The Listener – graphic novel review

The Listener by David Lester

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hitler’s rise to power is one aspect of the Holocaust that I was pretty ignorant of. The Listener illuminates this part of the story while still putting characters – a present-day sculptor from Vancouver, a couple who lived in Germany during the ’30s – first. Although I found the theme of the role of the artist to be a bit unnecessary – and to get in the way at times – overall The Listener is a fascinating read. I liked Lester’s art, too – though his angled figures and the ink washes take some getting used to, he finds very creative ways to tell his story. Bonus for Vancouverites: there’s a brief sequence where the protagonist describes East Van.

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Vacation reading: Rabbit at Rest, Slammerkin

Books taken:

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
Emma Donaghue, Slammerkin
Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine

The selection of vacation reading material is a task that this reader takes seriously. When planning for my first Momcation (just me and my mom, at a resort in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic), I knew I wanted some light reading (for around the pool) as well as some heavier stuff.

Falling in the “light” category, Gillian Flynn‘s Sharp Objects was the first book I started reading, on the plane trip south.

What a piece of crap.

I know Flynn is currently a critical darling for Gone Girl, which I’d read one chapter of and kind of liked but not enough to buy. However I decided to check out this earlier effort. After about 50 or 60 pages, when I realized what Flynn was up to – that Sharp Objects would basically be about 200 pages of red herrings and development of uninteresting (to me) characters, I decided to just skim it for the plot points and to see how the author resolves the tale of two dead girls. I’m glad I didn’t spend any more time on Sharp Objects than I did; this is one of those psychological thrillers where the psychology is all just a bunch of scenery-chewing thrown in to stall for time before the resolution.

I couldn’t even get through 50 pages of Don Winslow‘s The Winter of Frankie Machine. I liked Winslow’s Savages (which Oliver Stone turned into a movie last year) but this one did absolutely nothing for me. Winslow spends the first part of the book describing the main character’s near-perfect life to the point where I just wanted someone to shoot the son of a bitch.  When this didn’t happen – when, in fact, nothing really happened for the first 40 pages, which is definitely a no-no in a crime thriller unless you’re Patricia Highsmith (and Winslow is no Highsmith) – I was jonesing for some Elmore Leonard.

Then again, not too many crime thrillers could compete with Rabbit at Rest. I’d read all of Updike’s Rabbit series way back in the ’80s, when I was a mere lad, and loved them. I had a hankering to go back and the one I chose was the last in the series (although, in 2000, Updike published short story that picks up some of the series’ characters).

This was one of those great reading experiences – the perfect book at the perfect time in the perfect place. I started it on the plane and read 590-page tome every day of my vacation, usually around the pool, from late morning to mid-afternoon, by which time the rum had usually kicked in.

In Rabbit at Rest, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is 55 and retired, spending part of the year in Florida when he’s not back home in Pennsylvania. There is so much to love about this book I don’t know where to begin, but a few things struck me. One was how concerned Rabbit – and Updike – is about his (American) diet.

Rabbit at Rest was published in 1990, and though fast and processed food was already being blamed for health issues back then, it wasn’t nearly the topic of conversation that it is today, especially with the recent publication of Michael Moss‘s Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. But it’s on nearly every page of this book as Rabbit grapples with his increasingly poor health.

Another of Rabbit’s concerns is terrorism. The 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie air tragedy took place while Updike was writing the book and his protagonist spends a lot of time thinking and worrying about terrorism. Not exactly prescient, perhaps, since it was on a lot of people’s minds because of Lockerbie, but still a little eerie in light of what was to come.

One other thing I want to mention before going onto the next book: there is a scene in the first chunk of Rabbit at Rest that, for nail-biting suspense, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Which just goes to show, I guess, that sometimes you find what you’re looking for – page-turning suspence, in this case – in unexpected places.

