Jackrabbit Smile & Edge of Dark Water by Joe Lansdale

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub March 27th 2018 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316311588, Series: Hap and Leonard #12

The Hal & Leonard series is full up with crazy male bravado and vulnerability, pressing hard on our moral, sexual, and racial understanding until we squeeze out a guffaw and decide to fall for these guys sitting on our faces. These two take on challenges others would let fall into a fast-flowing river, and now that the series has become a regular gig on Sundance Channel as an Original Series, starring America’s own brilliant, tough-seeming, and comedic Michael Kenneth Williams and British star James Purefoy, hopefully Joe Lansdale will get more airtime .

Lansdale barrels ahead riding roughshod over anyone who hasn’t updated their hard drive with new information about the lives of gays, trans, and people of color. No more excuses will be made for those faltering on the road to total acceptance of these folks living in America. Lansdale doesn’t make any bones about it, just assumes the bad guys are the unreformed who ‘haven’t quite gotten there yet.’ There is damage being done daily to the psyches of ordinary folk with extraordinary skills who have to put up with crippling prejudice.

This fast-paced addition to the series addresses white supremacy head on: WHITE IS RIGHT is emblazoned on the T-shirt of a young man seeking the investigative services of Hap & Leonard, not knowing Leonard can be rattlesnake mean to those who disparage him for his color...or any old thing he might take it in his mind to do. This is the book #12 in the series so Lansdale doesn’t spend much time explaining the two main characters. The chapters are short and speedy, racing to a gruesome dénouement that features a hog farm, some mean twins, and a jackrabbit smile.

This is the kind of book one can read in a day, relaxedly, since it is mainly composed of dialogue and a few hard whacks of a rifle butt. But it will put you in a good mood since the bad guys get theirs and the good guys, well, they may not ever get paid, but think of what they’re doing for the planet! I ❤️ Joe Lansdale.

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Hardcover, 292 pgs, Pub Mar 27th 2012 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316188432

Is there a more prolific writer of Westerns than Joe Lansdale? Endlessly inventive, Lansdale has both a series featuring Hap & Leonard, and a slew of standalones in which he shares the way even good people can get themselves in a bad way in a world with evil in it.

In this standalone novel, published in 2012 by Mulholland Books, 16-year-old Sue Ellen is narrating. She lives in a small southern town and has two friends her age: a white gay boy named Terry who is reluctant to let anyone know his inclinations, and Jinx, a black girl friend since childhood. Lansdale is so natural in his use of skin color that he can teach us things we never knew we needed to know.

Sue Ellen, Terry, and Jinx discover the town’s beauty, May Lynn, killed and submerged in the river, tied by the ankle with wire attached to a sewing machine. None of the grown men in the town seem to want to pursue the matter, but merely shove the body in a casket and cover up the evidence. We get a bad feeling, but mostly we sense any sixteen-year-olds ought to pack up & leave that place, so when the kids decide that’s what they’re going to do, we’re onboard.

They’re floating, by the way, on a wooden raft, and along the way they pick up more than one who decides to go with them. Seems like practically everyone who knows their plans—to go to Hollywood—wants to go with them, if not the whole way, at least far enough to get out of town. There’s a posse of folks, more than one, following behind, looking for them, so it gets hectic and dangerous and the hangers-on fall off, one by one.

Lansdale always seems to get the tone right, however, and when there is a chance for evil to thrive he makes us question whether or not that’s the way we want things to play out. After all this is kind of a crime novel, kind of a police procedural, kind of a mystery, but it’s got heart…more heart than we’ve come to expect of the genre. I like the way people think and make choices that seem fair and right and good.

Lansdale himself is really kind of a standalone guy. As far as I know there isn’t anyone else doing this kind of crossover writing with lessons on race, human nature, and on right and wrong. It is never sappy, often funny, and always deeply thoughtful. He is not religious: “I got misery enough in my life without adding religion to it,” says a character in one of his later novels. The language he uses is country, and can be extremely descriptive, if not entirely proper: “Expectations is a little like fat birds—it’s better to kill them in case they flew away” or “certain feelings rose to the surface like dead carp.”

