Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Review: The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4

The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4 The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4 by Felix R. Savage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was looking for something fun and dumb, and I found it.

Notwithstanding an ending that veers too much into existential showdown, this is pretty good sci-fi that doesn’t take itself too seriously. As a stress reliever, it mostly did the trick, and I’m grateful for that.

The gimmick here hits you in the face: Fletcher “Fletch” Connelly is a working-class Irish kid who narrates his adventures in deep space. He hunts down A-tech, technology created by extinct races, and he tries to sell it back to humans.

This isn’t the deep future, just a late 21st Century. So, there are iPhones alongside space ships, and we even have an aging Mark Zuckerberg still standing as one of the titans of finance.

This could easily have been annoying if Savage had rubbed our noses either in the cleverness of his original conceit or in the ancillary sci-fi of his story. Instead, he makes it work by moving quickly and letting much of his real cleverness seep in through the cracks of the narrative.

The central sci-fi notion is clear in the title but glossed over for much of the early parts of the novel. (And that’s a good thing.) It seems one of the central achievements of past sentient races was the creation of what Fletch’s culture calls a “railroad” that spans the galaxy. Earthlings can attach our primitive spaceships to it and fly all around the galaxy, often to planets abandoned for millions of years.

Along the way, we get some fun and fast-moving stories. When Fletch comes across an animal species that drinks energy as moths go after light, it’s a close call. But [SPOILER:] he discovers they might be harvested as superior spaceship shields, creatures that absorb enemy fire should it come.

And Fletch’s in love, but it’s far from perfect. As I say, I’d be tired of a concept that I got my nose rubbed into, but it’s fun to see these space cowboys settle in to play Irish traditional music or to discover that the dread pirate of one adventure is actually a woman.

Make no mistake, this isn’t art. And, I confess, I’d probably had enough of it four-fifths of the way through. Still, this is the sort of fun I was looking for, and I’m grateful to Savage for providing it.


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Thursday, October 8, 2020

Review: The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gathered from reputation that this is supposed to John le Carre’s late career masterpiece. As much as I admire his work, I think it falls short of what I was hoping for.

That said, even second-tier le Carre has its virtues. Here we have the powerful element of Justin, a bereaved husband, trying to unravel the mystery of why Tessa was murdered. The answer, as we come to see in its broadest outlines almost from the start, has to do with big pharmaceutical and its potential for billion-dollar paydays.

Tessa herself may be the most remarkable character in the novel. She is, in many ways, too good for this world. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, but she determines to help ‘the wretched of the earth’ by exposing the lax drug trials these multinationals are doing before dispensing their drugs.

That too-good-to-be-true quality works because, since the death of their child, the couple has drifted apart. Justin has taken comfort in his hobbies – in particular his gardening – spending his grief by working to bring something like new life into the world. Tessa, meanwhile, has embarked on her virtuous project and experienced multiple affairs.

As Justin undertakes his detective work, he falls in love with her all over again. There’s an ache in the process, and there were some early parts that made me think of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair where passion flares after it’s too late.

The early promise of the novel fades for me, though, for two reasons.

First, this becomes more of a procedural than I’d have liked. Justin goes from place to place, assembling clues and talking to people in the know, but he doesn’t seem to grow emotionally beyond that early, arresting portrait. When I think of first-rate le Carre – of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Smiley’s People – I think about the way he asks human beings to carry the emotional weight of the cold war, the emotional weight of a nation’s clandestine misdeeds. Here, though, we rarely get a sense of the wrenching minefield of the experience. We have a flawed, weak man pursuing the work of his flawed, strong wife, but I don’t remember him gaining fresh insight to go with his outrage.

Second, even the procedural quality of this leaves me wanting. I read the even more recently published A Legacy of Spies a year or so ago, and – while I liked it more than this – it troubled me that so much of the ‘adventure’ consisted of that Smiley person, Peter Guillam, reviewing long-sealed records and coming to fresh insights.

