After the Golden Age
by Carrie Vaughn
(3/5 stars)
Sometimes it's a good thing not to write reviews right away. I was all set to give this book four stars. Then nature called and while taking care of business, the realization hit me: most of this plot was meaningless! All the digging for clues and setting things up didn't matter at all because in the end the villain calls our hero to tell her exactly where--and who--he is. What the heck is that?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that really this could have been chopped into a short story because the rest winds up being filler. Setting up all these relationships, what did it really matter? All but one of the superheroes wasn't even present for the grand finale!
The mostly unimportant story is like "The Incredibles" if the kids didn't have superpowers. Captain Olympus is like Superman and his wife Spark is like the Human Torch, only a girl. They have a daughter named Celia West who doesn't have any powers, except being a hostage. She's kidnapped about six times before the book starts.
The big nemesis is called the Destructor, who is like the resident Dr. Doom. The superheroes have caught him at last and now he's facing a trial. Celia is a forensic accountant assigned to the case despite that years ago she defected to the Destructor's side to get back at her parents. Meanwhile some new criminals are stealing priceless violins and fish (no fooling) and unleashing terror while also abducting Celia a couple more times.
The ride getting up to the big finish is interesting enough, though it never gets much deeper than the back cover flap description. This isn't in the vein of comics like "Watchmen" that try to have profound social messages.
The writing is pretty vanilla; it definitely is not going to challenge you. Celia is your typical spunky female just dying to be played by Rachael McAdams or Amy Adams in a movie adaptation. Though it's hard to have much respect for her since she gets kidnapped so many times before the story and four times DURING the story and yet still walks right into the trap at the end. Yeesh, after a while you'd think she'd get wise and start taking some precautions. And as I said, for all the digging for clues she does, it doesn't really have any impact. It would also have been nice if she hadn't been quite so whiny about her parents all the time.
The romance between her and a police detective who is also the mayor's son, like so much of the story just doesn't matter. In this case it's because another romance comes along, one that's a bit creepy.
Besides the end confrontation not being anything very exciting, the last chapter--which should have been an epilogue--quickly summarizes what happens to all the important characters. Besides limiting the sequel potential, there's nothing emotionally satisfying about these little blurbs.
In all it's comparable to the lesser superhero movies at your local multiplex. So long as you don't stop to think about it, it's not too bad.
That is all.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Bridge of Sighs
Bridge of Sighs
By Richard Russo
(1/5 stars)
(I'm going to spoil the hell out of this, so please don't chide me about spoiler space. You've been warned!)
Richard Russo's previous novel "Empire Falls" won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award for American fiction. The only award "Bridge of Sighs" should receive would be for Most Boring Narrator of a Novel.
And I'm not just saying that as some random crackpot or someone who reads Tom Clancy books all the time and stumbled on this one. I've read all of Russo's other books, including his book of short stories. "Nobody's Fool," "Empire Falls," and "Risk Pool" were all great novels.
Which is why this is so disappointing to me. If I can speculate (and why not, it's my review) I think after winning the Pulitzer Russo wanted to do something "serious" to prove he was a Great American Novelist like Hemingway, Updike, etc. So he tries all this misdirection and sleight of hand by changing narrators and tenses, creating stories within the story. The problem, though, is that when unraveled the story is perfectly ordinary, a tale so shopworn no amount of magic tricks could make it seem original.
What it all boils down to are three kids and their parents. There's Lou C. "Lucy" Lynch, who unfortunately narrates most of the story. Lucy is such a boring, needy, neurotic individual that if he were real I'd want to knock his teeth out. At 60 he still acts the way he did at 6 and his greatest wish would be that he could be 6 again and living with his mommy and daddy. How sick is that? I mean a lot of us would like to be in our late teens or 20s again, but Lucy actually wants to be a little kid.
Since there's no fortune telling machine around to do a reverse "Big" he's lucky to find a woman to wipe his nose and clean up after him. Her name is Sarah. She's a painter and substitute teaches art classes at the local schools. She lost a breast to cancer and had a miscarriage and gave birth to their son Owen. Of course we only get the bare minimum of detail about that so we can have hundreds of pages of Lucy riding in milk trucks and painting fences like the lost episodes of "Leave It to Beaver."
Sarah also loved another man, a far more interesting man. His name is Bobby Marconi, later Bobby Noonan. Where Lucy was the boring nerd like Richie Cunningham (or Potsy really), Bobby was the Fonz, with a motorcycle and tough guy attitude and probably a leather jacket. Bobby's father was an emotionally abusive jerk, continually knocking up Bobby's mother. This produced a series of boys who are referred to collectively, except one apparently was named David. Anyway, once he comes back from military school, Bobby joins the football team and starts dating the beauty queen. But he really wants Lucy's girlfriend Sarah. And she really wants him, but she settles for Lucy, which as my Amazon friend Ethan Cooper said is obviously a sign of a character defect. What girl is really going to pick Potsy over the Fonz?
Far, far too much time is spent on the saga of Lucy's parents opening New York's first convenience store. I scoffed at how his mom spontaneously comes up with the idea of the modern convenience store. According to our good friends at Wikipedia they already had 7-11 down south, but to hear Russo tell it Tessa Lynch is the one who came up with the whole thing.
A story with a boring narrator like Lucy can be successful if you can do at least one of two things:
1. Move the character to interesting locations.
2. Surround the character with interesting people.
Russo doesn't really do either. Early on we're told that present day Lucy and Sarah are going to Italy, which is where Bobby is living after becoming a successful painter. So it seems obvious that Lucy and Sarah should go there and see the interesting places like Rome, Florence, and finally Venice where Bobby lives.
