Month: August 2013

The Quarry by Iain Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kit has Asperger’s, we’re led to believe, and outright told at one point, but it comes across merely as a device for narration, not an actual useful character description. Kit’s being called “somewhere between a genius and an utter” only allows for a kind of commentary on commentary—a character who gets to say why he says the things he says— using words and phrases that do not contribute to a conversation, but just keep it flowing. The end result is a first-person narrator who comes across as a third-person narrator.

Well, so what, right? Here’s a novel called <The Quarry, about a weekend in the last few months of man dying of cancer, surrounded by visiting friends, old mates from their college dates. A crumbling house on the edge of a gigantic hole, a lot of booze, and a search for a missing tape with “embarrassing.” contents. Have you got enough symbols to play with yet?

I just got the feeling, reading this, that Banks throws out all these ham-handed symbols just so the reader could grapple onto them, leaving him free to explore, without agenda, a deeper, less cut-and-dried story. What it means to be faced with one’s own mortality, fallibility, the inconsequence of existence. It’s not merely that the universe is hostile and indifferent, it’s that the universe is shitty and at the same time pointless.

And the only way to narrate this exploration (not discovery) is via a matter-of-fact voice. But a third-person narration makes the author himself susceptible to being judged as having a moral point of view, so make the narrator a first person, someone who experiences and is effected by the action, and who, being autistic, does not judge.

I’ve only ever read one other book by Banks, ages ago, so I am probably completely off the mark here. But I’ll say this: 300+ pages, set mostly in one house over the course of a weekend, where, more or less, nothing really happens, and I do not regret reading it.

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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David McRaney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here’s a short little book, divided into 48 bite-sized chapters. Each chapter details a different heuristic, fallacy or effect we keep in our brains, in order to deal with a great big complicated chaotic indifferent world, filled with illogical creatures. Those illogical creatures are, of course, other human beings.

This is pop science at its best, given you tastes of intriguing ideas and understandings, with lots of examples and descriptions of experiments. If you want to read more, a healthy bibliography at the back will guide you to the quoted journals, studies, and books themselves.

The whole thing reads sort of like a collection of blog entries, which is not a complaint, It has the heft and pace of a bathroom book—something to a read a few chapters from a bit at a time. Some of the chapters overlap, and there are points where I wasn’t sure what the distinction between two similar aspects where—a heuristic was simply repackaged as an effect here and there. But hey, ya gotta fill pages. Reddit liked the book, and so did Lifehacker.

There’s website you can go to that has excerpts and podcasts linked to the book, and McRaney has a sequel out, called You Are Now Less Dumb. So if you liked The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronso, or Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, or even the Freakonomics books, add You Are Not So Smart to your to-read list.

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A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Picked this up in a used book store for a few bucks. Didn’t recognize the title, although I was hunting down Thompson tomes. I haven’t memorized his works list yet, but I knew a few to look for. This one, A Swell-Looking Babe, never gets a mention. Now I know why.

I shouldn’t compare one book to another, but I do it all the time anyway. And I’m no keen scholar Thomson scholar, yet, but this one seemed a bit meager. I mean, Thompson’s got this reputation for a real crackling suspense writer, and the other stuff I’ve read so far lives up to that. But not Swell. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better than other books I’ve forced my way through. But it’s not up to Thompson snuff, in my opinion.

The plot is complicated, and gets a bit confusing in places with Thompson’s thin prose style. There’s some characters in there that don’t come across as very consistent. There’s some situations that have this kind of forced tension and I’m not sure where the tension is supposed to have come from.

I feel like a fella who’s sitting down to a four star meal and starts complaining about how it’s only three stars. Three is still pretty damned good. Three will fill you up and if all you ever ate was threes, you’d be dining fine. But if you were expecting four…

Then again, if a body’s going to read everything by a writer, a body has to read everything. The man wrote a couple dozen novels, and I guess they can’t all be cracker jacks. So my advice—if you’re just getting into Thompson, don’t start here. But if you’re plowing through all his stuff, plow through this one too.

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An Arsonist’s Guide To Writers’ Homes In New England by Brock Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This started out as a solid three-star book, worked its way up to four via cleverness, and then got bogged down in a bit of tedium and down to three again. But I’m nostalgic for that cleverness, so call it three point five, rounded up to four. I’m going to justify this by saying that I’m looking forward to reading Brock Clarke’s other books, which is praise enough.

An Arsonist’s Guide is silly, but it’s such a subtle silliness that you kind of have to pay attention. It pops up here and there, an almost hidden taste of absurdity. This casts the main character as something of a fool, allowing the reader to doubt the veracity of his passions at almost every turn. He’s a self-proclaimed “bumbler,” a man prone to “accidents,” and while you take those accidents at face value at first, you start to wonder about them towards the end.

And it’s that end where I got a bit frustrated, as I say, with tedium. I wanted some kind of resolution, if not revelation. New characters keep showing up, each as stand-out exquisite as the next, and I don’t know whether to cast them as environmental or willful. When we finally do get a few histories revealed, my reaction was “really” and the same time as “how would that even work.”

