Friday, June 30, 2017

Review: The Bird and the Sword

The Bird and the Sword The Bird and the Sword by Amy Harmon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lot of the best fantasy is ultimately about language. Tolkien began, after all, with his linguistic experiments around the language of the elves and orcs, and the stories grew from there. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy has an entire system of magic around the notion that the world came into being when the first human spoke the true language, and now all magic is the residue of that same speech. And J.K. Rowling makes a big deal about how important it is for her young wizards to pronounce words just-so, to appreciate the power of the individual word.

A lot of powerful feminist literature explores what it means for a woman to lose her voice. Whether it’s something like The Little Mermaid story or The Handmaid’s Tale, we’re called on to interrogate the degree to which women are subjected to control by the removal of their voices, by silencing them.

Amy Harmon marries those two traditions in this gently magical story of a young woman who discovers power, love and a sense of her own desires through the process of recovering the voice taken from her as a child. This is fantasy in the broad sense of the term: it’s a story that invents a new world in order to comment on the one we know. It may not be “high fantasy” in the sense of the endless parade of Tolkien/Martin wanabes, but that’s a good thing. Instead, it’s a story that spins a new mythology from the long tradition of fairy tale.

This is also a story that goes in unexpected places. Lark is a lord’s daughter whose life is overturned when the king discovers that her mother is “gifted,” that she has the power to give “words” that reshape reality. The king has the mother summarily executed, but not before she can level curses upon the king and his son, and she can command her daughter to silence so that she will not suffer the same fate for exercising her power.

To the degree that this book explores the feminist trope, it’s telling that it’s another woman who silences Lark. And she does so not out of jealousy (as another woman attempts to do late in the book) but for her own protection. It’s hard to judge the mother: has she acted wisely to defend her daughter, or is she frightened of this particular female power? I like that the answer isn’t clear, that this is a real novel, not a political tract. It asks a powerful question – how do we accommodate a woman’s power – and then it allows multiple answers to emerge.

Similarly, Lark gets taken hostage years later by the new king, only to discover that her mother’s curse has left him gifted as well. He has the capacity to change into an eagle, but he can’t control the process. As her mother promised, he is losing himself “to the sky.” Again we see the ambivalence of the situation. This power is, in its way, welcome, and the king acknowledges later that he has always dreamed of flying. Yet it also limits him. It’s both a curse and a gift, an experience of the world that makes him more and less likely to tolerate the “gifted” community his father sought to exterminate.

And, at the same time as she’s taken violently, she slowly discovers she loves Tiras. And their romance is rich and rewarding, with a dash of Pride and Prejudice thrown into the battle narrative. You buy that they’re in love for the right reasons, and Lark’s narrating of her growing desire for him is legitimately powerful

We see the dynamic with Lark’s father as well. Early on he’s praised for being a mild, unambitious man, the perfect mate for Lark’s mother who might shine too brightly if she were nearer the throne. Later, he becomes a key player in the chess game to determine who will be named successor to the dying king. He’s Lark’s protector, but he also likes her as silent; he doesn’t want to see her power unleashed.

And to top all of that off, Harmon writes with real skill. Her prose is lyrical and engaging, but it’s never overwrought. It feels like a fairy tale, but it never resolves itself into something as straightforward as that tone would suggest.

I do think there are spots where the action drags (but that might be my fault for getting distracted for days at a time as I read this and therefore coming to it with more gaps of time than I usually do). For a story that comes to depend as much as this does on intrigue, there might be more of a run-up to the political crises in the last few chapters.

All in all, though, Harmon writes so beautifully, and she does so in the service of such legitimate literary questions, that I enjoyed this very much.


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Review: Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition

Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition by John J. Binder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For starters, John Binder is the name in Chicago-area Prohibition-crime history. He’s been a friend, mentor, collaborator, and resource to me, but that hardly makes me unique. John has been a generous and insightful resource to everyone who’s found his way to him in the last quarter century. In fact, a good squeeze-the-produce way to find out if a work in this field is any good is to check its acknowledgements page: if John isn’t mentioned, it means the author never really got started digging. Lots of people are doing good and provocative work on the Capone era, (think of Rich Lindberg, Matt Luzi, Mario Gomes, Rose Keefe, and Mars Eghigian) and but none of them are doing it without somehow coming into contact with John.

And this book is the summation of John’s three or four decades of research. If you’ve never really gotten the skinny on Capone, this book has it (though it may not be the best place to get a first exposure to that long and bloody story). If you already know where some of the bodies are buried, then no other source can take you so quickly to the current, advanced thinking about what happened, what people say happened, and how far we can go with revising this well-known but distorted historical moment.

