The Girl Who…

As I was incoherently saying earlier today, there’s a dearth of strong female characters in, well, everywhere. It’s no secret that Hollywood writers still uniformly think that women are too ‘adorkable’* to chew gum and walk – see Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, Katherine Heigl, Zooey Deschanel, et al. I also can’t think of very many strong, smart, self-sufficient female heroines in literature either. Alice in Wonderland and Pippi Longstocking come to mind. Lucy Pevensie. Arya Stark. Lyra Belacqua. Hermione Granger. Matilda Wormwood. Somebody write in and remind me of a kick-butt heroine who isn’t a small child. The only instance I can instantly remember of a grown woman standing up for herself and being strong is Lady Eowyn from The Lord of The Rings. Nearly every female character in every book ever written is either a dirty slut or a miserable helpless victim. It may not be fair to fault writers who lived 150 years ago for insufficient feminism – they wrote about the times they lived in. The Sexual Revolution wasn’t that long ago. It’s no wonder we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Now, in what the entertainment industry will surely dismiss as a freak occurrence with no rational explanation, we have the massive popularity of a book and movie franchise that wouldn’t exist without its convention-shattering heroine. I’m talking about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, which introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, the first truly, fully modern fictional heroine. Larsson’s books are compelling enough mysteries, but there’s no shortage of those floating about. What there is shortage of, and what these books offer, is an original character, an amped-up version of today’s cool young woman. Lisbeth is a deeply, perhaps irrevocably troubled person, and that is part of her appeal. As Larsson bluntly states on the first page of his first book, a staggering percent of women find themselves on the receiving end of some kind of violent and degrading treatment. It’s a lucky woman indeed who makes it to old age without being abused in one way or another. Most of us can relate to being made to feel helpless and weak. However, the image of the stereotypical weepy, self pitying victim is in itself degrading. As if a woman who has been raped or otherwise assaulted should just curl up and die, or continue feeling helpless, worthless and violated for the rest of her life. What I think readers love about Lisbeth Salander is her absolute refusal, no matter the horrible things that have been done to her, to give in to the victim mentality. She’s been abused, but she’s no helpless victim. She fights back with every weapon at her disposal. She continues, against all odds, to be herself.

Her role as a righteous avenger is only part of her appeal, although it’s the most obvious one. But besides having a talent for annihilating those who oppress her, Lisbeth personifies what I think of as an ideal new woman in countless other ways. She breaks practically every convention of how women are portrayed, across the board. First off, she is not conventionally attractive, a cardinal sin for any woman, fictional or otherwise. She’s less than five feet tall, malnourished, heavily pierced and tattooed, badly dressed, and has a bad haircut. She has zero social skills, an almost worse sin, for after physical appearance a woman’s worth is measured in charm. A woman should be like a kitten society says; soft, cuddly and endlessly, brainlessly amusing. Lisbeth is not amusing. She’s sexually liberated. She fucks whoever she wants to, whenever she feels like it, with no emotional investment. As is her prerogative, but that’s still considered shocking. The fact that Larsson has written a heroine with the sexual morals of a man is in itself a great leap forward. Society is still trying to wrap its collective head around the idea that a woman can and should freely pursue her sexual desires, outside the love/marriage institution. The fact that Lisbeth continues to enjoy sex despite having been raped is another huge fuck-off to victim culture. She sees no reason to let one man’s depraved actions destroy her own capacity for pleasure. She’s not interested in love, either. She does fall in love at one point, but it doesn’t work out, she feels bad for a while, then she gets over it. As we all do. No hand wringing, no baby-come-back. Having a love interest is traditionally a defining feature of any fiction featuring females, with the possible exception of the Miss Marple stories. How can a woman live without being defined by the man who owns her heart? Very easily, it turns out. Finally, Lisbeth’s greatest strength is her brilliant mind. She’s not defined by her looks or her sexuality or who she’s in love with. If there’s anything to define her by, it’s being a genius. A thoroughly modern one, a wizard on the computer who ferrets out evildoers’ secrets to use against them in self-defense. She gets by on her own resourcefulness, never waiting around to be rescued. This might be the first time we’ve met a heroine who is so completely her own person.

Obviously the thanks for Larsson’s popularity rests entirely on Lisbeth’s shoulders. For as I might have mentioned before, he’s kind of a crappy writer in many ways. The three Millennium books have a lot of faults, which I’ll admit are par for the course in the thriller/mystery genre. Larsson’s prose is supremely clunky, his dialogue graceless. There are long bouts of boring and unimportant exposition. There’s his habit of cataloging every sandwich, cup of coffee and Ikea purchase. To be fair, though, the editing process was never properly completed, because the author died before publication. Also to his credit, Larsson had quite a depraved imagination, inventing an unusually compelling series of mysteries. The first book can stand alone, and has a somber wintry mood that is very different from the other two, which delve speedily into a convoluted and far-reaching conspiracy. The last two books move with immense speed, gathering clues and twists on nearly every page. Larsson was planning a series of ten books, and had supposedly nearly finished the fourth one at the time of his death. After unraveling the inner workings of Sweden’s Secret Police, I can only imagine what new evils he was planning to mine. As always, his subject is the abuse of power. It was writ on a small scale in the first novel, unfolding withing one awesomely dysfunctional family. In the final two, he tackled abuse of power on a government level, with the same righteous anger. The sense that Larsson isn’t just aiming to entertain, but is truly all steamed-up about inequity within society might also be a part of the series’ appeal.

