31 March, 2002: The Hot Rock
The Hot Rock is the flip side of Donald Westlake's Parker books; Westlake says as much in his introduction. The Hot Rock was originally conceived as a Parker novel, one in which the cold-blooded thief had to steal the same thing a half-dozen times. Westlake says he realized that Parker would just get frustrated and blow the hell out of the supporting cast, so he had to create a different protagonist: competent but cursed, funny, a schlemiel. Thus was John Dortmunder born. In The Hot Rock, Dortmunder and his crew steal the titular gem, a small African nation's treasured emerald which is on display in New York, time and time again, each theft more ludicrous than the last. It starts out in believable Parker territory and rapidly enters slapstick land (the capers include a helicopter raid on police headquarters and a train-mounted assault on a mental institution). It's interesting how little it takes to make the atmosphere of the Parker books, in which everyone is out for themselves and most people would as soon shoot you as look at you, bleed away. What's left might not be the same kind of gripping plunge into the world of a sociopath, but it's awfully fun. I bet that the movie adaption -- starring Robert Redford and providing a name to a Sleater-Kinney album -- is brilliant, because the book's combination of lunatic physical comedy set pieces and po-faced comic dialogue, seems tailor-made for the screen.
11:53 pm 
28 March, 2002: Year of the Griffin
Diana Wynne Jones may be my single favorite living children's book writer. The majority of her books are variations on a single theme, parallel worlds, but despite that constraint, her work is surprisingly varied. Year of the Griffin is, by and large, not a parallel worlds story (although parallel worlds are discussed). Instead, it's -- oddly enough -- a coming of age novel set at college, albeit one featuring griffins, dwarves, intelligent pigeons, and a horde of miniature assassins. But all the fantastic elements, central though they are, could be discarded, and the novel could still be made to work with just a little effort. It's rather remarkable, really. (more...)
2:18 am
25 March, 2002: Carter Beats the Devil
There seems be something of a fad for plot-heavy, moderately literary, not at all experimental historical novels about entertainers. The book that kicked it off was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, about escape artistry and comic books; Elizabeth McCracken's novel of vaudeville, Niagara Falls All Over Again, is reportedly in the same vein, and if it's half as fun a read as Carter Beats the Devil, I'm going to go track it down. Glen David Gold's first novel, Carter is the story of Charles Carter, Carter the Great, a real-life stage magician from San Francisco who died in 1936. The novel manages to cram everything in: marriages, tragic deaths, a mustache-twirling villain, major roles for a few historical figures (F.M. Smith, the millionaire discover of borax; Philo Farnsworth, inventor of the television; Houdini, depicted as preening, self-promoting, a bit too sharp for anyone's comfort, and the great genius of the art of stage magic, all of which ring true; and President Warren Harding, who dies mysteriously the night after seemingly being dismembered in Carter's signature trick), murder, the mysterious workings of fate, a tough dame with a heart of gold, pirates, Secret Service agents, and a lion. It's a very conscious effort to write a good old-fashioned page turner, with more of a literary sensibility and updated for readership that likes books which are slightly more self-aware. It worked shockingly well; this is my favorite novel I've read in the past few months, and I eagerly away Gold's next.
10:13 pm
24 March, 2002: Nymphomation
Nymphomation is the prequel to Vurt; it takes place in a future Manchester, where a lottery based on dominos has utterly seized the public imagination. Those who hold a winning bone -- one with the same pattern on masked sex symbol Lady Luck's uniform as she completes her dance every Friday -- get rich; everyone else scrapes up enough money to buy another bone next week. The general shape of the plot is simple enough: a group of college math students are convinced that there's an underlying pattern to the winning symbols, and they want to find it and make themselves rich. (more...)
4:48 pm
21 March, 2002: The Arts of Deception
P.T. Barnum is probably best known today for being one of the founders of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the man to whom the quote "There's a sucker born every minute" is attributed. But Barnum was a hugely popular and successful showman who made money off a vast spectrum of exhibits. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum contends that as mass entertainment was beginning to develop in the nineteenth century, Barnum (always with a sense for what the public wanted) realized that ambiguity was something that could be sold. (more...)
