Children and Steamboats: The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

I love Tim Gautreaux's dedication pages. In his debut short story collection, Same Place, Same Things, he writes, "For my wife, Winborne, and our two sons, Robert and Thomas. I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts. I suppose I could have thanked them first, but they haven't ever baked me biscuits." Welding With Children, the second collection, is dedicated "To my teachers, who knew that every fact is a coin." And in The Missing, Gautreaux offers this dedication: "For my father, Minos Lee Gautreaux, who taught me to love children and steamboats."

These three dedications say a good deal about the kind of stories Gautreaux writes, old-fashioned tales where the best characters are not those who achieve great deeds, but those able to happily inhabit modest lives, enjoy simple pleasures, and act in a spirit of decency, kindness, and responsibility towards their fellow travelers in the world. In Gautreaux's universe, these qualities bring about their own rewards, while their inverse invite a host of miseries.

If this vision sounds impossibly naive and wholesome to you, then you've clearly never experienced the joy of reading a Tim Gautreaux book. It works because Gautreaux isn't prone to dewy-eyed nostalgia for a golden small town America, and he understands that even the best of us can't save ourselves from loss, pain, and the hundreds of small meannesses that people enact upon one another.

Sam Simoneaux, the protagonist of The Missing, is a man who has known that kind of loss. When he was a baby, Sam's entire family was gunned down in a vengeance killing, himself spared only because his father managed to hide him in a cold furnace. At the book's beginning, he and his wife have just lost their infant son to a fever. And then, on his watch as a floorwalker in a New Orleans department store, a little girl named Lily is kidnapped. It's 1921, and between spotty local law enforcement, slow communications, and widespread shady adoption practices of the time, the chances of recovering her are slim.

After the kidnapping, Sam loses his job, and guilt-ridden, tracks down Lily's parents and offers to help find her. The girl's parents are performers on a steamboat that specializes in pleasure cruises up and down the Mississippi. Suspecting someone might have noticed Lily on one of these cruises, Sam joins the crew as a third mate, responsible for frisking passengers for weapons, breaking up fistfights, and playing piano with the band whenever their itinerary takes them to a backwater where the boat's black orchestra might be in danger.

It's in these parts of the book that Gautreaux's writing feels most colorful and lived in, which isn't surprising as his grandfather was a steamboat captain and his father, a tugboat captain. All along the river, Sam puts out feelers, makes connections, and ventures into territories populated by generations of violent outlaws who operate outside the jurisdiction of any law enforcement.

As Sam's quest brings him closer to finding Lily, it also brings up old questions about his family's fate, and he faces the problem of how a good man can earn justice when the law is corrupt or indifferent, and the lawless go unpunished. The answers are hard-won, and the book's conclusion is both satisfying and bittersweet.

I checked this book out from the library, but after reading it, I plan to go out and buy a copy. Like all of Tim Gautreaux's books, I suspect this is one I'll be reading and re-reading for years to come.

And if you haven't read Gautreaux's short stories, "Floyd's Girl" and "Died and Gone to Vegas" are two of our favorites. My favorite story, "The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc," isn't available online, but it's in Same Place, Same Things, and is well worth your time.

Laudanum is a Hell of a Drug: Drood by Dan Simmons

Drood by Dan Simmons

When I've been telling people about this book over the past few weeks, it usually goes something along the lines of, "Oh my god, it's about Charles Dickens and a train wreck and mesmerism and Egyptian death cults and this shadowy, nefarious creature named Drood, and the whole thing is narrated by an unhinged, laudanum-addicted Wilkie Collins! It's great!"

The weird thing is, people seem intrigued. Either that, or my slightly manic pitch just unnerves them enough to nod their heads and smile so I'll settle down. But I'm inclined to go with the former. After all, Drood's premise is pretty irresistible.

Simmons extrapolates a fantastic and, at times, very frightening tale from true events in the lives of Charles Dickens and his friend, Wilkie Collins, particularly Dickens's last years. On June 9, 1865, Dickens was riding by rail with his young mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother when their train crashed horrifically, killing 10 and injuring 40. After the crash, Dickens's writing fell off dramatically, his health suffered, and he spent much of his last five years giving strenuous reading tours in Great Britain and the United States.

Those are the facts, but Simmons introduces a sinister figure whose presence in the story gives a dark, eerie cast to Dickens's final years. This is Drood, whom Dickens first meets in the aftermath of the Staplehurst crash. Along with Dickens, Drood is seen giving aid to the wounded... or perhaps not. Afterward, Dickens becomes obsessed with Drood, venturing into London's darkest corners, sewers, crypts, opium dens, pursuing danger, courting death, and more often than not, dragging along his good friend, Wilkie Collins.

