Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley CrouchMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Review: Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley CrouchMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Review: The Mourner
The Mourner by Richard StarkMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Somebody was reading too much Hammett back in 1963.
Ok, maybe not. It’s pretty tough to read too much Hammett (seeing how there was so little of it and all of it very good to great). It is not, I can certainly attest, all that hard to read too much Parker.
I have, indeed done that, as I have now knocked out the first four of the series in the last four days. (I feel like my tween self plowing through the Hardy Boys.)
In any case, I sense a real fatigue in this one. Stark relegates the great premise of these books to the background – instead of one-man Parker going up the too-civilized-for-its-own-good syndicate, he has to do a job for an ex-girlfriend who has an incriminating gun he needs to recover.
I can almost feel Stark (Westlake) searching for a plot and then thinking, aha!, as he imagines rewriting The Maltese Falcon.
The result is something that’s the equivalent of a garage-band cover of an earlier hit. We get a “fat man.” We get a middle-European fellow with an accent and a surprising resiliency. We get a stolen medieval statuette that no one – excepting one footnote-loving scholar – recognizes as valuable. And we get a femme fatale who’s convinced she can manipulate our detective hero.
I sort of enjoyed this, mostly because – like all Parker novels it seems – it flies past. They really go down quickly, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
It’s also fun to see Stark playing with the tropes from The Maltese Falcon. There is a modest cleverness to it that does not immediately fit next to the tough-guy stuff of Parker in general.
As I reach the end of it, though, I find I do not especially want to reach for the next one. It’s a little like having eaten too many Oreo’s.
In other words, I’ve had too much Parker. (For now at least.)
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Monday, March 22, 2021
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Saturday, March 20, 2021
Friday, March 19, 2021
Review: Ayiti
Ayiti by Roxane GayMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s hard to know quite what this book is. It’s sort of a short story collection, but – while there is one fine full-length story and three or four mid-length ones – much of it is closer to poetry. It’s got strong dashes of what feel like autobiography, but then it veers into points of view very different from one another. It has moments of real tenderness toward parents and children, and then it features work that feels like (and indeed was originally published as) erotica.
The fact that this is hard to categorize, though, is part of what makes it as strong as it is. Gay refuses to stand still as a self-identified immigrant. She doesn’t give us the story (or stories) her subjectivity is “supposed” to share. Instead, she reveals her own experience (or seems to – unless you check out her biography somewhere else, it’s hard to know where her life ends and her invention begins) and then insists on her authority to write the fiction that appeals to her.
Some of her protagonists are Anglo, some straight, some still children, some wealthy, some at risk of death, and some comfortably established in the U.S. I listened to this, and that compounded the sense that one story/prose poem bleeds into another. It’s tempting to identify Gay with some protagonists over others, but resisting that temptation seems to be a big part of what we’re asked to do. This is a narrative voice that flashes its ethnic experience, that trumpets its Haitian sensibility, and that then ventures wherever it chooses to go.
I think it might be interesting some day to read this in conversation with Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street. Both explore ethnic perspective in small doses (making each readily teachable) and both tweak the expectation that its author has any obligation to translate a particular ethnic experience into prose that a widespread (i.e. white and “non-ethnic”) readership can access.
I’ve been following Gay in a small way for a couple years. This is my first full-length work of hers (and it’s fleetingly short, of course) and I enjoyed it more than I expected. As a critic – in the limited way I’ve read her – she seems contradictory, though I acknowledge she may well make a consistent case for herself in Bad Feminist. Here, her ability to be one thing and then another, to insist on the power of her ethnic heritage and then – just as fully – to insist on her right to write as a full citizen of the world, gives this short and beautiful work a powerful punch.
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Thursday, March 18, 2021
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Thursday, March 11, 2021
Saturday, March 6, 2021
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Monday, March 1, 2021
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