The Hap & Leonard series has been made into a TV series starring Michael Kenneth Williams and James Purefoy. It is a rich stew of southern storytelling, darkened by reality but leavened with laughter. I don’t think I need to state how difficult it is to create new characters, new language, and new situations every year (sometimes more than once a year? is it possible?) and hit the bell each time. I’m a fan.



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Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

Audible Audio, Unabridged, 12 hrs 5 min, Pub May 30th 2017 by Hachette Audio ASIN B06ZZPN9Z7

It had never occurred to me that reading the memoirs of a sitting senator could be an interesting and informative way to spend time. Congress has infuriated me for awhile now. Before I became laser-focused on politics in Washington, listening to the “can’t manage it” complaints from Democrats really burned me up, so the thought of giving a Congressperson more time to blather at me was unappealing.

Since I have been paying attention, however, I can see lots of areas where “can’t manage it” complaints are perfectly in order, leaving me free to be angry with the GOP and their many allied organizations, e.g., far right, libertarians, religious right, etc. Franken points out many ways the best laid plans go awry, and suggests those who are tempted to complain about politics try it themselves. Not a bad idea. It may be time we send our best to Washington to try to make some headway.

So why does sitting-Senator Franken write a book now? He began it in 2015, shortly after he won his Minnesota seat by a comfortable margin for another 6-year term. He points out that Congresspeople do not make a large salary, but he’d better not say that too loudly in this climate where the enormous wage differentials between different types of work are an enduring and growing source of confusion, contention, and anger.

A congressperson doesn’t make as much as a Hollywood celebrity, no. So? He has trouble living on his Senate salary? Anyway, he may have written the book because he can, because it is a something he is good at, and because his books are bestsellers, bringing in real income. I doubt it will allay the need for more fundraising, but it would be nice if it did. It may simply mean campaign funds do not become a temptation.

But I think he also wrote it also to stir the pot and make sure we've heard the message that we need to work hard on our side to become involved and not allow the current administration to go beyond 2018. He's doing what he can to keep our spirits up. As Bernie says, now is not the time to throw our hands up in despair and resignation.

Franken spent most of thirty years trying to be funny and after he became a senator, he had to cap the well so that he’d be taken seriously. After his re-election Franken thought he’d earned the right to be funny again in public, and the truth is, we yearn to find something funny about Washington. We know it is absurd. We want to hear a professional’s take.

It seems effortless for Franken to be funny, so used he is to drilling down to the absurdity in everyday happenings in Washington, to make jokes about the ridiculous posturing and outright lies, to recognize his fellow performers in the Senate as a kind of troupe, some of whom are easier to work with than others. And it is a kind of a relief to look at these politicians as humans, with human foibles.

I admit I was surprised to hear his stories about Orrin Hatch’s credentials writing country songs, or Chuck Grassley’s apparent willingness to work across the isle with a fellow midwesterner. We’d always heard about the startling collegiality among a group who by day fights rancorously in public, though in recent years, with congressional incumbents going back to their districts on Thursdays and returning Monday afternoons, members of Congress have little opportunity to meet casually.

Everywhere I turn I see Franken promoting this book, so I’m sure everyone has some idea what is in the book itself. I was more interested than I thought I would be to hear how it is to campaign every day and every night, to win an election, to suffer through a recount and a challenge, to find co-sponsors for bills, to sit on committees, to fundraise constantly, to answer to constituents, etc. It does sound as though they are pretty busy, and Franken tells us the best way to help, rather than hinder, their efforts to conclude legislation that makes an impact. Calling one’s representatives does help, it appears, useless as it seems at the time.

Anyway, this is not a struggle to listen to—Franken himself reads the audio—and it made me laugh aloud in places. I learned a lot, and find myself interested to look at his earlier work, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right. Franken is such natural. Let’s hope he doesn’t fall for the really ridiculous claim that Minnesotans are going to gain a lot of long-term well-paying jobs if the Keystone Pipeline from Canada’s tar sands goes through. It would make me happy if he could convince his people that pipeline is not going to save them and it will probably ruin the rest of us.

I know senators represent their states, but those states are in a nation. I’d be happy to carve out a Minnesota-shaped space (or an Idaho-, Florida-, etc. -shaped spaces) if they think their needs more important than those of a nation. There is a balance between needs, and this is another thing getting out of kilter in Washington these days.

