Review: The Hike

The Hike by Drew Magary
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read a number of reviews of this one before I picked it up, so I certainly heard good things about it, but nothing gave me a sense of how playful most of this is. Most of what I read seemed to emphasize the existential questions that are the aftertaste here rather than the persistent clever game-like quality of it.

And, for me, it’s the playfulness that makes the first three-quarters enormous fun. Like Senlin Ascends and The Book of Lost Things – both of which I ultimately prefer to this still fine work – this is many ways a fairy tale for a 21st Century readership. Its best success comes in giving us an old woman dispensing magic beans, but doing so crankily and with exacting gardening demands. Or a talking crab who calls our protagonist Shithead. Or scary men with Rottweiler faces.

The details fly by, but the basic invitation is to lose ourselves in adventure and make believe. There are enough “now” moments – cell phones and business meetings – to make it feel as if it’s talking to our adult selves, but we’re invited to be frightened and thrilled like children. Our hero has to walk a literal path, venturing into an unknown that’s rigged only partway in his favor.

For much of this the point seems either pure entertainment – which it does well – or a meditation on the power of story itself to serve as an escape. I’m all in for the former; this is a clever story most of the way, and Magary has a terrific ear for juxtaposing the silly with the frightening. I’d be OK with the meta-narrative as well, but that’s been done.

As we near the end, though – and I think I can say it without a spoiler – Magary seems to feel he has to flex some philosophical muscle. The lightheartedness dims, and we start to see real suffering. Our hero faces an ultimate test linked to the nature of existence, and then he cheats (by “splitting”).

The result is a peculiar lingering melancholy that’s at odds with what makes most of this such a pleasure. Magary may have had this ending in mind the whole time, but it feels like a forced fit, like an effort at changing the tone late in the game.

So, while I like most of this, I think it’s ill-served by the last 30 pages. It becomes the novel people described before I read it, an intriguing one, but one less playful and less fun than most of what is really here.


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Review: The Killing Of The Tinkers

The Killing Of The Tinkers by Ken Bruen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not much given to the idea of detective series. For me much of the fun in a book is getting to meet a new character, and that’s gone if it’s someone we’re seeing again after a first – or a dozenth – earlier volume(s). On the other hand, Ken Bruen writes so well, with so sharp and comically sweetened a hardboiled edge, that I think anything he writes is worth a shot.

I don’t think this one quite reaches to the level of the first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, but that’s a masterpiece, so it’s more than fine to come close. And this one comes very close. Especially with its killer ending, this steps right up to that level of true excellence.

Bruen writes here with the same inspired hardboiled mumbling as The Guards. Sometimes his sentences come out as poetry; more often they just stop short. If it’s not inspired, neither he nor Jack will waste our time in saying it.

That’s as true at the level of the chapters as it is with those sentences. Some chapters wind around an incident, taking us right up to something disturbing in the world or in Jack’s blighted soul. Others belch out an insight and conclude all within the space of a page or two.

So, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll listen to Bruen meditating on whatever he cares to share, be it the murders of a bunch of Irish Tinkers, the thrill-kill beheading of a bunch of swans, or the writers or singers he thinks are most neglected.

For much of this book, I paid only loose attention to the plot. [SEMI-SPOILER] Jack is sure he’s solved the mystery of the Tinker-killer early in the novel, and it becomes less a whodunit and more a how-to-get-revenge. In that light, I just enjoyed the prose and the constellation of other characters, especially Cathy – the ex-punk turned mother of a child with Downs Syndrome – and Kiki, the intellectual who marries Jack when he’s in a manic mood and repents when she sees him in full.

I’d read a bunch, put it down for a few days, and then pick it up with the same joy a little later.

And then, [FULL SPOILER] comes that ending. The last couple dozen pages make it clear Jack’s fingered the wrong man for the Tinker killings. His certainty has sicced some mean bastards on a nasty but ultimately innocent man. And it’s as hard as hardboiled gets when Jack confronts the man – his teeth ripped from his jaw with pliers – knows the truth for himself, and nods again toward his murder. What else is he to do? If he owns up to the mistake at that late date, then he’s a dead man himself.