52 books—Going Clear

It’s a sad state of affairs when I feel I have to second-guess everything I write. But, as Lawrence Wright‘s Going Clear (Knopf, 448 pps) makes clear, the people heading Scientology are nothing if not aggressive in the church’s defense. Its hounding of anyone who goes up against the, ahem, religion is well-documented, not just in Going Clear but elsewhere.

So what can I say about this book (or Scientology, for that matter) that won’t get my phone hacked or Tom Cruise jumping on my couch? Well, not a whole heck of a lot. (I know one person who uses asterisks whenever he writes about Sc*******y.) It makes me wonder if this – a fear of reprisal – is why Paul Thomas Anderson chickened out in The Master. (Anderson never actually names the church, although ”the master” of the title is apparently based on Hubbard.)

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master.

First, why did I want to read Going Clear? I guess I find the subject of Scientology fascinating in a weird, twisted way. When I was but a wee lad of 19 or so, a friend of mine and I sauntered into Scientology headquarters in Winnipeg one evening. I recall taking the church’s patented personality test (oddly, not mentioned in Going Clear) the questions of which are so open-ended that no matter how you answer will reveal at least one flaw – a “ruin” in Scientology bafflegab, according to Wright’s book – that Scientology can fix.

It’s a numbers racket; we didn’t go back, but how many people take the test, and do?

Numbers racket or not, it still seems totally bizarre to me that something that is a well-documented product of the imagination of a sci-fi pulp writer (L. Ron Hubbard) could be taken seriously. Helloooo, people, he’s a science fiction writer! Science fiction. All he does is make shit up!

Scientology also has a weird patina of glamour about it. How many people know of it in the first place solely because of its celebrity adherents? And yes, there’s plenty of juicy Tom Cruise (and John Travolta) tidbits in Going Clear, including an incident where the church “apparently” pimped for the Mission: Impossible actor. Or should I say, set him up on a blind date?

Probably the main impetus for Going Clear was the defection and subsequent confession, if it can be called that, of Canadian-gone-Hollywood director/writer Paul Haggis (Crash, Casino Royale). Haggis joined at an early age and quickly moved up in the Hollywood hierarchy, thanks in part to the church. (One of the interesting facets of the Scientology phenomenon is Hubbard’s genius in targeting Hollywood from the beginning.) Haggis’s story frames Going Clear.

Another thing I find fascinating about Scientology is how it’s managed to survive this long, and if it can continue to do so. The church, it seems, has survived because it’s been able to keep many of its practices and beliefs, not to mention allegations of abuse, secret or at least hidden. Notwithstanding the fact that the church has pockets deep enough that it can buy airtime during the Superbowl, and that millions more will see the commercial than will read this book, it’s all there on the Internet.

Then again, Haggis could’ve found out just about any of this stuff at any time. If he’d bothered to look.

Vancouver content: a lot of early Scientology activity happened in Oregon, and Hubbard lived for a time in Washington state. The only direct Vancouver reference I found however was on page 91: “Dr. Stephen Wiseman, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who has been a prominent critic of Scientology, speculated that a possible diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality would be ‘malignant narcissism,’ which he characterizes as ‘a highly insecure individual protecting himself with aggressive grandiosity, disavowal of any and every need from others, antisocial orientation, and a heady and toxic mix of rage/anger/aggression/violence and paranoia.’”

 

52 books—Hefner

Who thought this was a good idea for a book cover?

That was my first thought on coming upon this paperback in a Powell River used book store last summer.

(The cover folds out, btw, to reveal even more Hugh Hefner and fluffy-tailed cherubs.)

I bought it on a whim; I’d never heard of this particular volume, although I knew (if I’d thought about it) there had to be at least one or two biographies of the king of the Playboy empire.

Anyway, last week I finally pulled it down from the Shelf of Books Bought and Which I’ve Been Meaning to Read (which is actually several shelves). It was a quick read – I burned through its 250 pages lickety-split, in three days.