Larsson was in the magazine business himself before he started writing fiction, and loved to uncover the dirty deeds of right-wing political organizations and the like. The hero and Lisbeth’s sometime parter, Mikael Blomqvist, is so obviously an idealized alter-ego of the author. He’s an impeccably moral journalist, an endlessly loyal friend, brave and brilliant and absurdly irresistible to women. His very incorruptibility is almost grating. He would be a rather dull protagonist if he didn’t have Lisbeth to spar with. Her near-anarchist ways make a good foil for his rather conventional thinking. He’s the classic good detective. All good all the time. Larsson’s world doesn’t have any room for shades of grey. It’s good guys and gals against pure evil. Lisbeth is the only really complex character in that regard. Everyone else is either or. Lisbeth likes to take morally suspect action, being capable of extreme violence and cruelty, but she’s more avenging angel than ethical conundrum. There’s never any doubt she’s doing the right thing, even when she’s being sadistic. (Acknowledging that a woman can be sadistic and violent, another trailblazing score for Larsson!) But, of course, a clear moral universe is what’s expected of crime fiction. The satisfaction of seeing bad guys get their due punishment is what makes the genre so addictive and pleasurable.

Speaking to anyone who might not get around to reading the actual books, there’s also movies available for you to watch. I have to disagree with the otherwise perceptive Joan Acocella’s assessment that the story lives better onscreen. For all their faults I think the books offer a more satisfying experience. However, the movies are also worth the time. Against all expectations I found the American adaptation far superior to the Swedish original. I don’t know who director Niels Arden Oplev is, but his adaptation is perfunctory and too genteel by half. The plot is overly simplified, losing too many relevant details. It’s a complicated story, but it didn’t need to be reduced to bullet points. I also thought the visual style was a little flat. The main weakness for the Swedish entry is the casting of Blomqvist, whose heroic characteristics the bloated and pockmarked features of Michael Nykvist reflect not at all. He looks more like a creepy rapist than the creepy rapist does. The American version has the benefits of a much more faithful and detailed adaptation job, the visual flair of David Fincher, director of perverse grunge classics Fight Club and Se7en. And  new-model 007 Daniel Craig is a much-improved Blomqvist – charismatic but rough around the edges. I thought that both actresses cast as Lisbeth Salander were excellent in their own ways, although Sweden’s Noomi Rapace might actually be a bit too beautiful for the role. Rapace plays Lisbeth as fierce and deeply angry. American Rooney Mara plays her more as wary and sad, looking at times like a drowned rat. I find Mara unrecognizable without black bangs, and that element of blandness is actually a strength when it comes to portraying a girl who is already iconic in readers’ imaginations. It allows her to create the character with no outside associations.

I find it delightful that people have embraced the Millennium books and made Lisbeth Salander a phenomenon. And I can’t help but bring up yet another wildly popular page to screen adventure that stars a young woman for whom self-sufficiency, intelligence, and physical strength rank far above cuteness and charm. I’m talking about The Hunger Games books. Although Suzanne Collins’s books are miles and genres away from Larsson’s they have similarities, in their heroines. Collins has created Katniss Everdeen, a girl who shares a lot with Lisbeth Salander. Like Lisbeth, she survives by her wits, cares deeply about doing what’s right, fights bravely against an inhumane and abusive power system, doesn’t need a man to take care of her, doesn’t give a damn what she looks like, doesn’t care about being nice, isn’t afraid to fight and kill if need be, and refuses to give up being herself. I think it’s no coincidence that both these young heroines have become household names, and are fiercely beloved and endlessly talked about. They are obviously filling a deep need for female role models that real women today can admire. Because the princess in the castle who dreams of getting married is so hopelessly obsolete it’s laughable, and so is the wily femme fatale who inevitably gets punished to being too up front about the feminine business of using her looks to manipulate men to her advantage. Because on both sides of the traditional virgin/whore schematic it’s the same thing going on; women using their only precious resource (their pussy, duh) to somehow finagle their way to a better station in life, whether by ensnaring Prince Charming in holy matrimony or turning tricks. That entrenched view of women is outmoded, outdated and no less disgusting for being perpetuated by singing critters in Disney movies. Well, today we have a generation of young girls (and boys) coming of age who’ve internalized the positives of first wave feminism, who’ve grown up with the expectation of equality, grown up expecting freedom and respect, and we want to see ourselves on the screen and in books.

*newspeak for ‘functionally retarded but still fuckable’

Two Bestsellers

(and their adaptations)

I’ve recently tackled, just to see what the fuss was about, two popular novels and their much buzzed film adaptations. Neither is destined to become a classic, but both have their strengths and both in their own way, speak to the Zeitgeist.

First, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, a look into the lives of black housemaids in 1963 Jackson, MI. Stockett, who is white, has attracted a bit of how-dare-she controversy for writing from the maid’s perspective, but overall her work has met with acclaim. I don’t see any problem with a writer tackling whatever perspective she chooses, but make no mistake, this is a book for white people. Though Stockett has enormous sympathy for her characters and the book is often moving, there’s no real sense of danger. We rest assured that although the characters are supposed to be at great risk, nothing truly bad will happen. The Help is no Color Purple.

This is one of those rare cases when I say go ahead and skip straight to the movie. The film adaptation is, like the book, thoroughly middlebrow, competent and unstylish, but rendered unforgettable by the justly acclaimed cast. The movie wisely plays to the book’s strengths, focusing on the faces of great actors like Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis and Jessica Chastain, all very deserving Oscar nominees (and in Spencer’s case, a winner.) It’s an actor’s movie. The women’s eyes tell the story far more movingly than Stockett’s pen. The characters, lovable or despicable, are the strength of the movie and they’re the strength of the book.