I’m a researcher. I’ve spent time in physical and on-line archives, and I know the thrill of discovering some ingot of information buried in a file open to anyone but rarely examined carefully. I love doing it. But I don’t know that I love reading about someone else doing it.

So, as beautiful as this almost is for a stretch, I found myself wanting more urgency both in what is what at stake for Justin and in the way he goes about trying to solve the mystery.

Credit to le Carre for the same soaring moral imagination as always – and acknowledgement that I put this down midway and then picked it up again – but this one doesn’t quite combine that with the page-turner skill of his strongest work.


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Friday, September 25, 2020

Review: A History of Eastern Europe

A History of Eastern Europe A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because I’ve dealt with some of the pressures of recent tensions by diving into deep family history. I believe I have identified my four-times great-grandfather as a merchant or public official who moved to the Bukovina region of modern-day Romania when that region came under Hapsburg empirical control in the 1780s or ’90s. In a slight way, I feel as if I’ve come to know him (and many of the 800-900 descendants I’ve uncovered with the help of various cousins) so I hoped that this series of lectures would give me a fuller context for his world.

There are parts here that do answer my particular question, and I did pay special attention to the Hapsburg’s 18th century expansion and the rising and falling fortunes of the Romanian state. As happens with a lot of things, though, I wound up getting drawn into things I didn’t expect.

Liulevicius is an academic, as am I, and he’s a skilled lecturer. I think he could probably use a little polish in the way he delivers a joke, but I am confident there are some (OK many dozens) who’d say the same about me. And his jokes are relevant since they represent a sustained way that Soviet-bloc citizens dealt with the gap between the reality they experienced and the propaganda the state produced.

Liulevicius’s themes are broad and flexible, but they do help orient the details of his account. He opens with the question of whether there really is a place called “Eastern Europe,” noting that many people within the region understand themselves as drawn more to Western or, at times, Russian influence.

We see states and empires rise and then fall. We see a hunger for mobility across the region, one that the two-generation reign of the USSR could slow but not stop.

In the way of good classes, this gives a deeper sense of its subject, and I feel more at home in the geography and cultures of the nations and peoples he describes.

If I started this as part of an escape from the tensions of the moment, though, I found myself getting drawn back to some of what I didn’t want to be thinking about.

Above all, I was struck by the persistent memory that the conservatives of my adolescence and young adulthood defined themselves by recollections of these conflicts. From Goldwater through McCain, the abiding fear was of Soviet power, of the power of an Eastern Europe that tried to influence us through subtle and direct ways.

One hard-to-understand feature of Trumpism – which may or may not be conservatism – is its acquiescence to Russian and authoritarian interests. We now have a President whose interests align uncomfortably with Putin’s, and no one on the right seems troubled by that.

There’s a strangeness in all that, a reminder that, as Liulevicius says, the ferment of Eastern Europe has a way of shaping the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, Putin – whose authority comes in large measure through Russia’s ability to influence the region – has had much to do with bringing Trump to power and with challenging many of the institutional structures of the United States.

Anyway, thanks to Liulevicius for a stimulating class even though it gave me less on my Romanian ancestors than I hoped and then, for further insult, made it all the tougher to stay in my escapist mode.


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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Review: The Belton Estate

The Belton Estate The Belton Estate by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Gilded Needles

Gilded Needles Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I nearly gave up on this one at the start, but I’m glad I kept at it.

The first few pages make clear that this is saturated with great atmosphere. It’s set near the legendarily bloody Five Points area of New York in the gilded age (as the title references in nice double-entendre fashion), and it’s an era I know fairly well from my own gangster researches. McDowell brings it to life with details that give a sense of the corruption and decay of the place.

And yet, ugh, it’s all exposition early. For a time I felt as if I were reading something from an encyclopedia. We’ll get introduced to a character and get a full backstory. Then another character and another backstory. I felt as if I should have been taking notes.

