Author: sarahwp

BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

This novel begins with a bizarre dedication:

To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 – Mother – Twenty-Nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood

Ellroy’s mother was murdered when he was ten, and the perpetrator was never caught. Apparently, for much of his early life he confused his feelings about this murder with another sensational case, the torture and killing of a woman called Elizabeth Short, whom the press nicknamed the Black Dahlia.

This novel tells the story of two fictional detectives’ attempts to find Ms. Short’s murderer. Given the biographical background, you’d think it would be a deeply felt examination of violence, and how it affects us. Instead, it is a straightforward and enthusiastic police procedural.

With very enjoyable energy and verve Ellroy manages to include just about every single element of any detective formula you can think of, into just this single story. It’s sort of an incredible feat. Thus we have:

-rookie who learns quick
-sexual torture of lithe young woman (I always need more of that!)
-partners who fight, but end up best friends
-detective who gets too personally involved in the case
-dirty informants
-room with meathooks
-surrendering your badge and gun, because you are a loose cannon!
-great sex with people we hardly know
-detective eventually has to face killer on his own
-wait! that wasn’t the real killer! stupid twist!

While I appreciate that this formula is almost always misogynist to some degree, BLACK DAHLIA really distinguishes itself in this department. The torture of the young lady is described with a degree of lascivious enjoyment that made me uncomfortable, and I found it deeply creepy when the main detective eventually started needing to imagine that every woman he had sex with was Ms Short.

That said, I quite enjoyed this formulaic and misogynist book. It has a strong and compelling, if stupid plot, which kept me turning pages. In addition, the writing style is endlessly creative and quite unusual, being a sort of pastiche of period slang. The dedication gives you a flavour of it, but try this:

Russ straightened the knot in his necktie; I clammed up. Sally jabbed a finger at the couch. “Let’s do this quicksville. Rehashing old grief is against my religion”

He also routinely refers to rapists as ‘rape-os’.

I don’t even know how to respond to that.

Top tip: People are apparently still obsessed with the Black Dahlia case today, which makes a Google search – specially an image search – something to be avoided. I have put a respectful picture of the lady up here.

I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!) by Stephen Colbert

I AM AMERICA continues my unexpectedly in-depth exploration of books written by American television comedians.

“I have so many opinions,” Colbert tells us in his introduction, “ that I have overwhelmed my ability to document myself.” Thus this book, which purports to be a series of essays expounding his views on major issues in American life.

It’s a very fun, if silly and forgettable little book.

On the Elderly:

Make no bones about it, old people are tough. Many of them grew up having to scrap for every penny. They made shoes out of newspaper and twine, and subsisted on a thin stew of newspaper and twine. Sometimes they had to go without shoes and stew altogether so that there would be enough newspaper and twine to treat the baby’s Scarlet Fever.

On Religion:

Some are put off by the labyrinthine structure of Catholic dogma, but many of its rituals are quite beautiful, and not just when edited together as a tense, poetic counterpoint to brutal violence in Mafia films.

And

Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: if you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.

On Science:

Reality has a well-known liberal bias. And who can you depend on to kowtow to reality like it’s the only game in town? Scientists. They do it religiously. With their fanatical devotion, scientists are no better than cult members – only difference is that they put their blind faith in empirical observation instead of in a drifter who marries 14 year-olds and declares himself the reincarnation of Ramses II.

So, funny and stupid. Because I like to bring you the best in blog accuracy, I often Wikipedia authors before I blog them. I know: what extensive research! Anyway, as a rather sad side point, I learn that Stephen Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he was ten. Poor man. It’s an unsettling thing, because one doesn’t think of him as a real person, but as a television character.

If you read this blog regularly you will be able to figure out without too much trouble that this is one of my night books – books I read when I can’t sleep. I’m finding not sleeping frees up an incredible amount of time. I should probably stop wasting it reading silly books and get focused on world domination.

Blog Trivia! Stephen Colbert got his big TV break with Amy Sedaris, the sister of David Sedaris, who I read in bed a lot too. My night books are all connected. I am sure this is a sign! Possibly a sign that comedians tend to work together.