While the movie may be faulted for not having prettier camera angles, the book’s faults run deeper. The problem is, it’s not really about the civil rights era, as it purports to be. Though there are multiple rather obvious cultural signposts sprinkled throughout – MLK! Catcher in the Rye! – the struggle for equality is used mainly as wallpaper for the human story to play out in front of. And although it purports to be the maids’ story, Stockett doesn’t seem to trust that her intended middleclass, middlebrow (in other words, white) audience to follow along unless baited with the dating travails of an insecure white chick thrown in. Stockett wastes too many  chapters on the character of Skeeter Phelan and her boring boyfriend and hair problems. (In the movie, Emma Stone’s performance as Skeeter is excellent, and the boyfriend subplot is thankfully trimmed to a bare three scenes.) The assumption that the white masses won’t want to read about black people stuff unless there’s a saintly white character to invest in is insulting all around – I’m pretty sure that millions of people of all colors and creeds have enjoyed the work of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker without the token ‘Good German’ figure shoehorned into every story.

The other problem with The Help is what the actual main theme really is. It’s not about civil rights at all. It’s another entry in the whole “evil 50′s”. Though the action takes place in 1963, it’s clearly about how life in 1950′s American suburbs was a soul-destroying hell somewhere on the level of the Spanish Inquisition. As presented by popular movies like Revolutionary Road (in which just being alive in the fifties is seen as cause enough for suicide) and the inexplicable glamorization of Sylvia Plath (the fifties drove her to it!) the fifties and early sixties were an unimaginably torturous time of mindless conformity and wealthy women going insane inside their gilded cages. Until the Sixties came along and magically made everything all better, an event usually represented in movies by The Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan, or just one of their songs. Which is exactly how life is portrayed in The Help.  (Except that it’s a Bob Dylan song this time.) Those poor brainwashed, overgirdled white ladies and their misguided quest for a nice car and a wealthy husband, unable to be fulfill their intellectual potential or be their true selves underneath all that hairspray. Wah. Recycling that old rubbish about middle class conformity at the expense of the truly interesting and unexplored reality of the maids lives is a waste of ink and pages, but it serves a purpose. The heady mixture of racism, ignorance and downtrodden suburban womanhood allows us to get all steamed up about how awful our grandmothers’ cloistered little lives must have been, then congratulate ourselves for being so much more enlightened than that. As if racial discrimination wasn’t alive and well, if slightly less overt. As if mindless white housewives don’t still leave their homes and children in the hands of disenfranchised, underpaid maids and gardeners, now more likely to be Latino than African-American, but still underpaid and disenfranchised. As if conformity and ignorance were historical anomalies that have gone away never to blight our suburbs again. Somebody needs to write about the help without whitewashing, without distraction, without making anyone feel better about themselves.

—————–

My second target is The Hunger Games, the latest phenomenon to burst out of the YA ghetto and into popular consciousness. I’ll admit that I only read the first book in the trilogy (and I have to say I’m roundly sick of everything being a trilogy.) There’s probably stuff in the last two books that puts the first one in a wider context and adds new perspective. But I only read the first one, just in time to catch the movie. In this case, I’ll take the book.

If you’ve been living in a cave recently, it’s all about a dystopian future society called Panam, sprung up in the wake of what used to be America, where the Superbowl has been replaced by adolescents fighting to the dead gladiator-style on live TV. Which is a shrewd and not entirely farfetched takeoff on our current ‘reality’ obsessed entertainment culture. The series has caught on across demographics partly because it’s original, fast-paced and violent and largely on the appeal of the heroine. Suzanne Collins has created, in the figure of Katniss Everdeen, a heroine for girls and for boys – strong, smart, moral and fearless. The book is a survival guide as much as an adventure story. Through Katniss, we learn how to live by our wits; rigging traps, building fires, scavenging for edibles in the wilderness, hunting, fighting, hiding, healing. Surviving. The book is suffused with its heroine’s will to live, and her will to do right. It’s also probably no coincidence that, at a time when the poor (which is nearly everybody nowadays) are beginning to feel not just neglected and poorly-done-by, but actively oppressed and pissed off about it, everyone is reading a novel about a country in which common citizens are little better than livestock for a decadent elite to play blood sports. Surely more than a few readers relate to the anger of the innocent Tributes forced to kill each other for entertainment, to the despair of their families trapped helplessly in an unfair controlled society. If there’s one unbreaking theme here, it is as the title implies, hunger. Hardly a page goes by without mention of food. Katniss is always hungry. Her life is ruled by food, or rather its absence. There’s a harrowing backstory of near-starvation, in which a burnt loaf of bread becomes a life-changing totem. The most lovingly written, sensual scenes are eating scenes. Suzanne Collins has captured what it feels like to live a life of wanting.

The only fault I really have with The Hunger Games, which I think will keep it out of the pantheon of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, is lack of context.  Critics have said that what makes those books fantasy classics and The Hunger Games not, is that their worlds are desirable and Panam isn’t. True enough, I doubt anybody wishes Panam was real the way we wish Middle Earth was real, but that may not be the point. Those books continue to hold our imaginations because they have the heft of mythology. (Even the insipid Twilight series boasts a compelling mythology.) Their universes are painstakingly detailed, rich with history, seemingly bottomless. Collins’s Panam on the other hand, is roughly sketched. There’s barely any history to explain how and why this world got to be so fucked up. There’s mention of the collapse of a previous civilization (ours), a war, a brutally suppressed rebellion, but it’s only a few cursory lines. Without its own mythology, this world feels bare. The worlds of Tolkien and Rowling feel satisfyingly real because their wealth of detail suggest any number of other stories besides the ones the author has chosen to tell. There’s so much more that must have happened, we think, so many characters and events that must exist outside the written page. We’re left hungry for more, and we spend time imagining what those other stories might have been. The Hunger Games don’t have that effect, because we just don’t know enough about Panam to imagine anything outside what’s been written. This is a problem. I imagine that it may be somewhat rectified in the second and third installments. If it isn’t, though, I’m afraid this series won’t go on to fascinate future generations but will fall behind as strictly a product of its time.