To be fair, in retrospect, I see a lot more sophistication to the method. I think McDowell is trying to push against conventional narrative and the sympathies it engenders. He keeps us at arm’s length from the characters for the same reason he immerses so fully in the Five Points world. He’s working to unsettle us, to take us to a chilling place.

Still, it’s tough sledding for a bit, but the great setting helps get you through it.

As the novel moves along, though, we get exposed to more of a traditional narrative. The at-first separate characters begin to affect each other across a web of the city, and the results get increasingly compelling. I went from thinking I’d drop it to racing through to the end.

Along the way, we get, first, a thoughtful critique of class. The upright, moralistic Judge Stallworth can’t conceive that Lena, our Five Points fence, and her family have the intellectual wherewithal to plot revenge over his sentencing and killing three of their number. He’s so caught up in an unarticulated social Darwinism that he doesn’t see them as fully human.

Meanwhile, McDowell never lets Lena and her family become objects of pity. For one, they don’t pity themselves. For another, they’re still repugnant in a lot of ways. They’re cruel, and [VEILED SPOILER:] what they do to the judge’s grandchildren is chilling.

Even more impressively, I think we get a novel that refuses to let us settle into comfortable story. It’s clumsy – even if intended – opening chapters estrange us as do the troubling doings of the later sections. Everyone is ugly either internally, externally, or both. We can’t readily sympathize with anyone – except maybe Helen, though even she is a bit much in her becoming consumed by the effort to help the poor whom her grandfather scorns.

Instead, we’re left with a Victorian-era sense of a world that’s dark whether it exposes its underbelly or lives in utter denial of it.

In any case, unusual as this is, it grew on me the more I read it. I’m glad I hung on to the end, and I recommend it.


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Friday, August 28, 2020

Review: Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In my after-college, semi-Bohemian days, my roommates and I used to be regulars at Chicago’s Lounge Ax. We’d be there for incredible shows in a room that held no more than 250 people, seeing shows sometimes with no more than 40 or 50 others.

If we were there early, the band would often be at the bar, and my roommate Bill had a knack for winding up next to semi-famous figures not saying much. Alex and Ray were better about initiating conversations. I was always the most star-struck, so when I jumped in it was usually with just a banal “that’s cool” so I could claim, with technical correctness, that I’d been part of the conversation.

That’s how we met Alex Chilton, the Rev. Horton Heat, and Rick Miller from Southern Culture on the Skids. The idea of it – a real rock star just spilling the shit! – sounds a lot better than it was. Chilton was just hitting on women a generation younger than he was. The Reverend was an agitated, aggressive guy even off stage. (Rick Miller was cool, though.)

I digress with such memories because reading this book feels like sitting at the bar next to someone on that order of cool. I confess I didn’t know Lanegan’s music – either solo or with The Screaming Trees – before reading this, and I still don’t know it well. But he was famous-proximate from his Seattle grunge days, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Again, better in concept than in fact.

Lanegan defines himself here – and I don’t know the alternative if there is one – as a hardcore junkie. He opens with a description of the day (or is it one of many?) when he got busted. He describes his descent into drugs, some music, occasional transactional sex, and more drugs.

This doesn’t open with a sense that he’s learned anything, and it doesn’t suggest along the way that he has either. He’s been through a lot, but we get it the way you might get it at the bar of the Lounge Ax, some touring musician running a hand through his grungy hair, pulling back on a cheap beer, and sighing out an “insider” story. “I was so high” or “I was too fucked up” or “I was thinking between my legs.” It’s a refrain, and it’s cool only from the outside.

Reading this, it’s not clear to me that Lanegan has learned anything. Props to his punk sensibility that he doesn’t give us much of the “and then I got clean” version – though there is a strange near-final religious epiphany that he describes without exploring.

