A Serpent's Tooth by Craig Johnson

I love this series and it never lets me down. And it didn't this time, either, though I did sense a change in tone. Johnson has a particular sense of humor that seems casual and learned at the same time. It is the result of thoughtful living, with the kind of distance that only long life can bestow. The same jokes or asides on the lips of a younger person would seem impertinent or studied, but somehow Johnson’s observations bring to mind that old cowboy hat Longmire uses--capacious enough to keep off a cold rain, but bruised and ratty with time and has seen better days.

Our old man sheriff has changed a bit--more hardbitten, furious, and full of vengeance. He is less composed and sure of himself and knows perhaps too much of the range of human cruelty. As a result, he is jumpy when it comes to criminal acts, and doesn’t always display that generous and reassuring control that I so appreciate in a law enforcement officer. He needs to be reminded to consider before exacting revenge for a loathsome act of arson.

Longmire references his mountain trip a few stories back in the series—the one where he very nearly met his maker—as a reason for his declining robustness and lack of patience when it comes to chasing suspects. He still takes extraordinary risks in his professional life: witness the fire rescue and facing the man who can throw a stiletto switchblade with uncanny accuracy. It is a little curious then, that Longmire doesn’t display that same risk-taking behavior in his personal life and grab hold of the opportunity that his beautiful and beloved deputy presents. He should jump her bones, marry her immediately, lock in that elusive chance for romantic happiness. At his age he should know how rare and fleeting a thing it is to find love, and how easily it slips away.


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The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes

I can’t remember now where I heard about Declan Hughes, but he is the real McCoy…an Irish writer with a depth of knowledge about human decency and failure, crime and motivations. His canvas is local—there is a known-ya-a-long-time intimacy to Irish novels that are quite unlike anything coming out of America, and families pass on curses and debts and deep knowledge of their community. Before turning to crime novels, Hughes was a theatre director and playwright, so he has the goods (knowledge of how to use conversation, structure, tension) to make a novel work.

In this first of a series Hughes wrote before the great economic downturn—the implosion it was in Ireland--with its inflated housing market and ballooning wealth. Since 2007 we have seen many follow-on novels that tell us how the aftermath of the financial crisis played out in Ireland, e.g., Tana French Broken Harbor and Ian Rankin The Impossible Dead, but this comes before the end when the crazy changes in living standards made one feel wildly giddy, as though one were looking in a funhouse mirror. It is fascinating now to look back at that time and wonder how everyone really thought it would end, or if it would end.

The main character is Ed Loy, transplanted for years to sunny California, where he escaped for a while his Irish roots. Come back to bury his mother from whom he was estranged, he found himself seeking the fate of his father, who had disappeared without a trace many years before. Nothing is finished until we decide it is so, and Ed finds old friends and enemies just about where he left them years before.

The story may become a bit unwieldy in its convolutions by the end, but the skill is sufficient to make us curious to look for more of Declan Hughes, Irish son that he is.


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& Sons by David Gilbert

This novel had a neat premise. Gilbert imagined the upbringing and life of a famous reclusive author, A.N. Dyer, and his sons. The story is mostly told from the point of view of the son of the author’s close friend, Philip Topping, who alternately felt rage and admiration for the “otherness” of the family.

We are meant to draw parallels between J.D. Salinger and A.N. Dyer, though one knows there are few enough points of overlap. & Sons contains some pages from Dyer’s breakout novel, Ampersand , but beyond the fact that both are coming-of-age novels, Dyer’s work did not resemble Salinger’s in many particulars. I sensed a disturbing cruelty in Dyer’s work that I had no sense of in Salinger’s. And if Ampersand suffered from “emotional claustrophobia,” I am afraid I felt the same coming into the home stretch of & Sons.

Gilbert created some marvelous set pieces for this novel, mainly the book party, fore and aft. A movie actor meets one of Dyer’s sons, a recovering addict, and demands he find some cocaine. That son calls his brother, who manages to whip up something special (not coke) and insert himself into the evening’s festivities. It was a clever piece of imagination, though to my mind it was carried on a trifle long—the jokes got crude and cruel--lessening my fascination.

It is entirely normal to feel a little curious about a person who changes the way we view literature, and I admit to some curiosity at times for the life of Salinger. But I also have a certain sympathy for someone who knows himself/herself well enough to wish to limit the celebrity aspect of their lives. I hope he wasn’t as lonely as he seemed, or as lonely as Gilbert’s parallel figure, A.N. Dyer, seemed to be.


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Skinner by Charlie Huston

I thought I had read some other things by Charlie Huston, but now I don’t think I have. Huston’s American crime novels have a noir quality that is unlike anything I have seen before. To say his writing is clipped does not really encompass the extent of its abbreviation. It is thought fragments. One of his main characters, Jae, tries to make connections or linkages between ideas and information coming from widely disparate sources. Trying to understand his characters’ conversations is a little like that, too.