REUNION by Alan Lightman

This short novel tells the story of a professor of English who on impulse decides to attend this thirty year college reunion. In the best tradition of college reunions, all his former classmates seem to be old, fat, and miserable, as indeed he is himself. He wonders into an empty room, and remembers his first love, who was a ballerina named Juliana. This memory sequence abruptly and unexpectedly then consumes the whole rest of the book.

If you think it’d be difficult to keep a flashback going over two hundred pages, you’d be right, but Mr Lightman struggles valiantly.

The memory is a compelling story: as a student he fell madly in love with this Juliana, who was obsessed with ballet. She got pregnant, and he desperately wanted her to keep the baby, despite the fact that this would likely ruin her career. She disappeared, and he never saw her again.

Most interesting to me in this book was Lightman’s concept of life as a river, which can split suddenly. You meet a beautiful girl in a park, for example, and do or do not take her number; and that’s a split. It could be your life ought to have changed, but you were so used to the path you were already on that you did even notice that the river had branched until you were too far downstream to go back. A very worrying and very probably accurate picture of the choices we make.

We’ve talked before in this blog (here) about how I really can’t bear a certain brand of contemporary literary fiction, which tends to involve excessive use of the present tense, a lot of prepositions, and the ending of every paragraph on a profound, or – just as bad – a poetic note. Curiously, this kind of fiction seems to be dominated by men, and Mr Lightman unfortunately undeniably falls most horribly into this category. I’ll let him speak for himself:

The four ballerinas move across the floor like a fluttering of wings, back and forth, around and around, changing shape again and again. At times they became a sequence of snowflakes. At times they are caged birds, beating for freedom. Angles and curves. Solids and lace. Filigrees of light trickling through trees. His heart cannot hold all the images and sounds.

In response, I can only say: barf.

ARE YOU THERE VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA by Chelsea Handler

As previously mentioned on this blog, I am now dividing my reading between day books and night books. Day books are so named, you will be astonished to learn, because I read them during the day. Night books are chosen to keep me company when I can’t sleep, and are generally cheerful and silly.

ARE YOU THERE VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA, seemed to fit the bill as a night book, being a loosely autobiographical collection of comic short stories, written by a quite successful female American comedian. I always want to support women in comedy, as it’s such a misogynist field, with the two available roles for women (virgin and whore) providing not much space to be funny in.

Unfortunately the book also didn’t have much space for funny. It badly needed an editor, being sloppily and repetitively written. It also seriously needed some fresh ideas. There is an entire story about midgets. You’d think every joke that could be made in that area had already been made, and you’d be right, but this didn’t stop this writer. There’s also a lot of stuff about vibrators, which while less overdone that midgets is hardly comedy gold.

I do like the title, based on the young adult classic ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET by Judy Blume. But that’s about it.

BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

This is how Sinclair Lewis describes our central character, Babbitt, who, when the book opens, believes he is happy. He does what everyone else does, thinks what everyone else thinks, and is dedicated to material wealth and the myth of the white picket fence.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete sewage system.

His best friend from university, Paul Riesling is deeply unhappy, and when they go on holiday together to Maine, Babbitt begins to question his life. Says Paul:

But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun

Paul eventually shoots and wounds his wife, and this affront to accepted behaviour jerks Babbitt out of his stupor. He attempts to make some resistance to the norms of his world, and finds himself slowly excluded from that world. He is immediately unhappy. His wife develops acute appendicitus, and in sympathy his bourgeois circle opens a little to let him back in. He leaps back into their waiting arms, glad his revolution is over.

I love this:

Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves

There is some redemption in the end, through these very children, because the book ends with Babbitt supporting his son against all their family in choosing to get married young, and become a mechanic, rather follow the traditional route of university and a showy wife.

It’s now a commonplace that the accouterments of late capitalism – cars, shops, housing developments – cannot make you happy. What is interesting about this book, written as it is at the very birth of this kind of capitalism, is to see the very birth of this critique – when the idea that money will not make you happy was still new, and unusual. He writes about it terribly seriously, and it’s very sweet, rather like having a child show you how to ride a bike.