The final page is note perfect in its leaving Jack disgusted with himself. He’s cleared a lot of money on the job, but he can’t take knowing what he knows. So he hires someone to kill ‘Mikey,’ the man he knows for the true killer at the last.

Bruen gives us all that in the space of a couple paragraphs. It’s a dark truth made all the darker in the telling. Yet it’s inspirational too in the discovery that someone so plugged into genre that he’s working in series has the capacity to hone the stiletto as he does.

So, yeah, I’m all in for the next one. I can’t imagine the next will be as good as this one, but if the slippage from this one (number two in the series) to number three is as slight as the slippage from The Guards to this, then I’m sure I’ll enjoy and admire it too.


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Review: Deliverance

Deliverance by James Dickey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals” is one of the most compelling poems of the last half century. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily among the very best – although it could be – but that it’s a call to consider our place in the world as either predator or prey. It happens to be powerfully written, and I’ve found it one of the best things to teach in introductory college literature settings, but above all it asks us to consider who we are if we neither hunting nor being hunted.

After all these years, I’d never read Deliverance. If you grew up when I did, though, you knew the song “Dueling Banjos” and you knew the phrase, “Squeal like a piggy” – neither of which I really understood at age 10 and neither of which appears directly in the novel. Still, now that I’ve read this, I understand both the power of the film (which I have never seen all the way through) and more of what Dickey may have been driving at in “The Heaven of Animals.”

Half of this book is the poetic meditation I expected on the distinction between the tedium of civilization and the thrill of life-as-survival. It opens with our narrator, Ed Gentry, recounting the irritating details of his life as an advertising executive. He’s worked to stay tough, but he’s in awe of his handsomer, stronger, more capable friend Lewis. So, when Lewis proposes a trip down the river through a north Georgia river about to be dammed up, it seems a last chance to grasp a vanishing outdoor world.

It's worth noting as well that the book ends in a similar “civilized” conflict – this one between potential conflicting stories about what took place on the river, in the inaccessible places of the world.

The other half of this book, though, is a classic thriller. It’s the middle section, and it pits man against man in a life-or-death showdown. Ed is initially hunted, and then he does the hunting.

This part is “Heaven of Animals” made literal, but a lot of the poetry gets lost in the translation. We get some powerful language about despair and last remnants of strength being just sufficient to the task, but somehow the urgency of the insight gets lost. Ed does what he has to do survive, but it certainly doesn’t ennoble him, and it doesn’t quite seem to give him the purpose that the poem celebrates. There’s nothing awe-inspiring about his [SPOILER] sending a razor-sharp arrow into a man’s throat. It’s an ugly and bloody instant.

To be fair, Dickey drives that point home by having Ed fall on his own arrow in the same exchange. Ed nearly kills himself in the moment of the killing that he does, and I admire the ambiguity that gives us. Much of its potential for poetry vanishes, though, under the weight of the thriller unspooling around it: we want to know whether Ed will survive.

As a bottom line, then, I do recommend this book – one I saw on every shelf of every one of my friends’ parents in the middle 1970s. I can’t tell how well it holds up altogether, and it’s particularly disturbing in this Trump era to see how much of it turns on the fundamental inability for the ‘elites’ of the city to communicate with the left-behind people of the rural spaces. In the end, though, Dickey is such a talented wordsmith, and he’s wrestling with such primal questions, that the still-thrilling conflict at the heart doesn’t entirely obscure the poetic question that lies even deeper.


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Review: Ham on Rye

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a vivid memory of discovering Bukowski’s poetry: the poem “Tough Customers” in the volume Play the Piano Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed in the ‘poetry closet’ at Denison University’s library in the summer of 1983. It was an amazing moment, one that opened up for me new possibilities for writing and reading literature. I’ve never found my way to his prose, though. If I started Barfly, I know I didn’t finish it, and he has remained only a poet for me ever since.

