Review: Let’s Kill Uncle, Rohan O’Grady

I have made up a poem. Would you like to hear it?

Rohan O’Grady
Is really a lady.

It’s true! Her name is actually June Skinner, which in my opinion is a name much better suited to the tone and contents of Let’s Kill Uncle than the rosy-cheeked-and-jocular-sounding “Rohan O’Grady.” But nobody asked for my opinion.

Let’s Kill Uncle is about a pair of children, a boy called Barnaby and a girl called Chrissie, who have both come to live on a little island off the coast of Canada. Because all but one of the men on the island died in World War II, there are no children at all besides just these two. Barnaby, who will inherit $10 million on attaining his majority, believes that his uncle is a psychotic madman trying to kill him; and nobody but Chrissie believes him. Together they hatch a plan to kill Uncle before he can kill them.

You know what doesn’t happen in this book? Uncle doesn’t turn out to be a sweet eccentric like so many presumed-dangerous adults in fiction about anxious children. He actually wants to kill the children. If they don’t kill him first, he’s going to get them. He has the crazy eyes and he wants Barnaby’s money. That’s because June Skinner is more like Shirley Jackson than she is like Edward Eager. Let’s Kill Uncle isn’t creepy to quite the same degree as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but it’s still sort of disturbing, albeit in a mostly-humorous way.

In completely different comparisons, June Skinner is sort of similar to Noel Streatfeild insofar as she doesn’t romanticize the characters of the children. They’re scared of the circumstances they’ve found themselves in, and they want adult approval, and at times they display flashes of integrity on certain points; but as a rule, they’re naughty the way children are, and practical the way children are. Their scheme for carrying out the murder is cold-blooded, and they spend a lot of time thinking about how not to get hanged once they’ve done it. So, um, I guess my comparison is to a very much darker and more gothic Noel Streatfeild, the point being that kids (like anyone) can be amoral monsters if nobody’s making them behave.

June Skinner! I would like to read another book by her to see how it compares. And I would like her to use her real name. Her real name is better than her pretend name. I’m sure she’s much swayed by this argument and will get right on the phone to her publisher to let them know that she would like all her books reissued under her given name.

Review: Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris

David Sedaris comes to Louisiana on book tours. And I want to tell you that right now, because nobody comes to Louisiana on book tours because publishers I guess think that we are stupid and illiterate. If they do come to Louisiana, they only come to New Orleans, but not David Sedaris. David Sedaris has been known to come to Louisiana and go to more than one town. He does it so regularly that I was convinced he must be from Louisiana. Which he’s not. He just comes there on book tours because we are not illiterate and we buy his books just like people in other states.

That is why I have really strong positive feelings for David Sedaris while only liking his books a medium amount.

I read Me Talk Pretty One Day in tenth grade. It was lent me by one of the many book-crazy people in the state of Louisiana, my friend Nezabeth, and I thought parts of it were really funny — like this one story he told about going into a bathroom at a party and finding a huge poop in the toilet and not wanting to leave because he didn’t want people to think he had left a big poop in the toilet and not flushed — because yes, I am predictable and poop stories always make me laugh — and parts of it really stressed me out because I didn’t know what was true and what he was making up.

Many years on, reading Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, I felt exactly the same way. I mightily enjoyed a number of the essays, like the one about obsessively keeping a diary and the one about having his passport stolen and the one about medical and dental care in France. His love for his sisters and for his boyfriend, Hugh, are obvious and touching. I felt fine about all that. It is cool with me that David Sedaris exaggerates for comedic effect the things his dentist said and how many baby turtles he accidentally killed as a child.

What really, really, really stresses me out are the essays that talk smack about his parents. Maybe his parents are awful. Maybe they are great. Maybe he had a happy childhood and these jokes he makes with them about how inadequate his father finds him and how much of a bully his father was are fine with everyone. Maybe they all laugh merrily about it at Sedaris family dinners. Like, probably so, right? Probably he wouldn’t make these jokes if it wasn’t all fine with everyone? Surely? Except when I read some of these essays it kind of feels like kidding on the square, like HA HA HA YOU NEVER REALLY LOVED ME DAD HA HA. But it must be all joke. Not serious at all. Right?

