The Good House, by Ann Leary

Of all the villains in modern literature, Daisy Buchanan has always been one I love to hate. As F. Scott Fitzgerald describes her, she’s so insulated from the world and from the consequences of her actions that she has no sense of right and wrong, and there’s no one willing to hold her to account. And that’s when she was surrounded by her social peers. Imagine if she lived in an ordinary place with ordinary people.

Hildy Good is (or was) the top-selling real estate broker in her seaside town. The town has been discovered by Boston’s wealthy, land and house prices have skyrocketed, and the quirky old-time residents are trying to hang on in the face of the invasion. The McAllisters, one of the newcomer families, have profited enormously by Brian’s management of a hedge fund (and other money-making silent partnerships), but they’re regular folks and Hildy is glad to sell them a property and introduce them around the town. She and Rebecca are on their way to becoming friends, sharing the occasional glass of wine and conversation. Rebecca even takes Hildy into her confidence on private family matters.

Problem is, Hildy has recently done a stint in rehab for her drinking, and while the old townies pretend not to know, Hildy doesn’t imbibe in front of them. They remember, even if she doesn’t, the conviviality that turned sour, the caution they used when she got in the car, the reason her valued associate departed for a competitor brokerage. But, while she’s on her best behavior in public, that case of wine in her trunk calls to her every night and she’s answering.

Hildy tries to do the right thing—or at least avoid causing herself trouble, which for some people amounts to the same thing.  She’s also on the lookout for the main chance, the big, profitable sale that’s going to put her brokerage back on top. As she travels through the town and interacts with the residents, she provides us with commentary on their quirks and problems in an acerbic and darkly comic voice. But the booze affects her judgment, and we begin to wonder how much of her commentary could be called accurate, and how much is self-protection.

One of her targets is next-door neighbor Frankie Getchell, a one-time boyfriend, and owner of a large and desirable property that Hildy keeps pressing him to sell. Frankie wants to hold on to it, mostly to store the variety of junk equipment he uses in his various jack-of-all-trades businesses.  A convenient man to know, Frankie’s the guy to go to if you need your trash picked up, driveway plowed, house painted or remodeled,or stuff delivered. He isn’t socially acceptable, but under the influence of a couple of stiff drinks, Hildy decides he’s just enough to sleep with.

The story keeps coming back to Rebecca, though, and the influence she begins to have on Hildy and on other people in the town.  Far from the vulnerable lonely woman she presents to the rest of the town, Rebecca has a cold core that gradually shows through in her treatment of others. Oddly enough, Frank is the first to spot it, but no one, including Hildy, will listen to him.  By the time Hildy recognizes the trouble Rebecca’s causing, she’s embroiled in a crisis of her own.

I can imagine comparisons to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but The Good House also reminded me of another book I recently read—Tiffany Baker’s The Gilly Salt Sisters. Also set in a New England town, also dealing with the poisonous power of money, the manipulation of others, and long-held secrets coming to the fore, The Gilly Salt Sisters has a small taste of magic not found in The Good House, but I think the two might interest the same readers.

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, by Jesse Andrews

I haven’t read a lot in Young Adult Fiction, mostly because I’m overwhelmed with selections in the so-called Adult Fiction category. Along with most other readers (and editors and publishers and reviewers and booksellers and librarians), I can’t draw a bright line between what is YA and what isn’t. I just know I don’t get over to browse our “official” YA collection. So I count myself lucky that I was able to steal this from someone else’s stack of books and drop into Greg Gaines’ world.

Greg has survived until his senior year of high school by being on the fringes of everything and the center of nothing. He hides his love of film (especially the work of Werner Herzog) behind a studied indifference which also conceals his near-constant and brutal self-criticism. (He’s got some points—serious social errors, like flat out complimenting a girl for having two boobs, are enough to make anyone want to tear his own tongue in half.) His parents love him with that bumbling uncritical affection that every teen hates and he has… Earl.

Earl has shared Greg’s love of Herzog since fourth grade, when the two boys tried to film their own version of Aguirre: Wrath Of God, the masterpiece shot on location in the Amazon—kinda tough to do in the local park. Their collaboration extends to their own films: Earl: Wrath of God II, Ran II, Apocalypse Later, and still others featuring Greg’s cat. The thing is, Earl couldn’t be more different than Greg: he’s an inner-city Pittsburgh kid, bright but lost at school, surrounded by unfocused, violent, drug-dealing brothers and a mother lost in alcohol and online chat rooms. Greg’s stable home is a respite for Earl, and Earl is the only person Greg can be himself around.

And then there’s the dying girl. Greg knew Rachel Kushner in Hebrew school, with all its attendant early teen drama, but they haven’t had much to do with each other since. When Rachel is diagnosed with leukemia, Greg’s mom decides it will be a mitzvah, or good deed, for Greg to spend time with her. Awkward, right? But he does, and brings Earl along in his wake. Earl lets slip the secret of their filmmaking and next thing you know Rachel is watching their movies. Even more awkward. Suddenly Greg is open to all kinds of emotional blackmail and everyone around him takes full advantage of it. Even Greg admits that it sounds like an afterschool special—treat the different kid well and you’ll rack up points, feel good about yourself, and Learn A Lesson. But real life is messy, and even Herzog’s art can’t touch it.

Jesse Andrews gives the story a sense of immediacy despite its looking back at events. Internal monologue, conversations role-played as scripts, jump cuts to real life, and Greg’s direct addresses to an unknown audience give the book the feel of documentary, but one that allows raw and sometimes hilarious access to the filmmaker’s mind. That also means Greg’s and Earl’s casual use of insult and obscenity to each other might make the language a little rough for some readers, so be warned on that front.