Instead, we get everything in a kind of monotone, something I experienced first-hand since I listened to this one with him reading it. Most of his stories have a wistful, “I was dumb as shit” quality, a puzzled, almost bemused sense that he was there, that he didn’t return calls that would have used his music as the soundtrack for David O. Russell’s first film, that he neglected to call Kurt Cobain back during the binge in which he killed himself, that he chose drugs over one of about six different women who could have been “the one.”

A few have a vague cruelty to them, a taking pride in kicking the shit out of someone who deserved it or a not-quite-contrite description of how he belittled someone beneath him on the ladder of rock star fame.

Lanegan seems to be working toward honesty with this, but – outside of its slow-motion car wreck quality – it’s fairly closed. Without reflection, it feels something like a journal: Day One, I did these drugs, day two I did these other ones. Again, Lanegan seems to have learned almost nothing other than the fact that he’s somehow survived the wreckage around him. If he hasn’t learned anything, he doesn’t have anything to teach.

All of that’s compounded by amateurish writing. If I’d had the guy in a class, I’d push him on some of the sentence-crafting basics. He overuses adjectives, not just larding them on but allowing them to fill in for the substance of analysis. I honestly can’t tell one of the women he almost loves from another. They’re all ‘sensitive’ and ‘soul-tingling,’ but there’s little to distinguish them beyond the adjectives.

Anyway, I did finish this, and I’m glad for the glimpse at a scene that – in Nirvana and Pearl Jam at least – produced some music I very much admire. As for the rest, maybe the show will be good, but I’m getting tired of the conversation at the bar.


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Friday, August 21, 2020

Review: Dogfight, A Love Story

Dogfight, A Love Story Dogfight, A Love Story by Matt Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is written by the brother of a girlfriend of a friend of mine. That’s distant enough that I doubt I’ll ever meet the guy, but it does give me a sense that I could someday find myself in conversation with him. That’s enough to incline me toward this without biasing me in its favor.

And the truth is, I don’t need much biasing here. This has all sorts of ingredients I am prepped to love. Our protagonist is Alfredo, a generally sweet kid who just happens to sell a few drugs and beat up the occasional person. And, oh yeah, determine to arrange an underground dog fight where – if all goes according to the eventual plan – he’ll turn his newly paroled brother back into the police and double-cross everyone in the neighborhood on bets.

But it’s hard to hold larceny like that against a kid who seems the only one in his world capable of real love. He didn’t mean to court Isabel – she was his newly jailed brother’s girlfriend – but it just sort of happened. And he turns out, objectively, to be a much better boyfriend. He cares about her, looks after her. Even, stunningly, listens to her as a partner and fellow human. It’s easy to see why she prefers him to Tariq; for all of his innate screw-up qualities, he’s trying to be a good man.

I don’t think the version of Queens that we get here actually exists, but that’s OK with me. Instead, it’s a multi-ethnic fantasy where Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, and the occasional nondescript white cops all mingle. Everyone is after an edge of some kind, so everyone sort of tolerates everyone else as a way of making personal peace.

There’s a large shot of nostalgia shot things. Max Marshmallow is an old Jewish guy who’s bought a bodega, left it more or less the same, but insisted on calling it a “candy shop” after the institutions of his late 1950s youth. Mike Schiffren, a Russian immigrant and likely Jewish kid, has set up as the local drug lord, but he’s only mid-level. The cops range from lazily to mildly corrupt, but they have their ambition within the force. Everyone’s scrambling for a chance at something. Like the most compelling cities, whether naked or partly clothed, there are stories everywhere.

The good news is that Burgess generally tells those stories well. It may be a bit much to find that everything happens in the space of a day or so, but everything moves along easily and cleverly. Burgess is a strong, literate writer, and he fills us in with what we need as he goes along.

I get a little tired of some of the narrative gimmicks, though. Alfredo’s inner monologue is often colored by the metaphor of his private file cabinet of memories, hopes, and grievances. Isabel often finds herself in deep conversation with her unborn child. Tariq is always trying to determine what “the book” – the Koran – would tell him to do. While I like the characters, the tropes got old.