The first half is low on titillation and heavy on Hefner’s Early Days of Struggle, his resourcefulness  and the 1950s publishing industry. As a wannabe publisher myself,  I found this part of the book fascinating. I especially appreciated the portrait of Hefner as a publisher; he didn’t set out to put together what would become the world’s best-known girly magazine, at least at first. His prime directive was to become a publisher, period. That he ended up buying that famous nude Marilyn Monroe calendar photo (the first brick in the making of Playboy) was just the result of a series of (happy?) accidents.

The second half of Hefner is a little less interesting. The author, Frank Brady, was a Playboy magazine editor and had access to Hefner, the Playboy offices and the Chicago mansion, it seems, but is obviously constrained by some remaining loyalties as well as timing. When this book was published, in 1974, Playboy was still more or less in its infancy – reality TV, Pamela Anderson and so much more still in its future — or at least, adolescence.

In this section, Brady’s description of the mansion, and how Hefner squirreled himself away in a publisher’s equivalent of a panic room (i.e. a luxuriously appointed one) for nearly a decade, reads like something out of every introspective teenage boy’s dream – imagine a room you never had to leave, where every want and desire is fulfilled and you control an empire from your bed.

However, the stuff about Playboy’s legal battles and former Playboy employees’ sour grapes is just not all that compelling. I guess there’s only so much you can do when the story you set out to tell is nowhere near complete. Hefner was published in 1974, while the magazine was still good, Jimmy Carter wasn’t yet in the White House and Hefner had just moved to his Los Angeles mansion.

It’s never clear, either, just how much of the quotes Brady uses are from interviews he conducted with Hefner, or were overheard in other contexts. Some notes about sources would definitely go towards the book’s credibility. (Coincidentally, or not, I also recently had problems about the lack of credible sources in Teresa Carpenter‘s wretched piece of yellow journalism about murdered Vancouver Playmate Dorothy Stratten, which I touch on here.)

Also it’s never quite clear, outside of the money (which may have been substantial), why Brady wrote the book. It’s neither a hagiography or a hatchet-job. The author seems mostly fair to his subject, although he does slip into a slightly hectoring and judgmental tone now and then. His feelings about his (former) boss are obviously a complicated mix of admiration, envy, loyalty, and a desire to distance himself from the whole thing.

Hefner is by no means the last word on its subject. But, with its mid-70s insider’s perspective into an unparalleled publishing phenomenon, it’s a start.

What kind of man

“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” – Hugh Hefner, in an editorial in the first issue of Playboy

52 books—Music of Chance

James Spader, M. Emmet Walsh and Mandy Patinkin in Music of Chance (1993).

The Music of Chance by Paul Auster

I first read The Music of Chance years ago, I think before I saw the 1993 movie but I can’t be sure. Anyway, I fell in love with it from the opening line: “For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forth across America as he waited for the money to run out.”

The first chapter continues from there and is a thing of beautiful existential exposition, interspersed with dialogue that reads like second-rate Raymond Chandler—something I didn’t pick up on the first time. (One reviewer on GoodReads implied that Auster lifted whole swaths of the dialogue from old crime novels, which adds a nice recontextualizing twist to the whole thing.) Anyway, the dialogue gets better, but it isn’t really the point.

The point is the dilemma that faces Jim Nashe, the driver who stops to pick up a card player named Jack Pozzi, an event that sets in motion a series of events that, in hindsight, seem inevitable but which, during the book’s hurtling forward momentum, are unpredictable. The dilemma being: do we consign ourselves to our fates or kick against them?

Not the best cover for the book, but one of the largest in the Google Images library.

This is a nearly perfect novel that I would include with my all-time faves, a list that includes E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate and Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit. The Music of Chance was a joy to re-read, and even though I saw (or thought I saw) a few flaws this time, they weren’t enough to inhibit my enjoyment of the book.

As an aside: for some reason The Music of Chance, which is Auster’s third novel and was published in 1990 when he was 43, didn’t send me on a Paul Auster-reading spree when I first read it. In fact I haven’t read anything else by the author (except a graphic novel adaptation of his novel City of Glass). For me, it’s as if The Music of Chance is a perfect distillation of his worldview, and requires no further comment.

