Sue Grafton's "U is for Undertow" - It Has Nothing to do with Water

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Kinsey Milhone returns for episode twenty-one in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. The irrepressible Milhone still lives in fictional Santa Teresa, owns that single all-purpose black dress, trims her hair with fingernail scissors, and – most importantly – still lives in 1988 where (or is it when?) she's about to turn thirty-eight. At least readers can be certain that, unlike Linda Fairstein’s Alexandra Cooper, Kinsey won't ever find herself in grave peril because her cellphone battery just died. Heck, Milhone still doesn’t even own a fax machine…

Harry Bosch Plays Frantic Father in Michael Connelly's "9 Dragons"

9 Dragons by Michael Connelly

After decades in which Harry Bosch's only concerns seemed to be his trad-jazz collection and sticking bad guys behind bars, his creator apparently decided he needed a more human side. Over a span of several novels, Harry learned he had emotions after all. First he fell in love with Eleanor Wish, an FBI agent he'd partnered with on a case. After Wish had been drummed out of the Bureau (a result of their method of solving that case), he found her in Vegas at a new gig as professional gambler, where he learned to his surprise that their... ummm... "stakeouts" had created a daughter, Madeleine. Ten years later, Bosch is now part-time dad to 13-year-old Maddy, who lives with Mom in Hong Kong. He's also discovered a half brother, legal eagle Mickey Haller (the titular Lincoln Lawyer). For 9 Dragons, author Michael Connelly puts Bosch's family ties through the proverbial wringer: and it's not a pretty picture...

It started like any other homicide case: three bullet holes in the chest of a liquor store clerk, the cash drawer standing empty. A minor difference: Harry Bosch had vaguely known the dead man, John Li - all the more reason to put the perp in slam. Bosch and David Chu, a Chinese-American cop from the Asian Gang Unit and his latest semi-partner on the case, finger a triad bagman as the killer. Luckily, they nab him on his way to the airport to skip the country. It's Friday, so Bosch and Chu perform some backroom paper shuffling to keep him stashed over the weekend so they have more time to build their case. As Harry's sifting through the evidence, he receives a message that almost stops his heart: a video of Maddy, bound and gagged in an anonymous room. The message seems clear: drop the case, and you get your daughter back in one piece. Bosch being Bosch, no one - NO ONE! - else is good enough; so Harry's on the next plane to Hong Kong, hell-bent on doing anything to get his daughter back.

Unfortunately, in his hurry to leave, Harry Bosch forgot to say a prayer to the god of unintended consequences. He will regret that omission...

After years of carefully crafting one novel a year, author Michael Connelly's annual output has doubled in each of the past two years - and he's also taken to "cross-posting" his characters, such as Mickey Haller's cameo in 9 Dragons, or the double cameos of Haller and Bosch in 2009's Jack McEvoy novel The Scarecrow. While "factory writers" like James Patterson farm out at least part of their production, Connelly is doing it all himself. And if you ask me, the strain shows this time out.

Bosch, ever irascible, is even grumpier than usual (maybe if he stopped listening to heroin jazz all the time?) in 9 Dragons. Normally pushy and demanding, this time out he's simply arrogant and condescending; and at times just a little racist. While I'd assume that Connelly intended to depict Bosch in a different light with a plot that casts him as a frantic father, he came off more like TerminatorDad to this reader; a veritable bull in a China shop as he shot hell out of Hong Kong. I'll grant that Connelly managed to toss in some pretty wicked plot twists, but I caught on to the biggest one of all long before he even set it up. And at least one of those twists was, to be blunt, completely gratuitous.

Worst of all, however, is that Connelly's writing - the actual nuts and bolts of it - seems to have suffered as he upped his publishing output to two per annum. The flow is choppy, the dialog is sappy, and the plot is messy. Sorry, but Bosch is always at his best when he's thinking instead of going off half-cocked. This time out Connelly's turned him into a visceral killing machine who, frankly, needs to chill out.

Wishin' and Hopin' Wally had Done a Better Job

Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb
 

After the other nuns hauled Sister Dymphna, gibbering and drooling, back the convent; her fifth-grade class weren't quite sure what to expect. They definitely weren't prepared for the beret-wearing, French-spouting Quebecoise the principal of St. Aloysious Gonzaga hired to fill Sister D's sensible shoes. The fall semester, however, proceeded normally after the “incident” - normally for a fifth-grade class that is, which, when you think about it, is about as far from "normal" as you can get. Toss a wannabe bad boy (a twelve-year-old held back twice) and a precocious Russian pre-teen vixen into that heady mix, and Felix Funicello (yes, that Funicello family: she's his third cousin) was destined to have a school year to remember. At the very least, he would have a semester to remember.

As a lay teacher (how the fifth-grade boys giggled at that word, even back in 1964) in a parochial school, Madame Frechette had her work cut out for her. The kids didn't make life any easier, of course - they were fifth-graders, after all. But as the days grew shorter and the annual Christmas show approached, this particular group of little rascals pulled out all the stops. Could Madame tame her unruly charges and pull off the requisite Christmas miracle? Keep on reading...

Kingsolver Takes on the 21st Century's Version of HUAC: The Lacuna

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Harrison William Shepherd came south from Washington to with his mother, Salomé, after the divorce. It was at Isla Pixol that he took up the habit of keeping a journal: even at fourteen, he had a writer’s ear for the world that surroundedhim. When his pretty güera mother moved on to a less wealthy man (and smaller house) in Mexico City, Harrison accompanied her – by then, into the second volume of his life story. All of Mexico was a hotbed of revolution in the '30s, and Harrison somehow found himself in the thick of it. By chance, he found a job cooking in the household of Mexico’s much-discussed revolutionary muralist, Diego Rivera, and his wife the just-as-much-discussed painter Frida Kahlo.

It was more than a job, it became his home: the mercurial Frida recognized a kindred artist in the slender, quiet boy she called Sóli (short for insólito, “odd” or “irregular”). She also recognized his other “leanings” (that insólito business), and so young Harrison became her friend instead of another conquest. During his six years in the Rivera household, the boy’s talent blossomed until he fulfilled his destiny: he became a writer.

Much more happened in those six years; during which Harrison cooked for the Riveras’ special guest, transcribed his lectures, typed his letters, and helped him clean rabbit cages. He was there the day that special guest, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated by an agent of the Stalinist regime. By then, it was time to go… Harrison eventually landed in Asheville, North Carolina. Like Tom Wolfe, another famous Ashevillian, Harrison published a novel; and then another and another. He led a comfortable existence in his little house with his cats and his devoted secretary. The year was 1949… and Harrison Shepherd hadn't an inkling that life as he knew it was over.
   
It’s no secret that author and commentator Barbara Kingsolver doesn’t pull her punches. Whether her topic is a missionary family in 1960s Belgian Congo or her family’s year as a locavore, Kingsolver resolutely speaks her mind. Doing so does not necessarily sit well with those who don’t share her worldview, however; which is probably what landed Kingsolver on Bernie Goldberg’s list of “100 people who are screwing up America.” Seems Kingsolver told her then pre-teen daughter, Camille, that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to yield to peer pressure and wear red, white, and blue on September 12th, 2001. That’s apparently not terribly dangerous to our civilization, however, since it landed Mother K at a mere 74th on the list. Hell, Eminem and Ludacris were both more than ten ahead of her! No word on where Bernie thinks Sarah Palin might belong, since when he published his list she was just an unemployed politician/hockey mom in Alaska.
   