As for the movie, it’s thriller made without an ounce of style or creativity, redeemed entirely by the charisma of star Jennifer Lawrence. Although there are a few lovely shots of decrepit Appalachia in the beginning, the visuals are thoroughly pedestrian. The adaptation, although faithful (Collins adapted it herself), has a dutiful sense of hitting all the key scenes without adding anything meaningful or fresh. The violence has, understandably, been toned down, and with it much of the suspense. As with The Help, the primary pleasure of this movie is in meeting the characters. There’s a good strong supporting cast, including Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and surprisingly non-embarrassing Lenny Kravitz, but really the single best thing, the one force holding the entire thing together is Lawrence and her expressive face, physical confidence and star-is-born charisma.

Life

Keith Richards’ autobiography has rocketed to the top of my favorite Stones books list, with good reason. It’s not like other celebrity memoirs, not written to make a buck, grind an axe, or make the author look good. It doesn’t have the anonymous bland tone that signals the hand of the ghostwriter. It takes off in a chatty conversational voice that is unmistakably Keith, and it shows, over 550 pages, what it’s like to be Keith. That’s an epic achievement in itself. Keith Richards has always cut a mysterious and slightly terrifying figure. Always on the run from the law, knife in boot, weaseling out of one scrape after another while all around him his associates drop like flies. Did he sell his soul to the devil? Ineffably cool, but not exactly likable. Well, now he’s managed to make himself very likable indeed, by making no apologies about his badness.

Life is no tour guide to rock star depravity. It’s a love story – between Keith and his music. It runs throughout the book, an undimmed, unabashed, joyful enthusiasm for all things musical. Keith Richards really fucking digs his job, and he’s never stopped being amazed at his success. Not his popularity or ability to fill stadiums, but just the ability to play and write songs and make great music and earn the respect of other musicians. There are constant long asides about the technicalities of guitar heroism, stuff about tuning and strings and dropped chords. As a non-musician, I’ve never understood the significance of those things, and this is the closest I’ve ever come to grasping it. It’s the best window on how those famous sounds came to be. That alone makes the old devil immensely sympathetic. Also, his disinterest in repeating the sordid old anecdotes. There’s some juicy bits there, all right, but they’re not the point. The notorious pissing on the wall incident doesn’t even merit a mention. Richards isn’t interested in what’s been talked to death already, he wants to tell the stories he thinks are important. Like a daring rainbound cat rescue, a childhood accident with a rock, or how he met his wife’s family for the first time. The death of Brian Jones is dealt with in a few lines – he’d been written off as a goner long before he took that fateful midnight swim – while the deaths of Ian Stewart, Gram Parsons, and Keith’s mother are given full requiem.

Besides music, the other long running love story is the one with Mick Jagger, of course. The notorious Glimmer Twins who used to be thick as thieves are now barely cordial, to Keith’s eternal chagrin. Mick Jagger has changed, not for the better, thinks Keith, while Keith has stayed steadfastly the same. It was Marianne Faithfull, in her own memoir, who called it out that those two were really the loves of each others lives. What I think we have here is the kind of passionate romantic friendship that used to flourish among the Victorians, a Platonic union stronger and more important than any marriage or sexual relationship. Each party complains bitterly about the other’s shortcomings, accusations of betrayal fly, sometimes blows are exchanged, but they always come back to each other. Keith repeatedly complains that Mick is jealous and hostile, actively trying to block potential ‘rivals’, but he seems unaware that his own criticism of Mick, Mick’s personality and Mick’s solo work comes off more like the bitterness of a neglected spouse than any valid point being made. The shocking and much publicized denigration of Jagger’s manhood does occur, but the context is more interesting than the slur itself. In the same paragraph Keith claims not to care about Mick’s affair with Anita Pallenberg on the set of Performance, brags about nailing Marianne and suggests that Donald Cammell’s suicide was good riddance. Reading between the lines, it’s clear the betrayal stung and stings still. The low blow is just a jab of payback. It’s a tragedy, according Keith Richards, that Mick Jagger had to grow up and become the monstrous ego demon “Mick Jagger.” After all those years and ups and downs, he’s still missing the kid on the train with the blues records.

Jagger has become the “Jagger” we know and love. He grew out of his blues purism and his stance against the world, accepted his knighthood, let the flattery and flashbulbs go to his head, and runs The Rolling Stones like a well-oiled money making machine. Richards has stayed the same blues-obsessed outlaw who goes to sleep hugging his guitar. He’s the one who exults in the honor of being allowed to jam with the locals in Jamaica, or the honor of playing with obscure but brilliant sidemen who haven’t seen the spotlight since the fifties. Jagger is delighted to have Wyclef Jean as a collaborator. Richards thinks it’s an honor to write with Tom Waits. They used to be The Glimmer Twins, now two more opposite men cannot be found, but together they still manage to form one badass entity called The Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger reveals bits of himself in his songs, but he will probably never open up and tell his side of the story. Thank God Keith Richards is open-hearted enough to share his life with us.

