Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card – 3 Stars

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but what the heck… there is a movie in the works for this book, and it’s definitely one of Orson Scott Card’s better ones, so I will make him my very second writer to be featured twice. You may remember him already from a Scholastic Saturday on Characters and Viewpoint. Well, this is him writing narrative.

OSC is, frankly, a bit of a jerk. I would strongly recommend against reading his blog if you are anywhere to the left of Fred Phelps and wish to attempt to enjoy his writing on its own merits. As I said earlier this week in the Flannery O’Connor piece, there should ideally be nothing outside of the text. That being said, we aren’t perfect and so I say don’t even put his execrable politics into your mind, at least not after you’ve read this book and maybe a few others (I’m partial to his short story Euripides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory).

Okay, so enough about Card. Let’s talk about Card’s writing. I am not by habit a really big fan of fantasy and science fiction. I mean, I am a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons and like all geeks/nerds of my age I loved me some Star Wars when I was a kid, and so I’m not averse to the genres per se. At the same time, though, an awful lot of the genre doesn’t do much else than provide escapist fantasy for the reader. Okay, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend to be somewhere else. The thing is, I can do that just as easily with War and Peace as I can with the tales of Drizz’t,* and I can get more out of War and Peace at the same time.

Okay, I’m beginning to sound like some sort of hipster intellectual type. If all you want is said escapist fantasy, great, more power to you. Personally, it’s not my bag.

Anyway, all that being said, one of the nice things about Card is that he *does* add theme to his stories. Ender’s Game is on the highest level about a small group of kids beating back an alien race. On another level, there’s some interesting material in here about the effects of technology on dehumanizing the enemy, material which is if anything even more pertinent now than it was when OSC wrote this book. There’s also a lot in here about the kinds of qualities that make someone a hero in wartime but a horrible, horrible person in other situations (to that point, there are a couple parts in here – I’ll warn you now – where actions of the eponymous character will make you cringe). There’s even perhaps something to pull out of here about what happens to children when they’re put into roles only adults ought to be put into.

There are several books that come after this which work only to varying degrees. Game is far and away the standout of the series. It’s really the standout of OSC’s work as a whole, frankly. But it is a very good book, I have to give it that.

*If you don’t know, you don’t want to know either.

The World According to Garp, John Irving – 3.5 Stars

The World According to Garp is not my favorite John Irving book, but as it is the one that he’s arguably the most famous for, I’m going to start with it. I’ll say this straight out: I am a John Irving fan. He’s not perfect (criticisms will follow) but he’s ambitious and while he can be messy, the messiness often creates a beauty all its own.

This is definitely one of his messier books that works. Irving overall seems to have Stephen King Disease, an affliction that causes him to use a lot of words to tell a story that probably could have been told using half of them. I don’t think he’s nearly as bad as King in this regard, but there are bits in this book, for instance, which don’t seem to have a lot to do with the narrative except that Irving wanted to make some sort of commentary on current social issues (what about the Ellen Jamesians needed to be said that his mother wasn’t, for instance, already saying?).

Okay, I do have to get one huge criticism of Irving of mine out of the way; this reason, in fact, is why I couldn’t in the end give the book the full-on 4 stars. For whatever reason, John Irving is just really, really bad at drawing female characters. There’s a small bit of debate out there as to whether male writers can accurately portray female characters at all  (and vice versa) and to be honest I think that’s mostly bunk. I can think of lots and lots of male writers who do just fine understanding the “feminine psyche”, whatever that is. Irving is just not one of them. You kind of have to accept, going into his books, that pretty much all the female characters in there are going to be placeholders and 2-dimensional cut-outs while the males are interesting blends of bizarre idiosyncracies, horrible character issues, and just enough good things about them to make a good lot of them likeable.* I can understand that this could be off-putting for some, but, well… on the flip side, Margaret Atwood isn’t particularly good at drawing men and her books are pretty fantastic as well, so it’s not a fatal flaw in my mind.