But no. Instead we stay moribund in Thomaston, New York, the kind of place only Lucy Lynch could love because it's so dreadfully boring. Most Russo novels feature a down-on-its-luck small town in New York or Maine, but this seemed like the least interesting of any of them. Well it's like they say, it's the people who make the town.
Which is the second problem. Other than Bobby, no one else is all that interesting. Lou's father is appropriately called Big Lou. That's exactly what he is: Lou, only bigger--and just as dull. Lou's mom is most often nagging or bossing everyone around. Sarah's only slightly better than that. At least at times there was Uncle Dec there for a little comic relief, otherwise it'd be one bland scene after another.
So we have a dull location with equally dull people. That leaves very little reason for any reader to keep trudging through the maze Russo sets up. A smart reader would give up by 300 pages. An inordinately stubborn reader would plow through to the end, hoping for something to make it worthwhile, only to be sorely disappointed.
This was obviously a misfire for Russo. The only good thing is that his next novel, "That Old Cape Magic" was much better. It far more succinctly dealt with the same issues of kids and their parents and a woman loving two different men. So maybe Russo learned from his mistakes. I hope so.
Now for my own amusement and to recap what I just said, here are the notes I wrote in the comments of Ethan Cooper's review:
BJ Fraser says:
I had to roll my eyes this afternoon when I got up to the part where his mom invents the convenience store. You really expect me to believe that, Richard Russo? He could have at least had her read or hear about it somewhere else first. As it is I doubt a bookkeeper in upstate New York came up with 7-11...but I'll have to go look it up in Wikipedia.
BJ Fraser says:
I've slogged my way through to nearly page 300 now. Except for the locked in the trunk part and the fight outside the movie theater there's really been nothing interesting as far as Lucy goes. The Noonan parts are better.
BJ Fraser says:
And to follow up to one of my comments, 7-11 began in 1927 in Texas and by the time Lucy's mom comes up with her convenience store, 7-11 already had a bunch of locations open from 7 to 11. The better way to do this would have been to have someone come back from a trip to Texas and mention something offhand to Lucy's mom instead of her seemingly on the spot coming up with the idea.
BJ Fraser says:
Lucy's stories really are tedious. His parents argue about money: whose don't? Even billionaire parents probably argue about buying a solid gold 747 from time to time.
When I did my Bildungsroman, I realized after going over the first draft I needed to get through the childhood stuff fairly quickly and move him to more interesting locales. But he has a Pulitzer and I don't, so what do I know?
BJ Fraser says:
I'm on the last 100 pages now. It all boils down to Lucy and Noonan both love Sarah. As if that hasn't been done a million times before. It's just a bunch of sleight of hand with the weird structure to make it seem like it's something different.
BJ Fraser says:
There is a little bit from Sarah's perspective back in high school/college. (Apparently we're never going to get to that period from between college to when they're 60.)
I'm thinking that Noonan runs away after high school (either because of guilt or dodging Vietnam or both) leaving Sarah to go with the boring guy or nothing at all. Many people probably would have chosen nothing.
I'm probably going to annoy people by putting in spoilers whenever I do finish.
BJ Fraser says:
You don't think The Boring NonAdventures of Lucy Lynch would be a great series? At least it would be good for those suffering from insomnia
BJ Fraser says:
Actually that sounds like a good idea for a series of Saturday Night Live skits. In one episode a quart of milk at Ikey Lubin's is nearing the expiration date. Shots of Lucy sweating and staring at the milk as the clock ticks with dramatic music in the background. Then just as Lucy is about to take the milk out, someone comes along and buys it. In the next thrilling episode, Lucy has only 4 pennies left in the cash register!
BJ Fraser says:
BTW, last year I used the Bridge of Sighs in a story. I wonder if Russo was aware of the tradition I found out from Wikipedia, which I assume is true:
Ahead I see there are already a pair of gondolas approaching the enclosed bridge between the old prisons and the interrogation rooms of the Doge's Palace. This bridge is called the Ponte dei Sospiri or later as the "Bridge of Sighs." I probably could have walked the interior of the bridge if any authorities in Venice had ever caught me scrambling around the city and peeping into people's windows.
"What are we doing here?" I ask Alejandro.
"It's a local superstition that if you kiss beneath the bridge at sunset, your love with last forever," he says.
"Did you kiss Aggie here?"
"No, but I want to kiss you here."
The gondolier finds some space for us to park beneath the bridge.
Though I know I shouldn't, I turn around to face Alejandro. As the sun sets, we each lean forward to kiss. It's a chaster kiss than we usually share, due to the presence of the gondolier and other lovers nearby.
BJ Fraser says:
And while I'm going on and on, perhaps the most unforgivable sin is not having Lucy and Sarah go to Italy as they'd been planning. Is there any question that Venice would make for a much more interesting setting than Thomaston, New York? You've got the art, the architecture, the history, and the canals in Venice. What's Thomaston got? A dirty river and a bunch of houses and businesses going to seed. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
BJ Fraser says:
Turns out you were right about Sarah. What happens is that her mom dies and then she collapses into Lucy's arms and that's how they wind up together.
But there was a little drama when Lucy found a love letter Sarah wrote to Bobby after a recent masectomy. They had a slight argument and then she went off to her mom's old neighborhood in Long Island. Of course she'll come back though. Maybe she'll run into Bobby in New York, though I doubt it.
BTW, what I find hilarious is that in the Acknowledgments he thanks his editor for "saving" this novel; I can't even imagine how terrible it was before the editor got to it.
By Richard Russo
(1/5 stars)
(I'm going to spoil the hell out of this, so please don't chide me about spoiler space. You've been warned!)
Richard Russo's previous novel "Empire Falls" won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award for American fiction. The only award "Bridge of Sighs" should receive would be for Most Boring Narrator of a Novel.