Bowie in Berlin

My other reading material has been Bowie In Berlin: A New Career in a New Town, written by a man named through some magical cosmic coincidence Thomas Jerome Seabrook. This is definitely aimed at the very, very serious fan. Seabrook assumes that we’ve already gotten our basic biographical necessities somewhere else and focuses only on the dark and fertile years between 1975 and ’79. During that time, as everyone doubtless already knows, David Bowie recorded what’s known as The Berlin Trilogy, and it’s the recording of those albums that is discussed in very, very deep depth. Admittedly, who played what instrument on which song and what they had for lunch later (rabbit stew) is pretty dry info, even for rabid fans. Luckily, Seabrook writes with enough wit and flourish to keep the reader engrossed, even when discussion turns to technical stuff about synthesizers. Seabrook has done some heavy homework – Bowie’s movements during those years are accounted for on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Oddly, all that homework didn’t include finding out what country the city of Warsaw is in – Seabrook refers to it as “the Czech capital”. Other than that glaring mistake, the book is thoroughly informative, entertaining and thoughtful. Recommended for fans who think they know everything there is to know about David Bowie and would like to learn more.

Sick Puppy

Carl Hiaasen’s Sick Puppy.

I actually read the majority of this book in one sitting right before Christmas, then came back to finish the final chapter weeks later. Hiaasen is known a premier ‘funny writer’ and this book is engrossingly lively and has some hilarious setpieces, like an unfortunate encounter between a fancy sports car and a garbage truck. The problem and downfall here is Hiaasen’s choice of subject matter. The corruption of Florida politics and land development isn’t very funny. Florida isn’t the only state whose fragile natural resources are being systematically destroyed by greedy land developers with plenty of help from a dirty government, but it’s a notoriously egregious example of the trend. I don’t know how much Hiaasen exaggerates the conniving ways of minor political figures, big-money lobbyists and other assorted scumballs, but I suspect not very much. Another problem is that the topic itself interferes with the story arc. It’s hard to make a happy ending, in which the greedy suits are vanquished and the pristine shoreline is saved from bulldozing, when the reader knows very well that in real life the system is in place and can’t be vanquished and the entire Florida coast is as good as fucked. The third problem is Hiaasen’s feat of making every single one of his characters thoroughly unlikeable. It’s par for the course that the slimy governor and his cronies are made as comically unsympathetic as possible. But the supposed hero is a mentally unstable ecoterrorist; the heroine is aggravatingly passive, drifting from one man to another with no more motivation than merely taking the path of least resistence; and neither of those two is very smart either. Even the antics of the title canine are more annoying than cute. (That reaction might just be me and the fact that I loathe Labrador retrievers.) There’s also something disconcerting about the tone. Hiaasen maintains a light, comic tone throughout, even when the story goes into some highly unsavory territory. The violent deaths of multiple characters are awkwardly played for laughs. It’s graceless but not disturbing (since those guys blatantly had it coming). That weird tone does go from awkward to just wrong, when in the big climax, Hiaasen intercuts repeatedly between violent rape and cutesy doggy hijinx. Hiaasen always writes about Florida, touching on various genre tropes, that much I know, but I don’t know if I want to discover if his other books are any better. I couldn’t put it down, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Book update

Time watching movies or online is well-spent. But time spent reading books is better-spent, and much, much harder to come by. Anytime can be movie time, or internet time. Reading time requires specific circumstances. Peace and quiet in a well-lit cozy place, that is. I know I won’t always have so many hours of quietude to myself. I’ve been trying to relish my reading time as much as I can. If my movie intake suffers, that’s alright. Keeping up with an influx of magazines takes hours out of the day. That’s time well-spent. I’m keeping up on my books as well…

I’d read a little Terry Pratchett a long time ago. The Carpet People, I believe it was, a book for children. Which was quite charming. Pratchett is rather acclaimed and prolific on the fantasy scene, and his Discworld series is very popular. There are closing in on forty of them, and they all take place on some kind of mythical flat-earth. The one I stumbled upon, Making Money, is a fairly recent entry and a direct sequel to something that’s come before, from what I could gather. I wouldn’t say it’s the most exciting fantasy novel I’ve ever touched – it deals with banking and the practicality of introducing paper currency in place of the goldish type. But I have to praise Pratchett’s style. He shares the absurd humor of Douglas Adams, always a welcome element. The funniness carries the book over the essentially boring bits about economy and gold-minting. Plus, there are Golems.

 

On a less fun note, I pulled out of the same donation bin (that’s how I like to acquire stuff) Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club. In which Karr vividly recollects an unenviable childhood dominated by an unstable, alcoholic mother. Karr’s father comes off throughout as a sympathetic, loving figure, while the mother is frequently terrifying. It’s  not until the end that we learn the dramatic roots of her extreme unhappiness. There’s the parental drinking and fighting, a decrepit grandmother who’s a horror in her own right, dizzying swings from poverty to material comfort and a few traumatic episodes of violence and sexual abuse. All together those things could make for a mawkish poor-me whine-fest, but Karr keeps her head. She makes no bones about having been a mean, unpleasant child, and she brushes off any temptation to feel sorry for herself. Sure, there were some hard times but there were also plenty of good memories and love. The memoir ends on a healing note, when mother faces her demons and it seems like everybody’s going to settle down and be ok. Karr has since published another memoir, chronicling her own adult alcoholism and poor life choices, which just shows how a bad legacy, no matter how well or perceptively examined, carries on from one life to another.

Also somewhat downbeat, Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton. A work I had never heard of and picked up out of a clearance bin on impulse. The term elegiac comes to mind. Morton isn’t the most graceful writer, and at first I was tempted to put the book down. But plain language is no impediment to a good story (as we’ll talk about more shortly) and Morton explores the terrain of aging poignantly. The story revolves around three figures representing three stages of life; a geriatric novelist contemplating his own faded legacy, an upstart grad student intent on refurbishing that legacy, and the writer’s middle aged daughter still trying to find her own place in life. The simplicity of Morton’s writing at first makes the story seem prosaic, but by the end it has become moving. The old writer faces the indignity of his age, and his impending death. The star struck young thing becomes disillusioned when faced with her hero’s evident decrepitude. And the daughter wonders what she’s achieved and where she’s going. It’s a bit sad, but also in a way hopeful. Each character comes to terms with his or her stage of life’s journey, and it ties together to illustrate the inevitable trajectories we all must make. The book jacket promises “Now a Major Motion Picture”. May not sound like a welcoming take-off point for a movie, but I’ve added it to my future watching list.