What you do get with Irving at his best is this almost Victorian tying up of loose ends in the plot wherein a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated things alluded to at various times somehow manage to combine themselves to create extreme scenes of tragedy. This is something Irving does to the point of absurdity in A Prayer For Owen Meany,** but in Garp the car scene – if you’ve read the book, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about – is presaged at maybe 6 or 7 different points by little tics by Garp and his wife and the various antics of his children, many of which seemed so trivial that you may have glossed over them. It lends a sense of divine planning to his work, although I do have to say in the case of Garp my feelings on the heavy-handedness of this effect; it’s similar to how the movie Memento is at once brilliant and a bit overdone.

This book is more of a character study than anything else… well, it’s a lot of things, I guess. Garp defies any attempts to pigeonhole it. Anyway, my point here is that it’s not really a sports novel in any sense but at the same time there is a recurring meme with wrestling/judo being something that T.S. Garp alternately finds solace in and gets into trouble with, and then of course there’s the TG former Philadelphia Eagles tight end Roberta Muldoon. With a sprawling novel like this, there’s something for everybody, I guess.

Speaking of having something for everyone, the book can be quite funny at times. You’ll want to watch this, as Irving is not always a comedian.He’s also acutely self-referential in his earlier work, a habit he loses later on for better or for worse.*** This book is a lot of peoples’ introduction to Irving, and I think that’s fair. It has all the oddball characters and neat plotting/theme stuff you expect from him, and most of his baggage is left behind for this. I guess you could get away with reading The Cider House Rules first, but that book, while overall a higher quality piece of work, doesn’t introduce you to the first half of Irving’s career the way Garp does.

*One notable exception, I have to say, is the protagonist in A Widow For One Year. More on that book later… perhaps.

**And I even like A Prayer For Owen Meany… that’s how good of a writer Irving can be. Chances are strong I’ll talk about that book later so I’ll save my thoughts on it for later.

***Yeah… on the one hand I quite enjoyed the references to Setting Free the Bears and some of his other earlier books (I want to say that The Water-Method Man got a reference too); on the other hand, how many books have to be written where the protagonist is himself a writer? Write what you know, I get it. The problem is, the overwhelming majority of readers are not writers, don’t particularly care about writing except for the quality of the work produced, and are just as likely if not more likely to be attracted to a writer’s knowledge about non-writery things (for instance, while I was kind of “meh” on Garp’s career as a novelist, I thought his stuff on wrestling was really interesting).

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby – 4 stars

Given that we’re just moving into the second week, it’s no surprise that there is still some room for “firsts”. In this case, the “first” is that this book, also Adapted Into A Movie, is the first one of the bunch which, in my opinion anyway, has a movie which is pretty faithful to the overall feel of the written version. I know that there’s a fair bit of controversy about this; English folks have insisted to me that by moving this out from London to Chicago it completely ruins/changes everything, but I have to flat-out disagree.

This book gets that elusive 4th star for me because it introduced me to a whole entire genre of books which, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at before reading this book. Actually, it’s two separate genres, only one of which has a name, and that name is dumb. “Chick Lit”. Yes, I get that it sounds like a candy (lol) and there has to be a way of differentiating the work of Helen Fielding and Lisa Jewell from Harlequinn romance novels, but I don’t know… the very title seems to exclude half the population of the world. Additionally, many of these smart romantic comedies are written by guys, too. Nick Hornby is probably the foremost example but there are others, including I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle (chances I will review this book in the upcoming year: strong).

Surely there needs to be one over-arching name for the whole thing. Because I am as humble as I am perceptive, I am going to provide my own name for this. Literally. I now anoint these kinds of books “Slick Lit”. Please note that I have copyrighted this phrase and therefore every time you use it you must add $5 to my PayPal account.