Though lesser known, Collins was a writer and frequent collaborator of Dickens's (and his two masterpieces, The Lady in White and The Moonstone have experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years). Collins flouted convention, living openly with one mistress, while fathering three children with another. He also suffered from a number of health problems, which he self-medicated with huge amounts of laudanum. A tincture of opium meant to be ingested a few drops at a time, Collins drank the stuff by the glassful, which sometimes resulted in hallucinations (Collins claimed he saw, among other things, recurring visions of his own double as well as a green-skinned woman with tusks).

In the genius stroke of the novel, Simmons makes this hallucinating, drug-addled, perpetual second fiddle the story's narrator. Jealous, paranoid, and particularly susceptible to the dark allure of Drood, Collins is the perfect voice for this surreal story. As his confessions become more shocking, and Drood's endgame becomes clear, the reader gradually becomes aware of exactly how unreliable a narrator Collins really is. What's true about his tale and what's not? Simmons leaves that all maddeningly, deliciously up in the air.

At nearly 800 pages, Drood is something of an undertaking, but fear not. It's also packed with action, scandal, devilry, and what Brady likes to call high-grade nightmare fuel - 800 pages are rarely this much fun.

Also, I should mention that if this book sounds at all interesting to you, you might enjoy this episode of Doctor Who (a different, but somehow not all that different take on Dicken's last days).

The Hard Road to Justice: Wicked City by Ace Atkins

Wicked City by Ace Atkins

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke

A sleazy hive of bootlegging, illegal gambling halls, houses of prostitution, political corruption, and dirty cops who turned a blind eye, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama the "wickedest city in America." The town's innocent citizens were too afraid to challenge the status quo until 1954, when the Democratic candidate for attorney general, a reformer named Albert Patterson was gunned down in an alley by persons unknown.

Patterson's death marked the beginning of the end for that status quo. It was too egregious, too much of a finger in the eye to ignore, and it was undeniable proof that the good could not live alongside the wicked in Phenix City and do nothing.

Though Atkins's account is fictionalized, the major events are true and many of the principal characters are real. In a short note that prefaces the novel, Atkins writes, "No author could ever exaggerate the sin, sleaze, and moral decay of Phenix City, Alabama, in the fifties or the courage of the people who stood up to fight it."

It's good that he says it, because the extent of the vice that Atkins is about to describe boggles the mind with its sheer audacity. Young women and girls picked up for loitering are taken to prison, where the inside of their lower lip is tattooed, and their names are taken down for the Sheriff's records -- he gets a cut of their future profits when they're conscripted into prostitution. Madams, law enforcement, club owners, and elected officials form a twisted alliance of civic leadership, and everyone gets a cut.

Powerful and harrowing, Wicked City is not without flaws. Characterization emerges slowly, and it's difficult to distinguish many figures from one another, particularly the corrupt officials. Atkins also makes a narrative choice that I didn't care for, interspersing limited omniscient points of view with the first person narration of Lamar Murphy, a former boxer and filling station owner who becomes Phenix City's interim sheriff. Sometimes these changes in perspective occur within the same chapter, which is distracting and clumsy-feeling. However, these quibbles become less important, charging towards Phenix City's inevitable, yet satisfying purge of evil and vice.

Atkins's website features some excellent orientation to the real Phenix City of the 1950s, including newsreel footage of some of the key figures and images of its greatest villains and heroes.

If you liked...: Hell At the Breech by Tom Franklin, this book is for you.

Better Ten Innocent Men Should Suffer: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Typically, the crime novel operates on the basic set of assumptions that wrongdoing has been perpetrated, and that wrongdoers must be sought out and punished to uphold a moral code, agreed upon by the state and the public. However, when the crime novel tweaks those conventions, interesting things happen.

The recent Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace deals with a detective's search for a serial killer in Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Here, the horrific crimes of one man are blunted against the backdrop of death and devastation of a less sensational and individually targeted nature.

Child 44 explores similar ideas, played out in a very different setting - the last days of Stalin's Soviet Union in the early 1950s. Like Peace's novel, the serial killer here is loosely based on a real life murderer; however, the basic premise of that human life is valuable and criminals should be punished is challenged by an entirely different set of constructs. How can the State pursue a serial killer when the State itself is guilty of murdering thousands of its own citizens? And moreover, how can a Communist state pursue a serial killer when crimes like murder are supposed to be byproducts of capitalism?

There is no crime, so therefore, no crime has been committed.