You can see me getting anxious about it before your eyes. I can’t help it. If I said anything remotely negative about any of my sisters in a published essay, I would fret about  it extensively and probably end up taking it out and instead saying “Social Sister is a beautiful goddess.” Because, you know, once you’ve written something down you can’t take it back. It’s out there!

And that is how I feel when I read David Sedaris, and is why, in spite of how great it is that he regularly visits Louisiana, I don’t read his books very often.

Cf. other reviews.

Review: In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje; or, Talk to me about beautiful prose

Disliking a book I expected to dislike always produces a strange mix of feelings. On one hand, I like being right. On the other hand, I like liking things. I greatly prefer liking things to disliking them. Given the choice, I would elect to like Michael Ondaatje, but the fact is that I just did not. I don’t like it when people indent dialogue instead of punctuating it normally, for one thing. Just punctuate it normally! Why do you think God invented punctuation in the first place?

(My stance in favor of normal punctuation has been documented in this space before, so I won’t go on. Just know that I prefer normal punctuation in almost every case.)

Here are the reasons I read In the Skin of a Lion, in increasing order of importance:

1. My friend the Enthusiast wanted to start a book discussion lunch thing with me and an extremely beautiful, intelligent coworker who I haven’t talked to very often. And the Enthusiast said she likes reading books with beautiful prose, and she suggested In the Skin of a Lion so I agreed.
2. I did not know that it was about aqueducts.

This book is about aqueducts. So now you know. I recognize that I should have found this out before consenting to read it, but I didn’t. It’s about Canadian history, too, which I guess is fine, except that I don’t know anything about Canadian history except how the British threw the Cajuns out of Canada and that is how they came to live in Louisiana instead; but the point is that all these historical tidbits were wasted on me. The millionaire who disappears in the book, Ambrose Small, apparently was a real guy. That seems like it should be an interesting plotline, yet instead it is exceptionally dull.

Another point to consider is that if the point of you as a writer is beautiful prose (which Michael Ondaatje might not claim is the case, but the Enthusiast heavily implied that it was), you had better be Tom Stoppard or Vladimir Nabokov. I mean that the prose had better be so exceptionally dazzling that it’s like reading the book version of Salisbury Cathedral or the Grand Canyon, where it knocks you on your ass and you can’t even think of anything else. I am reading Ada, or Ardor at the moment, and I eventually stopped counting the number of sentences that were making me say, “Whoa. Whoa,” because I worried my Nook couldn’t support that many bookmarks.

Or, well, I guess the problem is that I have no brand loyalty to this brand of prose. I am not especially interested in prose a la Marilynne Robinson and Michael Ondaatje, or even a la Donna Tartt, who has written one of my favorite books of all time. Their prose is fine, sometimes very beautiful, but striking metaphors and melancholy descriptions are not a sufficient condition for engendering enjoyment in me. I like The Secret History because the story is gripping; I have thrice failed to get more than a third of the way into The Little Friend because the story does not engage me.

What makes me appreciate prose qua prose is verbal agility. And humor, especially. Like the author has noticed that the English language is equal parts beautiful and absurd, and they are getting a really enormous kick out of it. Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Stoppard, Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible though not so much elsewhere — these are all writers whose prose is worthwhile on its own. A pure and scintillating pleasure.

Also, and I can’t emphasize this enough, In the Skin of a Lion is about aqueducts. AQUEDUCTS.

It’s about other things too. I know I know. It’s also about identity and other things. But it’s mainly about those things as they relate to aqueducts, and combined with the sort of prose it is, this feature of the book makes it positively unbearable to me. I just cannot abide with these brief staccato sentences about fires in kitchens and bridges falling over and whatnot. Pile on the clauses! Bring the periodic structure! That is the sort of prose that makes my heart sing. I am not a Caesar girl, I am a Cicero girl.

And you? Talk to me about beautiful prose. A talent writers should cultivate, or a distraction from good storytelling? Long gorgeous sentences with alliteration and chiasmus and zeugma and clauses clauses clauses, or is Ernest Hemingway the guy for you? Does poetical prose tend to seem affected to you or does it make your heart soar?