In a broad sense, this book has been done before, but not for almost 60 years and not without many significant recent findings. In the immediate wake of Prohibition, there was an entire industry dedicated to creating the general myth of Capone’s Chicago. On the one hand, you had the rise of the “Syndicate” under Colosimo, Torrio, and Capone. On the other, you had the nefarious Dean O’Banion (I can call him “nefarious” because he shot my grandfather), Hymie Weiss, and Bugs Moran lining up the Northside Gang. Then, after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was just Capone until he got knocked off his perch by Eliot Ness. Or was it for tax evasion?

From almost the moment the bullet casings fell to the floor, you had writers mythologizing the Chicago gangster. (Armitrage Trail and Ben Hecht were writing versions of Scarface while Capone was still at large, and every day’s newspaper – of which there were seven competing – brought some fresh anecdote.) There was nothing romantic about the character – that wouldn’t come until the middle 1960s with Mario Puzo – but he was certainly magnetic. Equal parts charismatic, menacing, cunning, and doomed, he quickly fit into an established storyline: a rapid rise and a sudden fall.

I have a long shelf full of books that people were writing in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, all of which tell the same essential version of the Chicago gangster story, one that featured Capone but that didn’t necessarily revolve around him. Then, starting in the 1940s, writers tended to focus on one or another aspect rather than the whole. Capone’s legend grew larger and larger, to the point that it overshadowed almost everyone else’s. (There are at least four serious biographies of Capone – Pasley, Kobler, Schoenberg, and Bergreen – and that doesn’t count the dozens of books that deal with a slice of Capone’s life or the countless quickie biographies that simply recycle what’s already out there.) In other words, the Prohibition story in Chicago got reduced to the story of Capone.

What Binder does here, above all, is restore the larger context of that story. Yes, there’s still a lot about Capone and a lot about booze, but this book recovers the histories of the dozen or more substantial gangs that started out as legitimate rivals. And it also restores some necessary balance to the crimes in play. It wasn’t all booze. It began with prostitution and gambling, grew to include the crucial business of racketeering, and eventually necessitated political corruption. So it’s more characters doing more things.

That larger net makes it harder to tell a coherent story. There are stretches here where we get long lists of names that may not mean especially much to people who haven’t studied this material. Still, no one has attempted to publish such lists since at least 1961 (when Kenneth Alsop attempted the last such overarching history) and no one has ever done so with so much ancillary research at hand.

Once Binder lays out the structure here – several gangs involved in several different kinds of criminal enterprises – he gets to the familiar story of “Al Capone vs. Bugs Moran.” Except, here, Binder refuses to let it settle into the familiar rise and fall of Scarface. Among other things, he asks an obvious question that few have posed: if we know that the Northside Gang had hundreds of gunmen and dozens of significant lieutenants, then how did the killing of only half a dozen of them – leaving Moran alive – bring an essential end to the gang war?

Binder’s answer is that it didn’t. The Massacre marked the beginning of the end, but only the beginning, and he gives a substantial chapter to the extensive sequel. The Moran forces may have been weakened, but they were soon, but temporarily, even stronger after their alliance with the noxious pimp Jack Zuta, the suddenly wealthy Aiello gang, and the bold, further Northside Touhys. In other words, as Binder convincingly reminds us, the gang war continued a good five or six years longer. The Capone gang – even after Capone was sent to prison – pursued a patient and disciplined strategy, one that took foresight but also good fortune. Time after time they fragmented the opposition, absorbing some of the ones they’d defeated, and then continuing to pressure the ones who remained. It took really until World War II, but they eventually consolidated everything and became (though this is outside Binder’s study) a kind of government for the criminal world, compelling anyone who broke the law to play by their rules, paying the proper “street taxes” and abiding by clear directives about where or when they could ply their illegal trades.

Along the way, Binder offers a number of thoughtful digressions to take down either longstanding myths or attempts at historical revisionism. Among them

• He argues that the South Side O’Donnells, led by the media savvy Spike, were more influential than contemporary observers – particularly the ones who attempted to record which gangs held which territory – seemed to acknowledge. He uses careful studies of police logs and Chicago Crime Commission data to suggest we’ve allowed Spike to settle into a teller-of-tales sort when, in reality, he was consequential.

