willemite

Updated 8/11/13 - added an interview with the author

George had imagined this moment many times but had somehow never imagined the outcome. Liana was not simply an ex-girlfriend who had once upon a time broken George’s heart; she was also, as far as George still knew, a wanted criminal, a woman whose transgressions were more in line with those of Greek tragedy than youthful indiscretion. She had, without doubt, murdered one person and most likely murdered another. George felt the equal weights of moral responsibility and indecision weigh down upon him.

There are lies, damned lies and then there is Liana Dector, falsehood on feet, the sort of dame who puts the fatale in femme fatale. Of course she was also George’s long lost sweetheart from college, the one. George is a decent sort, an unexceptional guy who had the misfortune to cross paths with the wrong woman at a tender age, and never really recovered. She is the one who has been haunting his dreams ever since, the one for whom he would drop all others, the one for whom he would do anything, really, anything. When she walks back into his life what she asks does not seem all that much, really. Of course if it hadn’t been all that much, then George might have been spared a whole lotta trouble.

He’d known he was going to say yes to Liana even before he knew what it was that she wanted. He’d known the moment he’d let her into his apartment. He also knew that Liana was as trustworthy as a startled snake…

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity - from filmreference.com

I am sure there are more than a few of us, particularly we gullible guys, who have a page of our private books dedicated to one person in particular, the one who broke our hearts the worst, the ones who came into, or more likely passed through, our lives at a point when the people we were becoming had not yet formed, when the clay was still damp, and left an impression, like a teen tagger in wet concrete. How does that scarring affect the rest of our lives? What directions do we take, or avoid, as a result? Two words work to describe George Foss once Liana returns to wrapping her desires around his dreams, poor bastard.

The story is told in two time lines. The earlier covers the time when Liana and George first got together, in college, and George’s attempt to find out what was really going on with his gf of a semester when she takes a powder. This includes learning about Liana’s life in her Florida home. The latter, and larger stream is contemporary, and includes a crooked ex boyfriend from whom Liana snatched half a mill, an impressively violent enforcer sort, George’s on-again-off-again gf, a mysterious house well off the beaten path, and a payload of diamonds.

There is indeed a mystery here. Can anything Liana says be believed? What is the truth of her tales, both now and in the past? What is the nature of her relationship with her erstwhile bf and with the thuggish Donnie Jenks?


Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon - Image was taken from Oscars.org

A few cops cross the stage but there is no primary PI in this noir tale. This book is less Raymond Chandler, and more North by Northwest. Liana’s favorite book is Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and you might extract some value by keeping that in mind. George has a cat named Nora, which might be a nod to The Thin Man, which featured Nick and Nora Charles. But I expect that one is a stretch. Are the references to hot and cold calculated nods to The Postman Always Rings Twice, or are we going all taffy-like again?

Liana is a person with several aliases, and that always makes one suspect there is content in here about identity. How do we become who we are? Can that change? What if people cannot or do not accept us for who we are? Can we ever get away from who we were? Notions of this sort abound.

I had become this different person, this person I’d rather have been—you know, in school, doing well, with a boyfriend, a boyfriend like you—but it was like I had a secret disease, or there was this clock inside of me, ticking like a heart, and at any moment an alarm would go off and [the girl I was then] would no longer exist. She’d die and I’d have to go back to being Liana Dector.

There are always some hesitations. I thought the notion of the book’s title was less than meets the eye. Few of the subsidiary characters come to life, much. But when you are flipping through pages as fast as I did and you will, such things generate as much concern as notions of morality to a sociopath. The Girl With a Clock For a Heart is a must-read thriller. Once you pick it up you will not be able to put it down, unless of course, that special someone from that special time all those years back should show up at your favorite reading spot and ask you for a favor. One look in those eyes and you know you won’t be able to say “no.”


Lauren Bacall - From noirwhale.com
==============================INTERVIEW

Peter Swanson graciously agreed to answer a few questions about his book. The responses here have been only minimally edited:

PLACE

How important is place in The Girl

What’s most important is the difference, class and otherwise, between New England and the fictional Sweetgum, Florida. Liana wants to reinvent herself, and part of that is leaving the town she lived in and never coming back. And when George visits Sweetgum it is important that he is out of his element.

Could it have taken place in locations other than Connecticut, Boston/New Essex, Florida?

The important thing would be the differences between the locations. The book is currently under option by a British film company, and writer/director James Marsh is working on an adaptation. I spoke with him about setting the story in England, which is his plan right now. He wants to substitute Oxford for Boston and a seaside town in East Anglia for Sweetgum. I thought this completely worked.

Why Tulum, and not, say Rio, Cancun, or the French Riviera?

The short answer is that I’ve been to Tulum and haven’t been to Rio or the French Riviera. The longer answer is that I just think there’s something incredibly evocative about Tulum, those Mayan ruins hovering above the ocean.

WRITING

On your blogger profile, you list yourself as a writer of crime fiction and poetry.  Which came first?

Poetry came first. I’ve been writing it since I was a kid, and for most of my twenties and thirties I worked very hard at becoming the best poet I could be. I’m not sure that worked out quite the way I had planned, but I wrote a few poems that, when I read them today, don’t make me physically ill. So that’s good.

Do they get equal time or is one dominant?

Right now, fiction is entirely dominant. I only write poetry now when I get an idea for a poem, and that happens very infrequently. I think I’m tapped out on poems. I don’t really write confessional poetry—e.g. Grandpa’s funeral, running into ex-girlfriend, etc.—so I sometimes feel like I’ve said all I can say in poetry form. This is one of the reasons I decided to do The Hitchcock Sequence, a sonnet for every Hitchcock film. It gave me a subject matter

You have written a lot of short crime fiction. Have you considered other genres, say police procedural, or horror or sci-fi?

I’ve written some horror short fiction and a little bit of sci-fi. It’s a matter of ideas, more than anything, and almost all of the ideas I get fall into the realm of mystery/crime. I like the idea of writing a solid police procedural but that involves a lot of research, and I’m pretty lazy about research.

When did you decide you wanted to write novels?

I started writing novels about ten years ago. At first, I just wanted to see if I could do it. I wrote a classic whodunit in which the amateur detective is a visiting writer/poet at a university. It was hard work, but more than that, it was a lot of fun. I loved spending a year in one fictional world, and I loved the feeling of finishing the novel, getting to the last page.

When did you start working on this one? Was it a prolonged gestation?

The Girl with a Clock for a Heart began life as a novella. It was essentially the college-years section of the book. My agent was the one who suggested that it could be turned into a book. The whole process probably took about two and a half years.

You are writing sonnets for all of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Is that project complete?

All the sonnets are written, although a few them definitely need to be tweaked, or even re-written. I’ve been sending the poems out individually to journals and online magazines, and several have been published. At some point I’ll see if I can find a publisher for the whole sequence.

What impact did Hitchcock's work have on your writing in The Girl?

Hitchcock is my favorite filmmaker, and he’s a big influence for that reason alone. Out of his 53 films there are at least ten or so that I re-watch frequently so they just seep in. James Marsh commented to me that he thought there was a real Vertigo vibe going on in The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, and that was news to me, although maybe he’s right. Definitely Irene is based on Midge, the Barbara Bel Geddes character from Vertigo.

THE GIRL

What was the spark that started your engine in writing The Girl?

I was thinking about the difference between going to college now and going to college when I did, back in the 1980s. Nowadays, most teens have an established online identity. When you arrive as a freshman and meet someone new you probably run back to your room and look them up on facebook and find out everything about them. But in the olden days all these kids arrived in college, and they had a real opportunity to reinvent themselves. No one knew anything about anyone. That was the spark that led me to wondering how far a freshman year re-invention could go.

When you were writing did you have particular faces in mind, people you know, relatives, neighbors, actors?

I do and I don’t. Usually, when I start writing a character, I picture what they look like, often using actors, but as I keep writing that connection seems to fade. As I said before, when I pictured Irene in this book I was picturing Midge from Vertigo. Short blonde hair, glasses. But she’s the only character in the book that I had a real specific person I thought about.

Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge in Vertigo

I heard that there is a sequel in the works,

There actually isn’t. The book I’m working on right now is a new standalone thriller. I would write a sequel but I would need to come up with an idea first that would get the characters back together, and that hasn’t happened yet.

TECHNIQUE

What is your physical writing methodology re when and how long?

I work at home in the morning, on my computer. I write 500 words a day on whatever it is I happen to be working on. That makes it sound like I’m incredibly disciplined but I do a whole lot of procrastinating before I start to write. Sometimes it’s reading, and sometimes it’s looking at mindless stuff online, or playing Candy Crush on my phone, but after doing that for a while, I eventually settle down into writing. I write my 500 words and then I quit. The most important part for me is that I’m writing every day, plus I think it’s important to read what you’ve written that day before you fall asleep. A lot of work can get done during a good night’s sleep.

In that case there are a lot of us who are incredibly productive. Thanks so much, Peter, for so generously offering your time.  Best of luck with The Girl. I hope a lot of people get a chance to read it.  

==============================EXTRA STUFF

Peter Swanson’s web site has a cornucopia of samples of his Hitchcock poems, other poetry, short fiction and non-fiction, and is well worth checking out

Armchair Audience is Swanson’s site for writing on “Books read. Movies seen. TV Watched”

A fun site that deals in you-know-what, noirwhale.com, which includes a lovely list of further links

A short story by Swanson, With the Lights Out

Dixie Clay woke past noon, and even waking she noted that the world sounded different from when she’d retired at dawn. As she swung her feet off the bed and into rubber boots, she looked out her window. The rain lashing Hobnob had slowed, now just fat drops plopping from greasy-looking leaves. By the time she was drinking instant coffee in her kitchen, the sun was coming out. This had happened a few times since the big rains had started in November, but Dixie Clay no longer ran to the door. She didn’t look for a rainbow. No, she no longer hoped, merely waited for the rain, and when it came falling harder than ever, as if it’d stored up its strength in the interval, she took a bitter comfort in being right.

When we think of great natural disasters in US history some chestnuts of misery pop readily to mind. The worst in terms of official body count (8,000) is the savaging of Galveston in 1900 by a hurricane (Isaac’s Storm). Many might offer Katrina, with almost 2,000 dead and damage over $100 Billion. How about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s (The Worst Hard Time). The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which killed 3,000. Maybe the Johnstown Flood of 1889. But were you aware of the great flood of 1927? Me either. On not so Good Friday, in 1927, a hundred foot wall of water burst through a levee (there were several breaches along the river) and laid waste to 27,000 square miles of land, applying the force of a couple of Niagaras to land near, and not so near the river, in effect, an inland tsunami.


Image taken from The Cotton Bowl Conspiracy blog

Entire towns were erased. A million homes were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands needed rescuing. What might it have been like in the time before, during and after this cataclysm?

The impending transformation of The Big Muddy to the Big Messy forms the backdrop in The Tilted World, the first joint book by husband-and-wife Tom Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter) and Beth Ann Fennelly (Great With Child). Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson are undercover federal agents sent to Hobnob, Mississippi to find out what happened to two revenue agents who had preceded them, but had never returned. They happen across the results of a failed robbery, several dead participants, but find an infant survivor as well. Ted, raised in an orphanage himself, takes on the task of finding a place for the baby. In doing so, he meets Dixie Clay Holliver, a young woman married to the charming but slithery Jess, an ambitious sort who cares for money in inverse proportion to his regard for his marital vows. He is not above using violence to get his way. Dixie Clay, 22, had lost her own baby to illness. Neither she nor her marriage had ever fully recovered from the loss. Dixie leaps at the opportunity to satisfy her maternal drive. Problem is, Dixie and her Jess are bootleggers the feds are looking to shut down.

Genesis-level relentless rain keeps the river rising and the people nervous. Some rich folks in New Orleans would like nothing better than to blow a levee upstream in order to reduce the risk to their property, and they may have found someone willing to help.

There is plenty to like in The Tilted World. Our co-stars Dixie Clay and Ted Ingersoll (which calls for yet another pairing of the 21st century version of Tracy and Hepburn, J-Law, and Bradley Cooper)


Image, from the film Serena, taken from the blog College Candy

are both very engaging. Evil does battle with good, or, well, some version of good. Babies need saving, huge danger mounts and a vast area is threatened. In telling us the story of Dixie, Ted and the town of Hobnob, Franklin and Fennelly also give us a taste for what the locals experienced in that dreadful time, the daily reports on the water levels, weather reports from up and down the river, news of threats to the security to the levee and the offer by some to actually buy the town in order to destroy it by blowing up the levee. There are also some elements of political historical interest, most particularly concerning the role and intentions of Herbert Hoover in the disaster recovery. (Heck of a job, Herbie.)

It is an interesting, engaging and fast-flowing read. You will care about the two main characters and learn something about the time and place. However, there are significant problems with the book. One is a cartoonishness. Dixie Clay is presented at times with a Disney-like aspect. The authors had already established that Dixie is a good egg, but give in to a princessy urge when they gild that lily by having her free a trapped hummingbird. I guess the dwarves were not available, although a relation of her husband fills some dwarfish roles later.

Image taken from BplusMovieBlog.com

Her husband, Jess, is such a black hat he should have been named Snidely Whiplash.



There is a corrupt local sheriff who refuses to listen to reason, (where have we seen that before?) and, returning to Disney, there is a particular affinity for orphans here. Toss in an addled flapper who reeks of madness. This is too bad, as the informational payload of the tale is considerable.