And in case the idea of two kids making a film in homage to one they love is farfetched, check out this story, which is told in detail in the book Raiders! by Alan Eisenstock.

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The Odds, by Stewart O’Nan

What are the odds that one author could capture two important elements of American life in two books, each of which is under two hundred pages? If you’re Stewart O’Nan, they are 1 in 1.  The first is Last Night at the Lobster (blogged here by Connie), a 147-page story of a restaurant manager whose life and identity are invested in his job, despite the way he’s casually dismissed by both customers and corporate hatchetmen. The second is 2012′s The Odds, in which a long-married couple makes a last-gasp getaway before divorcing and declaring bankruptcy. Its 179 pages encompass the silent recriminations, miscommunications, deceptions, and uncomfortable blend of inside jokes and familiarity-bred contempt of a man and woman who may have been mismatched from the start.

Marion and Art Fowler are retracing their honeymoon on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but this time packing thousands of dollars in a canvas bag. Right from the start we know that they are going to be divorced when this weekend is over, but Art thinks it’s only a maneuver to protect their few remaining assets.  He is full of other schemes to minimize the damage from their certain bankruptcy: planning to default on the credit card bill for their extravagant weekend, buying Marion jewelry that is just under the asset level for seizure, and above all, using a solid system to beat the roulette wheel in the hotel casino then smuggle his cash winnings back into the US.

What he doesn’t know is that Marion intends their divorce to be more than a legal fiction. As Art has struggled with their finances, Marion has found a life of her own.  She’s impatient with his neediness, practices maneuvers to deflect his affections, and withholds an enormous secret from him. That’s not to say Art is a saint—he can be indecisive, a poor planner (who doesn’t think a Valentine’s Day weekend in Niagara Falls would be crowded?), blind to her tastes, and overly optimistic about the risky venture they’re on.

For all the lows that are finally weighing their marriage down, there are some bright points, especially centered on their children as they begin to make lives of their own. There are moments of intimacy springing from thirty years of living together, familiar rhythms and mutual memories that knit them together and that will never fray. Those moments, small as they sometimes are, lend the story a sweetness that offsets the soured relationship and the desperation of their finances.  Like the Ripley’s 3-D movie Art and Marion see, O’Nan puts his readers in a barrel, has them pass jagged rocks and beautiful scenery on their inexorable way to the fall—but he ends the story just as the barrel launches into the mist, leaving us to create our own landing.

(And, ahem, Pulitzer people:  you may not be able to make a decision, but I hope dismissing O’Nan’s polished works as novellas isn’t in your catalogue of other sins.)

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Shallow Grave

Before he won the Academy Award for directing Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and became the artistic director for the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games, Danny Boyle distinguished himself in the mid-‘90s as a director of edgy, highly stylized films, including A Life Less Ordinary (1997), Trainspotting (1996), and Shallow Grave (1994), his feature film directing debut.

Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, the plot of Shallow Grave centers around three cynical and self-absorbed friends who share a spacious and well-appointed flat: David (Christopher Eccleston), an accountant; Juliet (Kerry Fox), a doctor; and Alex (Ewan McGregor), a tabloid journalist. They’re in need of a new roommate, and the film opens with a series of disastrous interviews in which prospective roommates are cruelly appraised, then rejected. Finally, Juliet personally interviews one intriguing candidate, a mysterious man named Hugo (Keith Allen) who says he’s returning to the city to write a novel. Juliet and Hugo make a connection, and she convinces David and Alex to take Hugo on as a roommate. The arrangement seems ideal until the morning after Hugo moves in. After he fails to join them for breakfast, the concerned roommates go to his room and discover him dead on his bed. Searching for answers, Alex discovers a suitcase full of money under the bed. Juliet wants to report Hugo’s death to the police, but Alex objects, arguing that if they call the police they’ll have to report the money as well. He proposes hiding the body and keeping the money. I do not want to give away too many details in this review (although readers of this blog can connect the dots based on the title and my brief summary); however, I do not think it is revealing too much to say that a seemingly foolproof plan becomes complicated when fractures in the friendship, not to mention Hugo’s past, begin to catch up with the roommates.

Shallow Grave is not a traditional murder mystery. The suspense is not focused on ‘whodunit’; instead, the suspense is generated from the ways in which the roommates, especially David, internalize their actions and the cumulative effect these actions have on the friendship. A subplot involving Hugo’s associates is not quite as well-developed, but it does help to tie events together at the end.

I first saw Shallow Grave back in 1996, and I think the film has held up surprisingly well. Ewan McGregor brings a lot of charisma to the role of Alex and arguably has the film’s most memorable lines, but Shallow Grave’s real chills come from Christopher Eccleston’s carefully crafted performance as the seemingly milquetoast, but ultimately unstable David. At 93 minutes, Shallow Grave is taut and fast-paced, and it is a good showcase for the talents of director Danny Boyle who, in the 18 years since the film’s release, has produced a diverse and impressive body of work.

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The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson

The books featured so far in this week’s posts may make you feel a bit uneasy, but it is a sort of comfortable scariness that they offer. Today’s title is quite the opposite. Shirley Jackson is a master of the macabre, and her short story “The Lottery” is still disturbing many years after I read it (probably in 8th or 9th grade). Just thinking about the story sends shivers up my spine and leaves me feeling slightly queasy.

