Review: The Mad and the Bad

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Julie has lived the last several years in an insane asylum. Hartog is a rich man out to kill his nephew so he can tighten his grip on the family fortune. Thompson is a hired killer with an ulcer that may be psychosomatic. And Peter is a seriously spoiled brat. Every piece of this novel has an odd shape. Yeah, you know they’re all going to come together, but that doesn’t keep it from being a hell of a lot of fun.

The phrase I finally settled on for this one is “Dashiell Hammett meets It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” A la Hammett, there’s a decently plotted story that serves as the frame for odd characters to exercise their idiosyncratic takes on the world and the violence in it. Like “Sunny,” every character is more or less morally demented. I hope it’s not too much of a [SPOILER] to note that Julie, our titular heroine, has no compunction about bludgeoning to death a man who has considerately given her a ride. And Peter almost gleefully shoots his uncle in the eye with an arrow. Those are the good guys, and that means we’re playing in a pretty amoral, comically hardboiled universe.

Part of the fun here is the realization that Hartog has hired Julie as Peter’s nanny not in spite of her supposed insanity, but because of it. He wants her to be an obvious suspect in his kidnapping and death. She’s a sick woman, and she’s set up. That ought to be enough for a by-the-numbers thriller.

But Manchette goes farther. He gives us a Julie who is not merely supposed to be nuts, but who is indeed nuts. She’s a paranoid woman – and we get little to explain why – who has inadvertently picked up real enemies. He gives us a Thompson, someone who might have walked out of a mid-career Elmore Leonard novel, but he puts him in a different context. This may be the same universe that Leonard explored at the same time, but it’s a different corner of it. In Leonard, we’d likely see this Thompson as representative of some aspect of American pyscho-sickness. In Manchette, he just sort of is. We get no explanation, just a kind of readerly pleasure in his weirdness.

I encourage you to read the introduction/appreciation by James Sallis, whose Drive is one of the outstanding hardboiled works of this generation. He calls attention to Manchette’s minimalist ability to show that sick weirdness, and, as he does so, he makes clear how his own work is an extension of it.

Some parts of this do feel a bit dated, but they have the excuse of being a good generation old. Manchette was clearly ahead of his time. Thanks to this New York Review of Books Press reissue, we get the chance to catch up with him.


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Review: Flight

Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Most of the time I was reading this, I heard myself categorizing it as “Young Adult fiction on a serious theme.”

For a while I couldn’t figure out why it felt so “young adult,” and then I found myself arriving at a definition for the term: Young adult literature feels as it does because its aim is to frame questions rather than analyze them. It’s real act of insight for a 12-year-old to frame the core questions of life: how do we deal with disappointment, with the awareness that we are not as central to the universe as we might like? How, given that, should we treat others? And how do we keep from despairing as we live in the space between all we could want for ourselves and the comparatively little that we do get?

It’s less insightful for an adult to come to such a question, particularly an author who’s explored the same themes – complicated by the particular fact of Native-American life in late 20th, early 21st Century America – more thoughtfully elsewhere.

In other words, this isn’t a bad novel, but it sometimes feels condescending. Zits is a generally uninspired kid. We’re not supposed to like him because he hates himself so much. Props to Alexie for giving us a protagonist who is initially so unlikeable, but the shape of the novel gives the impression early on that we’re going to see him redeemed. We know it’s coming, so the heart of the novel – his spinning “flight” across time and identity as he experiences the world from different perspectives – loses some of its effectiveness. He inhabits other bodies in a series of experiences that seem as much like a class syllabus as a genuine adventure.

I don’t want to ‘spoil’ the conclusion, but, if you’ve read a decent amount in your life, then you know what’s happening with it. And, again, it’s young adults who haven’t read all that much, so the book is clearly aimed at them.

Alexie has the capacity to draw scenes well, and that’s a virtue. He also gives his character a deadpan set of reactions – claiming things like “she was very pretty” or “I must have been crazy to think…” – that work against it.

I’m glad to see Alexie plumbing the life of a kid who’s torn between his Indian and white identities. It may well do good things for its intended audience, but I guess I’m looking for more myself.