Now for the big event. I’ve been hearing louder and louder buzz about the whole Stieg Larsson phenomenon. Of course, who hasn’t seen promos for the upcoming Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie. I just had to know what all the fuss was about. So I bought the book. The book has problems. There are about 200 pages of deathly boring exposition before the plot clicks into gear. There are elaborate introductions for superfluous characters. Unnecessary  detail about the exact dimensions of Lisbeth’s hard drive, who lives in which house across from who, and Swedish guardianship law. Larsson also sees fit to include every instance when a character takes a shower or eats a disgusting-sounding liver and pickle sandwich. Then, the story barrels on for hundreds of pages beyond its natural stopping point (the big reveal and showdown, natch) meticulously tying up all the less compelling running subplots. Also, Larsson can’t really write. His prose is workmanlike, with a flair for dramatically unpoetic descriptions, awkward blocks of exposition between bouts of action, and dialogue that’s neither realistic nor artfully stylized. Nevertheless, underneath these technical shortcomings is a compelling thriller. After the first dull few chapters, I became completely engrossed. You’ve doubtless heard the bare bones of it; there’s a mystery, corruption, family psychodrama, and much touted gruesome violence. It’s in the case of the violence that the loudest criticism of Larsson’s work has come. The original Swedish title of the novel was Men Who Hate Women, and that about sums up Larsson’s main theme. Critics have claimed that Larsson exploited violence against women by making an entertainment of it, all under the pretense of deploring it. But he really does deplore it. Despite the bone-dry tone, the message comes through. Larsson’s books have caught on in a sea of blockheaded, similarly violent thrillers because he had a mission besides telling an exciting story in which girls and boys get raped a lot. He’s righteously pissed-off about the prevalence of cruelty and corruption that persists in a nominally civilized society. Besides, it’s an unfair criticism in the first place. Female victimhood and male depravity are the backbone of the mystery/thriller genre. Dead women are the engine of a million detective stories, and it’s only Stieg Larsson who brings that unspoken undercurrent into the open and makes it his boldly stated main theme. It’s the first angry feminist murder mystery. Though on the other hand, some feminists would deplore the book’s dour view of womanhood as a state of perpetual victimhood. It’s a condescension to portray women as magnets for constant abuse, they would say. Make of that what you will. It’s a flawed work, but one that’s undeniably struck a chord.

 

 

Frankly, Mr. Shankly

Everything has a lighter side. And now, the lighter side of The Smiths. (If MAD was still running The Lighter Side strip, that would be a great one. Or are they? Do they still exist?) The root causes of Morrissey songs are most often debatable, but this one is pretty clearly inspired by his short-lived flirtation with gainful employment. He’d labored briefly as a clerk in a tax office, hated it and spent most of his pre-fame life mooching off the government. It’s also thought to be partly inspired by The Smiths’ by-then strained relationship with their handlers at the Rough Trade record label, a relationship that would continue, in animosity, until the band’s demise in 1987. The legend goes that label boss Geoff Travis did indeed attempt to write ‘bloody awful’ poetry, thus earning Morrissey’s eternal contempt.

All these interesting facts I got perusing my brand new Mozipedia, which I have just purchased after a lengthy search. Author Simon Goddard is widely accepted as the world’s leading expert on all things Morrissey, which isn’t yet something you can get a PhD in, but probably will be within my lifetime, if not Morrissey’s. Goddard has written the self-explanatory Mozipedia, and Songs That Saved Your Life an exhaustive compendium of the when, where, how and why behind every song The Smiths ever recorded. Therein, according to Goddard, Frankly Mr. Shankly is “The Smiths at their most vaudevillian extreme” because “The manifest music-hall wit of its lyrics transpose even to Marr’s complementary, tongue-in-cheek score…” And so on in a similar spirit. If that seems overwhelmingly academic for a pop song, it’s nothing compared to Gavin Hopps’s treatise Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, which is highfalutin to the point of being unreadable. Hopps has filled his book with mind-straining lines like (regarding Reel Around the Fountain):

“Morrissey’s use of ‘half,’ which is foregrounded by the parallelism with the previous section, quietly complicates everything and encourages speculation by tantalizingly telling us much less than it appears to [...] we remain outside the narrative, and are left to read backwards from effect to cause across a comical aporetic boundary.”

I was left in some doubt whether Hopps has in fact written an honest-to-God PhD level assessment of the works of Morrissey if read as literature, or if the whole thing is a massive joke satirizing the self-seriousness, willful obscurity and incomprehensible jargon of academic writing. For being filled with footnotes in minuscule type and the contorted, syllable-heavy vocabulary of academia, Hopps’s book is nonetheless useless as research material, for not having an index (though a ten-page bibliography is handily present.) One wonders at the inherent hilarity of treating Morrissey – in the end, a pop star, devilishly literate though he is – with such scholarly reverence. Though how can I judge poor Gavin Hopps? In my own meagre critical output, my longest rants and raves have been about ol’ Mozzer. He is, in his own sick way, one of pop’s great pied pipers. Just like Bowie has been someone to dress up for, Morrissey is someone to write for.