Review: The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Here’s what happened. The lovely and beautiful Jeanne, who has probably the best blog name out there and is also just an awesome person, sent me The Gone-Away World for my birthday last year. It came in the mail and was a complete and delightful surprise, and I was so touched, and I started reading The Gone-Away World right away because Jeanne said it was one of her favorite books ever. Immediately had no idea what the hell was happening. There were, like, pigs? And some sort of pipe disaster that maybe had something to do with radiation? And lots of made-up/repurposed words that I didn’t understand? And I was like, Oh hell, not only am I not going to like Jeanne’s favorite book, I’m not going to like the favorite book she sent me as a present. To avert this disaster, I swiftly shelved it on my shelves and did not read it anymore. Because apparently I subscribe to the ostrich school of problem-solving.

PSA: Ostriches don’t really do that. You may continue to use them as a metaphor as I have done above, but do please be aware that they don’t really bury their heads in the sand. I mean, how would that even work? Would they dig it with their beaks? In which case the danger would have definitely already eaten them/passed by the time they dug a hole deep enough to bury their heads in? Would they use preexisting holes? What if they weren’t near a hole?

Anyway, I realized recently that it had been almost a whole year since Jeanne so sweetly sent this book to me and I ungratefully failed to read it, and I was like, Oh screw it, I am the worst gift recipient in the whole world, I am going to read this book already. If I hate it I’ll just say, It was very inventive!

The Gone-Away World is a difficult book to describe. It’s a dystopian novel about a world only made livable by the Jorgmund Pipe, now on fire and threatening the realm of safety that has been carved out in the wake of a war that has left whole chunks of the world missing. As our narrator and his friends set out to repair the Pipe — a dangerous mission from which they know they will not all return — we are sent backward in time to hear the story of the narrator’s life before the war, and his friendship (really his brotherhood) with Gonzo Lubitsch.

Reading Jeanne’s review, I observe that she, too, had a difficult time getting into this book. It’s a difficult book to get into! The first chapter drops you in media res, and you think you know exactly what kind of world you’re in — post-nuclear probably, lots of radiation poison and other unpleasant fallout — but can I just tell you now? That is not the world you’re in. When the book finally reached the point of explaining all the things that had baffled and alienated me in the first chapter, it turned out to be an incredibly inventive sort of dystopia, the sort of thing that has weird and new possibilities that you wouldn’t have thought of and haven’t seen before. So that was excellent. I was completely surprised by how much I liked the parts of the book that dealt with the destruction and rebuilding of the world. It was a new, fascinating, awesome kind of dystopia, and I was sad when the book ended because I wanted to see more of that world.

(I realize I just said the book was inventive, which is what I said I was going to say if I didn’t like the book, but I did like the book. It’s just difficult to talk about it without saying it was inventive.)

The structure of the book, another thing that maddened me because I hate it when a book/movie/TV show is like “APOCALYPTIC SCENE OF CATASTROPHE” and then flashes a scene of bucolic pleasantness with a caption of “Six months previously”, turned out to make much better sense than I initially thought. This is a deliberately vague remark, the purpose of which is to assure readers who, like me, have trouble getting into the book, that there is a method to Nick Harkaway’s madness. Have faith, and he will pay thee all. Is what I’m saying. The sensibleness of flashing back will strike you in time, and you will go “Oh that’s why he wrote it this way.” I promise that will happen.

The writing didn’t charm me as much as it did Jeanne — sometimes it was funny, but sometimes it felt arch and fake. That wasn’t a huge deal, though, because so much insane stuff kept happening. So much insane stuff. All the insanest stuff. Basically,The Gone-Away World does not so much zig when you expect it to zag, as KAPLOOEY when you expect it to zag. And I say that in the best possible sense. As events unfold, there will be points at which you think you know what’s going to happen, but I promise you, you do not know what is going to happen. Like, at all.

Thank you, wonderful Jeanne! I am a dumb bunny for not reading The Gone Away World sooner, and I’ll definitely be trying Nick Harkaway’s new book Angelmaker when my library gets it in.

Lots of other reviews! Check them out here.

Review: Entwined, Heather Dixon

“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is one of several fairy tales that I truly love and only rarely find satisfying adaptations of. That isn’t a criticism of the world and its life choices, exactly, because I can see how “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” would be difficult to adapt well. It’s an odd little story, and the ending’s not the best ever, and even when I do read adaptations of it, I rarely feel they’ve done a good job exploring the potential of the original story. That was the case with Entwined, even though I did enjoy it.