What makes Jackson’s work disturbing, but also compelling, is her ability to move swiftly and easily from a pleasant scene of domestic or community bliss to outright horror. Her work explores the dark heart that Jackson seems to feel lies at the center of our most cherished institutions—family, community, love. These are frightening stories, especially as they usually are peopled by folks not too different from you and me. The horror of the tales is sometimes leavened by a dark strand of humor, but not too much. These are fascinatingly grim explorations of the human psyche.

While “The Lottery” is the story that I find most chilling in this collection, and the one that created a stir when it was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, there are other stories equally unsettling. “The Demon Lover,” “The Witch,” and “Trial by Combat” all will leave you wondering what is really going on in the lives of the characters.

These are not stories I go back to often, but sometimes, when you are in the mood to be discomfited, Shirley Jackson is just the writer to do it.

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Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie

Confession time?  I never read anything by Salman Rushdie until I picked up Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002.  I found his essays on everything from “Being Photographed” to “Going to Electoral College” to be funny, pointed, and written in approachable, engaging language.  So what was holding me back?  Perhaps it was that intimidating glare, which makes him look as if you’re going to disappoint him no matter how hard you try.  (Of course, looking for the picture I was thinking of yielded only photos of a smiling, avuncular wiseman.  Strange.)

On a whim, I picked up Haroun and the Sea of Stories and began reading it aloud to my wife.  It quickly became a standing date–9pm each night we’d sit down and I’d dive into The Sea.  Rushdie’s enchanting story drew us along right to the wonderfully satisfying end.  It practically defines what I love to see in totally escapist reading, but with a punch that few writers can pull off.

Haroun is the son of Rashid, a famous storyteller who lives in his own imagination and sometimes visits the “real” world to perform the pieces he finds in his fancy.  Haroun’s mother Soraya sometimes frets over money, but is largely happy until a nasty neighbor poisons her image of Rashid, and the two run off together.  Haroun rejects his father’s fantastic view of the world, and Rashid loses his storytelling facility.

Unfortunately, it’s election time in the country Alifbay, where Rashid has been hired to enchant voters so the politicians can tell equally large whoppers to earn votes.  Without his skill Rashid cannot perform, and only professional pride makes him go to his last gig in the isolated Valley of K to entertain provincial voters.  Haroun talks them onto a wild bus ride with a driver named Butt, who delivers them to their putative employer Snooty Buttoo and his fantastic houseboat.  But aboard the houseboat, Haroun finds himself flown away to an invisible moon that houses the Sea of Stories.  An immense ocean whose currents of standard storylines flow together to create new tales, the Sea is also being poisoned by “popular romances” which have turned into “long lists of shopping expeditions, and “talking helicopter anecdotes” that are spoiling the rich imaginative source that has nourished both tellers and listeners for all of human history.  The poison leads back to the enemy of storytelling, “Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech” Khattam-Shud, whose name means “The End.”

With Haroun’s assistance, the good Guppees, the Plentimaw fish, and the people of P2C2E (Processes Too Complicated to Explain) defeat Khattam-Shud and his Chupwalas, and balance returns to the moon.  With the Sea of Stories saved, the world undergoes a transformation that ensures the defeat of the colorless and the victory of the whimsical.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is called a children’s story, but it would be an exceptional child (indeed an exceptional reader of any age) to catch all the puns, literary allusions, political caricature, and meaningful verbal tics Rushdie gives his magical characters.  Haroun is a marvelous stand-in for readers living in the dull world.  His sudden gift of a wildly psychedelic experience reminds of what we set aside as we “grow up.”  It must have been a Chupwala who decided it belonged outside the realm of those who need it most.

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The Devil in Silver, by Victor LaValle

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into a bar…

Well I promise you haven’t heard this one. The guy in question goes by the name of Pepper, which would also be a good description for his personality. Pepper’s a hothead and his trip to a Queens bar to warn his girlfriend’s ex-husband to leave her alone turns into a brawl that includes three off-duty cops. Not wanting to take the time it would require to put Pepper through the booking process, and also wanting to teach him a lesson, the three take him instead to a mental health facility, where he’s committed for a 72-hour surveillance.

That’s the starting point for LaValle’s tale. Pepper’s lack of friends or family, his temper, his mishandling of initial contacts with some of the other patients, his run-ins with the overworked staff, and the numbing effects of powerful meds soon stretch that three-day stay into months. To make matters worse, a patient who is mysteriously protected by the staff in a separate wing that nobody is allowed to enter makes nighttime trips through the ceiling tiles, occasionally murdering other residents. They call him the Devil, and most think him a  monster while a few think he’s just a very sick man. Pepper becomes allied in a plot to stop him with the facility’s longest-held resident, a deceptively tough African-American teenage girl, and a man who obsessively uses the phones to try to get help from outside.

LaValle has a fluid, unusual style and a real gift for original characters. I found it easy to get immersed in his story, a kind of blend of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a monster novel like Stephen King’s It. The book is great summer reading fun, but it also has a serious side with indictments of bureaucracy and the mental health system, insightful glimpses into human nature, and a thorough exploration of what it means to be mentally ill. Pepper is an antihero whose screwups you’ll lament, whose ultimate victory you’ll always desire. To top it off the book is often flat-out funny. In short, there’s something here for almost any kind of reader, making The Devil in Silver an easy book to recommend.

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The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson

Psychologists call it “family of origin“.  Really, they’re the people on whom you imprinted: those who gave you your adult world view or against whom you rebelled.  But if you believe there’s such a thing as a “happy family“, you were born in a test tube and raised in a cave by wolves.  Some families are less weird than others, that’s all.

