Review: Like Life

Like Life by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this one.

I am convinced that, if I’d read it when it came out 30 years ago, I’d have been part of the chorus declaring it “outstanding” (as the cover blurb promises). As it is, I read some of Moore’s work not long after and did jump on board the bandwagon declaring her our leading voice for the American short story.

Even now, with some of the age showing here, I am stunned by the sheer narrative skill here. Each of these stories presents enough insight and information to stand as a novel in a lesser but still talented writer’s hands. And that’s where the art of the short story comes through. She has the capacity to compress experience, to make each word carry more weight than you think possible.

I’ll be reading one of these stories, and I’ll find myself trying to imagine how I could tell the same story. I always fail to do it as well as she does – even when I’m doing it only theoretically – because her work is intricate, because she weaves her stitches so tightly and evenly throughout.

At the same time, I admire the characters who emerge in each of these. A Moore character might seem a stereotype for one sentence, a clever twist on that stereotype with a second, and becomes a wholly original person with a third. That’s all it takes her, three strokes of the brush and her people are unlike any others in fiction.

Why the partial reluctance, then? Some of it is her commitment to an aesthetic I don’t always share and that I’m not sure has aged all that well. I recently read Mary Roach’s Stiff from a slightly later era, and that one struck me as afflicted with a “Seinfeld syndrome,” a too-great readiness to stand and observe rather than sympathize and sustain. I see some of that here as well, I think. Too many of these characters seem to suffer without our being invited to empathize with them.

In the stories I like the most from Moore – above all her magisterial “Dance in America” from Birds of America – there’s simply more heart, more humanity. Here – and maybe it was a ‘90s “thing” – I feel more as if I am being asked to shut up and watch the show. (Didn’t Pearl Jam nail it around the same time with the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – “Here we are now, entertain us”?)

Perhaps as a consequence of that, and perhaps simply as a reflection of the fact that Moore’s skill is so arresting on its own, I also find myself hard-pressed to remember what any particular story is about. Each one is gripping, and I would sometimes put my family on hold to read the final couple pages and get resolution, but then – almost every time – I’d find myself unable to remember exactly what just happened.

I think my favorite story here is probably, “You’re Ugly Too.” It opens with some of those quick and powerful Moore moves, and suddenly it’s clear that Zoe is unhappy with her small-time Illinois life in a way no literary character ever has been unhappy in small-town Illinois. She might have a serious medical condition. She has a chance at an imperfect relationship with a man she imagines caring about.

Every step in the story has narrative power. They can go on a silly date – and he can lean in to kiss her – and I’m hanging on it. At the end, though, much of it remains unresolved. She seems to have blown the guy off, but maybe not. She may be really ill, but we don’t know. I want to ask the questions, and I recognize that Moore is carving out a space for story that falls before what we’d think of as the conventional climax, but I can’t help wanting to know more. Forgive me for being a Philistine, but I want a story that does more than make me admire its craft.

That feels like an unfair claim and, as I say, I suspect it makes me sound insufficiently sophisticated. Somewhere, someone reading this is huffing at me and reaching for a recent New Yorker to clear away the stench.

So, don’t let me go too far in that direction either. Moore’s skill astounds me, and that’s more than worth the price of admission. Knowing some of what she’s gone on to do, and knowing how she’s evolved with some of the zeitgeist as well, I admire this and think of it as prologue to some of the great later work.


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Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like most people who read it, I loved Salvage the Bones. I think it announced the possibility of a major talent, someone we’ll have with us for the next few decades, someone who can “sing” the African-American experience with new words but echoes of the same tune that Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison laid down. No, it isn’t fair to compare anyone to both of those two, arguably among the handful of greatest writers we’ve produced as a culture. Still, Ward is so good – in Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing – that it’s not a complete stretch. We’ll have to see how her work ages and what more she can do, but – three novels in – she remains in the conversation for being one of the greats herself.

I read Salvage as a powerful search for a mother figure, whether the dog giving birth in the stunning opening scene, the lost mother whose fragmented lore guides our protagonist, or the towering and feminine Katrina bearing does as a devastating hurricane. This one has many echoes of that same question – here, Mam is dying when we meet her, and Leonie is simply never there for Jojo – but I think it’s reasonable to characterize this one as about the search for a suitable father figure.

There is Pop, of course, and he’s a powerful possibility. This opens with Jojo watching Pop and learning how to slaughter a goat, but really learning how to be a man who has to do what it takes to keep his family safe and fed.

But Pop is handcuffed as well. If Jojo is his heir, there is still a yawning gap where the missing generation should be. There’s Given, Pop’s son and Jojo’s uncle, killed (or murdered) before he could grow into manhood himself. There’s Michael, Jojo’s white father, who’s always distracted by his petty schemes and the jail time that follows and who simply doesn’t know how to be a father yet. There’s Michael’s father, Big Joseph, who’s so blinded by racism that he can’t understand how to parent. There’s even Al, Michael’s lawyer, who rescues the family only to put them into just as much jeopardy when he involves them again with meth.

And, perhaps finally, there is Richie, one of the two ghost figures (Given being the other) who stand as young men who might have been fathers had they had the opportunity to grow to adulthood. Both also stand as Pop’s first “children.” Pop did what he could to save the young Richie, but Richie was too weak, and Pop not yet come into his capacity yet. [SPOILER: And, of course, we eventually learn that Pop benefitted from Richie’s death in that he was allowed to leave the awful Parchman prison early for having shown he could obey the authority of the warden by tracking Richie.]

The hope here, then, is always Jojo, a boy who is seeking a way toward a life that will allow him to care for Kayla and the others. He’s innocent and loving, and all that will keep him from full fatherhood is the almost overwhelming work of growing into adulthood. With Pop’s help, and with wisdom from the dying Mam, he’s already carrying more of a burden than a boy should. But he’s a figure of deep hope, and he stands as a possibility that this African-American world is slowly healing itself.

If I had to choose, I’d still prefer Salvage the Bones because that one is more focused both in its inquiry and its characters. Still, I can see the case for this one since it’s more ambitious in the way it considers three full generations with glimpses of before and after.

Either way, Ward is clearly a writer to continue watching. She writes with real and sustained grace, and she explores questions that, without resolving into easy answers, nevertheless make us feel a little wiser for having considered them.


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Review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a funny book. That is, it’s funny-weird and funny-haha.

Throughout this, Mary Roach explores what happens to bodies after death when they are pressed, in various ways, into serving the living.

The concept is outrageous, yet it’s also interesting – compelling even – and Roach knows she’s onto something. Part of her approach here is a latter-day participatory journalism. She doesn’t simply report on what she’s learning, but she talks about her experiences learning it. At her best, she’s great at immersing us in one sort of lab or another. One of the most memorable parts is the way she describes the odor that clings to her shoes after she spends a couple hours in a morgue.

At a funny-weird level, she’s at her best in the early chapters when she explores what seems to me the most obvious examples of her inquiry. She visits cadaver labs, talks with morticians and pathologists, and gives us a tour of what it’s like in the world of scientists and engineers who use dead bodies to measure car tests and develop time-of-death determination techniques. It’s a good and important set of inquiries; however squeamish we may be about using bodies in such fashion, we still benefit from them. One researcher estimates that every cadaver used in car crash studies has saved dozens of lives a year.

The later chapters get a little farther out and, to my thinking, a little less interesting. It’s kooky to read about the researchers who tried to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin by suspending cadavers in positions that replicated what might have been the dying position of Christ. It’s more stomach-turning to hear about historical instances (and sometimes not so historical) when communities ate humans either “for the taste” or for imagined medicinal reasons.

Even granting the morbidity of the subject, it seems fairly far afield to conflate the original premise of cadaver usage with the less savory non-scientific pre-history of the treatment of dead bodies, While it’s interesting, a part of it feels tangential.

At a funny-haha level, this also starts out funnier than it ends. Roach has a gift for one-liners in context. She makes me laugh – and will probably make most people laugh – and that’s a good thing. In the beginning, she seems to be going about her work – her odd and self-assigned work – and then finding ways of lessening the tension. She’ll go through a strong description of something clinical, and then she’ll uncork a line that reminds us there is a silliness to it all, too.

