Flicker Reads

Every September I somehow wind up reading a crummy fantasy sequel. I realized early on that Queen of Fire was not going to bring me any sort of interest or joy, that Anthony Ryan had abandoned the tropes and groundwork he had laid in the earlier books, that the story had a dreary disconnect between characters that cast a pall over the whole novel, and yet I read on, hoping there would be some glimmer of reward at its end.
There wasn't.
To describe its plot is to grant it more grace and coherence than it deserves. I'm just disappointed that he took the momentum in building interesting characters and squandered it on this final volume. I wonder if he knew it wasn't quite up to the same standards? Authors rarely admit such things. Perhaps he just wanted to be done with this, having a new and better idea in mind for his next book. Thing is, I won't be reading that one.

I was underwhelmed by the wooden characters and nonsensical plot. Even worse, there was just something ugly and empty about it. Can't stand books that place women in positions of torture like this for purposes of supposed literary entertainment. My stomach was upset by the whole experience.

When it comes to cheap thrills, no one does it better than the king. I really enjoyed the first book in this series last year, Mr. Mercedes, and this second installment is also very good. Finders Keepers begins with the murder of a famously reclusive author and the theft of his precious notebooks containing the unpublished contents of two highly anticipated novels. After burying the notebooks in a trunk for safe keeping, our villain gets put in the slammer for a few decades, and a teenage boy finds the trunk and its valuable stash. This sets up a showdown with bad guy after his release from prison. King flips the bird at normal literary conventions, waiting to bring Bill Hodges into the story after 200 pages of rising action. We also get Jerome and Holly back as Hodges' trusty accomplices. He delivers a thrilling finale and sets us up for book 3 in the last chapter. I gave Mr. Mercedes a well-deserved perfect score, having found it deliriously entertaining. Finders Keepers was very good, but not quite at that level. One issue is that the villain here is less compelling than Mercedes' Brady Hartsfield. Apparently King realizes this as well, as he indicates plans for a horrifying resurrection of Hartsfield in his final volume. I can't wait!

Entertaining "epic" revolving around the building of a cathedral. Interesting characters, but the unwieldy scope of the story dilutes its power.

Started out really well in the first couple of chapters, but devolved into something conventional, as if he didn't feel or trust where it was going. I could have used a much less likeable protagonist to give the story some grit. As is, it was fine, though a bit silly and unbalanced.

Sometimes I'll finish a bad book and be ok; I'm perfectly capable of stoicism regarding such things. Other times...argh. I get angry. Angry is how I feel about this one.

When Harold Robbins’ first book Never Love a Stranger was published in 1948, it became a bestseller. Robbins hit upon a winning combination of elements to draw readers into his story that he would go on to repeat multiple times in the future. “Power, sex, deceit, and wealth: the four main ingredients to a successful story,” he was quoted as saying. Of course, not all members of the public were pleased with Robbins racy use of sex in his first novel, and Never Love a Stranger was banned under pornography restrictions in the city of Philadelphia. Robbins and his publisher sued the city and won. In his decision, the judge proclaimed, “I would rather my daughter learn about sex from the pages of a Harold Robbins novel than behind a barn door.”

For me, Never Love a Stranger gets filed under the category of “guilty pleasure.” The plot follows the life of Frankie Kane, a street-wise orphan who scraps his way to the top of a criminal empire during the Great Depression. I listened to the story on audiobook as narrated by the incomparable Will Patton, who lifts this glorious piece of tripe to a place wholly beyond its station. Patton has obvious fun with the novel’s terse, Cagneyesque main character, and the reader can’t help but enjoy it, too. If you are bothered by strong and obvious 1940s gender stereotypes and scenes of violence in the tone of “smacking a moll for getting wise,” steer clear of this novel. Otherwise, you are in for some dialogue that will have you chuckling in your recliner. I knew that I had reached a new level of noir ecstasy, when at the end, the novel provided this nugget of sap: [note: virtually nothing is lost in reading it, as plot comes secondary to tone in the story]

She looked at me. Her face had grown very pale. “Loved you?” she asked. “I’ve loved you so much ever since we were children that at night I couldn’t sleep for the wanting of you, that when we didn’t know where you were I would dream about you, that all these last months I was longing for you to take me -- I wanted your child inside me under my heart.” Her voice was strained and shaking with emotion. “That’s why I won’t bargain with you, Frankie. That’s why I’m not going to marry you.”

I crushed my cigarette out in the tray and took her by the shoulders roughly, squeezing my fingers into her arm. She made no sound, just looked up into my face.