Another significant gripe I had with this novel was that a core conflict is resolved off screen, and is related to us by a participant. This should have been in center stage. The ease with which Ted and Dixie locate some missing folks strained credulity as well.

But I do not want to end with a negative slant. There are very compelling scenes of the flood, burning of Atlanta, cinematic opportunities of the highest order. Dixie and Ted are very engaging. Despite her hummingbird moment, Dixie is more Mulan than Snow White, (the cartoon Snow, not the more kick-ass version in the current TV show, Once Upon a Time) a tough and determined survivor with very positive inclinations. If you can retain behind a mental levee concern about some of the questionable choices made by the authors you will definitely enjoy The Tilted World, come hell or high water.

==============================EXTRA STUFF

Here is a Wikipedia entry on the the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927

Archival footage of the event, a signal corps film

Riveting photos of the flood

Posted July 23, 2013

Updated 7/12/13 - added links to the New York Times Daily Show interview and the NY Times review

When it comes to literature about eating, science has been a little hard to hear amid the clamor of cuisine. Just as we adorn sex with the fancy gold-leaf filigree of love, so we dress the need for sustenance in the finery of cooking and connoisseurship…Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where is it converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Jones made an exploding sound into the telephone. It was like that Monty Python sketch, the Wafer-Thin Mint, where the guy is gorging himself and finally he goes, “I’ll just have this one wafer-thin mint…’”)

From GIPHY.COM

and the booming field of flatulence.


From Flixter.com
(I bet you thought I was gonna go with the infamous bean scene from Blazing Saddles. I am much too classy for that. You will have to go there on your own. Just click this.)

And did you know that it was not only possible to ignite farts, but are some people who have flammable belches?

Roach gets to the bottom of the practice known as keistering, and hooping. Prison is a likely lab for such research into the use of the rectum as a cargo hold. The storage capacity is impressive, to the point that one inmate was referred to as OD for Office Depot, for his hooping capacity, actually used for keistering office supplies. I’m not using that stapler.

And you will be amazed at how much of a rat’s diet consists of material that…um…emerged from the rat. So on spotting a certain rodent in Orlando, try to stop yourself from asking what it is in that taco he is toting. And you do not want to be downwind of that breath.

The colon comes in for considerable examination, and figures in a surprising theory for the cause of death of a king. She comes clean in a look at the history, reasons for and abuses of enemas. And, of course Mary lets loose when she gets the scoop on pooping. She even notes a chart that delineates the seven different types. You know you want to see it.


Bristol Stool Chart

Ok. Time to squeeze yourself off the boat. Be sure to tip the guide.

Roach always delights in reporting on names that are particularly apt.

my gastroenterologist is Dr. Terdiman, and the author of the journal article “Gastrointestinal Gas” is J. Fardy, and the headquarters of the International Academy of Proctology was Flushing, New York.

I suppose the academy might be better off in Richmond, VA, in the neighborhood called Shockoe Bottom, or maybe in Proberta, CA.

A couple of minor gripes. This book could really have used an index. And the chapter on feeding Spot and Fluffy, while interesting, seemed a bit of a digression from the main journey.

That said, reading Mary Roach is akin to the pure joy one experiences from things like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with the benefit of knowing that there is no smoke and mirror involvement. Reality is soooooo weird. And we have Mary Roach to thank for refilling our occasionally dwindling mental storehouse of disturbing images, (You will never think of Elvis quite the same way after reading this book) and fascinating scientific facts, like the possible origin for the belief in fire-breathing dragons or the medical efficacy of fecal transplants.

There is never a doubt that Mary Roach will make you laugh and teach you things you never knew before. What could be better? Ok, I mean aside from the Blazing Saddles clip.

==============================EXTRA STUFF

Here is the full vid of the wafer thin mint bit, aka Mr. Creosote. Don’t even try watching this if you get queasy easily. It requires a very strong stomach or a very weak mind.

The May 2013 issue of Smithsonian Magazine features an article by Roach, The-Gut-Wrenching-Science Behind the World’s Hottest Peppers and there is another piece in that issue that may be of interest, Why You Like What You Like by Tom Vanderbilt. BTW, the articles are named differently in the magazine and on the web site.

Town Hall Seattle has an excellent audio presentation by Roach

Mary is interviewed on NPR

And in the New York Times

There is a wonderful interview with Mary on The Daily Show, a two parter. Here is Part 1 and here Part 2

Janet Maslin’s NY Times "> review

Now…you know what we know.” Her voice went even lower. That nobody chooses. That we’re all sick. We’re all here.”

There are various forms of sickness in Jess Walter’s baker’s-dozen collection of bleak stories. Alcoholism, drug addiction, obsession, greed, dishonesty, some zombification, or the most uncurable of all, being born poor. The megafauna all glooped up in La Brea had as much of a chance to escape their situation as the characters in these tales, although some of Walters’ people do make an effort. The setting is mostly Spokane (or in this case Spo-can’t) with a few outings to Seattle and Portland, and even a road trip to Vegas.

The town, btw, is named for the Native American tribe, whose name means “children of the sun.” No sun children here. I am not sure the sun ever breaks through the overcast, but when it does, it is quickly clouded over. Or it might indicate the eye of something unpleasant wandering by.

The first story, Anything Helps simply knocked me on my ass. Wayne Bittinger, aka Bit, is homeless, reliant on the Jesus beds for an occasional mattress, descending to cardboard when he must, an experienced beggar, a fellow with alcohol issues, and with a son who has been taken in by some religious sorts. He needs permission from the state to see his own kid. The light in his world used to be reading Harry Potter books to his child, but now he has to scrounge nickels and dimes to buy a single book, and then has to break some laws just to get it to his son. Bit may have brought some of his misery onto himself. Choices had clearly been made, bad ones, but were all his problems of his own doing? His rough go pounded on some of my fears. I, too, loved reading Harry to my progeny. And while I have never had to live on the street, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that in today’s compassion-free America I might someday get to have the experience. No substance issues for me, yet, at least not since I stopped smoking in 2002, but I related like a brother to Bit, and sobbed on reading this story, big, heaving, wailing tears, fuh real.

I was reminded of Baskin Robbins while reading this book. Thirty one flavors, it seemed, but of pain, despair and failure. Walter offers a portrait of the underclass, looking at people who have made bad choices, people who have been cast in dark dramas by a hostile director, and relationships that seem likely to be noted on page one headlines of the wrong sort. One saving grace lies in some of the parent-child connections. Bit’s love for his child is palpable, even if his ability to express it is limited. Other fathers attempt to protect their young. But there is an undercurrent. While outcomes are often the result of bad decisions, the environment as a whole seems designed to keep people in their places. This enclosure may not be as concrete as Stephen King’s dome, but it contains its residents quite well anyway. In fact, the core image is one of being trapped. I won’t give away the specifics of it, but let’s just say that the people here might as well have checked into the Hotel California. Hell, most of ‘em were born there.

There are the odd bright spots. One decent guy prevents his boss from screwing a customer. One convict truly wants to do some good in the world. The oft-mentioned Bit really, really does love his kid. A convict on temporary release finds a golden moment on the outside. A father relates his own childhood to that of his kids, in a warm and useful way.

Walter’s characters are significantly flawed, more often than not. You may not feel quite the connection I did to Bit, but there are likely to be at least some folks on these pages who ring your bells, tug at your heart, and maybe lift your wallet.

Along with the dark content, considerable skill is on display here from the author of Beautiful Ruins and The Zero. We Live in Water may offer up a polluted lake, but it is still worth diving in, just to see what else is swimming around.


==============================The Stories

Anything Helps - see above

We Live in Water - a low level crook finds that screwing the boss’s wife and stealing his money is not a good career move. The son he loved and tried to protect, comes back many years later to find out what happened to dad.

Thief - when dad sets out to find who has been nicking change from the vacation savings jar, he must confront his own childhood behavior.

Can a Corn – a con on a medical leave chooses a form of freedom usually denied him. Some powerful imagery in this one.

Ken reeled in a dull catfish, yellow-eyed and spiny. No fight in it. Almost like it didn’t mind.

Virgo - An obsessed and rejected lover uses his position at a local newspaper to make life difficult for his ex, resulting in collateral damage.

Helpless Little Things - Every short story collection, it seems, needs an O Henry entry. In this one, a latter day Fagin meets his match.

Please - A father seeks to remove his son from the mother’s meth-lab home

Don’t Eat Cat - a zombie tale, that says more about how people can become undead (underclass) than it does about their behavior once turned, and how the uppers view of the unders (reminiscent of the UK telly series In the Flesh, which is highly recommended, btw))

The New Frontier - nothing JFK-ish here – a Vegas trip with a pseudo friend looking to save someone who may or may not need saving

The Brakes - a mechanic does a bit of good for an undeserving recipient

The Wolf and the Wild - a white collar criminal doing community service aims to make a better life for himself and those he is assigned to

Wheelbarrow Kings - a couple of down-and-outs scrounging to make a buck and contending with their lack of knowledge

Statistical Abstract for My Hometown of Spokane, Washington - like it says, a portrait of despair, by the numbers, and telling the narrators tale, in numbered paragraphs, mixing stats and personal info

8. I was born in Spokane in 1965. Beginning in about 1978, when was thirteen, I wanted to leave.

9. I’m still here.

Posted July 15, 2013

The tale of how my father lost his sister was as familiar to me as the stories my mother had told me of the Prophet, tales I would learn again later when my parents would enroll me in Sunday school at a mosque in Hayward. Still, despite the familiarity, each night I asked to hear Pari’s story again, caught in the pull of its gravity. Maybe it was simply because we shared a name. Maybe that was why I sensed a connection between us, dim, enfolded in mystery, real nonetheless. But it was more than that. I felt touched by her, like I too had been marked by what had happened to her. We were interlocked, I sensed, through some unseen order in ways I couldn’t wholly understand, linked beyond our names, beyond familial ties, as if, together, we completed a puzzle. I felt certain that if I listened closely enough to her story, I would discover something revealed about myself.

In the opening chapter of And the Mountains Echoed, a poor father tells his children a story. A monster ravished a town until a child was offered to appease him. In order to save the rest of his family and the town, a father sacrifices his favorite child to the monster. Years later, unable to recover from the sorrow of this decision, the father scales a mountain to reach the monster’s fortress, seeking to bring his son home. But, finding that the boy is happy, well-fed, clothed and educated, he reconsiders. In this story is the core of the tales to come. Hosseini writes of the bond between parents and children, and the sacrifices some parents make to see that their children are well looked after. Does the benefit of a more comfortable home, a richer material upbringing, outweigh the loss of that natural parent-child experience? The theme of parenting, with complications well beyond the keep-or-send-away element, permeates.

The son of a wealthy local big-shot comes to realize that his comforts come at the expense of others. A massively scarred girl is left by her mother in the care of someone who is probably better suited to raise her. A young woman sacrifices years of her life to take care of an ailing parent. A war-ravaged child is taken in by one of her caregivers.

I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing. My earlier novels were at heart tales of fatherhood and motherhood. My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.

There are sibling issues galore here. An ugly duckling twin gets revenge on the favored twin, but takes on a considerable burden. A brother and sister who were very close, are torn apart at an early age, and must cope with the absence, of that missing other part of themselves. Friendships that seem more like sibling-hood sprout like poppies in Helmand. A Greek boy is joined by the daughter of his mother’s best friend. She remains longer than expected. A fast, but fragile friendship forms between a rich boy in Afghanistan and the son of a poor man.

The cast here is international, as is the selection of settings. Hosseini was born in Kabul, but, as his father was an ambassador, he was exposed to the wider world. Dad was posted in Paris when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Hosseini’s time in France informs the parts of the book that are set there. Eventually his family immigrated to the USA, taking up residence in California, another site in the novel. He has visited his homeland since growing up in the West, like émigrés we meet in these pages. One Afghani emigrant struggles with the tension between remaining connected to his homeland, in a very concrete way, or maintaining his separation. How much responsibility for dealing with Afghanistan’s problems lies with those who have moved away?

Hosseini, best-selling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns returns us to a world, or rather worlds that we have seen before, a harsh Afghanistan as the emotional and table-setting core, and western locales in which are echoed the events of the old world.

…when you grow up in a Third World country, you know, poverty and affluence are juxtaposed. It's literally next door -- you don't have to go to another zip code. It's right there when you walk out in the street, and there are beggars and so on and so forth. So it becomes part of your life, and you can either not, just not reflect on it, but I must have, because I remember my stories always had to do with these things. There was always some guy who came from a very affluent background and some person who came from a much less privileged background, and their lives collided in some way, and tragedy would ensue inevitably. I mean, sort of a recurring theme in my stories

One of the points Hosseini makes here is the commonality of East and West, despite outward differences. He mirrors many of his characters’ experiences. People sacrifice themselves to care for those in need of help in both places. Parents are no less stressed in the West than in the East in terms of struggling with decisions about their children. Pain is too much for some in both worlds. In both worlds there are characters who cannot face their futures and opt out. In both worlds young people sacrifice themselves to care for others. In both worlds there are characters who are seriously damaged physically and must cope with adapting to worlds that value beauty or at the very least normalcy. In both worlds parents give up their children. We really are the same beneath our cultures and histories.