Skinner is current. It mentions the Tsarnaev brothers, for goodness’ sake. And it has lots of very alienated folks—unusual folks that are outside the mainstream. For that reason, it feels futuristic. These folks apply a great deal of cerebral muscle to take the technology we use every day to the next level.

However, meeting so many unusual people in one book made me feel a little alienated. I felt as though I were reading about comic book characters, which is another of Huston’s fields.

But let’s go to the heart of the mystery: I loved it. I loved the concept, the endgame, the central core of the story. It plays out beautifully, and mocks the gatekeepers of “security” in this age of terrorism. It has us rooting for the disenfranchised among us, and tells us to trust our overseers less and trust our own judgment more.

Part of the story features the slums of Mumbai, India and part is played out throughout Europe and in the cyberspace occupied by American security companies contracted to defend the United States. I can’t help thinking a very good companion book is a very serious and important book of sociology produced by Katherine Boo, called Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. In that book Boo shows us the [almost] limitless survival capacity of slum dwellers who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by innovating to live. Skinner carries the same theme.

In the end, I felt this was a very masculine voice talking to other masculine minds in a sort of video game mentality and graphic novel sort of jargon. His female character was aberrant, as were many of his male characters. They had a quality of unreality. For the reason that I could actually see in my mind’s eye the graphic depiction of his scenes, I found it interesting. It seemed less like literature than amusement, but that’s probably what he was aiming for.


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Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

“…a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you a photon…Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the universe is like a kind of symphony.” (Ruprecht, p. 152)

It’s been years since this book came out. It made such a big splash on its debut I feared it may be popular fiction of a type that doesn’t interest me. I waited a little, had a peek, retreated. A big book in the vernacular of adolescent boys: a wave of exhaustion overcame me. Gradually I began to notice that many people whose reviews I follow were finding it an exceptional read. I took another look. No. Still couldn’t ever seem to find the time to wade through the (what I am embarrassed to say I thought at the time) triviality of the thoughts of fourteen-year-olds.

Wrong.

The voice I had in my head as I read was inadequate to this opus. Out of frustration for my lack of understanding the significance of what others were enjoying, I bought the audio of this, performed with great brio, skill, and cognizance by Nicola Barber, Fred Berman, Clodagh Bowyer, Terry Donnelly, Sean Gormley, Khristine Hvam, John Keating, Lawrence Lowry, Graeme Malcolm, Paul Nugent, produced by Audible, Inc. Suddenly I experienced what I had been missing. This has to be one of the very best audiobook performances I have ever heard.

The book is a symphony in four parts, but in the voices of these performers, it is a four-part spoken opera. It is broken into three parts in print and in audio, but make no mistake: This is music. It is Murray’s attempt to reach those of us in alternate universes:

“There is a certain amount of evidence that music of various kinds is audible in the higher dimensions—“(Ruprecht, p. 590)

This is also a classic of literature, worthy of all the kudos heaped upon it, and many more besides. If I could place it next to another book of comparable stature, it would be Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s was slim and this is comparatively huge. But Murray makes his words count.

The four parts are named after video games. I believe Hopeland is an invention of the author, but Skippy finds details in the game seem to reflect his own challenges. The other game names may also be inventions, but there are real games out there with those names & the challenges sort of follow along with Skippy's. They may, however, have been created after, and as a result of the novel rather than having been referenced by Murray. Heartland (The Heartland has fallen under the rule of the ruthless tyrant Midan and his minions...). Ghostland (The blood elves applied the scorched earth policy to these woodlands...). Afterland (a traveling carnival of magical misfits in the afterlife).

Every review I have seen mentions its size as a stumbling block. Pity. It takes days, weeks even, to get to it all, but after having lived with the boys and teachers of Seabrook College for some time now, I am convinced this tragicomic masterpiece is one of the great books of the new century. Funny, tragic, sad, true, and painfully revealing, it addresses major themes of our times and reminds us, with lacerating humor, just how it is to be young today.

The ferociously hormonal boys central to the drama are engaged in the epic battle we all face but prefer to forget: how best does one grow up, today, in a world of global warming? To a fourteen-year-old, the gloom this question casts is rarely acknowledged but manages to shadow thoughts of the future. Murray captures the idiocy of youth, how they are so unsure of themselves, yet feel immortal at the same time.

The cast of characters is positively Dickensonian. Murray peoples an embattled Catholic boarding school with an administration loathe to lose paying students to competitors yet fully aware and conspiratorially silent about the school’s deficiencies; teachers involved in personal dramas struggle to inspire the teens in their charge while warily watching and abetting the administration in their deceptions.