When she first begins that, it’s effective. Over time, though, her method starts to show through. She’ll telegraph the jokes more than before; some of what she goes into seems like it may be there as much for the opportunity for the jokes as for its legitimate connection to the topic.

Even more, while I did enjoy this throughout, I started to get troubled by her essential capacity for callousness. She’s observational in a Seinfeldian way; she assumes for herself the privilege of making stories about others – about objectifying them. Henry James criticized that impulse a century ago, and it hasn’t become any more appealing. It had a moment 15-20 years ago, a period when it seemed the dominant comic style, but I think comedy has evolved into something else. Put simply, in the age of Trump, it isn’t funny to sit on the sidelines and mock, even if that mockery is as gentle and clever as this is.

So, if this one were half as long as it is, if the method hadn’t started to get old for me, I think I’d have loved it. As it is, I’m still impressed with Roach’s curiosity, humor, and skill. There’s a lot to like about it still, and I think it would have been an even greater pleasure when it first came out.


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Review: Nimona

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was one of those bonus offerings from Audible for those of us who have monthly memberships. It looked fun, so I gave it a shot, and it turns out to be reasonably fun.

The book – I “read” an adaptation of the webcomic which I understand will eventually lead to a feature film – opens with an acknowledgement that its setting is so clichéd as to be a mockery. It’s a kingdom with a too-good-to-be-true hero in Goldenloin (the name tells you the tone we’re looking at) even though the real good guy is Ballister Blackheart. The two are old lovers, which is an interesting twist even though it’s rendered as unremarkable.

Again, all of that is so familiar that it’s a warning sign. I’d certainly have bailed on this if it weren’t so short.

The part that ultimately distinguishes this, though, is Nimona herself. We meet her as another kind of cliché, a little girl who wants to be a super-villain sidekick – which leads her to hooking up with Blackheart.

Except, [SEMI-SPOILER:] she isn’t a cliché, especially not in this context. She’s actually a kind of homicidal maniac, killing off all sorts of people for little provocation. She wants to hurt others, and she wants to commit crimes.

It’s a reasonably striking concept, and I enjoyed the provocation. What do you do with a creature who seems like a little girl in a fairy tale parody when she turns out to be a very real and ruthless killer?

Stevenson is mostly about having fun here, though, so she doesn’t push this all that far. Plus, there are some irritations in the way the cast performs this. The actors are all strong, but there are too many sound effects and awkward narrator intrusions. It’s too aware of its own jokes when, at least as I understand the underlying dark joke, we ought to be having it all dawn on us only slowly.

So, I did find things to like here, and I do think it has its successes. Ultimately, though, this is so much about exploring cliché that, while attempting to subvert it, it most just endorses it. For a time, I figured this for a two-star book. In the end, I think it’s really a 2.5.


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Review: How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People

How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People by D.L. Hughley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Laugh at this one until you cry.

This is what happens when a thoughtful guy takes the time to explain how the world looks if you’re Black. It’s what happens when he writes to an implicitly Black audience in a way that even us white people can understand. And it’s what happens when that guy is also lights-out funny in the midst of the heavy stuff he has to report.

There may be some Dave Chappelle or Richard Pryor here – yeah, they’re the all-time reigning champs, I know – but I suspect there’s a heavy dose of Dick Gregory too. This is humor, humor about the weight of racism, but it’s humor focused as a studied political act. Hughley is performing pain and anger; he’s harnessing them into a performance.

At one time he jokes that he hopes his book will save just one person from getting shot, but not really. He wants it to save a lot of people because, if it were just one, he wouldn’t sell enough copies to make any money.

But, of course, he’s also deadly serious. He references far too many times when Black men – and sometimes Black women and Black children – have been shot for preposterous reasons: carrying a BB gun (unloaded) in a toy store on the way to pay for it, reaching for a wallet, saying “I have a gun” without reaching for it, or simply being large. He’s channeling real and abiding pain, but he knows how little Black pain seems to register in the larger world. So he’s making us laugh at the horror instead.

And, somehow, he keeps the laughs coming. At one point he goes into a tangent about police violence, noting that you know it’s a problem when they accidentally kill white people. He recounts a police killing of an Australian yoga instructor – blonde, no less – and refers to her as probably “the least killable person you can imagine.” “What’s next,” he muses, “Nicole Kidman?” That’s edgy but, with apologies to Nicole Kidman, it’s funny too.

Or there’s his quick analysis of the white dispossessed working class’s voting for Donald Trump because he promised to bring back the factory jobs that have mostly vanished. They don’t seem to realize, though, that it’s not immigration but automation that’s taken most of those jobs. As he puts it, “They voted from Trump, but they really needed DeVry.”

It’s rare to go long without being moved here, and it’s rare to go long without something to make you guffaw. It’s a spectacular performance, and it makes me respect this talented comedian even more than I already did.

As an answer to the question of his title, he concludes with a biting final observation: What’s the best way not to get shot? Don’t be Black.

As a white person, it’s not my job to say much in response to this. My job is to listen. Hard as these truths are, I’ve done that with an admiration that only amplifies the power of the message.


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Review: Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle

Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this one.

Rachel Dratch was another of the Saturday Night Live performers of the post-Adam Sandler era, a time when – or so it seems – the show shed its “bro” vibe for a space that slowly allowed a female-centered style to emerge. Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider gave way to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Dratch. Inspired as the young Sandler could be, I call that an upgrade.

Anyway, this book turns out to be only partially about Dratch’s SNL career. She gets that phase of her life out of the way quickly to set up the rest of this memoir about her experience navigating singlehood and then becoming a mother for the first time at age 44. As she tells us, the only roles she’s being offered after SNL and a brief stint on Fey’s 30 Rock are wacky best friends and lesbian secretaries. She’s still comfortable financially, and she’s working enough to feel involved, but her big-time career is mostly finished. It’s a complaint we hear from a lot of talented female performers and, to her credit, she reports it, owns it, and moves on.

The main thrust of this is, indeed, a memoir rather than an autobiography. We see her as she stumbles through the dating life, as she negotiates a steady but only semi-serious relationship, and as she embraces the accident of discovering she’s going to have a child. It’s a good story, and she tells it with insight and a persistent, mostly gentle humor. I expected a set of show-biz memories; instead, we get a thoughtful account of a woman who’s reinvented herself.

Dratch does reflect some on the nature of her comedy, but for the most part she simply models a more mature form of it. If Fey set the tone for their collective approach – a form I think of as based around slightly exaggerating reality and then wondering at its absurdity – Dratch puts her particular accent on it. There’s something Jewish in her tone, something I’d call an updated kvetchiness, and I like it.

Her most famous role, of course, was as Debbie Downer, the depressive friend who’s always reminding everyone of some unpleasant and often remote possibility. Here, she’s more fully human, more three-dimensionally prepared for the worst. But there’s something plucky to her as well. She knows she’s had more professional good fortune than most people, but she knows as well that she’s mostly burned through that good fortune.

What’s more, she realizes that her work in comedy – the way she immersed herself in the full contact work of improv and TV sketch comedy – has insulated her from experiences others take for granted. She’s funny when she talks about how hard it is for her to read the signs of a man’s interest in her. At one point she wonders whether guys are interested in her or in Lorne Michaels.

I read these comedy biographies to get a sense of the ways different comedians have found to be funny. Dratch isn’t as analytical about that as I might like, but she doesn’t have to be. She’s found a worthwhile story to tell, and she uses it to demonstrate what makes her a welcome and distinct comic voice.


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Review: GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED

GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED by Darrell Hammond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I never found Darrell Hammond all that funny, though, to be fair, I didn’t watch a lot of Saturday Night Live in his era. Still, I’ve found myself reading as many memoirs of cast members as I can because I’m curious about what makes something funny and because I have a son imagining a career in comedy.

Oh, and this was on sale.

