Dan's Reading Journal

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

I can not believe I have never reviewed any of Walter Mosley (or if I have, I can not find it).  In either case, it is an error in judgment.  Mosley is a prodigious author, 11 Easy Rawlins novels, 13 or so other fiction novels and a number of non-fiction works.

I have read a number of the Easy Rawlins novels, including the latest, Blonde Faith and I recommend them all for a variety of reasons. Mosley writes mystery fiction very well.  His plots, while not complex, are interesting and intriquing.  His characters (developed over many years and many novels) are even more interesting and intriguing.  However, Mosley's towering accomplishment is to invite the reader, particularly the white, middle-class (or better) reader, into a world we rarely see and often work hard to avoid.  Want to know why black men are angry?  Want to know what it is like to be suspected, scrutinized, scorned, and excoriated simply because of the color of your skin?  Want to know what it is like to operate in a world where almost every member of the "establishment", from governmental official to policeman to doorman makes an immediate (and typically negative) assessment of who you are and your purpose with one look at you?  Read the Easy Rawlins books and you will know....and once you know, it will eat at you and make you feel ashamed of your own, even unconscious behavior.  Because, as they say on Avenue Q, "we are all a little bit racist, you know".

Easy Rawlins is an unoffical private investigator who lives a sometimes hardscrabble and sometimes not-so-hardscrabble life in the Los Angeles of the 50's and 60's.  He is a WWII vet who saw all of man's inhumanity to man in the European theatre and returns to a different, but unfortunately similar, world in the post-war LA.  He grew up in Houston's famously dangerous Fifth Ward, and his best friend as a child (and as a man) is a cold-blooded killer and expert thief with the antithetical nickname of "Mouse".  Within all of this, and with all his work, he assembles a relatively non-traditional family and becomes a caring and dedicated father.

In Blonde Faith, Mouse's wife tells him that Mouse is wanted for murder (another friend of Easy's) and is missing.  Knowing the LAPD's obsession with Mouse, Easy is convinced that they will shoot first and ask questions later - regardless of the truth.  To complicate the feeling of loss, Easy has lost the woman he truly loves - she is about to marry another man.  Easy's typically difficult search for dignity and lack of pain in the world is very much multiplied by his personal life.

Mosley writes about what it is to be a man as much as he writes about what it is to be a black man.  Sometimes they are the same thing, often they are not.  Being a black man in 1960's LA is more complicated than being a white man -- and Mosley demonstrates this with amazing fluidity without turning to polemic.  The truth is so apparent that all he has to do is show it to you -- and that is an art form in and of itself.

Blonde Faith's plot plays out nicely but it is the characters - Easy, Mouse, the bartender, Easy's friends, including a restaurant manager, a black technology whiz and the supposed murder victim (a special forces vet by the name of Christmas Black) and the cops who make Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels work so well.

Mosley also has range.  He has written everything from good non-fiction to good and inventive science fiction (try Futureland).  Be entertained and learn something.  That's a pretty good one-two punch.  Walter Mosley delivers in style.

Short Takes (April) Non-Fiction

Back to the Library.  You know, you would think I would have figured out long ago how much cheaper it is to pay late fees rather than buy books.  So, just like the SciFi, I have been trolling around in the new non-fiction section.

Desperate Passage by Ethan Rarick is a quite well written new look at the tragedy of the Donner Party.  The story I was familiar with was one of bad luck resulting in horrific tragedy as this hapless group of California-bound migrants gets stuck in a big winter storm in the Sierra Nevadas.  As people die of starvation the group turns to cannibalism to stay alive.

Rarick takes new evidence and a fresh look and brings together an even more compelling story of arrogance, ignorance, boosterism, politics, and true heroism.  Pulling from family letters, recent medical research, and weather patterns, Rarick really shows how the truly bad decision-making and gullibility of the Donner Party combined with both the willful negligence of the "experts" hyping a new route west (some had never taken the path they recommended) and Sierra Nevada weather conspired to doom the Donner Party to privation and starvation.  Interesting tidbits include the fact that a much higher percentage of women survived versus men -- attributable to a) higher body fat of women; b) the fact that many of the men engaged in more physically challenging tasks, and c) the men were considerably older. Also, singles had a much lower survival rate than those with a family network.

