Category Archives: Fiction

*****Grand River and Joy

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Detroit, abandoned building

Michigan Central Station. When I was a child, my mother and I caught trains here. (photo: Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons license)

By Susan Messer – Bought this book about a notable Detroit intersection (writes Messer: “Joy Road—now there was a misnomer”) after reading an excellent Messer story last summer in Glimmer Train.

This novel covers the months leading up to Detroit’s horrific 1967 summer and its aftermath. The riot/rebellion the city and its residents–and vicariously, the entire country–experienced in July 1967 lasted five days, 43 people died, more than a thousand were injured, and the associated fires destroyed thousands of buildings. The city has never recovered.

Messer’s story details the intersection of lives, as well—black and white, Jewish and non-Jewish, parents and children. In the unsettled time leading up to the July events, Harry Levine—the Jewish owner of a wholesale shoe store founded by his father—and his family members and neighbors debate whether to leave their Detroit neighborhood and join the flight to the white suburbs. Harry also maintains an increasingly uneasy relationship with the store’s upstairs tenants, Curtis and his teenage son Alvin, who are black. Inescapable are the longstanding tensions between blacks and Jews, which derive from a tangled history of thwarted expectations and differing patterns of upward mobility.

Early in the morning after Halloween, nine months before the uprising, Harry and his sister arrive at the store and find painted on the front window the words “Honky Jew Boy.” Alvin is suspected. Later during the riots, when buildings all around the store are erupting in flames, Harry’s building is one of the few to survive, partly because this time the white paint splashed across the front window spells out “Soul Brother.” Alvin wrote it to save his and Curtis’s home.

Harry is a sympathetic character, but he suffers by a lack of coming to grips. He ignores problems with the building’s boiler, so it eventually threatens to blow up in a cloud of steam. More important, he downplays and ignores the simmering social forces in his community, which do explode in violence. While he could have been more conscientious about the boiler, the social forces were beyond one man’s capacity to redress. But he ignored how those forces might affect his wife, daughters, and sister, even though all around him “should we stay?” and “should we go now?” were a dominant conversation. Curtis, especially, tries to cut through the cotton wool Harry surrounds himself with and give him a dose of reality. It’s easier just to keep on keepin on.

This is a beautifully written story by a thoughtful writer that contains barrels of good humor and fundamental humanity. It helps the reader examine many sides of a complex time that should not be forgotten as long as America’s issues with race remain unresolved.

****Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage

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Pakistan street scene

Street scene, Pakistan (photo: r12a, Creative Commons license)

By David Ignatius – narrated by Firdous Bamji. A friend recommended Ignatius to me, and I was lukewarm about the first book of his I read (The Director), but I’m glad I came back for a second try.The story in this 2012 spy thriller concerns a super-secret CIA offshoot working in Los Angeles under deep cover as a pseudo music-biz operation called the Hit Parade (a name the CIA officers use without apparent irony). But something is amiss, because a key undercover asset disappears from the streets of Pakistan, followed by the assassination of three more agents in postings around the world. It’s up to officer Sophie Marx to try to discover the truth, the compromises, the torturous path of violence and deception that instigated and supported the Hit Parade’s enemies.

This plot is more persuasive than that of many thrillers, with startling authenticity enabled by Ignatius’s journalistic career. (He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post and writes about foreign affairs.) The NPR review quotes one of the book’s great lines: “Americans did not like lying to others. It made them uncomfortable. Their specialty was lying to themselves.”

As important, the characters are well-drawn. I was happy to see the crusty old CIA hand Cyril Hoffman reappear in this book. He’s a devil, but an entertaining devil. And he’s ours. Mostly. I especially liked Ignatius’s characterization of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence chief, General Mohammed Malik, trying to make sense of the Americans.

Mostly the narration is fine, but Bamji puts a slight whine in Sophie’s voice that’s not just annoying, but inconsistent with her dogged character.