This one, though, is worth the wait, even if I am coming to it 35 years late.

Ham on Rye opens with Bukowski’s seemingly autobiographical protagonist, Henry Chinaski, age two, sitting beneath a table and watching the legs of the adults go past. It ends with him gazing uncertainly at the rock-‘em, sock-‘em-robot-like game where his toy boxer has been knocked down for the count by a kid across the way. In between, he resents the world, grows into an ungainly body, and gets into more fights than I can count. Along the way, he tallies up reasons to hate himself, then he more or less shrugs them all off and settles into drinking, reading literature, and drinking some more.

If the arc of the narrative sounds flat, what makes this memorable is Bukowski’s nonjudgmental recording of the world around him. He is, in many ways, a camera, telling us what he sees and sometimes what he feels but never applying philosophy to it. The kids and adults of his world often do cruel things to one another, but he doesn’t spend time assessing others or himself. Life isn’t particularly generous in his case. He has a mean, insecure father and a weak-willed mother. He is awkward as a child and then, just as he finds his strength, he develops what the doctors call the worst case of “acne vulgaris” they’ve ever seen, and he has to deal with the almost disfiguring condition. He’d love to get laid, but he knows it won’t happen.

So, if there’s any drama here, it’s the slow-motion way in which Henry becomes accustomed to himself and to a world that seems always to tantalize him. He’s never going to get what he wants, but he develops a model of masculinity where he’s OK with deprivation. He sees himself as one of life’s losers, as someone destined for skid row, but he refuses to complain and he refuses to take comfort in anything metaphysical. He’s always interested in the world around him, not necessarily in its people, but in the substance of the things he encounters.

As a fan of his poetry, I enjoy that stance because it explains to me how he could write the unsentimental things he did. He’s willing to draw portraits of the forgotten people, the bums or the prostitutes or the alcoholics just this side of developing tuberculosis, but he isn’t interested in celebrating them. His greatness (a limited greatness, I think, but a memorable one) comes in his being so tempted to despair but never giving in. As close to bored as he is with his succession of failures, he can never quite suppress his interest in what makes people – including himself – tick.

It might be nice if there were a clearer structure here, and, for once, I’d be interested in seeing something that presents itself more clearly as a sequel or continuation, but I still admire this for what it is. It’s a fragmented, fractured work about a man whose life is a trail of disappointment. Somehow, throughout it, he never gets too low or too high. He just keeps his word-camera running and shows us a world few others have the combination of misfortune, strength, and fundamental humanity to share without moralizing.


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Review: Nicholas Nickleby

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two things strike me after reading this one.

First, this is funnier than I remember Dickens being. I guess there are terrific vignettes in a lot of places – my father always loved the scene of “give a nod to the aged P” in Great Expectations – but I found myself laughing throughout this. The narrative here can drag on a lot – the bits with Mrs. Nickleby, especially after he finds her meandering style of speaking in the middle and after, go on a long time – but then he has a way of pithily stating some contradiction or humorous insight. I listened to this, so I can’t go back and find specific lines, but I don’t know how funny they’d be out of context in any case. Instead, it’s just a matter of cutting through the fluff, of making light of someone or other in an elegant understated way.

Second, and more absorbing, I feel as if this comes perilously close to what I think of as the Marvel Comics’ villain problem. In most of those movies, the antagonist seems to have powers that mirror the hero’s. Iron Man battles someone in a large suit; Ant-Man goes up against someone who can shrink; Captain American faces off with someone who went through the same serum-strengthening technique he did.