While not racing prose, Rarick combines a decent narrative with historical artifacts and recent science to make an interesting book.  The Donner Party were initially thought of as blunderers who got what they deserved and were resurrected later as an example of tough frontier survivors with unconquerable spirit.  Certainly there were a few heroes whose story is awesome and compelling.  Rarick's conclusion is that the story is more than "gleaming heroism or sullied villainy...but a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous". 

My reading is somewhat different.  At every possible decision point, The Donner Party made the wrong, bad decision - sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes for expedience, and sometimes due to arrogance or hubris.  Their track record was perfect....from their late start from Independence right up to the choice to stay high in the Sierras rather than backtrack to lower altitude, the Donner Party picked wrong every time.  While not villainous, it was more than just bad luck.  I think they were arrogant and badly led and woefully underinformed.  Read the book and you can decide.

The Bounty by Caroline Alexander is another example of well trod ground being re-plowed.  Certainly almost everyone knows the story of Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh's trip to Tahiti, the mutiny, the almost unbelievable seamanship demonstrated by Bligh to get his little lifeboat across 3,600 miles of ocean to civilization, and the mutineer's voyage to and subsequent life (and ultimate rediscovery) on Pitcairn's Island. 

Alexander is the author of Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton's amazing journey of survival in the Arctic.  The Bounty is not quite as gripping and compelling.  The Bounty is well researched and the story moves along reasonably well up to the trial of the mutineers that are recaptured on Tahiti and then (pardon the pun) it seems like the story is dragging an anchor.  The trial and punishment phase of the novel just do not provide the zip that the beginning and the end of the story seem to have.

However, if you ever wondered what really happened to Fletcher Christian (and the other mutineers on Pitcairn) or Captain Bligh (who became on of the Governor-Generals of Australia, among other things) or the poor blokes who remained behind in Tahiti and were tried for mutiny, you could do a lot worse than reading this -- just skim through a lot of the trial details.

Short Takes (April 2008) Science Fiction

Escapist, junk reading is fun....most of the time.  I have found my public library's "What's New" (i.e., just published) section to be a great place to try out stuff just based on title.  I admit I usually do this with Science Fiction I am unwilling to take a flyer on and buy. This time however, the SciFi was almost a strikeout, but not quite.

Hunter's Run by George R.R. Martin, Gardiner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham plays through and combines some interesting concepts (most not original, but then, few ever are), but is amazingly less exciting than the the prestige of the three authors would lead you to believe.  The idea that the third world's (earth's that is) poor end up as labor on a new world is not new.  In fact, Richard K. Morgan does it a lot better, but it is not done badly here.  The idea that humans interact with other species is not new either and that concept has been done better elsewhere.  The idea that an alien race is hiding out from another alien race on a planet colonized by humans is an interesting twist.  The idea that the aliens hiding out are part of a collective consciousness, but able to act independently has also been done before (remember the Borg?).  The idea that the aliens clone the human who ignorantly runs into them and risks exposing them and then uses the clone to track down the original who escaped from them is pretty cool (as is the idea that the clone doesn't know who he is chasing for quite some time).  However, the aliens are not particularly well developed as a concept and come off more like Marvel Comics characters than anything else.  Moreover, the chase through the jungle has been done before as well.  The ending - if you persevere long enough to get there - has a pretty good twist.  Joe Bob would tell you to check it out (because it reads like a B drive-in movie).

Patrimony by Alan Dean Foster is a young adult scifi book billed as a "Pip and Flinx" adventure and reads just like you would expect.  Lots of places with weird names (lots of consonants and lots of x's and z's), lots of planets and species with weird names and off-putting appearances and personal hygiene (how many times should a species that smells bad but can not smell themselves be used as a plot device?). The tip off should have been the subtitle, " A Pip and Flinx Adventure" - Flinx is the genetically altered human in search of his father and Pip is the equally genetically manufactured flying venomous snake that communicates telepathically with Flinx.  And, oh yeah, they ought to be out saving the universe by finding an ancient, sentient weapons platform with which to fight off the coming scourge, but..... You get the point.....you have to be 14 and really in love with SciFi.

