Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is as close as any contemporary writer I know gets to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones work. I mean that as praise – and I certainly enjoyed reading this – but it’s tainted a little by the fundamental problem of the genre: books that seem bulked up just to feel weighty.

Some people refer to what Martin and Hobb and their rivals are doing as “high fantasy,” fantasy that deals with the politics of competing kingdoms, but I wonder whether it might be better simply to call it “fat fantasy.” We’re invited to read, and read, and read some more about a world different from our own. The joy of it is getting lost in an imaginary place, one reminiscent of our own but also full of possibilities we can never know. That generally means magic, swords, and exotic creatures.

Some of the best-sellers in the field take that imperative of the genre, start at ’10,’ and then amp it up higher still. In the days when audio books meant bundles of cassette tapes you could get only at the public library, I went through a lot of those writers. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Covenant – to say nothing of R.A Salvatore or Brandon Sanderson whom I’ve skipped – all seem to follow the same pattern. While there may be occasional jokes, the books themselves are fundamentally humorless. They learn that from Tolkien, of course, but they don’t bring his deeper substance. Instead, we get lurid stories of entire worlds at risk from some dark evil.

Martin solved that problem by doing away with “good” and “evil” altogether. His battles are between equally flawed people. Joe Abercrombie does some of the same in his First Law stuff, and to his credit, he brings a sustained irony to the stuffy business. But, in some ways, Hobb is simply a better writer of “fat fantasy” right now than anyone other than Martin. Her books are loooong, but they’re subtle, too. And not even Martin is especially subtle.

What Hobb does best is take the convention and rebuild it from the ground up. The conflicts we see aren’t universe-shaking. They’re rivalries within and between kingdoms. The kingdoms aren’t glittering empires like Tolkien’s; instead, they’re reasonable states that flourish or fall because of a rich but accessible economy. Martin does something similar, of course, but his characters are facing apocalypse. Hers are just wrestling with saving their own lives and possibly keeping the kingdom from falling into the hands of a narcissist.

Her magic isn’t overwhelming. (Another positive feature of Martin and Abercrombie.) There’s a consistency in “the wit” and “the skill.” Each offers power but ultimately turns on making it possible for someone no longer to be alone. It’s a notion of radical communion, tempered by the possibility of the strong controlling the weak, and it gives the novels a dash of philosophy: what does it mean to be closed within ones self when it’s possible to imagine weaving into another consciousness. That plays out at the level of the ‘magic,’ but more impressively it plays out in the larger story as well. The conflict between princes is all about whether to trust others or not, whether, as Black Panther puts it, to build bridges or put up barriers when things get troubling.

And, most impressively, Hobb makes the “fat-ness” of such fantasy relevant as well. Instead of what they call “world-building” – which I take as providing material that ought to be in footnotes – she takes time to admire a world that already feels built. Her best descriptions aren’t exotic but homely. She makes the smells and sounds of a stable come alive. She describes rooms that aren’t that different from the ones of our own world. She talks of a loneliness that’s familiar in the midst of a world that gestures toward the strange.

Anyway, there is a story here, one that unfolds very slowly. Hobb is a gifted enough writer to pull that narrative tease off, though, and the final quarter brings it all to a head. (And, semi-spoiler, the end is a deeply satisfying gesture to the power of “the wit,” that first and more natural power that Fitz discovers.)

This is roughly 450 pages and, in the end, it really just sets up the volumes that follow. I’ve read one of those out of sequence, and I know it holds up as well. So, as a bottom line, know what you’re getting into. This is long and slow, but it’s as good as the genre has given us. I always feel a little guilty surrendering to this sort of narrative, but I also know – in the hands of someone as talented as Hobb – that I’m not going to get let down here.


View all my reviews

Review: The Dispatcher

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Several years ago, on the strength of something I started and gave up on almost immediately, I pegged Scalzi as a genre hack. I can’t remember what I read, but I know it reminded me of what I think of as the worst in fantasy: something that took itself too seriously, felt bloated, and depended on trite elements of the form.

