Review: House of Sand and Fog

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember this novel from a review I read when it first came out more than 15 years ago. The premise sounded amazing, and I still think so. This begins as a masterpiece.

One of my favorite philosophers is Gaston Bachelard whose focus is on the experience of home. He explores the degree to which we understand ourselves based on the degree to which we feel at home in a certain place or among a certain group.

In that light, this novel begins as a powerful exploration of two people who find “home,” who find the completion of themselves, in the same place. Kathy is a mostly down-on-her-luck recovering addict who needs the house to feel a connection to a past she’s trying to recover. She wants to be the person she once imagined, and the house is part of making that happen in the wake of being abandoned by her fellow addict boyfriend.

Massoud is a former Iranian colonel, an officer who fled the country as the Shah fell and brought a stash of money with him. He’s spent the last 15 years watching his resources dwindle and experiencing his own slide into irrelevance. When he buys the house in a tax sale, it promises a new beginning. It gives him his first real stake in America, and it promises to make him whole again.

That conflict is powerful, and Dubus writes lyrically about each character. The story is compelling as each works toward her or his need around the house. He has to make immediate changes so it can be more valuable in resale. She has to circle around it when, homeless, she is no longer certain where she belongs.

Unfortunately, the novel takes a turn into something else midway through. [SPOILER] I have no problem with Kathy’s falling in love with a police officer who’s dealing with his own deep discontent, but it does bother me that he becomes more and more the driver of the plot. His sudden love for Kathy has him enlist, violently, on her side.

The final quarter of the book, then, is less an exploration of the powerful grip a home can have on you than it is a study in the way desire and frustration can boil over. It’s still a compelling story, one that has the grip-your-attention power of a suspense story when you know, with dread, what’s coming but can’t look away.

And, throughout, this is written in a beautiful fashion, one that recalls in parts for me the very different tone of Jefferey Eugenides.

So, this is a powerful work, one I’m glad to have

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Review: Windy City Watchdog

Windy City Watchdog by Bob Wiedrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This Chicago reporter’s memoir follows in a surprisingly substantial niche genre. From Ben Hecht on, it’s been a kind of late-career obligation for Chicago’s top muckrakers to reflect on their lives, careers, and favorite anecdotes. I got curious and combed my shelves for others in the tradition: I already have John McPhaul’s Deadlines & Monkeyshines (1962), Bill Doherty’s Crime Reporter (1964), and John Drummond’s Thirty Years in the Trenches (1998), and I’m not even including the late career retrospectives that Ed Baumann and John O’Brien put together. With that, I’m sure missing plenty more. Narrow as it is, it’s been fertile ground.

So, in that light, I find it kind of sad that Wiedrich’s memoir is self-published and that’s it’s gotten very little attention. Some of that, I’m afraid, is his fault. This is written in short, episodic bits. It feels like an assemblage of columns he’s written in retirement more than a coherent narrative. But some of that is a world that, as we see so dramatically with the crisis over “fake news,” has forgotten the work it takes to do real reporting. A generation ago, there’d have been a real market for something like this.

I’ve been doing a lot of digging in mid 1970s Chicago crime reporting (for a project that’s kept me from doing much other reading), and there’s no question Wiedrich was a real star. Alongside his Tribune partner Sandy Smith and the Sun-Times’ great Art Petacque, Wiedrich was the premier reporter of gangster events of his era. His old columns make sense of stories that others were putting together only in piecemeal. There’s a saying that journalism is the first draft of history. In those days, Wiedrich did his share of those first drafts, but he may have been alone in also doing a kind of second-draft, of writing pieces like his awesome “The Old, Gray Mob, It Ain’t What it Used to Be” in 1974 as a careful look at the way the founding generation of Chicago’s Syndicate was dying out. As someone going back to make sense of the period, I find his work is essential.