Northern Canadian Farming

If you do not believe in destiny, how do you explain this?:  In the last month, and specifically while on vacation, I managed to pick up three books by two different authors all set in rural farming communities in Northern Canada (probably Ontario or Quebec). Reviews will follow for Mary Larson's Crow Lake (her first novel) and The Other Side of the Bridge and for Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves (her first novel).  Want more?  Both authors live in the United Kingdom. 

Both authors capture time and place very well and create universal themes with interesting characters.  Check out the reviews.

Crow Lake/The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

Mary Lawson does not write action adventures.  There is plenty of action, and lots of adventure, but it is of the unfolding, slow reveal type.  Lawson's two books are engaging and captivating and carry the hallmark of what I love about great fiction -- they transport the reader to an unknown place and make it familiar and understandable and interesting.  Mary Lawson does that by taking us to rural farming communities in Northern Ontario.

In Crow Lake, we follow the trials, tribulations, and family interplay of the Morrison family as narrated by Kate Morrison as they work through how to survive the loss of their parents.  Kate has two teenage brothers and a younger sister and is reflecting back 20 years (from the present time) on the difficulties of that time.  Kate does this while trying to sort through her personal life in the present.  That present is more than a bit confused:  a relationship with a lover who wants more from her and her relationship with her favorite brother, who, while helping to develop in her the love of science which is her current profession, gave up his own promising development for reasons that are best discovered in the book.

Lawson is not breaking new ground here.  There is family tragedy and sacrifice.  There are incredibly dysfunctional families as neighbors.  Nature is capricious and cruel.  Being orphaned is both unfair and a tremendous challenge to overcome. Young men have sex drive.  As in most things, it is not the "what" as much as the how and why and where.

It is both the complete nature of place (the town, the farm, the weather), the people (Kate's family, the extended Morrison family who wants to help, the Pye's (the neighbors) with problems of their own, and the (pardon the multi-syllabic intervention) juxtaposition of what is happening in Kate's life in the present with what happened to Kate's life in the past that makes the "what" so captivating.  And captivating is the right word.  Lawson's prose is comfortable and familiar, yet rich and robust.  While there is some mystery to the story - it is not a mystery and it is not difficult to surmise what might happen or come next.  None of that diminishes the story nor the reader's delight in the short time spent in Crow Lake.

Lawson takes us back to Northern Ontario with many of the same themes in The Other Side of the Bridge.  The story begins in the depression and is focused on the characters and world of two brothers (Arthur and Jake Dunn) and the circumstances are once again familiar.  Arthur is a big, kind, and socially awkward boy (then man) who loves farming and hates school.  Jake is the prodigal son, effective in avoiding any semblance of work on the farm, smart, bright and accomplished in school (when he cares), good looking and attractive to women, and (at its most benign) a complete scamp.  Jake is expert at both getting what he wants and getting Arthur in trouble. The story is the relationship of the brothers, the relationship of a man to his land, a husband to his wife (and vice versa), a man and a woman to their honor.

It is also the story of Ian Christopherson, the son of the small town doctor, who both chafes severely at the assumption that he will assume the mantle of his father, is wounded severely by being abandoned by his mother, and is (as only a teenager can be) enthralled the significantly older woman who is Arthur's wife.  In a totally unexpected move (at least to his father and friends) , Ian takes a summer and weekend job working for Arthur on the farm.  It is through Ian's eyes that we see the town, its inhabitants, and its situation as other than fairy tale perfect.

As in Crow Lake, Lawson introduces some mystery into the story and again it is not hard to figure out.  And, once again, that in no way diminishes the power of the story.  There are two (perhaps two and one-half) plotlines here -- first, why did Laura marry Arthur and how does the relationship between Arthur and Jake resolve itself and second, what kind of person will Ian become and what will he become.

For the first, it is the universal situation of brothers in conflict and here there is conflict and manipulation and expediency and cruelty and kindness and redemption.  For the second, it is the universal coming of age story.  In both cases, Lawson does a masterful job of retelling these universal themes and the book, like her first, is captivating and engaging and powerful.

Enjoy Mary Lawson.

The Jew of Home Depot by Max Apple

"If I could just write like Max Apple......"  My guess is that most existing and aspiring authors will utter something along those lines after reading Max Apple's latest collection (his first in 20 years), The Jew of Home Depot.  These 13 individual gems sparkle and delight.