Going to the book itself, I first read this shortly after it came out in the mid-90s and it was a bit of a revelation. How did Nick Hornby, an English dude who wouldn’t know Seattle from something that rhymes with Seattle, get so far into my head? Rob Fleming, the book’s protagonist, is a MASSIVE music-phile, to the point that he owns a record store which at times seems like less of a record store and more of a really large record collection. I love music too (especially at the time, when I was attempting to fight a lack of talent and become a musician myself)! Rob is very unlucky at love. Me too! Rob categorizes everything into lists. Okay, I’ll stop. The point is, this is a protagonist that a certain class of 90s proto-hipster could really “grok”, so to speak (not that Rob Fleming would ever use a work like “grok”).

The plot covers the breakup of a relationship which is then slowly mended over the course of the book. Right. You’ve probably seen the movie already. Like I said, it’s pretty darn faithful to the book. The Jack Black character is even in there. What the book’s going to add for you if you choose to take this particular plunge is the thing that all books add over and above movies, and that’s the ability to get inside the head of the main character. I love movies. Some film adaptations actually put their point across even better than the books do (hi Fight Club). But even as film has a way of putting you there at a given location and making a bland character sympathetic because you like the actor, a well-written book is the closest you will ever get to experience what life is like behind another set of eyes.

Speaking of that, I think my favorite parts of the book come when Rob Fleming is either being a bit of a prat or is attempting to excuse previous assholish behavior. Let’s face it, people are not perfect, and to me, seeing him, for instance, try and make up a good-enough reason for badgering a former love into an abortion (for his part he does eventually admit he was in the wrong) makes him an ultimately more nuanced and therefore more interesting and therefore more likeable character than if he was just Mister Happy Go Lucky Never Do Anything Wrong Man.

So who can I recommend this book to? If you’re a something-phile you’re going to “get” Rob Fleming, I think. It doesn’t have to be music; I am not nearly as much into music as I was fifteen years ago and this book has still held up for me over the years because, I think, I’ve replaced my passion for music with a passion for other, far nerdier things. I also don’t think you necessarily have to be a male to like this, although I do think it’s refreshing to have work like this written from a guy’s point of view.* You might not find Rob’s epiphanies similar to your own, and this may or may not cause you to embrace a whole new mostly made-up genre of literature, but I have serious doubts that anyone with both a soul and a brain will dislike this.

*And about that… a study a few years back showed that men enjoy a good romcom just as much as women do, even as they refuse to admit to doing so among their guy friends. Take that, gender stereotypes!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote – 4 stars

What the heck. Life is too short to review stuff I’m kind of “meh” on, right? I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to write about the lesser stuff. I can’t have read 365 books which changed my life, right?

I kicked my 365 list off with a book, The Natural, which had a movie “adaptation of it which was so far off the actual thing that it may as well have had lightsabers in it. I have nothing against the movie per se; it’s a perfectly reasonable romantic comedy and Audrey Hepburn was one of the most beautiful women of all time.* The problem is that the book is just not like that.

So, if you’ve seen the movie you know that George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn have a “thing” which causes Peppard to hang around her, lovestruck, like a little puppy (can puppies get lovestruck? I’m going to pretend that they can and that this metaphor isn’t horribly mixed). It’s unclear as to what, exactly, Hepburn’s character does for a living, but this is kind of par for the course for rom-coms of the period – what, exactly, did Doris Day do for money in Pillow Talk? – and Hepburn is just so gosh-darn nice that you know it can’t be anything too bad. At one point her estranged husband, a man who married her when she was in her early teens, shows up and Peppard shoos him away. At one point they go to Tiffany’s and… okay, that part seems to be nothing more than an advertisement for Tiffany’s, so there’s not much to say about it except that it seems like that’s the basis for the title. And everyone ends up happily ever after.

The actual book, though? Well, that’s another thing. First, there is the point that the story is told in first person and that first person is the author Truman Capote. It is thought, in fact, that this story is based at least in part on a true story. That is, after all, what Capote did; he always saw himself as something closer to a journalist than a writer of narrative fiction in the classic sense. If you’ve learned one thing about Truman Capote, I imagine, it’s that his chances of being the male romantic lead in a heterosexual rom-com are, shall we say, very, very low. The man was gayer than a gay dollar bill.