VS Naipaul: I have a lot of issues

You may have heard that poor old VS Naipaul has embarrassed himself rather, once again. He claims that no female writer is as good as he is, not even Jane Austen.

Now, let’s leave the misogyny aside for a second, and just be kind of amazed that he can possibly think he is that good a writer. I mean, I loved A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, but let’s be serious.

He also cliams that within a few paragraphs he can tell if something is written by a man or a woman, and the Guardian has created a brilliant quiz so you can see if you can too. Here it is – try it, it’s fun. I got 7/10.

I want be restrained and end the post there, not engaging in any ad hominem attacks that would be below the dignity of this blog, but let me just suggest you Google ‘VS Naipaul wife beating’ and see what you can learn.

THE EAST OF EDEN LETTERS: JOURNAL OF A NOVEL by John Steinbeck

Every day before he began work on his novel EAST OF EDEN, John Steinbeck wrote a letter for his editor and friend Pascal Covici. These were never really intended to be read by Covici, but instead functioned as a warm-up for Steinbeck’s day’s writing, in which he ruminated about his ideas for the book, and his process in writing it.

The book is thus an interesting insight into the working methods of an experienced author. Aspiring novelists, give in to despair right now: he routinely cracked out 1500 words a day, and considered this a leisurely pace.

There are lots of interesting and entertaining observations. Regarding having his book read by his editor:

I am never shy about it when a professional is doing the reading. But God save me from amateurs. They don’t know what they are reading but it is much more serious than that. They immediately start writing. I never knew this fail. It is invariable. For that matter, I think I dislike amateurs in any field. They have the authority of ignorance and that is something you simply cannot combat

.

Or, regarding his original plan, to have every second chapter be more philosophical than plot based:

Such readers as only like plot and dialogue can then skip every other chapter and meanwhile I can take time for thought, comment, observation, criticism, and if it should seem a good thing to throw it out, I can do that too.

I often skip or skim boring bits in books, and I am pleased so great an authority as John Steinbeck clearly operates on this principle on occasion too.

Anyone who has ever written a diary knows how maudlin anything we write just for ourselves can be, and the letters are frequently of this nature, with moaning about DIY and needing to go to the toilet. This can sometimes be dull to trudge through, but was also I found curiously compelling. You do not often get a day-to-day account of someone’s year, and this made me feel strange close to the writer, and to his period.

DAVID SEDARIS at 3am

I’m not doing so much of the sleeping at the moment, which is not good for the health but is extremely good for the reading list. Usually one chooses books by a series of criteria, such as – I’ve heard of it, it sounds interesting, it’s free; at the moment, I am choosing books based simply on the question: how will it read at 3am?

David Sedaris reads wonderfully well late at night, and thus over the last weeks I have read THE SANTALAND DIAIRIES, BARREL FEVER, DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDOURY AND DENIM, and NAKED.

Sedaris has made a career of writing humorously about his own life. It is the apotheosis of anecdote. This is a pretty small niche, and it sort of staggers me he can get this much material out of one little life.

Interestingly, it’s quite hard to give you a little excerpt that gives an example of how funny he is; it’s not a one-liner kind of thing, more a comic point of view, that’s hard to define precisely. That said, here’s him sleeping on the floor of a Greyhound bus:

The bus’s colossal engine lay just beneath my head, providing warmth for the countless bits of misplaced candy that melted to form a fragrant bed of molten taffy

.

Sedaris had some trouble with drugs, and with being a general layabout, for much of his twenties and thirties, and some of his stories are about this. I don’t know what it means about me that I find this procession of failures strangely comforting; I think it’s just that one isn’t used to anyone being so honest about where they went wrong.