If I’d known what I was getting into with this, I doubt I’d have read it. For the most part, there’s not much funny to it. Instead, it’s a harrowing account of Hammond’s emotional illness. He was physically abused as a child, mostly by his mother but also at times by his father. He coped in the cliched way of working to make people laugh, but also in darker ways like substance abuse and cutting himself.

While there are some early chapters about his SNL life and his work as a comedian, the majority of the first two-thirds of this is a straightforward memoir of a deeply pained man. There’s power in his self-discovery, power in the sense that he is working toward healing himself as he tells the story, but he’s only a solid writer, not a great one. If I’d wanted memoir in full, there are a lot of others I’d have turned to first.

There are, eventually, some chapters about his SNL life, but he seems to admit in his afterward that they’re there because his publisher asked for them. He’s surprisingly unhappy in describing his time on the show. He was older than most of the cast, and he was a drinker in a serious and solitary way, so he didn’t connect with his castmates the way so many others of the same era seemed to.

More to the point of what I was hoping for, though, Hammond was never quite a comedian. He was, instead, an impressionist. And, as far as I’m concerned, the best parts of this book come from him discussing what goes into a thoughtful impression. You don’t want to be too exact, he says. Mimicry is more a gimmick than something funny.

Instead, the challenge is to find a quirk and then exaggerate it. He credits Dana Carvey as a mentor and model, and he recalls the power of a sketch the two did together. Carvey as George W. Bush promised he was “Not gonna do it” when it came to raising taxes. Hammond as Al Gore promised to take Social Security and put it in a “lock box.” He nailed the impression so fully and with such mockery that some observers thought it was a factor in that razor-close election.

So it’s interesting to hear him discuss how he listens – studies deeply – the characters he does impressions of. For his Bill Clinton, the most famous of his characters, he developed three different sets of tapes to hear the President in his morning, afternoon and evening voices. He listens for where in the throat the voice comes. Others concentrate on the material, but Hammond lets the writers handle that. He wants to get at a subtler performing quality of someone he “does.”

And, intriguingly, he claims to have a form of synesthesia that makes him hear some voices in color. That gift seems a part of what it takes for him to “get” his subjects.

There’s ultimately less of that analysis than I’d like, though, and that leaves the uncomfortable fact that – absent his striking abilities as an impressionist – he’s simply not that funny a comedian. (In the edition I listened to, the memoir itself is often flat, laughless. In the appended live routine, though, some of the same stories – presented with full-throated impressions – becomes funnier. It’s in the delivery.)

Between the candor of the memoir and the analysis of his art, there are some legitimate elements here. It has some power, but not quite the power I was looking for when I picked it up.


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Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am a nerd, of course, but not even I expect to find linguistics riveting and funny. That’s what happens, though, when you find yourself reading something by a brilliant thinker who’s not afraid to challenge many of his field’s presuppositions and who can spin a good story out of otherwise dry stuff.

McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.

The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.

The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.

McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.

Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.

He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.

Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.

If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.

Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.

What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.


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Review: The House of Broken Angels

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one has a majestic premise: we get to see as many as six generations reflected in the single month between the deaths of two members of an extended family. Their different stories telescope around the gathering(s), and we get backstory piled on top of backstory. From their roots in Mexico, through their time entering furtively into the U.S., to their all-American Spanglish childhoods, we get a glimpse of several decades of history as it has stamped itself on these individuals.

On top of that, Urrea has a real gift for voices. The oldest generations speak to us in an English (at times given to us as implicit translation) that’s formal and poetic. The next, exemplified by the patriarch and central character Big Angel, speaks matter-of-factly. And the youngest, Big Angel’s children and young adult grandchildren, talk with a cocky ease that’s sometimes reminiscent of a Junot Diaz narrator.

Those are real and memorable strengths, and there were times I was reading this that I thought it might be a masterpiece on the level of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. At the same time, though, there’s something inert about the narrative here. It feels sometimes as if we’re introduced to one family member and then another and then another. In each case we get a full backstory, but it’s already concluded. There’s just not that much at stake, not much that carries narrative uncertainty.

That central problem manifests itself particularly toward the end of this. We know from the start that Big Angel is dying, so there’s not much at stake as he winds down. He’d like to leave on good terms with everyone, but it’s not as if he has any particular amends to make. Various others have problems of one sort or another, but in the teeming cast, none seem really to stand out. There are, at times, almost a soap opera’s worth of mini-crises occupying one and another.

That begins to change somewhat toward the final third when [SPOILER:] one of the younger relatives confronts the gangster who shot and killed a couple of other family members years before. We’ve heard about those murders as a wound that will never heal, but it feels more contrived to be happening in the midst of the reality of the funerals of Big Angel’s mother and Big Angel’s imminent death.

[DOUBLE SPOILER:] Things get even more contrived when the gangster interrupts a family festivity threatening to kill one of the grandchildren and Big Angel, often unable by that point even to stand, puts himself between the would-be gunman and his child. It’s melodramatic, which might be OK if the whole of this were more clearly melodrama, and it feels orchestrated. The accidental machismo of Big Angel’s heroism serves as a climax, but it’s a climax that feels incidental rather than organic.

I’m aware that I read this one a bit too quickly – and took a few days break in between – so I missed some of the nuance of the different characters’ experiences. Still, I can’t help feeling that, beautiful as this is with its different voices and multi-generational span, it doesn’t live up to its early potential. I do love the effect of the first third of this, and I won’t be surprised if Urrea gives us a fuller masterpiece in years to come. As much as this delivers, it feels as if it could have been even more remarkable.


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Review: Burr

Burr by Gore Vidal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gore Vidal has long been a “name” whose work I didn’t really know. He seemed almost more famous for being famous than for any particular thing he’d written. So, when this one cropped up on sale, I figured I’d give it a shot.

As a concept, I love this book. A young man and partisan of Aaron Burr is hired to write a scandalous hit-job on Martin Van Buren by claiming that the Presidential candidate is actually the son of the disgraced old man. The result is a novel told back-and-forth between a present of Charlie Schuyler as he navigates the United States of the middle 1830s and a past of Burr’s life.

Burr’s voice, as Vidal gives it to us, is rich and ironic. He offers a view of American history that’s been buried by subsequent consensus, but that comes across as cutting and clever. His Alexander Hamilton isn’t the brilliant but flawed figure of musical fame, but rather an always conniving and striving upstart, jealous of Burr’s distinguished pedigree. (I hadn’t known it, but Burr was the grandson of the famous Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards as well as the son of the president of what would become Princeton.) His Thomas Jefferson isn’t the great, deistic sage we know, but rather a serial promise-breaker, a master politician, and a man capable of switching his philosophy as necessary.

The Burr we hear is a voice of dissent who lives long enough to be among the last major participants in the Revolutionary moment. He comes to us as a curmudgeon, a scoundrel even, but an unapologetic one.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone writing this book today. Forty-five years later, most of the references that seem essential to understanding it have simply fallen out of common knowledge. I found myself checking and re-checking Wikipedia for reminders of just who a whole host of secondary characters are. I remember Henry Clay and John Calhoun. But William Wirt? Samuel Swartwout? Some of these are colorful scoundrels in their own right, characters who must once have been near household names and who helped define American history. Today, well, they’re hyperlinks.

I enjoy the history lesson – that’s much of what kept me in this – but it’s striking to think that Vidal must have been writing for an audience (perhaps imaginary even then) sufficiently saturated in American history to recognize the nature of the revisionism he was exploring. In other words, he had faith there were enough “patriots” (in his Burr’s ironic sense of the word) to follow his fundamental claim.

As a consequence, there’s an airy elitism that pervades this, some of it Burr’s and some of it Vidal’s – himself the scion of a distinguished American family that history may have left behind. Vidal turns out to be every bit the master aphorist I’d heard he was. I didn’t write down any of the great one-liners he pulls off, but there are many turns of phrase that I wish I’d been clever enough to think of. Even so, that contributes to the sense that this is something that’s condescending to me, and to most of us reading it. We’re some of Jefferson’s great unwashed, products not of the openly cynical opportunism of Burr (who narrowly escaped execution as a traitor hoping to establish himself emperor of a region comprised of several of what are now some of our Southern states) but of the subtler hypocrisy of Jefferson and his “Virginia junto.”

