Walking on the Moon

Carl Hiaasen writes some world class light fiction, and Star Island is no exception.  It’s a fast moving send up of paparazzi and their targets where everyone’s a bit larger than life and the plot’s twisty enough to hold your attention without being confusing.  Writing such a thing is harder than it looks.  Striking the right tone, keeping the characters likeable but interesting, and keeping the plot’s clockwork running but obscured is all a challenge.  Hiaasen does all that and adds the South Florida flavor that he’s well known for.

All that said, Star Island is a trifle.  I’d forgotten I’d read it until I was looking through my kindle’s book list to see how far behind I am on these reviews.  Fun, while it lasted, though.

Recommended.

The latest in Steven Brust‘s Vlad Taltos series was available for the Kindle, so I actually read it before it came out in paperback.  My reviews of the books in this series are usually shorter than the other capsules, partially because most of the Taltos stuff is like most of the Taltos stuff, though not in a particularly repetitious way.  There’s always some twist to them that keeps you reading, and the writing is fun and thoughtful.  At this point, the books feel more like chapters than books, and it’s a little hard to review them in isolation.

These are well executed novels in the fantasy genre that are part of an interlocking overall whole.  If that’s your thing, and it’s certainly mine, jump in.

Strongly recommended.

If you’re looking for a detailed accounting of how Shakespeare passed his days, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare is not going to satisfy you.  As Bryson makes abundantly clear, there are not a lot of hard facts about the Bard’s life, and the interpretation of the ones scholars do agree on is fairly wide open.  If I’m going to be wandering through a field of data with few well marked sign posts, Bryson is one of my go-to guys.  He’s an excellent researcher, a fine raconteur, and brings an excellent blend of common sense and speculation to the topic.

His topic here is utterly fascinating.  Shakespeare is a towering figure in English literature, to the point where even though most people know he’s the biggest name, they really don’t know how many expressions and words he brought into the language.  Even if one leaves aside the structure and execution of his plays as drama, his contributions to the language would make him immortal.  For someone who has literally influenced how every English speaker expresses themselves, we know next to nothing about him.  Even the contents of the plays and poetry are up for some debate.  The absence of data has not lead to an absence of biography, and pulling the supported narrative from the mythmaking is not easy.

Bryson leaps cheerfully and diligently into the fray.  He catalogs the facts well, pausing often to point out the herculean efforts that pulling a single bit of knowledge can require.  His digressions on the lengths that both professional scholars and obsessed laymen will go to in pursuit of a new atom of information are enlightening.  Such obsession leads to wholesale speculation from both professionals and amateurs that often lodges in the public mind.  Bryson turns a lighthearted but needed hose on these narratives when they get out of hand.  But he’s a writer and is not immune to the draw of pulling a coherent story from a few facts.  He respects the urge, but retains his reserve.

Overall the result is a somewhat threadbare biography that illuminates the legend without being seduced by it.  The chapter on debunking Shakespeare conspiracies is particularly delightful in this regard.  Bryson is always engaging and informed, but he’s not buying anything that isn’t supported.  And even by those standards, the life and works of Shakespeare stand up just fine.

Recommended.

Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is a meticulously researched historical novel about the years of Lincoln’s presidency primarily through the eyes of his staff.  It’s no great challenge to find the facts about the Lincoln years, but Vidal’s telling makes the people real and the changes to the nation visceral.

Lincoln is heralded as a master politician, and the record shows his skills.  It’s one thing to read about those skills and to understand in the abstract how careful footwork and forethought made a political nobody into the President in a few short years.  It is quite another to watch Gore’s fictionalized Lincoln outmaneuver a viper in the cabinet that has been denigrating his judgment and plotting against him for half the book.  It is a brilliant scene, with Lincoln maneuvering Salmon Chase into a literal no-win position with lawyerly tactics and superlative control.  Then, even as Lincoln exults in the triumph, he has compassion for the seductive influence of power that drove Chase to make his play, recalling that the same thirst placed him in the presidency.  As I say, all these goings on are supported by the historical record, but Vidal brings it alive with the nuance and power of a great writer.

