The Silver Pigs (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery) 3.0 Stars

It’s entirely possible that I have in the past spoken of my love for mystery novels, but look, it’s been like 3 years since I last wrote a post on this blog so I cannot be expected to not bore all 4 of you by repeating the 12.4 anecdotes that comprise my life over and over and over again. Anyway, mysteries are a thing that predate my acquisition of a degree in English and as such are kind of a “guilty pleasure” for me. Calling them “poorly written” is a bit mean because mysteries have a different set of rules about themselves which don’t necessarily conform to the classic rules of literature (good characterization, good dialogue, etc. are usually second to a good, labyrinthine plot that keeps the audience guessing), and on top of that a lot of mystery novels are pretty damn well written (The Big Sleep comes to mind).

Not actually featured in the book.

Anyway, because of this literary closeness I find it a little hard to judge mystery novels, so this may actually deserve a higher rating than the one I gave it. I simply adore the Marcus Didius Falco series of books. And why shouldn’t I? These things were basically made for me. They’re mystery novels set in ancient Rome. ‘Nuff said. But on top of that, they’re written by a woman, which kind of shows. I don’t want to talk down too much about the general writing qualities of us men, but a lot of us seem to have a lot of trouble writing fully fleshed out women characters. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can think of a lot of authors I’d choose to read in spite of their relative inability to draw women (John Irving, anyone?), and there are definitely women authors who have the same issue in reverse (hi Margaret Atwood), but there is something to be said for an author who not only features a woman in a primary role but makes her act, like, normal and stuff.

The character in these novels is (okay, I guess SPOILER ALERT because The Silver Pigs includes their meet-cute) Marcus Didius Falco’s girlfriend Helena Justina Verus, although I guess also his mother and sisters to varying degrees. Falco is an informer for the Emperor, basically an ancient Roman version of the Pinkertons only without all the incompetence, who somehow manages to get together with a divorcee and daughter of a Senator. Much of the series concerns his attempting to climb into Helena’s status level and thereby make an “honest woman” out of her. Author Lindsey Davis does a great job of portraying the sexist society of Rome while creating a character in Helena who is strong-willed, competent, clever, and never the “damsel in distress”. At the same time, she also manages to avoid the Get Smart style setup in which the protagonist is an utter buffoon who is constantly bailed out by his more talented partner, whose reason for hanging around is never quite made clear. Marcus is good at what he does and, really, so is Helena.

I’m currently  5 or 6 books in and I can’t recommend this series enough, given the caveats that it is at the end of the day a mystery and you should probably enjoy mysteries. The quality of the history is surprisingly good, especially given that the books were first written way back in the early 90s, before it was easy to do historical research (and also before it was easy to debunk poor historical research). You might find yourself taking small breaks to look up the regions the characters go to or the activities they engage in on Wikipedia and the book rewards you for doing this by being pretty accurate (I mean, there are obvious English idioms used throughout but even this isn’t jarring, as one of the points of the book is to make ancient Rome feel like your backyard). The plotting is good enough, and in my opinion the characters are where this series really shines.

11/22/63 by Stephen King (1.5 stars)

This is the face of DOOM. Or the novel cover.

I really, really, really, really want to like Stephen King. It’s not just that he’s one of the foremost authors of our time and that by blithely coming in and saying that he sucks I sound exactly like one of those hipsters I despise so much. He’s also, truth be told, a very good writer, at least on a sentence-to-sentence and page-to-page basis. He’s not, like, amazing, don’t get me wrong – there are no “cup of trembling” passages in this book that make you want to find him and kiss him in the face – but he is very good at what he does and – yes, I will say it – I actually became emotional at more than one point in this book.

King’s issue is that all too often the whole does not add up to the sum of its parts, and this book is, sadly, no exception. Actually, the afore-linked “Sonny’s Blues” is a pretty great example of the kind of problem that is endemic to the writing of Stephen King. It’s kind of an average short story for the most part, with a decent theme which is at points well or not so well deployed. And then there is the final paragraph, which might be the most awesome thing ever written (seriously, if you haven’t read this, get thee to a library immediately). With a short story, this becomes manageable and okay; after all, even with a longish short story like this (if memory serves, SB clocks in at around 30 pages) I’m only putting in half an hour to 45 minutes of my time to get that big payoff. With a novel… well, that ending had better be 20 pages of amazing, not just one paragraph, and when the really cool payoff bits come halfway into the book, the experience is a bit disappointing.