Setting aside all physically abusive families, the Fang family is perhaps the weirdest one I’ve ever read about.  Caleb and Camille are artists, MacArthur Geniuses, grant winners, gallery darlings.  Their medium? Human confusion and anger.  Their canvas–any place they can set people against one another or cause distress.  Like Sasha Baron-Cohen, they find the outer limit of what people will tolerate, then push them past it.  Unfortunately, they decide to use their children to create the chaos they engender.

Annie and Buster, or “Child A” and “Child B” as they were known in the art world, are now grown.  Annie is a successful actor on the verge of her breakthrough into Oscar contention when a director calls for an unexpected topless scene.  Annie’s response puts her on the Web and into the tabloids, and her response to that causes her to flee Hollywood.  Buster is an unsuccessful novelist working as a freelance writer.  When he’s severely injured in the course of writing an article, he reverts to a Fang-style escape and runs for cover.  Both wind up at their parents’ home, the one place they swore they’d never return.  But.

Well, Camille and Caleb have a project on their calendar, so they take off to the big city.  And on the way they…disappear.  Their bloodstained car is found at a rest area, but no sign of them.  Bitter and suspicious, Annie spots it as another panic-inducing art piece.  Buster wavers between Annie’s view and believing that Camille and Caleb are dead,  Together, brother and sister grope their way through the following days, uncertain how to continue their own lives.

Interspersed in the current-day stories are titled pieces from the Fang family’s career, giving the reader a picture of their methods and results.  The projects become stranger the deeper the story goes, and as A and B become more integral to the work, the projects become more manipulative of them, to the point that Caleb and Camille become passive bystanders in the situations they force the children into.  With each revelation, Annie’s fierce independence and Buster’s uncertainty become more understandable.

Kevin Wilson is scarily creative when it comes to envisioning the Fang art, perhaps even more so in developing his storyline.  He also raises a lot of questions that make excellent fodder for contemplation and discussion.  What is Art?  What is an Artist?  What is a family?  What is child abuse?  At what point can a person be described as “grown up”?  So much packed into a beautifully written, imaginative book that it’s no wonder it made so many “Best Book of the Year” lists.

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Also coming soon as a Gab Bag for reading groups

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The End of Overeating, by David A. Kessler

I’m not obsessing about food.  Really.  But my reading of Sarah Wu’s book led to David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, so you could say I’m just following a chain.  But I’m not obsessed about food.  Really.  (Caveat: I compulsively overeat things like pizza and ice cream, but it doesn’t really show on me.  This is not an “I’m better than you” post, just a look at an interesting book that illuminates my own relationship with food.)

Former head of the Food and Drug Administration under the Clinton Administration, Kessler led a national drive to reduce smoking, implemented nutrition information labels on packaged food, and made it easier for experimental drugs to make their way into the marketplace.  Reading his CV (Dean of the Yale Med School, top awards from major public health institutions), you know that if anyone has credibility on the topics he addresses, it’s going to be Kessler.  And American overeating is a huge (pun not intended) topic.

We know we overeat, but we don’t know why.  We also don’t really understand why some people can overeat and not gain significant weight and others become morbidly obese with all the attendant problems.  In exploring the decisions we make about food, he conducts informal tests on his employees and observes behaviors that you can see in your own life.  Some of those tests would make him a pariah in this library, but hey, he’s the boss.  But, lest we hasten to place all the blame on evil food companies, Kessler reminds us that we do have a measure of control over our eating decisions.

Not that the food companies – from growers to retailers – don’t try to capture our taste buds by creating links between their products and our brains.  Humans crave fat, salt, and sugar; when put into a precisely designed product, balanced among those ingredients and the feel of the food in your mouth, we are almost unable to resist.  (One term that stays with me is “bolus” – the scientific name for the wad of food you get as you chew.  Kind of makes the process a little less enjoyable.)  One area I think Kessler overlooks is the relationship between processed food and the speed with which we eat.  Those chicken tenders we pick up at the drive-thru have had the muscle broken down, making it easier to chew and digest as we speed from one commitment to the next.  What do you do when that much thought is given to arranging fast, tasty product consumption?

Well, you change your routine to avoid food temptation and limit your exposure to the foods that make you overeat.  By knowing how much food it takes to make you feel full until the next scheduled mealtime, or the proper size of a snack to bridge that gap, you can scale portions back.  By knowing alternate routes home, you can avoid the temptations of all those brightly colored restaurants that line our highways.  And, in part,  knowing how food is processed before it reaches you might encourage you to take the slow food path back to a healthier relationship with your diet.  It isn’t easy, but it is worth a try.

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Watergate, by Thomas Mallon

Nobody really knows how it started, just that it did.  Did Charles Colson send G. Gordon Liddy?  Was it Howard Hunt trying to relive his CIA days with his old Cuba buddies?  Was James McCord sent by the CIA itself?  How were John Mitchell and Richard Nixon involved?  In any event, a team of burglars entered the Watergate office/apartment complex to raid the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and got caught.  One of them had Howard Hunt’s White House phone number, and it was off to the races.

In Watergate, Thomas Mallon mines the scandal and reconstructs the fallout among the Nixon Administration and its supporters.  He’s not so much interested in the mechanics of how a “third-rate burglary” metastasized into a full-blown Constitutional crisis as he is in the mental and emotional effects on people such as Fred LaRue and Rose Mary Woods as the cover-up melted down.

LaRue, whose name is not as recognized as HR Haldeman or John Erlichmann’s, is tormented by his personal history and bemused at the idea that he walked away from an oil fortune to become a political bagman. Woods is an iron lady whose unconditional support of the President is tested by Nixon’s lack of loyalty to her.  Among the actual burglary conspirators, Howard Hunt is distraught, questioning whether he subconsciously derailed the burglary, and afraid that he is being set up as the fall guy.