I do not have a comparative character count here, but it was my sense that this was a larger book than his first two. Each of those focused mostly on a smaller group of actors. This time it seemed there was more of an ensemble cast, in multiple stories. The links between some of the elements were a bit tenuous, as if a short story that was lying around was modified enough to serve a purpose in this larger tale and inserted. It is a large landscape and I felt that on occasion we wandered too long away from some of the primary characters, maybe lost some parts of their lives. To compensate for this, when we get back to them, we are offered a reader’s digest condensed report of what has happened since last we checked in. This created a bit of distance.
That said, there is vast world of feeling here. Not only the agony of parents who feel they must give up their children, but the pain of other sundered familial connections as well. There are deep scars of guilt for terrible acts, and the pain of love denied. There is also joy in finding a kind of love where hope was slight, in reconnecting with those long lost, with saving and being saved. The echoes in the mountains are the sounds of tears, of both anguish and joy, universal, penetrating, human. Listen.

Updated - July 17, 2013 - added a link re Brunelleschi

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrateor

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
Dante and Virgil approach the entrance to Hell
From the WorldofDante.org

The heat is on. There is, of course, a deadline. A mad scientist of a Dante super-fan, who takes theatrical delight in referring to himself as The Shade, would like to bring about a great renaissance for humanity, a reawakening similar to the one that occurred following the Black Plague. As with that earlier event, The Shade, a Batman villain if ever there was one, would like to cull the world’s population by, oh, say, a third. Malthus lives, and has spawned a group of die-hard Transhumanists who think we and our planet would be a lot better off were there significantly fewer of us using up space, air, water, et al, and hogging the remotes. Robert Langdon, returned to duty after sundry life-threatening adventures in Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol, has been called in to decipher the clues to where and how Mister Zobrist, (we can’t call him The Shade for 463 pages, can we?) conveniently dead in the opening, has set his viral bomb to go off. Or was he? Langdon wakes up in an ER, with a head wound, a distinctly fuzzy recollection of the recent past and thinks he is back in Massachusetts. Brunelleschi didn't design any buildings in New England. That large dome you see out the window means you are in Florence. Oops. And, by the way, there is a well armed, nicely leather-clad biker person heading down the hall, weapons blazing. Check please. He and Doc McSmokin’, a 208 IQ, blonde, pony-tailed physician, named Sienna Brooks, dash out ahead of the ordnance and the game is afoot. This offers an example of something that is entirely depressing. Had that been an American hospital there is no way he could have gotten out without having to sign insurance forms or promissory notes, guns blazing or not. (Mister Langdon. We need you to sign here, here, here, and initial here, here and here. You, with the gun, take a number and have a seat.)

Woodward and Bernstein, in All the Presidents Men, report on G. Gordon Liddy holding his hand over a flame at a dinner party to impress someone or other. He held it long enough to singe himself, and cause alarm in those present. When he was asked “What’s the trick?” he answered, “The trick is not minding.” Reading a book of Daniel Brown’s is a far cry from holding one’s hand over an open flame. But there are elements to reading his work that are certainly painful. There are benefits to be had, things to be learned, issues to be raised, but there are clichés to be endured, characterizations to be tolerated, dei ex machina to be ignored. I suppose one might think of it as a form of Purgatory. You can certainly enjoy the good while putting up with the bad. The trick is not minding the latter.

One does not descend into reading Dan Brown’s infernal novel expecting literary power. There are certain formulae at work, and if you are not prepared to be led along, keeping the blinders firmly affixed for the duration, you might do better to read something else with the several hours it takes to work your way through the levels in Inferno. (Yes, there are some) We do not expect to find work similar to that of, say, Louise Erdrich, or Ron Rash, and it would be unfair, not to say unkind, to apply to Brown the metrics applied to writers of more serious fiction. But then, what standards should we apply?

There are two general qualities that merit our attention here, and more specific elements within each. Is it entertaining? Is it informative?

Entertaining

Does the story engage out attention? Or do we find ourselves wandering off?
Is it fast-paced?
Do we care about the characters?
Is it fun?
In short, does this make a good beach read?

Informative

Does it teach us something new?
Is the information interesting?
Does it address some larger issue, one of actual significance?
Does it make sense?

ENTERTAINMENTDoes the story engage our attention? Sure. While not, for me at least, as engaging as The DaVinci Code, I kept turning all 463 pages, eager to find out what there was to be found, info and plot-wise. But I was not exactly panting to get back to the book at every free moment.

Is it fast-paced?

Is the Pope Argentinian? This is what Brown does. Aside from the sort of occasional interruptions that might give the wearer of a pace-maker the sweats, (noted in more detail below) he keeps things moving along. I was reminded of an old (1912) adventure tale, A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. That book was also a series. Battle, capture, rescue, escape, repeat, with bits of information about some underlying subject in the book tossed in to grease the narrative wheels. Ditto here.

Speaking of greasing, you will need to have some eye drops handy to avoid chafing from frequent eye-rolling. It seems that every time there is a need to gain access to some large institution, Brown trots out what seems almost a running joke of Robert Langdon having some relationship with the person in charge. I bet if Langdon needed 3am access to the UFO museum in Roswell, we would learn that he had tracked aliens with the museum director and had contributed a live specimen from the Crab Nebula at some time in the not too distant past. The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets? It wasn’t Washington who poohed there, or presented a monograph at the esteemed institution that resulted in such a large inflow of contributions that the institution was flush for a considerable period.

In a related matter, I was reminded of two cinematic clichés in particular. In one, the hero and heroine pause as the world collapses around them to engage in a lengthy soulful smooch. (Pay no attention to that incoming missile. Enjoy.) In the second, a child dashes back to the burning-building or alien-infested-spaceship to retrieve her (choose one - favorite stuffy, kitten, puppy, photo of long dead (but really only missing) mother or father). Brown spares us kittens and overlong liplocks, for the most part, but while Langdon and this volume’s Bond girl are dashing from persistent threats like a Florida race track rabbit, (who are those dogs?) Brown pauses the action every so often, inserts himself and his research into the narrative (Bob, Si, relax. We’ll pick this up again after lunch), and offers up the occasional art history lesson. I’m not saying that these are not informative and sometimes fun (as in the case of a particularly organ-rich Plaza della Signoria)


The Fountain of Neptune from The Museums of Florence

but it does alter the flow in a breathlessly paced novel to…um…take a breather. All right guys, up and at ‘em. Ready, set, flee.

Do we care about the characters?

Truthfully, it is tough not to care about a character that has the face of Tom Hanks ironed onto it, but yeah, I guess, although a lot less than a whole lot of other fictional people. It is fun to see Langdon attempting to recover his memory and figure out who that mysterious woman he keeps seeing in vision-flashes might be. Sienna Galore has a pretty interesting back-story, a large brain, and the usual physical assets required for Brown’s kicked-up Bond-girl roles. So sure, why not. Aside from those two, only a little here and there. Character is not the thing in Dan Brown books.

Is it fun?

As a straight up read, forgetting for the moment one’s analytical inclinations, yes. Brown does revel in puzzles and there are more secrets embedded in Inferno than there are candied items in a fruit cake. And some are quite delicious. (OK, I hereby out myself as a weirdo who likes fruit cake). Unlike one’s experience with fruit cake, however, you will miss out on that weighty feeling of having ingested a brick. Literarily, Inferno is a lot more like chiffon cake than its denser cousin. Also there are enough twists to keep the cap machines at the Nogara Coke bottling factory busy for a long time.

Does it make a good beach read?

Assolutamente

INFORMATIONDoes it teach us something new?Si! We learn of a mysterious transnational entity, that Brown swears is based on a real organization, that smoothes out the curves so that people of questionable motives, but certain resources, can go about their business unimpeded. The head of this group might have been well served with a fluffy white kitty and a pinky ring. Brown offers some nifty tour guides to this and that location in several cities, and a fair bit of history on Dante and his most famous bit of writing. He offers some illuminating details on this or that building, painting and sculpture, including where it might have traveled over the centuries (well, not the buildings, of course) and whether the version we see today is a fully original specimen. He also gives us a very good reason to take a tour of the secret passageways in Old World cities.


The Vasari Corridor from Wiki commons

Is the information interesting?

Leaving aside prophets and their like, before there were mononymous sorts like Liberace, Elvis and Madonna, even earlier than sorts like that English playwright, there was Durante degli Aligheri, known to a certain childhood acquaintance, Beatrice, as that boy who wouldn’t stop staring at her, known to certain priors in Florence as the guy who refused to pay his fine and was thus banned for life, and known to us in the 21st century as Dante.


Dante and His Poem by Michelino from Wikimedia

If you find Dante and his best-known work of interest, and really, you should, this book is a lot of fun. Of course what constitutes interesting is almost always in the eye of the beholder. If your thing is video games, well then not so much. (on the other hand, there actually is a lot here that does remind one of video game action, so I take that back) But if you are fascinated with old world history, art and architecture, Dante, the Black Death, Malthusian concerns, and the potential impact of a large human die-off, then Si, molto.

Does it address some larger issue, one of actual significance?

Sicuramente. Two in fact. One of the major elements in the story is the determination by our psycho-scientist billionaire sort that human population is about to reach a dangerous level, one which is likely to trigger all sorts of catastrophes. There are various ways one can address this concern, but the underlying concern is quite real. Brown does us all a service by bringing it to the attention of millions of readers. Another element here is the notion of “Transhumanism.” Basically this entails humans taking charge of our own evolution and using all the technology available to us to ensure maximization of our physical and intellectual capacities. Whether one sees this as a Satanic plot, yet another opportunity for the haves to have even more, or the beginning of a new human renaissance, the subject is worth checking out.

Does it make sense?

In some ways yes and in some ways no. There is validity to the underlying science. But would the baddie really leave a breadcrumb trail for potential foilers to his big bang?

That said, it can be fun to descend into the bowels of the earth, or the watery substructures of ancient architectural marvels, however many levels down you care to go.

Whether you think that Dan Brown belongs in literary heaven, Hades or somewhere in between, he makes a wonderful Virgil, leading us on an interesting journey, and showing us some things we might not have ever imagined. It may not qualify as a divine book, but Inferno is one hell of a read.

PS - One must note that the end of all three parts of Dante’s Commedia (the Divine was added later) end with the word “stars.” Brown does not disappoint on that score.

And I am sure there is significance to the fact that there are 104 chapters in the book, (plus a prologue and an epilogue, so 106) but I have not been able to suss out exactly what. There are 99 cantos in the Commedia, maybe a couple more with this or that added, but I do not know how one can fluff that up to 106. Yet, I am sure there is an explanation. When (if) I find it I will include it here.


WB2051

==============================EXTRA STUFF

Apparently the city of Manila took umbrage at a negative characterization in the book

An interesting discussion of Dante’s work

Wiki article on transhumanism

Washington Post review

Janet Maslin’s http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/books/inferno-by-dan-brown.html">NY Times review, which includes a wonderful observation re the book’s publication date

WSJ piece on how Dan Brown kept the wraps on his story lest copycats scoop him

For some ">nice images and info on the Vasari Corridor

If you get the urge, you can read Dante’s masterpiece for free thanks to the Gutenberg project

If you believe that Dan Brown should be relegated to one of the lower levels of hell, you might enjoy this piece in The Daily Beast, by Noah Charney, who clearly enjoys pointing out all the things Brown got wrong

GR friend Connie reminds us that there is a wonderful piece by Rodin, The Gates of Hell, that is worth a look.

Here is a nice Q&A piece with Brown from the June 20, 2013, NY Times, part of their By the Book series

Some interesting images and notions on Dante's hell, on a web post called The Topography of Hell

Updated - 7/9/13 - see link at bottom

I am hardly a monogamous sort. I find that I am regularly attracted to different types. Sometimes I like them with big bowls. I am definitely fond of zaftig with strokable, curvy edges, sometimes I prefer something a bit more conservative, upright, familiar. And rarely, slender even, maybe with sharp edges. Occasionally I go for something way out there, maybe with spikes or exploding bits. Ok, you can put your filthy mind back where it belongs now. We are talking about font types, but you knew that, right?

One of the great joys to be had in reading is to learn something new about some aspect of life that has been before your eyes all along. Walking down a street with no fonts on display might lead one to suspect involuntary transport to an unintended time and location, say Soviet era Moscow, or worse, Siberia. (and yes, there is a font called Siberian, a unicase, sans-serif). But for almost all of us, we are surrounded by fonts. Simon Garfield has certainly touched many, particularly in the GR community, with his work. We all do love to read and are probably more susceptible to the attraction of beauty, utility and charm in fonts than most. Yeah, we bad. But not only are fonts significant in the books, magazines, newspapers, and web-sites we read, they demand our attention as we walk down the street, step into an elevator, check the time, unwrap our breakfast, decide what faucet to twist when washing our hands, and they call to us from the labels on our clothing, whether obnoxiously plastered on the outside or applied more decently in clothing interiors. They are on traffic lights, highway signs, airport directives, the sides of police, fire and emergency vehicles. And they have, of course, been around in different times. Fonts do seem to capture elements of the zeitgeist.


A favorite haunt of mine back in the day

Thank goodness we have not heard of anyone with an allergy or aversion to fonts. Such an unfortunate would, under the onslaught of type in which we live, soon be reduced to a quivering mound of jelly. Fonts are everywhere and someone not only decided what font needed to be attached to each and every word, someone had to design each and every one. And I am not referring solely to you law-averse sorts (you know who you are) who communicate your needs with literal cut-and-paste design. Really, someone else designed each and every letter.