There’s much to enjoy here if you’re willing to double-check the history against Burr/Vidal’s version. It can drag in places since it takes a while to find Charlie’s story, but it’s a lot of fun too. I understand Vidal wrote a loose series of these histories, books that challenge our received version of the events that shaped who we are as a nation. I won’t rush onto the next, but I’ll be on the lookout for it sometime down the road.


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Review: The Starless Sea

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the last several years, I’ve offered up a consistent top-two when it comes to thoughtful fantasy novels written in the last decade: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

The Night Circus, if you haven’t read it, is simultaneously a love story, a story of magic in the literal sense, and a story that basks in the magic of its own telling. It feels like a dream, yet you can put it down, reflect on the wonder that someone actually wrote it, and then pick it up and get lost in it again.

And she wrote it when she was still in her early 30s.

So I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I’m glad to say it sustains my sense that Morgenstern is one of the most beguiling writers we have.

This is a book full of wonders. One of the first is a magical moment (magical within the story and to someone reading it) when our protagonist, Zachary, the son of a fortune teller, reads about himself in an ancient book he’s found in the library.

Others include a vast sea of honey rather than water, a man who becomes lost in time, cats and keys and bees that serve as determined and overdetermined symbols, a magical kitchen that can supply any desire, a heart that beats inside a clever wooden box, and a dollhouse that reflects and maps the larger world around it.

Throughout, the prose almost always glows, and I found myself pulled along with every page I turned. This is a book about the magic of reading, and it manages with that to make reading it a magical experience.

Even with all that avid praise, though, I do think this one falls short of The Night Circus.

For one thing, this is simply longer than it needs to be. I can’t point to anything specific I’d want to see cut, but there’s a laxness to the narrative in places. The first 15-20 pages feel as if they’re superfluous, but Morgenstern eventually redeems them into the full narrative. Maybe it would make sense to cut some of the plot threads – do we need three love stories? Do we need as many back-and-forths between the world below and the world above? Do we need so many simultaneous quests?

The answer may be yes. As I say, nothing is superfluous, and the novel never went sour on me, but I did find myself worrying toward the end that it would somehow fail. That is, I always felt the magic, but its spell went on so long that I could feel its limits. In The Night Circus, I never felt outside the power of the circus itself.

And that, I think, is a big part of the issue here. The Night Circus is bounded; all its events take place within the defined space of the circus itself. This one is sprawling. There are multiple levels of reality and time and multiple stories from a deep history and a present. We’ll get characters (modest SPOILER: Kat) who appear early as supporting characters, vanish for hundreds of pages, and return for purpose that doesn’t seem all that insistent.

I can see how that might have happened. If I’d ever managed to write something as masterful as The Night Circus, I suppose I’d be tempted to see if I could write something even bigger, something that broke out of the defined space I’d made for myself.

So, I do recommend this one. I was glad to have some of my enthusiasm tempered by not-quite-glowing reviews, so I’m happy to return the favor. Definitely read this, and start the countdown for Morgenstern’s third novel. But recognize that this one doesn’t always entirely hold up under its sweeping ambitions.


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Review: Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A little more than three years ago, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. That seemed like a kind of dream, a fulfillment of something my family – in particular my father – had imagined since (in his case) the early 1930s.

Three days later, my beloved cat – Tobi – was killed in an accident with the garage door.

Two days after that, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And nothing since then has felt quite the same.

It’s hard to think of that strange succession of events as having actually happened, or as having happened in such a way, with them seeming somehow connected. I’ll joke sometimes that the price of the Cubs’ victory was both my personal loss and the nation’s great self-inflicted insult, but it’s less direct than that. Those days were probably more or less ordinary, excepting those three events and the anxiety we all felt as the election loomed, but looking back on them makes them seem darkly poetic – seem as if it’s only fiction that can capture them.

In Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith traces her own build-up to the harrowing Trump victory. She takes the whole year, not just a week, and she weaves in her own great losses: long-time musical collaborator Sandy Pearlman of Blue Oyster Cult, and her on-again, off-again great love, the playwright Sam Shepard.

This book – it’s not quite memoir and not quite fiction in something of the model of Sergio Pitol – opens with her arriving out West to see Pearlman, among others. She learns right away that he’s suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, though, one from which he will never recover. And Shepard is struggling with ALS, the rugged figure deteriorating before her.

She is immediately taken by the sign in front of the cheap motel where she’s landed, the Dream Inn. It’s evocative, and she photographs it. (The book is full of such photos, and this is the first.)

What follows is hard to describe both because it’s often self-referential and because it’s occasionally self-indulgent. She meets a couple of men, Ernest and Jesus, in a dingy diner who are taken by the work of Roberto Balano. Then there’s a strange episode with candy wrappers that wash up to the beach and seem to be connected to the disappearance of a handful of children – all returned unharmed within a day or two. As Smith reads noirish detective novels, the line between what’s happening and what she’s imagining, blurs.

The book is loosely broken down into a series of months, with Smith moving from place to place, seemingly without a fixed itinerary. We are occasionally reminded that Smith is a major rock star – she explores the possibility of a tour in Australia which would allow her to visit a mountain that she and Shepard had always dreamed of climbing together – but mostly she’s an anonymous figure in the landscape. Everyone in the grey landscape of the America she explores seems to be a kind of artist; they all listen to interesting and distinctive music or read esoteric Latin American fiction. Still, no one ever seems to recognize her even though she’s just the sort of artist who’d be a touchstone for that sub-culture.

In the end, she reaches the discouraging denouement of Trump’s election, the sense that, as she puts it, “Twenty-four percent of the population had elected the worst of ourselves to represent the other seventy-six percent.” The experience feels unreal in the same way the deaths of Pearlman and Shepard – and the long-ago deaths of her husband, parents, and so many others – feel unreal. She wants to deny it all, to deny the truth of where we have found ourselves. She wants to counter at least some of Trump’s peculiar capacity to distort the real, his power to make his untruths have a cultural power even for those of us who recognize them as untruths. But she can’t.

At least not entirely, that is. She’s a writer and a poet, after all, and this memoir emerges as a strange space negotiating the real, the feared, and the remembered.

In the end, there’s a bit of a let-down in the “it was all a Dream [Inn]” reveal we get at the end, and I remain frustrated at times by the many references to Brooklyn hipster touchstones. At the same time, I love the crescendo that she reaches in the closing pages.

When you listen to Smith live in concert, there are often long stretches of self-indulgence, of periods when she drifts outside the structure of song into spoken-word or too out-there instrumentals. But if you stick with it all, there comes an end. There comes a great build-up of intellect and emotion. And, if you do it right – if you dance to what she’s playing – it’s overwhelming.

This ends with a couple of masterful bits – for my money the best writing of the entire book.

There’s this, “This is what I know. Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.”

Or this, “I saw myself with Sam in his kitchen in Kentucky and we were talking about writing. In the end, he was saying, everything is fodder for a story, which means, I guess, that we’re all fodder.”

As I read all that, as I listen to the eventual music of her work, I find the best way to appreciate it is to “dance” as well, to write along with her and to remember that ugly not-so-long-ago end to the Year of the Monkey.

In other words, what Smith accomplishes here is a solid draft toward living in Trump times. As I reflect on the book as a whole, it begins to feel more and more like a post-punk effort (like Jonathan Lethem’s A Feral Detective) to confront the strange Trumpian power to destabilize the real and the true.

There’s still a lot to work out in all of this approach, and I think others will eventually exceed Smith as she does it here, but she’s pointing the way. It’s good to imagine a world where the deaths of those we love unsettle something larger than ourselves. And it’s good to imagine a world where the esoteric things we value turn out to have a currency wider than they can in the real world.

To sum it up, our charged political moment, one where truth has been eviscerated, needs a reminder in the power of the imagination. Smith has been exploring art that resists the narratives of power for forty years. She’s still at it, and the music she makes is enough to get me out of my seat. Getting off your butt is a necessary step in fighting despair. The dancing can follow from there.