And I'm not just saying that as some random crackpot or someone who reads Tom Clancy books all the time and stumbled on this one. I've read all of Russo's other books, including his book of short stories. "Nobody's Fool," "Empire Falls," and "Risk Pool" were all great novels.
Which is why this is so disappointing to me. If I can speculate (and why not, it's my review) I think after winning the Pulitzer Russo wanted to do something "serious" to prove he was a Great American Novelist like Hemingway, Updike, etc. So he tries all this misdirection and sleight of hand by changing narrators and tenses, creating stories within the story. The problem, though, is that when unraveled the story is perfectly ordinary, a tale so shopworn no amount of magic tricks could make it seem original.
What it all boils down to are three kids and their parents. There's Lou C. "Lucy" Lynch, who unfortunately narrates most of the story. Lucy is such a boring, needy, neurotic individual that if he were real I'd want to knock his teeth out. At 60 he still acts the way he did at 6 and his greatest wish would be that he could be 6 again and living with his mommy and daddy. How sick is that? I mean a lot of us would like to be in our late teens or 20s again, but Lucy actually wants to be a little kid.
Since there's no fortune telling machine around to do a reverse "Big" he's lucky to find a woman to wipe his nose and clean up after him. Her name is Sarah. She's a painter and substitute teaches art classes at the local schools. She lost a breast to cancer and had a miscarriage and gave birth to their son Owen. Of course we only get the bare minimum of detail about that so we can have hundreds of pages of Lucy riding in milk trucks and painting fences like the lost episodes of "Leave It to Beaver."
Sarah also loved another man, a far more interesting man. His name is Bobby Marconi, later Bobby Noonan. Where Lucy was the boring nerd like Richie Cunningham (or Potsy really), Bobby was the Fonz, with a motorcycle and tough guy attitude and probably a leather jacket. Bobby's father was an emotionally abusive jerk, continually knocking up Bobby's mother. This produced a series of boys who are referred to collectively, except one apparently was named David. Anyway, once he comes back from military school, Bobby joins the football team and starts dating the beauty queen. But he really wants Lucy's girlfriend Sarah. And she really wants him, but she settles for Lucy, which as my Amazon friend Ethan Cooper said is obviously a sign of a character defect. What girl is really going to pick Potsy over the Fonz?
Far, far too much time is spent on the saga of Lucy's parents opening New York's first convenience store. I scoffed at how his mom spontaneously comes up with the idea of the modern convenience store. According to our good friends at Wikipedia they already had 7-11 down south, but to hear Russo tell it Tessa Lynch is the one who came up with the whole thing.
A story with a boring narrator like Lucy can be successful if you can do at least one of two things:
1. Move the character to interesting locations.
2. Surround the character with interesting people.
Russo doesn't really do either. Early on we're told that present day Lucy and Sarah are going to Italy, which is where Bobby is living after becoming a successful painter. So it seems obvious that Lucy and Sarah should go there and see the interesting places like Rome, Florence, and finally Venice where Bobby lives.
But no. Instead we stay moribund in Thomaston, New York, the kind of place only Lucy Lynch could love because it's so dreadfully boring. Most Russo novels feature a down-on-its-luck small town in New York or Maine, but this seemed like the least interesting of any of them. Well it's like they say, it's the people who make the town.
Which is the second problem. Other than Bobby, no one else is all that interesting. Lou's father is appropriately called Big Lou. That's exactly what he is: Lou, only bigger--and just as dull. Lou's mom is most often nagging or bossing everyone around. Sarah's only slightly better than that. At least at times there was Uncle Dec there for a little comic relief, otherwise it'd be one bland scene after another.
So we have a dull location with equally dull people. That leaves very little reason for any reader to keep trudging through the maze Russo sets up. A smart reader would give up by 300 pages. An inordinately stubborn reader would plow through to the end, hoping for something to make it worthwhile, only to be sorely disappointed.
This was obviously a misfire for Russo. The only good thing is that his next novel, "That Old Cape Magic" was much better. It far more succinctly dealt with the same issues of kids and their parents and a woman loving two different men. So maybe Russo learned from his mistakes. I hope so.
Now for my own amusement and to recap what I just said, here are the notes I wrote in the comments of Ethan Cooper's review:
BJ Fraser says:
I had to roll my eyes this afternoon when I got up to the part where his mom invents the convenience store. You really expect me to believe that, Richard Russo? He could have at least had her read or hear about it somewhere else first. As it is I doubt a bookkeeper in upstate New York came up with 7-11...but I'll have to go look it up in Wikipedia.
BJ Fraser says:
I've slogged my way through to nearly page 300 now. Except for the locked in the trunk part and the fight outside the movie theater there's really been nothing interesting as far as Lucy goes. The Noonan parts are better.
BJ Fraser says:
And to follow up to one of my comments, 7-11 began in 1927 in Texas and by the time Lucy's mom comes up with her convenience store, 7-11 already had a bunch of locations open from 7 to 11. The better way to do this would have been to have someone come back from a trip to Texas and mention something offhand to Lucy's mom instead of her seemingly on the spot coming up with the idea.
BJ Fraser says:
Lucy's stories really are tedious. His parents argue about money: whose don't? Even billionaire parents probably argue about buying a solid gold 747 from time to time.
When I did my Bildungsroman, I realized after going over the first draft I needed to get through the childhood stuff fairly quickly and move him to more interesting locales. But he has a Pulitzer and I don't, so what do I know?
BJ Fraser says:
I'm on the last 100 pages now. It all boils down to Lucy and Noonan both love Sarah. As if that hasn't been done a million times before. It's just a bunch of sleight of hand with the weird structure to make it seem like it's something different.
BJ Fraser says:
There is a little bit from Sarah's perspective back in high school/college. (Apparently we're never going to get to that period from between college to when they're 60.)