For particularly lazy criminals this Ransom Note Vector font might come in handy

Garfield offers us a laudable overview not just of what is out there in the world of fonting, (See, I didn’t say he was a font of wisdom on the subject) but how each and every bit of it (OK, OK, not each and every bit, but a whole lot of it) came to be, with notice given to many of those who did the hard work of designing and literally casting the dies which have defined printing for hundreds of years.

For those who might only know of Gutenberg from the project that is named after him, it was illuminating to learn that he had been a blacksmith before inventing the printing press. Working with molten metal definitely relates. Garfield offers us a considerable cast of characters (one might say they were all type cast. I wouldn’t. Or that they comprised a cast to die for. No, not me. That would be too low. But some might.) responsible for how words look. Gill Sans, for example was created by, no shock, Eric Gill. (Mister Sans is unaccounted for) Matthew Carter, the founder of Bitstream, designed Verdana among many others. John Baskerville designed the font that was named for him, but there was no mention of his dog. There really is a guy named Bodoni out there, first name, Giambattista. And on it goes. Some of these type-designers’ stories are more interesting than others. But if you find the one you are reading beginning to induce yawns, hang on for a few pages. There will be another that might catch your interest. There is attention given to the development of fonts in various countries, most notably Switzerland, Germany, France and England. Perhaps the most delicious name in the book belongs to a printer from the 1500s. Wynkun de Worde, the first Fleet Street printer, used an expanding range of typefaces, a big innovation at the time.


(Brothers Blynkun and Nodde de Worde did not get any ink here.)

My absolute favorite item in the book has to do with a spoof published in The Guardian on April Fool’s Day in 1977, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean nationhood of San Serriffe. And no, it was not leaked by a twenty-something intelligence worker.


Some readers, we are told, tried to book holidays there

There is much information of other sorts as well in Just My Type. Garfield looks at research that says that our brains demand evenness in a font. He looks at the gold rush of printing that followed Gutenberg, at whether a font can be German or Jewish, and at tools for helping identify individual fonts, both books and software. And he offers some intel on how this or that locality selected the font to be used across their cities, for things like airport or street signage. In addition there are some bits on characters (the type type, not the human sort) most of us have never heard of. Doctor Seuss would be thrilled.


Letters from Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra

There are certainly many bad fonts out there. Garfield offers a list of the ten worst fonts in the world. With the explosive growth in the number of such creatures, I imagine this is a list that will be a challenge to maintain.

Ok, so this can be a fun book for us reader-sorts. But I confess it was not a total love fest for me. I found that the illustrations offered for many of the fonts were not sufficient, or even sometimes available. Also, as someone with a memory that is not nearly so well formed as the metal dies in question here, I found that much of the information seemed to slip past, in one eye and out the other. It was a lot to take in. So, that’s my mandatory gripe. If I could give the book four and a half stars I would, for the occasional glazing over I experienced. But there is such a wealth of interesting information that my kinder parts persuaded me to go ahead and submit a fiver.

One can only pray that the new fonts that continue to fill our world and our sensibilities will do at least as well, and hopefully even better than those that have come before. And it seems that we should take no chances with this, so I offer here the beginning of a celestial wish for visibility, clarity and readability

Helvetica, full of grace, the font is with thee…

you know, just in case.

==============================EXTRA STUFF

The Atlantic Magazine had a fun video showing the history of typography

Kent Haruf takes his time. His first novel, The Ties That Bind, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Foundation Award and a Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. His second novel, Where You Once Belonged was published in 1990. Plainsong, which became a best-seller and was a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1999. It's sequel, Eventide, was published in 2004. Nine years later we have Haruf's fifth novel, Benediction. All his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, (a stand-in for Yuma where Haruf once lived) nearer to Kansas and Nebraska than to that suspect center of the scary urban, Denver. Benediction is not a sequel, but a stand-alone, although there are a few nods to characters from prior tales. All Haruf's novels are top-notch, written at a very high plane of craft, observation and insight, and Benediction fits in very nicely with his existing, outstanding body of work.

Dad Lewis gets the bad news straight away, cancer, terminal. Get your affairs in order. Over the remaining few months of his life Dad (we never learn his proper first name) does just that. We visit with him as he tries to come to terms with his life, recalling how he came to be on his own as a teen, how he met the love of his life, how he treated those around him, his son, daughter, employees, neighbors. This being a Kent Haruf novel, it takes a village to tell a tale. Eight-year-old Alice has arrived next door, at her grandmother's, her father long gone and her mother recently deceased. How the people of Holt cope with her presence will feel very familiar for return readers of Haruf's work, but still both startling in some of the details and incredibly moving in its execution. Reverend Lyle, late of Denver, makes the crucial mistake of actually preaching the gospel, not what most of the parishioners want to hear. His wife and son wish he would keep such things to himself. Haruf was the son of a minister, and his depiction of the politics of town religious institutions has the ring of seen rather than revealed truth. There is an older mother-daughter pair who figure into the story, most particularly in a wonderful scene that is simultaneously baptismal and pagan, and a few more characters who matter beside. There are no saints here, no demons. (well, ok, a few very minor characters are purely awful) Forgiveness is a major element for many of the relationships here. It is tougher to create an image with fine lines than to paint with broad strokes. Haruf takes his time and makes his characters breathe.

All the lonely people. Where do they all come from? Holt apparently. There is enough quiet desperation in Holt that I was reminded at times of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Love does not seem to last often enough, but there are some exceptions that keep hope alive. We are invited to look at relationships between parents and children, between present, past, potential and real lovers, and between people and the places in which they live. Communities definitely affect one's options, for good and ill.

One might wonder how the author goes about constructing his novels. Fortunately he has told us

When I think of a story, I always begin with the characters. I daydream and brood and imagine that character for nearly a year and, of course, they all have to have problems, so I think about their problems. Then I begin to imagine and daydream about the people that would be in their lives, and their problems. It’s my biggest effort to figure out how to bring them together in a way that would move the story forward — not necessarily predictably but certainly inevitably.

The atmospherics of Holt figure significantly in how we are handled as readers. After Dad gets the news and returns home, the sun is down. An assault is accompanied by rain. A parent hitting a child is lit by The wind cried and whistled in the leafless trees. During a significant sermon, The sanctuary was hot. The windows were open but it was a hot day and hot inside. It gets hotter and you get the idea. The use of weather throughout is ever-present, but tempered, never intrusive, there to add a highlight, reinforce a mood, never to direct traffic. Characters relate a fair bit around food as well, feeding each other or not. The flatness of the terrain adds exposure. ...on the plains, everything is visible, nothing is isolated. That appeals to me a great deal, these people being so visible, as if they’re seen in a spotlight. There is a scene that grabbed me, in which a character is walking the town at night and is stopped by the police:

Is there something wrong with you? What are you doing out here?
I'm just walking. Having a look around town.
Your family knows where you are?
They know I'm taking a walk.
It doesn't bother you to look in other people's houses? You think that's all right.
I don't think I'm doing any harm. I didn't mean to.
Well, these people don't like it. This man called you in.
What did he say?
That you were looking in his house.
Did he say what he was doing in his house?
Why would he say that?
People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing. I'd hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary.
I don't know what you're talking about, but you'd better keep moving.
I thought I'd see people being hurtful. Cruel. A man hitting his wife. But I haven't seen that. Maybe all that's behind the curtains. If you're going to hit somebody maybe you pull the curtain first.
Not necessarily.
What I've seen is the sweet kindness of one person to another. Just time passing on a summer's night. This ordinary life.

That passage seems to epitomize the writing and sensibility of Kent Haruf. His literary doppelganger, wandering through a town of people, seeing decency and finding meaning and joy in "this ordinary life." It’s not hard to say something nice about Benediction. Haruf writes of real human concerns, real human problems, engagingly and effectively. You will come to care about someone in Haruf's Holt, maybe more than one someone. Take your time with this one. Read it slowly. As we have come to expect, whenever Kent Haruf produces a new book, it is always a blessing.

============================EXTRA STUFF
I found many interviews with the author, and have included links to a few here, in case you get the urge. The author quotes I used are from the first one listed.

Benediction was chosen as the #1 Indie Next List Pick for March 2013. Here is the interview from Bookselling This Week, a publication of the American Bookseller's Association, by Elizabeth Knapp

From Telluride Inside and Out - interview by Mark Stephens

This Barnes and Noble profile was written by Christina Nunez

This http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/54801-a-lot-of-living-kent-haruf.html">interview is from November 2012, in Publishers Weekly on-line, by Claire Kirch

P.S. - I suspect that Kent Haruf has a secret first name, Clark.

I guarantee that when you reach the end of this novel the sound you hear will be coming from your own mouth, 'Awwwwwwwwww .'

The last book I read and reviewed was David Vann’s magnificent Goat Mountain. Outstanding stuff, heavy with content, violent, dark. Someone Else’s Love Story, while not the opposite, is certainly worlds away. An antidote. Maybe chicken feathers for the soul.

The book opens with a poem by Emily Dickenson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

Keep it in mind. But back to beginnings. Consider the first actual paragraph

I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.

Hooked yet? I was. And glad of it.

Shandi is 21, the mother of Natty, a precocious three-year-old. Her bff, Walcott, is helping her move to an apartment her father keeps in Atlanta. She is a familiar sort, a good-hearted everygal of a single mother, except stuck between her long-divorced and still contentious Jewish father (remarried with three more kids) and Christian, still-single, bitter mother. Stopping en route at a convenience store, her journey is interrupted when a gunman holds the place up, shooting a cop and taking those present hostage. Good thing there is a hulk of a guy there, football-player heft, and with brains to boot, a godlike hero who makes sure neither Shandi nor Natty come to harm.

Of course William Ashe has issues of his own, and maybe he has other reasons for risking taking a bullet than solely to protect a damsel and child in distress. Maybe he is choosing his own destiny, on the anniversary of a terrible event in his life.

Destiny does figure large in this story, and it is the consideration of this and other underlying concerns that gives the book greater heft than if it were a simple rom-com. Religion figures as well. It is no accident that Jackson, for example, uses “ungodly hot” in her opening paragraph. It could just as easily have been unbearably or unspeakably. There is a wide range of content here that relates to god. There is a virgin birth, no, really, a resurrection, miracles of one sort and another, sacrifice, concern with mythological beings like Norse gods and animated anthropomorphic creatures from Jewish legend. The book also looks at love, not just between the plus and minus poles of human magnetism, but between humans and god, between friends, between parents and children.

There are some things you will want to note as they pop up in the book. Birdhouses, birds and feathers flutter into view from time to time. I just bet they stand for something. Flowers and flower beds receive similar treatment, always raising Eden-ic possibilities. Ditto fireworks of one kind and another as an expression of love.

There is an investigation here of a back-story crime. It is handled with considerable nuance and maturity. Doubtless, there will be some who take offense at how this is treated. I thought it was excellently done. There is also a jaw-dropping (and wonderful) twist late in the book.

I was reminded very much of the feel of Silver Linings Playbook. Shandi, (can Jennifer Lawrence play her, pleeeeeease) William, and Walcott will win your heart. These are lovely characters, people worth caring about, facing difficult decisions and looking at core elements of life. Someone Else’s Love Story is about all sorts of love stories. It is about doing the right thing and struggling to figure out what that actually is. And it is lovingly and beautifully told. One right thing you can do is read this book. It may not be a religious experience for you, but I guarantee that it will be uplifting and leave your spirit feeling light as a feather. This is a lovely, charming book.

PS – I really hope they keep the cover art that is on the ARE I read. The image of birds, along with a few bursts of fireworks, is nothing short of perfect.

posted 5/17/13

This review has also been cross-posted on my blog. Images tend to disappear on GR. They are all present there. The book was released on Tuesday, September 10, 2013.

Drama is a description of what is bad inside of us and the end point of that is hell, a description of a hellish landscape.

This is what David Vann had to say in an interview with GR pal Lou Pendergast. (A link to the full interview is in the LINKS section at the bottom of this review) It will come as no shock then that in his latest novel he presents us with a hellscape, and we see that some of the bad is not content to remain cooped up. In fact David Vann's Goat Mountain is like Deliverance (without the sex) mated with The Golden Bough, as directed by Terence Malick.


David Vann

Northern California. Rural. 1978. On several acres owned by their family for many years. A grandfather, father and eleven-year-old boy, accompanied by the father's friend, Tom (his is the only name we learn), have come for an annual deer hunt. This is to be the boy's first chance to kill a buck. They spot a poacher on a hill. Sight him through their scopes. Encouraged to look through the scope of dad's rifle, the boy takes a careful sighting, then squeezes the trigger, instantly killing the unsuspecting man. What are the rules? Should the boy be turned in to the authorities? Should he himself be killed as an unfeeling abomination? Should the deed be covered up? Do they just walk away? Contending with this issue is the motive force in the story. But it is not the only thing going on here.

An idea is the worst thing that could happen to a writer, and as I’ve written these other books I’ve tried actually to not to know where I’m going. I think my ideas are very small and close the story off, instead I try to just focus on the landscape and the character with the problem and just find out what happens.

And yet some ideas manage to find their way in to this work. It is a good thing he eschewed this advice in favor of a bit of wisdom he received from a very accomplished writer.

I had a class with Grace Paley, and she said that every good story is at least two stories. And to me that’s the one unbreakable rule in writing – the only one. That if you just have an account of something, and it’s just an account – like in most people’s journals or blogs or whatever – it’s just sh*t. Like it will never work. I can’t think of a single good work ever that was just one thing – that was just an account of something. What we read for as readers is that second story – the subtext – and the interest of what story will come out from behind the other one. And so you can’t break that rule, as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen it done.