Azalea is the oldest of eleven girls. Their mother, who teaches them dances and plays with them and eats meals with them, is pregnant with a twelfth child and very ill. She dies giving birth to the twelfth princess, and the princesses are left with their cold, distant father. He barely acknowledges them and orders that the whole house go into mourning for a year, which means, essentially, nobody gets to do anything fun. Dancing — now strictly forbidden — is the one thing that still makes the girls feel connected to their mother. Almost by accident, they discover a magic passage that leads to a place where they can dance all night under the auspices of a mysterious man called Keeper. But Keeper may not be what he seems.

What I liked: I really loved the development of the relationship between the king and his daughters. At the beginning of the book, he can barely speak to them, referring to them as “Miss” and insisting on a strictly regimented lifestyle. In a book where many of the characters were underdeveloped, it was nice to see the gradual reveal that the king cared about the girls and wanted the best for them. This all leads to some fairly touching moments in the climactic battle and denouement. Out of everything in the book, this plotline felt by far the most genuine.

I also thought some of the creepy moments were pleasingly creepy. (Highlight the following if you don’t mind spoilers.) Azalea finds that Keeper has imprisoned her mother’s soul when she sees her mother in the underground dance floor with her mouth sewn shut. Urgh. Also when Keeper is trying to make Azalea do what he wants, he traps all of her sisters in mirrors. Isn’t it nice how mirrors have a seemingly endless capacity to be creepy?

What I didn’t like: The system of magic by which the story was run didn’t hang together all that well. I didn’t have a good sense of what sort of thing was permitted by this system of magic, and how a person would go about fighting it. The idea was that magic was sort of gone from the kingdom but not really — I don’t know, I could have used more backstory and a clearer picture of how magic worked and what everybody thought about it. I felt like a lot of potential for interesting story was missed here.

The sisters, of course, were indistinguishable apart from the top three, but that would be hard to avoid, with twelve of them. The suitors who came along were entertaining (esp. Lord Teddy because really, who doesn’t like nice young men who say “Dash it all” all the time?), but their relationships to the girls felt cardboardy, something the author put in because she felt she must, and because the fairy tale called for menfolk. Nor were they particularly well-integrated into the larger story. Dropping them wouldn’t have made any difference to the climax, which is never a good sign.

All in all, it was a fun fairy tale retelling — I love fairy tale retellings — that didn’t take full advantage of all the storylines and plot ideas it contained. But I still liked it and even teared up at the end, because, well, I am just susceptible to emotional moments with parents and their kids.

Numerous other people have read this, as the Book Blogs Search Engine‘s several pages of results will tell you. I missed seeing Anastasia‘s post on it earlier this month, which is weird because she posted about it around the same time that I was reading it. I don’t know how I missed it.

Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

I thought Leap Day would be an excellent day to post about Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a story about things that might or might not be real, and events that happen inside and outside of time. My sister (Indie Sister!) gave this to me for Christmas, and I actually read it a while ago but missed reviewing it in one of my reviewing flurries. So I shall talk about it now instead!

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is about a boy called Jacob who was traumatized by the sudden, violent death of his grandfather. He remembers seeing a monster come and take his grandfather, but his family assures him that this never really happened. On the advice of his therapist, Jacob sets out for the Welsh island where his grandfather claims he once attended a school for children with special powers. The idea is for Jacob to see how regular the island really is, so that he can move past these stories and live a normal, well-adjusted life. But when he reaches the island, he finds more than just the broken-down ruins of the old school.

To start with, books with pictures are awesome. I get so excited when I find a slightly older edition of a classic book that has color plates sprinkled throughout. Woodcut or watercolor or pen and ink illustrations make my heart sing. The pictures that adorned my childhood copies of Peter Pan, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Little Women are in my heart forever. I get why books don’t really do this anymore, that color plates cost a fortune and the publishing industry is already struggling, &c., &c. But gosh I sure do love it when a book includes a couple of pictures. Wish they all could. Anyway, Ransom Riggs is a collector of old photographs, and Miss Peregrine is illustrated with pictures he has found over the years.