In addition to making the historical figures as big as life, Vidal’s interested in capturing the metamorphosis of the nation as well.  Lincoln’s four years in office saw some of the largest growth in Federal power in our history, as well as some of the largest abuses of that power.  People are jailed for exercising their freedom of speech, the treasury begins directly controlling currency, a huge army is created, and other expansions.  Again, the record is clear, but Vidal brings his radical’s eye and novelist’s voice to explaining the changes.  He knows and shows the effects of the changes, but never presents the choices as cut and dried.  He makes no excuses, nor conjures any demons.

It isn’t hard to imagine his depictions of Lincoln, Seward and Chase in the cabinet of Barack Obama or of George W. Bush.  That alone is thought provoking.

All that makes the book sound like a civics assignment; it is anything but.  His characters are fascinating and dramatic, and his Lincoln is every bit the charming, disarming, dedicated man that history shows us.  There is drama, pathos, and comedy throughout.  Even if you have no interest in pondering the kind of man Lincoln was or how the mechanisms of government changed between 1861 and 1864, the book is interesting and entertaining.

Strongly Recommended.

I’ve long enjoyed reading Mark Twain.  There is a combination of pulling for the hometown boy, in that he is buried in my hometown, and well, I just like the way he writes.

There’s a certain amount of Twain’s life that one soaks up living in Elmira, the way I assume one must soak it up living in any one of the many other towns in which he lived.  Any opportunity for a high school English or History class to spend a week talking about his life was taken.  As a result, I knew the broad outlines of Twain’s life before I picked up this book.  Ron Powers, the author of Mark Twain: A Life, seems to assume such passing familiarity without leaning on it.

Overall, Powers’s book is a fine gateway into Twain’s life and career.  His writing is clear and crisp, assumes the reader has heard something of the subject without being an expert.  From that basis he composes a biography that is conventional in form – birth to death telling of the major events – but light and discursive in content.  There is a daunting amount of scholarship about Twain, focusing on everything from his place in world literature to the motivations for the most trivial choices, and Powers points that out without getting drawn into the vortex of it.

For example, it’s really difficult to decide how to address the subject of this biography: Twain is fictional and says and does things that Clemens doesn’t.  Powers solves this elegantly by referring to the writings (and the writer) as “Twain,” the adult as “Clemens,” and the child as “Sammy.”  The last seems a little incongruous until one reflects on how Clemens’s childhood informed practically all his written work.  It’s a very useful convention through which Powers keeps the reader connected to the history and influences of the man simultaneously. A reader can also see how he has been driven into this convention by a mob of scholars willing to dispute any particular characterization.

Powers’s narrative is well composed, and he drops a few bits of Twainian dry wit in as well.  He relates the seminal events with detail and provides analysis as to how and why the world and the author consider them important.  He also covers smaller incidents that provide background and tone.  Overall one comes away with a solid impression of Twain’s importance, abilities, and flaws.

There are some seams visible as well.  The chapters occasionally restate material already covered in a way that another pass or two over the whole manuscript might have caught.  Powers also seems enamored of William Dean Howells as well.  I don’t know the story here, but I suspect that Powers is a student of Howells, and is also interested in writing about him more extensively, or has done so.  It’s never distracting; Powers never forgets whose story he’s telling.  But still, you can see him stealing verbal glances at the person he’d rather dance with.

These criticisms are more in the spirit of notes.  The work is interesting, enjoyable, and informative.

Recommended.

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University has a great hook: Brown Student spends a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and lives to tell.  It was certainly good enough to get me to pick it up.  The danger with a hook book is that it never becomes more than its gimmick. Disciple is so good that by the middle I’d forgotten that there was a hook at all.