• He takes on Tribune columnist John Kass’s assertion that Capone was essentially a figurehead for later mob boss Paul Ricca. Binder acknowledges the consensus that Ricca went on to become probably the paramount figure in the mob, but he sees no evidence to suggest that influence began as far back as Kass asserts.

• He challenges the formidable Laurence Bergreen who put forward the notion that Capone was really fronting for Chicago Heights power Frankie LaPorte, but he does so thoughtfully, acknowledging the more focused (and more credible in this context) work of Matt Luzi who has shown the Chicago Heights gangsters were more consequential than contemporaries realized.

• And he more or less demolished Jonathan Eig’s recent assertion that William “Three-Fingered” White was the architect of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Those digressions sometimes do break up the core narrative of the book, but since this is a book about expanding about that narrative we can forgive it.

In the end, there’s so much here that it’s easy to declare it an essential work in the field. Binder gives us the most complete updating of the overall Chicago Prohibition era study that we’ve had in decades, and he does it with the same modesty I’ve seen in him for years, crediting others for the pieces they’ve contributed to this very large puzzle he’s done so much to solve. A lot of us have been waiting for this one for a long time, and it’s great to have it at last.


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Review: The Blue Streak

The Blue Streak The Blue Streak by Ellen Lesser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last of Ellen’s published works so far, though word comes that she has a new collection of short stories nearly finished.

On the one hand, this is impressive page by page. In this story of Danny, a recent college graduate who, having ruined his shoulder through over-training, has neither his near Olympic-level swimming nor any other clear plan. He’s treading water after a time as a “blue streak” in the pool, and he’s irritated his go-get-’em father in the process. Then, in the opening pages, his father dies.

What follows is a meditation on self and family, with many excellent set pieces. We get the note-for-note rendering of the family coming together and dealing with its grief, and we get close-ups of one family member after another.

The best of this comes in the details, and, as someone only a bit younger than Ellen, I found myself squirming at the all-too-close-to-home, warts-and-all rendering of a Jewish family. Since I’m scheduled to work with Ellen later this summer, I paid particular attention to that level of rendering. It’s clear she has real chops, and I hear from others she brings that same eye as a reader.

At the same time, this probably doesn’t “move” as well as I’d like. That is, its individual scenes are all solid, but they don’t always connect to one another as effectively as I’d like. (This is something I struggle with in my own writing.) We get an opening scene where, in a laundromat, Danny meets a young woman and perhaps makes a connection. Except for a quick glance back at the end of the novel, though, the scene has no staying power. The woman falls out of the novel.

In a similar vein, we get what seems a sub-plot about the medical examiner misplacing the father’s body. In a novel so steeped in realism, it seems gratuitous, a plot device to extend the general discomfort of the situation. [SPOILER: There’s also a plot twist where we learn that Danny has been cut out of his father’s will, a quirk of anger that we know doesn’t represent his father’s true feelings but that exacerbates the totality of Danny’s loss. Bottom line, it doesn’t need to be there, and it distracts from the real drama of Danny coming to grips with what it means to be his own parent.]

There’s a strong story in all of this. Danny is dealing with the end of his father’s life, the end of his career as a swimmer, and the beginning of a new kind of responsibility. At its best here, this novel makes that difficult crossroads a real drama. Danny doesn’t have it easy, but novels don’t happen in “easy.” They happen when someone like Danny has his eyes opened to a (detailed) world that doesn’t square with the one he anticipated.

It’s a pleasure to read this for its skill, but it seems less urgent today than I suspect it did when it came out.


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Friday, June 9, 2017

Review: Blood on the Tracks

Blood on the Tracks Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one starts out as an impressive reimagining of the procedural. Our narrator is the intriguing Sidney Rose Parnell, a traumatized Iraq war marine who’s joined up stateside with the railroad police in the Denver of her childhood. Sidney carries the horrors of her war with her, seeing the ghosts of the men and women she dealt with in her work in the morgue, and taking advice from her dead sergeant and dead lover. The one good thing she’s brought back is her traumatized service dog, Clyde, who’s pledged his loyalty to her after the death of his first handler, her boyfriend.

For most of the first half, it’s less a question of whodunit than of how Sidney will uncover everything. For all the trauma she faces, she remains a good detective, and it’s rewarding to see her puzzling through piles of evidence at the same time as she deflects the too common sexism that comes her way. She’s a strong character, and you know you’re in good hands from the start.