(Writing in praise of illustrations always makes me feel like “How can you reeeeead this? There’s no pictures!” “Well, some people use their imagination.” “Belle, it’s about time you got your head out of those books and on to more important things. Like me.” Beauty and the Beast is the best, y’all.)

Many of the reviews I’ve read of Miss Peregrine note that the story is rather slight, that it occasionally feels forced. Ransom Riggs wrote the story to the photographs, not the other way around, so this is a natural complaint to have. For me, while the story was a little slight, it wasn’t any slighter than a lot of kids’ books of this type; and I didn’t think the connection between narrative and photographs felt forced at all. The unrealness images fit so well with the tone of the book and the way the children in the home have been taken outside of time.

If I had a complaint, it would be that I didn’t realize there was going to be a second book. I assume there’s going to be a second book? Because the first one wraps up on a sort of “See sequel for more!” note, rather than a “Story is done, the end” note. Jacob has come to terms with his new knowledge of the wonders and dangers of the world, but he hasn’t quite come into his own action-wise. So I’m looking forward to the sequel, in which I hope there will be lots of fights. My favorite thing about stories where people have all different powers is when they team up and use their powers together! To destroy evil! There was some of that in the climax of Miss Peregrine and I liked it.

Other reviews are numerous! Get thee to the Book Blogs Search Engine!

Review: Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer

Joshua Foer, brother of a fiction writer whom I frequently mix up with Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, was writing a story about the world memory champions, people who can memorize the order of multiple decks of cards in five minutes, people who can repeat with perfect accuracy lists of thousands of complicated, unrelated items. Without exception, the memory champions he speaks to assure him that they are not special, their brains are not exceptional, and that anyone could learn to be a memory champion. Foer decides to put this theory to the test by seeing if he can become the US memory champion in the following year’s championship.

If you are interested in cognitive psychology and neurobiology and just anything to do with brains (and I am), much of the incidental material in Moonwalking with Einstein will already be familiar to you. For example, this thing about sexing chicks: It is incredibly difficult to sex baby chickens, because in many cases there are no clearly describable differences between male chicks and female chicks. But people who sex chicks for a living eventually reach a point at which they do it accurately over 95% of the time. They can’t say how they know the sex of the chick. They just know. Human brains!

On the other hand, I really enjoy reading about weird subcultures, and the weird subculture of memory champions was no exception. Foer writes engagingly about the two championships he attends, at which world-class memory experts may freeze on the fifth card in the pack, and Americans ruefully admit that other countries are better at memory than America is. I had not previously heard of “memory palaces”, the technique everybody uses for remembering a series of things, and that was an interesting thing. Basically you call to mind a space with which you are very familiar — say, the house where you grew up — then populate it with images of the items you are trying to remember. Then to recall them, you take a mental stroll through your childhood home, and there you will see all the stuff you’ve put there. Cool, eh?

You could read this book and decide to become a memory champion your own damn self, because the memory champions are telling the truth: It’s not about having a special brain. It’s just about practicing a lot. What I discovered while reading Moonwalking with Einstein is that writing lists is just not onerous enough to make it worthwhile to practice being a memory champion for two hours a day. Much in the same way that being awesome at cooking is not worth practicing that for two hours.

Foer includes a chapter about a British man called Daniel Tammet, a high-functioning autistic savant whose abilities Foer doubts. I’m not sure, really, what place this chapter has in this book — it seemed a bit out of left field — but nevertheless, it was interesting. Foer believes that Daniel does not really have the perfect memory he claims, that he is using the same memory tricks Foer himself uses. It was a weird little nonsequitur of a chapter but I still am a fan of reading about weird subcultures and unusual people, and so I enjoyed it a lot.

Well, that’s about all I have to say. Memory palaces. Americans are not good at memory compared to citizens of other countries. I am too lazy to practice things. Sexing chicks & other stuff I already knew about from having a crush on cognitive psychology. All in all, Moonwalking with Einstein was not substantive enough for the circumstances in which I read it, which were that I missed the 3:30 bus to the airport by one minute and had to sit in the very, very cold bus station for an hour waiting for the next bus. And then once I was on the bus, I was petrified that I would miss the airport stop and end up being dropped off somewhere in the wilds of Westchester and not be able to get to the airport EVER. And once I was at the airport I was afraid they would bump me off of my very full flight and I would not be able to reach my destination in time.