At the beginning of the book, Leo Demidov is a high-ranking official in the MGB, the State Security force responsible for investigating suspected traitors, dissidents, and spies. Leo is unwaveringly loyal to the Party and assumes that, if he's asked to arrest someone, there must be a good reason. When the son of another MGB officer turns up mutilated with soil stuffed in his mouth, Leo is sent to convince the family to keep quiet about their suspicion that it was murder.

Leo's not cruel and he takes no pleasure in the brutality of his job -- he just knows how the system works, and what happens to people who make too much noise, people who get arrested.

Though this murder and others like it are central to the story, Leo initially has very little to do with them. The first half of the book is actually devoted to the series of events leading to Leo's loss of faith in his government and his subsequent fall from the Party's grace. It's an unusual choice, but Smith isn't simply treading water here in the build-up to the murder investigation. This section of the book does an excellent job of establishing the culture of paranoia and perpetual fear, as well as shattering Leo's assumptions about nearly every aspect of his life, including his marriage.

Once Leo is in a position to begin investigating the series of murders, all children, all mutilated with soil stuffed in their mouths, the book becomes more of a straightforward thriller. However, because of circumstances I won't spoil here, the stakes are very high and the reading experience very, very tense.

There's been a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and hype about Smith's Child 44, all of it deserved. There's a cinematic quality to the story (in fact, the rights have already been purchased by Ridley Scott, with Richard Price set to write the adaptation), but it never reads like a screenplay. The writing is complex, powerful, and sometimes devastating. It's a fascinating premise for a crime thriller, and Smith delivers on every bit of the story's promise.

Beyond Words: The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr

"There was a purity to silent films that can never be recaptured in this clamorous age of sound effects and talking. We who made them knew that the most vital parts of the stories -- as of life -- can never be reduced to mere words. We understood that moving images are the catalysts of dreams -- more eloquent when undisturbed by voices."

During a time when Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles could only live in a few designated neighborhoods, and whites agitated for a Constitutional amendment to bar Japanese immigrants (and their American-born children) from attaining citizenship, Jun Nakayama becomes one of Hollywood's biggest and most unlikely stars. He appears in over 60 films, tours cross-country selling war bonds, appears on the cover of Photoplay, and makes women swoon in the theatre aisles.

But then in 1922, shortly after the murder of acclaimed director Ashley Bennett Tyler, Jun's career suddenly, mysteriously ends. Jun becomes a recluse, his old friends abandon him, he never appears in another film -- and he never tells anyone the reason why.

When the book begins, it's 1964, and little has changed for Jun; however, everything is about to. A silent movie theatre is opening on Fairfax, and an eager reporter named Nick Bellingham approaches Jun for an interview about the old days. Jun refuses outright, but Nick is persistent. Eventually, he reveals the real reason he's been pursuing Jun -- he's written a screenplay, has a studio interested, and wants Jun to star. The role is exactly the kind that always eluded Jun during his film career -- dignified, complex, sympathetic -- and he's intrigued enough to sit down with Nick.

The silent film historians who have written about Jun by 1964 blame his disappearance from the screen on a lack of good roles for Asian actors. However, no one knows the truth, and when a studio head begins digging up dirt, Jun realizes he can't relive his glory days without revisiting their darker moments.

Discovered in a theatre in Little Tokyo, Jun quickly becomes a sex symbol, enjoys the company of white starlets, and frequently plays villainous characters that offend the Japanese-American community.

Though he prides himself in avoiding the worst kinds of "houseboy" roles, his career stands in sharp contrast to his friend and foil, the Japanese actress Hanako Minatoya. At first, Hanako is his idol, then his mentor; however, their friendship becomes strained as the anti-Japanese sentiment in Hollywood grows more virulent. Hanako knows the score, and isn't afraid to stand up to the studios, while Jun lives in a state of denial, believing that his stardom will spare him.

In the end, though, it can't. And while many clues signal the cause of Jun's downfall in advance, his inability to see them for himself make the eventual revelation as shocking for readers as it is for Jun.

The narrative voice Revoyr creates for Jun is masterful, stretched taut with restrained emotion, longing, and lost opportunity. Revoyr also depicts early Hollywood with exquisite detail, rendered even more so by Jun's attempt to revisit some of his old haunts only to find them turned derelict. Though the book is many things -- an examination of racial prejudice, a murder mystery, an account of a too-forgotten era of moviemaking -- each element of the story fits together seamlessly.

And although it's the story of a man who has lost nearly everything, it's not a book that dwells in shadows and loss; the resolution is such a piece of beauty and four-square perfection, it will take your breath away.