So what else is in here beyond the dramatic tension of a family trying to figure out what to do with their young murderer?

All of my books are about religion and our need for religion...I started as a religious studies major actually. One thing that links all of my works...is how philosophy can lead to brutality

Religion it is, but not just religion, human nature. Our narrator ponders whether killing is in our DNA.

We think of Cain as the one who killed his brother, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.

And later:

What we wanted was to run like this, to chase our prey. That was the point. What made us run was the joy and promise of killing.

The story is told mostly as an internal monologue by the boy, as both child and man. While we encounter him as an eleven year old boy, his story is related to us by the adult he will become. Positing a guess that the narrator is speaking from 2012, that makes the narrator 45 or so, just about the author's age. And yes, Vann is familiar with hunting. I didn’t feel what I was supposed to feel. I killed my first deer when I was eleven and I started missing them after that.

Religion here considers the pre-historical

The first thing to distinguish man…there’s not much we can do that is older and more human than sitting at a fire. ..It’s only in fire or water that we can find a corollary to felt mystery, a face to who we might be. But fire is the core immediate. In fire we never feel alone. Fire is our first god.

In the atavistic is there relief from civilization? Vann offers a contemplation of human nature, through the eyes of a monster who feels more connection with ancient hunter-gatherers than he does with any living human.

I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.

Is the unfeeling boy really a monster, merely immature, or the core of what it is to be human?

This image of Vann and his father was taken from The Guardian

The bible references here lean toward the Old Testament, and they are abundant. For those who, like me, enjoy trawling for literary references it might be wise to heed Chief Brody's advice to Quint, "you're gonna need a bigger boat." Cain comes in for frequent mention. I noted his name nine times, but there may be more. There is a host of further biblical references, including one in which the boy endures his own Calvary-like hike. Edenic references abound. When we read I slithered my way up that steep canyon, my belly in the dirt, and I refused to be left behind, we might be reminded of Genesis 3:14:

Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

There is a look at Jesus as being guilty of muddying the lines between life and death, the Ten Commandments as being directed against inherent human instinct, and the Eucharist as a way of remaining connected with our bestial nature. Consideration is given to the existence of the devil, and whether we need for there to be some dark agent in charge, anything in charge, because the existential chaos of being is beyond our ability to cope. What are the rules? Who made them and why? And what happens, what should happen, when we break them? There are also parts that reminded me of Dante's Inferno, as the boy consumes some particularly sulphurous water early on and the group has to pass through a daunting metal gate to enter the place in which the story takes place, among other clues.

This is a book that reaches a grasping claw into your stomach and shakes your guts around before yanking them out. Definitely not a book for those who are uncomfortable with the dark, the violent or the sad. But even with all the brimstone challenging your nostrils, you cannot help but detect the aroma of power and substance in Vann's harsh new novel. Once you calm down from the brutality of the story you will long consider the subjects it raises.

==============================INTERVIEW

David Vann very graciously took some time during a whirlwind book tour to answer some questions about Goat Mountain

W - There is a lot in Goat Mountain about the primitive, atavistic drives in human nature. When the boy thinks "Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end" was he expressing some primitive element within the human character, his personal pathology or something else?

I think it’s both. The book shows a descent that one particular mind takes (as in my novel Dirt, also, and my nonfiction book about a school shooting, Last Day On Earth) but I’m also trying to find shadows of something human and not just peculiar to an individual.

W - How much of what the boy considers, particularly as it relates to a compulsion to kill, reflects your view of human nature (Do you think we are killers by nature?) or was the boy making excuses for his aberrant urges?

I honestly can’t answer any of the big questions about human nature or even individuals. I wrote about my father’s suicide for ten years and yet his final moment still remains mysterious to me. With the school shooter, also, I could put together a narrative that made his final act possible but not inevitable. At the last moment, he and my father could have chosen differently. So I don’t think we’re determined. I think we can kill or not kill, and that many factors push us toward or away. In my fiction, everything is limited to a character’s view always, but I also have basically had or can imagine having all the thoughts and feelings of all my characters, in that they feel possible and believable to me.

W - In an interview you said your books are about "how philosophy can lead to brutality." But the boy in Goat Mountain appears to have the brutality in him inherently. Can it be that brutality leads to philosophy?

That quote was specifically about Dirt, about the dangers of the New Age movement. But it’s an interesting question, whether brutality is so abhorrent it always has to be covered in philosophy in order for the perpetrators to be able to go on telling the story of themselves. You’re right that the narrator thinks he had an inherent brutality as a boy, or perhaps it was the culture he grew up in (he says children will find whatever they’re born into natural). He’s disturbed by the fact that he didn’t feel bad after first killing, but then this changes with the buck and after that he no longer wants to kill, and he becomes fully human when he kills without wanting to. That’s what I find really disturbing about human killing, when it’s divorced from instinct and becomes abstract and we kill for philosophy or religion or politics or calculated risk.

W - There are several references to a time before god. For example "grandfather did not come from god. I’m sure of that. He came from something older" and "The darkness a great muscle tightening, filled with blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work" and "The act of killing might even be the act that creates god." The contemporary view of the Hebrew and Christian god is that there was no existence prior. If the boy believes in god how could he believe that there was a time before god?

There has to have been a time before god, because we made him, and it was quite a while before we came up with the idea of making gods. And antimatter is interesting as a concept, because it makes possible the existence of something before anything, the existence of what pulls existence into being. That’s what the grandfather in the book becomes, the thing that makes matter possible. That’s the closest I can imagine to god. Putting a face on god is as stupid as imagining aliens with a head and two arms and two legs. Our images of god are all simplistic like that, too dumb to be able to believe now. I began as a religious studies major and moved on to fiction, which investigates mystery more honestly.

W - Did you have Dante's Inferno in mind while writing Goat Mountain? If so, were the obstructions the four face getting into their land an echo of the challenges Dante and Virgil face entering the Inferno?

D - I have always wanted to write an inferno, since it’s the natural goal or end of tragedy, as you’ve quoted from me before, and I like Dante’s depiction and also the Venerable Bede’s and Blake’s and McCarthy’s, and there are always obstructions to entering and time it takes to recognize. The inferno is an externalization of a felt landscape within, the shape of our human badness, and the characters have to be put under pressure for a while before they can start to see a mirroring in the landscape. So the book becomes increasingly hellish, as Dirt did. It’s really only in the final section of the novel, when they reach the burn (an area that had had a fire recently), that the architecture of their hell is more fully realized. So they don’t enter gates really but are steadily building.

W - If Goat Mountain completes a holy trinity for you, will you be continuing with religion as a major focus in your next book? What is your next project?

My next novel, which is finished, is titled Bright Air Black and is the story of Medea, set 3,250 years ago, trying to stay close to the archaeological record. It attempts to be a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of her as a destroyer of kings who wants a world not ruled by men. I’ve been wanting to write something about her for 25 years, and I’m fascinated by the time period because it’s the time the Greeks imagine as the beginning and therefore can be considered the beginning of western culture and literature, but it’s actually the end of an older world, the fall of the bronze age and Hittite empire and decline of the Egyptians. Medea worships Hecate and also Nute, an Egyptian goddess, so there’s a continuity with focus on gods and landscape. But Goat Mountain is the end of my books that have family stories and places in the background.

W - Are there any plans afoot for films to be made of any of your books?

I’ve co-written the screenplay for Caribou Island with two-time academy award-winning director Bill Guttentag, and we’re trying now to raise funding for the film. And the French producers Haut Et Court (producers of Coco Avant Chanel and The Class) and French-Canadian director Daniel Grau will be making a film from Sukkwan Island, the novella in Legend of a Suicide.

W - You said in an interview with the Australian Writers Centre:
...what I teach my students is how to read, how to be better readers, and the importance of studying language and literature. And, I use a linguistics approach for talking about style, very specifically talking about what individual sentences do, writing a grammar for a text.
Have you ever considered putting your teaching ideas into a book?

I have thought about that, because I can’t find a textbook that does what I’d want it to do, but I’m focused for now on writing novels.

W - What books have you read in the last year that you would recommend?

I’ve been reading a lot of books, about a book per week, and my favorite this year was John L’Heureux’s new novel The Medici Boy. A great portrait of an artist, an historical thriller, and a depiction of the persecution of gay men in 15th century Florence, it’s a rich masterpiece that I recommend to everyone.

W - What do you do for fun?

Right now I’m on a six-week residency in Amsterdam with the Dutch Lit Foundation, and my wife and I are going to music and museums and restaurants and walking all around the city. Amsterdam is wonderful. We live half the year in New Zealand, where I do watersports almost every day (waterskiing, wakeboarding, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking) or mountain-biking or hiking. And we sail on the Turkish coast each summer. I also play congas and a bit of guitar and I like tequilas and rums.

Thanks, David, for your time and fascinating insights.


============================EXTRA STUFF

Vann's earlier novel, Caribou Island was my favorite book of 2011. And his 2008 Legend of a Suicide is compelling reading as well.

Lou Pendergrast's interview with DV
(Source for "All my books ar about religion" quote)

The author's website - among other things there is a large list of interviews

And his GR page

The Family History Is Grim, but He's Plotted a New Course - NY Times article on Vann from 2011
(Source for "an idea is the worst thing... quote)

University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing Blog interview with DV from October 10, 2011
(Source for Vann's mention of Grace Paley)

The White Review with Melissa Cox (online only)
(Source of the "I didn't feel what I was supposed to feel" quote)

Winter is coming.

Mitchell Zuckoff seems to be making a habit of looking into the travails of crash victims. His prior book, Lost in Shangri-la , followed three survivors of a WW II era plane crash in New Guinea. They faced the usual sorts of dangers, a step back to the Paleolithic, and a diverse assortment of possible ways to die; cannibals, elements of an enemy army, all sorts of predatory and/or poisonous critters, microscopic invaders that could ruin your day, and help see that it is your last. The whole world was watching and cheering for their safe return.

Reversing his orientation a bit this time Zuckoff, in his latest WW II opus, Frozen in Time, has substituted brutal cold, and a particularly unwelcoming landscape for those other hazards. I’ll take the cannibals every time. (with a nice Chianti) In this instance, the whole world was unaware of the events until well after they had come to a conclusion. Upping his game, Zuckoff deals not with a single crash, but with several, in a cascade.

I suggest that if you have a choice between death by the fire of a predatory jungle or the ice of an arctic wasteland, you would do well to choose the former. You’d have a better chance of making it. At least you would not have to worry so much that the ground on which you were standing might open up and swallow you whole, that you might lose body parts to the relentless cold of Arctic winter, that you might lose your mind waiting to be brought home, while blizzard-driven snow seeps into your shelter. And of course there is always the danger of becoming a GI-sicle for a prowling polar bear. There are survivors of this experience who lived through 148 days worth of cold days in hell.



There is a saying that bad things come in threes. It might have been nice if that had been the case in Greenland, in 1942. Greenland seems to have the same effect on powered vehicles as the Bermuda Triangle. There were at least a dozen crashes there in 1942. The trouble under scrutiny here began on November 5, when a military cargo plane, a C-53 Skytrooper, [above] the equivalent of a civilian DC-3 airliner, was returning to its base from Reykjavik after a “milk run” delivery of war materials. It was carrying a crew of five.

Shortly after the plane reached the southeast cost of Greenland, a location that defined the edge of nowhere, disaster struck: …the Skytrooper went down on the ice cap. By some accounts, the crash occurred when one of the plane’s two engines failed, but other reports were silent on why the C-53 experienced what the military called a “forced landing.” The official crash report declared the cause “unknown and no reason given in radio contacts.” A handwritten notation added, “100 percent undetermined.”

The air over Greenland was a busy locale in those days, with dozens of flights transporting men and materials to the war every day, then returning home to do it again. But Greenland is the largest non-continental island on Planet Earth so, even with a lot of planes searching, locating a downed aircraft was no simple task. Here are some comparisons:

California – 163,696 sq miles
Texas – 268,820 sq miles
Alaska – 663,696 sq miles
Greenland – 836,302 sq miles

In other words, big frackin’ haystack.



On November 9 a B17F, a “Flying Fortress” redirected from its mission in Germany to participate in the search, ran into trouble

When they reached the end of Koge Bay fjord, [the crew] saw that everything outside was the same frightening shade of whitish gray. They couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the ice cap began…When the true horizon disappears in the Arctic haze, a pilot might as well be blind. Pilots fortunate enough to survive the phenomenon describe the experience as “flying in milk.”

Or, ironically, the exact opposite of a milk run. It did not end well, and nine more servicemen were unwillingly grounded.



On November 29th, desperate to evacuate members of crews what had been stranded in an arctic wasteland for weeks, a pontooned Grumman seaplane know as a Duck, assigned to the Coast Guard ship Northland was making a second daring run, having already rescued some survivors.
It went back for more. But a storm blew in before the Duck could make it back to its base. The pilot was flying blind. The plane crashed into the ice. This is an image of the very plane, taking off. Not a lucky ducky.




There is more, but these are the big three bits of awfulness of this tale.