…Yes, I am a stressy traveler. Why do you ask?

Other reviews are here! Oh, and in case you do not already know about RadioLab, can I take this opportunity to suggest that you check them out? Their show on memory and forgetting is here, dealing with some of the same issues Joshua Foer raises, and I love them so so much. RadioLab is made out of happiness and fascination.

Review: Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sometimes I do a quick search through my blog archives and find that I have somehow, in four years (four years!!), not reviewed a book that I love more than I love eating cheese fries while watching The Good Wife (in this case, more even than I would love eating cheese fries while watching Kalinda plan and execute a cold-blooded takedown of Dana). Watership Down is one such book. It is also an example of the phenomenon that a late conversion can make you more of a fanatic about something than if you loved it all along. My mother told me about Watership Down when I was in my early-to-mid teens, and I was like, “Oh, it’s about a psychic bunny rabbit and his bunny rabbit pals? Well I’m just going to rush right the hell out to read that one!”

However, if you haven’t read Watership Down, you should rush right the hell out to read it. It is the best ever.

Watership Down is about a rabbit called Hazel and his brother Fiver, who gets a premonition of danger to the warren where they live. When the leader of the warren refuses to listen to Fiver about this, Hazel and Fiver collect a small group of rabbits and flee the warren in search of a new home. As wanderers they are forced to behave in ways totally foreign to them, adjusting to meet the unexpected challenges they encounter, like not having any girl rabbits and not knowing how to get across rivers and making friends with birds and getting in fights with terrifying warrens full of creepy psychopath rabbits.

I find it difficult to enumerate the qualities that make Watership Down so wonderful, but I will try to tease out a few. I adore the way that Richard Adams develops Hazel from an average rabbit in an average warren to a leader of vision and courage. Adams manages this mostly through the eyes of the other rabbits: you see them begin to trust Hazel’s decisions more and more, and he sort of organically becomes their Chief Rabbit, and by the end any of them would die for him (and let’s face it, so would you). There is this marvelous scene towards the end where Hazel goes to confront the leader of an opposing warren, and for a scene that lasts a page and a half and consists only in Hazel talking quietly, it is just so badass.

Watership Down is also an excellent example, if you’re into that sort of thing, of a monomyth story. Richard Adams was strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell, and the story structure is very Odyssean, with the rabbits encountering danger after danger in order to find, and settle into, their home. There is the leader character and the supernatural aid character and the clever one and the strong one and the Neville one and the jester. You can’t not like this! It’s programmed into your brain to like this.

The way Richard Adams writes his rabbits is superb. They are really rabbits, not rabbit-shaped people like, say, the animals in Wind in the Willows. When they act, they act like rabbits would, or they at least acknowledge that their exceptional circumstances are forcing them to act differently than rabbits ordinarily would. That is great. Then on the other hand their speech patterns are those of mid-twentieth-century Brits, which look, there is a pretty fundamental layer of my consciousness at which proper books are the Chronicles of Narnia and proper characters talk like the Pevensies, so book characters who call each other “old chap” will please me more often than not.

I like plans. I like it in books and shows and things where the characters come up with a plan and then put the plan into action and then the plan works (or the plan encounters a roadblock and the plan-makers, thinking fast on their feet, alter the plan to adjust for the new wrinkle) and the desired effect is achieved. If I had been born in the days of Homer, I would compose an epic poem in praise of plans and plan-making, and I would sing it loudly at feasts and festivals. Because I love plans. And the Watership Down rabbits are always making plans, and that is another reason Watership Down is amazing.

Finally, if it weren’t for Watership Down, I would never have known about Mary Renault. I would have been part of the horde of people whose lives are currently impoverished by not knowing about Mary Renault. My mumsy told me about Mary Renault, and she had only read Mary Renault herself because one of the chapter epigraphs in Watership Down is from The King Must Die. I wouldn’t know about the Alexander books or The Charioteer! That would be terrible. Thanks, Watership Down!

P.S. SPOILERS. It is awesome that Bigwig’s final victory over General Woundwort is a psychological victory. I could read that scene every damn day.