But he is funny, really funny at the same time he is tearing your heart out with the stories of the boys trying to make their way in such a world. Howard, the history teacher, stays on the subject of the First World War for much of the term. The following riff could be taken for one of Murray's central themes, just by substituting global warming for WWI.

"In today's History class, Howard the Coward--who looks like he hasn't slept much lately, or washed, or shaved--wants to talk about betrayal.'That's what the war was really about. The betrayal of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong, above all the young by the old. "If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied" --that's how Rudyard Kipling put it. Young men were told all kinds of stories in order to get them to go and fight. Not just by their fathers of course. By their teachers, the government, the press. Everybody lied about the reasons for war and the true nature of the war. Serve your country. Serve the King, Serve Ireland...[Robert] Graves's friend Siegfried Sasson called the war "a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation"...'"

And what of the White Goddess, who makes appearances throughout the story? The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, a cycle of desire and destruction. One will always desire her but one can never possess her lest she lose her power to inspire. Those that survive her ravishment will eventually pass to the Black Goddess who represents enduring, reciprocating love. A reader might take this to mean that if one manages to "take the road less traveled by" and overcome their desire for the ultimately meaningless trifles that are the result of 'wealth creation', one might finally reach a higher stage of consciousness featuring enduring love.

“At the docks…we saw…the whole front half of a destroyer that had been completely crushed, like a car that had hit a telegraph pole at high speed…we were told that it had been hit by a wave—one wave, which came out of nowhere, crashed into the bow and smashed everything right back to the bridge…What if the eleventh dimension was not a serene place, but a place of storms, with entire universes ripping through it like huge turbulent waves? Imagine the kind of cataclysm you’d have if one of these white-wave universes collided into another universe…” (Professor Tomashi, p. 215)

This is how I feel now, after having reviewed and revisited this work for some weeks. I feel quite as though a gigantic wave has crashed over me and Murray has broken through to another dimension. It is a fabulous experience…Ruprecht would be happy.

An interview with Paul Murray speaking to Jesse Montgomery gives us the mind of the author. He speaks the way he writes: he is funny, but he reminds us of the darkness surrounding us and our lives of plenty. “I think the tragedy of the world at the moment is that it’s more and more intent on turning us all into teenagers and making us long for this period in our life when we were totally at sea.” He reminds us of responsibility: of our tendency to act the “kidult” when what we really need to do is, each of us, take personal responsibility for the world we have created.

Jill Owens interviewed Murray for Powell’s: “The only reality in our lives is loss, you know? The kids in the last part of the book are realizing that, and realizing that all the illusions they've been chasing are false, and the only real thing they have is each other…But at the same time I think the ending has a certain amount of optimism to it, because even in the middle of this quite cynical system that they're in, these kids have made a valuable discovery, that they have friendship and they have this capacity to take care of each other.”

In Murray’s book, Howard is one of the teachers who tells the boys what they need to pull together after Skippy dies. Speaking of the men of “D” Company going to fight in WWI:

“They had joined up as friends, and when they got out to the Front, when the grand words evaporated, the bond between them remained. That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.” (Howard, p. 557)

Murray: “M-theory is so complex and it's so astonishingly intricate. It has the fascination of what's difficult, in the same way that drugs are fascinating, or music is fascinating…At the same time, ultimately, they are leading you down a rabbit hole and they are leading you away from the world, and they are leading you away from people into this little narcissistic closed circuit.”

“It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. (Ruprecht, p. 301)”

Murray was mum in 2010 about his next project, but he did give a few hints to LitBlog interviewer in April 2011:”…I’d like to write something short and funny. I think the central gag of it is that this French banker meets a writer and the banker is very sensitive and poetic and the writer is just looking for a quick buck. I think it’ll be first person.”

There is more on his new project on a Farrar Strauss Giroux blog here.

Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon, but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part. [Wikipedia]

A fictional short story by Paul Murray published in The New York Times is not to be missed. In the story a young boy goes to school for the first time. As his father walks him to school, the son asks, “Did you go to school, Dad?”

“If there is a substitute for love, it is memory.”-- Kipling

“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why not story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word…” (Lori, p. 654)

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The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti

This is not a book about cheese. It is a love story--a cheesy love story, perhaps. Cheese is mentioned, sure, but that story comes early and occupies perhaps 40 pages of the 360. Remember the film version of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief? It was called “Adaptation”: “A love-lorn script writer grows increasingly desperate in his quest to¹…with many self-referential events added²." The script writer had so much trouble making a movie of the story that he spent most of the time talking about how hard it was to put the story into film, therefore ineluctably inserting himself into the story.

Well, this book does that too. Paterniti spent most of his professional career writing magazine articles—short deadlines, lots of travel, and a mass of information to corral quickly or jettison. When his agent asked him if he wanted to pursue a larger story idea he’d encountered—a special cheese made in a small village in Spain—his life and his editors were in alignment that the time was right to take up the challenge. He was given an advance and a deadline.