In this case, we could see Nicholas – if we twisted the context – as looking a lot like the sort of person he otherwise tells us he despises. Consider: he beats up two people, Mr. Squeers and Sir Mulberry Hawk, so badly that they are temporarily bed-ridden, and he threatens or actually strikes at least two more. He actually takes a valuable ring from the Squeers, though he returns it when he discovers he’s done it. He toys with the emotions of Fanny Squeers (though he claims he didn’t even really see her – which is quite an insult when you think of it), and then he sneaks in the basement to meet the woman, Cecilia, whom he thinks is Madeline. In the end, though he protests that he doesn’t want to be one of those guys who marries for money, he does indeed marry Madeline, inherit her fortune, and go into business.

I acknowledge that context excuses him in every case. He’s always so darned noble that we have to forgive him. But look how easily we could make the case that he resembles his uncle and nemesis, Ralph.

We’re supposed to dislike Ralph because his business is all speculation, but Nicholas eventually takes over the Cheeryble firm, meaning that he’s speculating as well. (Yes, I realize he’s dealing in real goods rather than financial instruments or straight-out usury, but it’s still business on a large scale with all the attendant risks.) We’re supposed to dislike Ralph because he’s single-minded and cunning, refusing to rest until he gets what he wants, but we could say the same about Nicholas. (True, Nicholas wants things that are good for others while Ralph is entirely selfish, but the point is that each refuses to compromise.) And each is, in the end, a Nickleby, not merely in name but in the enterprise of putting one nickel by another, in realizing that wealth and happiness, however designated, comes incrementally rather than in one fell swoop.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all that, except to think that, in later novels, Dickens seems to distinguish his protagonists from their antagonists more clearly. Pip is nothing like Miss Havisham – he’s all about embracing life while she lives for the dead. Uriah Heep isn’t like David Copperfield; he doesn’t even enter the book until the halfway point.

What I’m driving at is that, certainly here, it’s context that redeems Nicholas. Maybe, as Dickens moved on to later novels, he sharpened his critique on the world and distinguished his positive characters more fully from his malevolent ones. He made them more different to play to a notion that it wasn’t merely that the 19th Century British economy and social structure hurt so many, but that it also had more evidently evil people populating it.

Or, maybe, I’m just over-thinking this. I do know that part of what I liked was the sense that Nicholas is, in many ways, a tough and persistent guy. He wouldn’t succeed on his happy terms if not for a lot of clear authorial intervention. And, maybe, that’s a sign that Nicholas’s good fortune doesn’t entirely redeem him.


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Review: La Belle Sauvage

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book with two titles. On the one hand, it is part of the projected “Book of Dust” trilogy which, it seems, is supposed someday to constitute a single book. On the other hand, this is also La Belle Sauvage, a first volume that stands as a story in itself.

As engaging as each of those books is, Pullman seems never quite to reconcile them into a single project. This may be going somewhere extraordinary, but what we have so far is a terrifically fun adventure that’s garnished with not-quite-developed notions of philosophy and theology.

Like a lot of people, I was blown away by Pullman’s first book, The Golden Compass. Not only does that do as fine a job of bringing steampunk into the mainstream as any I know, it also attempts a real metaphysical inquiry within the fantasy tradition. As a stand-alone book, complete with its bold ending (worthy of George R.R. Martin for its sudden and sharp cruelty) it’s a landmark of the genre.

While I also really enjoyed The Subtle Knife, I was ultimately disappointed by The Amber Spyglass. I thought it diminished Pullman’s striking protest against religious faith hardened into dogma by turning into an almost adolescent assault on the possibility of faith itself. It simply never quite landed with the subtlety the first book(s) promised, and – unforgivably in my eyes – it allowed Asriel a redemption for his deep cruelty at the end of The Golden Compass. As much as I loved the first book in that first trilogy, then, I’d kind of put it all behind me.

Here we have Pullman revisiting that tangle of inspiration and disappointment. At least that’s how I understand “The Book of Dust.” We get enough tantalizing hints about the nature of ‘dust,’ a particle that reflects the stuff of consciousness in the same way that atoms reflect the stuff of the material world, that I’m back to being intrigued. In a world where souls live outside our bodies as daemons – animal creatures that accompany all people as manifestations of spirit – it’s compelling to think of the implications: how would we conceive of the soul if we could see it in ourselves and others?

