Bring Up the Bodies

After dawdling my way to finally reading Hilary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall, I didn’t want to hold off nearly so long before tackling its sequel—book two in what I think is meant to be a trilogy—Bring Up the Bodies. 

In an entirely non-subject-related way, this kind of reminded me of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve  in its middle-book-ish-ness: told more expansively, and with more trust of the readers, than the first; but, once given that trust, perhaps taking it a little too much for granted in terms of not feeling pressured to wrap up plot elements now that you know your audience will stick with you.

If Wolf Hall was about the rise of Anne Boleyn, Bring Up the Bodies is all about the cruelty and inevitability of her fall, and with a certain amount of grim glee in the engineering. We’d seen Cromwell as ambitious and mercenary and almost amoral in the pursuit of pragmatism, but now we also see his long game, his ability to spin out a revenge plot over years. (And his pettiness—the event for which he’s seeking revenge is a slight to pride, not actual physical or monetary damages.) We also start to see that the bread crumbs strewn earlier add up to a trail, in the case of Jane Seymour, whom Cromwell sees as both a strategic move for himself and possibly advantageous for Henry as well.

This book is also much more strongly about the rise of capitalism, the creation of taxes and a financed state. It’s the very cusp of the modern—like Shakespeare. The trick of finding oneself in the interior monologue of a sixteenth-century courtier has somewhat worn off, though. I keep finding myself forgetting its historical moment.

I still have distinctly mixed feelings about Mantel’s use of the generic he as always referring to Cromwell; it’s a tic whose purpose I understand as a way to keep the focus in the first book, but it feels a little less elegantly handled here. However, I did find the occasional dip into what feels like a royal “we”—but is really a national and non-royal “we”—quite interesting, especially if it develops into a more nuanced voice in book three.

Glimpses of America: Gail Collins and Jeanne Marie Laskas

There’s a certain kind of nonfiction book that I’m often drawn to, narrative nonfiction that uses a colloquial narrative voice while still presenting sound, factually solid information engagingly. When done well, these books read like fast-paced fiction—but the problem of tone often plagues them. It’s hard to balance while trying to write energetic, well-crafted prose but avoid being falsely folksy or glibly stylized; it’s hard to create a genuine voice that still keeps your facts authoritative and your presentation clear; it’s hard to make the right assumptions about what your audience does and does not know, to neither talk down to them nor confuse them.

In As Texas Goes, editorial columnist Gail Collins wants, I think, to be writing in the mode of the late Molly Ivins: blisteringly funny fury. But Collins doesn’t feel to me to quite have the tone down—nor, certainly, Ivins’s genuine love of Texas that went hand in hand with her frequent rage at its political climate. Despite attempts at even-handedness, Collins can’t resist the satirical aside, or a rhetorical strategy of feigned bafflement even when it’s completely obvious that she wants to scream at the people of Texas for falling for this malarkey. The book is a useful overview of exactly how and why Texas has become so much of a model on the national stage, and why that might be a truly terrible idea. But I think it might be more effective if Collins trusted the reader a little more to see what’s outrageous without constant neon signposts picking out (often over and over again) the absurdities chronicled.

I know Jeanne Marie Laskas primarily through her memoirs (two of which I worked on), which I found charming and sweet. And in her new nonfiction book, Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work, some of the qualities of the memoirist add appeal: her friendliness, her genuine positivity toward what she’s writing about, her gung-ho willingness to try new things and grapple with her own expectations and prejudices. But while this book is engaging and Laskas does, I think, do credit to all the people she depicts, the tone is rife with a kind of faux (or perhaps real) naivete. As with Collins, it feels like mistrust, or mischaracterization, of the audience: the book casually, and unthinkingly, presumes that none of the “kind” of people who are its subjects (from gun owners to cheerleaders, from ranchers to coal miners), or even people who come from the kind of communities where most of the subjects live, would read such a book, or even examine and discuss their own lives amongst themselves.

What Rhymes with America

One of the best papers I wrote in graduate school, and certainly one of my favorite papers to write, was on Macbeth, and specifically on the way Shakespeare treats time in all its permutations in that play: the historical past, the presaged future, the contentious present. The way verb tenses twist and twine, the way words recur and echo, the way the historical material at the play’s base is handled: all, to me, speak of a preoccupation with how we travel through time, how we deal with our past and go forward into our future.

