Blitz Book Review

A Satire of America

2012-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

All Her Father's Guns by James Warner

PREAMBLE
Intelligence starts with understanding there are at least two sides to every question. Higher intelligence believes you accept this, but strive to choose between conflicting viewpoints in the pursuit of truth. It means believing there's such a thing as truth, which today requires a leap of faith. Very few writers are able to make that leap, though some approach it partway.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE NOVEL
James Warner shows signs of having a first-rate intelligence. The chief sign is the novel's great satirical wit. One reviewer has called the novel "exaggerated." In its depiction of America (specifically, California) it really isn't. America might be the most purely mad Barnum and Bailey civilization that ever existed.

"A transvestite drove past in a classic Bentley, followed by taxis bearing alternating advertisements for Web development tools and downtown strip clubs."

Warner, an expat Brit, sees the madness and nails it in his novel.

"I marveled at California's ability to combine ruthless efficency with fantastic fickleness. They believe in their right to self-discovery, to be their own designer brand-- aren't these the same ideas that make California the most high-tech part of the world? Aren't the entrepreneurship and the craziness two sides of the same coin?"

The story is told through the alternating viewpoints of two characters, bland author stand-in Reid Seyton, and Cal Lyte, the hyper-mad libertarian-conservative father of his girlfriend, Lyllyan. Cal is a rich investor absorbed with an eccentric ladyfriend, Viorela, and a legal dispute with his even more eccentric ex-wife.

Reid, if not a cipher, is a passive actor. Not quite a sponge. Which leaves the book to be dominated by Cal.

The satire is put over by a sharp writing style and quick pace. Warner keeps things fast-moving, his writing always intelligent and clear.

I'm not a fan of dense prose, which I long ago learned is a cover for the writer having few ideas and little intelligence. In these instances the writer gives so many nonessentials that you eventually realize it's all nonessential. Wordiness mistaken for art. The smart writer with something to say knows how to say it, and how to get straight to the point. Communicating that something, those essential ideas, lessons, insights, is the goal. James Warner does this.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE ABOUT THE NOVEL
Most writers today are plodders. They're sober-serious about every sentence, every word. When they try to communicate a thought, like Jonathan Franzen in his novels, it's done with deliberate sober-serious plodding ploughhorse earnestness, always from one viewpoint, the angle and intensity remaining strictly flat. Not a movie with three dimensions, and scarcely with two. Even this takes an enormous effort, a tremendous expenditure of the author's limited mental capacity to get to that point, then you're hit over the head with the massive unwieldy book.

The best writer of them all, William Shakespeare, stood above all plodders. His brain moved very fast. His characters sparkled with wit. His genius was his ability to shift gears and keep his work in balance; to laugh at his characters one minute and cry with them the next. No easy task.

James Warner has wit. He's a sharp guy. Knows all and sees all. But he allows himself to become trapped by his own ability. By his wit.

It's like reading issue after issue of The Onion newspaper. After awhile the sarcasm becomes spiritually deadening. Stifling. Adopt this attitude full-time and you see the entire world and everyone in it through this cynical prism. A prison. You end up believing in nothing and no one.

Warner's dilemma is that he hands his novel to his most fascinating character, Cal Lyte, a walking and talking cartoonish compendium of mad American flaws. Having given him the book, about halfway through Warner tries to turn Cal into something resembling a real person. It doesn't quite come off. A tricky feat to pull off, no doubt.

I'm reminded of the excitement generated way back when Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City came out. Here seemed to be a writer with the goods. The first two-thirds of the short work had style and verve. Wow! you thought. Knows all and sees all, and describes it with knowing, winking humor. Then the author tries to get serious, to close the game out-- to close the sale with the reader-- and of course he can't do it. McInerney has failed to do it with book after book since, and maybe has given up.

The problem with satire that shows a crazed universe and destroys everything in it is that, in my narrow opinion, you need to provide a way out. This is an insane universe but some of us hope for a hint of a way out, a ray of sanity somewhere.

This is quibbling. James Warner is a talented writer. All Her Father's Guns is a fun read. It's hard to ask for more. Let's hope Warner's next novel tops it.

PUBLISHER: Numina Press
www.numinapress.com
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 8.0

Strange Religion

2012-01-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

The Tehran Initiative by Joel C. Rosenberg

"Dead bodies were all over the scene."

Imagine! A pro-war novel, one of a string of pro-war novels, by self-proclaimed Christian Joel C. Rosenberg. What happened to the Prince of Peace?

"Blood was everywhere. Khan was writhing and screaming in pain."

Rosenberg presents a distorted, cartoon version of the Christian religion, within a story about an apocalyptic world with insane rulers in Tehran opposed by scarcely less insane rulers in Washington.

"He didn't want to kill them, but they were armed and hostile, and if he had to do it, he wasn't going to feel guilty about it."