I'm thinking that Noonan runs away after high school (either because of guilt or dodging Vietnam or both) leaving Sarah to go with the boring guy or nothing at all. Many people probably would have chosen nothing.
I'm probably going to annoy people by putting in spoilers whenever I do finish.
BJ Fraser says:
You don't think The Boring NonAdventures of Lucy Lynch would be a great series? At least it would be good for those suffering from insomnia
BJ Fraser says:
Actually that sounds like a good idea for a series of Saturday Night Live skits. In one episode a quart of milk at Ikey Lubin's is nearing the expiration date. Shots of Lucy sweating and staring at the milk as the clock ticks with dramatic music in the background. Then just as Lucy is about to take the milk out, someone comes along and buys it. In the next thrilling episode, Lucy has only 4 pennies left in the cash register!
BJ Fraser says:
BTW, last year I used the Bridge of Sighs in a story. I wonder if Russo was aware of the tradition I found out from Wikipedia, which I assume is true:
Ahead I see there are already a pair of gondolas approaching the enclosed bridge between the old prisons and the interrogation rooms of the Doge's Palace. This bridge is called the Ponte dei Sospiri or later as the "Bridge of Sighs." I probably could have walked the interior of the bridge if any authorities in Venice had ever caught me scrambling around the city and peeping into people's windows.
"What are we doing here?" I ask Alejandro.
"It's a local superstition that if you kiss beneath the bridge at sunset, your love with last forever," he says.
"Did you kiss Aggie here?"
"No, but I want to kiss you here."
The gondolier finds some space for us to park beneath the bridge.
Though I know I shouldn't, I turn around to face Alejandro. As the sun sets, we each lean forward to kiss. It's a chaster kiss than we usually share, due to the presence of the gondolier and other lovers nearby.
BJ Fraser says:
And while I'm going on and on, perhaps the most unforgivable sin is not having Lucy and Sarah go to Italy as they'd been planning. Is there any question that Venice would make for a much more interesting setting than Thomaston, New York? You've got the art, the architecture, the history, and the canals in Venice. What's Thomaston got? A dirty river and a bunch of houses and businesses going to seed. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
BJ Fraser says:
Turns out you were right about Sarah. What happens is that her mom dies and then she collapses into Lucy's arms and that's how they wind up together.
But there was a little drama when Lucy found a love letter Sarah wrote to Bobby after a recent masectomy. They had a slight argument and then she went off to her mom's old neighborhood in Long Island. Of course she'll come back though. Maybe she'll run into Bobby in New York, though I doubt it.
BTW, what I find hilarious is that in the Acknowledgments he thanks his editor for "saving" this novel; I can't even imagine how terrible it was before the editor got to it.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Radiant
Radiant (League of Peoples #7)
by James Alan Gardner
4/5 stars
It took me a while to finally get to this book. I read the last of Gardner's Festina Ramos books 9 years ago and just hadn't gotten around to buying this. Since it's been several years since this came out and there's no sequel, I guess we can say that (for now anyway) it's the end of the line. And it was a pretty good end.
Like all of Gardner's books in this series it's told in first person. Except for "Expendable" these have all featured someone other than Admiral Festina Ramos, but she always shows up. "Radiant" is no exception to this. The narrator in question is Youn Suu, who hails from a planet colonized by Burmese people. When something went wrong in her bioengineering, she was left with a deformed left cheek--on her face of course.
This gets her into the Explorer Corps. The Explorers are all disfigured in some way because some scientific studies determined that people feel the loss of an ugly person less acutely than an attractive one. On Youn's first real assignment she goes to a planet that's being attacked by glowing red moss known as the Balrog. There she meets Ramos and gets bitten by the Balrog, so that it begins taking over her body's cells.
From there Youn and Ramos follow a distress call to Muta, where a colony of scientists has disappeared. As they go down to the surface, they're attacked by strange smoke monsters who emit EMP to disable electronics. In the process of determining who these monsters are and what they want, Youn and Ramos make some discoveries about the universe--and themselves.
Unlike when I read "Trapped" last year, which was mostly a spin-off of the same universe, for this one you really need to have read the rest of the series. Given that this is sort of an ending, there are references to stuff that happened in the previous Ramos stories--Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted, and Ascension. Since I hadn't read those in almost a decade I was a bit lost at times in remembering what Gardner was referencing.
The good thing is that if you like light space opera, then you'd find this series enjoyable enough to start at the beginning. Actually I'd like to reread "Expendable" at some point but my copy pretty much disintegrated a while ago.
My real complaint is sometimes there was a little too much conversation. This sounds hypocritical because in my blog I have a few times complained how much I hate writing action scenes. But a little less hypothesizing and a little more finding out what things were would have been nice.
Still, like the rest of the series it's light enough to make it a quick read. Recommended if you like "Star Trek" or similar fare. It's too bad that there don't seem to be more of these forthcoming, but "Radiant" makes for a good ending while leaving things open for the future.
That is all.
by James Alan Gardner
4/5 stars
It took me a while to finally get to this book. I read the last of Gardner's Festina Ramos books 9 years ago and just hadn't gotten around to buying this. Since it's been several years since this came out and there's no sequel, I guess we can say that (for now anyway) it's the end of the line. And it was a pretty good end.
Like all of Gardner's books in this series it's told in first person. Except for "Expendable" these have all featured someone other than Admiral Festina Ramos, but she always shows up. "Radiant" is no exception to this. The narrator in question is Youn Suu, who hails from a planet colonized by Burmese people. When something went wrong in her bioengineering, she was left with a deformed left cheek--on her face of course.
This gets her into the Explorer Corps. The Explorers are all disfigured in some way because some scientific studies determined that people feel the loss of an ugly person less acutely than an attractive one. On Youn's first real assignment she goes to a planet that's being attacked by glowing red moss known as the Balrog. There she meets Ramos and gets bitten by the Balrog, so that it begins taking over her body's cells.