Kingsolver’s position on Bernie’s list (and those of his adherents) will most certainly rise, however, if they read her latest novel, The Lacuna. She might even end up in the top ten, which is pretty darned ironic: you see, The Lacuna is all about making lists of "dangerous" people…

Kingsolver structures her latest novel as an autobiography, her protagonist’s journals posthumously transcribed by his faithful secretary, Violet Brown, and then shelved for half a century. The earliest section she ascribes to the opening chapter of a memoir written by Shepherd himself; and she has also fashioned a literal lacuna – a gap of some two years – where a journal had been destroyed (to protect the "guilty"). The remainder is a remarkable record of a young man’s journey, of a facile ear for dialog, of a quiet and unassuming life. Here is a young man who stood within the shadow of a political whirlwind and yet wrote more of the banalities of his fellow servants' lives; who cared more for Lev Davidovich Trotsky the man than he cared about his politics. That would become an important point to remember a decade later…

If you’re at all familiar with the history of mid-twentieth century America you’ll know without having to finish The Lacuna what was going to happen to Harrison Shepherd – not that anyone would put it down by this point. Of course, the final chapters contain copies of letters from the FBI; the transcript of a hearing before HUAC (pointedly citing the presence of Richard Nixon), “news” filled with half-truths and outright lies, and quotations taken out of context. Harrison Shepherd became a casualty of bigotry and hatred disguised as patriotism, convicted of not being “American enough.”

If Bernie Goldberg happens to read (or more likely, hear about) The Lacuna it’s a good bet that Barbara Kingsolver will climb much higher on his next list of “America’s enemies.” Harrison Shepherd made HUAC’s top ten, and the guy was about as political as Lady Gaga. The reason Barbara has become “more dangerous”? Simple: the story of Harrison Shepherd could happen to anyone – and happen today, when “citizen journalists” feed off each other’s strident pronouncements, all without worrying about “facts”; when out-of-context quoting has been raised to high art; when desk-bangers with radio microphones happily label anyone who disagrees with them un-American. Of course, Kingsolver will herself be quoted out of context, and you can be sure that plenty of people are already calling her un-American… most of whom really, really need to read The Lacuna, but never will.

More’s the pity.

Patricia Cornwell, "The Scarpetta Factor": Too Much Angst and not Enough Action

The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia D. Cornwell

Back in 1985 Bobby Ewing was murdered on Dallas, but he was resurrected in a ham-handed “dream sequence” the next year; a television event that may rival the infamous “jump-the-shark” episode of Happy Days for small-screen hubris. Not to be outdone, author Patricia Cornwell left signature character Kay Scarpetta grieveing upon finding lover Benton Wesley’s engraved Breitling watch amidst the ashes of a bomb site in 1998’s Point of Origin; only to raise him from the dead five years later in Blow Fly. The reunited couple has since wed, moved to the northeast, and set up multiple psychiatric and pathology practices in Boston and New York… a real shuttle family. And yes, Lucy and Marino have tagged along, though Marino can only afford housing in NYC, and lacks a squat in Beantown. Scarpetta's billionaire niece Lucy can, of course, afford both…

To keep busy while Ben (or is it Wes? I never remember) toils at the McLean Institute; the Doc, as Marino calls Scarpetta, does pro bono autopsies for the NYC medical examiner and picks up pocket change as a forensics consultant to CNN. Guess that latter’s how the couple affords both a home in Boston and a pied-à-terre on Central Park West. Though the latest media sensation in the Big Apple is the disappearance of money maven Hannah Starr three weeks ago, Scarpetta’s not on that case – instead, she’s on the case of a young jogger whose body was discovered in the Park. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection, but during Scarpetta’s next appearance on CNN the host tries to get her to connect dead woman to missing woman, going so far as to claim that both had been seen “getting into a yellow cab.” Gee, I thought everybody in Manhattan rode in cabs all the time…

Wes… errr, Benton has his own problems, involving an “inappropriate” Christmas card from a recently discharged patient at McLean. Something about this woman sets his teeth on edge – though it’s difficult to figure out what could ruffle the preternaturally calm shrink and former FBI wunderkind. That is, of course, before the bomb shows up on their doorstep. All of which kicks Marino, Lucy, Lucy’s squeeze Jaime Berger (ADA in charge of sex crimes [ain’t that Linda Fairstein’s job?]), and a host of cop-types into high gear. A missing BlackBerry and a deteriorating relationship between Lucy and Jaime add to the fun.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet – if you thought Benton’s (did I get the name right) resurrection was something, The Scarpetta Factor is gonna set you on your ear.

Somewhere about 1998, the Kay Scarpetta series went off the rails. Instead of being about a ferociously intelligent woman who uses her skills and intellect to solve crimes, the series morphed into something about relationships – dysfunctional relationships. First there was Scarpetta’s niece Lucy, the supercali-technologic-XP-all-precocious young lesbian: her coming out, her violence, her tendency to be completely uncontrollable and just abour as antisocial. Then there was the whole Wesley thing, with his “death” and reappearance. Then there was the Marino thing - a drunken attempt to “hook up” with Scarpetta. There were all the moves - Virginia to South Carolina to Florida to Bos/NYC – and Scarpetta’s career changes. Oh, and the whole wolfman Chandonne thing, too…

Recently, it looked as though author Patricia Cornwell had pulled the series out of its funk, especially in the last installment – simply named Scarpetta. In the seventeenth book of this venerable series, however, Cornwell backslides something fierce. Of the nearly 500 pages of The Scarpetta Factor (a hefty tome), much more than half is given over to the characters’ analysis of their feelings, fears, hopes, desires, memories… There are soliloquies on what kind of tomato Scarpetta should slice up for a 3:00 AM salad to make herself feel better about the bomb squad’s leaving fingerprints on her glass sculpture. There are extended – and I mean several pages – renderings of Lucy’s barely-contained rage at what she considers a slight by an FBO air-traffic controller. There is page after page of Marino and Wesley in their ongoing pissing contest. It’s rather boring, in fact.

Yes, the pieces of a good mystery are all there: Marino has his cop moments; Scarpetta is a pathology goddess in scrubs and a hair net. Lucy has better computers (and more smarts) than NSA signals intelligence, and knows how to use them. But Lord! There is so much misdirection and so much sniveling going on in here that its removal would have cut the book in half and still left the plot intact.

Last time out, I thought Scarpetta was back: sadly, it appears I was wrong.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road": Now, Tomorrow, and For Ever More

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In some not so distant future the unnamed man and boy shamble slowly across a bleak, ashen landscape, headed toward the shore of an unnamed sea. They are two of the last survivors, a pair of dying souls making slow progress across the face of a world already dead. They're following The Road down its winding path, passing desiccated village, burnt-out city, and dilapidated farmstead. The leaden sky is empty of birds; the cold, mucky gray water supports no fish; no animals prowl among the blackened stumps of the forest alongside their route. The few humans still alive forage for scraps of preserved food among the ruins or, worse, commit that unthinkable act so familiar to the last survivors of disaster.

In some other, brighter time, the man had had a wife, a home, a career. Now he has but a pistol with two bullets, a shopping cart, a few tattered blankets, and a plastic tarp to keep the ever-falling ashen snow from soaking through their few meager supplies. The boy, a child of indeterminate age, was born as the cataclysm that destroyed their world struck; his mother is long gone, dead by her own hand after uttering her own epitaph: "We're the walking dead in a horror film."

In this post-apocalyptic world there is no color left; only black, white, and an all-encompassing gray. There's little left for a father to teach his son: there will be no more games of catch, no more pop-up storybooks, no more hours whiled away on fishing trips. All that remains is survival, and the boy's grim, oft-repeated question: "We're the good guys, right?"