Frozen in Time tells the stories of how the crash survivors fared, how the rescue operations were planned and how those worked out, or didn’t. These stories are both fascinating and chilling. There are many examples told of MacGyver-like creativity on the ground among the crash-ees, among the rescue teams and, decades later, in an expedition looking to bring ’em home. This last is a parallel tale that is given much less than half the book. Not all the men and not all the planes made it back in 1942. The author becomes involved with people who are looking to find and repatriate the remains of the crash victims who did not survive. There are a lot of personalities in play here and a fair bit of politicking. It is not as interesting as the core survival tale, but it is informative. A recovery mission does indeed take place, in 2012, and the author is a full participant in that.

It’s tough enough finding a 60+ year old wreck that stands still, (not counting myself) but in Greenland the ice sheet is a very large moving target. Drop a flag on point A and when you return it could be at Points E, Q or X. And then there is the accumulation of more than half a century’s worth of compacted snow.

Imagine searching for a diamond chip buried deep beneath a frozen football field; your best tool is a straw what makes tiny holes into the ground, through which you peer down to see what’s below; if your holes miss by even a little, you’ll miss it; and you have a brief window to explore ten potential locations before being kicked off the field.

The story of the attempt at recovering remains is certainly interesting. It is no surprise that there are sundry parties at Department of Defense meetings who offer a chilly reception to the contractor who was looking to undertake the mission. We get to be a fly on the wall for a few of these.

But the meat of the story is the tales of survival, how these men (all the crash-ees were men) contended with such a hostile environment, what they did to create livable living spaces, how they coped with hunger, as well as cold, and fear. Some fared better than others. It is a bit frightening to learn that a plane landing on a glacier is in danger of getting frozen to it, like a warm tongue to a frozen pipe. There are uplifting items as well in this dark tale. You will learn about the “Short Snorters Club,” if you are not already a member, and the purpose of a Snublebus. You will also expand your vocabulary a tad with some arctic terms.

You will learn as well, about the dedication of the military to bringing home every reachable service member, and about some of the after-effects of the stranding experience on those who made it out.

Spencer’s family knew him as warm and funny, and they’d remember him as a man who bought toilet paper in bulk long before warehouse stores. When his younger daughter Carol Sue asked why, Spencer explained: “I have been without toilet paper,” he told her, “and I am never going to be without toilet paper again.”

Not Scarlett O’Hara perhaps, but a telling indication of the permanence of the crash experience on the survivors. Many found themselves with increased susceptibility to cold. Not everyone had the luxury of such discomfort. One poor bastard survived a crash in the B-17 only to succumb to another as he was being flown away from the bomber in a rescue plane.

There are several crews to keep track of and I think it would have been useful for there to have been a section listing them by vehicle, rather than, or in addition to the straight alphabetic list provided in an appendix. That said, the volume I read was an ARE so there may be a difference or two between what I saw and what is in the final hardcover edition. Just in case it is not provided there, I have tucked the crew list by craft under this spoiler notice.

C-53
Captain Homer McDowell, Jr
Lieutenant William Springer – co-pilot
Staff Sergeant Eugene Manahan
Corporal William Everett
Private Thurman Johannessen

A brand new B17F – radio sign PN9E
Pilot – Lt. Armand Monteverde
Co-pilot – Lt. Harry Spencer
Navigator – Lt William “Bill” O’Hara
Engineer – Private Paul Spina
Asst Engineer – Private Alexander “Al” Tucciarone
Radio Operator – Corporal Loren “Lolly” Howorth
Mechanic - Private Clarence Wedel 35,
Tech Sergeant Alfred “Clint” Best and
Staff Sergeant Lloyd Woody Puryear

The Grumman J2F-4, aka the Duck
John Pritchard
Benjamin Bottoms
Corporal Loren “Lolly” Howorth

You are on your own keeping track of other planes, ships and ground-based rescue teams that come into play in this story.

If you liked Lost in Shangri-La, it is a good bet you will find it worth the effort to search for a copy of Frozen in Time and bring it home. Read it in a warm place.

==============================LINKS

The author’s web page

The author’s FB page for this book

Harper Collins promo video

Video of the downhole camera. (2012) Uncomfortably similar to a medical scoping

A Coast Guard page on an earlier attempt to locate the Duck

North South Polar - Lou's site

List of crashes - 1942-44

====================================

Cross posted on my blog - all the intended images appear there

It happens from time to time that, as with people, the first impression one has of a book changes when one expends some energy, and looks more closely. I remember a girl who glowed like the sun to my heart when light shone through her hair. But I will spare you those details. I was struck with a similar sort of smitten on my first reading of Simon Van Booy’s The Illusion of Separateness, my reaction a Some Enchanted Evening experience. Wow, what a great book! Moving, poetic, artfully constructed. Curves in all the right places. Oh, sorry, yeah, the book. While I may move from point A to some other point over the course of this pondering, I should let you know up front that I end up still liking the book, so there will be no trash-talking, Dear John letters, or years of pain and regret here. Oh, damn, yeah, the book.

Remember the Oscar winning film Crash? Yeah, I think Brokeback should have won too, but the structure was one of separate tales intersecting. Ditto here, with the added element of time, like three-dimensional (or would that be four-dimensional?) chess. There are two primary players.

The book opens in 2010 with Martin, an elderly caretaker at the Starlight Retirement Home in Los Angeles. We learn in short order how he came to be with his adoptive parents in Paris, or at least some of the story. Then how he came to be in the USA. We see Martin learn something significant about his heritage. In 2010 he is awaiting the arrival of a very disfigured man.

That would be Hugo. His is the main story here. When we meet Hugo in 1981 he is a middle-aged maintenance man at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He is asked by a Nigerian immigrant neighbor to watch her seven-year-old son, Danny, and this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (We do follow Danny a bit later) Hugo does not really have friends. A sizeable chunk of his head was blown away during World War II in Paris, and people tend to keep their distance. He grows tomatoes to give away, and seems a decent sort. But he has very troubled dreams, or are they memories?

There are others. John is a US bomber pilot in WW II who crashes in France. Amelia is his blind grand-daughter whom we meet later.

The core connection here is between Martin and Hugo. There are other goings on, but their impact, IMHO, is either barely related or serves to manipulate events to a foregone conclusion. Still, the first time I read this book I was all choked up at the end. Hanky-worthy it was. And I will not try to take that away. This is a very, very moving story. You will feel, for sure. I will get to my concerns in a bit. But first some internals.

The story connects from character to character like a back-stitch. When one chapter ends, the last bit connects to the following chapter and a different character. And so on. There are plenty of parallels working here. Some characters feel hated, Hugo in different times for different reasons, Danny as a black child in Manchester. Memory and imagination get a lot of attention. Kindness is on display in diverse locales, as some who have feed those who do not. Artistry pops up multiple times too. John draws, as does Danny. Amelia works at an art museum. A briefly noted schoolboy in France also draws. Both Hugo and Martin work as maintenance men. Memory and imagination figure in this story as well, as does a contemplation of the eternal. Van Booy has a gift for language and it is no shock to learn that he publishes poetry as well. So there is plenty here to hang your feeling of content on. It is not only a story, but one that carries some greater weight. It also has its very own tone and cadence. One might associate clipped sentence structure with a writer like, say, Cormac McCarthy. Which carries certain dark implications. But that clippedness is used to very different purpose here.

Sometimes a priest would come and sit with me, talk to me, touch my hand. It felt nice. I wondered if His hand touches all, or if ours touch His. I remembered then, books in an attic. A small hand. Forbidden but they crawled through boxes anyway. Boxes of books and other boxes. Then I thought of the boy who brings cakes to the park for us. I wanted to boast to the priest. I felt proud to know someone like that, he knows Him, but I know Someone too. A child with the power to save us.

On the other hand, some of the sentiments expressed here sounded a bit Hallmarkian

Lives are staged from within

We’re all famous in our own hearts

What people think are their lives are merely its conditions. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know.

So what’s the gripe? The title of the book is The Illusion of Separateness and we are meant to see that we are all connected somehow. Six degrees or something. Which is fine. I am sure there are many ways in which the paths of our lives cross each others. Sometimes in meaningful ways, most times not. The gyrations Van Booy went through to link Martin and Hugo seemed to me, on my second reading, forced. Not their first encounter, but latter ones. As with some Spielberg films, you get the sense that the writer/director is leading you by the nose and maybe pulling too hard sometimes on the reins. It felt less like something was being revealed than that something was being constructed. And sometimes it did seem a bit on the goopy side. I know, I know, makes it sound bad. And I do not really mean for the overall take to be a huge negative. We are manipulated by writers all the time. It is part of their job. But sometimes the beams are not well enough hidden behind dry wall or plaster.

So, bottom line is that if you can suspend your disbelief for a short time (I really do mean a short time. This is a short book, and a very fast read.) you will be well-rewarded by an amazing and incredibly moving story, told in beautiful language.

Not so, with the girl. We did get together, but it ended badly, very badly. This book, however, will cause you no harm at all. Who knows? Maybe you will feel a connection and it really will be The One for you and not an illusion at all.

UPDATED - 6/20/13 - see link at bottom

HOW THE WEST SOUTHWEST WAS WON OVERRUN

On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom. For the eight thousand years between Folsom and the Spanish, no one knew what happened; there had been people here the whole time, but no one knew what they were called. Though right before the Spanish came there were the Mogollan and when the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudo…but whether they had wiped out the Mogollon or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apache. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanche. Who were in turn wiped out by the Americans.

A man, a life—it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

The Son is a magnificent family saga, covering two hundred years of Texan, but more significantly American history. Do not be fooled into thinking this is just a book about the Longhorn state. In the same way that Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk (also set in Texas) took a specific day to stand for an entire period, The Son takes a much larger swath but remains a stand-in for the nation as a whole. A ranching and oil dynasty rises in parallel with the USA rising as a global power.

Items covered include the settlement of Texas by Americans, Indian Wars (sometimes from the perspective of the Indians), The Civil War, WW I, WW II, the Depression. Economic shifts, rise of oil in international importance, significance of corruption in government, impact of increasing difficulty of drilling in the USA and rise of the Middle East as the world’s major source of oil, including some economic intrigue involving the use of insider information. The misuse of the land is raised, as is the complicated relationships between residents of Mexico, Texas, and some who traveled both sides of the border.

Meyer splits the task of looking at different times in American history among three members of the McCullough dynasty. Eli McCullough is the patriarch of this clan, born not on the Fourth of July, but on the Second of March, 1836, otherwise known as Texas Independence Day. He is, literally, the first Texan. (Well, as with the US Declaration of Independence, it was not completely Ok’d until the next day, but who’s counting?) and is as large a character as the state itself. We meet him when he is 100 years old, in 1936, looking back on his life and times, (a la Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man) and some bloody times they were. Early settlers into what was still Mexico overwhelming the locals with numbers and guns. Bloodshed aplenty as a new population displaces current residents, whether Mexican citizens or one of the many Indian tribes in the area. Eli is captured by a Comanche raiding party that kills and abuses most of his family. Later he becomes a Texas Ranger, as a substitute for criminal prosecution, making the Rangers remind one of the French Foreign Legion.

The second perspective is that of Jeanne Anne McCullough, Eli’s great-granddaughter. We meet her at age 86, injured, on the floor of her home in 2012, and are treated to her recollections as well. She is the primary female character here, a crusty old bird who is also shown in softer light earlier in her life. But while softer, Jeanne was still tough even as a kid, eager to cowgirl up, take on tasks usually reserved for men, and was unable and unwilling to adapt to the very different expectations of northeastern refinery. Adaptation, and recognizing change, seeing the truth in front of her, or not, figures in her journey. She will use ill-gotten knowledge for personal gain some day.

Finally there is Peter, born in 1870, one of Eli’s sons, and Jeanne’s grandfather. Peter is the superego to Eli’s id. He struggles with what he sees as excessive violence in which his father revels, and tries as best he can to act in a moral way. I found Peter’s character to be the most real of the three. Constantly having to manage moral as well as physical conflict. He is the romantic of the crew. You will love him.

We see all three come of age in very different ways. Eli is taken captive by raiding Comanches as a thirteen-year-old but over an extended period, relying on his courage and quick wits, he learns the rules and the ways of the tribe, coming to see many things from their perspective, and becomes a respected leader. We get to see him again, struggling to adapt to white society while still a teen. We see Jeanne wanting to be who she is but struggling against the bias of the age that preferred its women less hardy, adventurous and determined. We see Peter struggling to reconcile his family and community responsibilities as a young man with the cruelty of his father and the racist townspeople determined to drive out the other, who happen to be people he knows, respects and even loves.

There is enough carnage in The Son to make fans of Cormac McCarthy lock and load. One particularly brutal event is nothing less than anti-Mexican pogrom. And there is enough political inspection to make fans of Steinbeck perk up when Eli says things like:

let the records show that the better classes, the Austins and Houstons, were all content to remain citizens of Mexico so long as they could keep their land. Their descendants have waged wars of propaganda to clear their names and have them declared Founders of Texas. In truth it was only the men like my father, who had nothing, who pushed Texas into war.

Meyer also notes several instances in which the victors write history that is distinctly at variance with how events actually occurred.

There is a lot in here about how change sweeps in and the present is always in the path of a rampaging future, whether one is talking about wilderness being replaced by farming and ranching, working the land being replaced by digging through it, or one population displacing another. Meyer highlights a major theme of the book when the last Comanche chief is found to be carrying a copy of History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Meyer takes on some regional stereotypes as well.

There is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and was treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite them to join a campfire.