From there Youn and Ramos follow a distress call to Muta, where a colony of scientists has disappeared. As they go down to the surface, they're attacked by strange smoke monsters who emit EMP to disable electronics. In the process of determining who these monsters are and what they want, Youn and Ramos make some discoveries about the universe--and themselves.
Unlike when I read "Trapped" last year, which was mostly a spin-off of the same universe, for this one you really need to have read the rest of the series. Given that this is sort of an ending, there are references to stuff that happened in the previous Ramos stories--Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted, and Ascension. Since I hadn't read those in almost a decade I was a bit lost at times in remembering what Gardner was referencing.
The good thing is that if you like light space opera, then you'd find this series enjoyable enough to start at the beginning. Actually I'd like to reread "Expendable" at some point but my copy pretty much disintegrated a while ago.
My real complaint is sometimes there was a little too much conversation. This sounds hypocritical because in my blog I have a few times complained how much I hate writing action scenes. But a little less hypothesizing and a little more finding out what things were would have been nice.
Still, like the rest of the series it's light enough to make it a quick read. Recommended if you like "Star Trek" or similar fare. It's too bad that there don't seem to be more of these forthcoming, but "Radiant" makes for a good ending while leaving things open for the future.
That is all.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
That Old Cape Magic
That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
(4/5 stars)
There's a bit of jealousy involved when I read something like this. If I queried an agent with a story about a neurotic middle-aged man who's unremarkable in any significant way who has a low-tempered midlife crisis, there's no way I'd ever get it published. But when you've won a Pulitzer Prize you get carte blanche to write books that many others (including yourself) have already done before.
The neurotic man in question is Jack Griffin. Long ago he wrote movies, that was until he married Joy, who gave birth to their daughter Laura. After that Jack moved to Connecticut, where he teaches film classes while Joy works in the admissions office.
The only real problem in Jack's world is his troubled relationship with his parents. His parents were both English professors who had a love of Cape Cod--the Cape referred to in the title. Jack sees his parents, probably rightfully so, as snobs who looked down on everyone including Joy and her family, despite that they never so much as owned a house, preferring to ruin those of their colleagues. Jack has spent a good portion of life trying not to be them, something that weighs heavier on him after his father dies.
During a wedding on the Cape for Laura's best friend, secrets are revealed and Jack and Joy's relationship begins to unravel. His life goes south, his mother dying and her ghost haunting him--usually taunting him while he moves back to LA to try and write movies again. Meanwhile Joy seems to be doing pretty well with a new man in her life.
I didn't hate this book, but I don't think Russo was really saying anything he hadn't said in all of his previous novels. All of his protagonists are haunted by their parents, like all of us to some extent struggle to reconcile that our parents aren't perfect. It was really hard for me to "root for" a guy who has such an obsessive fixation on his parents that he nearly lets it destroy an otherwise happy marriage. Especially because while his parents were jerks they didn't beat him or molest him or anything like that. You can look in the newspaper (or on the Internet) and see parents who are much worthier of obsessing about. It's really amazing Jack hadn't gone into some form of therapy long before this.
Another thing that bugs me is Jack's story "The Summer of the Brownings." He takes the unfinished story out of a drawer and finds some holes not only in the story but possibly his memory and then later finishes the story. But we never really know exactly how he changed it and the story itself never seemed to have much significance. I thought Jack's possibly faulty memory--brought up again when his mother is dying--would have some kind of an impact like in John Irving's "Until I Find You" but it didn't really seem to do anything. It was more of a red herring than anything.
Another minor point is that although Jack is a screenwriter and a teacher of film, he doesn't seem to have much love for movies. We never learn what Jack's favorite movie is or about any scenes or actors who meant anything to him. We get vague details about some projects he worked on, and even those are treated with apathy. Really I don't think the author thought any of that important, that Jack's career was just means to an end. Interestingly Russo has worked on movies like "The Ice Harvest" and he's taught at universities, so it probably seemed easy enough to combine those two into Jack's career. The way it's presented, though, Jack might as well have been a garbage man--not that there's anything wrong with that--because neither movies nor teaching seemed very important to him.
The good thing, though, is that a skilled novelist can manage to beat a dead horse and still make it interesting for the reader. Despite that I've read numerous books and seen numerous films about a guy having a midlife crisis and parental issues, I was never bored with the book. The narrative and dialog are quick and sharp, keeping the story from becoming a limp, inert mess as could have easily happened (and often enough has happened) in the wrong hands.
So even though Jack's story is probably familiar, especially to fans of Russo's other novels, it's still a lot better than a lot of junk put out there.
That is all.
by Richard Russo
(4/5 stars)
There's a bit of jealousy involved when I read something like this. If I queried an agent with a story about a neurotic middle-aged man who's unremarkable in any significant way who has a low-tempered midlife crisis, there's no way I'd ever get it published. But when you've won a Pulitzer Prize you get carte blanche to write books that many others (including yourself) have already done before.
The neurotic man in question is Jack Griffin. Long ago he wrote movies, that was until he married Joy, who gave birth to their daughter Laura. After that Jack moved to Connecticut, where he teaches film classes while Joy works in the admissions office.
The only real problem in Jack's world is his troubled relationship with his parents. His parents were both English professors who had a love of Cape Cod--the Cape referred to in the title. Jack sees his parents, probably rightfully so, as snobs who looked down on everyone including Joy and her family, despite that they never so much as owned a house, preferring to ruin those of their colleagues. Jack has spent a good portion of life trying not to be them, something that weighs heavier on him after his father dies.