Maybe.

From the pen of Cormac McCarthy (the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men) and soon to appear in theaters, The Road set a new standard for the author's often grim worldview. In his chilling saga of life amidst the ruins of our civilization, McCarthy has envisioned a future so bleak, so dismal, that to have given his characters names would have endowed them with too much humanity to bear. Instead, a nameless pair treks slowly through a blasted, ashen future world, their dragging steps lit sporadically by lightning flashes by night and rare glimpses of a wan sun behind billowing clouds of ash by day. "The nights now only slightly less black, by day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

McCarthy's prose is beyond spare in The Road: his words have been stripped to bare essentials, their spare form a conscious parallel to the starvation diet upon which his characters subsist. Like the blighted world in which it's set, the book itself is nearly depopulated. The few characters are reduced to mere skeletal remnants in more than merely the physical sense; their sole surviving emotions a guttering orange flame of will to live and the white hot light of fear. For father and son alone, there is one other emotion: filial love; the pair's only constant in a forgotten and forgettable world. The power of that bond between father and son will overcome fear; overcome sorrow – it is what makes them the good guys.

McCarthy's bleak vision may serve as a prediction; it may serve as a warning. It will most certainly serve to incite contemplation.

If Ron Paul Wrote Science Fiction: “The Unincorporated Man”

The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

Justin Cord awoke after a nap that put Rip Van Winkle to shame; awoke looking upon an angel. In fact, Neela Harper wasn’t an angel: she was a reanimation specialist. A lot happened in the three centuries since Justin Cord had crawled into a secret cryogenic suspension unit and staged his disappearance. He woke to an entirely different society: not long after he went under, the world economy collapsed and society followed close behind. The center of American society became Alaska, and the hardy self-sufficient types who populated the last frontier had some interesting ideas about how things should run. In short, every human being is now a personal corporation – all forty billion of ‘em, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. At birth, each person accrues 100,000 shares of stock in himself. Five thousand belong to the government, 20K belong to the parents, and the remainder get used to feed, clothe, house, and educate the child. Once of legal age, the citizen takes possession of whatever stock remains. A system-wide stock exchange allows every citizen to trade in the shares of every other citizen – including oneself. The ultimate goal is to buy enough of your own stock to become the majority holder, which – in theory – allows you to do pretty much what you want. If you have special talents or skills, your stock becomes more expensive; same thing if you get a good job or become famous – even if it’s just for being famous, like Paris or Nicole.

Justin Cord, however, is a “new” breed of citizen: no one owns a single share of Justin Cord, and he also refuses to own a share of any person. For that stand on principal, Cord earns the undying enmity of the world’s most powerful corporation, CGI, in general; and CGI’s corporate hatchet man Hektor Sambianco in specific. Why the fear and loathing? To CGI and Hektor, Justin Cord – the “one free man” – represents the greatest threat in history to their economic and social system. On that basis alone, Cord must be neutralized: either forced to incorporate, or just plain terminated; either one would be fine. CGI is up against a formidable foe, however: Justin Cord has already had one lifetime of experience fending off financial and legal attacks – but he’s also in a world in which everyone has had a lifetime of experience in high finance. Can Cord remain The Unincorporated Man? Stay tuned…

Speculative fiction can be especially difficult to write successfully: not only must the author fulfill his audience’s expectation of solid plot and believable characters, those readers also expect a future that’s a logical outgrowth of current trends. That probably explains the plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War era; the predictions of rampant sea-level rise in more current scifi. Readers cut authors slack on those predictions by way of a process called the willing suspension of disbelief. Even when we can’t quite accept an author’s vision, we’re still willing to adhere to the polite fiction that all things are possible – as long as everything hangs together in a coherent whole. An author who struggles to make his future fit that convention is an author who has failed his readers.

SoCal brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin base their first joint novel (the latter’s website cites three prior YA novels) on a single change that sweeps society, uniting every human under a single socioeconomic system; the system of personal incorporation. The brothers take particular pleasure in explaining how their prediction of a sort of hypercapitalism is the best of all possible worlds, alternating between paeans to the perfection of the market and the evils of any government larger than the brain of a brontosaurus. The system government’s only purpose is to let contracts to private companies for the largest possible projects – terraforming the other planets of the Solar System and developing interstellar travel, for instance. Any other functions handled by present-day governments – education, the justice system, transportation – are “better” handled by private corporations in the Kollins’ future.

There is no argument that the Kollin brothers have postulated a future that, while unlikely, could occur under certain circumstances (this reader finds it both amusing and slightly chilling that the father of the personal incorporation movement was a “minor elected official from Alaska…”). That duty of the scifi writer has been satisfied – though the “universe” of personal incorporation has some obvious flaws that the writers either ignore or overlook; that's what "willling suspension of disbelief" is for. On the other two responsibilities of the author, the brothers meet with less success. The arc of the plot resembles a poorly-rigged tightrope: it seems taut at both ends, but sags badly in the middle. In the case of The Unincorporated Man, this is because vast chunks of the novel’s central third are riddled with gratuitous expository passages, presumably intended to laud the libertarian premises that underlie the fictional universe. Only a few minor characters are particularly likeable; and the major characters are so heavily stereotyped that they should be wearing Kabuki makeup. The writing is often clumsy; and the novel suffers from editing lapses, dangling plot threads, routine visits from the Coincidence Fairy, and a scattering of continuity problems. It ain’t gonna win awards from the proofreaders.

It’s unusual, but not unheard-of, for a work of fiction to thinly disguise proselytization for a political position. A recent example of such a work was the late Michael Crichton’s heavy-handed State of Fear. The Unincorporated Man, however, takes the practice to extremes. Going beyond Crichton's rather genteel partisanship, however; the Kollin brothers take their lead from AM radio: that which is not part of their philosophy deserves no respect, and must instead be mocked. That means tht the government is ineffective by definition. The “tax man” has become an evil demon; who might as well have a big knife and a hook, and spend his nights lurking on lovers’ lane. Government courts need to ask for help from the private sector because they can’t afford anyone who isn’t simply mediocre. Oh, yes, the future universe is a capitalist paradise.

Yet there are still serpents in that paradise: the system’s most powerful corporate boardroom looks like an episode of “The Apprentice,” for instance; and the excesses of that same corporation (CGI) are every bit as repugnant as anything a democratic government has done (we’re not talking Idi Amin’s Uganda here…) – bribery is routine and murders are contracted with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. And if you’ve read this far and don’t mind a spoiler, by the end of the novel the characters suggest that incorporation is akin to slavery, and that anarchy would be preferable…

The Kollin brothers have written what amounts to a white paper for the Libertarian Party of the 24th Century – so be it. But don’t be fooled by all the accolades heaped on The Unincorporated Man by “fellow travelers.” Five hundred pages in defense of a futuristic libertopia notwithstanding, at its core the novel remains a work of science fiction: and it’s really not all that good.

The Unincorporated Man - $8.99
from: RedShelf

Marcus Sakey, "The Amateurs": This is a Job for Professionals

The Amateurs by Marcus Sakey

Imagine that you’re thirty-something, stuck in a dead-end job, and not one of the lofty dreams of youth has come true. If someone came to you and proposed a scheme that could change your life, what would your answer be? Even if it meant breaking the law? The Thursday Night Drinking Club answered, “Yes.”