“You stupid little fool!” I was raging mad. I could feel the pulse pounding in my forehead. “Maybe that’s the way it started, but can’t you see what I’ve done is for you -- that what I’ve thrown away has been for you? Don’t think I couldn’t have cleaned up this mess if I didn’t want to. I had a dozen places in the United States I could have gone to and operated from, and they never would have been able to touch me. I didn’t have to quit. I quit because of you. If it weren’t for the way I felt about you, I would have beat this the same way I beat everything else that got in my way; I’d have ruined Jerry’s career as I could have.

“You were the only reason I threw in the towel -- because I fell for the line you gave me. Maybe I always knew deep inside you were right, but it was for you that I did it.

“I didn’t make any bargain with you. I’ve turned my life inside out for you. I’ve traded a fortune for you, I’ve traded a loaf of bread for a pie in the sky, steak and potatoes for an ideal. And if you still think I don’t love you, baby, you can go to hell!”

I was fully prepared to give the story three stars, but felt this exchange was worth an additional  star. I you dare read this, I highly recommend the audiobook.

I watched an interesting Maroon 5 music video a few weeks ago to the song “Maps.” It opens with Adam Levine bursting into the ER to find his girlfriend being frantically treated for life threatening injuries. The video then goes backwards, scene by scene, letting the viewer witness all events and choices that led up to this horrific conclusion.

In a similar fashion, Celeste Ng’s debut novel (which has gotten mad props in the last year) opens with the following sentence: “Lydia is dead.” What unfolds thereafter is a story of loss and the mystery of how the bright daughter of a Chinese American family disappeared one night, her body later discovered at the bottom of a neighborhood lake. I read The Lovely Bones earlier this year, and there are many striking parallels with Everything I Never Told You: shocking death of daughter, 1970s time period, family grief explored with one parent using an adulterous affair as a coping mechanism, a mother who leaves home unexpectedly to chase a thwarted youth, third person omniscient narration with a tendency toward literary description. The big difference between the two books is that Lovely Bones is solely concerned with the aftermath of Susie’s murder, while Everything I Never Told You is primarily focused on the prelude to Lydia’s death. This places the reader in the uncomfortable position of knowing that everything he or she is reading is leading to a very sad and dark event. I already have a sore spot for stories of deep family dysfunction, particularly where children are neglected or parents project their own youthful ambitions onto them. Knowing here that it was all going to lead to the death of the book’s most likeable character made reading this novel difficult, and I had to take frequent emotional breaks to bear up under the weight.

Celeste Ng has an eye for detail, and she finds a way of uniquely describing some of the story’s most pivotal moments. Here is one of my favorite passages in which Lydia’s jealous older brother Nath pushes her into the lake:

More than this: the second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.”

I can’t say that the story brought that kind of quality from cover to cover. Especially toward the end, the novel seeps into cloying melodrama. I blame Ng’s tendency to wring the emotion from some of her moments and certain instances of awkward, proclamatory dialogue. Although her time period is necessary to strongly establish the issues of gender and racial discrimination, Ng overuses her 70s cultural references. The first couple of name drops were ok, but after a while it becomes a distraction and seems forced. The examples she provides of gender discrimination in Marilyn’s early life are purposefully crude. I can buy that these events happened, but let’s find a way to describe them more organically, fewer broad strokes. As is, they occur in a way that panders to the reader’s sense of injustice and renders the story into a comic book.

Most troubling to me was the portrayal of Lydia’s parents. Though Ng does a nice job of providing background to justify these behaviors (particularly the mother), I kept wondering how two such amazingly bright and sensitive people could be so singlemindedly stupid and insensitive to their children. They become static, unpleasant characters, which simply doesn’t jive with how much time Ng takes to earlier flesh them out as true human beings. This makes the ending feel artificial - a bit of a deus ex machina. I’m guessing the movie will do it twice as terribly, but that’s to be expected. It certainly wasn’t My Sister’s Keeper level of bad, so perhaps I should just count my blessings.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate!

I listen to tons of audiobooks and there are many fantastic narrators out there. My favorite is Will Patton. You probably recognize him from several of the movies he's been featured in: Armageddon (he was the sad sack estranged from wife and little boy), Remember the Titans, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Postman. I just saw a photo of him from No Way Out, which I never knew was him because I was too young when I saw it to remember the actor who played Hackman's aide- but helps me tie him to another really cool role. 

Patton has played a huge role in steering my reading the last couple of years. I first heard him when I listened to James Dickey's Deliverance, and I was absolutely blown away. How did he do it? The prose in that novel is very challenging - magnificent but challenging - but Patton knocks it out of the park. I'd never heard someone apply such intelligence and understanding to a performance like that before. After that, I heard him read The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and then King's Mr. Mercedes, getting me into a whole Stephen King vibe that I've continued with this year. I also heard him narrate Neon Rain, which got me hooked on the James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series. This, too me, is Patton's best fit, as he perfectly inhabits the alcoholic chaos and savage dreams lodged inside Dave's mind. I know that Mr. Patton ran into some trouble himself this year with a DUI, and I was sorry to see that, but he's still my man. No one has better preparation, better characterization, better delivery.