As another aside: The Music of Chance was made into a 1993 movie starring James Spader, Mandy Patinkin, M. Emmet Walsh and Samantha Mathis. If memory serves, it’s a pretty good flick; unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have been issued on DVD. (Get on it, Criterion!) However, it’s still out there on VHS.

 

 

52 books—The Best American Short Stories 2011

There was a time I was a regular reader of this anthology series, as well another annual short story collection, the O. Henry Prize. I stopped somewhere in the last five or six or even more years, for no particular reason. I was reading other things, partly and also because, as handsome as these editions are, I’ve run out of space. And hence no point in buying them.

But I grabbed this one from the discount table at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle a few months back. As part of my losing battle to read books I already have rather than buy new books,  I determined to finally pick it up.

One good thing about BASS 2011 was that I’d already read three of the selections: George Saunders’ “Escape from Spiderhead” and Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” (both were in the New Yorker) as well as Jennifer Egan’s “Out of Body” (actually an excerpt from her book A Visit From the Goon Squad, and therefore kind of a cheat, though it did appear in the magazine Tin House).

I reread all three as part of the collection—it’s interesting to see short stories in a different context, as part of a larger whole; also because I’d largely forgotten two of them and loved the third (“Escape from Spiderhead”) when I’d first read it.

Anyway, to get to the meat of the matter: I always find reading these collections to be satisfying and filling, like a Las Vegas buffet in a higher-end casino. Looking back over the table of contents, I can pick out the stories that really hit home, those that came close and others that left me cold. I’ll give a brief one- or two-sentence rundown of my favourites.

“Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman—I loved the idea behind this one; a woman tries to find her dead mom’s parrot. The parrot does an uncanny imitation of the woman’s mom and she wants to hear her voice one last time.

“Gurov in Manhattan” by Ehud Havazelet—A middle-aged man, in the company of a constipated wolfhound, looks back on his life. Hit a little too close to home.

“The Dungeon Master” by Sam Lipsyte—I’m a fan of Lipsyte, at least his novel Home Land which I thought was very funny (and not to be confused with the also funny, if unintentionally, TV series Homeland). In this one, the anti-social title character takes it upon himself to teach his fellow gamers about life.

“Property” by Elizabeth McCracken—A man moves into a house that’s not all it was cracked up to be. I liked this story’s moral, or at least the lesson learned by the main character about looking at things from a different perspective. The way grief—the man is freshly widowed—runs through this story makes it more powerful.

“To the Measures Fall” by Richard Powers—The history of a reader and the life of the book she discovers at an impressionable age. Readers everywhere I think will be able to relate to this one. I liked these lines: “Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then live support, then heroin.”

“Escape from Spiderhead” by George Saunders—Already mentioned. George Saunders is getting lots of love for his new collection (which includes this story), Tenth of December. I’m a fan, so I enjoyed reading this story, about pharmaceuticals run amok, a second time.

What I didn’t like: it seemed like an inordinate number of these 22 stories featured, somewhere in their pages, a conveniently off-camera dead child. And there were a few stories I didn’t like at all, including two that struck me as very forced parables (“Phantoms” by Steven Millhauser and “The Sleep” by Caitlin Horrocks). All in all though a very enjoyable read (and I always like reading the Contributors’ Notes at the end, especially the more generous contributors who explain how and why a story developed).

Next up: either The Music of Chance (a favourite novel) by Paul Auster or Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (a favourite author).

52 books—Bring Up the Bodies

One of my new year’s resolutions is to do more blogging. I was partly inspired by my girlfriend, who just did a whole month’s worth (each day every day) for December. You can read the results at BCRobyn.com.

Anyway, another resolution is to read at least one book a week—not counting graphic novels. I’m also going to try to review, or at least summarize the reading experience of, each book, fiction or non-.

To begin with: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, published last year.

There’s not much to say about this novel; it’s already won the Booker Prize, as did its predecessor, Wolf Hall. Both books (as well as a third, not yet published) are about Thomas Cromwell, King Henry the VIII’s “fixer.”