Mallon also creates the interior lives of Richard and Pat Nixon.  Pat, often characterized as a plastic political wife, carries on an affair while living in New York, and seriously considers leaving her husband for her true love.  She’s also deeply angry at Dick for his passivity in the face of the investigations.  Dick is self pitying and confounded by the media fascination with Watergate in the midst of his successful foreign affairs and economic policies.

The most fascinating character Mallon creates is Alice Roosevelt Longworth.  The daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, she knows all the political and domestic dirt on the whole Washington crew, and her own peccadilloes are well known among longtime Washingtonians.  Her well-honed political instincts are dismissed by other characters as the foolishness of a 90-year old woman better known for her witty salons than her inside knowledge.  How would the whole thing have played out had Nixon listened to her?

In the long run, as Mallon leads the reader to conclude, it doesn’t matter how the whole thing started.  The Watergate scandal peeled back the lid on the rotten core of Nixon’s blowout 1972 re-election. The dirty tricks, the illegal cash transfusions, the bribery, and the idea that those things mattered less than getting Nixon re-elected infected the souls of the President and his advisors, and that’s what created the revulsion that Nixon couldn’t understand.

There is a tinge of satire in Watergate, but the final effect is that of a tragedy.  For those who view Watergate and Nixon’s resignation as the well-deserved defeat of a soulless man, Mallon uncovers areas where we can sympathize with him.  For those who still admire Nixon, Mallon reveals a man fundamentally self-centered and in many ways unlikeable.  That Mallon is able to do both is a function of his skill at absorbing history and digging into the psyches of those who think they make it.

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Island of the Sequined Love Nun, by Christopher Moore

No question about it, Christopher Moore has a penchant for weird titles.  And within those weird titles are books that combine satire and horror and that put Christopher Moore in a class by himself.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun sounds like it would fit right in there.  Maybe not the horror…maybe a little tropical island sex?  Even the cover seems to suggest content of a more salacious kind.  It’s the classic bait-and-switch, but this time it works out in the reader’s favor.  (And anyone who says, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” has never met a publisher’s marketing department.  Just sayin’.)

Tucker Case is a pilot living and working on a tropical island.  He’s there not by his own choice, but because the backside of the world is the only place he can go to escape his former boss’s vengeance.  (Hint to would-be pilots: joining the mile-high club while you’re tanked and the plane isn’t is a good way to draw unwanted attention to yourself.  Especially if the plane is pink.)  There isn’t much to do on that island, since he’s more or less the prisoner of The Sorcerer and The Sky Priestess.

Ummm, what?  Yes, The Sorcerer and The Sky Priestess, who in real life are Sebastian and Beth Curtis, are the deities in the island’s cargo cult.  With 20th century flash/bang special effects, the ability to grant or cut off supplies at will, and a team of Japanese guards protecting the fenced-in compound, the Curtises live a life of privilege and ease.  All they have to do is make the occasional flight, cargo and destination unknown.  And that’s where Tucker comes in.

As foolish as he acts, Tucker isn’t a fool, and he begins to scratch around the edges of the Curtises business, with the aid of a ghost and a talking fruit bat.  It is, after all, Christopher Moore.  When he discovers the truth of the flights, he sets in motion a plan to end the shenanigans.  The fact that it involves sailing across the open ocean, stealing a 747, and landing on a tiny runway is no obstacle to the newly-matured Tuck.

While many of the outlandish ingredients of his other books are there, to me this is a darker tale closer to real life than any of Moore’s other books.   It also seems to me that this is the first book that shows the promise behind his wackiness.  With Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Moore’s off-beat humor and off-the-wall plotting took on the sharper edge of an author who has transformed himself into a writer.

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The Last Testament: A Memoir by GOD (with David Javerbaum)

Humor is hard to do.  It probably ties with horror as the hardest type of story to develop and sustain through the end of the book.  Thankfully, both God and amanuensis David Javerbaum, a veteran of The Daily Show, are able to pull it off.  For one thing, God is aware (as one would expect from an omni-omni being) of his own sense of humor, although he occasionally suspects that it may border on the sociopathic.

So now we have, from his own lips, the truth of the stories collected in the Book that has the highest sales in the history of the world, even though the royalties don’t quite match the revenues.  We learn the truth about Creation – yes, it was Adam and Steve – the zing that’s going to greet new arrivals at the Golden Throne, and the greatest Broadway show of all time.  And hey, God does have favorite sports figures, with drastic repercussions for The Second Coming.

In the midst of this tell-all confession, God opens up about his relationship with his children.  Yes, plural.  Jesus is the middle child.  His older brother Zach is nicknamed The Holy Ghost for his favorite trick, sneaking up his brother and yelling, “Boo!”  His younger sister is Kathy, whose envy of Jesus’ sacrifice led her to beg her Father to allow her to do the same.  (You’ll have to read the Book to find out how they accomplished it.)  But Jesus is not only His favorite, he’s the only one who can overcome His Father with The Look.

The big issue, though, is the one that is fast approaching.  Although they don’t buy into Him, God is really impressed with the vigor with which the Mayans worship, so He’s decided to go with their calendar.  Humanity: October 28, 4004 BC – December 21, 2012.  RIP.  And just to prove that he’s not fooling around, he’s given us day-by-day warning signs.  (My favorite is August 11 – “Reenactors at Colonial Williamsburg declare independence from management, asserting their inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and employee discounts at Busch Gardens”.  Since CW employees already have discounts, we can check that one off as already accomplished.)