He clearly had no career plan, but was eventually discovered reading aloud his diary ,which he had kept from age 21, in a Chicago club. This got him a spot on NPR with THE SANTALAND DIARIES – his essay about working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s (say no more). He then wrote BARREL FEVER, which is the only one of his books I’ve read that is ‘fiction,’ and indeed the only one I gave up on. It’s interesting to see how difficult it is to be what you are: a personal essayist – in a world of novelists. No doubt there’s a moral in there somewhere. Then came NAKED (my second favourite, after WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES)and DRESS YOUR FAMILY.

So, apparently, I am now a Sedaris expert. And all the rest of you were wasting your time sleeping.

TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer

For the benefit of those of you who have been being held by Columbian rebels for the last few years, I will summarise the TWILIGHT plot. A central character, unashamedly named Bella Swann, moves to a new high school. There she meets Edward Cullen, who is strangely beautiful. They fall in love. She discovers he is a vampire. He is a kind of vampire who has learnt not to eat people. A people-eating kind of vampire tries to kill Bella, and Edward saves her.

At first, I really enjoyed this book. It has real-page turning power. It’s very compelling, the will-they-won’t-they and the suppressed sexual tension, and I was just thinking: I see why this is a hit! I am so in touch with the zeitgeist! With the mind of the common man! Let’s watch the movies!

When, sadly, it all just got too stupid for anything. I tried, god knows, I tried. If I could like it, I know I could be a different type of person: Fun! Happy-go-lucky! Down-to-earth! Etc!

But, I mean, god:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him – and I didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Here‘s an interesting article about the author, who is an Arizona based Mormon mother-of-three who has never even seen an R-rated movie. This starts to make it clearer as to why while the book is very sexy, nothing sexual actually happens. It also helps to explain some of Edward’s clothing choices:

He was removing a light beige leather jacket now; underneath he wore an ivory turtleneck sweater. It fit him snugly, emphasizing how muscular his chest was.

I was reading this book at the same time as RABBIT, RUN, which is a novel that makes a serious attempt to understand how relationships work. It made for a lurid comparison with TWILIGHT, where the main hurdle – falling in love – is handled in the first couple of chapters. Thereafter, all major threats are external; whereas, at least in my unhappy experience, most major threats are entirely internal.

Geez. I will never be Fun! and Down-to-earth! at this rate.

RABBIT, RUN by John Updike

This book had been frequently recommended to me, in particular, and vehemently, by young men of a certain stripe. Thus, I had avoided reading it.

It begins with the central character, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom going out to get his pregnant wife some cigarettes. He doesn’t come home. Almost on impulse, he drives through the night, trying to go South. It’s a sort of wonderful fantasy of escaping a disappointing life.

The fantasy doesn’t last long, as he gets lost, and returns to his home town, where he gets romantically involved with a lady who is a part-time prostitute. His wife gives birth to their baby, and overwhelmed with guilt her returns to her. One night, after a fight, he leaves his wife again. She gets drunk and accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub. (No, I did not expect that twist either). After the funeral he flees back to the part-time prostitute, who is pregnant, and says she will abort if he doesn’t marry her. Once more, he starts running.

The presentation of someone trapped in their life was strangely compelling, maybe because I am about Rabbit’s age. He was a very good basketball player in high school, and he yearns constantly for that experience, of the perfect. It’s awfully sad. Here’s when he’s trying to force himself to go back to his wife:

What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it’s this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.

Stylistically, it’s astonishingly accomplished: he actually manages to pulls off not just the present tense, but also very long stream-of-consciousness sentences, both of which are usually a recipe for disaster. Try this, when Rabbit seems some Amish:

Amish overworked their animals, he knew. Fanatics. Hump their women standing up, out in the fields, wearing clothes, just hoist black skirts and there is was, nothing underneath. No underpants. Fanatics. Worship manure.

Unfortunately as you may be able to tell from the above quote, the book is sort of creepily obsessed with sex, and with women as sexual objects. Rabbit wants to have sex all the time, even when his wife is just back from the hospital, even when its time for the baby’s FUNERAL. And it’s all taken terribly, embarrassingly, seriously:

His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached

Small angelic sex apart, it’s a very good novel.