This sounds to me more like a Nietzschean than a Christian. Nietzsche mocked Christians for being poor, guilt-ridden, and meek. He never met Joel C. Rosenberg! Jesus himself of course was crucified by the dominant empire of the day. The choice then was: Caesar or Jesus? Power against weakness. The World versus Salvation. It discredits the religion, in my humble opinion, to throw out the religion's message, its spirituality, and its integrity in defense of Caesar, which is what Rosenberg is doing.

"David smashed him over the head with the iron, sending him crashing to the pavement, bleeding and unconscious."

As for the novel itself, it's a grim propaganda piece full of props and puppets. The hero, David Shirazi, is of the Nietzschean superhero variety. Shirazi works for the CIA. The CIA demi-god heroes rescuing American Empire are thoroughly secular, consumed with high-tech weaponry, high-tech toys, pausing to pray every so often to Christ to help them save high-tech civilization as they work within a hysterical narrative for Caesar and his Pilates, their actions accompanied by gallons of blood and numerous flying body parts. The fanatical bad guys, cartoon Islamists, are projections of the author. The protagonist is a sociopathic robot. Rosenberg needs to give him a sliver of humanity, so he has his mother dying. There's only one semi-intriguing character in the entire work: The mad Mahdi, an insane but mysteriously powerful villain. He's no less cardboard than the other characters, but at least it's a colorful cardboard. Meanwhile, hero David Shirazi is busy.

"He righted himself, took aim, and squeezed off two more rounds at the officer's chest, killing him instantly."

Rosenberg's novel is an obscenity, due to its falseness. In an Author's Note, Rosenberg proclaims how Christian he is. Yet his book is one of the more un-Christian books I've read, which says a lot, given the context of today. There's a Christian way to oppose evil, but Joel C. Rosenberg hasn't found it. You'll discover no Alyosha Karamazovs in his unhappy pages.

In its way, The Tehran Initiative is as insane a novel as the one I recently reviewed by Ann Beattie. I have to rate his book higher simply because it is a page-turner. Which is fine. One doesn't need to linger long over those fast-moving pages. Meanwhile, duck your head, because more missiles are flying.

"What David didn't know was that death was already on its way . . . At an altitude of 17,429 feet, the CIA's $4.5 million, state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicle known as the MQ-1 Predator had already received its encoded orders . . . Now, a five-and-a-half foot, one-hundred-pound AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missile was sizzling through the crisp morning air at Mach 1.3."

Does this sound like it was written by a Christian? Or by someone consumed with armaments, war, and death?

PUBLISHER: Tyndale House
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 5.0

More Is Less

2012-01-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien
(stories)

This opening of a story, "Old Wounds," is what passes among the refined literary crowd as good writing:

"In our front garden, there were a few clumps of devil's pokers-- spears of smoldering crimson when in bloom, and milky yellow when not. But my mother's sister and her family, who lived closer to the mountain, had a ravishing garden: tall festoons of pinkish-white roses, a long low border of glorious golden tulips, and red dahlias that, even in the hot sun, exuded the coolness of velvet. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the perfume of the roses vanquished the smell of dung from the yard, where the sow and her young pigs spent their days foraging and snortling. My aunt was so fond of the piglets that she gave each litter pet names, sometimes the same pet names, which she appropriated from. . . ." Etc. etc. etc.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Is this how to open a story?

Has the reader thrown the book across the room?

No writer today can afford to open a short story or even a novel with such dawdling prose. Get to the friggin' point! No one has time today for such shit. This isn't 1835 upper-class England lounging around the estate.

When you the reader after many arduous attempts do make it through a few of the stories, you find the punchlines range from the ordinary to the maudlin. Each is overwritten so as to hinder communication with the reader. We get the idea, Edna. You write very well. Delicately and finely well. Quite impressive. Not compelling. Less is more. Thank you.

PUBLISHER: Back Bay Books
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 5.0

Ms. Beattie

2012-01-13T09:22:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie
("A Novelist Imagines a Life")

"You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore," Richard Nixon famously said at one point during his long political career. Little did he know that his critics would still be savaging him-- and his wife-- almost 40 years after he left office. Little did Richard Nixon allow for Ms. Beattie.

There aren't enough adjectives in the English language to adequately describe Ms. Beattie's book, but I'll try.

"Cruel," "bizarre," "obsessive," "regrettable," "embarrassing," "snide," "shallow," "hatchet job," "sneering," "smug," "superior," "scornful," "contemptuous," "sheer petty meanness," "40 year-old grievances," "insufferably condescending," "literary stalking," "third-rate insights of a high-schooler," "the most superficial of superficial writing," "272 pages of thinly-disguised hatred," "a terrible idea for a terrible book."

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Half of the book is Ms. Beattie trying to explain why she's writing about Mrs. Nixon. She never does explain. She's incapable of explaining.

"She may well have been unknowable even by her family," Ms. Beattie tells us.

Ms. Beattie does nothing to find out, to get behind the surface of Pat Nixon. Her sources, like Joe McGinniss, Jonathan Schell, and Albert Goldman, aren't exactly objective or reliable. Other than a stray quote or two used to show Pat Nixon in the worst possible light, Ms. Beattie doesn't dig up the perspectives of those who actually knew the former First Lady. Certainly not anyone who'd be sympathetic to her. Her family loved her. Her daughters turned out fine. There might be more to the story.