The Club is Alex, a bartender; Mitch, invisible doorman at a swanky hotel; Jenn, a travel agent (do they even still have those in the era of the internet?); and Ian, the club’s one semi-success – a trader who hasn’t grabbed the brass ring in years. Every Thursday the friends meet at the restaurant where Alex tends bar; meet perhaps mostly because misery loves company. Their favorite drinking game is one they call “Ready-Go”; basically a form of “what if?” When one night Alex’s question is, “What would you do if you had a share of a quarter-million dollars?” the question is more pertinent than most: Alex knows where there is a quarter mil just ready to be picked up. The problem is that to get the money, the four will have to steal it. That should be no problem: they’re smarter than the average crook, after all. And so a pact is made, a foolproof plan is formed, and the Thursday Night Drinking Club set themselves up to embark on a life of crime.

Bobbie Burns was right: even the best-laid plans often go awry.

Everything begins according to plan, but then things begin to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, but horribly wrong – and a man lying dead in the alley behind the restaurant isn’t even the worst of their problems. You see, the friends may be smart, but they are definitely amateurs and they make an amateur mistake: they don’t realize who they’re dealing with. And the four are dealing with people who are a lot, lot worse then they’d ever expected…

Chicago author Marcus Sakey seems to be building a literary career out of “what if” scenarios himself. The Amateurs begins slowly, seeming at first glance little more than a by-the-numbers thriller with the quartet of amateur crooks caught in the inevitable squeeze between the cops investigating a crime and real crooks wanting their booty back. If that were the case, the plot of The Amateurs would play out with but slight differences from Sakey’s previous novel, Good People. That was, in fact, my first impression of the novel. In the earlier tale, however, Tom and Anna Reed (the titular “good” people) find themselves forced to make tough decisions that will affect their lives. The four friends in The Amateurs find themselves in much, much deeper doodoo. What the four of them do, what the four of them decide, will affect their lives and the lives of those they love – and that’s only for starters: what the four of them finally do, what the four of them finally decide, will effect millions of lives.

In that, Marcus Sakey has raised his new novel far beyond some simple by-the-numbers thriller – not that The Amateurs isn’t a first-rate thriller, because it certainly is. More than just write a crime novel, however, Sakey has crafted a study into the psychology of how ordinary people react under extraordinary circumstances. The Amateurs goes even further: it is ultimately a study of how a seemingly ordinary person can give his life meaning.

"How to Rob an Armored Car": How Not to Succeed In Business WIthout Really Trying

How to Rob an Armored Car  by Iain Levison

Welcome to Slacker City, PA, population three – average age (and average annual salary) twenty-something. The local slackers - Kevin (ex-con turned professional dog-walker), Doug (English major turned food-service worker), and Mitch (nothing much turned auto parts manager at Accu-Mart) – certainly seem friendly enough, though their affability might well be because the three are constantly stoned. Mitch and Doug live a life of glorious underachievement, with their grody apartment and beater rides. Kevin’s life is a little more interesting, since his wife’s job helps pay for the slightly larger house the family of three needs and a slightly newer truck; but the marriage was never all that solid and it seems to be getting shakier (ask Doug why, eh?). The slacker lifestyle becomes more appropriate after first Mitch and then Doug lose their jobs in quick succession; but at least Mitch’s exit doesn’t come before he can arrange for an $1800 flat-screen to “fall off a truck” into Kevin’s pickup at the Accu-Mart loading dock. Flushed with pride at the easy success of their first foray into grand larceny – not to mention intrigued by the apparent lack of effort – the trio determine that their destiny is to become master criminals.

Jobs having gotten scarce as hen's teeth in the dying rust-belt town of Wilton, the friends end up dividing their time between plotting their next caper – a caper that never quite seems to go right – and regularly refilling the house bong with weed - job searches can go hang. Whether it’s dealing pills for a shady MD; a steal-to-order Ferrari; or the ultimate caper, robbing an armored car; the three wannabe gangsters quickly prove that they’re a twenty-first century edition of The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (except that these three don’t shoot at all). The trio prove remarkably lucky, though: their victims can’t shoot straight, either.

If you ever need to know how to knock over an armored car, talk to Howard C. A high school classmate of mine, Howard knocked over a Brinks truck just a couple of years after we graduated. Of course, Howard managed to knock it over by T-boning the truck with his semi at a busy intersection, as opposed to cold-cocking a guard and making off with bags of cash at gunpoint; but it still makes for a good story. On the other hand, Iain Levison’s literary version of his three slackers’ similar feat – How to Rob an Armored Car – turns out to be somewhat less interesting. Perhaps it’s the overstudied aimlessness of his characters that makes Levison’s plot uninteresting; perhaps it’s the by-rote stupidity of every one of their criminal plots that does the deed. Then again, it might be just how hard Levinson struggles to make his characters maximally slack. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t quite work for this reader. Lacking much of a plot, How to Rob and Armored Car still manages to be moderately entertaining, mostly because of some fairly stock gags and a couple of cute twists. It’s readable – but I wouldn’t put it on the top of the stack. (Confidential to Levison: those who speak English with Hispanic accents don’t pronounce Mitch “Meesh” – that’d be French.)

Thrice before an author (Dog Eats Dog, Since the Layoffs, and A Working Stiff’s Manifesto), Iain Levison seems determined to carve out a niche for himself writing about aimless stoners too lazy to get off the couch to repack the bowl on the bong. Someone ought to warn him that embers of his chosen demographic aren’t real big on reading novels…

An earlier, slightly different version copyright ©2009 for curled-up.com by Rex Allen

A Last Look at Fifty-One Lives: Marion Winik, "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead"

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik

Back when I first moved to Austin, Texas, I already knew about the little band of local celebrities. Where most of the locals kept their eyes peeled for Matthew McConaughey or Sandra Bullock down on 6th Street or watched for Willie, Jerry Jeff, or Marcia at the Broken Spoke; I was a little different. When browsing the shelves at Book People or fondling the produce at Whole Foods or Sun Harvest, I always kept one ear open, listening for a distinctive velvet growl. The Austin celebrity I was always hoping to meet was Marion Winik.

Alas, Marion moved away from Austin; and a few years later, so did I. Not long after she left, the frequency of her commentary on NPR's All Things Considered dwindled and I heard that voice redolent of whiskey and cigarettes no more. Widowed in 1994 (the story she spins out in First Comes Love), Winik remarried some six years later, moved to small-town Pennsylvania, and began a new phase in her life - perhaps even growing up just a little... but she still writes, thank the Lord, as she proved with her 2005 collection of essays titled Above Us Only Sky (the title’s from John Lennon’s “Imagine”). After a three-year hiatus, Winik returned with a vehicle that’s a little bit spiritual, a little bit weird, a little bit funny – and a whole lot of interesting.

In her latest, a tiny volume that might well be described as Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology as told by a female Jack Kerouac, Winik shares fifty-one vignettes of people (mostly) she has known; people who have since “moved on.” They’re dead – hence the title, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a riff on the Tibetan Book of the Dead cross-bred with Winick’s post office address in southeastern Pennsylvania. Just as the deaths of those we know leave the survivors feeling the full spectrum of emotions, Winik manages to share that same breadth of experience. No matter whether she’s writing about her cat, her father, or her son’s second-grade teacher, she manages to capture not just the essence of the dearly departed but also the fundamentals of her understanding of the person and his life. Some deaths left her sad, a few left her puzzled – and at least one left her angry that she could no longer berate the deceased.

