect they will not enjoy the game as much as I do. If I wind up with what looks like a clunker, I just pop it back on the shelf, with a very slight twinge of guilt, which adds an extra little frisson to the whole proceedings, and start over.

I have no hesitation in saying that the subject volume is the very best book I ever chose while playing the Library Game. I remember the book very well; it was small and thick, in a glazed-cloth library binding, dark green, with largish print in an old-fashioned font, and very wide margins. The book block was very, very well worn by the time it came so fortuitously to me. The pages were heavy, grown soft and flexible with age and wear, and the corners had been read clean away so that they were evenly rounded, top and bottom. The tipped-in sheet at the back boasted a profusion of due dates, stamped in each time the book had been checked out—starting, if I recall correctly, in the 1930s. Long Beach has always had a huge retirement community, so the library was very popular. A lot of the books there—particularly the classic literature that I have always favored—had been read many times, but even so, I could tell straightaway that this book had been unusually popular. The title already sounded so exotic, so promising. I had no idea what a “Pimpernel” was, but it was very obviously something fabulous and strange, and who doesn’t love the word “Scarlet”? And the author!! My god, she literally called herself Baroness Orczy. Well, her real name was Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orczi, and she really did start life as an impoverished, exiled Hungarian baroness in London, but that is by the bye.

The book exceeded my wildest conjectures. It became evident at once that the Baroness was possessed of an inexhaustible fountain of the most exquisite melodrama ever devised, plus a total lack of shame. There is not the slightest scintilla of a curb on the romance, the passion, or the total ridiculousness of this wonderful love/adventure story, set during the French Revolution. Every page glitters with gloriously excessive prose that is not so much purple as amaranthine, amethyst, violet, pomegranate. “The fond embrace of Madame la Guillotine,” “priceless lace at his neck and wrists,” “Aye! I, whom that same popular rumour had endowed with the sharpest wits in France!”

The Scarlet Pimpernel may also be the sexiest, most exciting romance novel of all time. My pulse still literally quickens when I think of certain moments in this book (oh god, the staircase scene ... !) Men will like it too, though, because the hero is absolutely awash in brains, dash and heroism. And humor. Barbara Cartland made an enormous fortune by making inferior copies of this one book, over and over! Come on! It’s got audacious rescues, clever disguises, hair’s-breadth escapes, gorgeous clothes, secret identities! Please believe me when I say that this book is about one hundred times better than any of the (many) movie versions.* All of which, I believe, I have seen. Oh, gosh. Look! You just have to read it, if you haven’t.

*Matthew Macfadyen is the first actor I’ve ever seen who could possibly do the part justice, and I have been considering the matter for literally decades. Get on it, Beeb.

ANGUS, THONGS AND FULL-FRONTAL SNOGGING

by Louise Rennison
272 pages, HarperTeen

Review by Maria Bustillos

I was already pretty horrified to learn that a film was being made of the YA classic, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, a dear favorite of mine. They always mess these things up. And then I learned an even more terrible fact: the book's title has been changed for the film, to: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.

Oh, Louise Rennison. I do hope that Nickelodeon has paid you a zillion dollars for the privilege of wrecking your book, that brilliantly glittering marvel of the novelist's art. Louise Rennison! I have just seen the trailer of this film (from the director, sadly, of Bend it Like Beckham,) and it has filled me with sorrow, rage and despair.

Alas, Louise Rennison! The original work’s crazy, cheeky grace and hilarity have apparently been traded in for the most conventional, textureless, eighth-rate, simperingly “inoffensive” situation comedy. The book has been dumbed down, that much is clear even from the trailer, with all the risk and the chic and the chaos just watered down into a blob of pabulum. Let it be known that those of us who love your books are not just offended, but wounded to the core and tearing our hair out in unending misery. Oh god, and what can I say about the poor Buzzcocks! Ack, a bubblegum cover of “Have you ever fallen in love with someone.” Fail, fail, such ultramegafail is here revealed.