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Review: Rolling in the Deep

Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From what I understand, this novella is a prequel to a successful horror series. That’s not my genre, but this one was free with my Audible membership, and I was curious to see how it did what it did.

On balance, as horror, it works as a kind of textual Blair Witch Project. (It even references that film as part of the story.) We get a lot of detail about a film crew that boards a mid-sized cruise ship in order to film what they expect will be a schlock documentary trying to prove that mermaids actually exist. We get a series of characters from the ship’s and film’s crew, and we also get a group of “mermaids,” attractive women outfitted with artificial tails who usually perform in aquariums.

In the end, though, no one emerges as a fully formed character. They’re all types, all victims-in-waiting.

And we know they’re victims because a prologue tells us that everyone on the ship has been killed.

If that sounds like complaint, it isn’t. I don’t know Mira Grant’s work, but I respect her craft. She knows her business, and she knows what her readers are expecting: it’s going to get gory, so why pretend otherwise.

The chief trick here is an old one. For most of the early parts, we don’t see the actual, monstrous mermaids of the Marianas Trench. Instead, we glimpse them just outside the frame. There are hints of what happens – which Grant’s retrospective structure allows – but we don’t get the full-on horror until the end. We know it’s coming; the thrill is in wondering just when and just how it is.

And then we do get the horror, full-blown. [SPOILER:] The final pages here are entirely bloody with everyone we’ve seen killed in some vicious manner. It’s basically a slaughter, and not my thing.

I’m sure I’d have grown tired of this if it were a full-length novel. That’s fine, though, because I’m not a horror guy. For what this is, I’m glad to have the chance to see how Grant employs a basic strategy to make this work within the conventions of a genre that has never really worked for me.


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Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a while reading this to realize it’s a great book, but I think that’s part of its greatness.

This novel begins slowly when Charlie Friend decides – somewhat irresponsibly – to be among the first purchasers of “an Adam,” a fully functioning robot. Then his relationship with Miranda, his attractive upstairs neighbor, begins to grow more serious. Then they cooperatively provide the information – the character DNA as it were – for Adam’s personality, and Adam begins to experience the world and form a self. As a final ingredient, the couple (trio?) begin to take an interest in Mark, a five-year-old boy neglected by his parents in the neighborhood.

As my quick summary suggests, that all felt disconnected and mildly arbitrary. I was looking for the novel to explore some facet of Charlie or his relationship or the developing Adam , but it felt as if was just adding ingredients.

And then, in a kind of wave, I realized that we were getting “programmed” in the same way Adam was. Ian McEwan – who really is one of the world’s great writers – feeds us a succession of basic concepts. Charlie is a kind of dull normal, an upper-middle-class underachiever who mostly realizes he can interest Miranda only because of the predictable and comfortable stability he embodies. Adam begins as an entirely blank slate, but he gets shaped by the preferences they select for defining his personality.

Each decision the characters make sharpens what we see of every one of them, though. Charlie’s decision to purchase Adam begins to define him as a self; it makes him more aware of his limitations and eventually pushes him to become more fully human in his capacity to care for others. At the same time, it alters his relationship with Miranda which further pushes Adam into a character torn between seeing Charlie and Miranda as pseudo-parents and pseudo-lover/rivals.

As a result, even though it starts with basic premises, this novel gets deeper and deeper. It becomes, by the middle third, a sustained inquiry into one of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? Adam is clearly the product of a kind of programming – though he evolves as a self from his initial programming – but in some ways, so are all three of the others. Charlie “programs” Miranda as he tries to win her into a romantic relationship. Mark, as a child, is still subject to being shaped by the way the others treat him. And Charlie himself gets reshaped by the way others respond to his desires. In a telling scene, when Miranda introduces him to her father, her father mistakes him for the robot and finds Adam “better” at being human.

At a broader level, the novel does the same thing in the way it constructs an alternate history of Great Britain in the post-war years. Most significantly, the brilliant codebreaker and student of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, does not die as a consequence of homophobia. He survives, with dramatic results for the progress of computers and robotic science. It’s a single event – one item in the basic “computer code” of history – but it’s sufficient to change the world as we know it; enough, for instance, for us to have robots in the midst of the Thatcher Administration. (A separate event has the British lose the Falklands War, changing its status as a world power.)

From the halfway point of this forward – even through a denouement that runs on longer than I’d have imagined – I found this doing some of the best work that fiction can do. It leaves us without comfortable answers about the ethical differences between seeing a child as a blank slate who will grow into a full self and the same consequences for a robot who will, after a day or two of electrical charging, do the same.

The questions here are powerful, and so are the materials we get to answer them. And so, in the end, is the careful, steady novelistic strategy that McEwan uses to share all of them with us.

This one is going on my list of novels I’ll consider teaching in my Introduction to Fiction classes. It’s that richly imagined, and that richly depicted.


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Review: Meyer

Meyer by Jonathan Lang
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been “off” graphic novels for a while now, without quite knowing why. This one is not going to change that trend.

As someone who writes about Jews in organized crime, I figured I almost had to read this one. It’s described as a late-career imagining of Meyer Lansky, and it’s even blurbed by Lansky’s grandson, Meyer Lansky II. So I figured it had to be interesting as history.

Well, no. It isn’t.

Apart from a handful of references that you might get out of a Wikipedia article, there’s little insight into the nature of Lansky’s long and intriguing criminal career. Our fictional Lansky here spits out clichés about how to be tough and how to outsmart others, but none have any particular links to the particular experiences of the man.

There’s even a small point when, talking to a young Cuban Jewish immigrant he’s befriended, he says, “You look a little like Bugsy.” The reference is to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, but – as anyone who’s read Robert Lacey’s masterful biography of Lansky should know – Siegel’s friends were scrupulous in calling him “Ben.” That’s minor, I know, but when a man is as secretive as Lansky was, it seems we ought to respect the handful of quirks we know about when we try to imagine him in history.

And, besides, I figured, this didn’t have to be history. If it were a good story, it wouldn’t matter if it departed from the historical record.

Well, it isn’t.

For reasons we never learn, Lansky opens the novel living incognito in a retirement home. Then, for reasons that we learn only vaguely, he determines to take part in some crime (is it recovering a sunken load of heroin? Is it taking out the local “Godmother” of Cuban smuggling? Is it accomplishing something for his one-time protégé “Legs” Friedman?) which will obscurely qualify him for citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return.

As all that suggests, I’m unpersuaded by the premises and ultimately uninterested in the outcome. It makes no sense to me why this character had to be Lansky – why not an invented aging Jewish gangster – and then it makes no sense to me that he’s doing what he does.

With all that, I’m not in love with the illustrations either. I like the way they evoke a time and place – Miami in the early 1980s – and I like the story’s general evocation of that world as well.

In the end, though, I’m just not hooked by this one, and I think it may be a while before I give another graphic novel a shot.


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Review: The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution

The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution by Susan Hockfield
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll say this for this book: it would have made an interesting magazine article in an alumni magazine. As a book, well, its core idea is spread awfully thin, and it’s all the more troubling that Susan Hockfield doesn’t do more to interrogate the risks and costs of the technological promise she explores.

Hockfield begins with a thrilling claim: just as the different fields of physics, chemistry, engineering, and math converged to create the rise of electronics and the technologies that have transformed our world, we are on the brink of another convergence with the way the biological sciences are marrying those earlier ones. We are, she claims, close to knowing how to use viruses to build more efficient and less environmentally taxing batteries, close to new devices that can purify water at little cost and with portability, and close to fashioning medicines that can treat us in targeted and personalized fashion.

It’s an exciting notion, and it does make me perk up my ears and imagine the possibilities. At the same time, she repeats her thesis over and over in this fairly short book. We get the idea quickly, but we get told it far more often than we need.