During a wedding on the Cape for Laura's best friend, secrets are revealed and Jack and Joy's relationship begins to unravel. His life goes south, his mother dying and her ghost haunting him--usually taunting him while he moves back to LA to try and write movies again. Meanwhile Joy seems to be doing pretty well with a new man in her life.
I didn't hate this book, but I don't think Russo was really saying anything he hadn't said in all of his previous novels. All of his protagonists are haunted by their parents, like all of us to some extent struggle to reconcile that our parents aren't perfect. It was really hard for me to "root for" a guy who has such an obsessive fixation on his parents that he nearly lets it destroy an otherwise happy marriage. Especially because while his parents were jerks they didn't beat him or molest him or anything like that. You can look in the newspaper (or on the Internet) and see parents who are much worthier of obsessing about. It's really amazing Jack hadn't gone into some form of therapy long before this.
Another thing that bugs me is Jack's story "The Summer of the Brownings." He takes the unfinished story out of a drawer and finds some holes not only in the story but possibly his memory and then later finishes the story. But we never really know exactly how he changed it and the story itself never seemed to have much significance. I thought Jack's possibly faulty memory--brought up again when his mother is dying--would have some kind of an impact like in John Irving's "Until I Find You" but it didn't really seem to do anything. It was more of a red herring than anything.
Another minor point is that although Jack is a screenwriter and a teacher of film, he doesn't seem to have much love for movies. We never learn what Jack's favorite movie is or about any scenes or actors who meant anything to him. We get vague details about some projects he worked on, and even those are treated with apathy. Really I don't think the author thought any of that important, that Jack's career was just means to an end. Interestingly Russo has worked on movies like "The Ice Harvest" and he's taught at universities, so it probably seemed easy enough to combine those two into Jack's career. The way it's presented, though, Jack might as well have been a garbage man--not that there's anything wrong with that--because neither movies nor teaching seemed very important to him.
The good thing, though, is that a skilled novelist can manage to beat a dead horse and still make it interesting for the reader. Despite that I've read numerous books and seen numerous films about a guy having a midlife crisis and parental issues, I was never bored with the book. The narrative and dialog are quick and sharp, keeping the story from becoming a limp, inert mess as could have easily happened (and often enough has happened) in the wrong hands.
So even though Jack's story is probably familiar, especially to fans of Russo's other novels, it's still a lot better than a lot of junk put out there.
That is all.
Monday, January 10, 2011
The Widower's Tale
The Widower's Tale
by Julia Glass
(4/5 stars)
A good litmus test for how compelling a book is is that when you put it down, you want to pick it back up again. I put down "The Widower's Tale" on December 1, 2010 after muddling through the first 75 pages and then I didn't crack it open again until after the new year. So it did in fact take me more than 40 days and 40 nights to finish reading this book. Not exactly what you'd call a page-turner.
I think a lot of my problem in being able to plow through this book was I felt I'd already read it before--several times. Much of it focuses on Percy Darling, a retired librarian in a wealthy Boston suburb called Matlock. An academic from Massachusetts? The late John Updike made a career with that formula. The rest of it, though, reads less like Updike to me and more like the well-mannered sibling of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections." Glass uses a lot of the same techniques as Franzen, spreading the narrative among multiple characters, though Glass focuses outside the Darling family as well. The chapters usually have the same structure where they start at a point in the future from the previous chapter and then work back to dovetail where we left off before. This of course isn't unique to Glass or Franzen, which is only part of my larger point that "The Widower's Tale" presents little that's new.
The narrative I mentioned starts with Percy Darling a 71-year-old retired librarian. His elder daughter Clover is a neurotic divorcee, who gets a job with a local preschool that takes over the barn on Percy's farm where his beloved wife Poppy used to practice ballet. There's also 20-year-old Robert, Percy's grandson who goes to Harvard and is studying to be a doctor like his mother Trudy, a world-famous oncologist. Robert's friend Arturo is a rabid environmentalist, who along with Robert and some other ecowarriors has been pulling various pranks against the affluent people of Matlock and other wealthy suburbs in a probably futile attempt to change the world.
There's also Celestino, an illegal alien from Guatemala who does some gardening work for Percy, and Ira, a gay teacher at Clover's preschool. Glass could have saved a good 150 pages by eliminating their narratives, because neither really does much for the book. Celestino's tale of being virtually adopted and taken to America by a wealthy French family is somewhat interesting, but doesn't really go anywhere. Ira was the stereotypical effeminate gay type straight out of central casting, which I found mildly insulting and wholly unnecessary.
The plot, such as it is, involves multiple threads of Percy falling in love with a woman named Sarah Straight (Straight and Darling? Really?), who is some 20 years younger than him and develops breast cancer that's treated by Percy's daughter. The breast cancer part really made me yawn. I think by now there are about 2,000 movies on Lifetime devoted to breast cancer. Not that I have anything against people with breast cancer, but it's clearly been done before. She's tired and loses her hair? Really? I'd never heard of that before! (That might have been true if this were 1957.)
I'm being overly sarcastic here considering I'm giving it four stars. Glass is a capable enough writer and I think a good many people will find it interesting and entertaining. Those who thought Franzen's "Corrections" was too dysfunctional and mean-spirited would find this far more warm and soothing. My primary complaint is that I felt overall I'd seen everything in this book before. So while it was interesting, it couldn't hold my attention, as indicated above.
It's also the kind of book where a lot of stuff happened, but I didn't feel like I picked up anything of value from it. I certainly wouldn't call affluent Massachusetts families, a day laborer, and a gay teacher a microcosm of modern American society, at least not a complete one. Overall the message seemed to be that things change and you roll with the punches. Wow, I've never heard that before.