Ms. Beattie spends her entire 272 pages dealing with her constructed stereotype of Mrs. Nixon, a personality as one-dimensional as Ms. Beattie's Nixon paper dolls, the weirdest moment in a weird book.

Ms. Beattie tells us nothing about Mrs. Nixon not already known or believed, and which could've been encapsulated in a page, if not a paragraph. But Ms. Beattie does tell us a lot about Ms. Beattie.

The first question is, Why did Ms. Beattie write this book? A floundering writing career? A need to settle ideological scores from 40 years ago? Nothing else to write about?

There's not a hint of objectivity from Ms. Beattie. For instance, she contrasts John F. Kennedy, Camelot's golden knight, the attractively glowing icon of virtue, against scowling jowly dark-bearded bad guy Dick Nixon, embodiment of evil. Can we admit this is a stereotype? One that stems most from the legendary 1960 debate between the two men.

There's much to like about the JFK myth-- every nation requires myths-- but a writer of Ms. Beattie's reputation should be able to give us something more than the most superficial of contrasts. In actuality, Kennedy and Nixon were more alike than they were different. Both had great talents and enormous weaknesses. Both could be opportunistic and devious. Both engaged in actions that were dangerous and corrupt. Their ideologies were remarkably similar. (Lukewarm liberalism; intense anti-Communism.) They were creatures of the political system, and the milieus from which they sprung. Complex individuals. Curiously, or not, JFK and RN were also fairly good friends.

Ms. Beattie's view of the two men reveals to us how she views the world. The need for the appearance of virtue, for affirmation that her affluent class of well-bred liberals are virtuous. They need evildoers in order to accomplish this, someone to act as grimy backdrop so They, the Clean and the Saved, can gleam with virtuous light.

Much of the outsized hatred of Richard Nixon by the affluent Liberal class was caused not by what he did, but by what he was-- those aspects of his personality and background he was unable to hide. Awkward, striving, square, sweaty, transparent, social climber, nakedly ambitious-- the classic example of the self-made person who doesn't belong.

Ms. Beattie remains captive of the snobberies of high school. (Or prep school, whichever it was.) Ms. Beattie grew up in chic circles and has moved her entire life in chic circles. For such people, Image and Manners are All. Mr. and Mrs. Nixon lacked the superficial qualities which Ms. Beattie most values-- and which Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, by contrast, had by the truckload.

A sadder tragedy about Ms. Beattie is what's revealed about Ms. Beattie the writer. She intersperses the thin narrative with her opinions and advice about writing-- what she no doubt inflicts upon her captive writing students. Her perspective makes her appear stuck in a time warp. Most of the names she drops, such as Raymond Carver, were big literary names at the same time Ms. Beattie was a big literary name-- 25 years ago. Not just in the subject of the book is Ann Beattie a living and breathing anachronism.

PUBLISHER: Scribners (a once-great company)
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 3.0

Upcoming Reviews

2012-01-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

Reviews of the following are upcoming, in no particular order:

Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie.

Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien.

City of Ghosts by Stacia Kane.

All Her Father's Guns by James Warner.

The Tehran Initiative by Joel C. Rosenberg.

AND an appraisal/reappraisal of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

Some diversity in that line-up. Now all I have to do is write the reviews! Stay tuned.

The Genre Novel

2012-01-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

Trader of Secrets by Steve Martini

What makes a great novel? British critic F. R. Leavis believed that a great work of fiction was both morally significant and artistically accomplished. By "moral" he didn't mean ideology, but a larger knowledge about character and humanity.

The major problem with genre novels is that most of the characters are pawns who can easily be disposed of at any time without thought or regret. The genre novelist is a sociopath almost by definition. This was not the case with forerunners of genre fiction like Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and Somerset Maughm. Or even Raymond Chandler, who disdained the fictional puppets of other detective writers. But it's the case in novel after novel today.

Every death is a tragedy. Particularly when the bodies pile up (as they seem to do in my Crime City USA), you need to express a sense of the tragic; profound regret at the nature of the world.

At the end of the classic western movie "Shane," for instance, the hero expresses regret-- deep regret-- at killing the villain, for he knows that in so doing he's killed part of himself.

Unfortunately, this isn't the kind of regret one feels at the conclusion of Steve Martini's Trader of Secrets, but instead, regret that a skilled writer who's displayed the tools needed to write a very good novel has wasted his talents in conforming to the generic genre style.

Trader of Secrets is a spy/detective story in which hero Paul Madriani and friends travel the globe tracking down a supervillain named Liquida who's being used by a collection of terrorists bent on creating a device which could destroy much of the planet. The plot has obvious potential for melodrama, which would be fun, but Martini takes the scenario seriously, and makes it believable. Martini lays down his plot threads expertly. His characters are well drawn. One of them, a NASA scientist who's fallen in with the bad guys, is sympathetic. The villain Liquida is often fascinating.