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Review: The Association of Small Bombs

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Don Delillo’s Mao II proposes the troubling idea that terrorists have assumed the role of writers: they have become the individuals who, imagining in solitude, release their visions and reshape the world. The Association of Small Bombs answers that premise. It’s the story of two families responding to the fact of a terrorist’s bomb. They had ideas for how they wanted their lives to go. After the bomb, they find they can never fully escape its consequences.

This is a thoroughly depressing novel. The opening scene (and back cover copy) describe the explosion in which two young brothers are killed. Their friend survives, but he has to deal with injuries for the rest of his life. The parents of the children and many of the people they encounter spread a kind of contagion in the years that follow. Each tries to rebuild a life, but they find everything discolored by the fact of the violence they have endured.

Mahajan uses a striking narrative device in that the characters go their separate ways but find themselves reconnecting with one another and with the perpetrators. There is no escape. Nothing they do can undo the effects of the experience, and that leaves them perpetually diminished. It’s novelistic in the satisfying sense that we see a picture larger than anything the individual characters can see. There’s a haunting geometry to the way different people connect, yet they have no idea how their histories affect one another.

While I admire the essential premise here, I’m frustrated that we get it in total at the beginning and that nothing really alters it. Victims of violence suffer not just from their pain but from the lingering sense that some random force has changed the trajectory of their lives. They are forever marked, revealed to be cowards or ever unaware of the narrow limits of their capacity to shape their own lives. But we have that revealed in the opening pages. As Monsour staggers away from his dead friends, he already suspects everything he will ever learn.

There is, in other words, little development in the way the characters think about the world. As impressive as the novel is, it’s longer than it needs to be. Part of me wonders whether it would work as well as a short story, whether it would pack the same punch more efficiently in a smaller space.

That said, this is certainly compelling material. Even if the characters are essentially static, we get a glimpse of modern India, of a nation that seems to feel acted upon more than self-determining. Those elements, the ways in which we see tensions among Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, among urban and rural, and among the wealthy and the struggling, do justify its greater length. That material seems peripheral to the central insights here – peripheral to this novel, as I feel compelled to read it, as a response to Delillo – but it makes the whole worthwhile.

This is troubling material, given to us in bleak fashion. I’d like to close my eyes to much of it, but Mahajan makes me have to look.


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Review: Terminal Lance: The White Donkey

Terminal Lance: The White Donkey by Maximilian Uriarte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Most of the good contemporary war fiction I read – Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, or Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds – makes it clear that much of the story is about boredom. It’s about the anxiety of waiting for something big and terrible to happen. There’s no story without those frightening events, but they’re anomalies. The real matter is the stultifying routine in the anticipation of them.

If you’re narrating and much of what you have to tell is anti-narration – if much of it is the opposite of story – then you have to figure out ways to show the nothing-happens part. Those strong novels find different ways of solving that narrative problem, and I recommend them all, but Uriarte has found a different and striking solution. This is a graphic novel, and the pictures carry much of that nothing.

There are pages here without words, and pages where the words are largely the noise of people filling the silence. And there are illustrations that move very little from one frame to the next, showing the rich detail of nothing happening. The end brings that forward in subtle and powerful ways. There is a 20- page wordless sequence in which we see only Abe lunging toward the bathroom to throw up. That sounds overdone, but trust me, it’s powerful.

Talking only about technique sells this short, however. Abe has gone to Iraq for reasons he forgets almost as soon as he arrives. He befriends Garcia, and the two of them navigate the uptight rule-boundedness of their wartime experience. We see elements in the Catch-22 vein – one officer, having misplaced his own rifle, creates a “drill” obligating the entire platoon to look for it before they can leave for a break – and we see the old Dear-John conflict of a young man feeling estranged from the woman he loves or thinks he loves.

And then there is the strange poetry of the white donkey of the title. In a work that’s this ambitious in terms of its emotional insight and geo-political range, it’s a real surprise to find such a layer of artistic insight. The donkey may mean nothing. In fact, I hardly noticed it when it first appeared. But it’s a kind of symbol that haunts Abe and that Uriarte brings into the story with surprising subtlety.