This memoir is not, for the most part, as spot-on as those old columns. I enjoy the way he captures a kind of gentle corruption permeating the Chicago he remembers. He has a great story about trying to tip a cop off about a bookie joint as a kid, only to be told to mind his own business. Or he talks as well about how, as a nearly broke young reporter, he’d join cops for free meals from restaurants that knew they were being gently squeezed.

I picked this up for the nuggets I might get on the gangsters he covered and knew, and I’m afraid it’s often thin in that department. There’s a sameness to most of the Syndicate members he discusses, though he clearly hated Richard Cain, a sheriff’s deputy who notoriously worked for the Syndicate at the same time. (And wound up shot in the end.) Cain once tried to entice him into a sexual encounter with a prostitute in an effort to collect dirt on him for future blackmail. Otherwise, we get a lot of names but none of the only-now-it-can-be-told details that I was hoping for.

There are some nice moments of reflection on the vanished Chicago and only a little of the “things were so much better then” nostalgia that threatens any project like this. I come away from this thinking it would be good to spend an afternoon with Wiedrich, who still seems sharp, but that the book itself doesn’t quite give a new look at the history he first helped uncover.


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Review: Past Imperfect

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The British empire may have died, but its death spasms continue. Fellowes has gotten famous, so I understand, from Downton Abbey – which I have not managed to see – and I thought reading this might give me some flavor of what people seem to admire so much about it.

On the plus side, this is often ‘sumptuous,’ a word I associate with Downton Abbey. We get long descriptions about the lives of assorted aristocrats, their homes, and their hopes. At its best, Fellowes gives nice, insightful portraits of individuals. At its worst, it runs on, tending toward what I might call a pornography of upper class life – descriptions that acknowledge the banality of the whole crowd but that go on to detail their whims and hungers with lingering attention.

All of that is generally what I signed up for: a 21st century English novel of manners. What really disappoints me, though, is the clumsiness of the narrative here. Fellowes can certainly write at the sentence level, but the whole of this feels almost amateurish in its organization.

At an architectural level, this is a Gatsby rewrite. Our narrator is a man of “the crowd,” but he’s on the outskirts of it. Through him, an arriviste pushes his way in, falls in love with a young woman, and then finds he cannot after all reinvent his background sufficiently to win her.

As we get the story, though, it’s presented through the organization of a mystery novel – a staged and dated variation of the old locked-room mystery. The dying Damian tells us that he understands he sired a child on one of his many mistresses of a couple decades before, and he wants to know which woman is the mother. Of course he has a list of all the women he slept with, and, of course, our protagonist/narrator proceeds from one ‘suspect’ to the next.

The organization that follows is so straightforward as to be embarrassing. We get a section dedicated to each – with her name on it in all but the final case – then we get a chapter on life ‘back then’ and a chapter on the present-day ‘interrogation.’ The skill of the sentences obscures the real hack-work underneath. Why, for instance, would one woman confide that she ‘bought’ her child to fake a pregnancy that would force a man to marry her? It’s a story she’s never told anyone, and there’s no conceivable motivation for sharing it when she does; it’s just convenient to the arc of the story as we get it. When he needs an answer to move onto the next chapter, he gets it. And why does each chapter reach a ‘climax’ in which it seems the child in question might be the one…only to have the possibility eliminated by one or another last-second reveal? Again, narrative convenience.

Throughout the novel, we’re teased with the idea of “Portugal,” a final and too-embarrassing-to-speak-of scene that, predictably, we get described near the very end. [SPOILER] So, Damian loses his temper and tells all the upper-class twits off. And he’s an asshole to our narrator. By that point in the novel, our narrator’s more or less forgiven him. It’s not that big a deal, yet it carries the weight of concluding that part of our narrator’s life…even though he admits he remained in contact with his old set over the following decades.

And then there’s a ‘twist’ at the end that’s really frustrating because it violates the spirit of the ‘mystery’ as we’ve gotten it. Someone on the list shouldn’t have been there and vice-versa and, guess what? The most obvious person of all is the one. Fellowes gets to express his contempt for the excesses of the aristocracy – he shows us his appreciation for the common sort after all -- but the wealthy get wealthier, and a sliver of the fine old caste system persists.