Dirty Words

Just read Dirty Words, edited by Ellen Sussman. It’s not quite an encyclopedia like the cover claims it to be. It’s a collection of sex-related essays by a host of writers, organized by what word they’ve taken as their starting point. Some are funny, some touching, some just stupid (Karen Connelley’s defense of prostitution as somehow noble – um, no.) The point was, I take it, to be entertaining and a little bit naughty, and that it was. The takeaway question, though, is what is the point of even attempting to write about sex at all? Educational writing about sex has its place – if it weren’t for Cosmo’s tips some of us would never learn the birds and bees. But what, exactly, is the point of literary writing about sex? Anyone who has ever perused the venerable Penthouse Forum knows that the most effective sex writing is also the least creative. If stimulation is the goal then generic descriptions of thrusting organs are the most effective. When serious writers attempt to write sexy the result is usually awkward. The harder the writer tries to convey the essence of the act the further from from his goal he ends up getting. It’s notoriously difficult to convey physical sensation through words, and the more words are thrown out there the more we get the uncomfortable sensation that the author is, of course, relating something about himself and OMG, too much information! That’s why the clumsy letters to Penthouse are sexy – the reader can plug him- or herself into the action without the offputting  and unwanted effect of imagining Philip Roth or whomever engaged in the very act being described. That’s why explicit love scenes in novels are a bad idea, which thankfully rarely occurs. The most famous piece of literary smut, Pauline Reage’s Story of O is an odd beast indeed. I found it sexy not at all (partly because my interest in BDSM is vanishingly small.) Reage (real name Anne Desclos) attempts to combine explicit sexual depravity with big ideas about choice, freedom and personal fulfillment and doesn’t quite get there. As might be expected, the bondage distracts from the philosophical musings and vice versa. Though the novel is, as admitted by the author, an expression of personal fantasy, the dry tone of the prose makes it feel very, very impersonal indeed. There’s also the problem of odd anatomical descriptions. Reage refers to all genitalia as ‘his sex’ or ‘her sex’, which smacks of Victorian-era daintiness, or confusingly, the heroine’s lady-bits are referred to as ‘her belly’, as in ‘he entered her belly from behind’. This may be a case of poor translation, and perhaps in the original French it comes off as more poetic, but it does illustrate a central problem of explicit writing – what the hell to call those things. The only person I know of who has successfully produced erotica that is both well written and genuinely sexy is Anais Nin, in her collection Delta of Venus. I take that to be the exception that proves the rule. The rule being; carnal acts are best left to the visual arts, or better yet, the privacy of the bedroom.

 

Atmospheric Disturbances, etc

I’ve guiltily noticed that I haven’t wrote up a book report in almost a year. Obviously, it’s because I’ve dumbed down to a subliterate level. I just watch TV and drool. No, I’ve just been lazy. I’ve read a few books in the past months and I’ve also had some ignominious failures along the way.

 Last fall I was keeping up with my reading alright. In October I read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three. It was a lot better than the first Dark Tower novel, which I thought hewed too closely to traditional Western tropes  - grizzled gunslinger, deadbeat frontier town, strumpet with a heart of gold, etc. The plot of the second Dark Tower is too complicated to lay out, at least not without giving away some key moments the reader should discover for themselves. Let’s just say that King, as usual, takes an idea so fantastical as to be preposterous and through the vividness of his vision makes it thoroughly believable. A random door that allows you to enter the mind of a person in a parallel dimension? Why haven’t I found one yet? It remains my fervent belief that Stephen King will, if not within his own lifetime then at least in mine, be recognized as a master of language on a par with any of the more acclaimed novelists who don’t write about alien invasions and deadly plagues. Anyone can write about monsters who eviscerate people, but not too many monster/horror books (or movies) continue to haunt us years after we’ve put down the book. Besides having an unrivaled imagination for the gruesome, King deserves credit for his characterizations. He may kill off his characters ruthlessly (and disgustingly, as often as not) but he also has great sympathy for even the most unlikable ones. King takes readers inside the mind of both the battered woman and the abusive husband, the cop and the crazy psychopath, even the monster gets his due – he may die but at least we’ve seen his point of view, twisted and wrong as it may be.

After that, there was Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, best known as the source material of a popular broadway musical. Pretty grim material for a musical, I’d say. Wicked ostensibly takes place in the land of Oz, originally the brainchild of L. Frank Baum. It’s partly a retelling of events that took place at the end of Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, plus a lot of backstory regarding the Witch, whose name, is turns out was Elphaba. Some of you may have read Baum’s book, and maybe even the other Oz books that followed it, but I’d venture that most of you got your images of Oz from the 1939 movie, which has remained a steadfast family favorite through generations. The movie took many liberties with the source material but remained true to the spirit of the original, though I haven’t read the book in decades and never in English. Maguire’s Oz is an unrecognizable place. Baum’s book was aimed at youngsters and had a resounding sense of the whimsical, even though it continues to support various allegorical theories. Maguire’s book is decidedly not for children, rife with violence and graphic sexuality. It’s not a bad book on its own terms, but it probably would have been better if Maguire had scraped away the remaining traces of Ozness and made the effort to fill out a fully original fantasy world. As it is, the only things his book has in common with Baum’s is names, geography and, near the end, a few key events. In addition to the aforementioned sex and violence, the new Oz is also politically fraught – the Wizard in no way benevolent here, but a megalomaniac and dictator in no uncertain terms. It’s dark times for Oz, in a dark book.