There’s also a strange and possibly clumsy afterword here, a final chapter that picks things up more than a year later and shows us Alfredo and Isabel in their new lives. It seems an acknowledgement that the first part ended without quite wrapping things up, but then it also seems to suggest we’ll get a full sequel.

Those are small points in the larger structure of a book that I mostly enjoyed. This may be dated now; a decade after Burgess wrote it, he’d likely find much less tolerance for the implicit cultural appropriation here. That saddens me some, though. This is ultimately a generous-spirited book, and I think it’s fantasy of different peoples coming into conflict is something work exploring.

The blurbs compare this work to Jonathan Lethem (one of my favorites) but I don’t quite see that. Instead, I think it’s more a next-generation Elmore Leonard – a book that fits real and feeling characters into a world so saturated with irony that they become all more memorable and poignant.


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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Thoughts after watching Across 110th Street

I’ve spent the last couple days mainlining African-American noir films that I might include in my upcoming first year seminar. I was disappointed in Deep Cover. I thought John Singleton’s Shaft (1990) started off well but then gut muddy. I thought the original Shaft had a terrific tone – which is meaningful in its own right – but that it lacked substance.

So, by the time I got to Across 110th Street, I was pretty jaded. I wanted a movie that would frame noir as I continue to define it: a kind of applied ethics. That is, in a world where right and wrong cease to be clearly defined, the central question is how can we act for the good.

This film not only asks that, but it asks it from an almost dizzying range of perspectives. It’s hard to watch, hard for the provocative reason that it never lets us settle into any one character as our fixed point of view. Yaphet Kotto is absolutely compelling as a young, college-educated, African-American police lieutenant who wants to modernize policing. He has political backing as the investigation of several murdered gangsters – three black and three white – and two policemen threatens to roil Harlem. He’s against old-school rubber-hose tactics, but it’s clear he doesn’t entirely understand how business has always been done. He is right in wanting to use a lighter hand, but if he wants to solve the crime and perhaps forestall others’ deaths he’ll have to reconsider.

He plays opposite Anthony Quinn whom I haven’t seen on-screen in at least a decade. On the one hand, it’s striking to see how old-fashioned his grand gestures and over-the-top yelling can be. On the other, it still packs power. He plays an old-school Italian-American cop. He’s called a racist throughout, but I don’t know that that’s entirely true. Yes, he has trouble accepting Kotto’s character as his equal, and yes he has no trouble seeing some African-Americans as not-quite-human.

At the same time, he knows his community. There’s a powerful but passing moment early when, with half a neighborhood being held in police custody, a woman asks him to see what he can do for her husband. Quinn’s character knows immediately that the husband is innocent, knows that a by-the-book approach will insult the man and lead to potential trouble later. So he pulls rank and has the man released. Then, on a dime, he starts whomping on another man held at the same time. He may have racism in him, but he sees the people of his neighborhood as real and individual. He knows them, and Kotto can only look on with a great and understated bewilderment and envy. He’s also a corrupt cop, on the take from the African-American mob. He defends it by claiming he takes only gambling money, not drug or prostitution.

I expected the film to come down to a perverse buddy-cop experience with our sympathies going from one man to the other. As it turns out, though, the film is richer than that. We go long stretches without seeing either Kotto or Quinn and, instead, focus on some of the purportedly secondary characters. All of them come across as multi-dimensional, as confused people trying to do what they believe is the good.

There’s a mafioso, Nick D’Salvio, who’s clearly in over his head. He’s handsome and self-possessed, but he knows – and others taunt him – that he has his status because the “old man’s” daughter has married him. You don’t rise in a violent game because a woman takes a liking to you, so the unspoken thinking goes; therefore he must be soft.

In several of the early scenes, we see him happier when he’s at a family party or holding onto his kids. When he does punch someone, he looks at his bloody hands and shakes. It’s compelling; he doesn’t want to do what his role demands that he does. He thinks he is ‘doing right’ by fulfilling his father-in-law’s demands, but we can see the toll it takes on him. He becomes tougher and uglier. He ceases to be the man he was at the start.