Bring Up the Bodies (and I loved the context in which this phrase is finally dropped in the story) is specifically about the years 1535-6, and the beheading of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife.

As a Canadian, my relation to English history is more than a little deficient. What little I think I know I’ve probably learned from movies and from being forced to read the play A Man For All Seasons in high school. (Or maybe we had to sit through the 1966 movie version, which starred Paul Scofield, Orson Welles, Robert Shaw and John Hurt.) I think that Cromwell has a reputation as a pretty nasty customer. The play  pits him against Sir Thomas More, the Chancellor of England who refused Henry’s demand to annul Henry’s first marriage, to Catharine (“Katharine” in Bring Up the Bodies).

I’m not sure how much the play is responsible for Cromwell’s reputation, of if that’s also the general consensus of historians. But Mantel’s version of Cromwell is fully-realized. He’s just about always the smartest person in the room (basically, the Denzel Washington role) but is self-aware enough to note that even he can sometimes be surprised. His motives are complex, as are his dealings with the various factions vying for his attention. He’s also got a dry sense of humour which is revealed in his inner monologue and the occasional well-deployed bon mot, which is usually delivered to seem politic on the surface but often cuts two ways.

Much is made in Mantel’s books of her hero’s lowly origins, as the son of a blacksmith. Other characters, rivals for the king’s affection and trust, are always reminding Cromwell that he doesn’t belong in King Henry’s court. His background is never far from Cromwell’s thoughts, either. In many ways, if not all, those origins have made him a survivor in a particularly vicious pool of piranhas.

Anyway. The upshot of Bring Up the Bodies and Wolf Hall is that you don’t have to be interested in the royals or in historical fiction to enjoy Mantel’s triumph. I’m a fan of neither (I’ve never seen an episode of The Tudors) and I ploughed through the second half of Bring Up the Bodies (it’s a 400+ page book) in practically one sitting. It’s not about what happens, but it’s a particularly fascinating take on how and why a queen of England could be beheaded.

Be Good Tanyas in Nicholson Baker’s ‘book of raunch’

Vancouver’s Be Good Tanya’s make an appearance in Nicholson Baker’s 2011 ‘Book of Raunch’.

Well now this is weird. I was reading Nicholson Baker‘s 2011 novel House of Holes, subtitled “a book of raunch”, when I came across a reference to Vancouver’s very own darlings of trill, the Be Good Tanyas.

In this passage, about midway through the book, a guy named Wade wakes up in a hotel room in the House of Holes (which is either an actual house or the name of a sex amusement park, or maybe just a state of mind – I’m not entirely sure) and orders up a woman from room service.

So far so good, right? Up comes Koizumi, who describes herself as “a sculptor” and also “a collector of wet-dream memories.” Pretty soon, Wade is feeling her up:

Wade felt her breasts.
“I’m sorry they are quite small,” Koizumi said.
“Nonsense, they’re exquisite, and you know what the Be Good Tanyas say. ‘The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.’ You know the Be Good Tanyas, right?”
“Yes they’re Canadian. I’m Canadian Japanese. I believe in supporting Canadian singers.”

Did you catch that? Is that not a weird and obscure reference? The thing is, the reference sticks out especially because up until that moment in the book music has barely been mentioned, if at all, never mind the name of a specific (and real world!) band.

On another note (pardon the pun), the reference took me right out of the story—which until then was a pleasant and porn-y fantasy, almost completely devoid of any real-world references. So aesthetically, I’m not sure if it’s a reference that entirely works.

Still, it was pretty fun to come across a Vancouver band in House of Holes, of all places.

Music video – Be Good Tanyas, “Littlest Birds”:

Michael Chabon – interview excerpt pt 1

Michael Chabon’s new novel.

Michael Chabon is an author I feel a personal connection with.