This is an excerpt from the audio:




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The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

Paperback, 340 pgs, Pub Oct 14th 2014 by Mulholland Books (first published 2013),ISBN13: 9780316188449

Joe Lansdale is not an old man and yet he has published at least 45 novels and 30 short story collections, sometimes two or three books a year (!), as in 2012, according to Wikipedia. Some of these may be reprints of old favorites because it is difficult to imagine someone publishing quality fiction at that rate. But quality fiction is what I would call this 2013 novel. A young boy, his sister, and his grandad traveling north to Kansas from East Texas in the early part of the twentieth century find themselves at the mercy of a band of marauding cut-throats.

In what may be a signature trait of this author, a reader enjoys the company of what we call 'unusual characters' who represent the kind of resilience and humanity once assigned to heroes in Greek mythology. Race is an abiding subject of discussion in Lansdale’s novels and nearly every novel has at least one vital character who speaks out eloquently on race relations in America.

Eustace is a principled black man of nearly unequaled trustworthiness and equanimity—except when he drinks: then he cannot be trusted by man nor beast. This novel also ruminates on whoredom (Jimmie Sue) and the inequities of perception that result from other physical differences, like dwarfism (Shorty). There is a wild hog, too, who is accepted for what he is and how he is. Hog is a valued member of a select community.

“To some extent I find sin like coffee. When I was young and had my first taste of it I found it bitter and nasty, but later on I learned to like it by putting a little milk in it, and then I learned to like it black. Sin is like that. You sweeten it a little with lies and then you get so you can take it straight.”

Despite the graphic sense of brutality that reigned in the West during the period depicted in this novel, the most enduring sentiment in Lansdale’s novel is that of humor: the author counters each act of senseless brutality by heaping abuse on the perpetrator through description or through the mouths of other characters.

Some characters muse on the nature of man and the “why” of extreme violence. There is no answer to the “why,” Lansdale concludes. It makes no sense no how. Good may triumph over evil, but it ain’t always a sure thing. One has to puzzle out for oneself a sense of what is good and hold onto one’s own values to make the world into what we wish to see.

"Fatty was, in his own way, as dangerous as any Comanche. He was just mean as a snake for no other reason than it pleased him; all those men who had been with were like that, and I wondered then what made a man that way. I didn’t come up with any answers."

I listened to the Hachette Audio production of this novel, beautifully narrated by Will Collier, and highly recommend this method of consumption. Collier makes each individual unique, and Shorty’s accent and manner of speaking elevates his thinking to philosophy. One becomes so attached to the characters in this book we forgive them most of their more egregious transgressions and miss them when we do not see them for a couple of pages. I was terrified Eustace 'bought the farm' in the last shoot-out, and waited anxiously for word of him, that drunken cuss.

He did get the farm, after all, where he struck oil just as autos were becoming the norm.

There are few folks who can pull off a western these days, and the beauty of Lansdale’s writing is that he doesn’t idealize the turn-of-the-twentieth-century life in the west. It was a lawless, racist, sexist place where one was often at the mercy of men stronger and crueler. But when good people band together, they can often accomplish much, and create the kind of environment in which they want to live. It means a great deal to me that Lansdale reflects us back at ourselves, and shows us possible paths out of the thicket.

Lansdale’s books have spawned an industry: several movies and TV series, as well as graphic novels, have come out of his stories. A new publishing company, Pandi Press, is involved in republishing earlier Lansdale work now out of print. Among the books Lansdale is best known for are the Hap and Leonard series of nine books, featuring a white blue collar war protestor and a gay black Vietnam vet. The Sundance Channel premiered a series based on these books and find them if you can: the series, the actors (e.g., James Purefoy, Michael Kenneth Williams, Evan Gamble), and the writing are all terrific.

Lansdale's stand-alone novel called The Bottoms has received the most critical praise to date, and is currently in film production. Lansdale also writes horror and has a cult following in this genre. Enjoy this author in any of your favorite genres, but don’t miss him.