Lately, though, I’ve been hearing things that made me think I might have miscast him. Someone somewhere praised his more recent non-fantasy series, and then this book came up on sale and mercifully short. So, I gave it a shot.

In praise of this, I did finish it. What’s more, I admire the root premise: it’s a world where something has changed so that anyone murdered by another returns to life. I grant the intriguing possibilities of that potentially supernatural phenomenon. I further grant that it’s an interesting move to imagine specialists in killing in such a changed world. These dispatchers kill people – usually in hospitals – so they will avoid natural deaths and thereby return to life.

But that’s about where my admiration stops. There’s a mystery in place, but there’s little grace in its exposition or its solution. It’s set in Chicago so, of course, it involves the mob. It also involves hot dogs and the best toppings for them, however briefly. And there’s a cop with whom our protagonist reluctantly partners. None of that material is especially compelling or memorable.

Worse, Scalzi barely mines the implications of his premise. He has his character embrace a too-easy agnosticism. When someone asks if the phenomenon of such resurrections is proof of the divine, he suggests a better proof would be for people to stop wanting to kill each other. That’s a good line, but it suggests a disappointing lack of interest in something so profound.

Since anyone who murders someone provokes this response, it isn’t clear why we need specialists like Valdez. Wouldn’t it make sense for doctors just to kill patients whose operations they’ve botched? Why bring in an outsider when anyone could do it?

In an even more glaring oversight, there’s no real consideration about the change in the value of a life if it’s suddenly so much harder to get killed. Beyond the theological implications, there ought to be existential ones: what does it mean to be alive if, suddenly, we get more chances at life than just the one? I’m not asking for Sartre, but I am asking for something along the lines of the excellent insights of Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Anyway, I’m willing to bump Scalzi up one notch from the pay-no-mind-at-all level I first assigned him to, but I’m not persuaded to try any more of his work.


View all my reviews

Review: The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy

The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy by Blaine T. Bettinger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is, essentially, a text book for a class you teach yourself. I walked into it with a scattered and decent sense of what DNA can tell me as a prospective genealogist, and I finished it with a much fuller grounding. There’s a lot I have to go back and get down more clearly, but I’m solid enough with all of this that I could tell an absolute beginner the differences between the commercially available DNA tests.

There’s not a whole lot more to say than that. Bettinger does what he promises he’ll do. The charts are clear, his language is straightforward, and I sense that some of the more detailed discussions will be useful if I ever pursue some of these questions in an applied way.

I understand that this is the definitive book on the subject, at least at this moment. I’m sure this will be dated within a few years – the science is evolving (as Bettinger clearly and intriguingly explains) and much of the approach here is tied to the commercial offerings of 23andme, Ancestry.com, and Family Tree DNA, which will, almost certainly, change rapidly to meet new consumer demand – but that’s fine.

If, like me, you couldn’t find a single place to get all the answers, this is that place. It’s going on my shelf, and I expect I’ll be consulting it.


View all my reviews

Review: God Bless America: Stories

God Bless America: Stories by Steve Almond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wonder if it’s possible to have too much talent. (It would be nice to think that was one of my problems, wouldn’t it?) That possibility comes to mind because, as strong as almost every story in this collection is, there’s a sense in which they don’t quite fit together. Almond has so many different arrows in his quiver – so many different kinds of strong stories he can work on – that some of these feel as if they undermine others.

I met Almond very quickly at the beginning of the summer, and he is staggeringly gifted as a reader. He has mastered what I think of as the “manic style,” and when he’s writing in that mode he is in the conversation for being as good as anyone I know who’s going now.

The best example of that style in this collection is “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched” in which a psychotherapist gets drawn into playing high stakes poker against one of his former patients. I love being able to describe the story so neatly and to feel the humor and tension that spill out of the premise alone. Even better, Almond has a way of writing sentences that go on a beat longer than you’d think, that push something that looks like the everyday into absurd, manic dimensions. As you read, you almost run out of breath and then, when that extra tacked-on fragment arrives, you laugh enough that you do become breathless.