The problem is with the heroes, who, in order to combat Liquida, become-- or always were-- as soulless as he is. Someone could argue that this is necessary to defeat villainy-- except that the AUTHOR at least needs to stand above this, needs in some way to convey the balancing morality of F.R. Leavis. Otherwise the novel degrades us more than improves or enlightens us as human beings.

There's nothing original in this novel, other than the technological premise. It's been done before, by Ludlum and countless others. Cookie-cutter stuff. Airplane-riding fare. Time filler. Martini is cranking out product, deliberately limiting his vision, in so doing saying, "I'm not an artist," because he doesn't push himself to be as good a writer as he could be.

I can pick out the exact moment when the author lost me, after hooking me for page after page. It occurs during the climax sequence, which is a small war. Martini's once in-control attorneys, Madriani and company, and his daughter Sarah, are suddenly in the middle of horror. It's not portrayed as horror, isn't shown as a nightmare, but as an everyday happening, after which the heroes will take a shower, brush their teeth, and go watch a football game. Another day at the office. Bodies everyplace.

Is America ancient Rome? Does the bloodlust appetite of the reading public demand to be satiated with dead bodies as if spectators at the Colosseum? Are we sociopaths?

Martini lost me when his hero-- the hero, not the bad guy-- with bullets flying everywhere, begins killing people (just the enemy) with his car. They're mowed down like store dummies. The tone is gleeful. I guess it's war. Undeclared, illegal, but still. If you're on the right side all is allowed. I'm sure Martini's heroes slaughter people in book after book and are never the worse for it. This is how the genre works.

(Study, by contrast, the outsized grief of barbaric Achilles and Priam in The Iliad.)

The moral failure of Trader of Secrets is also artistic failure. Any promise the novel gave of greater emotion and meaning isn't realized. Not that Steve Martini would care in the slightest.

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 7.0

A Japanese Mystery

2011-12-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X by Keigo Higashino
(translated by Alexander O. Smith)

I debated with myself for a long while over whether to give this detective novel a 9. I haven't given any book a 9 here yet. I worry that if I start giving out high scores, like a 9, I won't stop. The Blitz Rating system will become diluted. My carefully constructed edifice of infallible book analysis will come crashing down. The Devotion of Suspect X will then have become a Japanese tsunami obliterating this blog. It could happen!-- if I'm not careful about giving out high scores.

Plus, there's a case to be made against the book. Not a strong case, mind you, but it's there.

For one thing, the pacing of the novel is deliberate , even slow. There are two detectives, one official and one unofficial, Kusanagi, veteran detective of the Tokyo Police, and his friend Yukawa, a genius physicist at the local university. It's a classic pairing of professional and amateur. Much of the narrative involves undramatic discussion between Yukawa and Kusanagi, over the case they're pondering, and also the related question of intuition versus logic.

There aren't a lot of fireworks in the book. No car chases or melodrama. I can't say there's no emotion. No, I can't say that, though a good part of the book is almost clinical in tone. Our two analysts spend much time analyzing the case, and their opponent, a mathematics teacher who's something of a genius himself. It's a chess game, with much positioning of pawns.

What else?

Well, the names of the characters can be confusing. Kusanagi and Kishatani. Yasuko and Yukawa. What up with that?

What of the book's strengths?

The novel, and thus the mystery, is written with great clarity. It's right there in front of you. Right there! The language, the description, the narrative-- nothing is hidden. Or if it is, it's hidden in plain sight. I loved the clarity. You feel after awhile that you're looking at a chess board. Keigo Higashino has total control over his material.

That material is in perfect balance. How rare this is! The sections of the book, beginning, middle, and end, are in proportion. No overblown finish with dead bodies everywhere, or five different climaxes. Nothing goofy. No authorial desperation to find a way out. Higashino knows the way out. He understands that less is more.

This is a detective novel, but it's also literature. This is the kind of thing long-ago genre authors like Eric Ambler used to accomplish. The proportion gives the overall work aesthetic impact beyond the mere words of the book.

Two other points should be mentioned. In Agatha Christie fashion, Higashino pulls off an unexpected solution. You can't believe it's coming, but Higashino does it. A genuine surprise, if surprise is the right word. I can't tell you-- or if you're a long-time reader, maybe I can-- how unusual this is. How difficult, at a time when all stories have been written.

Second-- and this is as much of a surprise-- Keigo Higashino approaches Simenon level with his understanding of people, his portrayal of character. He nears the highest level. It's a surprise because for much of the novel the characters don't seem particularly deep at all. Aha! Higashino sneaks up on the reader. And he makes it so believable! This isn't a "psychological" detective novel. It's too smart, too subtle, for that designation. It never hits you over the head. The book's impact sneaks in elsewhere. Maybe into your soul. You're left at the end shaking your head, feeling the impact. How does he do that? There are no over-the-top action sequences, yet the novel closes with an emotional bang. This is fine, fine work.

I believe I'll give it a 9 after all.

PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 9.0

Why the Short Story Is NOT Dying

2011-12-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Awake Till the End by Alysse Aallyn
"Crime Stories"

No, it's not true that I'm too tough on writers. I'm not tough at all. I'm waiting to be enthusiastic. I ask only, ONLY, that the author meet a few minimum requirements. Such as, that the writing be readable. Don't insult my intelligence with self-indulgent verbiage best meant for yourself. If you do write only for yourself-- or a professor-- with no thought of involving the reader, keep it in a journal.

I'm not talking now about Alysse Aallyn, whose modest volume of stories is surprisingly good.

Fifteen engaging tales that aren't really crime stories, since many of them merely hint at crime, or the crime takes place offstage. They're pop stories, meaning, highly readable. Aallyn adds touches of wry humor. On occasion, surprise and pathos.

Alysse Aallyn shows her characters as human beings, with emphasis on human. She understands their weaknesses and quirks. She presents a parade of unique personalities. Though she can be scathingly cynical-- usually is, come to think of it-- she loves life and enjoys people. Aallyn gives you first herself; her smart and personable voice.

A few of the stories border on excellent.

"Scathed," about secrets between a mother and daughter, is painfully knowing about men and women.

Alysse Aallyn is best at depicting children. She makes them thoroughly believable, as in "Cold Huntsman," about a sensitive girl and her flaky aunt, and most of all, "Violet," which at the end delivers a kick.

A few of the endings are too hurried, too abrupt. One or two of the works seem like fragments more than stories. But hey, she keeps you wanting more.

PUBLISHER: The Midnight Reader
http://www.midnightreaderpublishing.com/
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 8.0

Why the Short Story Is Dying

2011-12-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

THE SPOT by David Means
stories

David Means learned his creative writing class lessons too well. This book is the literary standard. Finely-crafted sentences, long paragraphs of them, sentence after sentence without a break, like a salesman who gets you on the phone and keeps talking without pause and it's all babble. It's not scene. It's not really narrative. It's just writing.

From "Reading Chekhov":

"Behind them the office building, with its reflective glass, collected and cubed the vista. The terminus of parting; the deep, elegaic tragedy of it."

There's scarcely a sentence in the entire book that's not this kind of pretentious shit. But then, when the title of a story has "Chekhov" in it, you know it's literary output intended to be pretentious. Someone is sucking up to someone. The objective is to impress. Not to entertain, not to move or thrill, not to enlighten. Impress-- and not the general reader either.

This book is literary writing at its worst.

The characters are interchangeable. They run together even within the bounds of a single tale, as in the title story, "The Spot." Every character is soulless. Every one is stupidly violent or apathetic, without conscience and barely conscious. Organisms helplessly caught in a flow of nature or a flow of stupidity. It's not that Means doesn't like people. His characters aren't people. They're not even caricatures.

The settings are uniformly grim. The sentences run together and the paragraphs run together. The characters and situations run together as the words run together. The plots are buried under sheer wordiness.

One of the stories lists three ways someone copes. Here's one of the ways:

"Assume a protoplasmic mobility; the creep of the protozoan, one-celled hydra, primal and original and eager to consume itself for lunch."

Sounds great. Not exactly positive. What does it mean?

It's bullshit writing. Means is basically just shitting the reader.

Since I can't quote the entire book, it's impossible to convey here how bad it is.

Yet pillars of the literary establishment love it! The back cover contains flatulent blurbs by The New York Times, London Review of Books, Jeffrey Eugenides and James Wood. On the dust jacket right inside the back cover is the author photo, which makes David Means resemble his characters. He appears to have all the intelligence of a ripe squash.

For a minute, looking at the photo and reading the book, I wondered if the thing was one big put-on. A mock collection. A satirical joke. But no, they've been charging $23 for it, and the blurb writers are serious. They truly believe it's good. Which says a lot about the higher levels of the literary world.

The New Yorker, flagship publication of that world, originally published the title story with its depiction of rural Neanderthals stumbling vacantly about middle America. Likely because the story confirms a Manhattan stereotype.

David Means anyway, within the open spout of words, briefly becomes honest about what he does:
"--we'd meet just as we're meeting now. Except it would go on forever. The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does. That's what it's about. It would keep going onward, like the light from a star. We know they're not going to find a way out, around it, and we know they're just going to continue--"

You've been warned.

PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber, Inc.
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 2.0

Psychotherapy Insanity

2011-12-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

NETSUKE by Rikki Ducornet

My actual at-the-moment thoughts about the author's viewpoint while I was reading this novel:

"I'm a very talented whacked-out man-hating obsessed-with-sex but very talented bourgeois woman writer with a lot of time on her hands to ponder/wonder/worry about sexual relationships while writing with sparkling prose this obsession about men as sexist self-involved manipulative monsters expressed through the character and voice of a smug smiling well-depicted self-destructive psychotherapist dominating others victims hapless naive putty-in-his-hands sheep including his wife plus a transvestite it's not general truth it's my truth at least it's art at least arty at least it's readable and not too long you may enjoy it."