Review: The Lambs of London, Peter Carkroyd

Five bitchy remarks in response to The Lambs of London:

1. I cannot keep Peter Carey and Peter Ackroyd straight in my head. Both of them write books that sound like I would love them, and then I never love them. So I am doing like Mother Jaguar. I graciously wave my tail, and I shall call it Peter Carkroyd. And I shall leave it alone.

2. Can’t not mention this when talking about Peter Carkroyd because it is horrifying. Peter Carkroyd is also notable for writing the book Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes. The film is narrated by someone who calls Oscar “my grandfather”, so all the way through the movie you assume that awkward Cate Blanchett and awkward Ralph Fiennes are eventually going to get together, to produce the father of the narrating grandchild. But does that happen? NO! Awkward Ralph Fiennes gets very ill taking a church-on-a-raft to the Amazon or the Australian outback or someplace and finally flops limply and near death into a settlement, and a woman in the settlement is like “Oh, poor dear, I will take care of him,” and he’s all “I’m near death” and she takes him home and rapes his semiconscious self and the next morning he goes into the church-on-a-raft to pray for forgiveness for seducing the woman (this takes place way back in the day before they knew about sex), and the church-on-a-raft sinks and he drowns. And then the end of the movie is, like, the narrator turns out to be this old guy telling this story to his own granddaughter, who is, like, ten years old. Not cool, Peter Carkroyd and assorted film people. Not cool. And scarred me and Social Sister for life.

3. Charles and Mary Lamb, the fictionalized subjects of The Lambs of London, are people who just don’t interest me. I don’t know why. Mary Lamb went crazy and stabbed her mother in the throat, and Charles Lamb had to look after her for the rest of his life. I love craziness, and I love devoted brothers. Why I wouldn’t be interested in a) them or b) a novel about them is beyond me. But it’s true. I don’t care about Charles and Mary Lamb. I just don’t.

4. The other historical storyline in The Lambs of London is about William Henry Ireland, the famous Shakespeare forger who forged a ton of documents in Shakespeare’s hand and eventually got caught. I actually am interested in this, but Peter Carkroyd dealt with it so boringly and with so little insight or novelty that by the end of the book I was actually less interested in William Henry Ireland than I was when I started.

5. Peter m.f. Carkroyd. Why do we even let you write books?

Review: Zone One, Colson Whitehead

There are certain writers in New York who seem to be everywhere but with whose work I am unfamiliar. On the weekend of Halloween, I decided to start making inroads. I am leery of Nicole Krantz, and I am actively unfond of JFranz so decided to go with Colson Whitehead, as I know nothing to his discredit and think he has cool hair. It was Halloween weekend, the weather was going to be a bit slushy (I innocently thought), and altogether it seemed like the perfect weekend for staying in and reading Colson Whitehead’s new zombie book, Zone One. But then, instead of being mildly slushy, the weather on that Saturday decided to be a Winter Wonderland(tm). Winter Wonderland weather is not zombie weather.

(Lest I be misunderstood, I was not happy about the Winter Wonderland. I was not ready for Winter Wonderland. It was at that time still two months until Christmas, and if I start feeling Winter Wonderlandy in late October, the many weeks until Christmas (I LOVE CHRISTMAS) would seem insanely long. Miniature Roommate and I were deeply unhappy with the Winter Wonderland. We spent most of the day inside, drinking hot chocolate, watching The Count of Monte Cristo, and periodically leaping up, glowering at the window, and having the following dialogue in shrieks:

Jenny: This is bullshit!
Miniature Roommate: It’s OCTOBER.
J: BULLSHIT.
MR: Why can’t it wait? Why is it doing this to us?
J: ABSOLUTE TOTAL BULLSHIT.
MR: Why does the weather want me to start working on my Seasonal Affective Disorder already?
J: Poor us!
MR: Poor us!

Miniature Roommate and I both like to whine, which is one of the reasons we get along so well.)

Point is, the reading of Zone One had to be postponed until the fall had returned. Cannot be reading Halloweeny books when the skyyyyyyyyyy is a ha-zy shade of winter! So I waited until the week started, and by then it was too late to curl up with a book on the couch and read it cover to cover, and I think in the end that was probably a good thing. Because here’s a passage from Zone One:

It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last.