All kinds of challenges came to meet him. For one, the man who had been making the cheese was no longer in business. Actually, he was bankrupt and contesting several lawsuits. That’s part of the reason why the cheese part of the story didn’t take that long to tell. But cheese was the least of it. This is a book about Catalan Spain, male friendship, disconnecting, and taking time for wine, children, and storytelling.

This book is Paterniti’s ‘telling room.’ By the time Paterniti did the barest minimum required of a journalist writing a story—seeking out both sides of the lost-cheese-factory story—I read it avidly, thirstily. It comes at the end, ironically, a decade or more after Paterniti began his researches, “aging” the story until it was crumbly, Herculean, tasting of flower and dirt and minerals. And pretty darn close to indigestible. The footnotes…

The writing changed direction and went around and around like a word tornado sucking up stray facts, interesting asides, musings, apologies, accusations, justifications along the way. The book editor of this work must have had moments of terrible doubt. By the time the story came into print, nearly twenty years after its conception, technology had changed so much sections of it felt positively dated. But again, this story evolved into the story of a way of life, or men’s lives, or the life of one man…it had been begun and worked on and agonized over and left for dead so many times over the years, it is a miracle it has seen print at all.

Paterniti is a good man, an interesting man. Just begin with an open heart and do.not.think.about.cheese.

¹imbd.com
²wikipedia.com


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We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel has just been added to the long list for the 2013 Booker Prize. A short story of hers called “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Literature and became the first of several astounding chapters in …New Names. The work feels brave and completely fresh--raw even. The perspective, voice, and language held me spellbound.

On Bulawyao’s website is a quote from Chinua Achebe:

“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”

It seems an appropriate quote for someone who has taken such liberties with language and point of view.

Narration begins in the voice of ten-year-old Darling, whose father is away, whose school is closed, whose friends (Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, Stina, and Chipo) scream-sing with her as they run riot through the neighborhoods in search of guavas to steal. Bulawayo’s Darling tells us what they find besides guavas, and it is her words, reactions, and attention that feels real and tells us what we have always wondered: how does a child grow up in a world like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? What does the world look like and from where do these children acquire knowledge of concepts like “justice,” “fairness,” and “freedom”? Do these concepts include any notion of personal responsibility?

Very quickly in this novel one senses the danger in child’s play. The world is life-threatening, and the children know it. Their play, their home-life, their worship--it all has an edge that makes them brave and vulnerable at the same time. They rely on one another. The chapter “We Need New Names” was another breathtaking high-wire act that left my heart in my mouth. From this point I did not relax my guard with Bulawayo’s book in my hands. It felt explosive.

In “Shhh,” Darling hides the fact that her father has come home and is very ill. When her friends find out, they push their way into Darling’s shack, immediately intuiting that Darling’s father is dying of AIDS. Even Darling hadn’t grasped that—she was angry with her father for having left, and angrier still that he came home with a sickness. But the children face the man lying on the bed and talk openly about death and heaven and then they begin to sing:

"When Godknows starts singing Jobho, Sbho joins in and we listen to them sing it for a while and then we’re all scratching our bodies and singing it because Jobho is a song that leaves you with no choice but to scratch your body the way that sick man Job did in the Bible, lying there scratching his itching wounds when God was busy torturing him just to play with him to see if he had faith. Jobho makes you call out to heaven even though you know God is occupied with better things and will not even look your way. Jobho makes you point your forefinger to the sky and sing at the top of your voice. We itch and we scratch and we point and we itch again and we fill the shack with song.
Then Stina reaches and takes Father’s hand and start moving it to the song, and Bastard moves the other hand. I reach out and touch him too because I have never really touched him ever since he came and this is what I must do now because how will it look when everybody is touching him and I am not? We all look at one another and smile-sing because we are touching him, just touching him all over like he is a beautiful plaything we have just rescued from the trash. He feels like dry wood in my hands, but there is a strange light in his sunken eyes, like he has swallowed the sun.”

That passage ripped my heart out.

Every once in a while Darling will break into our attention with “This is real” or ”Is this even real?” She captures that sense of incredulity we experience when life starts to feel a little ludicrous and outside our control. In the last half of the novel she is a teenaged high-schooler in Detroit, Michigan (Destroyedmichigan). Her outsider status gives her the requisite distance for maximum observation but she retains her need for community. She is continually questioned about, and always questioning, “home.”

This is an exceptional debut and NoViolet Bulawayo has created a fictional world that stuns as it captivates. I remember thinking that Bulawayo and Jesmyn Ward are sisters of the pen, for both have the ability to flay open the skin to get to the “real.” This is a bravura performance. I do wonder, however, if such a performance can be replicated.

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