The heroine of this book, Georgia Nicolson, is not a cute girl. She is a force of nature, chaotic, mercurial and unhinged, a comic invention on a par with the Lucy of I Love Lucy. What a blast of fresh air these novels were to me, with their utterly frank depiction of a lazy, selfish, sex-obsessed teenager who calls her school “Stalag 14” and mopes and whines all over the place all day long. Like a real fourteen-year-old girl!! They are not adorable!! They are about the least adorable thing around. Or rather, if they are adorable, it’s entirely in spite of themselves; they’re hilarious, too, despite themselves, outrageous and terrible like the real Georgia Nicolson, and please, not because they are “cute.”

So here is the scene in which the apparently offensive part of the original title appears in the book. Georgia and her bff Jas are stalking Wet Lindsay to see if she is in fact really, really dating Robbie, the Sex God. Robbie, it turns out, is indeed meeting the horrible Wet Lindsay outside the Odeon.

I held my breath and Jas’s hand. She whispered, “Get off, you lezzer.” Then ... Lindsay put her face forward and Robbie kissed her.

Walking home, eating more chips, I said, “What sort of kiss do you think it was? Was there actual lip contact? Or was it lip to cheek, or lip to corner of mouth?”

“I think it was lip to corner of mouth, but maybe it was lip to cheek?”


“It wasn’t full-frontal snogging though, was it?”


“No.”


“I think she went for full-frontal and he converted it into lip to corner of mouth.”


“Yes.”

This miniature excerpt is enough to indicate clearly that perfection has been messed with.

Therefore, I consider it my duty to inform a public that may not be aware of the real worth of the novel from which this inferior movie was made (if the trailer is to be believed*): Pay no mind to the fact that the most awful-looking teen rom-com has been made with a vaguely similar title. Readers! Run out and buy a copy of the real thing, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging,, the first true contender to The Adrian Mole Diaries for the crown of Most Hilarious Teen Novel Ever.

* to say nothing of the scathing testimony of my 17-year-old daughter, Carmen, also a longtime Rennison fan, who has already managed to see the entire film online, and who is absolutely to be believed, in this instance; though admittedly not quite so much when it comes to certain other issues, e.g. what time she is in fact getting home, in stark contrast to the alleged or agreed-on time she is getting home. In any case, C. saved her particular fury at the movie for the diminution of the role of Dave the Laugh—with whom all right-thinking readers of Rennison are hopelessly in love—and for the entire and inexplicable absence of Sven.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

by Junot Díaz
335 pages, Riverhead Books, 2007

Review by Maria Bustillos

A weirdly beautiful, sad, funny book. I am a bit gutted to think that everyone everywhere did not grow up (a) speaking the Caribbean-inflected Spanish patois that I am fortunate in sharing with the author, Junot Díaz, because about 30% of this novel's ineffable humor springs from that very pure, very concentrated source, which Mr. Díaz manages with total facility and perfect pitch, and (b) exact same thing goes for a really absurd degree of familiarity with The Lord of the Rings, Dune and so on. The Tolkien banter here is especially rarefied. A Dominican thug, compared to the Witch-King of Angmar! That may have been my favorite bit, so recherché and yet, so apt. It takes a real Tolkien nerd to appreciate the choice of the Witch-King of Angmar in this particular instance, because he was the Lord of the Nazgûl, just like this guy was for Trujillo, so it's just perfect. Unfortunately, I can't tell you my favorite of the many Tolkien-derived jokes, because it would be a terrible spoiler. Made me bawl, though. But for reals, it would not be a bad idea to bone up on your Tolkien before tackling this wonderful novel, or at least to have it by your side as you go.