I bought Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his first novel, when it was published in trade paperback in 1988 or ’89. I loved the book (and the female love interest, the delightfully named Phlox) and was also supremely envious (Chabon was 25 at the time, I was just a couple of years younger and “novelist” was very much a career choice I had in mind). When The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was published in 2000, I sold the idea of an interview with Chabon to the Globe & Mail newspaper, even though this meant driving down to Seattle (where he was giving a reading at Elliott Bay Book Company).

After the reading we did the interview, and Chabon was gracious, even when we kept pestering him for a photo and he was running late for dinner. Of course, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, an achievement I’d like to think I had a hand in although of course I did not.

In the last decade, Chabon has emerged as a champion of genre fiction and comic books. He’s written essays about Sherlock Holmes and American Flagg! His short novel The Final Solution featured Sherlock Holmes (though I don’t think he’s explicitly named); The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a mystery set in an alternate world, where the Jews, post-WWII, have settled in Alaska (they are “the frozen chosen”). He’s also written comic books, including a series about The Escapist, the fictional superhero invented for Kavalier & Clay.

Having grown up on comic books, science fiction paperbacks and John D. MacDonald thrillers myself, before discovering John Updike, Philip Roth and other so-called realists, I have come to admire Chabon even more for helping wake me up to the realization that there’s no shame in loving both Rabbit is Rich and The Quick Red Fox.

His latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, is set in the real world, more or less, although there is an alternate history, sort of (Chabon creates a fake ’70s blaxploitation film series). And there are tons of pop culture references, from Star Trek to Marvel Comics to Quentin Tarantino. And two of the main characters own and operate a record store, so there’s lots of music, mostly jazz, references. (Oh, and there’s even a Barack Obama cameo, which is quite well done.)

I enjoyed Telegraph Avenue, though I’m not sure I found it rave-worthy (it’s not the book I would recommend to someone who hadn’t read anything else by its author). It’s kind of like High Fidelity but with jazz instead of indie-rock and more midwifery. Lots more.

Anyway, this past Wednesday I got to interview Chabon again. This time the chat was via phone (Chabon was at his office in Oakland) for a piece that will run in the Vancouver weekly the Georgia Straight next week (he’s on a book tour that brings him to St. Andrews-Wesley United Church Sept 26). Parts of the interview didn’t make it into the finished piece, especially some small talk at the beginning of the conversation about genre fiction and obscure writers we admire, including Walter Tevis and Nicholas Meyer. I’ll post another excerpt or two in the next week or so.

Michael Chabon on Walter Tevis and Nicholas Meyer:

SC: In an interview with Mother Jones recently, you mentioned Nicholas Meyer. He had an interesting career – the wrote a Sherlock Holmes novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and wrote and directed The Wrath of Khan, the second Star Trek movie.

Michael Chabon: That’s right, one of my favourites of all the Star Trek feature films. He was a big important figure for me. That first book of his, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was a little light bulb over my head. It was the first piece of fan fiction I encountered, and in many ways I think it’s the supreme fan fiction, with pastiches that really do work and give you the feeling of reading something by Arthur Conan Doyle. And Wrath of Khan, when his name turned up on the credits I remembered how thrilled I was.

SC: And didn’t he make that time travel movie, Time After Time [1979]?

Michael Chabon: The one with Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, Jack the Ripper and H.G. Wells chasing each other… I love that movie.

Time After Time (1979), written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, features H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper in modern-day San Francisco. Meyer would later go on to write and direct the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan.

I mentioned him at some point a long time ago, around the time when Kavalier & Clay was published. He got wind of it and sent me a note. And then he died shortly after.

SC: Are you a fan of Walter Tevis?

Michael Chabon: He’s a favourite of mine. I love Mockingbird, and of course the chess book, The Queen’s Gambit. I’ve reread it three times since the first time. I’ve turned my wife [Ayelet Waldman] onto it too, it’s one of her favourite books. He was such an odd writer, his writing career had such an odd trajectory. The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth—and one of the greatest chess novels ever written.

If you see this book, buy it. Read it. Love it. Treasure it. Then keep buying copies to give to friends.