This actually does figure rather prominently in the book. You know how you didn’t know anything about what Holly Golightly/Audrey Hepburn did for a living? Well, it’s a bit more strongly hinted at in the book: she is what was known at the time as a “society girl”, a woman who would spend the evening and, yes, often the night with wealthy men in return for dinner and other various favors. Roger Ebert once said about the lead character in the movie (also a book!) Memoirs of a Geisha that “if you have to say that you are not technically a whore, then you are a whore”. I don’t think Holly Golightly ever flat-out said she wasn’t technically a whore, but you get the idea.

So this created a puzzling situation for her: even in a city as large and cosmopolitan as New York City during the middle of the last century, a woman like Holly Golightly would have found it very, very hard to find a close friend she could confide in. Other women were potential rivals, and men? Any man she expressed a weakness to could become a man who at best would try to fix her and at worst would no longer be a potential, um, client. The character of Truman Capote was practically the only person Golightly could befriend without constantly trying gain the advantage in their relationship. And even then, there was quite a bit of tension… but I’ll leave that to you, the reader, to discover for yourself.

I have heard rumors that there is another adaptation coming of this book, one that’s much more closely based on the novelette. I know that when I took a trip to London back in 2009 there was a play adaptation of it which was playing on their version of Broadway. Suffice it to say that I am very much looking forward to this film. Even if you intend to see this for yourself, I still recommend the book. If nothing else, it’s a shorter way of figuring out whether or not you’ll enjoy his writing enough to sit through In Cold Blood.

*Oh, okay, I do have one huge thing against it: Mickey Rooney. But everyone, pretty much, has that against this movie, and the less discussed of it the better.

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).

The Natural by Bernard Malamud – 4 stars/4

I’ll get started with, appropriately enough, a baseball book considered by many to be a classic of American literature.

This book is in a… strange situation in literature. Don’t get me wrong, I think the book is fantastic, but it’s also shaded by a pretty fun baseball movie which is purportedly based on it but which really isn’t. I mean, the main character of Roy Hobbs is in there as are most of the minor ones, but the movie – and hey, I am not telling you that you should not like it, but you have to respect the difference here – completely gutted the theme of the book in favor of a more general “ain’t baseball grand?” one.

In my opinion “The Natural” is a must-read for anyone who has ever been interested in the Pete Rose case. Gambling is potentially a huge problem in sports because it can affect the outcome of the games. Sometimes fiction is better than dry fact in explaining why things are the way that they are, and this book is like that. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, but you know that bit in the movie where Roy Hobbs shatters Lightning and then he’s rounding the bases and he’s bleeding and then suddenly it turns into a scene of father and son playing catch? Needless to say, that’s not in the book. The ending is… just a bit darker than that. Without getting into too much detail, this book is a classic American tragedy – since it’s about baseball perhaps it’s *the* classic American tragedy – about a man who attempts to overcome his personal foibles with God-given talent.

I think that the character of Roy Hobbs in the book is a lot more nuanced and, frankly, interesting than the Roy Hobbs of the movie. The movie Hobbs is just an everyday great guy who has an Eddie Waitkus-like run-in with a Baseball Annie but who is otherwise a pretty likeable guy. The book Hobbs is, well, a lot more like we think professional athletes as being today: more than a little arrogant about all things, super-confident about his own ability to play his chosen sport (is it arrogance when you know you’re good?), boastful, brash… to me, the really interesting bits about a character aren’t the things that he can do but that he can’t or won’t do. And unlike the movie Hobbs, the book Hobbs is full of can’ts and won’ts.

So yeah, great book. I should warn you, though: if you’re already a fan of the movie, reading this may make you want to throw it out (or at least see someone remake it).