Toward the end, this is still pretty solid, but it deteriorates into more of a conventional thriller. It’s nice that it’s a woman detective coming to the rescue of a decent but generally helpless man, but there’s a lot of been-there, done-that to it. The climax is surprisingly bloody, and there’s a lot less of the nuance we get from the beginning. From the original straw-man bad-guy of “the burned man,” a disfigured Iraq War vet, we end up with entirely unsympathetic skin-head bad guys out of central casting.

Things move well even at the end, and Nickless can certainly deliver the goods, so I did enjoy it.

I gather this is the first in a series, and I can imagine subsequent ones will continue to mine what it means for Sidney to carry so many of her ghosts back with her. I can even imagine a series that culminates in a big disclosure around the serious crimes she was peripheral to in Iraq.

As all that plays out here, though, it feels as if much of the best material gets held back. As with the Burned Man, we get some misdirection. The Iraq crimes come to us as a tantalizing story, but, per the logic of a series, they get deferred.

This is a bit better than conventional, but it’s not quite the powerhouse it gives promise of being.


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Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Review: Jar of Fools

Jar of Fools Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the great things about reading graphic novels these days is that, mature as the genre is becoming, we can still see its origins. If you’re my age – ahem, comfortably middle-aged – you remember when Maus (and maybe even Contract with God) came out. With few exceptions, the founding examples of the form are still around, still almost current.

I can’t say I’d heard of this one before I found a nice two-volume edition for sale at my local comic book store (shout out to Comics on the Green in Scranton, PA) but it looked intriguing and I gave it a shot. It’s from 1994, still the dark ages of graphic novels, but it’s new to me.

The story here is compelling: Ernie was a top stage magician, but he’s haunted by the death of his brother Eddie in an escape stunt gone bad. Their old mentor, Al, is on the lam from a retirement home, and Ernie’s old girlfriend – who’s also haunted by Eddie’s death – can’t start the new life she thinks she wants. Throw in a con-man living out of his car with his 10 year old daughter. And you have a full cast of characters.

It’s hard to paraphrase what happens in the story because, like a lot of the best narrative art, it grows out of the urges and needs of the characters. Each of these is surprisingly well realized, and I found myself curious about everyone we get to spend much time with. I loved the first part and simply raced into the second. I think the second wraps up a bit too quickly, forcing a few changes in character that come without a great deal of explanation. But that’s a quibble next to the general inspiration of the whole.

The art is understatedly beautiful. Maybe because it was originally serialized in a Seattle weekly or maybe because Lutes hadn’t yet seen some of the box-breaking experiments other artists got into, the drawings are all small, reminiscent of newspaper comic strips. But each box is unusually eloquent. Lutes has a gift for giving quick dashes of character so that even background characters come to feel like people we recognize.

Over time, I felt as if the characters here were actually separate actors, each giving a solid performance in a moving story of broken people finding one another.

We’ll have to see how the full history of the graphic novel genre gets written, and I am sure that a lot of what we take now as exemplars of the form will fade or seem dated. These black and white drawings in their small boxes may not make the eventual cut, but there’s a poignant and broken magic to them. The form may have taken a different direction than this one suggested, but it’s a real gem, and I urge you to check it out if it comes your way.


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Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Review: Dodgers

Dodgers Dodgers by Bill Beverly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a pretty good crime novel. It’s got a great perspective since our point-of-view is East, a “watcher” at an L.A. crack house. He takes in everything he sees, always alert to threats and always committed to the “safe” way. There’s a lot of money in the business, so he’s got no reason to try anything freelance.

As all the reviews and blurbs recount, East and a small crew have to drive from L.A. to Wisconsin to kill a potential witness against a key player in the larger gang. So this turns into a road trip story with characters who have little experience of the places they’re headed. East is responsible in ways the others aren’t, and he tries to keep them on task despite distractions.

The tension here comes from our young protagonist growing into a sense of his own capacity. He isn’t ready for a mission this fraught at the start, but he’s someone older, more able at the end. We don’t know until the last moment whether they’ll be able to pull the hit off, and we don’t know for a good bit longer than that whether it was a crime worth committing.

If this is really just a crime novel, though, the ending is unsatisfying. [SPOILER] East, stranded in the Midwest, finds a new life for himself, helping operate a paintball factory in a decaying Ohio town. He’s back to watching, and he feels pretty good about himself. Then he discovers that someone he thought he thought was dead has returned, and he has a choice: go back to his old life or try for something new. That’s intriguing (and I’ve undersold it) but it isn’t quite ‘crime’ anymore.

So, while this is a good crime novel, it’s even better as something more, as an exploration of what it means to grow up in this 21st century America.