There’s Richard Ward as Doc Johnson, the African-American boss of Harlem. (Interestingly, Shaft has a Bumpy Jones character in the same role. Both are clearly references to the real-life Bumpy Johnson.) He’s “the king” where he lives, but only because the Italians have backed him. He resents their condescension, and he chafes at the rules they expect him to play by. He has no problem having people killed, and he sells drugs as readily as he runs numbers, but he also has a cultural pride. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s “boy,” and – while I’ll have to watch it again to untangle some of the finer plot points – his betrayal of the Italians at the end allows the police to get to a hold-up-man on the run before the mafia, ultimately depriving them of $100k.

If there’s a standout performance in my book, though – and there are a lot to choose from – it’s Paul Benjamin as one of the hold-up guys. He carries whole scenes on his face, impassive except for a powerful quiver along his jaw. In rare unguarded moments, we see the innocence that might have been as he daydreams about living beside water so he can fish and garden. More often, though, he is as he tells his loving wife: a 42-year-old ex-con with a medical condition (epilepsy) who has no shot at a future…no shot except that, through a crazily fortunate turn of events, he’s managed to steal $100k in mafia money.

Just as the film never lets us settle into any one perspective, it does remarkable things with sound. The music by 1970s soul great Bobby Womack and 1950s jazz great J.J. Johnson is fabulous. But, as often as we get proto-Scorsese or Tarantino overdubs of it, we also get stretches of aching quiet. Director Barry Shear flat out gets it in the way the loud and the quiet call on us to switch perspective in that other fashion.

If all of that weren’t enough, this ends with a remarkable shocker. [SPOILER: DON’T READ THIS UNTIL YOU SEE THE FILM] As the climax arrives, with the two other hold-up men tortured to death, Benjamin’s character is on the run from the detectives and, though he’s less aware of it, Johnson’s soldiers. Fatally wounded, he tosses the money to the street below, where a bunch of schoolchildren realize what it is and disperse the money. Then, he turns his attention to the approaching Quinn and gets ready to fire.

Kotto stops him, firing the fatal bullets and saving Quinn. It’s a strange moment of affirmation, but it feels earned. Kotto has had to step outside his quiet impulses, and Quinn has had to acknowledge, fully acknowledge, his partner’s capacity.

Then, and this is the real [SPOILER:], the African-American gangsters shoot Quinn from another roof. I read it as their acting on orders from the Italians to kill a copy who, once on their payroll, has proven too independent. I want to look again, though, because it may also be Johnson’s men determined to strike a blow for racial justice of a kind.

In any case, as Quinn realizes what’s happened, realizes he’s been shot in the head and will die in moments, he grabs for Kotto’s hand. A bewildered Kotto grabs it, and the camera holds on their clasped hands. It almost feels like a glitch in the movie as things stop, jump a frame, and then freeze on a single instant of the two men having found common ground. The film moves forward another couple frames, enough for us to see the hands begin to come apart, but it ends with a still of the two still holding each other.

It’s such a rich image, one that seems both earned and fleeting, that’s haunted me in the ways that the best and most compelling films do.

There is, at last, no single right way to do right. It’s a complicated world, inflected by differences of race, wealth, and age. The film works, and works well, because it recognizes that complicated truth and then gives us so many excellent characters (and performances) to play it out across.

 

 


Sunday, July 19, 2020

Review: I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To start with the problems, this is a structural mess. We open with a taut, procedural scene where our hero – who ultimately has so many names that I don’t know what to call him other than “Pilgrim” – reads a brutal crime scene and determines the murderer is a woman. That’s not high art, but Hayes pulls it off with real skill. You know you’re in the hands of someone with some chops, and you know we’re going to see how Pilgrim solves the murder while dealing with the burden of a troubled past.