Take for example the last sentence of this excerpt: “Oss was secretly thrilled to be treating Sharpe. The depth of his rage was refreshing. It returned Oss to his adolescence, to the loathing he had so lavishly apportioned to his own father, who sold hardware, who developed pathetic infatuations with his prominent customers.” It’s almost like overhearing someone else’s therapy, as if our speaker can’t help clumsily revealing too much about himself as he talks.

Another good example of stories in this manic style is “Not Until You Say Yes” in which an older TSA worker is assigned to look after a con-artist kid who’s doing everything he can to delay flying cross county to a father who doesn’t really want to see him. Our TSA worker comes both to admire the kid and to resent him; she feels a flicker of a maternal impulse, but she also wants to get back to her own life. The more she suspects she’s being manipulated, though, the more she respects the kid for his savvy and even deeper emotional neediness. It’s a sad story in many ways – Almond is generally sad even beneath the mania – but it moves quickly and it’s compelling.

Toward the second half, though, these stories tend to come in a very different form. There are a handful that turn on Jewish themes – “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve,” “Hagar’s Sons,” and “A Dream of Sleep” – but none of them quite fit the manic style that seems Almond’s signature. They are solid stories, stories I’d be proud to have written, but they don’t have quite the same distinctive feel as many of the earlier ones. I’d probably admire a collection comprised exclusively of such stories, but they bring a seriousness in tone and style that, next to those earlier ones, feels decidedly unfunny. Almond is never merely about making you laugh, but he’s great at evoking the nervous laughter of the discomfort that comes before disappointment or disaster. In these “Jewish” stories, though, there’s none of that leavening, none of the sugar that makes the horseradish go down. (Maybe I should call these Jewish stories the “matzoh stories” since they are unleavened in such fashion.)

And, finally, if I’m being honest, I simply don’t like “First Date Back,” in which a returning Iraq War vet moves clumsily toward assaulting the flight attendant who’s welcomed him back when there’s no one else to meet him. It’s a disturbing story, and I don’t think Almond quite earns the credibility it takes to level such a serious account in a context so removed from everything else he’s written about. Even here there’s plenty of skill, but it’s so out of the focus of the rest of the work that it distracts from the effect of the whole in yet another direction.

I plan to continue reading Almond’s work, but it may be a while before I go for a full collection. At his best, in that manic mode, he’s doing something I envy and admire; he’s finding a new voice for the short story that makes you laugh, think, and feel. The rest of this is generally good, but its “ordinary impressiveness” makes clear how much better that best work is.


View all my reviews

Review: You Will Know Me

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one has been on my list since it came out more than a year ago when a student (thanks, Callie) recommended it to me. I’m glad I waited, though, because outside of a Summer Olympics when the gymnasts get their quadrennial two weeks of fame, this Winter Olympics with its analogous figure skaters is the perfect backdrop for reading this.

As I see it, Megan Abbott is the premier woman writing in noir. I loved her afterward to Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place because it showed the conscious ways in which she sees the potential for bringing a female perspective to the form and its generic concerns. She’s a good writer, that’s clear. More impressively, she’s reinventing the genre in ways I certainly couldn’t imagine.

In place of a detached tough guy who enters a mystery in the capacity of detective – whether formally a detective or incidentally – we get a mother who’s already hip-deep in the world of her family and her child-prodigy daughter’s elite gymnastics world. She isn’t glimpsing some deep unsettling ‘noir’ truth; she’s encountering the dark, then darker, then darkest side of the seemingly perfect family she’s nurtured.