If you liked...: The Remains of the Day, this book is for you.
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Note: The character of Jun Nakayama is very loosely based on the actor Sessue Hayakawa, who was also "discovered" performing in a Little Tokyo theatre, and had a successful silent film career. However, unlike Jun Nakayama, Hayakawa transitioned to the talkies, and in response to a lack of roles for Japanese actors, formed his own film production company. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1957 for his role in Bridge on the River Kwai.

BooksMobile*

As you may or may not know - or care, for that matter - I've forsaken L.A. for Lower Alabama for a few weeks to do some research for the forthcoming smash hit, Brady's Dissertation: Eight Or So Chapters That Changed A Very Small Subfield of Sociology for a Few Years Until Cultural Analysis Falls Out Of Fashion, If It Hasn't Already.

In the hours in which I'm not giving myself motion sickness with a microfilm reader or driving all over south-central Mississippi in search of transcripts of speeches and interviews, I've been hanging out with the family, eating well (oh oysters, you magnificent sea boogers - how I'll miss you when I leave), and getting book recommendations from the kinfolk. Here's a couple that I've started on:

Mea culpa: I'm only about forty pages into each of these, but in the interest of actually posting for a change, I thought I'd share the contents of my bedside table.

Nonfiction-wise, my uncle Charlie recommended John M. Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. (Ha! Another one!) I'm several chapters in and it's a corker of a story so far, full of turn-of-the-century engineering/hubris and fascinating/horrifying political shenanigans.
If you are an Isambard Kingdom Brunel groupie, or enjoyed The Great Deluge you will probably find this to be right up your floodplain, so to speak. I'm not far enough along yet to tell if the flood really Changed America, but given that a young Herbert Hoover made his name on the national stage in the course of the recovery efforts, I'd say the book probably earns the subtitle.




On a walk downtown the other day, my dad and I stopped in at Bienville Books, where we happened upon Flashman at the Charge, one in a series of books that he and all of his friends have been devouring like eighth-graders on a Harry Potter binge. Flashy, as our protagonist is sometimes called, is a lot like Blackadder, only randier, more venal, and even more cowardly. (There is, so I hear, a Blackadder character who's an homage to ol' Flashy.) Flashy may be a little much, though it's too soon to tell; unlike Blackadder, you rarely get the sense that you're in on the joke along with the protagonist, and George MacDonald Fraser's humorous prose is about as subtle as if it were painted purple and dancing naked on top of a harpsichord singing "Subtle Prose Is Here Again."** Still, what it may lack in finesse it makes up for in a wealth of historical detail, and if you appreciate bawdy humor you might enjoy this one quite a bit, even as you find yourself appalled by every third sentence or so.

In short, if your dad has a birthday coming up, odds are either of these would probably be a perfect gift.

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* This may in fact be the worst pun I've ever used in a title. I'm pretty pleased with myself.
** Paraphrased with apologies to the good writers over at the BBC.

The Hosebeast of Haute Couture

The Collection by Gioia Diliberto
Different Like Coco by Elizabeth Matthews

Between these two recent books on the life of Coco Chanel, one an illustrated biography for small children and one a work of fiction, for historical accuracy, I'd put my money on the novel.

Understandably, biographies intended for a juvenile audience will need to omit some of their subjects' more scandalous moments, but it verges on irresponsible to whitewash the life of a Nazi-sympathizing, child labor law-breaking monster, no matter how pretty her clothes were. Other criticisms have been leveled at Different Like Coco, and Gwen's recent post covers them pretty well. In any case, as a female role model for small children, Coco Chanel probably ranks somewhere slightly above Leona Helmsly and the Bratz.

But enough of that unpleasantness, because Diliberto's The Collection is a perfectly delightful book that I highly recommend to everyone.

Set in 1919, the novel follows the naive Isabelle Varlet to Paris where she gets a job in Chanel's burgeoning Paris atelier, and quickly promotes to second in charge of a workroom. Isabelle is a talented seamstress and Paris agrees with her; however, her pilgrimage to the city is motivated more by the death of her fiance, a shy provincial baker, than by ambition.

Along with the other seamstresses, Isabelle works ten hour days, six days a week to get Chanel's fall collection ready. But along with those duties, she's also subjected to impossible clients, backstabbing co-workers, and the mercurial tempers of Mademoiselle. While the plot is a little bit thin, Diliberto is a master at well-placed historical detail, and the flurried activity of the Paris fashion world is captivating enough to carry the story.

And Diliberto's portrayal of Mademoiselle is extremely well-done, both shrill and shrewd. Much is also made of Chanel's shortcomings as a designer. Unable to draw or sew very well, she often appears as a brilliant hack. But credit where it's due, the character of Chanel also has terrific confidence in her vision and an unparalleled eye. She casts off designs and dismisses her competitors with the shrugged off comment, "Nobody wants to look like that anymore."