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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

Ferris, as you might be able to tell from the title, is all about religion in this novel. His main character, Paul C. O’Rourke, is a dentist—a dentist with a taste for the absurd. He is funny, especially when he is trying not to be. His practice in New York City keeps him crazy busy, so he allows himself only a few indulgences. He is a Red Sox fan in New York, which means he must watch every game (except the 6th inning), taping them to watch later if he has something else on his schedule. The ritual is one which gives structure, and a kind of meaning to his life. He wants something. He still has desire of a sort.

O’Rourke tries to be normal, just so that he can get along with other folks, but he is like a space bot acting human: it’s all wrong. O’Rourke is having a crisis. He doesn’t get the point “of it all,” and he especially doesn’t see God acting in the world. So when a patient tells him he is part of a long-lost race of non-believers in God (any god), O’Rourke wonders if perhaps it isn’t just possible: To be genetically indisposed to believe in God.

O’Rourke wants something to be everything: absorbing, challenging, meaningful. His girlfriends had close family ties, and O’Rourke found that to be meaningful for awhile: he wanted to be a part of their families as much as he was interested in the women themselves. But their religious affiliations always proved a barrier. O’Rourke didn’t believe in God.

One night O’Rourke wakes in the middle of the night and the city outside his window is completely quiet. Not a person could be seen, though earlier the streets were filled with people.

"I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose…No one had called or emailed or texted. I would do practically anything, I thought, to have them back—I mean the strollers and lovers of a few hours earlier, so that I might have another chance to stroll alongside them…and, after awhile, to leave the Promenade, off to bed for a good night’s sleep—or to that one vital thing among the city’s offerings that night, that one unmissable thing that makes staying up all night a treasure and not a terror—and then to rise again at a decent hour—to walk the Promenade in the light of a new morning…oh, come back you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts, the day is hard enough. Don’t leave me alone with the night…There was the hum of the river, and the last desultory traffic of the night washing by on the expressway below. I can only suggest the effect it had one me, that is the feeling that my life, and the city’s, and the world’s every carefree, winsome hour, were perfectly without meaning."

In the final pages of the novel, O’Rourke finds himself understanding a little of how others manage to get through their days. If it doesn’t hurt, there is no reason to worry about it. "What’s the point of dwelling on all the shit and the misery?" He’d like to do as others do, but one senses his melancholy. He is lonely and there is no God.

Finally, O’Rourke concludes that there is no certainty, no freedom from doubt, “there is only will.” We may retain the doubt, but we must still act, and in the acting, we may have enough to sustain us spiritually. It makes sense to me what Ferris says about religions: that they are less concerned about God than they are about the religion itself. And all religions have this problem. They can sometimes even lose sight of morality itself, a failing no involved God should permit.

O’Rourke was free to change his affiliation from the Red Sox to the Chicago Cubs, and take a swing with a cricket bat at a ball that came in fast and low one day in Kathmandu because while he still had doubt, he also had hope. The pitcher was his patient, a patient with perfect teeth.

I had to work hard on this book for many days before I caught glimmers of Ferris' meaning. I don’t think it is because I listened to it rather than read it. The listening helped because the reader, Campbell Scott, was drier and funnier than the voice I had in my head as I read, but it is true I couldn’t mark the sections that wove the religious quest together. They got buried under the avalanche of extraneous associations the story of the dentist practice provoked.

There is nothing wrong with a little existential angst, especially if it makes one doubt and not be an arrogant prick. But Ferris is right. It doesn’t get one anywhere and itself has no meaning. One can only do what needs to be done and go on with it. Unless, of course, you don’t. Go on with it, I mean. That's the other option.


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A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson returns to her theme of “What If” in this companion volume to Life After Life in which we met Ursula Todd and many possible iterations of her life. Ursula’s brother Teddy and his family take center stage in this novel and the generation gap is caught beautifully as Atkinson articulates the view from Ted and that of his only daughter, Viola. Viola’s son and daughter, Sunny and Bertie, exhibit an equal distance from understanding their own mother’s life choices and personality.

Kate Atkinson adds an Author’s Note at the end of this story which tells us much of what she was communicating in this novel. “It is about fiction,” she tells us. “We must imagine what we cannot know.” Atkinson chose to look at the Second World War, and makes her central character an RAF airman. Teddy, we wonder at the end, does he even exist? That’s the thing about fiction. All that attention, care, and love lavished, and in the end, they are only characters on paper. But Atkinson caught enough truth in her writing that we know these characters, Ted, Viola, Sunny, are real enough within each of us.