PUBLISHER: Coffee House Press
http://www.coffeehousepress.org/
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 7.0

Lethally Bleak

2011-12-03T10:03:00.000-08:00

THE LETHAL INJECTION by Jim Nisbet

Many writers try to be bleak. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, authoress of bleakness, recent recipient here of a Blitz Rating, tries hard to be bleak. Not all who try to be bleak achieve it.

Jim Nisbet has been hyped as the bleakest and darkest-- most "noir"-- of all noir writers. It's not an exaggeration.

This is a problem from the reader's standpoint. Lethal Injection is an unrelieved depiction of a crude world populated by assholes. It's bleak.

There are four chief characters.

The ultra-violent black prisoner on death row in Texas is a heavily idealized homoerotic projection of the author's liberal ideology. The doctor who injects the prisoner is impressed by the condemned man's Nietzschean violence. He seeks to discover if the man was in fact innocent. This path leads the doctor to two depraved druggies, rounding out the quartet.

The doctor is so weak, characterless, and stupid, he gives the two druggies more power than they would otherwise have. This is the crux of the plot. Doctor or no, he's inferior in body, intelligence, and will even to them. They use that power.

Nisbet does this kind of thing very well, creating a world without hope-- an environment without humanity, only animalistic warped misfires of human beings operating across an inescapably ugly landscape.

At bleakness combined with violence, Nisbet has no peer. The noir experts are right. In the entire book there's not a single ray of light.

Lethal Injection is the kind of fiction Joyce Carol Oates wishes she could write!

PUBLISHER: The Overlook Press
www.overlookpress.com
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 7.0

A Completely Different Kind of Detective Novel

2011-11-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

With this novel I sprinted through chapter after chapter of seeming idiocy, thinking this was the dumbest detective novel ever written, the author hustling crackpot dope-smoke drenched California New Age philosophy and illogical notions about the methodically logical work of detection while not knowing the most basic things about the craft (how to aim and shoot a pistol, say)-- the detective side of the novel merely a framework for Sara Gran to write about the inner city in the tragic city of New Orleans.

Then, at page 171, I was brought up short by the sudden entrance, into Gran's dilapidated tale, of the Jerry Sandusky (Penn State) matter. I'm not making this up! Unbelievable. Her book was published prior to the revelations, mind you. Synchronicity in the universe indeed. You have to give Sara Gran points for timing.

I began to look at the narrative of Claire DeWitt in a different light.

Within the bounds of time and space-- going outside them actually-- Gran seems to prove her philosophy. None of the fragmented pieces fit, but then, they might. "There are more things in heaven and earth. . . ."

Does Sara Gran's detective, Claire DeWitt, solve the grim mystery?

DeWitt, like all detectives, at least the fictional variety, believes in the search for truth. She just happens to have a roundabout way of getting to it.

This novel may not be for the traditional detective reader-- or it may overturn the traditional thinking of that traditional reader, as happened to me. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is highly creative, with strong characterization, a dense sense of New Orleans life, and even a book within a book. For all her quirkiness, as well as her alternate detective universe, Sara Gran gives you your money's worth.

PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 8.25

Quest for an Angel

2011-11-24T10:55:00.000-08:00

The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo
(Stories.)

Don DeLillo's writing style is controlled and bloodless. Clear, with a slow pace. In an enervated tone DeLillo examines, through most of the collection, delicate Princess-and-the-Pea persons in controlled situations. Even when presenting what are in effect stalkers-- he does this often-- the moments are careful. Unlike Joyce Carol Oates stories (reviewed below) Don DeLillo's tales take no chances, make no mistakes.

This guy takes baby steps. Picture Mr. DeLillo shuffling slowly along a sidewalk. DeLillo's a commodity trader jumping in and out of a market, taking quick small profits, never going for the big score.

Two points about the DeLillo approach.

1.) He has a one-note technique. The first story in the book dates from 1979, the last from 2011, yet they could've been written on the same day. Status quo writing. The frozen Ice Man seen in the National Geographic.

2.) Like all literary writers, DeLillo's narratives exist mainly inside his head, which gets tedious.

DeLillo's not as observant about people as Oates. He doesn't see through them. DeLillo portrays characters as blank walls, then searches for flickers of personality behind the walls. People as mysteries. Only the situations change, whether on a university campus ("Midnight in Dostoevsky") in a museum ("Baader-Meinhof") or at a movie house ("Starveling").

The title story, "The Angel Esmeralda," begins the same way, DeLillo examining the lower class from a detached perspective. An onlooker contemplating the Other. An intermediary is brought in: Ismael. (Do we assume literary significance?) The setting is the South Bronx. The environment takes on realistic shape, until it reminds me of the last time I lived in Detroit, three years ago. This surprises me.

DeLillo steps cautiously outside his usual bounds as the reality, the risks, the emotion and the meaning become tangible. The story is about the forays of a small group of liberal nuns (nuns by definition are liberal) into a harsh and chaotic world. The nuns, by their determined commitment and their selflessness, become heroes. Excellent stuff.

The difference between this story by Don DeLillo, and everything Joyce Carol Oates has ever written, is each author's different view of humanity and the universe. "The Angel Esmeralda" has soul.