The Collection succeeds because Diliberto creates such a compelling uber-bitch. She's awful in all ways, but at the same time, Isabelle would rather work on her clothes than anyone else's, and it's easy to see why.

Behind the Rape of the Lock: The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee

The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee

One fatal stroke the sacred hair does sever
From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!

I was immediately struck by the clever premise of The Scandal of the Season, but wondered, really, how interesting was a book that fictionalized the events surrounding Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" going to be? Along with Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Pope's mock epic is one of those works that sounds hilarious to high school students when it's explained in modern language. What they don't expect is that they're going to have to hack through some truly dense 18th century verbiage to get the jokes. Most give up, which is not to say that the hacking isn't worthwhile. There are always two or three kids in the class whose eyes light up when they get to Swift's sentence about baby ragout.

And Sophie Gee's novel is not only clever, it's absolutely delightful, peppered with witty banter, forbidden trysts, and Jacobite plots to murder the queen. The book begins with the young Pope traveling to London with the Blount sisters, partly to drum up some publicity for his latest poem and partly to woo the elder Blount, Teresa. She'll have nothing to do with him, though, and is holding out for a wealthier prospect, preferably one without a hunchback.

Though the Blounts have a good name, they're deeply in debt, and the girls have this season alone to snare mates before word of their financial ruin leaks out. Teresa relies on the friendship of her beautiful and well-connected cousin, Arabella Fermor; however, Arabella has lived in the city long enough to see Teresa for the grasping nobody she is.

And Arabella has other things on her mind, not least of which is the attention of Robert, Lord Petre, one of London's most eligible bachelors. Despite her good judgment, Arabella becomes Robert's lover and believes he'll marry her even though he's financially out of her league. And Robert isn't a total rake - he loves Arabella and believes he can convince his family to approve the union. Meanwhile, Pope watches the affair unfold at masquerades and garden parties, and uses its doomed end to compose his best-known work.

Gee's eye for historical detail is rich and precise, but it's her dialogue that sells the story. Characters live and die by their wit, which goes a long way towards explaining how a middle class Catholic with a hunchback could gain access to London's elite. And despite living in a superficial society where much is expressed in euphemism and pun, the relationships between the characters are surprisingly deep, and sometimes moving.

If you liked...: Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos or the work of Jane Austen, this book is for you.

Spiritualism! Victorian Pornography!

All Will Be Revealed by Robert Anthony Siegel

Now that I have your attention.

Augustus Auerbach is a wheelchair-bound multimillionaire, obsessed with creating a legacy in pornographic pictures. Verena Swann is the widow of a famed Arctic explorer, who becomes a hot property with the New York spiritualist set after realizing she can communicate with her dead husband. When the two cross paths, they embark on an unlikely friendship and unlikelier romance.

Of course, there are problems. Besides being a pornographer, Auerbach is a recluse and control freak. And while Swann is a talented medium who seems to fall into genuine trances when speaking to her husband, she is a fraud. Additionally, her brother-in-law, grown fat on the fruits of her labor, is unwilling to let her out of the game, however distasteful.

Siegel does a good job rendering Auerbach, Swann, and her spiritualist biddies (she refers to them as "the weepers). Still, the book was a little thinner than I would have liked. There's one bit of particularly tense conflict that I was very excited about; however, Siegel underestimates what he's got going and resolves everything too quickly, and perhaps a little too happily.

Not to give anything away, but Siegel also passes up a crackerjack opportunity to have a villain mauled by a bear. How do you let something like that that get away?

If you liked...: Angelica by Arthur Phillips or Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, this book is for you.

Your Dad Would Like This Better Than a Necktie

The Second Objective by Mark Frost

In the winter of 1944, the Nazis were staring down Allied armies on German borders, and defeat looked eminent. In a last-ditch effort, Hitler ordered an offensive that would later become known as the Battle of the Bulge, and included a plan called Operation Greif.

The operation involved approximately 2000 English-speaking German troops dressed in the uniforms of dead or captured American and British soldiers, and their objective was to sneak behind Allied lines and switch their road signs, take their bridges, and generally screw with their day. However, for a tiny group of these German soldiers, there was a nefarious second objective. All the soldiers involved in this second objective were either captured or killed... except for two, who were never accounted for.

Mark Frost's book is a fictionalized account of those soldiers, and of the NYPD detective turned military police who has to stop them.

This is the kind of old man book I usually stay far away from; however, Mark Frost was a co-creator and executive producer on Twin Peaks, so I made an exception. And I'm very glad I did.