(And Pullman does some brilliant stuff with the daemons here. I love the way the daemon of the infant Lyra constantly changes shape – as all children’s daemons do – in response to those giving her care. It’s an almost perfect image to see it become a kitten submitting to being held by another person’s cat-daemon.)

Still, most of such metaphysical thinking comes only indirectly or through hints. Our bete noir here, a brilliant and insane “historian” (as metaphysical scientists are called in Pullman’s universe) named Gerard Bonneville, has done deep research into the ‘Rusakov Field.’ We get to see reams of his notes, but they’re inscrutable, some in foreign languages and some in code. We get a few gentle explanations from Malcolm’s tutor, Dr. Hannah Relf, but they’re generally just shorter descriptions of principles made clear in the first trilogy.

So, my verdict on this as “The Book of Dust” is an incomplete. The hints here suggest Pullman may find a way back to his intriguing questions – that he may succeed in creating a young-adult fantasy world with as much substance as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia but without that works embrace of an orthodox faith that Pullman sees as limiting true individual expression – but they aren’t developed. Maybe this second trilogy as a whole can redeem the too-easy conclusion of The Amber Spyglass, but we don’t know enough yet.

On the other hand, La Belle Sauvage gradually becomes an utterly rollicking adventure. If half of Pullman’s inspiration is an effort to out-C.S. Lewis the original C.S. Lewis, the other seems to be to recapture the joy of Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island. Once [SPOILER] Malcolm and Alice find they have to rescue Lyra and ride the titular canoe down a flooded river to London, we get what feels like pure old-fashioned adventure.

(As proof of that intention, there’s even an old-fashioned frontispiece in the hard-cover edition that the publisher sent me as a desk copy for a class I don’t teach. Thanks, though. That frontispiece, with its lithographic line-art and its excerpted sentence from later in the book, looks exactly like the kind of thing I’d have found in one of the library copies of Treasure Island, Horatio Hornblower, Ivanhoe, or any other classic adventure story I spent my childhood checking out.)

I loved the rhythm of the desperate canoe trip, and I also really liked its strange digressions into fairy and fantasy. Those suggest a separate metaphysics from the stuff of ‘dust,’ but Pullman doesn’t go into them in much detail. He doesn’t have to, but the fact that he doesn’t underscores again the tension between this as two discrete works in one volume.

There are some other issues as well: it isn’t clear why Lyra is so exposed in the first place. If she’s so essential for all that will follow, then why is she left more or less friendless in the convent where she’s prey to whomever assaults her first? And, why is that Bonneville is able, alone and deeply injured, to track the children more effectively than the best-equipped ships of the CCD and Oakley Street squads? I can wait on an answer since that’s part of what you get in the young-adult genre, but it does dampen some of the excellence that’s otherwise in place here.

So, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I am back in line for the promised second volume of this second trilogy. Pullman can certainly tell a good story. I’m willing to wait and see whether he can also sharpen the point of his ambitious critique about the nature and possibilities of contemporary faith.


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Review: Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition

Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition by David Mamet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This has to start with the dialogue, with the things these characters say and write. After all, it’s Mamet, and no one has a better ear for making music out of the hunger to sound tough.

Consider, for instance, the way our journalist-protagonist Mike Hodge puts it in one news story, “Jackie Weiss had died of a broken heart, it being broken by several slugs from a .45.” Yeah, that’s funny, and yeah, it’s in bad taste. But that just makes it funnier.

At one level – the level of the blurb on the back – this is a story of Hodge looking to get revenge on the gangsters who kill his girlfriend. [SPOILER] And that level works well enough as tight noir: her murder is parallel to but ultimately separate from a Syndicate consolidation around the murders of a pair of Jewish gangsters – Jackie Weiss and Morris Teitelbaum – but it turns out to be tied even more tightly to an IRA plot to steal tommy guns for its rebellion. Hodge goes from potential source to potential source, learning things he doesn’t want to know and getting slowly closer to figuring out whom he ought to try to kill himself.