OK, so you’re not supposed to take it seriously.  There’s no doubt about that, even though God takes pains to tell us on several occasions.  The Last Testament is a parody that explores the gap between people’s interpretation of the Bible, and their actual knowledge of the Book, interpreted through the lens of a writer familiar with history, theology, exegesis, psychology, and current events.  And if you decide to take it any other way, check out Againesis 19:4.  With tongue firmly in cheek, David Javerbaum has delivered a funny book that succeeds in making the reader look at the world from a new angle.  And that’s why humor is hard to do.

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August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts

As August: Osage County opens, Beverly Weston, a one-book wonder poet and the patriarch of a large Oklahoma family, is in the process of hiring a native American housekeeper. A little drunk, he reveals some of his family’s dysfunction. His wife Violet has mouth cancer and is addicted to prescription drugs, and Beverly admits that these are only part of her larger problems.

Tracy Letts’ pitch black comedy drama won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, along with the Tony, the Drama Desk Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and pretty much every other award available to plays. It’s in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, following the disintegration of an American family, in this case people of the central Plains, after years of slow decay from inside.

As the first act opens, we discover that Beverly has gone missing, and his three daughters, their spouses and fiancés, sister-in-law, and grandchildren have returned home to keep vigil. Violet is in terrible form, popping pills like candy and confronting her daughters with every ugliness in the family. Her barbs and those shot back by her daughters, especially the eldest Barbara, are hilarious, but so full of anger and pain that the laughter turns to acid in your mouth. Violet’s sister Mattie Fae bullies her 37-year-old son Little Charles, a boyish man, and bickers with her husband Charles. Barbara’s academic husband Bill seems nice, but he’s had an affair with a student and the couple are, unknown to the rest of the family, separated. Their daughter Jean is fourteen going on forty, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed, but not nearly as worldly as she’d like to believe. Beverly and Violet’s second daughter Ivy is soft compared to the other sisters, cowed by her mother’s bullying. Youngest sister Karen has had a life of unhappiness, but returns to the family with new confidence gained from her relationship with her older fiancé Steve.

Each of the family members are hiding a secret which comes out over the course of the long (for a play) and harrowing drama. It’s bitter, but epic, and like the best family sagas, the Westons are symbols of a deeper degree of societal rot. Violet is a terrifying matriarch, pushed beyond the breaking point and pulling the whole family down around her. She may be drug-addled and diseased, but she’s tough as nails and none of her family’s foibles have escaped her. The other twelve characters in this tragedy of dysfunction are all interesting too. Wait for a time when you can handle some darkness, but by all means, don’t miss one of the great American plays.

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Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

When is a bandwagon no longer a bandwagon? How about when a genuine author comes along, takes his place and kicks the crap back into the street?  The best I can tell from my own reading is that would leave three writers whose insight goes deeper than the mechanics of killing the undead.  The third, of course, is zombie newcomer Colson Whitehead.  The rest of the wannabes should grab a broom and start sweeping the street.

It takes some nerve to approach such a trendy subject, but Whitehead has penetrated to its heart and brought back a novel that resonates on many fronts.  May I blushingly suggest that in the course of 259 pages he has found the true appeal of the zombie storyline, and it completely dovetails with my own?  Of course, I’ve only stumbled through a few incoherent emails, while Whitehead has unerringly written a novel both graceful and frightening in its depths.

Mark Spitz is the main character of the narrative.  A determinedly average person from an ordinary middle-class family, he has thus far survived the zombie apocalypse, and is now engaged in an overwhelming volunteer task.  He and thousands of other civilians are assigned to clear New York, building by building, of the undead.  The professional military has already conducted the massive operations that eliminated the majority of the zombie hordes, and it is now up to Mark Spitz and his two partners to join in the mopping up so that “Zone One” can begin rebuilding.  Manhattan still attracts the ambitious and hungry (mostly hungry), but military barricades and crematoria work 24 hours a day to deal with that external threat.

Of course we learn more about Mark Spitz as the story progresses—his life before the plague, his initial discovery of the threat, his own flight from shelter to shelter, the source of his nom-de-guerre.  He is such an ordinary person that we come to completely identify with him, but even there Colson manages to surprise us.  One aspect of Mark Spitz’s personality we especially adopt for ourselves is his certainty that he is destined to survive.  Who among us doesn’t think that we’ll be exempt from the pandemic, the asteroid crash, the accidental nuclear war?  Death is always for other people.

Where Max Brooks assembled first-person narratives, Whitehead goes deeper into the psychology of a survivor whose internal life reveals far more than the spoken word ever could.  We see how he divides other living humans into classes based on their chances, and treats them accordingly; we see what little remains of his survivor’s guilt, and we see the hope in others that he ruthlessly suppresses in himself.

But I read all of this as an extended metaphor. Mark Spitz withheld almost all of himself from others even before survival made that necessary.  He had a distaste for people that didn’t quite rise to the level of misanthropy, tolerating a few for the company or opportunities they provided while he went about his self-centered life.  Don’t we all do that?  Don’t we all reveal only the portions of ourselves that we want others to see?  Sure, the closer they are the more we reveal, but even our inmost thoughts are ours alone, dismal as that may sound.  The zombie apocalypse gives perfect cover to anyone who doesn’t want to feel guilty about withholding themselves.

My own thoughts about the literary zombie trend?  It’s about The Other.  We live in a world that is so fractured by ethnic, linguistic, national, class, and political divisions that it would take a saint not to create groups of Us and Them.  The zombie narrative cuts through that Gordian knot.  We are alive.  They are dead.  No matter how viciously we the living may have treated each other before, now we represent possibly the best way to guarantee our own survival. And when it comes down to that, I’m going to sacrifice You for Me.  So be it.