So tonight I noticed an old Harold Robbins book listed on kindle: Never Love a Stranger.

Harold Robbins is one of those authors I've harbored some very small bit of guilt in never reading, simply because a generation or two ago he was the king of the trashy novel. So I took a look at the book and shish boom bah - narrated by Will Patton! Perfect! Knock Robbins off the bucket list and spend a few hours with my main man Will. Amazon lists the kindle edition at $6.99 and throws the audiobook in for 1.99 extra - nice deal. Much better deal than getting the paperback, by the way - that they have listed at $323.00 used and hardback $395.00 used. :)

I'll squeeze this one in sometime this year, but realize that with Will Patton reading, the damned thing can't be lower than three stars. It just can't.

The good news? GRRM is back in fine form after the wayward fourth book. The simple reason for this is that he gets back to the characters and subplots that he abandoned in the last volume, so that we again get to enjoy the happenings of Tyrion and Daenerys while losing some of the dull and tragic stories from last time, such as that of poor Sansa, who we can hardly bear to check in with, and Samwell, whose sniveling became reader torture. God knows it's enough of a gut check for the poor reader to endure the Jon Snow saga, as dear Jonny becomes chief administer at the Wall and all of its continual barrage of starving, quarrelsome people. But this being George "I can't resist beginning 5 new subplots at this late stage" Martin, we now have new characters to contend with, such as Quentyn Tyrell, who hopes to meet Dany and woo her into a powerful alliance, and young Aegon Targaryen, who apparently has been secretly reared in order to guard against assassination and is now ready to reestablish Targaryen rule over the land.
Now for the bad news. I used to think there was this well-ordered master plan to this series of books, and that GRRM knew exactly what he was doing. Now, I'm pretty sure he's making this up as he goes - there is just way too much sporadic storytelling. For example, we get one or two sections of Davos Seaworth early in the story, and then the book just leaves it. Tyrion's story in this book also finishes in an awkward spot. The character of Melisandre is given one section in which we see into her thoughts and plans, which was terrific as she is one of my favorites, but that was it with her. In short, there are way too many pots on the kettle at the moment and the chef is doing a sketchy job of managing the cooking. Undoubtedly, GRRM has so much creative control at this point that his editors are now just his lapdogs. The dragon is off the chain and no longer responding to the whip.

All of this reminds me once again how blessed we are to have the work of J.K. Rowling, the last international sensation to publish a fantasy series, and who put together her books with such craft and care that we never knew to doubt the process. She continues to write books with such mastery of the novel's form. Someday we'll have enough historical distance to grant her place in literature's pantheon.

A Dance with Dragons (balls in your court now, George)

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng

The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett

Acceptance - Jeff Vandermeer (finally healed the psychic wounds inflicted by first two in this series - ready for the final dose of insanity)

Go Set a Watchman - 3rd on the audio list. Not buying it because I don't want grumpy, racist Atticus making me sad on my bookshelf). 

Proven Guilty - Jim Butcher - was going to meet him at Salt Lake Comic Con. No money to go anymore. :(

Missoula - Jon Krakauer - every Montanan is now required to read this book and help heal these wounds

Phew. Got to finish Midnight's Children lickety split. 

If Hausfrau was a painting it would be entitled "Woman with Empty Heart." It's the kind of character study that many people will utterly loathe, others will call a contrivance. A book that does not offer a sympathetic protagonist nor deliver any semblance of happy ending is one you won't want to haul to the beach with you this summer for pleasurable diversion. Hausfrau is an obvious modernization of a certain classic novel (or two), in which the main character of Anna feels herself adrift and unhappy in her life. So, she attempts to fill it with the usual banalities an attractive woman can muster: adorable children, handsome husband, a lover, another lover, another lover... Anna has no spiritual center to help anchor her, and worst of all, she is what I call a "sensationalist," that is, she believes that feelings - arbitrary chemical impulses - will guide her to contentment. If she'd only bothered to read Siddhartha, she might have realized her miscalculation. I found the story, on the whole, interesting, though occasionally the tone bordered on that of a Lifetime movie. The main issue I had with Jill Essbaum's novel is that I didn't feel that the character of Anna worked for me. What I mean is that her thoughts and motivations did not seem to arrive authentically and naturally in a manner that coalesced into this mess of a human being. There are many excellent books in which human messes do work for me; in fact, these are my favorite sorts of characters to read about. I'm wondering, and I'm certain Essbaum considered this, how the novel would have done with first person narration. Or did mirroring Tolstoy necessitate nixing that option? I hated the ending, but I expect it was the natural conclusion.