In my opinion, this is an excellent passage. I think Whitehead should have ditched “forgotten”, and the clause that begins with “calling forth” is grammatically awkward, but overall, a good passage. It has good images and it evokes the postapocalyptic mindset and landscape. It feels crafted, but not overly; it’s got enough precision of imagery to be clear, but not so much that it’s not evocative; altogether, it works really well as a section ender.

But then the next section immediately begins with this:

His unit has slept the last four nights in a former textile warehouse that had been converted into spectacular lofts, alcoves of glamour notched into the cliff face of the city. The apartment they chose belonged to the drummer of a minor rock outfit whose one big charter was a muscular anthem that tried to identify, verse by verse, the meaning of stamina. It was a stadium staple, a real rouser, the royalties evidently providing ample down-payment money. In the blown-up magazine covers on the walls, the owner was perpetually on the verge of being elbowed from the frame by the rest of the band, who were of a more rarified attractiveness. Such was the drummer’s lot.

And other parts have stuff like this:

The two rigs were the size of shipping containers, perched on trailers that had dragged them through tthe Zone after they had been deposited by aerial crane. Who knew which military installation’s thighs they had slithered from, what manner of other deviced gestated in the neighboring R&D lab. [and on and on and on into infinity]

The problem is not that I hate metaphors and descriptions, but I don’t like metaphors that don’t do anything. “Alcoves of glamour notched into the cliff face of the city” sounds good, but it isn’t a precise description and doesn’t create an image in my mind of what the lofts looked like. I think surprising metaphors should be scrutinized closely and applied judiciously. The passage about the god of death is worth being lavish over, because it’s the end of a section and it’s talking about something important to the setting. It’s exhausting and frustrating to read a book where the author is lavish with the metaphors in every single passage. The writerliness made it hard for my reading to flow smoothly along. It was like Marisha Pessl multiplied by twenty and minus the engaging plotline. I felt the way Samuel Johnson felt about the metaphysical poets.

The other reason it’s frustrating is that Zone One subscribes to the school of dystopian fiction where the author doesn’t want to seem too eager to explain everything right away — which is fine, I’m fine with that, exposition can be really awkward; but if that’s what you’re going to do, you have to be able to create a sense of place pretty vividly. The preponderance of writerly metaphors obscured my vision of what the city was like in this post-zombie world; and what kept happening is that I wasn’t sure if some of the descriptions were supposed to be literal or metaphorical. I wasn’t immediately sure how far into the future the story was supposed to be set, and it took me ages to get a sense of place. A clear, straightforward description of the loft apartment — or any of the dozens of places in New York that they go — would have gone a long way toward helping me get my bearings. I wanted to shriek SAY NORMAL WORDS at Colson Whitehead. I love metaphors but I also love nice clear writing. (N.B. Colson Whitehead has heard this criticism before and does not appreciate it.)

I feel like when a paragraph makes me want to scream “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?”, some part of the writer/reader mechanism has gone wrong. The book has some terrific little set pieces, especially towards the end, but the writing was driving me crazy, and the plot didn’t move fast enough to please me. And that is why I didn’t enjoy Zone One as much as I wanted to, though more than I probably would have if I’d sat down and read all those exhausting relentless metaphors in one sitting, rather than over several days on several days’ subway rides. Also I don’t like zombies. They are all mute and lurchy. If I’m going to read about supernatural critters, I’d like them to be loquacious.

I am not giving up on Colson Whitehead though! I’m going to read Sag Harbor, and I have high hopes of liking it better. I want to like one of these ubiquitous New York writers! I’m pretty sure JFranz has irritated me too much in the past for it to ever be him. I hated the one book I read by Paul Auster, ditto Siri Hustvedt. And Jonathan Safran Foer is not a different person in my mind from JFranz or Jonathan Lethem. Soooo….

This evening I am off away home for the glorious Thanksgiving season, during which I shall eat masses of food, have my hair cut by someone I trust, play with my puppy, drive about with Daddy, take walks with Mumsy, watch football with Captain Hammer, and go dress-shopping then get tired of dress-shopping and go home and watch twenty consecutive episodes of The Vampire Diaries with Social Sister. Taken altogether it will pretty much be the pinnacle of human happiness, especially if we win the Arkansas game. I will be away from the blogs most of next week, so if you read anything awesome, please come tell me, or email me, or whatever. I am definitely in the market for something awesome to read.