For starters, Beverly can flat out write. He has a peculiar, wonderful rhythm. It’s almost as if his sentences lope in that tough-guy performed way. It’s almost like reggae without the underlying hope and celebration. I took down these gems. “You think it’s the same out there? But you don’t know. It ain’t. Them police don’t budget on you. That’s their country. They love a little Negro boy.”

Or “Talking to Ty, you ended up knowing less than you started with. He took a pleasure in sharing nothing, enjoying nothing, a scrawny boy who’d almost starved as a baby, didn’t eat, didn’t play – failure to thrive, the relief doctor said. Smart but didn’t like school, fast but didn’t like running. Never cried as a baby, never asked questions. Never loved anything but guns.”

Beverly puts all of that prose in the service of telling his crime story, but also in the service of his more ambitious project. These are kids – and they really are kids, still in their early teens – who’ve inherited a world that offers them almost nothing.

It took me a while to figure out what’s so evocative in East’s name – purportedly short for Easton – and it finally hit me. Like Gatsby this is a story of the American dispossessed venturing, not West, but East. Our hero here is defined as someone trying to reverse the history of the country. His final conundrum is almost a literal take on American history: he can return West, return to the ‘boxes’ he’s always known, or he can try to venture further back into the coastal East, a world that represents the original promise of our culture.

L.A. may be home to East, but there’s something empty about it. Some of that is the violence he knows – he watches an innocent girl get shot in the early pages of the book – but some of that is an even more profound emptiness. His brother Ty, who experienced a “failure to thrive” as an infant, is perfectly suited to the place. But East, who longs for the chance to be loyal to something worthy of him, can’t find what he needs.

The ending that somewhat disappoints as part of a crime novel is compelling in this other context. Once Ty tracks him down at the end, the “center” (i.e. the Midwest of Ohio) cannot hold. East has to choose the L.A. he has always known, or the “East” for which he was inadvertently named. It’s a choice between an everyday despair that’s taught others to murder without qualm and an uncertain future that smacks of the American promise to reinvent ourselves.

There’s a lot to chew on at the end of this and, as much as I admire it, I think there’s a calculated sloppiness, almost a “lope” to the rhythm of the narrative. It’s compelling, and I enjoy it, but I’ll be curious to see what Beverly goes on to do. As many others have said, this is a spectacular debut in itself – and it’s been on my list since I first heard the reviews almost a year ago – one that seems to announce the start of an impressive career. Sign me up for Beverly’s next one, and certainly give this one a consideration.


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Friday, June 2, 2017

Review: The Other Woman

The Other Woman The Other Woman by Ellen Lesser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Again, I read this with a bias since I am readying to work with Ellen at the end of the summer, but, still, it’s pretty good. I read the first part of it with admiration, paying attention to the narrative choices she was making and trying to trace the way she brought her character(s) into focus. Then, I read the second half with enjoyment, genuinely wondering how Jennifer would resolve her situation.

The story here is deeply clever. Jennifer is in love with Richard, a married man, and things open as she prepares for his son’s first visit to her home. She’s been drafted as a quasi-mother, someone expected to nurture a near stranger, and she isn’t ready for it. That’s a striking perspective on the “affair” story, and there’s real poignancy in it.

The part I most admire here is the way Lesser carefully excavates the backstory without slowing the momentum of her present tense recounting. This is a short and quick novel – one that feels always to be moving – but it gets a lot done in that space. This is all of Jennifer’s life in her time in Vermont, and we come gradually to see how circumscribed her relationship with Richard has made it.

The voice is always good. We get a sense of Jennifer unpacking her circumstance at every turn. She makes me mistakes, she tries to learn from them, and she tries very hard to grow. I quibble with the reviewer who claims this is a story of Jennifer’s growth. I think, in the end, this is more a story of how she works backwards, of how she needs several months with Richard’s broken family to realize the extent of her mistakes. She needs all that time to discover her mother’s trite lesson: work to make your own family. Love the people who are given to you wholly rather than those who commit only partway and then demand more from you.

I admire the lower-case f feminism of the work. Jennifer may have made questionable choices, but Lesser gives her full opportunity to be human. Her story matters because it is hers, and that’s a deep commitment to an equality of experience.

If I have a ‘wish for more’ with this one, it’s that I’d like more on Richard. On the one hand he’s such a consistent ass that I don’t see what attracts Jennifer to him. On the other, I’d like a little more insight into how he’s feeling as his ex-wife effectively manipulates him.

Still, as I say, good stuff, and all the more fuel for my anticipation of working with Ellen later.


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