I’m going to go ahead and spoil the best scene for you because a. I do not want you to feel you should read the book for this, and b. if you do read the book for this passage, I want you to know when it’s okay to stop. The book involves an English teacher who travels back in time to stop the assassination of JFK. Thing is, he travels back to 1958, not 1963, so he has a lot of time to kill, and so in turn he takes a job at a high school in a small town in Texas. While there, he is induced to direct the school play, and in coming up with the casting he discovers that the star offensive lineman on the football team is a naturally talented actor. It’s a tiny bit paint by the numbers – said lineman gets cold feet, thinks he isn’t good enough, the football coach makes fun of him because he’s a small man who is afraid of smart, talented people, and so on – but it’s so well written that this doesn’t matter that much. The play – Of Mice and Men – goes on, and this football player is so amazing (two guesses as to which role he plays) that he inspires the entire cast to hit over their weight, they bring the house down, and it’s all greatness.

If this was a short story or a novella, I would have no problems reviewing this passage in and of itself and giving it 3.5 or 4 stars. It’s that good. The thing is, it has nothing to do with the rest of the damn book. There’s a scene later on where the guy who plays George dies in a car accident which is, I think, supposed to be part of the divine retribution against the protagonist changing history here, but otherwise it’s just tucked away, the characters making just the smallest of cameo appearances later on. Thematically, there’s a tiny, tiny point to make with it; perhaps it is the past attempting to rope the protagonist into a long-term commitment which will make it hard to impossible to kill Oswald before he assassinates JFK. It’s not enough.

The real issue here is that the high quality of this scene contrasts sharply with the main plotline of the book. There are plenty of good points along the way but you read something like a novel in large part for the payoff, and the payoff is just plain awful. It’s King Lear esque in the way the consequences do not really stem from the actions*. There is a thing in writing called the deus ex machina (Greek for “the god in the machine”) wherein a hero wins the day due to circumstances entirely beyond their control. This is heavily frowned upon in modern literature, to the point that even beginning short story writers will critique the work of their classmates when they see this in action. Well, guess what: if you use the deus ex machina to make the hero lose, it feels every bit as clunky and awful.

Ultimately, Stephen King has grown too good and too popular for his own good. A quality editor would have taken one look at the last third of the book and told King to re-write the thing**, and probably to pull the excellent drama teacher subplot out of the book and make into its own thing. King has gotten to the point where he has no editor, or if he does, that editor is so afraid of him that they just rubber-stamp whatever it is that he produces. This is a damn shame, because with the right approach I think this could have been one of the seminal novels of this age.

*Actually, that’s an insult to Lear because you can at least make a case for the way he treats his daughters as having something to do with his grotesque ending, whereas here… somehow JFK living = the US is thrown into a post-apocalyptic hellhole in which Maine is owned by Canada. No, I am not making that up.

**Which, by the way, he apparently does not do. His book On Writing, which otherwise is a pretty decent bit of meta-writing which I may critique here in the future, actually says that he writes in essence three drafts. That is a tiny, tiny amount. I’m not saying that he has to put in 10, 11, 12 drafts the way Hemingway did, but… his stuff reads a lot like he spent 3 drafts and not 6.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – 4 stars

When a lot of literary types talk about style, they usually mention folks like Hemingway or Raymond Carver. I know Hemingway in particular kind of disliked people talking about his style – there’s a quote by him that runs along the lines of “people took all the mistakes I made with my writing and called that my style”. I don’t think that’s *quite* true, but it’s certainly the case that some people just plain write differently than others, and additionally since there’s not a straight-out correct way to write vs. an incorrect one, “style” is, in fact, one of those things you can talk about.

Where am I going with this? Well, there is probably no latter-20th century writer with a more personable style than James Ellroy. His work, to put it bluntly, reads like something between a sick and twisted update of Dick and Jane and the saucy Hollywood tabloids Ellroy read so much of in his youth. Taking a paragraph from the beginning of this book:

Warrants was local celebrity as a cop. Warrants was plainclothes without a coat and tie, romance and mileage per diem on your civilian car. Warrants was going after the real bad guys and not rousting winos and weinie waggers in front of the Midnight Mission. Warrants was working in the DA’s office with one foot in the Detective Bureau, and late dinners with Mayor Bowron when he was waxing effusive and wanted to hear war stories.