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****Wise Blood

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Brad Dourif, Wise Blood, Preacher

Brad Dourif in John Huston’s Wise Blood

By Flannery O’Connor – It’s daunting to try to add something substantive to the voluminous commentary written and discussed about this first entry in Flannery O’Connor’s remarkable canon. But yet, every good book demands careful attention of its readers. And every reading is the chance to make new discoveries and find new insights, at least for oneself.

My reading group tackled this one yesterday. While the novel didn’t have any characters with whom we could identify (or maybe even much like), the fact that it stimulated a lively hour-and-a-half discussion was strong testimony as to its depth. Almost every member of the group sought out additional resources, online lectures, background on O’Connor, critical appraisals, and the like. One of our group watched the well-regarded John Huston movie version and said it helped her understanding a lot and makes the humor clear (nice review of it here)!(trailer)

O’Connor wrote the book over a five-year period ending in the early 1950’s, and we speculated how it would have been perceived in that era, given that it is still fairly opaque today, when experimental and unconventional fiction and characters are much more common. The characters in this book are like trains on a confusion of separate tracks, occasionally crossing, but fundamentally heading to their own destination, pursuing their own ends.

My reading group is a mix. Some have lived in the South, some grew up or have lived in other countries, and they had varying exposures to religiosity, though the religious leanings of the principal character, Hazel Motes, are unique to him. He’s a self-styled preacher for the Church Without Christ (of which he was the originator and sole member). The notions of penance and redemption are fundamental to the story, even if Motes pursues them in a herky-jerky, self-destructive fashion.

I went back to Sally Fitzgerald’s collection of O’Connor’s letters to find what the author herself said about what she intended with this book. Writing about a rather confusing review, “the last part [of which was] about the impiety & lack of love in the book & all that,” she wrote, “It seems to me the form of love in it is penance, as good a form as any other under Mr. Motes circumstances.”

This book is a classic of Southern Gothic writing, and I especially appreciate how she dealt with the question of the book’s “sources.” She wrote, “I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out the way it went in.” Which is why, sixty years later, it can be still be pulled apart, discussed, and new insights discovered.

Left-wing Crime and Right-wing Thrillers?

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hawk

(photo: pixabay)

A recent essay in The Guardian by Scottish crime fiction writer Val McDermid suggested a key difference in the subtext of crime fiction versus thrillers. McDermid had attended an international crime writers’ conference in Lyon, France, a country where people are “deeply interested in is the place of politics in literature,” by both long tradition (think Emile Zola and Victor Hugo) and current trends. It’s hard for politics not to be top-of-mind for many French people because, as in much of Europe, right-wing parties are making gains that would have been inconceivable in the years immediately following World War II.

The political undertone of crime novels is typically left-leaning, says McDermid, when they are “critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly.” They often reveal corruption in City Hall or police departments. Moreover, they explore characters who do not fit easily into society. Even when the perpetrators are high-status, they harbor a shameful and destructive secret (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). More often, their characters emerge from society’s ragged fringes. Henning Mankell departed from his usual focus on crime to write specifically about these disenfranchised in his novel, The Shadow Girls.

By contrast, the political point of view of a thriller “tends towards the conservative,” McDermid suggests, “probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you.” Good examples are found in the work of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal, The Avenger), Tom Clancy (Patriot Games, The Hunt for Red October).

In the end, readers of the thriller genre expect a significant return toward normalcy, despite the typical last-chapter carnage. While some criminals may be brought to justice by the end of a crime novel and the city put back in order, it isn’t always, and the reader is left with a feeling of more to come. This is in part because good crime writers—like George Pelecanos or Michael Connelly—ground their work in real problems, and these real problems are not easy to solve.

This is not to conflate the personal politics of the author with the underlying thrust of their books’ genre, as does the rebuttal essay linked below. Plenty of thriller authors have liberal personal politics, and plenty do not. Moreover, while differing world views may influence what authors write or whom they pick to be their villain, the more popular and successful writers generally keep their political opinions on the back burner. Even so, “our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world,” she says. With all the inevitable exceptions to McDermid’s formulation, it makes for a thought-provoking rule-of-thumb.

Related articles and some exceptions to McDermid’s formulation.