That is all.
by Julia Glass
(4/5 stars)
A good litmus test for how compelling a book is is that when you put it down, you want to pick it back up again. I put down "The Widower's Tale" on December 1, 2010 after muddling through the first 75 pages and then I didn't crack it open again until after the new year. So it did in fact take me more than 40 days and 40 nights to finish reading this book. Not exactly what you'd call a page-turner.
I think a lot of my problem in being able to plow through this book was I felt I'd already read it before--several times. Much of it focuses on Percy Darling, a retired librarian in a wealthy Boston suburb called Matlock. An academic from Massachusetts? The late John Updike made a career with that formula. The rest of it, though, reads less like Updike to me and more like the well-mannered sibling of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections." Glass uses a lot of the same techniques as Franzen, spreading the narrative among multiple characters, though Glass focuses outside the Darling family as well. The chapters usually have the same structure where they start at a point in the future from the previous chapter and then work back to dovetail where we left off before. This of course isn't unique to Glass or Franzen, which is only part of my larger point that "The Widower's Tale" presents little that's new.
The narrative I mentioned starts with Percy Darling a 71-year-old retired librarian. His elder daughter Clover is a neurotic divorcee, who gets a job with a local preschool that takes over the barn on Percy's farm where his beloved wife Poppy used to practice ballet. There's also 20-year-old Robert, Percy's grandson who goes to Harvard and is studying to be a doctor like his mother Trudy, a world-famous oncologist. Robert's friend Arturo is a rabid environmentalist, who along with Robert and some other ecowarriors has been pulling various pranks against the affluent people of Matlock and other wealthy suburbs in a probably futile attempt to change the world.
There's also Celestino, an illegal alien from Guatemala who does some gardening work for Percy, and Ira, a gay teacher at Clover's preschool. Glass could have saved a good 150 pages by eliminating their narratives, because neither really does much for the book. Celestino's tale of being virtually adopted and taken to America by a wealthy French family is somewhat interesting, but doesn't really go anywhere. Ira was the stereotypical effeminate gay type straight out of central casting, which I found mildly insulting and wholly unnecessary.
The plot, such as it is, involves multiple threads of Percy falling in love with a woman named Sarah Straight (Straight and Darling? Really?), who is some 20 years younger than him and develops breast cancer that's treated by Percy's daughter. The breast cancer part really made me yawn. I think by now there are about 2,000 movies on Lifetime devoted to breast cancer. Not that I have anything against people with breast cancer, but it's clearly been done before. She's tired and loses her hair? Really? I'd never heard of that before! (That might have been true if this were 1957.)
I'm being overly sarcastic here considering I'm giving it four stars. Glass is a capable enough writer and I think a good many people will find it interesting and entertaining. Those who thought Franzen's "Corrections" was too dysfunctional and mean-spirited would find this far more warm and soothing. My primary complaint is that I felt overall I'd seen everything in this book before. So while it was interesting, it couldn't hold my attention, as indicated above.
It's also the kind of book where a lot of stuff happened, but I didn't feel like I picked up anything of value from it. I certainly wouldn't call affluent Massachusetts families, a day laborer, and a gay teacher a microcosm of modern American society, at least not a complete one. Overall the message seemed to be that things change and you roll with the punches. Wow, I've never heard that before.
That is all.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Geek Love
Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn
(3/5 stars)
A "friend" reviewed this novel and as something of a freak myself I couldn't resist reading a novel about freaks. But I found I didn't like this nearly as much as I thought I would.
The best way to think about this story is that it's like a darker version of "The Addams Family." Ma and Pa work for a traveling circus and decide that it's too expensive to recruit freaks, so they'll breed them! Ma takes all sorts of drugs and such in order to create deformed babies. Some of them die, but four (or five) survive. They are Arturo, a boy with flippers instead of limbs; Ely and Iphy the conjoined twins; Chick the boy with strange psychic powers; and Olympia the hunchbacked albino dwarf who is our narrator. As in most family sagas the narrator is the most boring character with the least personality. Arturo the Aqua Boy is the big star of the family. Ely and Iphy are second with their singing and dancing. Even Chick finds a niche when Arturo starts a cult devoted to making people into deformed freaks. Olympia's only real role is to be Arturo's valet and main worshiper.
I guess despite being something of a freak myself I'm not so deluded to think that being a freak makes someone special or better than "normal" people. As the story goes on I really found it increasingly grotesque and disturbing instead of funny or interesting. Adding to this is the portion that takes place in the present where Olympia is dealing with her daughter and a mysterious woman who thinks like Arturo that deformity is the key to enlightenment.
Anyway, other people obviously thought this was better than I did. I was just a victim of overly high expectations the book couldn't deliver upon.
That is all.
by Katherine Dunn
(3/5 stars)
A "friend" reviewed this novel and as something of a freak myself I couldn't resist reading a novel about freaks. But I found I didn't like this nearly as much as I thought I would.
The best way to think about this story is that it's like a darker version of "The Addams Family." Ma and Pa work for a traveling circus and decide that it's too expensive to recruit freaks, so they'll breed them! Ma takes all sorts of drugs and such in order to create deformed babies. Some of them die, but four (or five) survive. They are Arturo, a boy with flippers instead of limbs; Ely and Iphy the conjoined twins; Chick the boy with strange psychic powers; and Olympia the hunchbacked albino dwarf who is our narrator. As in most family sagas the narrator is the most boring character with the least personality. Arturo the Aqua Boy is the big star of the family. Ely and Iphy are second with their singing and dancing. Even Chick finds a niche when Arturo starts a cult devoted to making people into deformed freaks. Olympia's only real role is to be Arturo's valet and main worshiper.
I guess despite being something of a freak myself I'm not so deluded to think that being a freak makes someone special or better than "normal" people. As the story goes on I really found it increasingly grotesque and disturbing instead of funny or interesting. Adding to this is the portion that takes place in the present where Olympia is dealing with her daughter and a mysterious woman who thinks like Arturo that deformity is the key to enlightenment.