I’m probably being harder on this than I should be. I did finish it, after all, and one of its clear sins is its length. Still, I’d heard such good things about Downton Abbey that I have time believing Fellowes had much to do with shaping the way those stories came together.


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Review: Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I confess I didn’t really plan to read this. I’ve loved Franken since I first saw him on Saturday Night Live, proclaiming the ‘80s not the me-decade, but the “Me, Al Franken, decade.” Still, I figured I’d heard what I needed to hear, and I’d just go on rooting for him to do his good work in the Senate while I spent time reading more serious fiction.

Then I kept stumbling across excerpts of this book, and each one made me laugh. There was the famous one about Ted Cruz, “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.” There was his quoting Lindsay Graham as evidence that Republicans can be funny too. Noting that Graham was running 15th in a field of 17 candidates for the GOP Presidential nomination, Franken told him, “Lindsay, if I were voting in the Republican primaries, I’d vote for you.” Without hesitation, Graham replied, “That’s my problem.” And there was his persistent talk about how he’d had to “de-humorize” his statements in order to become a legitimate Senate candidate.

Finally, I got hit with a chance to buy the book as part of a fundraiser and, well, I just couldn’t stop reading it.

In many ways, this is three books in one, and all are interesting.

The first 50-60 pages are really a memoir of Franken as a Jewish kid in Minnesota growing into a successful comic. In the spirit of Steve Martin’s recent memoir, it brought the pleasure of revisiting many of the great skits of my adolescence from the performer’s side of things. I hadn’t realized how central Franken was to the early SNL vibe. He wasn’t Martin, who came to be the manic face of the guest host, nor was he Lorne Michaels, the impresario. He wasn’t even John Belushi or Bill Murray, the most inspired of the performers. But, as a writer, he was a constant voice behind all of those people, and – with the exception of Michaels – he was there longer.

Again as with Martin’s memoir, one of the pleasures is to discover the existing comics that Franken wanted to emulate. I love his take on Bob and Ray – perhaps my father’s favorite comedy team – and, once he says it, I can see how their dry approach informed Franken, his partner Tom Davis, and much of what I remember from those early SNL days.

The middle part of this book recounts the long process of Franken’s run for the Senate. It tells how a politically inclined person slowly decided to become a candidate. Along the way, he had to overcome a strange primary – in which his old humor was read out of context – and the closest Senate race in U.S. history – in which his humor was manipulated into untruths.

This part gets a bit slow in places – there’s less tension than the narrative seems to imply since we know the outcome beforehand – but it is intriguing for a political junkie.

The best part of that section, though, is the way Franken discusses the role of humor in his campaign. He talks a lot about how he had to try to present himself as someone other than who he’d been his entire adult life. His frustration is fun to see, but even more fun is to have him release some of the best jokes he had to self-censor during the campaign. It isn’t news that Franken is funny and insightful; it is news that he was being funny and insightful at this most serious part of his life.

The final section is even more fun as the now-established Senator Franken gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the Senate. The line about Cruz turns out to be an anomaly. Franken talks about how he feels compelled to push against his Republican colleagues, but he offers a refreshing look at what it means to know the people you’re fighting with. It’s striking to hear him report that Jeff Sessions – the same guy whom Coretta Scott King called too racist to be a federal judge and who is a neanderthalic Attorney General – asked his wife to knit a blanket for Franken’s first grandchild. Franken assailed the guy during his confirmation hearings, and it’s more compelling to know he did so with a personal affection for the man whom he politically opposed.

Anyway, this turns out to be a thoughtful and fun book. I kept daring myself to put it down, but then it would jump back into my hand and make me read it. All I can say is, if you’re tempted, give it a shot. Franken’s voice comes through on the page, and we certainly need as much of it as we can get these days.


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