There’s a pointlessness to the experience of Iraq as Uriarte sees it, but the mission itself doesn’t seem to be pointless. We watch Abe grow from an awkward boy to a haunted man, and we really do ‘watch.’ Uriarte fills him out as the work progresses, and our final images show him with broader shoulders and a kind of hard-won wisdom.


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Review: The Cold Cold Ground

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sean Duffy is a Catholic police detective in a place and at a time when the IRA sees him as a traitor and his Protestant colleagues see him as an odd duck. It’s 1981, Prince Charles is about to marry Diana, Pope John Paul II is about to get shot, and Bobby Sands and other IRA big-timers are on hunger strike. Northern Ireland is a powder keg, and then things really get crazy: someone starts killing homosexuals, and a young woman may or may not have hung herself. Oh, and Sean falls an attractive doctor.

In a lesser writer’s hands, all that could have been a mess. In McKinty’s, it’s riveting. I realize everything I’ve just described sounds like the obvious elements of a generic hardboiled novel, but McKinty makes it feel as if he’s invented the form.

For starters, the moment is perfect. Maybe it’s because I was a young high school student when these events took place – these were the news stories of my near adulthood – but the era seems rich with characters and conflicts that stayed with us. Northern Ireland was at the heart of a great storm, and McKinty excavates it with real care. We get the hit songs of the moment (from Dolly Parton to late-career Lou Reed), quick but accurate descriptions of the phones and record players, and glimpses of the cars everyone was driving. He brings back an era, one that wasn’t frightening in its everyday details, and makes it a locus for the conflicts that would drive the following decades.

More than that, though, we get everything with rare skill. McKinty dispenses backstory and fresh clue with a terrific rhythm. I never felt he was slipping in something important that I’d have to slap my forehead later for not noticing, nor did I feel he was telegraphing what was important. Instead, his story really feels like the story of a mystery slowly unraveling.

I do think the end falls short of the excellence of the first 90 percent of this, though. [SPOILER] Until the assassination attempt by the IRA team he’s provoked, he’s an ordinary thoughtful cop. When he takes out a half dozen armed men who have the drop on him, well, it feels contrived. And then, when he travels to Italy to kill a double agent, it seems like too much. I accept that he’s a man of deep integrity. I don’t accept that he’d take ‘justice’ into his own hands and kill a man who, despite awful crimes, has the chance to end “the Troubles” years earlier than otherwise.

I suspect that end is connected to my bugaboo about series. I’m not saying that Duffy should have been killed at the end, but I do think it would have been more true to the story to have him fail, to have him have to eat crow despite knowing who ultimately did it. To me, it feels like twisting the story to set up a sequel and probably more books with the same characters.

Barring the last chapter, though, I very much enjoyed this. I’ll keep an eye out for more McKinty – one more in the line of star Celtic noirists – and I’m happy to recommend him to others.


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Review: Young Once

Young Once by Patrick Modiano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been looking to read something of Modiano’s ever since he won the Nobel Prize in 2014, but, knowing nothing about him, I haven’t known where to start. After talking with one of the reps from New York Review of Books Publishers at MLA, I went with this one.

It’s hard to know how much of my reaction is colored by knowing this is a “world-class writer,” but I did enjoy it a lot. Under other circumstances, I might not have forgiven its ever-so-thin voice, its persistent minimalism, but reading it now I very much admire the way Modiano accomplishes so much with so few brushstrokes.

This begins with a brief frame narrative that lets us see Louis and Odile as they turn 35 years old and reflect on their early lives together, a period that saw them separately working with and exploited by post-World War II criminals. They’ve built a happy life together, and it seems natural to look back, to realize all at once they were indeed “young once.”

The flashback scenes then take up the rest of the novel, and they move so quickly it’s hard to keep up. In short, one to two page bursts, we get one scene after another of the two meeting up with the men who encourage and exploit them. They’re each barely 20 years old, and they discover that others want to use their dreams against them. Odile wants to sing, so she attracts sleazy types. Louis, haunted and inspired by the memory of his bicycle-racing champion father, wants to be loyal to someone, so he attracts wannabe big-shots who let him take the risks for them.