I guess the point is that if readers’ willfully suspend disbelief, so do people in real-life, with the expectation that their own life will tell a story. It’s easy to tell lies to people who want to hear a narrative, not the cold, inconvenient truth. Or something.

But I liked it. The Arsonist’s Guide felt to me like what A Confederacy of Dunces would be if set in New England suburbs with a much humbler Ignatius J. Reilly. Brock Clarke has been compared to John Irving, and this character to Irving’s Garp (which I have not read) so I guess that says something for those of you who like that sort of thing.

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The 39 Steps by John Buchan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So here’s one of the first, if not the very first, man-on-the-run stories. Here’s a spy novel before there were spy novels. And not even archetypal James-Bond type stuff. I’m talking about what the spy-genre has become lately—less international intrigue, subtle politics and craft, and more thriller-style run-and gun. I guess the genre’s returning to its roots, although I have no idea if Fleming and Ludlum drew much from Buchan.

I grabbed a copy of The 39 Steps after seeing the new hard-back re-issues in a book store, although I got mine for 99 cents on my e-reader. A fun read, and not without a little depth. It starts off with a guy who’s too bored for his own good, what James Bond might have been if he’d skipped military service and got ahold of Catcher in the Rye instead. But all of that’s just ironic prelude to the inevitable fun: murder, a wild chase through Scottish country side, disguises, ciphers, daring-do, doubt, triumph.. and then world war one.

Oh well. Buchan doesn’t bother giving us the party line on why or how the war started, blending a few made-up motivations with a touch of actual history to lend itself authenticity. But history’s not the point, nor is patriotism for that matter, or any kind of morality. This is just an adventure, one that a bored middle-class type can get into for a few hours. Nothing more.

Nor does it need to be more. And this was a nearly harsh lesson for me, since, right in the thick of things, my e-reader went all wonky. Right at the climax, whenever I turned to the next chapter, the book would turn itself off. I managed to download a version to my desktop, and realized that the page numbers were misleading me—I was, in fact, at the end of the novel (the rest was glossary and biography). No denouement to speak of, no anticlimax, which was a bit anticlimactic.

A tight little novel, readable in an afternoon. Then you can go back to your boring life.

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Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence by Jill Emerson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Always been a sucker for hard-boiled fiction, especially the old pulps. Well, I say old, but I don’t think they’re old yet. Jim Thompson’s old, but I’m only just getting into Thompson. Ross H. Spencer’s old. Is Stephen King old? He’s got a title in the Hard Case Crime library, and so does Lawrence Block.

Seems there’s this old pulp revival thing going on, and it’s not enough to make a buck dusting off the oldies, we got guys writing new oldies too. Guys writing new oldies using their old pseudonyms. Or something.

I guess Block wrote lesbian crime fiction under the name Jill Emerson ages ago, and for this new old stuff he’s written a new book with that old name. I never read any of that old Jill Emerson stuff, so I can’t tell you if this is more of the same.

But I have read all of the John Keller novels, and I can assure you Getting Off, this novel, is more of that same. Same straight forward tone, same matter-of-fact attitude towards murder. But now there’s sex. And there’s long cheesy parts, which I guess is the way they did it back then. Almost cartoonish, nearly a parody.

There’s a meager plot and an attempt at a morality, but the ending is too long and drawn out and there’s enough coincidences tossed in to make it all too convenient and just a tad tiresome. I guess I can give that sort of thing a pass when I’m indulging in some old pulp. But when it’s new-old, it doesn’t feel authentic. Just played out.

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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of you are going to absolutely love this book. I didn’t, but then, that’s just me. Read my other reviews, the things I’m in to, you can probably figure you why this one wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. I read it mostly because the title was intriguing, a book club I’m in had read it before I joined, and it was immediately available at the library.

The story’s not bad, and the writing is consistent. It’s languid, not quit torpid, (although to me it was). Sensuous, sensual, whatever. Although most of the imagery is, by force, black-and-white, Morgenstern paints a vivid picture.

However, I might not have read the book if I had known how dreamy it was going to be. It’s call The Night Circus, but the circus itself , in the novel, is called The Circus of Dreams. I can’t stand reading about dreams. Not just that they’re pointless, cop-outs used by writers who can’t be bothered to stick to their own rules. Dreams are weird, grounded in nothing substantial or meaningful, completely alien—and therefore boring—to anyone except the original dreamer. Or, they’re written about in a way so utterly unrealistic. No one knows why or how we dream, so how can any writer hope to relate dreams in a way that does anything except remind the reader she’s immersed in artifice?

That said, the dreaminess of the Night Circus is not all that bad. Morgenstern offers up a cozy atmosphere, the kind that the “curl up around a good book” type of reader will enjoy getting lost in. There were times when I was counting pages as I read, but others times when I was surprised how much I’d gotten through.

So, while I should give this book two stars, I’m going to add one more out of respect for what Morgenstern has managed to construct—a fantasy, an illusion held together as much by the reader’s willing complicity as by tricks of light and word choice. Just like the circus itself.

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