Little Women Dream Cast

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Little Women, Alcott

(photo: Karen Cox, Creative Commons license)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, originally published in two volumes almost 150 years ago—and readable here (if “your” copy got lost)—has been a staple of schoolgirl reading ever since. “Like every other girl who ever read Louisa May Alcott’s novel, I wanted to be Jo: creative, strong-minded and independent,” says NPR’s Lynn Neary, going on to wonder whether Jo sets too high a standard. (And I ask, what are standards for, if not to be aspirational?)

Adult re-readers may want to reexamine their assumptions about this work and may find darker commentary underlying the surface action. “Little Women is brutal, a ferocious wolf dressed up in the curly white sermons and sentimental homilies of children’s stories, says Deborah Weisgall in The American Prospect, and its larger themes of thwarted ambition, not fitting in, and family rivalries make it “an enduring model for women’s stories, but it is rarely considered literature itself. It should be.”

The archetypical sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy and their travails during the Civil War were based largely on Alcott’s life with three sisters. Almost inevitably, Hollywood has produced five movies, including two silent films of the March sisters’ story. News that a new version of the film is in the works has prompted speculation about which actors might play the leads, and “dream casts” have been proposed by both Entertainment Weekly and the website Book Riot, which proposes an especially bold choice for Professor Bhaer, the portly German who ends up marrying you-know-who (and would finally make that outcome rather palatable).

In 1933, the sisters were played by Frances Dee (Meg), Katharine Hepburn (perfect as Jo), Jane Parker (Beth), and Joan Bennett (Amy), with neighbor and love interest Laurence, called Laurie, played by Douglass Montgomery. The 1949 cast—a real dream cast—included Janet Leigh (Meg), June Allyson (Jo), Beth Margaret O’Brien (Beth), and Elizabeth Taylor (Amy). Peter Lawford played Laurie. Most recently, in 1994 (trailer), Trini Alvarado (Meg), Winona Ryder (Jo), Claire Danes (Beth), Kirsten Dunst (Amy), and Christian Bale (Laurie) led the cast.

For generations, young readers have been heartbroken—me included—that conniving Amy, not wonderful Jo, ends up with Laurie. Fan fiction has finally provided the sought-after happy ending. FanFiction.net has a sizable Little Women fandom, and the fic I glanced at was totally PG, though I did not review all 316 entries. Here’s a sweet one. Pretend you’re twelve years old again and swoon.

**Chum

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cocktail

(photo: wikipedia.org)

By Jeff Somers – By the time I finished this 2013 book I felt like I had a very bad hangover and my tongue had been used as an ashtray. Practically nothing seems to hold this group of nine friends together except drinking and smoking, and the quantity of alcohol consumed explains many of the difficulties they encounter.

Written in the stripped-down modern style, the book is unencumbered by information about jobs, personal histories, and life outside the interactions among various pairings of these friends. With alternate chapters told by different members of this seriously dysfunctional group, the book starts with a hilarious wedding scene in which first the bride, then the groom, lock themselves in the venue bathroom, refusing to come out and carry on with the proceedings. Subsequent chapters skip backward and forward in time to before the wedding and some months after. Nevertheless, Somers guides the reader well, and I was never confused about when events took place or who narrated them.

Much of the narrative focuses on two characters—bad boy Tom and good guy Henry—as much of the plot focuses on the trials of the newly married or to-be married couple, Bick and Mary. The book is full of snarky dialog that’s at first amusing, as in this conversation between Tom and Henry on the wedding day. . Henry speaks first:

“How long you give them?” I asked.
Tom sat forward immediately, as if he’d been thinking about the very subject. “Well, let’s be logical. Bick drinks, and Mary doesn’t like it when he does. Mary drinks but doesn’t think she has a problem, when she very obviously does. Mary is jealous and controlling. On the other hand, Bick is snide and weak, while Mare is easily annoyed and shallow.”
“Be fair,” I admonished, “They’re both shallow.”
“Fine. Put all that together, and I don’t give them a day over seventy years. Eighty years, tops.”