What’s worse, as far as I’m concerned, is that the whole tone of this book is of a college president trying to sell her faculty’s accomplishments to a group of donors. We get some of the science, but never its intricacies. We do get the names of individual researchers, but I always hear a small “and we’d be happy to assign this young scientist a professorial chair with your name on it” in the background. And, even more loudly, I hear a “and these people are creating start-up companies that, with an angel investor or two, could make someone an awful lot of money.”

In other words, there’s more sizzle than steak in support of that core thesis, and it gets old.

Worse than such condescension, as far as I’m concerned, is that we never hear about the risks of such technologies. There’s a brief acknowledgement that we want to be careful before we release genetically modified crops into the world, but I’d like to hear more. There’s no consideration of the risks behind wanton distribution of vaccines. You don’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to know that the HPV vaccine – whatever benefits it might legitimately have – has harmed a great many who’ve had it. We may still want to go ahead with that sort of aggressive mass-vaccination, but we ought to recognize the need to monitor its effectiveness and its hurts. There are potential health benefits, but there are profit certainties as well.

I’ve recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, his first novel in which he characterizes a nostalgia for an American “can-do” attitude as somehow missing the very point of human existence. Here, I see Hockfield making the very claim that Vonnegut mocked more than half a century ago.

I do like optimism, and this book is filled with it, but I think it’s crucial to temper our sense of what technology can do with the toll it exacts on the world and on us. Hockfield is selling us something, but she’s not quite letting us see the price tag.


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Review: The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes the rules of a genre aren’t clear until someone manages to break them.

Fantasy, especially quest fantasy, is supposed to be center on the young and on memory. Telemachus is still almost a child, but he remembers his father and sets out on what becomes the beginning of The Odyssey. Bilbo’s too old, so Frodo has to go, and they know to go on the quest in the first place because Elrond and Gandalf are the only ones who remember the old lore.

In this remarkable fantasy, our protagonists are a compelling older couple, Axl and Beatrice, and they are motivated to embark on a quest to find their son because they cannot remember anything. The two have recently been told by their village elders that they can no longer be trusted to keep a candle burning in their home at night. They are otherwise almost blissful in their life together.

And put the emphasis on “together.” The two are deeply and touchingly in love. He calls her “Princess” most of the time, and she both supports and depends upon him. They seem the idea of what it means to grow old alongside someone who complements you.

They learn before long, however, that the reason they have forgotten so much is that a dragon has been breathing out a mist that produces a kind of amnesia.

In the end, two characters come to embody different philosophies for confronting that fact. One (SPOILER: Wystan, the Saxon warrior) believes that killing the dragon will end the amnesia and free everyone to a fuller experience of the world. Another (SPOILER: Gawain) argues that the forgetfulness is necessary. In its absence, he fears that old memories and old hatreds will erupt, shattering the peace and happiness of the country.

SPOILER FROM HERE ON OUT: As it turns out, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s Gawain who’s right. With the dragon dead, it’s likely the Saxons will recall the awful slaughter the Britons perpetrated in an earlier generation. He and Arthur, with Axl as a key envoy, brokered a peace across the land. Then, in a deep betrayal, they killed Saxon elderly, women, and children in a war crime, and Merlin enchanted the dragon to produce the effect.

Wystan is a young hero, one who knows only that he should hate the Britons even as he comes to appreciate the old couple (who are Britons themselves). In his youth, he believes that full knowledge, full memory is just and right. He’s motivated in general by good intentions – though his hatred erupts every so often – but he risks a war that will consume the countryside.

We never see that great war – which is a skillful move by Ishiguro – but we do see how it affects the old couple. As the dragon’s mist slowly evaporates, they remember the painful – staggeringly painful – truth that their son died long ago during a plague. Even worse, they’d quarreled before his death, and Axl had forbidden Beatrice to go and pay her respects to his grave. Their quarrel was so deep that, at one moment, Axl left her to sleep with another woman.

Memory reveals, then, that the two have had a difficult life together. Once they recall it all, they vow to remain together, but they are left at the conclusion with the challenge of proving to a mystical boatman that they are a rare couple that knows true love. They insist that they are until the very end, but I read the final, gorgeous scene, as showing us Axl forgetting her on an enchanted isle that represents a kind of death.

It’s a beautiful and harrowing end, but it implies the dark philosophy that we have to be prepared to forget if we are ever to allow ourselves true happiness. That’s a vision of the fantastic that flies in the face of what fantasy has held as a kind of axiom, and it’s memorable and powerful.

Kashiguro is a chameleon of a writer, someone who seems entirely to reinvent himself at every turn. I admired Remains of the Day very much, but found it somewhat flawed. Unlike most people I know, I did not like Never Let Me Go, which I found overly contrived. This, so far, is my favorite of his work, and I feel I’ve learned a great deal from reading it.


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Review: Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A couple points of preamble, I suppose. The kind of organized crime history I write is in more or less direct conflict with what English writes. I take it as an axiom that we can never genuinely know what happened among men who, literally, lied as part of their everyday professional lives. Not only that, but they often depended on those lies having currency. As I like to put it, gangsters worked to make people believe they had power and influence at the same time as they worked to keep proof of that power away from anyone who might be able to prosecute them for it. They misled everyone as a practice, so how can we hope fully to untangle the true story decades later.

As a consequence, I am always at least as interested in the footnotes of a gangster history as I am in the main text of it. As a result, then, I’m not doing this book justice since, in listening to it, I couldn’t indulge my habit of looking for (and evaluating) the quality of the source for each controversial claim. If I’d read this on paper, I might have better things to say about it…or possibly worse.

What English does here, and also in Paddy Whacked which, while never reading in full, I’ve read in often over the years, is flesh the myth of the Mafia into a larger, at least semi-documented story. He’s a storyteller, which is something I admire, but I’m not always convinced that he’s on top of the latest findings of others who – at the price of not telling their stories as smoothly – tell them more accurately and with a greater a awareness of what the sources allow us to say with confidence.

There’s a spot here early where English talks about what’s been called “The Night of the Sicilian Vespers,” a supposed wave of killings that knocked off the old time “Mustache Petes” of the Mafia in favor of the younger generation of mobsters personified by (and purportedly headed up by) Lucky Luciano. Those “Vespers” are a central part of Mafia lore and are acknowledged in FBI accounts as well as in most popular histories of the mob.

The trouble is that, as academic historian Alan Block has shown, there were no such murders. With one possible exception, there are simply no records of potential Mafiosi killed in the months following Luciano’s taking out of Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Joe Valachi may have reported it before the McClellan Committee, but it was either hearsay or myth. It didn’t happen, and English ought to be aware of that.

Or, later, he’ll often quote Luciano’s “last testament,” a quasi-biography he dictated to reporters near the end of his life. Like Meyer Lansky’s interviews with Israeli journalists in the early 1970s, though – interviews that English cites several times – such autobiographical works were highly contextualized. Luciano was trying to interest someone in making a film about his life (and in bringing substantial rights fees with it) so he both glamorized his experiences and downplayed his own crimes. Lansky meanwhile was trying to get the Israeli government to grant him citizenship under the Law of Return that guaranteed it to any Jew who requested it. As a result, he played up his Jewish identity and worked to cast himself as someone who’d always been an outsider.

In the sort of gangster history I value, those accounts do matter, but they matter as part of the larger, contested stories in circulation about each man. They don’t tell us what happened, but they do tell us something about the way these men were trying to shape their own reputations.

To be fair, though, English has a different agenda. He has a version of organized crime history that comes out of the “great man” school. For him, the major players – Lansky above all – had a vision and went on to realize it. I don’t especially buy that Lansky scoped out the situation in the 1930s that would develop in the 1950s, but there is evidence that he did. I read it that Lansky was always looking for opportunities, that he likely explored dozens of other ventures going way back. English can’t be entirely wrong in asserting that Lansky eyed the possibility of taking over the nation of Cuba decades before it actually happened.

And English has an appealing way with words and narrative. I know firsthand how hard it is to tease a narrative out of a range of characters who are working simultaneously toward a mostly shared (but sometimes contested) end. He does a nice job of moving his story forward and then back-tracking to give the biography of some new and essential figure: Batista, Luciano, Lansky, Trafficante, and Castro. No one of those chapters is as strong as the books dedicated to each individual, but those other books don’t weave so broad a story.