Most of the fifty-one subjects are identified not by name, but by some characteristic that defined their relationship. Her first husband, Tony, is The Skater; her father, The Driving Instructor. Many of the characters who’ve passed through Winik’s tumultuous life will be familiar to those who’ve read her memoir or her collections of essays including The Skater and his friends, all dead of AID;, and The Clown, dead by his own hand in Austin. An ominous number of Winik’s friends from her twenties and thirties (and perhaps forties) died of overdoses (though one died when hit by a bird while motorcycling in Mexico). The Glen Rock Book of the Dead isn’t all dark and dreary, however: Marion shares many a pleasant memory – there’s a paean to the insouciant King of The Condo (an Austin alley cat named Rocco); and then there’s a memorial to a little pink house at Catina and Moulton in New Orleans, casually killed by that bitch, Katrina.

Perhaps the most poignant is her vignette of The Competition, a fellow memoirist with whom she shared an alma mater and a messy life – except that she’d never met the woman, didn’t know her from Eve...

When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in The Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was in my mind even more of the time, When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple of years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blues Clues armchair for my daughter, and on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: a Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met. [Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: a Love Story and Pack of Two, died in 2002. She and Winik never met.]

You might think the subject odd; you might be put off by the references to homosexuality and drug use. You might merely think, who cares about her optometrist, who died when she was eleven? So what if her first father-in-law was a Quiet Man? Why should we care about the deaths of her second husband’s three brothers? We’ll not go all John Donne on each other here – let’s just acknowledge that Marion Winik has the skill, the words, the heart to make us care about these people.

copyright © 2009-2019 scmrak

Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood": You'll Hear that Final Whimper...

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

With the exception of limericks about Nantucket and perhaps Poe’s “The Raven,” there may be no bit of poetry more familiar to those who received an education in the USA during the mid-twentieth century than the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Say it with me: “This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”

A flourishing sub-genre of fiction is entirely devoted to predicting whether Eliot was right – it could be a bang, after all – and to just how that inimitable whimper might come to pass. Though the method of civilization’s passing might be secondary to the plight of the scattered survivors, the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction still must address the instrument of our demise – hence Eliot’s verbal musings. On the “bang” end of the spectrum authors have postulated rogue comets and mindlessly diabolical asteroids; alien invasion; or nuclear holocaust (e.g., Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon) – sometimes with but the barest of hints (c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) about the events. The “whimper” contingent leans more toward environmental upheaval, plague (Stephen King’s The Stand), or both. And then there’s Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in which a thoughtful author predicts that the proximal cause of mankind’s unhappy fate will be his own unrelenting hubris. For The Year of the Flood, Atwood reprises her dystopic vision of mankind’s future; this time as seen through the eyes of a handful of survivors – survivors of “the waterless flood.”
Toby survived the waterless flood partially because she’d prepared for such an eventuality – building a hidden store of provisions and medicinal herbs – and partially because the schoolmarmish, fifty-something herbalist had the good luck to be living in a secure high-end health spa. Ren survived by accident: when the plague hit, she’d been quarantined after possible contamination by one of her “clients” at the high-end sex club where she worked a trapeze act. This is their story…

Toby and Ren have shared history, believe it or not. They’d spent several years together as members of God’s Gardeners, a sect that seems to have been created by mating the Amish with PETA – the central tenets of the faith are to avoid the use of modern conveniences and to never eat anything with a face or a mother. The Gardeners celebrate a different saint each day, saints like Dian Fossey, Euell Gibbons, and Terry Fox; and live simple lives amid beehives and rooftop gardens. All the while, “modern civilization” swirls around their little colony – a dystopian hell in which gargantuan corporations have taken over even the last vestiges of government, and therefore may comport themselves pretty much as they please. When the only police or military agency on the planet is CorpSeCorps – the corporate security corps – the question of “who’s minding the minders” pretty much becomes moot. Meanwhile, the Corporations sequester their scientists and technicians in secure compounds where they gleefully develop “new and improved” product after “newer and more improved” product to peddle to the rest of humanity, those called the “plebes.” Filled with the bored, the uneducated, and the chronically unemployed; the plebelands are a sea of hedonism and violence upon which the scattered islands of the compounds float uneasily. The billions of plebes subsist on a diet of SecretBurgers (the secret is where the meat comes from), get their health care from HelthWyzer, get their rocks off at Scales & Tails (Ren’s employer, a division of SecksCorp), and the women dream of a spa weekend at ANooYoo (where Toby’s a manager). Obviously, the txtg gnrshn named the businesses.

And then one day the world changed: a particularly pesky new bug got loose and the corporations couldn’t manage to get it under control. And when the dust cleared, the only survivors were the few who’d been isolated when the plague struck – a surprising number of them Gardeners… The Year of the Flood tells the same story as many another post-apocalyptic novel: a small band of survivors struggles to find food and shelter, and fights off the criminals who flourish with the disappearance of social order. Where Atwood’s saga differs is in the construction of her plot: instead of a sharp break when “the flood” occurs, Atwood’s content to let her story wander back and forth across that line in flashbacks of varying lengths – mostly how Ren and Toby got to this point; less of how the planet got in such a state. As in her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood spends little effort on answering procedural questions – the “how” and the “why” are explained in just a few toss-off sentences. She is instead content to let her audience read between the lines of a 400-plus page social commentary – which makes it no less biting, when all is said and done.

The “universe” of The Year of the Flood is the same as that of Oryx and Crake, right down to the appearance of a handful of characters in both tales – The Snowman, narrator of Oryx and Crake, shows up as a teenaged Jimmy; Crake slips into the plot several times as Glenn; and Oryx even shows up once – as do the Crakers, the post-modern humanoids Crake designed and gave to Oryx to “train.” Though they share the same universe, however, with its manmade piggoons, rakunks, liobams, multicolored Mo’Hairs, and phosphorescent lumiroses; The Year of the Flood stands resolutely alone.

A superb example of Margaret Atwood’s renowned ability to spin a tale that both entertains and enlightens, The Year of the Flood is one of those rare books that can take its reader through the full range of emotions. By turns dryly witty, terrifying, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; Atwood’s latest is one you simply shouldn’t miss. As you're reading, you can hear that whimper...

copyright © 2009-2019 scmrak

John Sandford, "Rough Country" - Virgil Flowers Returns (if Anyone Cares)

Rough Country by John Sandford

Erica McDill paddled her canoe out to watch the eagles return to their nest at sunset. She never came back. Virgil Flowers was on a boat of his own when he got the call, only a couple of hours into a big muskie fishing tournament. Virgil never came back, either. The difference was that, a few hours later, a very alive Flowers stood looking at a very dead McDill.

In Virgil Flowers' experience, murder is usually about sex or money; and McDill seemed to have plenty of both. The Eagle's Nest Lodge near Grand Rapids (the one in Minnesota, not the one in Michigan) began as a family joint; but a while back the owners had converted the Lodge to a high-end, women-only resort and the place had thrived. Though not officially a hangout for wealthy North Woods lesbians, a good chunk of the clientele had always been either full-time residents or visitors to "the island," McDill among them.

Nothing back home in St. Paul looked suspicious and the setting of the killing seemed to indicate a local, so Virgil began his investigation by nosing around the Eagle's Nest and the Grand Rapids lesbian community - a community that substantially overlapped with the local music scene. That overlap was mainly due to one person: the top local band's lead singer, Wendy Asbach, a brash, brawling blonde C & W type with a set of pipes to die for. So, the number one question: did McDill die for them?