Frost hones in on a single squadron chosen for the second objective and follows their actions without either losing sight of or getting bogged down in the huge battle that rages around them. And on top of that, it also manages to be pulpy as hell without either trivializing the war or turning it into a "Greatest Generation" love-in. It's just a good old balls to the wall, high stakes nail-biter with scary villains, a Bogey-tough hero, and a police procedural vibe that works surprisingly well with the war story.

I loved it, Potts loved it, and I suspect you will, too.

If you liked...: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont or The Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, this book is for you.

Future Comic Geek Cred

It always bugged me that we got into (f'rinstance) Y the Last Man starting with #12 or thereabouts. It's either the indie snob in me or the mylar-bagging comics nerd in me, but I likes to get in on the ground floor.


Which is why I am now going to plug Guttsville and put you, dear reader, in a position to say "I liked that before it was cool."

The book, by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving, is set in the belly of Leviathan, where a group of convicts/settlers (swallowed on an ill-fated trip to Australia back in the day) have managed to survive, if not thrive, for several generations. They refer to that forgotten period before the giant fish thingy ate them as "The Drytime" and they are convinced that, like Jonah, they are being tested by the Lord. The wicked, in Gutsville, are hung over bile ducts by the Town Elders and digested by the creature. Our hero - the son of the town Ratcatcher - may have just found a way out, but it's a certain digesting for that kind of blasphemy and sedition.

The art in this six issue miniseries is murky and grotesque (in a good way) and the premise and writing are super inventive. The characters are a little stock, at least so far, but the issue ends with a twist that promises much fun ahead. All in all, a really nifty book.

The first issue is out on stands now, and those looking for a new high-concept comic that's a bit off the beaten path should check it out - especially if you ever thought Pinocchio kinda had a neat thing going there in the belly of that whale.

If I Was Less of a Raging Gentile, There Would Be All Manner of Cool Yiddish Slang in This Review

Seeing as how there's been quite a bit of ink/pixels/whatever spilled on the subject of Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, I will be brief.

Damn, it's good.

Reading The Yiddish Policeman's Union, I was reminded of that Dylan tune from the Wonderboys soundtrack, "Things Have Changed".* It ain't the greatest thing ol' Bob ever done, but it's damn fine songwriting and perks along at a zippy pace - a seemingly effortless little tale that is a lot harder to write than it looks. It gets stuck in your head for days, and even if it maybe doesn't quite measure up to his earlier stuff it's just a pleasure to enjoy something made by someone who's so good at what they do.

Chabon gives us a world where, instead of Israel, the displaced Jews of WWII got a chunk of Alaska called Sitka. Our Hero - Sitka homicide detective Meyer Landsman - has recently had a truly wretched divorce and is living in a fleabag hotel, deep into a romance with a shot glass and a bottle of slivovitz. When a junkie a few rooms over turns up dead, shot execution-style in the back of the head with a half-finished chess game on the table next to his bed, Lansman takes it personal and sets out to find the killer.

Things in Sitka are often not what they seem, and it is - in an oft-repeated phrase around the town - "A strange time to be a Jew". Mysteries deepen, thuggish Orthodox "Black Hats" are up to something, and the long-planned date of "Resettlement" is fast approaching, when the Jews of Sitka will have to hand the place back over to the Feds.

I won't say much else about the plot, as is only fair with a detective story, but I will say this: it almost - but I would say not quite - goes off the rails towards the end.

On the other hand, it's a hell of a yarn and it's written like gangbusters. Chabon can string a sentence together like few else out there. It is simply a blast and a half to read the man's prose, and for that, I'll forgive just about anything.

If I had to sum up the novel's appeal - its heady blend of "What if...?", hardboiled Judaica and masterful writing - I'd do it with the following sentence, in which Landsman is struggling with a suspect for his gat.

"He yanks his sholem loose and turns it around, and the world pulls the trigger on all its guns."

Seriously. It's good.

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*This flick, philistine that I am, was my first introduction to this Chabon feller. Also, Alan "Wash from Firefly" Tudyk played the janitor/former student of the protagonist in the film. And now you know.

Something for Everybody

- Atul Gawande's new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance is as good, if not better, than its predecessor, Complications. Standouts include "The Score," an essay about innovations in the area of childbirth; "The Bell Curve," about what separates an average hospital treatment center from an excellent one; and "What Doctors Owe," a piece about malpractice.

- As we come to that beach reading time of year, may I direct you, gentle readers, to the work of Ken Follett? As a teenager, I came to Follett's books for the ubiquitous dirty bits, but stuck around for the taut pacing, high adventure, and well-researched historical settings. On my travels last week, I re-read Pillars of the Earth, a 1000-page behemoth about cathedral-building, corrupt bishops, pillaging earls, and a prior who's crazy like a fox. That I finished it in a L.A. to Pittsburgh round-trip speaks both to Follett's skill as a writer and just how badly the airline messed up my flight (in the form of a 5-hour layover in Detroit).