In the end, I did enjoy the well-defined scope of the narrative here and, tip-of-the-hat, he even managed to dig up a detail that I wish I’d had for my own book. And that I could have had if I’d read this sooner – Chicago Jewish gangster David Yaras, with, I would claim his partner Lenny Patrick – ran the San Souci casino in the early mobbed up years. I knew that detail, though the FBI gives them a different Mafia partner (Detroit’s Joe Massei according to the FBI, Pittsburgh’s Sam Mannarino here), but I wish I’d known this claim that Yaras was part of first wave of short-sighted thugs as opposed to the subtler, long-term thinking of Lansky and his crew.

So, if you’re curious about this era of Cuba – and it’s often fascinating for the way it helped invent a music and a style that defined much of the era – and if you’re not as hung up on the footnotes as I am, there’s a lot here to enjoy.


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Review: Bossypants

Bossypants by Tina Fey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this has helped me realize much of what makes Tina Fey so exceptional a comedian.

First, her basic shtick is to take the everyday and amplify it just a little, like turning the volume up from five to seven.

Her most famous Saturday Night Live moment, of course – even though it happened after she’d left the show as head writer and Weekend Update host – is her Sarah Palin impersonation. Magnificent as that was, it really was mostly a matter of tweaks and exaggerations. In a crazy world where an utterly unqualified Alaskan governor found herself put forward as a legitimate candidate for major federal office – something that seems almost quaint now that we’ve seen how things can get even worse – all Fey had to do was exaggerate some vowel sounds and add peculiar hesitations to her impersonation, and she laid bare the absurdity of it all.

In 30 Rock, a terrific show that serves as the key link between Arrested Development and The Office, Parks & Rec, and Brooklyn 99, she took what she knew from her SNL life and made it just a bit kookier. We saw blowhards and divas who still managed to be mostly human and, in the middle of it all, Liz Lemon gave us a barometer of what could almost be “normal.”

Second, Fey works best as part of a team. She’s up front about that in this book, but it’s also obvious in retrospect. She came up through Second City with a sketch comedy background; others came the stand-up route. You can see her being especially good at respecting other people’s ideas even if it means tossing her own. A highlight of this book is her quick summary of the rules of Second City improve technique: always say “yes” – always acknowledge a partner’s suggestion – and always say “and” after that “yes.” That is, always see what possibilities can follow from such a proposal.

So, I not only enjoy Fey’s comedy, but I appreciate her as one of the central architects of American comedy in the last couple decades.

I picked this book up by design because I’d haphazardly found and then read a couple of other SNL memoirs – Chris Kattan’s and Norm MacDonald’s. Just as Fey was arguably the best of the cast/writers of that era (maybe Will Ferrell has had a better performing career and maybe Adam McKay has had a more illustrious writer experience, but she excelled at both), this book has been heralded as the best of the SNL memoirs.

My sense is that, while it’s always going to be a pleasure to hear Fey do anything, this ultimately isn’t as interesting I’d imagined it would be.

On the one hand, my first hope for a comedy memoir is to get a sense of how a comedian came to think about the nature of comedy. Steve Martin is terrific in Born Standing Up for the way he describes a half-conscious, half seize-the-opportunity move he made from the political comedy everyone was doing to a silly, almost pratfall style that he recognized from silent movies and early television performers. Chris Kattan is surprisingly interesting in how he describes what it was like to explore physical comedy in a world geared for the television camera.

It’s fine that Fey does very little of that – she should write the book she wants to write – but I’m sorry that so influential a voice hasn’t given more thought to the mechanics of what she does so well. There’s a moment when she talks about a Lorne Michaels lesson that stands out: she says that Michaels taught her that you need a balance between (in the SNL/30 Rock context) Harvard nerds and improv veterans. Left to their own devices, Harvard nerds will write too much to please themselves while improv types will work too hard for the quick and easy catch-phrase or audience pleaser. She calls the former the equivalent of classic military strategy and the latter like fighting in Vietnam. The point is to work toward the balance.

But such comedy mechanics and insights are rare. Instead, we get a kind of conventional this-was-my-life backdrop, and it works only intermittently.

It’s nice to hear her talk about her family, but those sections point out the limits of her comic method. If she excels at exaggerating the familiar, it doesn’t work that well to exaggerate a childhood that the rest of us don’t know anything about. I believe her when she describes her father, lovingly, as a Clint Eastwood type. It just doesn’t work all that well as humor since we don’t know the extent to which she is tweaking her picture to her storytelling temperament. And it doesn’t work all that well as memoir because she doesn’t push for much depth or fresh insight.

It’s compelling to hear her talk about the persistent outrage she has felt about the way women are marginalized in American culture – and it’s great to see her alchemize what could have been justified anger into comedy – but, since this is a book, she’s talking alone. Funny as she is, her gift is to make others funny and then to become all the funny in the course of such interactions. Here, we lose that space of reaction. I love the Liz Lemon sigh when she stands in front of the irresponsible writers’ room (shout out to Judah Friedlander). She may be alone in the camera, but she’s responding to a mass of unrestrained craziness.

In this book, she’s alone on the page, all alone. Her one-liners land often enough, but that’s ultimately not her genius. In the absence of others interrupting her and helping her hone her insights, this rarely soars above a pleasant conversation with someone who’s trying a little too hard to be entertaining.

I remain as admiring of Fey as ever, but I don’t think this stands out among memoirs of comedians.


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Review: Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Norm MacDonald has a line in here – and I paraphrase – about the mixed blessing of having a cult following. It’s a good thing, he says, if you have a cult following and you are a cult leader. Then you get all the money, and you can sleep with whomever you want. It’s not so good if you’re a comedian, though, because a handful of people really like your work while everyone else doesn’t get it.

Every so often, I do get MacDonald’s work. He can be razor sharp with some of the work he did on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. He shares some of his best lines from that show in this book, and many hold up. His perfect joke may have been, “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are having marital problems. Insiders report the trouble developed from the fact that they are Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts.” As he observes of his own joke, what makes it effective is that the punch line is so close to the set-up. The space between ordinary and funny is razor-thin, but it’s there.

You might call that dry humor. You might call it deconstructed humor, as MacDonald suggests at one point. And you might call it humor with a punk aesthetic, as MacDonald quotes others saying. In any case, it works, but it works in small, concentrated doses. It works best in that Weekend Update format, with a guy reading cue cards – as MacDonald repeatedly describes it – and grinning into the camera to show he’s in on the joke.

But members of the cult that enjoys MacDonald’s humor insist there’s more to it than that. He’s not merely a sophisticated gag writer, they say, but he’s also challenging the very nature of comedy. He’s mocking the premise that we are supposed to take it seriously that someone is about to make us laugh.

The result is often a calculated sloppiness. There may never have been a less competent actor or impersonator in the history of SNL. He couldn’t deliver a line without a self-aware smirk, couldn’t inhabit any identity but his own. The only character I remember him having any success with was his Burt Reynolds, and that worked only because it was so transparently bad, because Burt Reynolds was a more or less has-been by that point, and it was funny to see his diminished sex appeal yoked to MacDonald’s disinterest.

I’ve never watched MacDonald’s TV shows, but that’s only because I’ve never been tempted. I get that people like his good friend and long-time supporter Adam Sandler trumpet his successes – and laugh at what feels like a sustained inside joke built around the dare to see just how much he can deconstruct the premises of conventional comedy – but it often feels to me like a self-defined group of cool kids laughing at the simple fact that the rest of us don’t get the joke.

Anyway, most of this book is of that kind of humor. On the one hand, I admire its audacity. This is less a memoir than an anti-memoir. Near the start, MacDonald reflects on the notion that memory is always flawed, that nothing can ever be entirely true, so his story will be Based on a True Story. From that fairly thoughtful premise, he spins a story of how he and his sidekick, Adam Eget, proceed on a cross-country trek to win or lose a million dollars in Vegas. And then there’s a thread about a disgruntled ghost writer who interrupts the narrative with his frustrations about working with MacDonald.