Ultimately, though, the constant put-downs are just sad. As I neared the end, I started to wonder whether Tom and Henry are actually two sides of the same person and could think of only one scene where that wouldn’t work. Both were described as present in scenes, just as multiple sides of other characters’ personalities were present, waiting to break out—usually after a couple of cocktails.

While the novel starts strong and with good humor, the excessive alcohol use, which damaged existing relationships and prevented the strengthening of new ones was, in the end, a downer. Back-of-the-book copy calls it “the story of love, liquor, and death.” That would be one actual death and the death of friendship too.

Somers writes a popular series of futuristic violence featuring his character Avery Cates, and Amazon readers who liked this book tended to be fans of that series. I am still puzzling over this reader comment: “Ultimately I felt disappointed that what was revealed was more or less the point of the whole book.”

****Death of A Spy

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Central Asia

Nakhcivan (photo: wikimedia)

By Dan Mayland – Met this author at a conference and thought I’d give one of his books a test-drive. Quite engaging. Glad I read it. Especially intriguing was the setting—countries near and around the Caspian Sea: cities in Azerbaijan and its remote state Nakhchivan, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). Any book with maps at the front tells me the author has taken care to keep readers oriented. Sometimes it where you are really matters.

The protagonist, the likeable Mark Sava, a former CIA station chief in Azerbaijan is living in Kyrgyzstan, running a spies-for-hire business, when a former mentor and colleague is found dead in Tbilisi. This is something he has to take care of and should be an easy deal—contact the family, get the body on the way back to the States, “do this right,” he tells his wife. But once in the dead man’s hotel room, Sava knows something is seriously wrong. This was a hit, one whose roots are somewhere in his own past.

Soon his errand of mercy blossoms into a full-blown catastrophe involving Russian spies, a mysterious new Nakhchivan airfield, Sava’s former lover, and security officials from Azerbaijan who must stay a step ahead of their country’s own deteriorating politics.

Mayland has spent considerable time in the region where his Mark Sava thrillers are set (this is the fourth). His website includes “extras,” more maps and photos of places featured in this book. His dedication to authenticity has been rewarded by glowing reviews and Amazon best-seller status in the espionage category in both the US and UK.

**The Paying Guests

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London townhouse

(photo: Zoe Rimmer, creative commons license)

By Sarah Waters, read by Juliet Stevenson. Usually I enjoy being read to, but this is a book that might have been a better experience in the print version. NPR’s Julia Keller called it a “bewitching” tale of a young woman who falls in love with a married person, with all the well-known probability of a bad ending which that act entails. It didn’t bewitch me, alas. (It didn’t help that some of the reviews I read contained significant spoilers.)

It’s 1922 London, and to make ends meet, Frances Wray and her mother must take in lodgers—“paying guests”—after the family’s father died and both sons were killed in the Great War, leaving the two women with little more than a big house. Their constant petty economies dampen Frances’s spirits, and the young couple of a slightly lower class that moves in upstairs alternately energizes and mystifies her.

Says Keller, “Waters is a master of the slow build,” and I would second that, so much so that it isn’t until the book is nearly half-over and after some dark foreshadowing that the story picks up any steam (and it does get tastefully steamy, never fear). Subsequently, the consequences of a dramatic act of desperation begins to suffocate Frances in significant moral dilemmas, but, ultimately, the story unravels too slowly its last third or so.

If I’d been reading this, rather than listening to it, I could have whipped past some of its more lugubrious and repetitive dialog, along the lines of “Oh, Frances, what will we do?” No doubt this is a matter of personal taste, but I would have preferred some more doing in the book’s 21.5 hours (576 pages) and a little less wondering about it.

*****The International: A Novel of Belfast

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hotel bar, barman

(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International. The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” according to Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

Patterson’s writing style reflects the unadorned—and often wryly humorous—worldview of his young narrator, yet see how precisely he captures the sense of a departing wedding guest:

“You look like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.
He sucked air through his pursed lips and held a hand to his heart as though to say that any more enjoyment would have killed him.
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” I said.
“Great people,” he said and the hand on his heart became his word of honour. “Not a bit of side to a one of them.”