- My review for the new (and sadly, last) Larry Brown novel, A Miracle of Catfish is up at PopMatters. A great book from a much-missed writer.

Best Served Cold

The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox

Edward Glyver is the son of a drunken lout and a woman who pens sentimental novels to eke out an existence. His parents die young, his education is cut short, and his prospects are limited. None of this, however, should have happened to Edward Glyver.

Going through his mother's papers, Glyver stumbles onto some shocking truths that suggest he was born to something better than his current lot. As he seeks to uncover the truth about himself, Glyver learns that the source of all his troubles lies in the person of a former schoolmate, Phoebus Daunt. Glyver's quest for justice gradually turns vengeful, and leads our anti-hero from the opium dens and whorehouses of 19th century London to a pastoral estate called Evenwood, and back again.

Employing tropes from the gold standard in revenge stories,
The Count of Monte Cristo, Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night also throws in a few new twists. Rather than introducing us to a virtuous man gradually driven to obsession, the book begins right after Glyver has committed a seemingly senseless murder and is doped to the gills on laudanum. As the story progresses, however, Glyver emerges as a strangely sympathetic and admirably resourceful narrator.

The book is written as Glyver's own account, anonymously donated to the Cambridge University Library years after later and edited by a "Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction." Through the fictional editor's footnotes, Cox's knowledge of Victorian England shines, blending a good yarn with well-researched settings and figures from the period.

Don't be put off by the book's length - it's a surprisingly speedy read.

If you liked...: the setting and narrative structure of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, the plot of Nicholas Nickleby, or like a good revenge story like The Count of Monte Cristo (or Revenge by Stephen Fry), this book is for you.

Red Dirt Girls

On Agate Hill by Lee Smith

I bet that even Lee Smith's grocery lists are good reading. Some of them would make you feel like you were outside in springtime (orange sections; basil; 2 pomegranates; brie). Some would be straightforward (wine, fashion magazine, chocolate ice cream, pack of Marlboro Lights), and others would require you to put the pieces together yourself, however weird or disturbing the tale might be (e.g. paint thinner, diapers, hearts of palm, veal).

Smith's writing falls into two basic groups. The first involves stories of modern southern women questioning the tenets of southern womanhood, to hell with what the Junior League has to say about it. Strong, emotionally complex, charming books -- like Barbara Kingsolver meets Steel Magnolias. In the other variety, Smith writes historical fiction that conveys both the weight of the past and the arbitrary breeziness of the choices that determine it. As she did in Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith demonstrates in On Agate Hill that a life story is bigger than a single life. But no matter what she's writing, there is always a story there, and it is always a corker.

Following the success of Smith's bestselling The Last Girls, On Agate Hill was released fairly quietly this fall. However, the riveting storytelling here stands up to some of Smith's best work.

The book begins with Molly Petree, orphaned during the Civil War, and living with her dying uncle in a crumbling plantation. It's a slice of the Reconstruction Era that calls to mind Gone With the Wind without the simplistic idealism and racism of that book. Later portions of the book follow Molly to a rigorous boarding school led by an unstable religious zealot and her lecherous husband; then, to her unlikely marriage and life in the backwoods; by the book's end, Molly has faced everything from stillborn babies to murder charges.

A thoroughly absorbing read - I didn't want it to end. If you like contemporary southern fiction, and haven't read Lee Smith, well, then you can't really say you like contemporary southern fiction because you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Two Words: Vigilante Justice

Hell At the Breech by Tom Franklin

One night, Arch Bedsole, an aspiring politician from a tract of Alabama wasteland known as Mitcham Beat is gunned down. His cousin, Tooch, claims that with his last breath, Arch said the murder was committed by "folks from town." To avenge his cousin, Tooch rounds up a posse of men from the Beat, forcing them to sign an alliance in blood. Those who don't are lynched. Those who do are quickly whipped into a frenzy of greed and blood lust, more deadly than Clarke County's drunken, aging local sheriff can manage.

Franklin's novel is loosely based on true events, and his details of poor sharecropper life in the post-Reconstruction South are grisly and unforgettable. Life is cheap, murder is easy, and even the good guys don't come out clean in this gripping story of violence and mob mentality.

If you liked...: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or the Drive-By Trucker's backwoods feud song "Decoration Day," this book is for you.

The Rich Behaving Badly

Gone With the Windsors by Laurie Graham

In 1936, King Edward VIII ticked off just about every member of the English aristocracy by abdicating his throne for the love of a twice-divorced American commoner, Wallis Simpson. She wasn't particulary attractive, young, wealthy, or pleasant, but she had something that turns a king's head - the ability to boss him around.