As the ad said, "you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy" Max Apple, but as my Jewish mother would say, "it doesn't hurt either".  Many of Max Apple's characters are Jewish, but in most cases their Jewishness serves to bring the human condition into brighter relief.  Apple can develop a full-formed character in a flash (or a couple of pages, at most) - in many cases, I have a better sense of Apple's characters after a few paragraphs than I get from some authors mid-way through their novels.  It is a wonderful and entertaining gift. He truly is a peer of Garrison Keillor and Calvin Trillin, who possesses similar gifts.

Apple ranges pretty wide.  In Yao's Chick, it is the saga of the abnormally tall first-generation Chinese from Vietnam daughter trying to make her way in America while dealing with her immigrant parents.  But it could be ANY first-generation American dealing with immigrant parents (or grand-parents)...Apple gets the nuances, but also captures the larger human experience that all first-gen folks go through.  In Stabbing an Elephant, a new senior Rabbi faces his first true political test -- how to deal with a powerful board member and a 4-year old child.  In the space of a couple of short paragraphs, Apple is able to demonstrate why the old Rabbi was beloved, how elastic Judaism can be, and how the personal and professional can become so incredibly tied together.  I am also sure that any person well versed in the clergy/congregation relationship will find humor and truth in the story.  In the Jew of Home Depot, it really does help to be Jewish, but the essence still rings through.  What happens when New York Lubuvitcher Orthodoxy meets Texas small town?  What happens when teenagers, no matter how sheltered, discover a new and different world.  What happens when desires are thwarted?  Apple gives a look inside, a glimpse of the way things are and they way things could be -- both for the better and for the worse.  In Sized Up, Apple ponders the fate of a man whose middle-aged crisis creates an inescapable desire for a child ("yet at 46, and not in love, he wanted a child").  When one amour, an attractive 40 year-old 6 confesses her horror at the idea of a pregnancy that would destroy her life-long size 6 and the another, a 30 year-old flight attendant insists that it is more important that she can always walk down the aisle of the plane with no problem, our protagonist becomes fixated on larger women.  Apple makes it believable, real, and terrific.

In my favorite story, Proton Decay, a middle-aged, very successful, never married Cleveland business man (3 pharmacies and a package store) falls for, then schemes to meet, a scientist who spends months under water in an abandoned salt mine looking for evidence of ....well, you get the point.  After seeing the article in the newspaper and the segment on 60 minutes, he is in love.  Max Apple makes it an interesting, engaging, and all together like-it-so-much-you-will-read-it-again story.

The art of the short story is nowhere near dead.  Max Apple alone ensures that it stays that way.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Let's cut to the chase quickly here.  I hated this book.  Not dislike, not did not care for, not indifferent or ambivalent or so-so or take it or leave it.  Hated it.  Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2007 and was one of the New York Times Best Books of 2007.  With all due respect, they could not be more wrong.

First, it is verbose and overlong - 614 pages that might (just might) have been a decent enough novel if cut roughly in half.  Second, for all of its descriptions, prose, and philosophy, only a very few of the many characters really are developed enough for the reader to really understand.  The characters that do stand out tend to be the ones making the shorter appearances (notably, Bill and James Houston's mother).  Third, you have read or seen all of this before in different places, and it was better the first time.  The insanity of war (Catch-22), the surreal nature of Vietnam (Apocalypse Now), how the government misrepresented the war (Bright, Shining Lie and The Best and The Brightest), the absurdity of it all (Going After Cacciato), what war can do to a individual survivor (Paco's Story and Close Quarters) and the 20/20 hindsight of what really happens to the "gung-ho" guys (Bright Shining Lie again) and many, many others.  Nothing in Tree of Smoke struck me as good as the same/similar character or situation I read/saw previously.

Finally,  this book was pitched as showing us the "moral and spiritual extremes of the Vietnam War" and for all of the clamor, really shows neither.  I could not find much spiritual about the book, let alone an extreme.  As far as the moral lessons, Tree of Smoke offers nothing new and the rehash of the old is mildly entertaining at its best and tedious most of the time.

I would not make the effort on this one.