Except, that’s not what happens. The in media res moment turns out to be almost a wrong turn. The murder case matters, I suppose, but it’s merely parallel to and coincidental with, a much larger terrorist plot. The murder, in fact, fades so far into the background that it seems contrived when we return to it. That great first scene seems like it belongs to a different book.

In something of the same way, we move for a long time into a series of almost alternating perspectives. We have Pilgrim as he finds himself drawn back into the secret agent world he’s left, and we have “the Saracen” who becomes radicalized after the Saudis behead his father for the crime of independent thought. We get a lot from inside the Saracen’s head, but – given that this is a first-person narrative – there’s no explanation for how we get that material.

[MAJOR SPOILER: This ends with the Saracen dead and Pilgrim cutting himself off from U.S. intelligence agencies. That means that there is no plausible way for Pilgrim to know all that he comes to tell us. Terry Hayes may know it, but he presents it to us as if we are learning it through Pilgrim’s consciousness. It is, if you look too closely at it (though it’s mean-spirited to do that) a major flaw. Or, it’s an effective way to build tension that not-too-unreasonably asks us to suspend our disbelief.]

More tellingly, the politics here are troubling.

On the surface level, we have the consistent premise that torture and assassination work. Pilgrim isn’t happy about it, but he kills people, and he participates in things like water boarding. He owns up to the ugliness, but he values the intelligence such methods help him gather. [SPOILER: At the end, when the Saracen waterboards him to try to uncover a false lead he’s planted, we get the report that he’s held out for some number of seconds longer than the world record holder.] Worse, he stoops to serious unscrupulousness at the end when he comes close to hanging a five-year-old with Down’s Syndrome to get the Saracen to reveal the nature of his plan to infect the West with vaccine-resistant small pox.

Concerning as that is – intelligence operatives regularly report that information obtained through torture is as likely to be misinformation as it is legitimate – it obscures a deeper darkness. The Saracen does get occasional sympathy. He is, after all, a great and brave fighter, a man committed to freeing his people from the house of Saud, and a clever adversary. He didn’t ask for revolution, he had it forced on him.

Still, the broad outline of this is a proxy religious war. We have a “Saracen,” explicitly defined early as a warrior defending Islam, against a “Pilgrim,” a man committed to leaving the safety of his home to pay respect to something he holds holy. Moreover, Pilgrim is a man denied his birthright. His adoptive father, a billionaire, dies before his adoptive mother who effectively cuts him off. Pilgrim is supposed to be a child of privilege, supposed to be a natural born sailor enjoying the fruits of his inherited wealth, but he’s been cast as a front-line defender of the West.

Put like that, it’s hardly a [SPOILER:] to say that he succeeds. At its ugliest, this is the story of the best the West can provide outsmarting the best the Islamic world can provide. So, yeah, no surprise that he ends the book literally sailing off into the sunset on a private boat, stoically implying that he – a part of the potentially softened West – has proven the sleeping strength of our secret warriors.

So, though, with all that to hold against this book, I still found myself hanging on the edge as I worked through the final chapters. For all the narrative clumsiness of the method, Hayes succeeds in building tension, in creating the “thrill” that underscores a thriller. This isn’t generally my genre of choice, but I tip my hat to the overall effectiveness of it.

If you want to read a book that grabs you and puts you through the ringer, this is a good one to try. It may lack a certain narrative logic to jump back and forth as Hayes does, but it has a real power when it all comes together. I felt it when a crucial phone call seemed to go awry, and I acknowledged the moral price that Pilgrim understood himself as called to pay. Sure there’s an ugliness in accepting the necessary ethical compromises of the secret-agent work; Robert Ludlum made that clear a generation ago even if he simultaneously (like Hayes) valorized it in the midst of his critique.

But, at the end of a novel like this, when you’re properly exhausted from its effective ups-and-downs, when your nerves are frayed, it’s exciting to see the showdown between our two formidable characters.

So, there may be a lot this book is guilty of, but I also have to admit it’s a kind of guilty pleasure too.