One thing you might notice in there – hey, you’d be blind if you *didn’t* notice it – is his use of alliteration. James Ellroy loves him the front-end rhyming. In fact, reading his stuff is just a little bit like reading Beowulf. Somehow, this trick makes his writing feel tougher and manlier, like a hipster wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt to be ironic except that in this instance you don’t want to punch the hipster in the face. Wait, that’s a terrible analogy. Let me just say it this way: Ellroy write good.

The other thing that I really enjoy about Ellroy is the in-your-face aspect of the material he covers. Black Dahlia is based on the true story of a young woman who was found murdered and mutilated in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. There is a desire, I am sure, to treat this period with some nostalgia. Ellroy presents it with all of the corruption, bigotry, and, shall we say, different tactics employed by policemen that you really ought to expect in a modern adaptation of a story from this period. Those of you who have seen the movie or read the book for LA Confidential might remember Ellroy’s treatment of the Zoot Suit Riot at the beginning. A different writer might avoid talking about this incident already, given that it’s a starkly racist incident, or at least find a way to keep the protagonists of the story away from it. Not Ellroy. He forces you to face the out and out bad sides of the folks you’re rooting for, neither promising you that they’ll ever receive their just deserts nor experience some kind of revelation that transforms them into someone with 2012-era sensibilities.

The main character in this book is a former light heavyweight boxer who… deals with the world around him the way a former boxer might. I guess that makes this something of a sports story, and I should add here too that Ellroy is a huge fan of the “sweet science”, but more than anything else it’s classic noir, hitting some of the classic notes of noir – the grittiness, the way Los Angeles’ glitzy front was just a facade for utter horribleness – even better than it might have been possible for Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. And behind it all is one of the twistiest, unexpectedy complex plots you’ll ever read.

Ellroy is an easy read due to his style but I wouldn’t necessarily call him a light read. Black Dahlia has points in it which will probably make you want to put down the book and seek out some of the kinder things society has to offer. That doesn’t make it a bad book by any means, though, and neither is it the kind of “good” book everyone recommends but nobody reads. You might hate yourself for it, but if you can get into the style you’ll enjoy it.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon – 3.5 Stars

So since I’m going after all of my favorite authors (see my previous reviews of Vonnegut, Vonnegut, and Nick Hornby), I should probably after Michael Chabon, right? This book may not *quite* be at the level of High Fidelity or a lot of Vonnegut, but it’s a perfectly good, readable book in its own right. I’m not entirely sure that it’s the best Chabon out their either – that honor might go to Wonder Boys – but it’s a good, solid 2nd to me.

Every highly renowned “name” writer seems to have their schtick, the same way that a stand-up comedian might have theirs. You know what I’m talking about, right? Mitch Hedberg’s big thing was that he was a stoner, Patton Oswalt is the king of geeks, Dane Cook is the comic who isn’t funny, etc. Yeah, so for whatever reason, modern literary writers have evolved in a similar manner. I could put together a thousand-word essay as to why this is and the crazy ways that writers and stand-up comics are basically doing the same thing but to be honest that is too hipster even for me to inflict upon my readership. Anyway. Suffice it to say that “schticks” exist.

Chabon’s “schtick”, at least up to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is that he prominently features gay men in his books without making the books explicitly about homosexuality. His debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, concerns a young man trying to feel his way through life in, you guessed it, Pittsburgh, while trying to figure out exactly what his sexuality is (I don’t want to review *that* book here, but to Chabon’s credit it’s not exactly binary).* Wonder Boys had, for those of you who remember the movie, the relationship between the Toby Maguire character and the Rob Lowe character. And Kavalier and Clay continues this theme, as one of the main characters figures out his sexuality over the course of the book and then has to make some tough decisions as to whether he can afford to live a life as both a gay man and a comic book artist. Male sexuality is a topic that just doesn’t get covered very often, except in the classic heterosexual sense, and I think that Chabon is a very brave author for exploring this aspect of humanity.

The book also, as you might have guessed, appeals to me on a personal level due to the historical angle. It’s set in the 1930s in New York City, right smack at the beginning of the original comic book craze. Indeed, Kavalier and Clay themselves are based somewhat on Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the artists for DC Comics who came up with the concept of Superman for Action Comics #1. The attention to detail by Chabon with the comics themselves is astounding (here I also have to admit to being an avid comic book fan in my youth, so this was an extra special thrill). There’s also cameos by Salvador Dali and Orson Welles because, well, you only get to write so many books about the 1930s, right? Oh yes, and some weirder bits about the Jewish mystical construct known as The Golem, which, before reading this book, I only knew about from Dungeons and Dragons.