I’ve tried not to reveal much of the story because I want to leave the reading of this terrific novel to you.  I would, however, appreciate hearing your thoughts on the last few paragraphs.

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Flashman at the Charge, by George MacDonald Fraser

There’s never been an anti-hero quite so … heroic … as Harry Paget Flashman.   Cad, coward, spendthrift, popinjay, drunkard, turncoat, bully: all the things you’d normally avoid in the ordinary protagonist of your ordinary reading (and hopefully in your daily existence) are Flashman’s best features.  In his private memoirs (transcribed from his papers by George MacDonald Fraser), Flashy is charmingly consistent in relating his tales without concealing a single detail of his abominable behavior.  Anyone else might occasionally attempt to justify their behavior, but Flashman is perfectly aware of his “strengths,” and that candor forms the root of his attraction.  (And if there was even a single hint of remorse, the whole edifice would come tumbling down.)  In the course of 12 volumes, Flashy travels more miles than Phileas Fogg (usually on the run or under arrest), beds more women than Casanova, and escapes hordes of outraged husbands, parents, and harem guards.  Honestly, what’s not to like?

He also manages to participate in every military scrap of any significance, in spite of his deep and abiding concern for his own skin.  (In one of his famous references, he somehow manages to fight on both sides at Gettysburg, winning medals from both the Union and Confederacy.  Alas, Fraser was not able to edit and present those papers to his readers.)  And, although he would prefer to be in the rear cheering on the fools and would-be heroes, events always conspire to put him in the thick of things.  Despite his best (worst?) instincts, somehow he survives to get the credit, the medals, and the reputation.  Problem is, everyone expects him to keep living up to his reputation and the cycle starts all over again.

Flashman at the Charge recounts his misadventures in the Crimean War, and his return to the land that made him a hero the first time around.  When the story takes off, Flashy has detected the rising drumbeat for war with Russia and successfully gotten himself into a billet guaranteed to suit his indolent life—part of the British Army’s Board of Ordnance.  The Board gives him great cover as an essential part of the war effort, and allows him to live at home with his randy wife, go to his club, and chase the prostitutes and young women of London.  When a young European prince is turned over to the “heroic” Flashy to complete his military education, all of Flashman’s efforts are for naught and he finds himself aboard a transport heading to the Black Sea.  His chagrin is offset by cases of excellent wine and cigars, the finest foodstuffs, and new uniforms designed to highlight his magnificent physique.

Being Flashman, he winds up at the center of the Battle of Balaclava, culminating in the Charge of the Light Brigade.  And being Flashman, he happily accedes to surrender, especially when taken to the estate of a Russian noble blessed with a beautiful sister and daughter.  Being Flashman, he’s happy to make their most intimate acquaintance, which he’s determined to enjoy until a treaty is signed.  And, of course, being Flashman, there’s a fly in the pudding that sends him rushing headlong from his host’s house.  The journey that follows takes him all the way back to the Khyber Pass and the tribal guerilla war against the Russians, and another unwanted opportunity to be a hero.  The poor fellow just can’t catch a break.

Barry wrote a fine obituary for George MacDonald Fraser when he died nearly four years before this post (!), capturing all of Flashy’s appeal.  My enjoyment stems from the historical detail that Flashman provides and that Fraser annotates.  Flashman also has an eye for the social hypocrisy and sometimes the brutality that he witnesses.  Ironically, he does not notice his own casual racism which is cringe-worthy in the modern reader but accurate for the English upper class of his day.  Finally, it’s amazing to see the parallels between Flashy’s adventures and the modern day.  If the Kremlin and the White House had read the first Flashman book, the hard lessons learned by the British might have dissuaded them from wading into the morass of Afghanistan.  There truly is nothing new under the sun.

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The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

A note from Jessica: I’ve been with BFGB since its inception 4.5 years ago. This will be my last review, since I’m leaving for a new job in a new state. Writing about books has been my favorite part of working at WRL. Thank you for the good times, readers.

They call it a cure for death, but that’s misleading. You can still drown or starve or fall out a window. It is merely a cure for aging, it is completely illegal, and it can be had for seven thousand dollars on the black market. That’s not a bad deal in the year 2019.

John Farrow decides to get the cure at age 29. He can afford it on his income as a lawyer, especially now that he’s changing his specialty to divorce law. (“‘Til Death Do Us Part” has taken on new meaning.) He does not struggle with the decision. He is not Catholic, so he can’t be excommunicated. He is not worried about potential societal consequences of pollution, scarce resources, or violence. He is normally a logical and conscionable thinker, but, he realizes, “no argument could be made against my profound interest in not dying.”

After a few years of indecision, the United States legalizes the cure. This sharply-decelerated death rate provides a fallow playground for debut novelist Magary, who imagines all sorts of unintended consequences. There are the Peter Pan cases, young children whose mothers illegally suspend aging in their infants. There are the hyper-violent trolls who forswear the cure and instead seek to maim, but not kill, people who might live forever. There are the viruses that now have decades to perfect their attacks against individuals. And there are new career opportunities, even as the planet bulges with people. Our hero John eventually takes a job as an End Specialist, a government employee who grants death to people who no longer want to be cured of aging.