So when I saw What Rhymes with America, I fixated, perhaps unhelpfully, on its use of Macbeth, and its references throughout to that play. Most of this did not make its way into my formal review (which you can find here), but I’ve kept thinking about it for the past couple of days, and here are some additional thoughts.

Both are about how we grapple with time: how we imagine and achieve a future that seems discontinuous from and noncontiguous with our past. For Macbeth, the witches have predicted a future for him that’s better than he could ever have imagined, and the warnings baked in to those predictions (all the Birnam Wood stuff, for example) seem nonsensical, and therefore easy to discount. For the characters in What Rhymes with America, though, no deus ex machina in the form of a witch is going to show up and point them to a brighter future. They desperately want the failures of their past to give way to something more. They want to believe there’s something they’re destined for— Lydia as a writer, Sheryl as an actor—or something they can go back to; all Hank wants, for example, is his old life just as it used to be, with Gina and Marlene and a job as an economist. Yet they’re so unable to control the variables to make things proceed according to their desires (whereas Macbeth got everything he ever wanted, in the worst possible way, and then lost it to the back end of those prophecies).

Just some musings. Read the review if you want to know more about the actual play.

The Creeper: a suspension-of-disbelief conundrum

I recently learned that Tania Carver, the appropriately named author of two truly grisly recent police procedurals, The Surrogate and The Creeper, is actually the pseudonym of the husband-wife writing team of Martyn and Linda Waites (Martyn also writes crime novels under his own name). This alter ego was called into being when Martyn Waites’s editor noted that the UK was lacking a “high-concept female thriller writer” in the vein of Karin Slaughter (who’s also incredibly appropriately named, though in Slaughter’s case I believe it’s genuinely her name). Martyn volunteered to become one, then enlisted his wife when the first novel turned out to need a rather intimate perspective on pregnancy.

So there is something a little self-consciously calculated about the way this author, and these novels, came to be, which may be contributing to the suspension-of-disbelief issue I’m having with the series.

Police procedurals have kind of an opposite version of this problem than what plagues from the amateur detective novel. In the amateur-sleuth setting, one’s mind begins to boggle that anyone continues to live in the small towns filled with annual gruesome murders that fill hundreds of cozy novels yearly. (I’ve recently been noticing this in C. C. Benison’s “Father Christmas” series, about a minister in a rural English village; the books are charming and well-constructed, but I don’t quite see how the series, titled after the verses in “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” can possibly get all the way down to the partridge in the pear tree with a single villager left alive.)

But of course, the level of violence and mayhem isn’t the difficulty in police-based series (though it must be said that if the world had a tiny fraction of the number of serial killers in an average year’s output of crime fiction, we’d all be cowering in our basements in fear). When I start to get suspicious is when every case starts to have a deep personal connection to the police officers. It’s one thing to do that in a series opener (as Carver did with The Surrogate, which hits very close to home on both personal and professional levels for the series hero, Phil Brennan); that sets the stage for a motivation level that’s above and beyond what’s required by the job. But just as your average small town would shortly run out of small-town criminals, it seems like even a fairly large city would have a limited supply of mad killers whose deeply particular personal animosities bring them into conflict with members of the police force and/or their families.

I know, it’s good to care about the victims in a crime novel, but The Creeper is only the second book in a series and it’s already starting to feel a little strained. I’ll give it one more shot, but if book three plays out the same way, I’ll probably leave the next Carver on the shelf.

Mamet at his Mamet-iest

Although I’d read the play many times, I’d somehow made it this far seeing only the film version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Which is quintessential Mamet, so it felt like a thing worth doing even though I wasn’t sure how well it would stand up in 2012.

And I have to say, based on the film and, well, a lifetime of Al Pacino, I was a little worried about how well Pacino would transition from the flashy high-flying role to the more Willy-Loman-esque part of the down-on-his-luck elder statesman. Fortunately, that ended up not being a major issue, but the play, and the production, were poised between outdated curiosity and curiously relevant.