This is maybe a bit more serious of a book than High Fidelity but I think it has the capacity to appeal to a similar group. It’s made a couple of “best novels of the 2000s”, which is fair, although as you can see from my own rating I might not *quite* put it at the level of The Catcher in the Rye or what have you.** It’s not made to be intentionally hard to get through and so its modernity turns it into a fairly quick read. This is not a book that will make you feel guilty for spending time on, so if you’re the kind of person who likes to alternate “great” works with “fun” ones, this could really fill either niche for you.

*Fun fact: according to wikipedia, he was actually profiled by Newsweek as being an “up and coming gay writer”. His wife, I am sure, was shocked to hear about this.

**I reserve the right…

Short Story Sunday: Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories – 4 stars

Let’s the get the short story ball rolling with the recognized father of the format, Anton Chekhov. You might know him better for his plays – The Cherry Orchard in particular is still performed today – but just as important, I think, is his short work. There is not to my knowledge a compendium of *all* of his short stories. Maybe with the increasing popularity of the Kindle, Nook, and other eBook formats this will change but this is a man who wrote literally hundreds of short stories, which range in size from a couple hundred words (this review may well end up being longer than some of his short-shorts) to 30-40 pages in length.

Given that very high volume of stories, and given Chekhov’s own philosophy of what a writer ought to deliver – when asked, one time, about the “morality” of his work, he responded that if he was to write a story about a horse thief, it was his job to make the reader understand what life as a horse thief is like, not to tell them that horse thievery is right or wrong – he covers practically everything there is to cover in late 19th century tsarist Russia. A couple of the best ones which I would refer a reader new to Chekhov to are:

Sleepy, an account from the perspective of a tired, overworked, and too-young nanny for a young child of a well-to-do family.

The Lady With The Little Dog, a longer story (for Chekhov anyway) about a man whose dalliance with a cute girl changes both of their lives forever.

Oysters, one of Chekhov’s more whimsical short stories.

If you liked these, I’d also like to recommend a couple that didn’t make this particular book:

Ward Number 6, about life in a Russian insane asylum, told from the perspective of a doctor who slowly descends into a level of insanity of his own.

Christmastime, a story about the power of writing and expectations which, I have to admit, makes me cry a little bit inside every time that I read it.

Death of a Government Clerk, which to me is Chekhov’s best of his short-shorts. It concerns a toady who literally dies of embarrassment after transgressing a superior.

While I think the historical aspect of the stories makes them interesting enough on their own (seriously, is there a better way to understand what life in that world was like better than reading a handful of these stories), I think that they’re also worth reading for the sake of the craft. The short story has grown a lot since Chekhov wrote; for instance, Ernest Hemingway generally had to rewrite his shorter work 10 or more times until he was satisfied, and the sheer bulk of Chekhov’s work indicates that he didn’t really do this. That being said, there are a few things that he just plain got right the first time that other people have been copying ever since. I think specifically of a piece of advice from one of his letters which is also repeated in this work. This bit talks about description, specifically how to effectively describe a setting without overdescribing. What he said – to pick out 3 or 5 different, specific details of a place and to let the reader fill in the rest in his own mind’s eye – is a bit of advice you will still see writers as diverse as Natalie Goldberg and Stephen King espouse today.

I don’t want to say that Chekhov is a “must-read” for anyone attempting to revive the mostly-dead short story genre because the only real “must” with that sort of thing is that to be a writer you must simply write. That being said, if you’re looking for someone’s style to ape or for inspiration, it’s hard to go wrong with Chekhov. On top of that, a collection of his stories makes a good bathroom book; there are bound to be pieces short enough for a quick 2-minute break or an hour-long bathtime read.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre – 4 stars

Remember when I said I’d eventually add some non-classics to the list? Still working on that!

When most people think of spies, they think of James Bond or Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible series: daring, suave men with gadgets galore and sex appeal out the wazoo who do battle with bad guys who practically wear black hats wherever they go, so easily recognizeable is their “badness”. It’s strange, then, that a man who was practically a contemporary of the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, could write books which portray spydom so… differently.