The Teggs-us Rangers of the mid 18th-century would seem to have had a lot more in common with The Dirty Dozen than they might have had with Seal Team Six. It is also clear that there has been little change in the fact that governments often want services but are not always eager to actually pay for them. The corruption of those in power seems constant across the time-scape here.

Wandering notions. We are always on the lookout for possible connections to the classics. There are some here but they do not seem central. The Eli of the bible lives to 98 and has a son named Phineas. This one lives to 100 and also has a son named Phineas. One might see in the Comanche raids here a link to the Philistine raids of the earlier time. Also Eli was cursed by God that his male descendants would not see old age. This is not entirely the case here, but the death rate is alarmingly high for this Eli’s progeny through the generations. There is a Ulysses in this story, who, like his namesake, goes on a quest. And Eli is referred to in this way as well, in Peter’s diaries:

I began to think how often he was home during my childhood (never), my mother making excuses for him. Did she forgive him that day, at the very end. I do not. She was always reading to us, trying to distract us; she gave us very little time to get bored, or to notice he was gone. Some children’s version of the Odyssey, my father being Odysseus. Him versus the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, Everett, being much older, off reading by himself. Later I found his journals, detailed drawings of brown-skinned girls without dresses….My assumption, as my mother told us that my father was like Odysseus, was that I was Telemachus…now it seems more likely I will turn out a Telegomus or some other lost child whose deeds were never recorded. And of course there are other flaws in the story as well.

But ultimately, I do not think there is a core classical reflection at work here, just a bit of condiment for the large meal at hand. In an interview with the LA Times, Meyer cites among influences Steinbeck, Joyce, Woolf and Scottish writer James Kelman. I am sure those with a greater familiarity with works by those authors will find many connections in The Son that my limited knowledge prevented me from seeing.

The Son is Meyer’s second novel, well, second published novel anyway. He wrote a couple before American Rust was published in 2009. He wrote that while in an MFA program in Austin. He has it in mind that this book, which was initially called American Son would form the second volume of a trilogy. It is even more impressive when one considers that Meyer was born in Baltimore, in a neighborhood known more for John Waters films than Indian wars and oil booms.

Family sagas can be fun reads, long, engaging and hopefully educational. They can, of course, be over-long, post too many characters to keep track of and become tedious. Sometimes, though, they exceed all expectations and levitate above the crowd in the genre due to the craft of their creation, the quality of their characters, and the depth of their historical portraits. Some, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth rise to the level of literature. The Son also rises.

The book was released on May 28, 2013

======================================LINKS

5/21/13 - Rave review from Ron Charles of the Washington Post

Author’s page

Wiki

2010 LA Times interview with Meyer

5/29/13
Meyer was interviewed yesterday on the WNYC Leonard Lopate program - definitely worth a listen

6/20/13 - Janet Maslin's NYTimes review, The Glory and Brutality of a Purebred Texan Clan

What can I tell her about mistakes, about the things we shouldn’t have done? They’re ours forever. We carry them just under our skin, the scars of our living.

Ripped from the headlines. Lee Martin came across an article in his wife's hometown newspaper about a man who had made his pooch a doghouse that looked like a sailboat, and wondered what sort of person might do that. That was the beginning. The man he imagines is Sam Brady, 65, closeted, lonely living in the town of Mount Gilead. In the bible, Gilead refers to testimony or witness, so someone is gonna be revealing something.

Sam has been carrying a secret inside since 1955. It has to do with the death of his boyhood friend, Dewey Finn. Whatever the surrounding events, it is Sam's journey from secrecy to confession that is at the core of this novel. Turns out Sam is not the only one with a secret in this town.

Brady's life is turned upside down with the discovery of a teenage girl in his yard. Maddie is the granddaughter of Sam's next-door neighbor. Arthur is retired Navy and enjoys peppering his speech with nautical references. He is a widower or recent vintage and his loneliness is palpable. He inserts himself into Sam's life, for good or ill. One good is his input into Sam's plan to build a new doghouse for his beloved basset, Stump. A simple doghouse becomes more of an Arc, and the subject of considerable intrest and admiration. So Sam, having kept mostly to himself most of his life now has not only a new buddy in Arthur, an affection for the lost Maddie,

I don’t know anything about his granddaughter, only that she was nice to Stump and he seemed to take to her, and. Although it surprised me to find her in my side yard, it wasn’t at all an unsettling surprise; it was, if anything, a little wrinkle I didn’t mind. A little zest, Vera would say. A little shazam to give the blah-blah-blah a kick.

strangers stopping by to look at the structure and a reporter from a local paper wanting to write a human interest story about it and about Sam. The reporter is interested in more than the doghouse though, and Sam becomes alarmed that his secret is in danger of being exposed. The world pokes into his life in another way when he sees a report on CNN about a hostage crisis, one in which his older brother, Cal, out of touch for many, many years, is a participant. It is more than merely human company that intrudes on Sam's life. Danger arrives along with his brother.

This book was my introduction to the writing of Lee Martin. He was a Pulitzer finalist for his novel The Bright Forever in 2006, so one makes certain presumptions. I found some of those presumptions to be well-founded and some not so much. The best element of the book was the gentle portrayal of Sam and his cohorts. There is nothing flashy here, no neon in the writing. It is all
Midwestern understatement, contained, controlled, and effective. I was reminded of the writing of Kent Haruf, who also casts his gaze on the lives of some older sorts being upended by the presence of the young. You will definitely feel for Martin's characters. They are so lovingly portrayed. Martin peppers his tale with bits of quirky charm that add to this warmth. The doghouse, of course, Sam dressing his dog in a silly outfit, a few boys skating by Sam's and engaging in goofy banter. There is a lot here about needing, seeking and finding love in various ways.

There is also a layer of danger and violence that mirrors the guilt felt by several of the main characters, entailing content on anti-government militia sorts. I found some elements of this less believable. And there is an execution element that I thought to be just too much. In a high-danger situation, a character interrupts by sleepwalking through. I found this to be not credible, and it disturbed the flow of the story. There were also a few too many coincidences for comfort.

There is considerable content in River of Heaven. Can the entirety of our lives be determined by the choices we make as young people? Does confessing our sins help or just make matters worse?

River of Heaven is a lovely book, with plenty of well-crafted characters, warm-hearted content, some sorrow, some joy and a bit of fun to recommend it, but the flaws kept it from being a top-notch read for me.

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (Chapter 5 – Frankenstein)

Roseanne Montillo has dug up information about diverse real-world elements that influenced Mary Shelley in the creation of her seminal novel Frankenstein, joined the parts into a cohesive whole and energized them with intelligence, insight and wit, breathing new life into our appreciation of that great tale. She shows also the monster-rich environment that influenced MS, a world that was very well populated with mad scientists, mythical beasts, grave robbers, an actual evil stepmother, and people close to her who had monstrous leanings of their own, long before she added her creation to the list.

Your first experience of Frankenstein probably looked like this.


Boris Karloff’s interpretation of the never-named “wretched creature” of the novel, gave him literal baby-steps and a child-like yearning for love and acceptance. Dramatizations of the character that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote rarely show him possessing the sort of intellectual curiosity and power with which she imbued him. Hollywood is definitely good at keeping things simple and it did so here. Most people think of Frankenstein’s monster as a big, inarticulate lug, who got a raw deal out of life the second time around and succumbed to an angry, pitchfork and torch-wielding mob, like two guys carrying a gay-pride banner at a Tea Party convention. It was not quite that way in the book.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

The monster’s plea to his creator shows him to be something other than the grunting fiend of cinema, more of an articulate fiend.

I heartily recommend reading the core material here, before, during or after you take on Montillo’s exposition. In a way, it is like putting on special glasses and seeing the 3d contours of an image when all that one had perceived previously was strictly two dimensional. Or watching a pop-up videos version of a familiar song. You will learn a lot reading Montillo’s book.

The book tells two tales. The first is Mary Shelley’s personal history. The second is a portrait of the world in which she grew up, the external influences on her, and how they contributed elements to her novel. There is, obviously, overlap.

2010 painting of the young Mary by Esao Andrews


Mary Godwin was the daughter of William Godwin, a leading writer and philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), an early manifesto on gender equality. Clearly Mary got pretty high-end brain DNA from both parents. Unfortunately, Mary’s mother died ten days after introducing her to the world.

Mary’s makers


Mary grew up in an intellectually lively environment. As dad was a big cheese in the intellectual world, gatherings at the Godwin manse tended toward the illustrious. Thomas Paine read from his famous work in her home, as did many luminaries of the time, including a well-opiated Coleridge, who read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner while young Mary secretly listened in. This piece of that poem found its way into that little girl’s book.

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Dad remarried four years after his wife died, to Mary Jane Clairmont. Mary’s new stepmother was straight from central casting for any of several tales by the Brothers Grimm. One result of this, some years on, was an attempt to keep Mary away from her father after she hit adolescence, and was a threat to absorb too much of daddy’s attention. MJ saw to it that Mary was banished for a stretch to a distant seaport, residing with a family that was only barely among Godwin’s friends. Mary had opportunities while there to hear many a fish story from local seamen.

Her relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley began when she was in her mid-teens. Shelley was married at the time, which was awkward, but that did not prevent the young couple from cementing their relationship. Shelley found Mary to be a true intellectual equal, which more than made up for her average looks. Scandal pursued them, but the young couple seemed not to care. A circle formed, Mary, Shelley, Mary’s half-sister Claire, who was smitten with PBS, and later, Lord Byron. It got complicated. There are bits from Mary’s relationships that contributed material to the book.

Shelley and Byron


As was common at the time, artists and scientists were not the divided clans they tend to be today. The greatest scientists of the age wrote poetry. And Shelley was renowned at his college for the many dangerous experiments he had running in his room. Shelley taught Mary, who had been home-schooled, a lot about science. They had several children together, only one of whom survived. It may be that one element in her story was a desire to bring back a dead child.

Montillo take us through the travels of the pair, and later the group, showing the places they stayed, the routes they took, their stops along the way and the stories Mary is likely to have accumulated at various locations on their journey. Yes, there really was a guy named Frankenstein. Another local alchemist sort had been pursued by angry townspeople after some imagined outrage.

Professor Montillo also offers considerable history and color of the time. The era in which Mary Godwin grew up was the Enlightenment. Science, unchained from the restrictions of superstition, was on the move.

The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (from Chapter 3 of Frankenstein)

Resurrectionists


Daring scientific experiments were being performed across Europe. There were things in the air at that time that had never been wafting about before. For example, there was a fellow named Galvani, who not only developed a particularly useful battery, but wanted to use his invention to re-animate the newly dead. In fact there was a lot of medical training at the time that required a steady supply of fresh material. As England restricted access to the needed product to the newly executed, that created a considerable market for materials from other sources, giving rise to the growth of so-called Resurrectionists, although flesh-miners might have been a more fitting term. Competition became pretty steep among gangs of grave robbers. The trade was so lucrative that some of the nearly departed were sped on their way by greedy practitioners.

Dissections were often open to the public


Also a lot of this medical work for which the sack-‘em-up-men labored so lustily was done in public fora. Popular entertainment was different in form from what we have today, but I expect the content is particularly consistent. Anatomists vivisected bodies in front of audiences of medical students and the public. Think of it as a monstrous live theater version of CSI. Public hangings were major social events, attended by large throngs ever eager to revel in the misfortune of others, or an early version of reality TV. And of course there is always room to amp up the excitement level, particularly when some of the edgier medical sorts had LARGE ambitions. Giovanni Aldini, nephew to Galvani, performed a particularly gruesome re-animation attempt so shocking that Galvani ultimately had to find some other way of making a living. It does, however, bear remembering that every time the paddles are applied and a doctor yells “Clear” we have mad scientists like Aldini to thank for the many cardiac patients who have been, literally, reanimated by the application of electricity. It’s enough to make you want to scream “It’s Alive!“



Montillo also goes into some of the history of alchemy, as Mary makes plentiful reference to practitioners of that art in her book. There is a particularly curious description of how to create a homunculus. (no mention of blond hair and a tan ) Montillo also brings in the obvious connection between Mary’s creation and folkloric notions of golems.

One of the fun bits in the book is a description of a London emporium that sought to capitalize on the growing popular interest in the possible uses of electricity. The Celestial Bed and the Temple of Health was begun by a medical quack interested in the potential benefits of electric stimulation. But the place cloaked its true nature under the guise of providing medical care. I suppose The Celestial Bed did offer plenty of sparks, but the heavenly electricity generated within its walls was produced at least as much by its patrons as by galvanic devices.

The greatest benefit of The Lady and her Monsters is that it lays out many of the elements that Mary was or might have been exposed to in her few years on earth before she took pen in hand to write her contribution to a group ghost-story contest. There is indeed some interesting material offered on Mary’s life after the 1818 publication, most particularly her decision, when revising some years later, to alter Victor’s mode from Promethean arrogance to tool of the gods, reflecting her own denial of responsibility for the events of her life. But other material having to do with the time after publication was not as interesting as that concerning events that inspired the book. Her subsequent life was not a happy one, and I am not sure how much we gain by learning that.

Nevertheless, The Lady and her Monsters is a delightful book, both informative and entertaining. It does a high-voltage job of bringing the story of how Mary made her monster to life.

==============================EXTRA PARTS

This ">very nice bio of Mary Shelley, from The Poetry Foundation, has considerable information about her other works.

A nifty web-site on Resurrectionists. Can you dig it?