I don’t want to give too much away in the form of spoilers, but this begins with Katie dimly suspecting something dark in the spangled world of her daughter’s gymnastics. There’s a hit-and-run accident – which may not be an accident – and it becomes increasingly clear that it’s connected to an effort to maintain the façade of innocence in their gymnastics world. First we suspect one person, then another, and then finally the real culprit – and it’s the last person we’d have imagined, the one who most represents the supposed happy world. Abbott gets us from one of those suspects to another, gradually unpeeling the red herrings until we’re confronted with what we don’t want to see.

I can see criticizing this for moving slowly. I thought it dragged early, and Callie warned me that it would. She also urged me to stick it out, and I’d glad I did. There may still be room for some tightening in the text early – I don’t want to be too presumptuous with Abbott, who’s taught me to admire her – but I suspect the power of the ending comes in part through its contrast with that carefully sketched world of the opening chapters.

By the end, I found myself holding my breath. It wasn’t a matter of being afraid to find out who did it – Abbott had prompted that realization pretty carefully in the final quarter of the novel. Instead, it had to do with realizing that she really had the guts to end this on such a dark and damning tone.

I admire Abbott in part because her sense of noir incriminates all of us. Here, Katie is a “good mother,” yet that fundamental pose leads her to endorse the worst sorts of crime. This book not only condemns the world of pushed-and-posed girls gymnastics, but it calls into question how complicit we are in our family’s crimes when we justify them in the name of being a parent.

That is a very long way from The Continental Op or Philip Marlowe, but it’s a provocative extension of the same fearless ethical inquiry into how we justify our decisions in the Modern world. I thought Abbott’s Queenpin was really good, but this is even more ambitious. Now, everything she’s written is on my list.


View all my reviews

Review: The Automatic Detective

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a funny premise, executed almost as well as I can imagine it. Our detective hero, Mac, is a robot created as a killer by an evil genius. By the time we meet him, though, he’s developed consciousness and sworn off evil. He drives a cab, keeps his head down, and has almost no friends while he waits to earn citizenship in this steampunk city of rotary phones and sentient robots. When the kids next door get kidnapped as part of a deep-seated conspiracy, he sets out, detective-style, to find them.

I’ve seen similar concepts burn out quickly. (See Rex Nihilo for one.) Sometimes, when the joke is in the premise, it’s easy to get lazy as you write. Martinez doesn’t fall for that, though. He’s consistently clever in his language and his juxtapositions. To take one early example, it’s deeply clever that he’s both a “Mac” – as in the Apple computer – and a “mack” which was a generic nickname for anyone who drove for a living.

Martinez is terrific with the language throughout, taking such laughs where he finds them but never overdoing them. Instead, he gives us a nice range of characters, all clearly modeled on hardboiled types, but growing out of his concept as well. There’s the 800-pound gorilla with a taste for contemporary literature; the robot who boots up with the default personality of the loyal, snappy secretary; and the honest cop who happens to resemble an exotic monkey. We get all that with humor and consistency.

There are a couple of spots that seem to strain the premise, though. The almost femme fatale, a 21-year-old beauty who’s also the best scientist in town, is odd in her taste in lovers: first there’s the four-armed low-life thug and then there’s Mac. It isn’t clear how or why she’s interested in him, and that’s a bigger elision than most of what goes on.

More troubling in the long run is that the noir aspect of things gets obscured (or even mocked) in the way the central conflict unfolds. This is almost note-perfect for the first half – and I’m deeply impressed – but then it has to make more of the ultimate bad guys. That means turning a robot/technology fantasy into an outer space alien fantasy. I get that Martinez painted himself into something of a corner – and he makes good humor out of it – but it seems an unnecessarily complicated way of filling out the plot.

In other words, this is at its best when it’s playing with atmosphere, but it needs a plot – a silly one – to keep things moving. As I got deeper into the second half, when the plot becomes more central, I found I was in something of a hurry to finish up.

So, be alert to what you’re getting. It’s hard to imagine doing this any better than Martinez does it, but, hard as he tries, he hits what seems a ceiling to this kind of project in the end.


View all my reviews