Virgil Flowers commenced to do what Virgil does best: he poked his nose into enough people's business and turned over enough rocks to build a case, and then he let nature run its course. Witness and suspect interviews were a little tougher than usual for Virgil this time, though, since the cop who looks like a surfer dude (blond hair that's a little too long, tight faded jeans, and a string of rock concert tee shirts) figured out that good looks and an "Aww, shucks, ma'am" style just didn't seem to work as well on these particular women. Well, they worked fine on one of ‘em's sister: now, if he could just get his cell phone to stop ringing at all the wrong times...

Rough Country, John Sandford's third Virgil Flowers novel (after Heat Lightning and Dark of the Moon), finds Lucas Davenport's go-to guy still wandering around Minnesota's back roads in a state pickup truck, pulling a private boat. He's also still more inclined to leave his sidearm under the seat of the truck than under his arm, and he still has enough of an anti-authoritarian streak to sleep with witnesses and the occasional suspect - that he doesn't this time is probably more a result of the sexual preference of most of the women in Rough Country than for lack of trying. Given the small-town setting of the McDill murder, Flowers truly doesn't have much to work with - and that means neither does Sandford. A single red herring is pretty much all that separates readers from an open-and-shut case, and identifying the killer on about page 100; even with the stinky fish it's still close. So Sandford has to find other ways to pad out the plot. I lost track how many times Flowers had to backtrack because his chief local source, Zoe Tull, "neglected" to tell him yet another interesting factoid - one of which in fact turned out to be important, but the rest of which were just more distractions. All of that means that, while the two previous novels featuring Virgil were not only fun, they were also good mysteries that kept readers guessing. This time, though, the fun factor is just as prevalent but the mystery element is pretty ho-hum.

As ever, Sandford keeps up a running patter for his character . Clearly, Virgil was ADD as a child (consider that he doesn't sleep, and he doesn't  seem to be able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time - except fishing). We learn that Virgil detests the Dixie Chicks (probably more a Clear Channel thing on Sandford's part than a music critic thing, since Virgil thinks Leann Rimes is the bomb); we also get minor insights into his three ex-wives. Unlike the previous two novels, though, Virgil has little luck with the ladies this time - however Sandford spins Virgil's frustrations into an amusing secondary thread. The problem with Rough Country, unfortunately, is that this thread is almost as engaging as the murder mystery. For that, Virgil loses half a star...

Find Rough Country at eBay

It's Got "a Lot of Bad, Bad Words in It": Whale Talk, by Chris Crutcher

Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher (2001)

Rumor has it that for most people, “high school” turned out to be little more than a variant spelling of “hell” – head cheerleaders and varsity quarterbacks excluded, I guess. I can’t speak from experience: my usually well-ordered memory seems to have misfiled most of what happened during my teens. I don’t know why, but the few lingering scraps seem to suggest that the rest is hidden out of willful self-defense. The renowned young-adult author Chris Crutcher, however, clearly does not suffer my peculiar memory malady: oh, no, Crutcher clearly remembers high school just fine, in all its excruciating, humiliating, embarrassing detail. He’s been making a living remembering those years for a couple of decades. Not only does he remember them, he shares them in all their glory – and Whale Talk is one of his best.

Somewhere in northeastern Washington, not far from Spokane, lies the town of Cutter. This bucolic little logging burg is, like many an American small town, proud of its high-school athletes; though Cutter might take things to extremes. As are most small western towns, Cutter is pretty homogeneous, which is just a fancy way of saying that almost everybody who lives there is White and Anglo-Saxon, and most are at least nominally Protestant. Cutter just happens to be where T. J. Jones lives with his adopted parents. The name on his birth certificate is “The Tao,” having been named after her favorite book by the birth mother with whom he spent his first two years. Considering that “Tao” is pronounced “dow,” it’s easy to see why The Tao Jones goes by a nickname (especially after the DJIA shed about a third of its value last year). T. J. also happens to be what lots of locals call a “mongrel” (a little further east in Idaho, he’d be called a “mud person”): his birth mother was Caucasian and his birth father (“the sperm donor”), Afro-Japanese. Sort of like Tiger Woods, T. J. Jones is a walking advertisement for what geneticists call “hybrid vigor,” ‘cause T. J. Jones has it all. A superb natural athlete, intelligent, and also darned good-looking; T. J. is everything one expects in a homecoming king – except perhaps he’s a little, errr, dusky. Oh, and he can have a wicked temper. Luckily, T. J. has a fantastic support system in his parents, his girlfriend Carly, and his therapist/friend, Georgia Brown (one of the other two people of color in Cutter) – otherwise he might have gone postal by his late teens.

Not all of T. J.’s classmates are so lucky. Like every school, every town – heck, every group of more than three people - there are students at Cutter High who are marginalized by their so-called peers for having the unmitigated gall to be “different.” Different can mean just about anything: developmentally disabled or super-intelligent, overweight, stick-like, painfully shy; anything that makes a kid stand out is grounds for exclusion… and worse. T. J. knows all about this exclusion stuff; having missed birthday parties and had dates broken because the parents of would-be friends don’t want “one of those people” in their homes. He’s getting through it, though, thanks to that support system.

When approached by his Senior English teacher to start a varsity swim team, T. J. is initially dubious. That’s for good reason: sure, he can swim; but not only does Cutter High not have a pool, there’s just one in the whole town (at the All Night Health Club), and it’s not exactly Olympic quality. And then T. J. has a brilliant idea… and soon Cutter High School has its first swim team ever. Only it’s a team composed entirely of the misfits, the marginalized, and the otherwise excluded – it’s a team with only one swimmer and no hope of ever winning a meet. Swim-team captain T. J. Jones has set his sights far higher than mere athletic accolades, however. He intends to give his six teammates something that the rest of their classmates have been trying to take away from them since first grade: their dignity. And so, the Cutter High swim team takes to the water: besides T. J., there’s a swimmer who weighs over three hundred pounds, one who’s the ultimate geek, one who’s a weight-lifting singer, one who’s so “average” that he just plain disappears in a crowd, one developmentally disabled, and one who has a weird limp and the baddest attitude ever – for darned good reason. Throw in a homeless man who sleeps in the health club at night as assistant coach, and you have all the ingredients of the most heartwarming sports story since Robert Redford blew out the stadium lights in “The Natural.”

If only it were that simple… but of course, it’s not.

Remember that T. J. is a “person of color”? Well, there are plenty of people in this corner of Washington who don’t much care for any color but lily-white – and chief among them is Rich Marshall, owner of the local lumber mill and the biggest cheese in Cutter’s alumni club. He spends more time roaming the halls of CHS with the football team than he does in his company office – and every time he sees T. J. Jones, something nasty just has to happen. See, Rich’s high school girlfriend Alicia left him and went away to college, then came back to Cutter with a mixed-race daughter. Rich married Alicia “anyway,” but little Heidi is collateral damage in a relationship that goes past dysfunctional to dangerous. When T. J. first meets Heidi, she’s attempting to scrub the “dirt” off of her arm – an arm almost exactly the same shade of brown as his.