John is a shrewd narrator with a strong streak of resilience, imperative for people trying to survive in a post-aging world. The novel starts out as a quirky thought-piece, filled with speculative “What-if?” scenarios of the near future, but it gets progressively deeper as the years go by. The ranks of the homeless swell. Cars are abandoned when worldwide gasoline reserves are tapped dry. Transportation grinds to a halt.  Some nations use nuclear weapons to control their populations, while other nations employ ageless armies as career pillagers.

Though playful at first, Magary’s book transforms into a bleak vision of the future. Let us hope it is not prophetic.

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The Zombie Autopsies, by Steven C. Schlozman, MD

Oh noes, another zombie book! Can the world sustain yet more coverage of the apocalypse brought on by the undead? Well, in this case, it not only must sustain it, but the world will be better for it. You see, we now have a clue, brought to you in this Max Brooks/George Romero-approved journal, of how the plague started and how the disease progresses. What great luck that we also now have a record of the spiritual implications of blowing their undead heads off. Whew!

On an isolated island in the Indian Ocean, a small team has been assembled for a last-ditch effort at understanding the physiology of the zombie.  Knowing that their exposure to Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome (ANSD) is certain, these brave souls intend to provide as much medical evidence as possible before they succumb to the syndrome. Or, in layman’s parlance, become ex-people. Unfortunately, it was only by accident that any record of their inconclusive discoveries made it off the island, but even those were tainted by the relative inexperience of the journal’s author, Dr. Stanley Blum.

The project is beset by difficulties, not least of which is that Dr. Blum is an administrator, not a researcher. Dr. Gutierrez, the world’s leading ANSD expert, is also rapidly progressing through the stages of ANSD, although she is able to direct the autopsies. Slowly, the project begins to reveal the medical reasons behind the familiar symptoms of ANSD– the shuffling gait, the insatiable appetite, the ability to remain active despite advanced decomposition. The most serious problem, though, is that the test zombies cannot be sedated, incapacitated, or eliminated, so the work has to be done on animated humanoids, classed as No Longer Human. And they have to be fed.

Schlozman uses an intriguing device to introduce and periodically interpret Blum’s work. The journal is accompanied by a bureaucratic memo reminding the reader that these observations provide the foundation of an upcoming meeting to create a comprehensive strategy. The memo includes a glossary, a copy of the Treaty of Atlanta (laying out the ethics of dealing with zombies), personal materials from Drs. Gutierrez and Blum, and a significant collection of emails.

Schlozman easily moves between voices, adopting the appropriate tone for each.  Blum’s handwritten journal alternates between his medical observations and a narrative of his one week in the lab. While the first are informative, the latter are both horrifying and plaintive. The bureaucrat is analytical, even detached; the Treaty of Atlanta is earnest; and those relevant emails are chilling in their specificity. There is one niggling detail at odds with Max Brooks’s description of the earliest outbreaks, but that could be put down to confusion or cover-up over the source and spread of ANSD. Regardless, this is a necessary and readable addition to the scholarly literature, and when it is declassified, should be an essential acquisition for every surviving public and academic library.

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Calling Mr. King, by Ronald DeFeo

Being a killer-for-hire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’ve got your airport security to get through, the mooks you occasionally use for backup can be unreliable, sometimes the targets are inconvenient, and the wrong numbers–always with the wrong numbers!– can drive you around the bend. It’s too bad that  Mr. King is finally letting all that get to him.

Mr. King (not his real name, for obvious reasons, nor even his nom de guerre, but let’s use it for now), isn’t unhappy with his work. He’s well-respected, well-paid, and if his career choice is interfering with his life, he hasn’t noticed it.  When those calls come in (and they’re always wrong numbers looking for Mr. King that alert him to new assignments), off he goes, does his nasty bit and waits for the next call. Pulling the trigger is, to him, as easy and as unmemorable as ordering a cup of coffee. Nor does he care about the person on the other end of the gun. They are the intersection of a time and a place from which he will walk away and they won’t. Cold-blooded. Remorseless. Effective.

At least, until now. While trailing his current victim, an irritatingly good-humored fellow, Our Hero has an existential moment. If he didn’t pull the trigger, how would the world change? How would he change? From that moment, he will never be the same. The regular meal that he eats at the same cafe each night won’t taste as good. His proletarian underworld contacts and their lack of sophistication will aggravate  him. And for the first time, he doesn’t care about his work. A whole world has opened itself to him, and he dives into its possibilities.

He also has a chance to exorcise his childhood demons when his employers give him an involuntary vacation and he returns to his boyhood home. Not surprisingly, the demons are smaller and more tawdry than he’d built them up to be. Although the troubled and violent relationship he had with his father remains significant to him (it did, after all, provide him with a career), it doesn’t loom over him the way it had.

But he is a hit man, and when the next assignment comes up, he is reluctantly pulled away from his improvised life to head into the most important and difficult job of his career. To say any more about the story would give away one of the most interesting denouements I’ve read in a while. Will you trust me when I say it’s worth it?

This may sound like a serious and even violent book, but it is really a darkly humorous picaresque with minimal violence. That the violence is initially so brief and matter-of-fact is itself an insight into Mr. King’s personality, but it also makes it easier to focus on Mr. King’s gradual self-invention. With little or no background, Mr. King decides that he’s an expert on Georgian architecture and the paintings of JMW Turner, but the reader knows how shallow his knowledge really is. He also decides that he should pose as Peter Chilton, a member of the English nobility, affecting an accent and mannerisms that he clearly isn’t prepared to sustain. Those extended sections of the book are like watching Charlie Chaplin on a ladder– you keep waiting for Mr. King to take the big fall and laughing at the close calls. The result is quite unusual: what sounds like a thriller potboiler evolves into a sympathetic character study of a tragic man.

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