31 May, 2001: Running Dog
Don DeLillo has written an acknowledged masterpiece examining the culture of paranoia in post-war America. It's funny and thoughtful and haunting. Unfortunately, it's also White Noise, and I just read Running Dog. The novel isn't bad, as such -- although Don DeLillo ranks only slightly ahead of J.G. Ballard on my "I Never, Ever Want to Read Sex Scenes by These Authors" list; he's possibly the least erotic writer to ever write a novel featuring a randy politician boffing a nubile young reporter, and that's a lot of potboiler competition to face down -- but I didn't feel that there was a single note in this book (with the possible exception of the sex scenes; Underworld handled sex with both more grace and more discretion) that DeLillo hadn't hit elsewhere and to better effect. Throw Mao II and Libra (my favorite DeLillo book) in a blender with a dash of White Noise and a pinch of Ratner's Star. The plot features a reporter (for Running Dog, a sort of radical-politics Rolling Stone settling into graceful middle age) stumbling across a BCCI-slash-Ollie-North-ish conspiracy, while investigating said politician's hidden collection of pornographic art. It all felt tawdry and meaningless and overly plotted, which may, I suppose, have been DeLillo's point. But I don't think so. And oh, those shudder-worthy sex scenes.
1:48 am 
29 May, 2001: The Steampunk Trilogy
File this one under "guilty pleasures." To give you an idea, the first of the three novellas that make up Paul DiFilippo's The Steampunk Trilogy deals with a Victorian mad scientist creating a highly-sexed newt-woman. The villain of the piece is named Lord Chuting-Payne. DiFilippo is that kind of writer. And even though he's not a great prose stylist, I find his work fun, if not particularly memorable (with the possible exception of a story I think was by DiFilippo, involving a courier who was having problems with Police lyrics slipping into his consciousness; that story was a peach). The second of the three novellas, featuring a historical figure, Louis Agassiz, teeming up with the Venus Hottentot's daughter in an effort to find a powerful (and vulgar) fetish that various magician types wish to use for Great Badness, is amusing, featuring a few nods to New England folklore and Lovecraftian pseudo-folklore; the third novella, starring Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman in a voyage through the afterlife, mostly left me flat. I can't recommend The Steampunk Trilogy as any kind of quality literature -- I'm sure I'll remember nothing about it, not even the atrocious puns, a few months from now -- but it'd make a fine beach or airplane book.
1:29 am
19 May, 2001: Pfitz
Oh boy, was this book a charmer. I'm a huge fan of Italo Calvino's If on a winter night a traveller. Huge. And this story, by Andrew Crumey, felt like one long story form Calvino's book, with extra bonus Borgesian elements. Whee! So meta! It's great! The setup is that a very eccentric prince (there's no specifics on time or space; call it 18th C. Europe, when the Wunderkammer was still going strong) has devoted his life -- and his subjects' energies -- to the production of imaginary cities. Architects will construct blueprints for all the imaginary buildings, biographers will detail all the imaginary residents' lives, cartographers will map every imaginary inch, and so on. The full realization of the latest city, Rreinnstadt, will be the prince's, and the kingdom's, great and lasting achievement. (more...)
4:35 pm
16 May, 2001: Figgs & Phantoms
This book is another Ellen Raskin oddity; it features some of the hallmarks of her y.a. books -- a bizarre cast of characters; a young, female protagonist and her older, male partner in crime -- but where Raskin's other novels that I've read have been focused on external mysteries, this one is entirely internal. Mona Newton is the teenaged scion of a vaudeville family, the Figgs. Her uncle, the aged near-midget Florence "Baby Flo" Figg, is dying. What follows is an exploration of grief, the love of books, and the Figg family's private religion -- for, after death, Figgs go not to Heaven but to Capri. As their guide to Caprification states, "It was night. I was lost. Then I saw the tree that grows wild and free welcoming me with open arms." Although this is possibly Raskin's oddest book and the idea that life is for living is always welcome, the meditations on reading do come close to being overly didactic. Of course we love books, Ellen! Why do you think we read yours?
10:54 pm
16 May, 2001: The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel)
Ellen Raskin is probably most familiar to the world through her (rightfully acclaimed) young adult mystery (and meta-mystery), The Westing Game, but I'm a fan of all of her work. The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel) is an earlier and less polished work; the characters aren't ever fully realized, the mystery, such as it is, is disarmingly easy for anyone past the age of studying S.A.T. words, and the topical references -- hippie protestors, anyone? -- haven't aged well at all. But it's still a charming bit of whimsy, accentuated by Ms. Raskin's doofy, modish illustrations (which have aged delightfully, thank you); it recounts the adventures of Mrs. Caroline "Little Dumpling" Carillon, famous soup heir, and her adopted twins, Tina and Tony, as they attempt to locate Mrs. Carillon's long-lost husband, Leon. Or Noel. Or both. This was a fun way to spend an evening, but I'd steer Raskin newcomers to The Westing Game or the wonderful The Tattooed Potato and Other Mysteries first.
10:15 pm
8 May, 2001: Fast Food Nation
At its heart, I think that this is a book about nostalgia: nostalgia not just for Mom's home cooking, not just for the kind of comfortable neighborhood diner that McDonald's eradicated, and not even for the kind of iconic ranching life that, as author Eric Schlosser argues, has fallen victim to the demands of the modern international agribusiness corproation. I think that it's nostalgic for a time in America in which power was less centralized, when individual workers had more autonomy, when individual cities were less standardized. I think that this is a book which longs for the Progressives. (more...)
11:41 pm
8 May, 2001: Holes
There's nothing I like better than a really nasty children's book. Children's books dealing with the fantastic -- to be specific, "books for middle readers," and I set aside the sort of fantasy that Tolkien or Lewis wrote; I want stories about normal boys and girl dealing with fantastic situations -- should, to be really top-notch, be full of dread, absurdity, or dreadful absurdity. Look at the Queen of Hearts in Alice or IT in A Wrinkle in Time. In Edward Eager's Half Magic, a maurading knight is punished by having a flaming plum pudding stuck to the end of his nose. Every word Roald Dahl ever wrote in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was filled with a barely-disguised venom saved up and doled out in poetically suitable ways; every word Daniel Pinkwater has ever written has been filled with a barely-disguised wonder at the sheer breathless comic bafflement that is life. And so with Louis Sachar's Holes. (more...)
10:49 pm
3 May, 2001: The Eternal Footman
It may seem odd that a book about a literal plague of demons -- demons of melacholy, no less -- decimating the population of the western world could be life-affirming, but that's the word I would use to describe James Morrow's The Eternal Footman. It's a sequel to Towing Jehovah, in which the two-mile-long corpse of God plummets into the sea and is, at angelic request, towed to Its presumptive final resting place in the Arctic Circle, and Blameless in Abaddon, in which a grief-maddened Pennsylvania judge puts His not-yet-brain-dead body on trial for crimes against humanity. They're little seriocomic masterpieces. Jehovah was about humanity's relation to God; Abaddon was about the nature of evil and how people reconcile themselves to the fact that bad things happen. Footman completes the trilogy neatly; Footman is about death. (more...)
10:15 pm