Frankie for free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg

I happened on this book in an unusual way. I was visiting my wife at her office in Harper Collins, and while waiting for her to complete this or that task, I looked around for items of interest. My eyes alit on this one. "Looks like weird fun," said I. Many of the books I review are selected by my esteemed wife dashing in the door and exclaiming, "you've gotta read this!" Or one or the other of us catches an interesting TV interview with an author and picks the book up at Barnes and Noble (no, not Amazon, NEVER Amazon, which seeks to devour publishers like the one that employs my wife, not to mention most available book-reviewer sites). But this was more of a found object. And so, over a period of a couple weeks, I read this thing, bits at a time. When I had finally finished Our Occulted History I felt like I had just gotten off a roller coaster designed by a person with no inner ear. I have had diverse reactions to this thing, and it should come as no surprise that the first line that popped into my head while reading the book was: "It's one thing to maintain an open mind, but maybe not so good to have one so porous it retains nothing of value. Jim Marrs' brain is so filled with empty space it is unlikely that even a virus could find enough substance to which to attach itself. He puts the pseudo in pseudo-science." Which may be the tiniest bit harsh. But I do think there is something going on here that bears some looking into.



Ok, how many of you have ever been exposed to marijuana? Let's have a show of hands. You know what I mean by exposed. Don't get cute. And puh-leez, don't pretend you never inhaled. Looking out over the group, I can see that almost every hand is raised, which means we have some liars out there. Yeah, my hand is up as well. From the tender age of fifteen. And yet here we stand sit, not a heroine addict, not a crack addict, not an alcoholic, and I have never been any of those, although I was addicted to cigarettes for many years. While I do not see much menace in it, I do not smoke pot any more. No moral high ground here. The stuff, while admittedly a nifty enhancement to Hendrix, Santana and a host of other musical artists, particularly when one ingests music via headphones, puts me to sleep. For me, pot, hash and some other things I will not go into, proclaimed unacceptable by the forces of righteousness, whether or not those proclaimers were peddling cigarettes, alcohol or equally addictive food products, were, for me, gateways to bedtime. I freely admit that I have not partaken since the 80s, and even then it was a rare event. But I do concede that there are situations within which the use of pot, once normalized, might make it easier for one to consider other products that are less benign.

So, let's steer this vehicle back onto the actual roadway. What has this got to do with Jim Marrs? I'll tell you. There are all sorts of gateway drugs in the world. Not all will have a pharmacological impact, and not all, as with weed, will necessarily pave a pathway to perdition. Our next example is one of those. And again, it is one I have sampled, probably even more than pot. Alien visitation. No, no anal probes, abductions or anything of an extreme sort. Never met, saw or conversed with an alien. (My personal eX-files have to do with a very Earth-based failed marriage) But I have tasted the out-of-this-world product and I like it. I have read my share of UFO books over the years. Although I am not a regular viewer, I have seen more than one or two episodes of the pseudo-scientific eye-roller Ancient Aliens. I mention this not to say that I buy their particular line of BS, but to note my starting position re alien visitation, namely that the subject matter still draws me. I have seen some freaky petroglyphs, in Hawaii, in Chichen Itza, the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, in the American southwest. And despite Don Henley's claim that They're not here and they're not coming, I am inclined to believe that they have at least stopped by for a look-see and were spotted by the locals, actually a lot of locals, all across the planet, so maybe it was less of a look-see than a "whoa-ho, what have we here? Let's check this place out" sort of thing. This requires no more suspension of disbelief than some of our more popular religions. And sustaining such notions does not lead to a suspension of intellectual processing. But the potential exists for this benign belief, given the proper (on in this case improper) influence, to be inflated into something alarming.



Just as a druggie friend can push one beyond a little weed into a much darker place, so people like Jim Marrs can take an interesting notion and, through their powers of story-telling, lead the gullible to a vulnerable place. I suspect that Jim Marrs is a lunatic. I fear that he may be a con-man. I can see that he applies the fuzziest of logic in looking for support for his theses. It is obvious that he lives in an echo chamber inhabited by other paranoids and conspiracy theorists and that they reinforce and embolden each other to the point where, as in the right-wing bubble, opposing opinions are routinely disregarded, and whatever theories are being floated by the elect are accepted as revealed truth. This is where the primary problem lies. Step inside the bubble and, like a spacecraft air-lock, eliminate from one's intake any competing notions. I also know that Jim Marrs is a gifted story-teller. However, you might need a pair of these

and one of these

to get through the entire book safely.

It is an amazing story he has to tell. Marrs claims that a close look at ancient literature from across our world, particularly from Sumer, reveals not only that aliens have visited our lovely planet, but that, in order to more effectively mine gold, they modified the genetic makeup of the local hominid population to make the homo sap we are today to create a usable labor force. It gets weirder, really. He also posits a magical, and I do mean magical, form of gold that has unnatural properties, like an anti-gravity capacity and maybe even a multi-dimensional one. Guess what was inside the Arc of the Covenant?

Funny powder, and not the sort they serve at after-parties on Oscars night. Ok, people. Time to break out your tinfoil hats. But let's make sure they are tinfoil tri-corner hats. (Sorry, I was unable to come up with a corresponding image) Marrs has a political agenda as well. On his web-site, Jimmarrs.com, I found the following:

Seeing how Paul and Palin are now candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the corporatists would love to weaken, if not stop, the so-called Libertarian Tea Party influence on the future direction of the Republican Party. [I guess Paul and Palin are not right-wing enough for Marrs] Live and learn and don't fall prey to revisionism, usurpation and political/media manipulation.

He makes statements that have the sound of reason, but lack the substance. Here is an example.

ìIn his 2010 book, Babylon's Banksters, Joseph P. Farrell, as a doctoral graduate of Pembroke College Oxford, who had unparalleled access to old books and manuscripts in Oxford University's library, said his thesis was both simple to state but difficult to understand. "Since ancient times and with more or less uninterrupted constancy, there has existed an international money power which seeks by a variety of means including fraud, deception, assassination and war to usurp the money- and credit-creating power of various states it has sought to dominate" (implying, of course, that if you find Farrell's case unconvincing it is because you just don't understand it. Yeah, I've heard that argument before).

What does unparalleled access mean? Is there a double-secret code that Dean Wormer gave Farrell that allowed him access to materials mere mortals were not permitted to see? Who says his access was unparalleled? Any fact-checking done on this? If there was, Marrs isn't telling. Are we to presume (yes, we are) that having this unparalleled access means that the researcher in question therefore has superior interpretive powers, and was thus able to spot, and interpret this secret info, and incorporate the gained knowledge into his thesis? But what that information might have been we are not told. It goes on. Marrs does not mention that among this great scholar's publications are Roswell and the Reich and Genes, Giants, Monsters and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda. Be sure to secure the hatch to the bubble after you step inside.

I could make a list of the outlandish claims that this guy makes, but it would make my usual, wordy reviews seem like headlines. There is a debating technique favored on the right known as Gish Gallop. It entails spewing so much bullshit in a small amount of time that one's opponent winds up spending all his or her time refuting the bullshit and does not get to make their own case. Marrs' work has that feel. Replay Romney in the first debate for a taste, if you like. And Marrs seems like such a down-home folksy sort that one might be tempted to indulge in a few puffs. After all, even in his political attire, there are positions he holds that are pretty reasonable. But if you toke down, or snort up too much, you drift past the amber fields of reasonableness, and ascend until you are off in la-la-land and the world is suddenly really out to get you; 9/11 was an Israeli plot; remote viewing psychics in the US Army watched as aliens shot down Russian probes nearing Mars; The Rothschilds (translation: Jews) control the world's economic apparatus. It was JFKs driver who killed him. And so on. So make sure you load up on personal weapons, and for sure bring along that special hat, because you never know when they might be listening in. I'll give you an example of Marrs Gish-Galloping later.

Back to the book. So, next step. If they came here, why did they come? Was it to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before? Columbus did not sail the ocean blue to check out the Caribbean beaches. He had a concrete, business purpose in mind. Marrs would have us believe that they, a race he calls the Anunnaki, from Sumer legends, came to earth, or at least stuck around on Earth, for the gold. I picture alien spouses asking star-traveler hubby, "So, Gorp, what did you bring me this time? Not another carnivorous flower, Geez!" To which Gorp smiles and hands over vast quantities of the shiny stuff. Lady Gorp blushes, throws her several arms around her main guy and exclaims, "This place is a keeper, Sweetie. When are you going back?"



Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For instance, in anthropology, just because we do not have rock (or in this case bone) solid examples of each and every step along a path of natural selection, that does not mean that those steps did not take place. Scientists are constantly finding previously undiscovered bones, unthought of species. Here is one that came to my attention just in the time since I began with Marrs' book. Mr Marrs prefers to fill our knowledge gaps with notions of alien interference. And he is not above the odd lie to bolster his case.

Although Darwin never explicitly stated that man descended from the ape, his devotees advocated that conclusion.

Actually they did not. Apes and humans are evolved from prior species, not from each other and it was only the opponents of Darwinism who characterized his work as claiming humans descended from apes. Erect straw man. Light match. And he continues,

Even after a hundred years of effort, no one has been able to fully substantiate Darwin's theories through documented fossil exhibits.

Um, well, actually yes they have. It is frequently the case that in any large chunk of science there will be specific steps from, say, point D to point F in a full alphabetic range, for which there is not 100% complete fossil evidence. It is the nature of science to extrapolate from available information. The absence of specific elements in the range of every possible piece of fossil evidence is not evidence that the missing bits do not exist. For a guy who is positing that humans were designed by an alien race, he seems unusually tetchy about insisting that every possible link be found in the theory that scientists across the planet accept as sound. But if Marrs can believe what he wants, why not the rest of us? I am not completely convinced that Jim Marrs is not the product of an alien huckster having bred with a cactus to produce him, I am still waiting for him to disprove that rumor, and he has never denied his questionable, and possibly prickly parentage.

They wanted our gold, so they fiddled with our (homo neanderthal, or maybe homo erectus) DNA to produce a work force trainable enough to to work the mines. It gets better. You may have heard the word Nefilim, basically angel-human hybrids. In the hands of Jim Marrs, it looks like our eight-foot-tall visitors liked a little, very little, relatively, something on the side. I will leave aside all the obvious penis jokes here, although it does pain me to do so. Tall, blue and handsome + human female = the Jim Marrs special, alien/human hybrid children, the Nefillim. Also, the inspiration for a classic film, well maybe not exactly a classic.



If you have not yet summoned men in white suits with large nets, here is where the bat really meets the shit. Marrs goes on and feeds into other wing nut paranoid fantasies about a core of thirty-three families (guess what sort of DNA they are protecting) who rule the planet, while, of course, suppressing the discovery of the proof of our alien ancestry. (We wouldn't want the baby to know who gran really is, would we, not until he is old enough to be able to handle the shock, and then, naturally, dominate his personal section of the planet) Of course what he counts as evidence has not convinced real scientists, and is unlikely to do so.

So what Jim Marrs has done, and has been doing for some time, is to take the nifty notion that they were here at some point in human history and lace it with his own rich blend of opiated Tea Party paranoid delusion, fusing the two. Smoking at this pipe keeps ya coming back, if, that is, you buy in. And here is one final item, before a bit of a detour. He talks a fair bit in his book about a magical substance referred to as powdered gold. Well, it turns out that there are entities more than willing to sell this stuff to the gullible. I have no specific knowledge that Marrs has a financial stake in any of these companies, but let's just say I have my suspicions.

Not only is he proselytizing stealth political messages in his book, but it becomes much more overt when he lectures. I am separating this out from the already lengthy body of this review, tucking it under a spoiler label. There is enough detail involved that only those who are interested would want to spend the time to read it. It consists of a series of political claims Marrs makes in a lecture and how his claims are lacking in foundation.

MARRS ATTACKS

Here is a quote from Jim Marrs: Hidden History Part 1, a lecture you can find on Youtube. This lecture was posted on February 7, 2012.

…global warming, which is turning out largely to be a hoax, because they fudged all the documents…they simply…but there is environmental change and there is a warming. Go outside. You can figure that one out. But, it's not us. It is solar system wide. Something is happening solar-system wide. The outer planets are becoming more luminescent. The ice, the polar caps on Mars are melting. The ice on the moons of Jupiter, they seem to be melting. So, whatever's happening, it's not your SUV, no matter what Al Gore says. By the way Al Gore happens to have been one of the creators of the carbon tax credit company, corporation, out of Chicago, which is gonna handle all the carbon taxes that we're all gonna have to pay, and manage the sale and trade and exchange of these carbon tax credits, which means that they'll rake in billions and billions of dollars. So, gee, Al, maybe you had an ulterior motive in pushing this global warming idea.

So we will play Gish Gallop with Marrs here, as time is not much of a factor, but the methodology he uses should be illustrative of the tactic. Throw out enough lies and your opposition will have to spend all their time refuting them, while you move on to more lies. So, here goes.

Well, here I thought I was going. But a funny thing happened on the way to posting the review. Turns out that with this section included I have actually exceeded the maximum size for a review. Thanks to a recommendation from Traveller, I have moved the entire section (I know, you're dying to see it. Go ahead, admit it) to comment #6. Sorry. Yeah, I know. I do tend to drone on sometimes. Sheesh!


If you are ok with just reading this as an entertainment, Our Occluded History delivers the goods. It offers a wild, entertaining, and occasionally thought-provoking tale. But if it strikes deeper in you than that, all I can say is "step away from the hookah."


Posted 3/30/13