T. J.’s senior year at Cutter High will be a delicate and sometimes dangerous balancing act for him and everyone around him: his swim teammates, his family, and little Heidi. It’s a year that will give him the strength he needs to be someone – perhaps someone great – and it’s a year that will take away one of the most precious things he has. To characterize Whale Talk as merely a “coming of age” tale is almost an insult to the growth T. J. Jones undergoes. One pretty much knows what to expect when opening a young-adult novel written by Chris Crutcher: the protagonist will be an athletic high-school boy who doesn’t quite fit into the rigid caste system of his small high school. He could be a jock – the king of the jocks, probably – if he wants, but he finds the jocks small and shallow. He has great (a) great parent(s) and somehow makes a connection with that one teacher who puts him on the right path; meanwhile thumbing his nose at those adults who’ve never outgrown their high-school attitudes. He participates only in those interscholastic sports in which he competes against himself – track, swimming, cross-country – even though he could be an all-around athlete. He has a smart, slightly quirky girlfriend with whom he hasn’t had sex. And he knows in his heart of hearts that the people who run the cloistered little world of his high school are complete idiots. Chris Crutcher’s books are all that way; more like a prix fixe meal than a la carte…

That’s pretty much the outline of Whale Talk, like Running Loose and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes before it (and, I’d wager, Chinese Finger Puzzle and Athletic Shorts, too). But even though the basic concept of his young-adult novels doesn’t stray far from the one central theme of “Be Your Own Person,” each novel also has its own flavor and its own set of issues. In the case of Whale Talk, the flavor is definitely chocolate – and the themes are much darker. Front and center is racism; the ugliest form of hatred – here directed not only at a strapping teenage boy but also at a little girl. Another theme is that of violence, violence for its own sake and violence born of ignorance – especially physical abuse of a wife or girlfriend… or a child. Crutcher does not pull any punches in Whale Talk – you are hereby warned not to come to this book looking for sanitized dialog or simple, happy-days solutions. The ending… is not as happy as it could be.

Whale Talk gets pretty rough. Crutcher has never been one to pull any punches when it comes to his plots or dialog. He’s softer on organized religion this time than he is in his other books I’ve read; though he still takes some shots at other favorite pastimes of the social conservatives. Such “problems” are never the reason that books like this are challenged – and Whale Talk has been challenged regularly ever since its publication in 2001. The reason that’s stated most often is “profanity”: I haven’t any idea what number he or she reached, but I can guarantee you that some stick-up-the-butt type somewhere has gone through the book counting and can tell you exactly how many “dirty” words are in the text. Then he went and screeched to a school board somewhere about how “we don’t let our children talk like that at school, so you shouldn’t make them read those words.”

The shame is, that while the dirty-word counters are making their little marks on a tally sheet somewhere and just about foaming at the mouth over the language, they aren't reading the rest of the words – and so they’re not getting the point. There are some sections of Whale Talk that are incredibly difficult to read, to be sure. The first scene between T. J. and little Heidi is a race between breaking your heart and turning your stomach – yet it is the utter realism of hideous words coming from the mouth of a child, the instant knowledge of what a little girl’s life must be like, that gives this scene power rarely seen in adult fiction – much less young adult writing. One courageous educator in Alabama said of complaints about the language in this book, “[the message of this book] is more important than the language used.” Cooler heads don’t always win, however: s/he was, of course, eventually overruled…

Whale Talk is a tough read, one that your teenager may well find disturbing. It isn’t disturbing because it uses “a lot of bad, bad words”; as a school board member in Decatur, Alabama, would have it. Whale Talk is disturbing because what’s in there is utterly, entirely possible.

Why Read "The Spire"? It's Pointless...

The Spire by Richard North Patterson

Sixteen years ago as a senior (and one of the B-est of MOCs) at Caldwell University, Mark Darrow stumbled off fraternity row early one Sunday morning, only to find the body of a young African-American classmate lying in the shadow of Caldwell's iconic landmark, The Spire. The uproar over the death of one of the school's few minority students (not to mention a beautiful young woman) and the conviction of a second student - one of Darrow's closest friends - knocked the legs out from under the tiny college's fundraising efforts, and it'd been downhill ever since. Darrow's career, on the other hand, had moved in the opposite direction: after Yale Law, his rise in the ranks of attorneys was positively meteoric until, at forty, the handsome young man was a millionaire many times over. That's when his Caldwell mentor and the closest thing to a father he'd ever had, Lionel Farr, came calling in his Beantown highrise office with a proposition. Since the current president of Caldwell had just been caught with his hand in the till (to the tune of $900K), would Darrow please quit his law practice and take over for him?

Well, of course he would...

Back in Wayne, Ohio (home of Caldwell), Darrow found his alma mater clearly on the skids, with morale among both alumni and faculty tanked. Since that long-ago murder started Caldwell on a long, slow decline, Darrow found the case weighed heavily on his mind. Though snowed under with his presidential duties , Darrow nonetheless found time to investigate Angela Hall's murder - especially when he realized that, in hindsight, some things had never added up. To make his nights even shorter, Darrow also embarked on a personal investigation of the alleged embezzlement by his predecessor. Juggling not just a job and a new-found "hobby" would be plenty for a normal man, but Mark Darrow's not your ordinary man: there was also a certain young woman he hadn't seen in sixteen years.

Did the wrong man go to jail for life? Where's the missing money (and who made it go missing)? Could Mark Darrow turn Caldwell around in spite of having zero experience running a university? Would the young widower's broken heart be mended by a raven-haired beauty? All the answers will be found near the center of the Caldwell campus, at The Spire.

Richard North Patterson's seventeenth novel (and second for 2009), The Spire isn't a novel of political intrigue (The Race or Balance of Power), nor is it a courtroom drama (Dark Lady), nor an "issue" piece like Exile or Eclipse): Patterson has written what may well be the first (and very likely the last) mystery with a university president as protagonist. In creating his fictitious Caldwell, Patterson draws heavily on his undergrad days at Ohio Wesleyan University, though the real place seems to have no "spire" at the center of campus - that would be the University of Texas...

Although the plot of a white-shoe Boston attorney turned university president trying to solve two different crimes (one more than a decade old) bears no resemblance to anything else in Patterson's oeuvre, the novel remains immediately recognizable as his work. As in both Exile and Eclipse, the protagonist is a single male legal eagle called to help an important person from his past; about to re-encounter a woman he'd left behind. 

Some might think that the dynamics of small-town race relations and the friction between "town and gown" in small university towns are issue enough for Patterson in The Spire, though I would disagree. Neither such stress is covered in any particular detail, and race relations are actually glossed over except to say that "some people were racist back in the old days." In the absence of a great question to discuss and about which his characters might wax philosophical (endlessly...), Patterson's latest is decidedly smaller that most of his recent works. It's not much smaller physically, but it's smaller intellectually. Where protagonists in his "large-scale" novels are world-class experts working at the leading edges of their vocation (the law), Darrow seems somehow able to have leapt into an entirely new job and still have time to investigate not one but two crimes - and have hot monkey sex with a beautiful woman in his day. Oh, to be young again, eh? Or perhaps it's the Perry Mason effect - lawyers are all supernatural beings.

Besides a plodding and pedestrian plot, The Spire also suffers from a surfeit of transparency. That both of Darrow's investigations would result in miscarriages of justice uncovered was, per convention, a given from page one. What is worse, however, is that the true villain of the piece, regardless of Patterson's clumsy attempts at misdirection, is as obvious as an NBA center amongst a tribe of pygmies. What a generous reviewer might call a "huge plot twist" came as no surprise whatsoever for this reader. Last, Patterson never laid any groundwork for Darrow's decision to leave a highly lucrative legal career and become president of a tiny college - while barely in his forties. Such shortcomings do precious little to recommend The Spire as a mystery/thriller novel - and I don't recommend it, either.