More thoughts in my full review, here.

Killer twists (literally): new books by Val McDermid and Joy Castro

One of these, I found a little frustrating as it went, but the cleverly constructed shocker of an ending made up for it, and the other hit me in the opposite way: going along swimmingly, full of atmosphere and local color, then twisting itself into a knot of jaw-dropping improbability.

Val McDermid‘s The Vanishing Point falls into category one. McDermid’s prose can be a little clunky, but usually her plotting is taut, but in this case, I was getting more than a little impatient with the mechanics as I went along. Far too many chapters ended with a portentous variation on “if only I had known what was about to transpire.” The narrative kept fixating on the stalkerish/abusive ex-boyfriend of one of the central characters, dropping heavy hints about his bad-guy nature hundreds of pages after the reader had caught on that he was far from Mr. Nice Guy. And the book seemed fixated on the tiniest, minutest details of relationships among its main players. But much of that turned out to be…what’s the opposite of a red herring? Things that seemed extraneous but were actually pointing the way to the final reveal. I never saw that coming, and I really should have.

For 95 percent of the way, Hell or High Water, Joy Castro‘s debut novel (she’s written two memoirs as well) was well above average in terms of character and, especially, setting and ambience—post-Katrina, non-white New Orleans, with a finely calibrated sensitivity toward that particular environment’s racial and class politics. The heroine, Nola, is obviously working through some substantive damage, but in ways that she (mostly) accounts for and acknowledges; it’s clear there’s a little more going on than she’s telling us, and clear that she has buttons being pushed by investigating a feature on registered sex offenders, but while that trail of bread crumbs is clearly being laid, it’s not done in a heavy-handed manner. The bulk of the plotting, on the other hand, feels a little desultory: while researching this feature, Nola is also doing a private investigation into the disappearance and ultimate murder of a tourist au pair. All these threads wrap up in the book’s final chapters in a shocker of an ending. It feels manipulative: in both the way Castro has withheld crucial information (or, precisely, the way Castro has had Nola withhold crucial information from her narration) and in the way the two seemingly completely unrelated crimes come together (though that’s Mystery Pet Peeve #12 for me, more generally).  Technically impressive, but also a little annoying.

Dead Accounts

There are a lot of ways to be disappointed in Theresa Rebeck’s Dead Accounts. If you were hoping to see Katie Holmes crash and burn in a leading Broadway role, for example, your schadenfreude will have to sit this one out, as she proves perfectly capable, outside of a little vocal strain, of holding her own with the rest of the strong cast (Norbert Leo Butz, Judy Greer, Josh Hamilton, and Jane Houdyshell). But, more generally, the play just isn’t all that good, nor is it bad or strange in a way that’s thought-provoking even if you end up not liking it. There’s nothing I can point to and say “This is the problem here”; there’s just not much to it.

Full review here.

 

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Yes, I am probably squarely in the idealized audience demographic for Robin Sloan‘s novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and yes, its basic premise could have been tailor-made for me: on the borderline between bibliophilia and technophilia, a fairy tale including a quest narrative about old books, yet with several of its key scenes set at the Google-plex.

It’s definitely somewhat in the Neal Stephenson vein, though Sloan is infinitely more concise: where Stephenson tends toward obsessive and polymorphic digressions into whatever shiny thing has most recently caught his eye, Sloan has in fact written what amounts to a highly compact modern-fantasy novel, streamlined, taut, and largely free of woolliness in its world-building. It’s a coming-of-age novel with a vaguely fantastical setting, yet fully suffused with the economic anxieties of this particular historical moment.

The thing that really grabbed me, though, is the way Sloan tackles (and again, with remarkable conciseness) the larger issue of the nature of print culture and how evolving technology affects that: our relationship to information (Old Knowledge vs the internet), eternal life, code-breaking. This question, by extension, looks at other kinds of aesthetic and cultural projects too, in the different levels of craft exercised by the different characters: Mat, who builds miniature worlds and creates material experiments in his home kitchen; Neel, who’s figured out how to digitally engineer the world’s most perfect computer-animated breasts; Clay, who seeks shared aesthetic and problem-solving experiences; Kat, who has unbounded faith in both the brute force and the finesse of technology.