"--does the power of transcendence linger?" At its best, art is transcendence.

Reading the stories in this volume is like a nun waiting for the face of Esmeralda to appear. It does appear.

PUBLISHER: Scribner
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 8.5

Wasted Talent

2011-11-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates
("Tales of Mystery and Suspense")

Joyce Carol Oates has as much pure writing talent as any American writer going. Oates is a master with words. She's observant. She comes up with the occasional surprising insight, expressed in a perfectly concise way. Her problem is the "More Is Less" syndrome, which we see in the rock n' roll field with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Paul McCartney, Bono, and, well, everybody except Neil Young and rock artists who conveniently died.

They should have all retired the moment they began recycling themselves. Quit when their best work was out there, it couldn't be topped, they'd said all they had to say.

With Joyce Carol Oates the point may have been reached after the Upon the Sweeping Flood stories in the 1960's.

This current story collection provides little mystery and no suspense, but it does offer competent prose and a lot of laughs. One story, "Smother," is fairly good. Some are passable. Others are ridiculous. I laughed out loud during every story, either when Oates pushes the writing style too far ("pushes" "the" "writing" "style"), or at the ridiculous characters, situations, and expected "unexpected" moments of violence.

Sorry, Ms. Oates, but the "second husband" picking up that pitchfork-- ain't gonna happen. Not minutely believable. Anyone who understands people knows this. He'll think it, sure-- Oates's characters live intense lives inside their heads. But hey, it's only entertainment, right?

Mary Roberts Rinehart hysteria combined with cranky misanthropy and comedic violence-- this book is more cartoonish than my Crime City USA!

PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 6.5

Reading as Masochism

2011-11-20T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
(With Intro by David Foster Wallace acolyte Michael Pietsch, who also edited the monstrous thing.)

This never-finished novel is 547 pages. The novel's theme, as far as I can determine, is madness. Highly recommended if you wish to go insane.

The Pale King comprises in one novel everything wrong with literary postmodernism. The story is about the Internal Revenue Service. Slogging through the novel is like trying to read IRS regulations. Wordiness and pointless complexity. Also much self-involvement. Very much self-involvement. I gave up at page 159.

Wallace's kind of writing is A.) Showing off. B.) Solipsism squared. C.) An extended creative writing assignment. D.) Literary fireworks and footnotes masking a core of stupidity.

I'm not simply name-calling. David Foster Wallace presents a nihilistic state of mind. The first paragraph is a word-clotted description of a field of weeds and insects which ends with the pretentious line: "We are all of us brothers."

Are we? Really? If so, what does that say? Brother to a weed? Communicant with a fly?

You know you're in trouble in Chapter 2 when you encounter a long paragraph which continues without break for many pages. Verbiage. No, not verbiage. Vomitry.

The sadly deceased author David Foster Wallace is, sadly, the highest value in the literary world today. Establishment literary critics love his books. ("--the greatest writer of my generation" -Benjamin Alsup, Esquire magazine.) Someone will have to explain it to me.

PUBLISHER: Little, Brown
REVIEWED BY: King Wenclas
BLITZ RATING: 3.5

Blitz Is Back!

2011-11-20T15:41:00.000-08:00

I plan to get a lot of reviews up on this site. Stay tuned.

Not Happy!

2008-08-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA
Short stories by Mathias B. Freese
134 pages.

Reviewed by King Wenclas.

"--Jon feels that early events and individuals, for whatever reasons which up to this day he can't sort out, deeply imprinted upon him."

Mathias is a psychotherapist and that's how his stories read. Most are unbearably solipsistic, plunging the reader into depths of self-observation, the torpid trivial traumas of childhood, the overcoming of which is the signal of adulthood, but not for author Freese! He's still wringing his hands over the overbearing father kicking aside his shoeshine kit ideas and other such unhappy brutalities. "Woe is me!"

Yes, this world is full of assholes, many of them, and Mathias B. Freese is adept at portraying them-- not overcoming them but in a limp beaten-down way enduring them-- including the brutal father; including a fictional Arnold Schwarzenegger satirized in the collection's most entertaining piece. The rest are tales for the psychoanalyzed; the self-obsessed "deeply imprinted" with something they're still trying to sort out: resting on couches while Dr. Freese murmurs encouragingly; muttering woefully to him, "Why? Why? Why me?"

Which is what I was saying to myself, having received the book, while reading it.

See:
www.mathiasbfreese.com
www.wheatmark.com

Novel of the Year

2008-06-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

PRIVATE SCREENINGS by Lawrence Richette
--a book review by King Wenclas--

"She had become one of those beautifully unreachable women you saw on the Upper East Side wearing a secular halo composed of utter poise and a frightening lack of need."

"The usual gargoyles: God, it takes far less time to get tired of the rich than they would ever dream. Not that this bunch even looked particularly well-dressed: stripped of their plastic and their family names, they'd have rated, at best, a corner table at Wendy's."