And then I spent several months trying and failing to find a book I could actually finish reading. There were several fails, but I’ll leave you with two notable ones. First, I gave something called Paul Is Undead a shot. Written by Alan Goldsher, it’s another chapter in the tired trend of inserting zombies into every available pop culture orefice, in this case, the British Invasion. Such a concept could conceivably fall on either side of the fine line between stupid and clever. To imbue John, Paul, George and Ringo, et al with a superhuman nature is appealing, not least because it did seem, in their heyday, that they were monstrous and supernatural. The problem with Goldsher’s approach is not only that he lewdly and frequently falls on the wrong side of good taste. He flagrantly flouts the conventions of zombie lore – it is a truth universally agreed upon that zombies, being dead as it were, do not age in the conventional manner, do not have the ability to eat human food should they so choose, do not have powers of mass hypnosis, cannot reattach severed body parts, and for God’s sake do NOT ejaculate. There are rules, and Goldsher makes a mess of them, without the benefit of particularly good new ideas to replace the conventional wisdom. The real problem here, though, is embedded in the very concept. If the Beatles were zombies all along, what does that do to the dramatic arc of their story? The familiar and tragic end of the Beatles saga can’t be changed. Everybody knows that John Lennon was no zombie or vampire or ninja master – he was a man and he was murdered. Lennon is dead, as is Brian Epstein, as is Stuart Sutcliffe and as are many others who played a part in the story. To imagine otherwise, however fancifully, is a disrespect to the dead.

Flunking a dumb zombie book is nothing to be ashamed of. If it’s dumb, it’s dumb and if I don’t like it, fine. To barely be able to make a dent in an acclaimed literary masterwork makes me hang my head in shame. I’m afraid to say, Roberto Bolano’s doorstopper 2666 left me unimpressed. The novel was  published to much fanfare after the writer’s death in 2004. The book consists of five loosely related parts, dealing with, among other things, a mysterious fictional German novelist, and a very nonfictional wave of unsolved murders that have taken place in Mexico (the title refers to the number of women killed or vanished.) It was the author’s intent to publish the five parts separately as novellas, but his publishers went against his wishes and released everything in one massive block. I could only force myself to complete the first section, which is about four scholars in laborious pursuit of the elusive German. Perhaps the other parts are different in tone, but the one I read is almost unbearably dull and difficult. Bolano has strengths – he’s a master of poetic descriptiveness, of capturing emotional minutiae, and evoking a heavy pall of sorrow. On the other hand, he has absolutely no grasp of dialogue, so it would appear, because there is barely any, and what speech there is bears no trace of how real live people conduct conversations. This is not a killer in and of itself – Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave us, in One Hundred Years Of Solitude not a line of dialogue, and that work is nevertheless enthralling  (if confusing). There’s no magic realism in 2666, however, from what I’ve seen. The characters, middle-aged academics all, move through their romantic permutations without being believable or interesting, and nothing much happens, even when they decamp to Mexico in search of their literary hero. What really bothered me  and made the book so very tedious to slog through is Bolano’s habit of filling whole pages with convoluted run-on sentences. A well executed run-0n sentence is powerful trick in a writer’s arsenal, and should be used sparingly. To make nearly every sentence a run-on is a writer flaunting his virtuosity at the expense of clarity and plot development, not to mention a detriment to the reader’s being able to make sense of what the hell is supposed to be going on. What is going on, once the impediment of never-ending sentences is somewhat conquered, is not much, actually. Our heroes read, write, attend conferences, fall in and out of love, and lollygag around a decrepit Mexican hotel for while, then it ends. This was hailed as some kind of modern classic in the making, but I can’t think of much good to say about what I could get from it.

I’m don’t think I’m a total failure at reading books though. It’s no fault of my own I couldn’t handle 2666. It’s not as if I’m not equipped to handle a difficult novel – I’ve read VALIS. I did come back and read something moderately difficult; Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances. I recall being intrigued by Galchen’s write-up in The New Yorker in 2008. The New Yorker placed it in a context of an  ’insane narrator’ canon that also includes Pale Fire. In Galchen’s novel, a New York psychiatrist suddenly becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a near-identical ‘simulacrum’ and goes in search of his real Rema. Though it’s obvious to the reader that Dr. Liebenstein has gone insane, his conviction that his wife has vanished is moving, as is his hopeless quest to get her back, even as he reluctantly grows to accept the presence of the simulacrum wife. The book does at times get boring, as when Liebenstein, with no clues to follow, muses aimlessly about love, reality and the philosophical ramifications of the Doppler effect. It’s no spoiler to say that nothing supernatural ever reveals itself. It’s not a science-fiction. And though the hero is clearly undergoing a mental-health crisis of some sort, it’s not about the nature of sanity vs. the lack of it, not about the workings of the mind at all. All along, it’s a meditation on love and devotion, with many odes to the sweetness of memory and the value of those tiny moments that make a relationship, and the long journey towards coming to terms with losing love. Even if all those things take place inside the head of an insane man, they’re no less touching.

Bright Eyes

The million dollar question is, was this the song Conor Oberst was listening to when he was choosing what to name his band? I have no idea. It would be delightful if it was, though. Because nothing could be more emo than taking your name from an Artie Garfunkel song, especially one about rabbits. Now, about the rabbits. The song was written by one Mike Batt, reportedly either in tribute to his dying father or on commission, or both. Garfunkel cut the song for the soundtrack of the movie of the book Watership Down, and later released it as a single, which was huge in the UK. I’d venture to guess most of us know it from the movie, which terrified us with its goriness when we where children. Or maybe that was just me. Anyhow, the song gives me simultaneous warm-and-fuzzies and heebie-jeebies, because I had a very close emotional attachment to Watership Down. It’s my favorite book, if you had to hold a gun to my head and make choose one. Of course I loved the movie too. To portray the lowly rabbit as a heroic creature was a stroke of genius on the part of Richard Adams. Be forewarned, there’s a lot of grittiness and violence in the book, and the cartoon adaptation doesn’t shy away from showing blood. Garfunkel’s beautiful theme song was just the perfect touch. Listening to it again takes me back, and I think I need to pick up the book again and refresh my memory.