Anyway, other people obviously thought this was better than I did. I was just a victim of overly high expectations the book couldn't deliver upon.
That is all.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Star Wars: Red Harvest
Star Wars: Red Harvest
by Joe Schreiber
(2/5 stars)
When I read and reviewed "Night of the Living Trekkies," which covered similar bloodstained ground, I complimented the book for delivering exactly what it promised. Such can not be said of "Red Harvest," which fails to deliver on the promise of Jedi/Sith fighting zombies.
Oh sure there are zombies and there are two Jedi and some Sith, but it never really amounts to anything. From a pure geek standpoint there's nothing COOL about any of the fights. There are a couple of times when a Jedi or Sith hacks apart a few of the zombies with a lightsaber. But there's nothing that comes within tauntaun spitting distance of the sweet lightsaber fights from the movies--even the dreadful prequels. That's a big letdown and as something of a Star Wars geek (especially when it comes to lightsaber battles) I can't overlook it.
If you want a plot summary it's pretty simple. Long ago during the time of the Old Republic (some thousands of years before even the Star Wars prequels) there were a lot more of the evil Sith lords (the "dark side" of the Force like Darth Vader in the Emperor if you're not up to speed on all the prequel stuff) who have their own academies, which are like an evil version of Hogwarts. The head of this academy is Darth Scabrous, who is researching a way to become immortal, which requires a very special orchid.
Just such an orchid is being raised by a Jedi named Zo Trace. What's so special about the thing is that the orchid requires the Force to grow, so it essentially has bonded with Zo. When a bounty hunter comes to steal it, Zo has to go along or else the plant would die.
Once they get to the planet, Scabrous uses the orchid to create some weird concoction that causes some of the Sith students to become zombies. They in turn start attacking others and from then on it's a fight for survival.
The zombies generally operate under "28 Days Later" zombie rules, which means they're fast, as opposed to the shambling "Night of the Living Dead" zombies. What would have made things better is if the zombies could use the Force and their lightsabers.
The author does such a poor job juggling the characters that I question if he's seen any zombie movies at all. I'm not exactly the expert, but I've seen a few, enough to know that you have to have your varied characters come together into one tight-knit group. (See "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "28 Days Later," "Zombieland," and even "Shaun of the Dead.") But this never happens until the very end; the characters remaining isolated from one another until that point. Really, there is a formula to writing a good zombie story and if you're going to deviate from that you need to have something better than this.
Also, the author at a couple points uses colloquialisms with the Sith students. Star Wars characters do not say "Whatever" or "Fail." I don't care what year it's taking place in the Star Wars universe, that just shouldn't happen. At least they didn't say, "Talk to the Hand," so we got that going for us.
From a purist standpoint this book itself is an abomination, a cheap way to cash in on the resurgence of zombies in popular culture. I would have been willing to give it more slack if it was fun or had some good fight scenes. Since it doesn't, I definitely can't recommend this.
That is all.
by Joe Schreiber
(2/5 stars)
When I read and reviewed "Night of the Living Trekkies," which covered similar bloodstained ground, I complimented the book for delivering exactly what it promised. Such can not be said of "Red Harvest," which fails to deliver on the promise of Jedi/Sith fighting zombies.
Oh sure there are zombies and there are two Jedi and some Sith, but it never really amounts to anything. From a pure geek standpoint there's nothing COOL about any of the fights. There are a couple of times when a Jedi or Sith hacks apart a few of the zombies with a lightsaber. But there's nothing that comes within tauntaun spitting distance of the sweet lightsaber fights from the movies--even the dreadful prequels. That's a big letdown and as something of a Star Wars geek (especially when it comes to lightsaber battles) I can't overlook it.
If you want a plot summary it's pretty simple. Long ago during the time of the Old Republic (some thousands of years before even the Star Wars prequels) there were a lot more of the evil Sith lords (the "dark side" of the Force like Darth Vader in the Emperor if you're not up to speed on all the prequel stuff) who have their own academies, which are like an evil version of Hogwarts. The head of this academy is Darth Scabrous, who is researching a way to become immortal, which requires a very special orchid.
Just such an orchid is being raised by a Jedi named Zo Trace. What's so special about the thing is that the orchid requires the Force to grow, so it essentially has bonded with Zo. When a bounty hunter comes to steal it, Zo has to go along or else the plant would die.
Once they get to the planet, Scabrous uses the orchid to create some weird concoction that causes some of the Sith students to become zombies. They in turn start attacking others and from then on it's a fight for survival.
The zombies generally operate under "28 Days Later" zombie rules, which means they're fast, as opposed to the shambling "Night of the Living Dead" zombies. What would have made things better is if the zombies could use the Force and their lightsabers.
The author does such a poor job juggling the characters that I question if he's seen any zombie movies at all. I'm not exactly the expert, but I've seen a few, enough to know that you have to have your varied characters come together into one tight-knit group. (See "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "28 Days Later," "Zombieland," and even "Shaun of the Dead.") But this never happens until the very end; the characters remaining isolated from one another until that point. Really, there is a formula to writing a good zombie story and if you're going to deviate from that you need to have something better than this.
Also, the author at a couple points uses colloquialisms with the Sith students. Star Wars characters do not say "Whatever" or "Fail." I don't care what year it's taking place in the Star Wars universe, that just shouldn't happen. At least they didn't say, "Talk to the Hand," so we got that going for us.
From a purist standpoint this book itself is an abomination, a cheap way to cash in on the resurgence of zombies in popular culture. I would have been willing to give it more slack if it was fun or had some good fight scenes. Since it doesn't, I definitely can't recommend this.
That is all.
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