"I walked home in an effervescent mood, the kind you enjoy even while you tell yourself it isn't going to last. The rain stopped by the time I reached One Hundred and Tenth Street. Broadway gleamed darkly in the light that poured out of the markets, through the windows of saloons."

I don't like giving quotes from novels, because novels count for their effect not on a well-written sentence, but an accummulation of sentences put together in the right way to create a picture; an experience. For Richette's latest novel, a love story set in New York City at the end of the 1980's, I could give a hundred such quotes which by themselves don't mean a great deal, but placed artfully in-and-out of a compelling narrative in short bursts they add a three-dimensional depth to the tale.

It's a story about a struggling young screenwriter and his struggling young actress wife; but really it's a story about New York, the variety of settings, people, incidents, jammed together like a mosaic; variety which gives the glittering island its appeal. Private Screenings captures this magical, awful place better than any novel I've read. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City in comparison is an outline, a sketch; while Richette's, covering roughly the same time period, is a deep-hued painting.

The three things I loved about this book:

1.) The narrative voice of the main character-- the screenwriter-- falling in-and-out of love with several women, including his wife. The narrator has the mad unpredictable energy of an artist; doubts, analysis, scorn, sarcasm, jubilation, disappointment: temperament. The final stage: wisdom; appreciation of the things of life. The novel is first the voice: fast-paced nonstop wit and energy, like the city.

2.) I loved the characters, wonderfully portrayed; likeable, maddening, real. From Victor the quack filmmaker to Quentin the jaded friend to rich girl Jill and Holly the prize-- Tony's wife-- toward which he seems to be fighting the entire book; to other quirky types found only in New York like Manfred the Eurotrash pimp. All rendered humorously, as types, yet by the end of the novel becoming to us real people.

3.) This occurs through the novel's warmth, the quality I enjoyed most about the book; a quality obtained through the author's love of humanity, and, for all his satirical jabs at it, of the city he's writing about.

One can finally say it's an accomplished novel, a whole; carrying resulting aesthetic effect-- the artistic power of accomplishment. Form: the novel in balance, so that this incident in Chapter One touches that occurence in Chapter Fourteen, the harmony conveyed to the reader subliminally, not kicking-in fully until the end. Each part of the story, each character, fits, with nothing extraneous. Richette creates not flash, not smoke-bomb rock show pyrotechnics (though the story has pyrotechnics), so much as a sustained vibration of intensity and mood.

Most needed from the American novel today is this novel's optimism; a realistic optimism which comes from enduring the knocks of life. Tony the main character survives crazed and desperate scenarios to arrive back at the starting point of life that is the culmination of experience.

Brilliance is an effect that lingers after the object which created it has passed from view. Private Screenings achieves this.

(Available through Amazon and Xlibris. Buy it!)

Iron Man and the Imperialist Mindset

2008-05-27T07:27:00.000-07:00

A MOVIE REVIEW by King Wenclas

THERE ARE many good things about the "Iron Man" movie which has done land office business at the box office. Like many such comic book movies, it understands the basics of classic storytelling: sweep; adventure; troubled heroes fighting malicious evil. My favorite sequence is when the hero, Tony Stark, creates his suit of glowing armor while being held captive in a cave. This is right out of "The Iliad"-- the creation of Achilles's shield. It encapsulates the pure joy of creation, which so defines us as human beings. Wonderfully done; thrilling to watch.

For all its classic aspects, however, the movie is definitely of this time and place, showing where we are now as a civilization; how far we've come from the "conservative" Fifties when action movies were named "Viva Zapata!" and blockbusters like "Ben-Hur" had an anti-Imperialist viewpoint. How far we've morally declined.

It's scary that after five years of a disastrously expensive war, U.S. intervention in the world remains a given.

In "Iron Man" the U.S. Army patrols the globe, cameras surveying every corner. Our Roman soldiers are triumphant Messalas. The grubby Bad Guys' chief flaw if their lack of technology, as an arrogant American arms dealer tells them. Power is the only value.

Two revealing moments:

1.) The conscience of the movie is provided by a WASPy liberal Vanity Fair(!) journalist who's a graduate of Brown-- only the snobbiest, most patrician of the Ivy League establishment training schools. Her liberalism is not a criticism of the System, but a reminder that Empire must be benevolent. She WANTS the Tony Starks of the world out there, only representing good as they interfere with other societies across the globe. (Iron Man's speedy traversal of that globe a metaphor for America's police powers.)

2.) The Brown grad's ethos is underscored by the movie's key turning point, when Stark/Iron Man listens to a female BBC voice-- the British voice of Empire; used as such, ironically, in films like "Ben-Hur" in which the Romans carried Brit accents and were the bad guys. Things have changed!

The BBC voice relates tragedies around the world; horrific happenings. Its message to Stark: Get involved! Go after them! Impose American power! Which Stark as Iron Man does, splattering evil grubby ethnic villains all over the place. Entertaining, but also revealing of the Imperialist ideology which now runs our country.

Blasting Literature!

2008-05-20T12:10:00.001-07:00

Stay tuned for exciting reviews.