There’s also an inquiry into naive and stubborn idealism of various sorts, whether that’s fetishizing the old or getting starry-eyed over the new.  There’s a lot going on inside this deceptively simple story (like, of course, a fairy tale—and you’ve even got a quest motif happening here, as well as the callbacks to the fantasy epics of our own childhoods). Its surface pleasures are charming, but the book is also thoughtful and philosophical, and very tidily executed, with an elegant restraint unusual in this sort of novel.   

It may be time for me to take a break from behavioral economics books…

…because I think I’m at the point where I can quote word-for-word from the conclusions of all the major current studies that go into the average one of these. Maybe a year or so from now, some new research will have been done, but right now, everything is starting to feel a bit recycled.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, for example: an elegant synthesis of an enormous amount of difficult information in an impressive amount of detail.  It’s just that I knew a lot of it already, from reading many, many other books building on Kahneman’s work and cross-referencing him frequently. The pleasures I found here were in the smallest details, like seeing the actual math behind Bayes’ theorem (not that I could explain it now, mind you, but, much like my experiences with reading Stephen Hawking, for a few brief, shining hours, it all made perfect sense). I also enjoyed the focus on the role of luck, and the idea that in fact the idea of regression to the mean is essentially about luck, but I’m sure the book felt a lot more revolutionary to readers who hadn’t been down the path before.

Where Kahneman did an elegant overview, Dan Ariely‘s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty takes a zoom lens to one of the topics that’s covered almost as an aside in a lot of behavioral economics books: lying and cheating, and how we rationalize such behaviors to ourselves. Which, at least in this book’s opinion, basically boil down to various kinds of priming effects and contexts—though I will note that this did feel a little oversimplified, more so than in a lot of these book. Again, definitely interesting in the small details—I was especially intrigued by the research into the way one kind of act of dishonesty, like carrying a counterfeit Prada bag, can spread “contagiously” to one’s overall willingness to cheat in other circumstances—but none of it felt ground-breaking anymore either. To this reader, who freely admits she may be in a bit of a rut, anyway.

Cliff Walk: visiting old haunts

I’m a sucker for mysteries with a lot of local color, at least when that color overlaps with places and subjects of my own acquaintance. Give me anything set backstage in either a theater or a college English department, for instance, and I’m a happy camper. For geographical reminiscing, though, New York settings don’t always do the trick—there’s just too many of them, for one thing, and I’m familiar enough that I spend more time nit-picking subway routes than I do enjoying guest appearances by my favorite blocks. So when I’m craving a stroll down fictional memory lane, I tend to like places I’m pretty familiar with but not currently residing: the Boston suburbs, Philadelphia, certain sections of London, Edinburgh, and Providence, Rhode Island.  And after a trip a couple of years ago, I seem to have added Brighton, England, to the list (which is well-timed, as there are currently a couple of pretty good series running there, but I digress).

I lived in Rhode Island for some time, but I hadn’t been back in over ten years before making a trip up that way early this fall, visiting both Newport and my old neighborhood in Providence.  So Bruce DeSilva’s Cliff Walk, his second mystery featuring reporter Liam Mulligan with the state of Rhode Island itself as the most important secondary character, was very well-timed. (I think, in fact, I took a photo from the exact spot on Newport’s Cliff Walk where the titular murder occurs).

But this is also a tighter and more thoughtful book than the series opener, Rogue Island, with genuine insight into the slow whittling away of the local newspaper business, and into the specific ways corruption and violence work in a uniquely small state, one that’s changed enormously in certain ways over the past decade or so, and in other ways, not at all. I particularly like the way DeSilva makes plot out of the fact that, in a tiny place, not only is it equally likely that old friends will have grown up to be, say, state’s attorneys and/or pimps, but that you’ll keep tripping over the same sources if you’re doing crime reporting, and your relationship with them will necessarily oscillate between adversarial and collegial.

Also, I liked the thwarted romance here better than the semi-successful but doomed one in the previous book. I don’t know how long DeSilva can keep spinning out the decline and fall of the Providence Dispatch, but I’ll keep reading.