Roose has many great qualities as a writer.  He’s inquisitive, intelligent, fair, and he writes clearly and with a sharp eye for the details that bring scenes alive.  Better than all of those things, though, he is fearlessly honest.  He puts himself into a situation where he keenly feels the prejudices of himself, his friends, and his family and works his way through it with us.

That sounds like Disciple is some Hallmark Channel journey of self discovery, but it’s more like a Bill Bryson travelogue.  There are interesting things to see, new people to meet, and moments that change one’s life.  Roose greets the points of interest with enthusiasm and wonder, sketches the people with lively economy, and earns the deep moments with great pacing and structured writing.  He hides all that structure behind an adventurous tone and brisk narrative.

Those kind of skills will serve a journalist well in any environment, but Roose has bitten off a big hunk of  discomfort and portent.  Liberty is uncomfortable to him because he, like many of his readers, believes that he’s heading into a world of hidebound intolerance. It is important because the group represented at Liberty is a significant segment of our society.  And the preconceptions matter because any time we demonize a group – and those preconceptions are demonization – we forget that these people are people.  Many excellent writers and good journalists would not be able to keep their integrity when confronting their own prejudices.  Roose acquits himself exceptionally.

He conveys the dogmatic blinders in place at Liberty that lead to real world intolerance and violence, and he describes the unexpected openness and fellowship that draws the students there together just as clearly.  It is here that his skills as a writer and fairness as a journalist shine.  The transcendent surprising beauty of this world and its insular biases both come out as the natural constructions of human beings and human communities.  Through his prose we feel the tug of a community on his heart that he disagrees with in his soul.  Everything in his experience at Liberty is personal and human – the very antithesis of demonized.  One may still come away believing that the Liberty teachings are wrong, but not that the people are inhuman.

It is a remarkable book.

A must.

A week or two ago, I sat down on an LAX to IAD flight with a copy of Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur, and I left the plane in DC as a Klosterman fan, having devoured the book in the intervening couple hours.  I’d certainly heard interesting things about Klosterman as a thinking man’s commenter on popular culture, but I wasn’t prepared for how fast I’d take the hook or how deep it would sink.

Dinosaur is a collection of essays on a fairly broad range of topics running from the usefulness of time travel to the dichotomy of NFL football as the most conservative and liberal sport in America.  From the first few pages of the first essay, about what it means that people say anything at all in interviews, I was gripped by Klosterman’s serious approach to playful topics.  “Why would you ever talk to (say) Michael Moore?” is a question everyone’s asked.  Few people have interviewed Errol Morris and Ira Glass on the topic, and interwoven their own well reasoned thoughts into those interviews to form a compelling essay.

Klosterman is a man who takes ephemeral and sometimes frivolous things seriously, and then subjects them to a meticulous dissection under the light of a strong intellect.  Then he composes those thoughts in a way that is compelling and diverting.  He is, in short, a man after my own heart; more honestly, he is a man I would like to be.

Strongly recommended.

Another Philip Marlowe novel – Raymond Chandler, of course.  Like The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, this is a mystery with Marlowe trying to get to the bottom of it.  As with the other novels, Chandler’s style creates a high contrast world of lush language and minimal, beautiful scene-setting.  Unlike those books, we get a version of Marlowe who is much more vulnerable.

In Farewell, Marlowe is much more in the world he’s exploring.  In the other books I often had the feeling that Marlowe was above the proceedings, even when he was emotionally invested.  There were moments of physical peril, but I never felt it.  More to the point Marlowe never seems to feel it.  That’s not the case in Farewell.

Marlowe’s always been human enough to make some mistakes – and he makes some doozies in Farewell – but he generally is the smartest and highest minded guy in the room.  In Farewell, I came away feeling Marlowe was letting his demons have their way with him more than usual.  And he suffers for it more than usual.

The suffering is never just a plot point; it is the natural consequence of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.  It’s Marlowe’s reactions to it that are interesting.  There’s the plot stuff, of course, but more interesting is how it changes him and how he shows it.  Viewing these changes through the stylized idioms of another time makes the workings a little harder to make out, but invests them with more iconic power as well.