On the other hand, very little of this is funny.

I can see MacDonald hoping for laughs, and I can see him – or one of his supporters – pointing out that the joke is that it’s funny precisely because it isn’t funny. But there’s a persistent sloppiness and a persistent changing of premises that ultimately just tires me out. I did listen through to the end, and I generally found myself interested to see if the ultimate joke would land, but I was almost always disappointed.

And through it all, I found myself questioning the fundamental taste of the project. It’s supposed to be funny that MacDonald pretends to a morphine addiction, and that his ability to supply morphine to Lorne Michaels is what got him the gig with SNL. I believe Michaels himself had an addiction, but we know that John Belushi and Chris Farley, to name just a couple, died of their addictions that were fueled by the show. If this were funny, genuinely funny, I’d forgive it. The Producers and (so the reviews say) Jojo Rabbit make fun of Nazis, but they’re funny enough to get away with it. Bad Nazi comedies are doubly bad. So unfunny stories about addiction at SNL – or about prison rape on a later occasion – are doubly unfunny.

As a bottom line, then, I guess you already know if you’re a MacDonald fan. If you are, you’ll probably enjoy this. If not, well, join me in the majority who finds this a little daring and a lot dragging.


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Review: Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live

Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live by Chris Kattan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was never especially a fan of Chris Kattan in his Saturday Night Live days. (OK, so I bought the book because it was on sale and because I have been working my way through a lot of comedy memoirs.) I suppose I wasn’t really a fan of the show at all back then. Once Adam Sandler and his backup band left – and I hadn’t loved a lot of their stuff either, though they did pave the way for a pattern of regular and ever-more-exaggerated characters to become the backbone of the show – it felt like “this year’s cheaper model.” It took me years to realize that Will Ferrell really was a deeply talented comedian, and by that point he was gone and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were already going.

In any case, Kattan always annoyed me, even when all I did was see him on movie posters or in 10-second promos for his Roxbury guys. He seemed to be playing off the fact that he’s a funny-looking guy, seemed to think it was sufficient just to mug for the camera.

To my pleasant surprise, though, this is a mostly thoughtful and revealing memoir. Yeah, it gets into the controversy about how he broke his neck while performing a skit – and it actually become a weaker book as he dances around trying to blame anyone while also getting it out there that he was a real victim – but its best parts are early and middle when he reflects on the nature of comedy.

As a member of the Groundlings (and the son of one of the founders of that comedy troupe) Kattan explored a raw, physical comedy. I hadn’t really known his Mr. Peepers character – a simian figure who clambers over straightmen/women, licks faces, chomps apples, and breaks everything in his way – until this book, and now I find him fascinating to think about.

Kattan describes the experience of creating Mr. Peepers at the Groundlings, and it seems a lesson in comedy. In workshops and then in early skits, he kept pushing the limits of the character. As he did it live on stage, he fed off the energy of the audience. The physicality of the performance made it urgent, made it something that felt dangerous not just for its stunt work but for the sense that something could go wrong. It was live theater, and I suspect I’d have loved it.

When it translated to TV, though, it was a different phenomenon. There was a studio audience, one I gather was farther from the actual stage, but the real audience was the millions on TV, and it couldn’t play the same way. If the directors kept the camera pulled back far enough to see the full scene – as Kattan says he wishes they did – then we home viewers could get a sense of the physical possibilities and other actors’ reactions, but the performers’ faces would be diminished by distance. If they went with the directors’ preferred close-ups, then we couldn’t see the reaction shots, couldn’t see the way the real energy of the character affected others. And that’s where the humor lay.

That got me thinking – and following the thoughts of Kattan – that TV sketch comedy is often necessarily safer than the kind of comedy that brings SNL performers to the attention of the producers. It’s a different sport, almost as if Major League Baseball players had to prove themselves as softball stars before they could join the big leagues.

In any case, Kattan writes the first parts of this well as he weaves back and forth between chapters about his unusual childhood – he lived weekdays with his mother on Mt. Baldy with Carlos Castenada as a neighbor and weekends with his comedian father – and his discovering how to be a better comic in his years on SNL. Unlike some memoirs I’ve seen, this one has a structure, one that turns it into an argument supported by the particulars of Kattan’s life rather than a narrow recounting of that life.

There are a lot of spots where you can feel Kattan pulling his punches; it’s a little moving to hear him take responsibility for the bad choices that cost him most of his friendship with Will Ferrell, and there are times he expressly refuses to name someone whom he thinks might be hurt or offended by being revealed. But the through-line for much of this is a persistent hunger to understand what makes something funny.

Kattan himself isn’t always funny, and it’s surprisingly effective when he offers a lame gag in the writing – like his persistent reminders of the ways technology like answering machines has changed. That’s not funny, or not quite, but we know it because we see a comedian exploring how his medium functions. I’ve read some fairly weak memoirs, but this one mostly works. I not only enjoyed it, but I went looking for some of that era’s SNL shorts on-line and find more to like in them than I remember.


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Review: Player Piano

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve thought about Vonnegut a lot over the last 3-5 years, and I’ve re-read most of what I’d once read multiple times in high school and home from college. His work was my intellectual comfort food and then, all at once, I’d decided I was beyond him.

The big insight that launched my re-interest came when I realized the extent to which we can trace his coming to terms with the trauma of his war-time experiences, culminating in Slaughterhouse-Five. I found real power in the early novels as we watch him inching ever closer to confronting what it meant to witness what the Allies did to the Germans at Dresden, a story more ironic and horrible than anything he could ever invent himself.

For me, Vonnegut gets really good with Mother Night, his third novel, though we can see some interesting things happening in Sirens of Titan, his second. This one is his first, and, coming back to it, I see some glimmers. But, by comparison with what was coming just a couple years later, this is close to a failure.

Among other things, this is badly plotted. Our hero, Paul Proteus, does have a fascinating experience. Unable, in Vonnegut fashion, to share faith with either of the sides in conflict – he’s born and trained to belong to the engineering elite, but he’s temperamentally unable to join them or the active resistance – he eventually gets fired in order to be sent as an undercover agent of the rebels. Everyone assumes he’s someone he is not. (It’s clumsy here, but Vonnegut does it elegantly in Mother Night.)

That section should be the heart of this novel. Instead, it comes something like two-thirds of the way through with the earlier parts all an extended comic sci-fi/dystopia. It’s apprentice work for the excellence that would follow, but at first it’s spread out too slowly and then it’s rushed. In retrospect, I think a good editor could have saved it, but first he or she would have had to know the voice and style Vonnegut would later develop.

This does interest me, though, for the glimpses we see of what I’ll call the proto-revelations of trauma. This is still loosely in the “Harrison Bergeron” phase where, in a kind of libertarianism, Vonnegut seemed to fear the power of unbridled government more than, as he eventually settled into, the unbridled power of late capitalism. In this moment, we see a poignant yearning for some of what the war made possible. Multiple characters, no more ironic than others, seem nostalgic for the shared purpose of battle.

We do get an early sense of the pointlessness of war. One character recounts winning a major medal because, moments after a Nazi attack, he got a generator working again and electrocuted a thousand Germans who’d managed to make their way to an electric fence that was temporarily disabled. That is, we get an acknowledgement that war is pointless and anti-human, but that doesn’t entirely overwhelm the sense that the narrative of war has a power to bring humans together.

There’s a send-up of corporate life that involves inventing a series of pointless Blue/Green/White teams with strong patriotic self-definitions – that is, there’s a sense of the phoniness of what Vonnegut will call Granfalloons in Cat’s Cradle – but he doesn’t seem all the way able to dismiss the “foma” of patriotism.

In other words, I see a residue of his claiming that what he endured had some purpose to it. That residue is eroding – I think it may be mostly gone by Sirens of Titan – but this marks a fascinating glimpse at the man Vonnegut was before he made himself into the Vonnegut we know.

Don’t bother with this one unless you’ve done the other early ones first, but it’s valuable because of what it shows of an artist slowly forcing himself to become himself.


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