Most of this book turns out to be conversation, though – from Hodges’s extended philosophical and artistic disputes with his friend and colleague Parlow, to his seeking information from his wise African-American madame friend Peekaboo, or his encounters with one after another underworld character who might be able to help him. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would get boring quickly, and the eventual resolution wouldn’t carry much weight. In Mamet’s hands, though, we get gems like these:

+ The first phrase he’d heard, in basic training, was that those looking for sympathy could find it in a dictionary, between “shit” and “syphilis.”

+ Peekaboo explains why a cheating husband should go to exceptional lengths to pretend innocence to his wife. “She knows the truth. She needs to be assured her husband is observing the proprieties.”

+ A friend observes to Ruth, moll to one of the murdered Jewish gangsters, that knowledge is power. Ruth answers, “Power is power. People say differently don’t understand power. Or knowledge. Knowledge is what gets you killed.”

+ A tough old detective type tells Hodge that the Chinese invented gunpowder “to foil the evil spirits.” “The question is, then” Mike said, “what is evil?” “Well, that is decided,” Doyle said, “by the fellow holding the gun.”

+ In the wake of Annie’s murder, Hodge descends into serious alcoholism. “He comprehended perfectly the concept that time would heal grief, but had lost all understanding of ‘time.”

+ Parlow tries at one point to rally him. “You were humbled by your love, you were humbled by her slim white body, you are humbled by death, but real humility is nothing to be proud of. And you, full stop, stink.”

+ When he returns to The Tribune and hands in a sob-sister type story, his editor responds with, “You either go out and drink less, or drink more. Something. But don’t break my heart come in here with this fucking valentine to your long-lost talent. Because someone at Hull House may care, but I’ve got to write a newspaper.”

+ Or the same editor later in his rant, “I don’t understand writer’s block. I’m sure it’s very high toned and thrilling, like these other psychological complaints. I, myself, could never afford it. As I had a Sainted Mother at home who, without my wages, would have been hard put to drink herself to death. Further: I think, if one can afford it, but one has nothing to say, one should not write. This is not writer’s block but common courtesy.”

+ Or, as a kicker, “Like most men who think they understand men,” Mike thought, “this man only understands fools.”

That’s a lot of top-shelf quotes, but I’ve restrained myself from others. As I say, it’s the dialogue – the particular Mamet poetry – that makes this go.

I can see the appeal of Prohibition Chicago for Mamet – who’s celebrated the sleaze of the city going back over the most recent half-century in works that stand among the best plays of our era. In many ways Chicago toughness came to a head in Capone’s city – a point Mamet helped to cement in contemporary readers’ imagination with his writing the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.

In that regard, the tone here is just right. This is a way of looking back at the events of the 1920s with the sharper-edged language of today to shine light into corners the real journalists of the time allowed to remain dark. As such, this is solid historical fiction, work that gives you a fresh sense of the era, a book that makes you think your grandparents may not have been as sweet as they seemed when your parents bundled you up to see them in their retirement homes.

I feel a bit compelled to point out that this is not particularly good history. Dean O’Banion is somehow still alive after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And Nails Morton, long dead, would not have had the sort of residual gang that turns out to be responsible for blackmailing out IRA partisans.

I’ll acknowledge those points as the bugaboos of my work as a gangster historian, though. I won’t let those cultivated inaccuracies or the sometimes winding plot stand in the way of the general excellence of the prose here.

Mamet knows his way around a typewriter like few people, and it’s great to see him taking on the tommy gun era – with the tommy gun famously called a “Chicago typewriter” – in a way that makes it fresh and makes it sing. This may not be his best work, but even second-tier Mamet is worth celebrating.


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