12:02 am
18 March, 2002: High Spirits
High Spirits is a collection of ghost stories. More specifically, it's a collection of Christmas ghost stories: humorous Christmas ghost stories set at Massey College at the University of Toronto. That's a rather specialized niche. Robertson Davies didn't write these stories for publication, as I understand it; they were to be read at the college's annual Christmas party. And they read like that. Reading about Davies encountering the ghosts of various British and Canadian political figures is amusing, but it must have been great to hear him perform; you can tell just by looking at the cover photo that Davies did funny voices. My enjoyment of these little vignettes is somewhat hampered by not knowing jack about Canadian politics (I'd be hard-pressed to say when William Mackenzie was in power, much less what his personal fobiles were), but the stories breeze by, and the ones that don't require knowledge of snowback politics -- encounters with creators of artificial life, with the saints removed from the liturgical calendar in 1969, with the spirit of sexism, with the Devil himself -- are quite entertaining. High Spirits is probably not worth reading in a clump, but they'd make fine stories to read around a roaring fire; you could start a Christmas tradition.
10:27 pm
15 March, 2002: The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
Most books that attempt to move the magic realism of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I will define, very loosely, as novels set in the everyday world in which the fantastic happens and is not explained) to the United States are generally dismal failures. One which was not was Shoeless Joe, the book by W.P. Kinsella schmaltzed up for the movie Field of Dreams. Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy doesn't quite live up to the earlier book, but the novel -- a rather confused tale of an 1908 exhibition game between the all-stars of a semi-pro league, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and the Chicago Cubs -- still works. The game, held in Onamata, Iowa, lasted for days, and nobody seems to believe in it except Gideon Clarke, a young man whose father was imparted with the knowledge after being struck by lightening. There's much more crammed into the book than there needs to be (midgets! albinos! terrorists! great ghostly trickster Indians! carnies!), but I found it enjoyable nonetheless, perhaps because so much of what Kinsella is playing with involves cracked takes on things that I find particularly American. This is probably best left to those who enjoyed Shoeless Joe and are looking for something a bit more manic, however, as the parts really come off as better realized than the whole.
12:04 am
7 March, 2002: Banvard's Folly
I had been waiting for this book for so long that perhaps it was bound to be a disappointment. Banvard's Folly, by Paul Collins, is thirteen tales of the losers of history: oddballs, frauds, hucksters, and lunatics who never quite succeeded. I'd read a couple chapters already in McSweeney's, and I was desperately looking forward to this, a book that sounded tailor-made for me. I read it in the course of a weekend and enjoyed it, but found it somewhat lacking, especially given the degree to which I had enjoyed Collins' essays when I originally read them. (They are among the inspirations for the mode in which I attempt to write my weblog.) I like histories about cheats, losers, frauds, and the dwellers on societies' fringes. But I like social history that picks small incidents and uses them to represent a larger world. (more...)
9:49 pm
3 March, 2002: Camp Concentration
Camp Concentration is probably Thomas Disch's best known book; it was one of the grand sensations of 1960s s.f., but is perhaps less remembered today, its central plot point (that the United States is going to be engaged in a war in Central America and conscientious objectors will be locked up) having been unfashionable (and unlikely) since America pulled out of Vietnam and ended the draft. The protagonist is Louis Sacchetti, a rather detatched observer: a man of no particular political conviction other than a scorn for the government, a lapsed Catholic, overweight, intellectual, ineffectual. Dumped from the regular prison he inhabits into Camp Archimedes, a secret government research facility. He has been brought there at the request of Mordecai Washington, a prisoner-cum-eperimental subject, who knew Sacchetti vaguely in high school and was impressed by Sacchetti's intelligence (and his outspoken atheism, of which Sacchetti has now repented). Camp Archimedes is an experiment in increasing the intelligence of soldiers (the "Camp Concentration" of the title), and Mordecai wants someone to translate between the subjects and the wardens. (more...)
2:15 pm