What I'm getting at here is that I am practically Oscar Wao myself. I'm Cuban, not Dominican, and I'm not hugely fat, of course, and I'm a girl. But I'm Caribbean through and through, and also a terrific nerd (or dork.) So in case you need to know just exactly what it means to be a "bailarina cubana from one of the shows" (of the 1950s, as in fact my own mother was,) the precise nuance of the exclamation, "Jodido!", or what it means to have 18 Charisma at Dungeons and Dragons, I invite you to email me for the details. Mr. Díaz has created a world of spectacular richness and texture in this book, but it’s the real world, too, so like the one I inhabit that I caught myself gasping with the delight of recognition, over and over, as I read. But please, don't call this Spanglish, as so many reviewers have done! There's no half-measures or sloppiness about this newly synthesized language, which is like a whole new wing of English; plus, it's the way we actually talk; freaky and mixed-up, but brimming with feeling and nuance, with precision. But here's the thing. This is the greatest immigrant novel I've ever read, and I could go on and on about its authority, humor, sadness and truthfulness, the loopy power of its unique voice. The brilliant meshing of his harrowing, horrible story of personal betrayal and corruption with the fate of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo; the symbolic tragedy of the whole Dominican Republic is not here confined to rape and brutality, but to forced abortion and boiling in oil. But wait! There's more ...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is constructed with dazzling subtlety and artistry. This is a writer's book if there ever was one, and that's its main strength, its real genius. Those among us who have attempted to write novels ourselves, and are in the habit of analyzing the craft that goes into their making, will have their breath simply stolen away by this thing. The narrator is 3rd-person omniscient, but no, not really, but well, yes ... no. He breaks for a moment right out of frame, and slides imperceptibly back in again. The author and the narrator are ... well!! How did he do that? I started rereading right away, in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the dextrous, tightrope-walker control Díaz has over this wild and crazy material. No soap, though. You can't just unlock the magic so easily ... really, you'd have about the same luck trying to figure out how a palantír works by staring into it.

ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS

by Doug Dorst
448 pages, Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition

Review by Maria Bustillos

Alive in Necropolis has the compulsive page-turning wallop of Harlan Coben or Robert Harris, and the nostalgic pleasures of a fine San Francisco history; it's got ghosts, and all sorts of very cool and ingeniously imagined supernatural wrinkles to do with them, like ghost-killing, and even ghost-policing. It has villains and heroes, sordid drug dens and doomed love affairs, booze-soaked fiascos and hair's-breadth escapes. And it's sad, and touching, and very, very funny. The dialogue in particular is superfine. I imagine that Dorst's wise-cracking cops will make an absolutely rawkin' movie. (I had already cast Adrien Grenier as Mike Mercer, our hero, before I reached the end.)

Mercer is a cop with issues, working in the necropolis of Colma, California--which is a real place, a tiny town near San Francisco made up largely of cemeteries. In Doug Dorst's Colma, however, there is justice to be done among the dead as well as the living. The novel threads between the future and the past, love and loneliness, the crimes of ghosts and of living men and women. Mike Mercer's story is told against this beautifully-wrought, pleasurably strange and complex background, and Dorst elevates him onto that rare, high plane of the novelist's art where we come as we read to believe, despite his fantastic situation, that Mercer is a real person, someone we know; someone we'd like to scold, to argue with, to embrace and comfort.

The novel’s idiosyncrasies never get in the way of the storytelling. There’s a series of police reports, painstakingly reproduced as old-fashioned forms typed out in Courier, that provide both comic relief and asthma-inducing suspense without ever seeming gimmicky or out of place because the story is all, and the reader races along the plot’s resilient thread quite effortlessly all the way to its thrilling end.
Most of all, Dorst grants his all weird cast of characters--the washed-up and wasted, the 19th-c. criminals, the stoners and thieves and homeless guys lost on the streets--a rare compassion. His kindness and keen perception flow over all equally, like a benediction. That's what really makes the book such an enjoyable read: the author is a boon companion, witty but never self-regarding, clever without the slightest pretension. The NYT called this book "big-hearted" and I can't do better than agree with them, except to add that it is also one of those rare policiers that succeeds in communicating a deeper purpose.

To illustrate this point: one of the main messages of Alive in Necropolis is that a man should "die like an aviator," to wit, having flown; having taken the risk of flying, of having lived. Dorst weaves this simple, valuable message quite unabashedly, playfully even, through multiple layers of the story. I just loved that, that such an exciting, thriller-paced ghost story should also be so innocently serious and just good, you know--it really sent me. Highly, highly recommended.