What makes this memorable is the way Modiano accomplishes his story so economically. The whole book is only a little more than 150 pages, but it takes us through their separate highs and lows, introduces us to three or four of their would-be mentors, and still gives us a striking portrait of a Paris just reinventing itself after the war. And this isn’t just coldly quick. Some of the passages are deeply moving. Scenes where Louis spends time leafing through stacks of old magazines for glimpses of his father, or where Odile, humiliated by being fired from her singing job, invites further humiliation onto herself, really hit home. You get the persistent sense that these people, whom we meet in such short bursts, have rich lives beneath the surface we see.

Interestingly, we never get the end of the frame. [SPOILER] At the end, Louis decides to double-cross his final “patron,” and the two take off with a suitcase full of money, presumably the money they then used to purchase the remote home where they start the novel. It’s part of the minimalist approach that Modiano doesn’t spell that out, and it’s part of the tightness of the story that they seem to get away with it with so little difficulty or complication. Like Hemingway, but in a different tone and to a different effect, he gives us only scraps that stand in for the whole.

I do think there is something perhaps too modest here. This is heralded as a major novel by a Nobel laureate, yet it’s also a small work, one that doesn’t quite introduce us to a world-changing style. It’s just a beautiful and a subtle piece of work. So, just as I may have given this more attention for knowing Modiano’s reputation, I also think I might have demanded more of it for that same reason. I have another of his in the queue, and I’ll be curious to see how this style holds up.


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Review: MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Throughout reading this, I found myself thinking of William Steig’s Shrek. If you haven’t read that, you can knock it out in about 10 minutes, reading slowly. The first time I came to it, I’d already seen the first movie, and I couldn’t believe how such a film could grow out of something so small. As I reflected on it, though, I came to admire that little book for inspiring others to such flights of creativity. I couldn’t have read Shrek as creatively as the filmmakers did, but I enjoyed the experiencing of looking back and seeing all I couldn’t see on my own.

I come to MASH the book after the film and after what, for many years, I regarded as the finest television series ever developed. (I confess it felt a bit dated the last time I saw it – still brilliant but somehow tamer than I remembered.) As such, I see things in it I know I’d have missed if I read the book first.

For starters, the first character we meet is Radar O’Reilly. I know the way Gary Burghoff subtly developed that character. I think still of the powerful innocence of his having his teddy bear with him in Korea, of his perpetual competence with the work and his perpetual uncertainty about the larger questions swirling around him. Here, he’s just a curiosity, a somewhat slow young man with a gift of near telepathy that makes him the best communications officer around. Without knowing what he became, I wouldn’t have reflected on him as much as I did. I see the shell that Burghoff and others filled in, and that makes me like this more than I would have.

There are other intriguing moments, too. Hawkeye remains at the center of everything, and you can see how Donald Sutherland and then, even more brilliantly, Alan Alda filled him out. But he is less central than the show eventually made him. Here, it’s Trapper John who is clearly the best surgeon, and there’s another sidekick named Duke who’s a Southern version of Hawkeye.

And you can see as well some of the weakest elements of the show. Frank Burns is a pure weasel from the start, and his two-dimensionality is softened only by his sudden dismissal by the better surgeons. Hot Lips Hoolihan never gets to develop into the dedicated professional that Loretta Swit made her into. Instead she remains an easy target throughout.

It’s easy to see where the novel comes from: Hooker must surely have read Catch-22 and then decided he had doctor war stories that would fit a similar, picaresque-in-one-setting formula. And there is a powerful original note here: the idea that doctors, pledged to save lives, have a ‘catch-22’ of their own in having to be part of the effort to take them from the enemy.

Much of this is dated, from references to 1940s sports heroes to the comfortable use of “Spearchucker” as a nickname for a minor African-American character. And, courtesy of the film and movie, the book’s central insight is both more familiar and better done.

Still, this one has some virtues of its own, as it explores a sardonic take on the question of how to stay sane in a fundamentally insane situation. Cross its basic competence with its historical insight, and this is one worth checking out if you remember MASH in any of its other forms.

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