George Smiley is in many ways the antithesis of the James Bond style spy. He is middle-aged, overweight, and more than a little bit nebbishy. In fact, he uses his natural unobtrusiveness as a way to keep people from ascertaining his true motives. Where Bond sleeps with at least 2 women every movie, Smiley can’t even keep one from cheating on him – in fact it is her philandering that for quite a while makes him unable to solve the central mystery of the book. At the same time, though, you get the feeling that in the real world the average spy is far, far closer to George Smiley than James Bond. In fact, if anyone really behaved like Bond in real life, they’d probably be killed during their first mission.

The spywork itself is also massively different from what you’d expect it to be. Rather than engaging in high-speed chases and shoot-outs with half of the Soviet Army, the work performed by Smiley and his associates involves a lot of interviewing people without letting them in on your real motives for interviewing them, sneaking documents in and out of secure facilities using simple bluffs and pre-arranged phone calls rather than magnetic suits and high-powered pen-lasers, and figuring out, using clever blackmail schemes, who can and cannot be trusted. There is an old adage in the military that their job is 99% boredom punctuated by small periods of sheer terror. Not to make the book sound boring – it is a slow burn but it is extremely tense throughout – but Tinker, Tailor advises the reader that this is the paradigm of the spook as well.

I want to avoid giving away too many spoilers here but I do find it interesting that the man LeCarre probably used as inspiration for the villain in this piece – the double agent Kim Philby, who in real life ran off to the Soviet Union in the early 60s and lived a long if reportedly not entirely happy life behind the Iron Curtain after he was found out – was also one of the men that Ian Fleming used as inspiration for James Bond. It’s not just an interesting bit of trivia, I don’t think; this fact highlights the difference between what we think about spying and what spying actually is.

The other thing that sucked me into this book and kept me turning pages – aside from the great writing, of course – is the moral ambiguity. How is it even possible, you ask, to include large gray areas of morality when you’re fighting against a people a former President of this country called “the Evil Empire”? Well, what you don’t do is make the Soviets at all sympathetic. Instead, you show the Circus – LeCarre’s name for MI6 – as being corruptible, underhanded, and a bit too preoccupied with the ends to worry overmuch about the means, and then to top it off you show the hero of the story commit a couple of absolutely astounding lies of omission. These people are still heroes because they’re still far better than the folks they’re fighting against but at the same time the book does not leave you wondering why, if we’re so great and they’re so bad, we were barely winning the Cold War at the point in time in which the novel was written.

So… if you’re looking for a spy thriller that’s more about realism and less about stuff blowing up, then this is a great book to read. Just don’t expect to come out of it thinking WESTERN CIVILIZATION RAH RAH RAH I LOEV MERKA (in fairness, the “cousins” barely figure into this story; the hubris displayed throughout is almost entirely on the part of English people).

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – 4 stars

“You are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be.”

That is the central thesis statement of Vonnegut’s Mother Night as well as its most powerful line. While I enjoy Vonnegut in general and am also a particularly big fan of Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You Mister Rosewater, the short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House among his works, this book, I think, is the pinnacle of Vonnegut’s creation.

It’s about a man who by day works as a propagandist for the Nazis and by night is a spy for the Allies. Pretty straightforward stuff, right? Only this man is wracked by guilt, both in the sense that he worries about what people might think of him in the West when they realize what he’s really doing and also, on a personal level, whether the stuff that he’s doing for the “good guys” is equal on a moral calculus to all the propaganda he’s put out for the Nazis. These are not questions with easy answers, and Vonnegut deftly maneuvers his way through this issue, all while keeping the wit that brings us to read Vonnegut about him.

Vonnegut uses a framing approach to this book, pretending that it’s actually a memoir being written by the main character while he is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison, which lends an extra bit of verisimilitude to the whole shebang. This also would have made it quite topical for the time, as the book’s release (1961) coincides with the capture, trial, and execution of Adolph Eichmann (caught in ’59, tried in ’61, hanged in ’62). Eichmann, of course, always claimed that he was little more than a bean counter in the Nazi machinery. The main character’s role in advancing the Nazi cause was, if anything, greater, and yet he seems at once more sympathetic and, because of the spy connection, perhaps a bit more likely to be set free.

Mother Night might not be the best introduction to Vonnegut, although unlike, say, Faulkner, it is hard to make a misstep in just picking out one of his works. I might recommend Slaughterhouse Five if, somehow, you have managed to avoid reading him up to this point. That being said, Night is in my opinion his best book, so I guess I could also say that if you are only going to read one of his books in your lifetime it ought to be this one. That being said, take care to read lots and lots of Vonnegut. He’s good for the soul.