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Monday, June 29, 2020

Review: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sometimes at a funeral there will be that person whose central place confuses you. You’ll recognize the surviving spouse, siblings, and children, but then there will sometimes be that mysterious friend who’s given the same standing. Sometimes that person, recognizing the potential discomfort that comes with being elevated beyond other mourners, will be considerate enough to explain the backstory. Other times, the person stands presumptuously, implicitly blaming you for not recognizing the special nature of the friendship.

Benjamin Taylor is presumptuous here. He puts himself forward as a chief mourner of the great Philip Roth, and he takes it for granted that his memories of their friendship are a balm to those many of us who have mourned him after knowing him only from a distance.

Not long ago, I read and enjoyed James Atlas’s Remembering Roth – another of the short memoir/biographies of Roth that we are getting as we await the promised seminal biography from Blake Bailey. In it, Atlas told the story of how he’d been swept into Roth’s circle the way a lot of people were. Roth would find something to admire in a younger writer’s work, would send a note, and then their friendship would erupt.

Just as often, though, as Atlas tells it (and as others suggest), Roth would grow prickly and distant. He didn’t write such people out of his life, but he’d let a friendship lose its luster. Atlas is especially good at recording the slow-growing sadness of realizing that he was getting pushed out of an inner circle he’d been fortunate to be part of for a decade or so. There was always someone new, someone full of promise and without baggage to fill the vacated place.

Taylor, it turns out, was more or less the last man standing when Roth died. I understand there were others – Adam Gopnik was a famous late-life intimate – but, as we get the story here, Taylor is the central one.

And, whether that claim is true, his descriptions of it are almost cringe-worthy. On the last page – though it’s hardly the first time he says something so self-serving – he records saying to Roth, “You have been the joy of my life.” And then he quotes Roth’s answer, “And you of mine.” I’ll believe Roth said it, and I’ll believe he meant it. But I won’t believe he never said it to anyone else, and I won’t believe he’d have looked at his life differently a week before or a week after. We know enough about Roth’s mercurial moods to know that much of his power came from living within such moments.

As such, it’s an awkward and uncomfortable experience to have Taylor record such sentiments without putting them into a larger context. He never tells the story of his friendship with Roth; he merely basks in it. And that leaves the rest of us feeling like excluded mourners.

I could forgive some of that awkward tone if there were more substance or more new information here.

To Taylor’s partial credit, we do learn (for what I think may be the first time) that Roth did indeed continue writing after he stopped publishing. He has volumes of late-life material that some publisher will likely release some day. We also get some brief snippets of Roth’s private correspondence with Taylor, and some of the lines are genuinely memorable. One, for instance, is Roth’s observation, “Hawthorne, that visionary pessimist, had it right: Our enemies are forever the legions of purifiers and pleasure-haters.”

And then there’s Roth’s reported claim that he slept with Ava Gardner sometime in the 1980s. Here’s how Taylor records that in what may be the most uncomfortable moment in a short book filled with them. “ ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis? You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the eighties. When I had her.’ (I tell you this, reader, in strict confidence – as it was told to me.)”

As for substance, Taylor seems a solid reader of Roth though not an extraordinary one. He offers quick critical observations every now and then, but he rarely explores or supports them. One of my favorites, and potentially the most substantive claim in the book, turns on how Roth – who could not bring himself to believe in an afterlife – dealt with what it means to lose somebody, and to be lost oneself. As Taylor puts it, “Philip’s solution was to rename mortality and declare himself indestructible till death. It’s not a bad gloss on what’s always been the ultimate human problem.”

That kernel of insight might have served as the heart of a worthwhile book here. I’d have wanted to see Taylor slow down, give context to, and reflect on Roth’s fading years.

Instead, we’ve gotten something that awkwardly celebrates a friendship that, as it might have meant a lot to Roth and surely did to Taylor, doesn’t really concern itself with those of us who had our own readerly relationship to the man.


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