As always, if you want a whodunnit, Chandler delivers.  He does so with so much style and literary power – and drive to say new things with a comfortable character – that I’m happy to read it if the case is unsolved.

Strongly recommended.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Grapes of Wrath, which means that what I think of it doesn’t matter very much.  I have not come away from my recent brushes with Steinbeck particularly impressed, though I have enjoyed some of his work.  I confess that those brushes left me somewhat reluctant to read more of him, but after The Forgotten Man, I was kind of primed for the time period.

Grapes is extremely impressive.  It is well structured, well written, factual, and sympathetic.  It manages to capture the migration of poor farmers from the dust bowl to California and migrant farming during the depression at levels from the strain on individual families to the larger economic forces behind the change.  In fact, though I mentioned the dust bowl, Steinbeck doesn’t; to him, the economic forces were going to cause people to lose farms and migrate even without the drought and erosion of the dust bowl.

Capturing all this is a difficult balancing act.  Structurally, Steinbeck alternates chapters between the large trends and the plight of a specific family, the Joads.  The wide lens shows that the Joads are not alone in their plight and the close chapters show us the specifics troubles of a family in crisis.  He also moves the group successfully through the most informative points in the migration.  They aren’t placed at specific historic events like some early-thirties Forrest Gump, but Steinbeck brings his family into contact with realistic examples of the best and worst of the depression in California.  All the situations the family encounters follow from the real situations; everyone is motivated by real emotions and economics.  There are no mustache-twirling villains here, nor white-hatted heroes, just people dealing with real events as human beings.

Steinbeck’s grasp of the specific situations and the larger forces would make this a textbook if he didn’t populate the world with believeable characters.  There are certainly characters here who act as symbols as well as people, but with the possible exception of Casey the ex-preacher, everyone reacts like a person to the situations around them. The reality of the characters’ reactions helps make his large scale descriptions comprehensible, even as it humanizes their effects.

Despite craft that makes it appear as though Steinbeck is relaying truth to readers, he certainly has a point of view.  I believe he plays fair, explaining comprehensible and even sympathetic motivations for even the least likeable characters.  Still, he is on the side of government help for people in trouble and for those people banding together to help themselves at the expense of farm owners and financiers.

Personally, I am sympathetic to that position, but even if you aren’t Grapes is a vivid, thoughtful description of a trying time in America.  Themes and situations in here apply today as well as they did in the 30s.

Strongly recommended.

The Long Goodbye is the Raymond Chandler novel that most people have heard of that isn’t The Big Sleep. After reading Sleep I was pretty sure that I’d like anything Chandler wrote, and Goodbye didn’t change that impression.

There are many similarities between the two.  Chandler’s voice is the same voice, and Marlowe’s the same character.  There’s a mystery and dames and lots of stylized tough guy talk.  The Los Angeles  setting conveys a sense of place to the point that LA is nearly a character.  In short, all Chandler’s strengths as a writer are here.

The differences are in tone and theme.  The Long Goodbye really couldn’t be titled anything else.  The pacing and tone make the reader feel the passage of time; the plot proceeds episodically over weeks, not the frantic rush of many mysteries.  The revelation is slow and lurching, as one finds out secrets about ones friends and relations in life.

The titular farewell also echoes through the text.  This is a book about absent friends, and not idealized ones.  The friend in question wasn’t Marlowe’s blood brother, nor did they see eye-to-eye. Their connection was made by chance, and develops awkwardly in fits. Yet friendship and decency impose obligations and attachments on men like Marlowe even when the relationship is rough hewn and haphazard.

The two themes play off one another as Marlowe discharges his debts and pays his respects in the fits and starts by which our lives all progress.  Chandler’s exploration of these uses a a clever traditional mystery plot in his unique style.  I never try to figure out whodunnit, but I was pleasantly surprised by the big reveal.  The trip is more interesting than the destination.

Strongly recommended.