Gone With the Windsors is a fictionalized account of how Simpson got her man, and alienated a country in the process, told through the eyes of an old school pal, Maybelle Brumby.

After being widowed, the newly wealthy and delightfully dippy Maybelle moves to London to enjoy the hospitality of her sister, Violet. Violet promises her brushes with royalty and introductions to interesting men, but can't deliver anything more than a half-witted viscount and dull holidays in Scotland. Determined to get in with a more glamorous social set, Maybelle realigns her loyalties with some old acquaintances, including Wally.

Maybelle's diary entries follow Wally's deft social maneuvering into the inner circle of Britain's royalty, and eventually, into the bed of HRH Wales. The book starts off like a cross between Daisy Miller and Pride and Prejudice, but turns out to be a lot more fun - imagine the cast of Clueless transported to pre-war England.

The royal gossip makes for fun reading, but Graham also sneaks in some subtle commentary on the attitudes of England's upper class, many of whom spent these years receiving Christmas cards from Mussolini and making excuses for Hitler.

As a result of her cluelessness, Maybelle makes a number of poor financial and social decisions during her time spent with the royals, but she's so endearing and goofy that it's hard not to spend the book rooting for her.

If you liked...: Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis or Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding, this book is for you.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I swear, I won't make a habit of this, but I was kinda proud of the way this review turned out. Plus, if I hadn't already written about it somewhere else, it's exactly the kind of book I'd write about here. Such a good story, and nine kinds of fun.

In other news, I recently found myself in the unfortunate position of wanting to wear sandles to work but discovering that my toenail polish was horribly chipped. Then, I remembered an article I'd read in this month's Glamour about how to touch up your nails in two minutes while you're wearing your sandles. And it worked!

Let it be noted for the record that Glamour magazine impacted my life in a very real and immediate way, something that the novels of Philip Roth have not done even once.

'England is a Nation of Starers'

Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud

The Goods: Chase-Riboud, in addition to being an acclaimed sculptor and poet, writes meticulously researched historical novels that tell the stories of history's oppressed and voiceless. She has previously written about Sally Hemmings, a harem girl of an Ottoman sultan, and the Amistad slave ship. In Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud follows the true story of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi* woman born in South Africa during the Dutch and English colonization. Her family and her lover are killed by the Dutch, and she goes to Cape Town where she becomes a maid to a Dutch family. Her master's brother buys her with the plan to take her to England to exhibit her.

For the next 5 years, millions of people in England and France came to gawk, poke, and prod at a caged Saartjie, hoping to catch a glimpse of her 'Hottentot apron,' the traditional genital mutilation of the Khoikhoi. She was sent before the 'greatest' minds of France - naturalists, scientists, phrenologists and artists, all products of the Age of Enlightenment - who determined that Hottentots are not only inferior, they must be a different species altogether.

Saartjie died at the age of 27 in France, her body sold and dissected, and her skeleton displayed alongside animals well into the 1970s. In 2002, her remains were finally returned to South Africa.

Thoughts: Those are the facts; however, most of the story is told by Saartjie, though occasional chapters are narrated by the men who enslave her, as well as those who try to save her. Through her narration, Chase-Riboud creates as real and immediate sense of what exploitation feels like, and the psychic devastation that comes with being human property. The white men in the book are also well written, displaying fleeting moments of humanity and compassion - just enough to enable them to manipulate Saartje - but despite these lapses, they are monsters. And whatever emotions overtake them as they cart the 'Hottentot Venus' around the countryside, guilt is never one of them.

A good deal of their dialogue is lifted directly from the writings of thinkers of that age. Reading it, you'd think that 19th century science had nothing to prove other than the superiority of the 'white race.' Then again, I suppose that kind of obsessive search for an inferior being was the only way they could sleep at night. When Saartjie is raped by her captors, the justification they repeatedly use is, "Hottentots have only one word for virgin, woman and wife." It doesn't matter to them, so why should I afford her any respect?

Ugh ugh ugh. Not a happy read, but an excellent book.

If you like...: well-researched historical fiction like The Crimson Petal and the White or heart-wrenching postcolonial literature like Things Fall Apart and The God of Small Things, this book is for you.
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* The name 'Hottentot' was given to the Khoikhoi by Dutch colonists and means 'stutterer.' Of course, the fact that the Khoikhoi learned Dutch fairly easily completely escaped their grasp. As far as the Dutch and English were concerned, the Khoikhoi language was nothing but gibberish. Many went so far as to say it was not a language at all.