What I like best about Atkinson’s work is her sense of humor about the tragedies of human life. She is a wonderful storyteller on the order of a Bruegel painting: large canvas, detailed figures not all doing the good and great thing. She gives us history, and we see the now, but we also get potential for the future. She does not leave us feeling that the thoughtful or erudite must be gloomy or humorless. With this two-book fiction, she gives us enough distance to see possible outcomes of decisions made now, and we always have the sense that we can change the outcomes if we don’t like where we’re headed. Her characters are complex enough to exhibit the petty and the grand. Once again, we always have a sense of possibility: character is malleable! We can change.

Atkinson tells us that this novel is “about fiction…and the Fall of Man from grace.” She indicates many references in the novel to Utopia, the Garden, the Way and then the falling, rising pattern of the characters, birds, planes correspond to what she is trying to convey. War is a fall from grace. And no matter how we frame the argument, innocents become victims. Atkinson reiterates that she is not a polemicist so wants her characters instead to express doubt and insecurity about the notion of the efficacy of war.

The thing about Atkinson’s fiction is that it is capacious enough to include the traditions of the past with the irresistible freshness and piquancy and social criticism of now. She does a marvelous job of telling a rip-snorting story at the same time she is urging caution. She was always a wonderful writer of fiction. She is in the process of becoming a great one.

A word about the audio production of this title: Hachette Audio did a brilliant job of producing this audio, read with terrific understanding by Alex Jennings. It is highly recommended. However, if one is familiar with Kate Atkinson's work, one will note that Atkinson has a tendency to move easily and quickly forward and back in time and between outlooks of various characters. One shift that was particularly difficult for me to catch in the audio was the story of Augustus. At the end, when I realized the importance of Augustus, I had to admit I didn't understand where he fit in. One glance at the paper copy set things straight for me since Augustus' story is set in different type in paper.

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I recently listened to the NYTimes podcast of reviewer Tom Perrotta and Ruth Franklin talking about this book and I was struck by their insight that this book, in contrast to Life After Life, is about people who don't change very much at all: Viola, especially. Even though we know now that we can rewrite our lives, even our history, Viola holds on to old resentments and punishes herself and her family. Sunny seems to have taken the lessons of the earlier possibilities to heart, however.


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Guilt by Degrees by Marcia Clark

I see all the rave reviews for this title and I credit Clark for being able to create creditable characters in a thoroughly authentic law environment. That is the thing Clark does best: how does a special prosecutor's office sound, what do people actually do, and how do crimes actually get prosecuted successfully? What are the snags? I wouldn’t, however, call it “gritty.”

Clark is a rare creature, and so is her creation, Rachel Knight. Knight manages to get up (late) every day in her suite at fancy L.A. hotel where she lives with its closets of designer outfits that will hide a Glock. Knight retains close friends who can also help her with cases, keeps a sexy man-friend on a short leash, and maintains her figure by fantasizing about food more than she eats it. Much of the pleasure of the book is finding out what she will be eating or drinking, where, and with whom, and hearing her intimate chit-chat with friends. She’s clever, but not so much so that we feel jealous of her. Mostly we feel jealous of her friends, who get so much of her attention. We’d like to be them, knowing we could never be Knight herself. She’s an original.

But why then did I feel as though this was a slight downslide from her first in the series? Knight herself mentions that her heart bleeds for the poor victims of crimes that she prosecutes, but she doesn’t show it. In her job, I might be worse after a couple of years, but one wants to believe the best of those that prosecute serious crimes and those that make lots of (taxpayer) money. One doesn’t want to think they are, after all, lushes with the shells of success.

But this is a series, after all, and there is always variation in the mix. Let’s say this: Clark seems exceptional at a number of things, one of which is writing bestsellers. I wish her the best.

A word about January LaVoy's reading of the novel: LaVoy gets full points for sounding feminine and enthusiastic and interested all the time. She has a voice that keeps its cool no matter what the circumstance. She can be talking about designer clothes or a gruesome autopsy. It's all cool.

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