Running Loose: A Challenge to Bluenoses Everywhere

Running Loose by Chris Crutcher

I don't know about the rest of the guys out there, but if my senior year in high school had started out like Louie Banks', did, I'd have been one happy camper. Louie was a certified Big Man on Campus at THS – Trout (Idaho) High School – he had a starting slot on the football team, a better-'n-average GPA, and a cheerleader for a girlfriend. Maybe he was a big frog in a very small pond, but it sure seemed that Louie had it all. But that was before Coach Lednecky put a contract out on an opposing quarterback and called him some pretty unattractive names, starting with mild racial slurs and ending with the N-word. When Louie decided to stand on principle, Coach denied everything and almost the whole town turned against one confused seventeen-year-old.

Everybody, that is, except his best friend Carter, his parents Norm and Brenda, and Becky. Beautiful, smart, sexy Becky…

I don't know about the rest of the guys out there, but if my senior year in high school had turned out the way Louie's did, I might not have made it. It's a testament to a strong, levelheaded young man who'd been well prepared by loving parents that he made it through the trials and tribulations heaped on his head over those nine short months. It's even more astounding that he came through more grown up than he'd ever imagined. Dear Abby used to say, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Louie Banks would definitely have had enough lemonade to keep Trout, Idaho, from getting thirsty for a long time. Here's to Louie, Running Loose on the back roads of western Idaho.

Like most Chris Crutcher books, Running Loose is written for adolescent males; guys who can identify with what Louie goes through every day at school (and what he does every night under the covers). It's a coming-of-age story in the sense that every seventeen-year-old has to come of age; but it's also a coming of age tale in the sense that Louie Banks does more growing up in that short year than a lot of "adults" have gotten around to doing by the time they're thirty.

Sure, the story is simplistic – it has to be, because people don't write another Ulysses for YA fiction. The idea is to entertain, to give the reader something he can identify with, and get across a hidden message or two. The twin messages in Running Loose are pretty powerful: a stand on principle is position of strength, and one must always roll with the punches. Louie Banks may shoot himself in the foot from time to time – he is, after all, only seventeen and therefore only about 10% as smart as he thinks he is – but when push comes to shove he makes some decisions that his parents can be proud of.

The odd thing about that last sentence is that there are parents out there who apparently would not be proud of their kids for acting like Louie Banks. Like many of Crutcher's books (Chinese Handcuffs, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Athletic Shorts, and Ironman), Running Loose is a banned book. It's been challenged dozens of times over the years, not long ago (August, 2006) in Rochester, New York. According to the mother of a child given this book on a summer reading list, Running Loose is "soft-core pornography." She was described in a local newspaper as, "so upset by the book's use of racial terms and sexual references that she believed her son could gain little by reading the literature." Her husband said, "Some of the things in the book are unbelievable, and I was extremely surprised."

They must not have read the same book I did: here are just some of the lessons Louie Banks could teach the children of this couple:

1) Take a stand against intolerance and racism.
2) You do not need to have sex to prove you are in love.
3) Not every authority figure is a fit role model.

Soft-core pornography? Excuse me? The kid uses the words "hell" and "bastard" a couple of times. He does make not-infrequent references to, shall we say, the practice of self-gratification, but he gratifies himself, and his girlfriend's not involved.

Here is what is really wrong with the book, things that the couple from Rochester clearly want the libraries and schools to keep out of the sight and mind of their child: Louie calls his parents by their first names. He spends a (sexless) night with his girlfriend. Instead of the minister, the high school football coach, and the high school principal, some of the best advice Louie gets from adults comes from a bar owner and even the town drunk. And, worst of all, Louie blames an unfeeling God for some of the worst things that happen to him. Something tells me that those are the only passages that those Rochester parents ever read…

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The Siege: Stephen White Makes You Forget All About Alan Gregory!

The Siege - Stephen White

Along about April every year, things start heating up on the Ivy League campuses. Perhaps it's because the end of the school year is imminent; perhaps it’s the sap rising in hormonal student bodies. Whatever the case, Yale is no different – perhaps even more loony than others, since April is when the societies “tap” new members. Societies like Skull & Bones, Book & Snake, Scroll & Key may sound like the houses of Hogwarts; but they’re real: several Presidents have been members (as have a few cartoonists…). So when things at the “tomb” of Book & Snake start getting strange one April Friday, the campus cops write it off as tap-week festivities.

Things had already started, though: Ann Summers Calderón found the cryptic note in her purse during the week, the one that warned her that something was about to happen and that she was not to tell anyone. But she does: she tells Sam Purdy… That’s why Sam is there for the opening salvo. At the start, it looks like another student prank; a good one – one that might go down in history. The thing about “orange for my disappointment, blue for my contentment” just smacks so much of a prank, especially since blue is Bulldog holy colors and orange belongs to detested Princeton. It looks like a prank when the first student to appear on the steps of Book & Snake shows the little black box taped to his belly, the one with the cartoonish label saying “bomb.” It looks like a harmless prank right up until the moment the bomb blows the hapless teen to bits – and whoever's inside the near-impregnable tomb of Book & Snake still has seventeen more just like him inside…

Yale’s an elite school, and the “taps” are supposedly the elite of the Yalies – the ones inside Book & Snake include children of captains of industry, of a Supreme Court justice nominee, of the Secretary of Defense… and of Ann Summers Calderón. With “assets” like them in danger, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team is in town on the double – along with a host of other alphabet agencies; not one of whom has the slightest idea who’s in there, how many are in there, and – most important – why they’re in there. Disgraced Boulder cop Sam Purdy is in town as Ann Calderón’s eyes and ears, and that’s how he meets Poe – Chrisopher Poe, the FBI antiterrorism version of Fox Mulder – and Dee, wunderkind CIA counterterrorism analyst. Good thing: ‘cause whoever’s inside that tomb and whatever’s on their minds, there’s plenty of terror to go around…

There are suspense novels, and there are suspenseful novels – and then there’s Stephen White’s The Siege. This, my friends, is a suspense thriller in the classic tradition, written by a man who knows how to trip all your psychological switches: White is, after all, a clinical psychologist. His tale opens on a sunny day marked only by the vaguest sense of uneasiness, but by the time it finishes two days later, you’re bordering on cardiac arrest from the tension. It is a book of which I happily say something I very rarely say: you’d better block out a long weekend to read The Siege in one sitting, because you will not want to put it down. It is that good. One reason it’s that good is that Stephen White has written a hostage novel in which the readers, like the horde of cops and FBI agents that surround the nearly impregnable building, have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside. That’s right – instead of shifting the viewpoint from inside to outside like most (if not all) novels and movies about hostages, White did not write a single scene – not a single word – from the viewpoint of the hostage takers: readers, like the hostage negotiator; like the HRT; like Sam, Dee, and Poe; have no earthly idea what’s going on in there – or why it's happening. See what I mean about suspense?

As he has shown in past novels – both his standalones and the Gregory series – White is in his element when it comes to crafting his characters. It’s a treat to see behind Purdy’s cop mask, for instance. But White’s best chops are reserved for his new characters, Dee and Poe – with that relationship that’s a twenty-first century version of Burstyn and Alda in “Same Time Next Year.” Then there’s the local New Haven PD hostage negotiator, thrown into the shark tank on a world stage – she's one gutsy woman. Even minor characters are rock-solid.

Longtime White fans might be disappointed to find his usual protagonist, Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory, relegated to a small cameo role in the epilogue; though Gregory’s frequent running buddy Sam Purdy does get to strut his stuff. This isn’t the first time White’s left Gregory on the sidelines, however; he also played a minor character in 2005’s Kill Me; which, frankly, is the only other White offering to come close to The Siege for suspense. As far as this reader’s concerned, Stephen White doesn’t need to write any more Alan Gregory novels: more like The Siege will be just fine.