The novel’s only violence of the kind that would become all-too-familiar happened somewhat before the book begins, when four Catholic barmen from The International were shot leaving another bar, late at night. One died, creating the opening that Daniel filled.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about the barmen who died, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

The Author

Princeton University, through the Fund for Irish Studies, brought Belfast author Glenn Patterson to campus last week. He talked about how his writing emphasizes history and politics and his deep sense of place. And, he said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” This theme is borne out in a postscript to The International, where Patterson recounts going back to newspaper archives from 1967 to see what they’d made of the NICRA’s formation, and the answer was “scarcely nothing.” In that gap, the novel grew.

Charming, disarming, Patterson told stories and read from several works, include four of the five short literary interludes he was commissioned to write for Philip Hammond’s “Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic,” which premiered April 14, 2012, the 100th anniversary of the night the ship—built in Belfast—sank. I regret I couldn’t find them online to share with you; they were extraordinary.

It still being (barely) March, the month of St. Patrick’s Day, also see: Glenn Patterson’s top 10 books about Belfast.

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Fan Fic Fest

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Sherlock, Freeman, Cumberbatch

Martin Freeman (Watson) & Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) in Sherlock

Last night a high-powered panel of experts discussed fan fiction and its uneasy relationship with traditional media, moderated by Anne Jamison, author of Fic, and oft-quoted academic expert on this phenomenon. (She teaches the fan fic class I’m auditing at Princeton.) Fan fiction, in essence, is taking existing characters (from Elizabeth Bennett to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometimes both at the same time) and creating new plots and storylines for them. One of its fundamentals is that people write it for love of the characters, not for money. On the panel were New Yorker tv critic Emily Nussbaum, Jamie Broadnax, creator of the website Black Girl Nerds, commentator Elizabeth Minkel of The Millions and The New Statesman, and intellectual property attorney (and fan) Heidi Tandy.

Traditional media often treat the huge and hugely diverse fan fiction universe in what the panelists observed is a mocking way, as if it were made up solely of young women who want to write about male-on-male sex. That trope is called “slash,” it is alive and well, and it really got going with Spock/Kirk fan fic. Now there’s a huge Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) fandom. (Find some well-written Johnlock material here.)

By contrast, the X-Files spawned a lot of het (heterosexual) fic written by people who really thought Scully and Mulder should get together. And, of course, the runaway financial success 50 Shades of Grey began as E.L. James’s fan fic based on the Twilight series.

Though sex is an important component in some fan fiction, and though a lot of it is written by young women, it’s a much more diverse field than commentators typically acknowledge. Meanwhile, there’s something unseemly, panelists agreed, about highly paid stars and showrunners snidely critiquing the writing of people who are doing it for free.

Interestingly, some tv shows are courting the fan fic community, counting on its obsessiveness to uncover Easter eggs in the story and faint clues and parallels and arcane references. Sherlock (though Benedict Cumberbatch has run afoul of the fan fic world for some of his critiques of it) uses many fan fic tropes, and the first episode of Season 3 included a group of fan fic writers as characters, creating their explanations for how Sherlock was not dead, even after the fall witnessed at the close of Season 2. Panelist Minkel has covered these developments nicely.

The Sherlock showrunners draw on many sources—not just the “canon” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories—but all the movies, books, and other derivative works about Holmes that have been created subsequently. Fan fiction, the practice of live-tweeting shows, and other possibilities are cracking open the tv screen, and, in the future, popular programs will likely exist both within and outside their scheduled allotments.

Fan fic is a great big and raucous world, and if you’re at all curious, here are some places to start exploring or toe-dipping: Archive of Our Own (AO3), which reports it contains almost 18,000 fandoms, has more than a half-million users, and 1.6 million works; and the FanFiction Network, which used to be the most popular fan fic site, but is being outrun by AO3.

The tagline of Jamison’s book is the possibly aspirational “Why fanfiction is taking over the world.”

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