Fun TV Fiction

Deception Point by Dan Brown

Dan Brown, for many, has been the thriller writer for the past few years. The Da Vinci Code and its prequel Angels and Demons both did incredibly well and helped him eclipse even Stephen King and John Grisham for a time.

This outing is similar to his other three books – a big conspiracy, a race to solve some problem with world-wide ramifications, and some sort of code-breaking/problem-solving component. Here, the plot revolves around NASA’s discovery of life on other planets. A meteor found embedded in the Arctic is discovered by scientists with fossils of giant bugs that look to confirm life outside of Earth. Swirling around this discovery is an intense political confrontation between a president who has been hammered on excessive spending, especially on NASA, and an up-and-coming senator willing to do whatever it takes to be elected.

I finished the book in two days, which gives you some sense of the sharp pacing of Brown’s book. In many ways, I wished “literary” writers took a page from the Dan Brown’s and John Grisham’s of the world – literary fiction and beautiful writing/prose does not mean that the pace has to plod on and on and a plot has to be limited to the mundane, the every day.

Overall, this book was entertaining up until the last 50 pages where Brown had to find a way to neatly wrap up his many plotlines. The tension is well-done and this is certainly the kind of book you can read between books that actually require you to think and engage with the text, which is what I did. Don’t expect to be blown away, but enjoy being able to turn your brain off for a few hundred pages.

Slow and Underwhelming

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

I often wonder if there is a drop-off after a writer wins the Nobel Prize. At some point, I’d like to sample of books from writers who have won the Nobel directly pre-dating their win and directly following it. I wonder if winning the prize somehow makes it impossible to push yourself and your writing because you have already arguably won the literary prize of prizes. If so, I will immediately send a letter to the committee and tell them not to award Ian McEwan, Philip Roth (well, maybe awarding him the prize he has clearly been waiting for will get him out of his slump), and Haruki Murakami anytime soon because I think they each have so much good writing within them.

I wonder know, reflecting on Coetzee and the arc of his work, if this book was published simply to publish. The first twenty pages are riveting, as gripping as a good thriller. When we are first introduced to our protagonist, he is just realizing that he has been hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle. This single moment changes his life. I really cannot emphasize enough how strong the opening was, how much potential Coetzee set up. And then it all self-combusts. Instead doing something memorable, we get something searching for concreteness. The redemption the character tries to find in others is so flat that I found myself rushing to finish it just so I could start something new. For those who love Coetzee’s past work, most notable Disgrace and Elvis Costello, this will be a major disappointment.

I can only hope that the Nobel has not forever ruined any chances of Coetzee pushing the literary envelope the way he has in the past.

Some beautiful quotes (at least he has not lost his ability to write beautiful and memorable passages):

“Don’t immigrants have a history of their own? Do you cease to have a history when you move from one point on the globe to another?”

“We do not need love, old people like us. What we need is care: someone to hold our hand now and then when we get trembly, to make a cup of tea for us, help us down the stairs. Someone to close our eyes for us when the time comes. Care is not love.”

“Once upon a time his heart was his strongest organ. Any one of its brother organs might let him down – bowels, spleen, brain, but his heart, tried and tested first on Magill Road and then in the operating theatre, would serve him faithfully to the end.”

A Marriage of Wit and Heartache

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer’s sixth novel contains by far one of the most memorable and unique voices I have come across. The “wife,” Joan Castleman, married to a world famous writer Joseph Castleman, is a woman whose keen wit and bitter sarcasm comes through on every page. Maybe what impresses me most about this novel is how the voice sustains itself for so long. How the extreme mixtures of anger, relief, love, and tenderness come together in an almost torrential downpour of prose. It was a novel for this generation, in the voice we would come to expect from someone in their mid-thirties. Yet Joan is over 60 years old and is in the process of reliving her marriage to her husband starting with the affair they had together while he was still married and an English professor at Smith. From there, we see Joan stand by her husband through his many affairs, as the wife behind the scenes that ultimately is the rock and the stable force in the family. I won’t ruin the ending, but it is one that will make your stomach twist and turn from a mixture of surprise, anger, and ultimately, respect and understanding.

It really is the voice that drives this novel. Wolitzer’s Joan is such a compelling character that you cannot help but really experience the ups and downs that have led her to where she is at the outset of the novel – on a flight to Helsinki with her husband who is about to win a big literary award, finally realizing it is time to end the marriage. The book is just over 200 pages, yet I found myself literally devouring each page at a breakneck pace. The Wife was actually listed as one of the most underrated books published in recent years and I can see why. I was thoroughly impressed with this and look forward to reading more of Wolitzer’s work.

Interesting Quotes:

“All of them, the novelists, story writers, the poets, desperately long to win. If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it.”

“Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice.”

“These men who have so much, need so much to sustain themselves. They are all appetite, it sometimes seems, all wide mouth and roaring stomach.”

Brooklyn: The Borough of Life and Follies

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies starts off being about Nathan Glass, a divorced recovering cancer patient who goes to Brooklyn to die, but quickly turns into an oddly touching story about Nathan’s nephew Tom and as the title reflects, the amusing follies that follow their reunion with one another. Auster’s love of Brooklyn has been well-documented and the book is one great homage to the history-laden borough. From a fake manuscript of The Scarlet Letter to a religious sect that swears of technology and embraces silence, Auster fills his book with so much absurdity that you cannot help but laugh. But no matter how many twists and turns the story takes, both believable and unbelievable, at no point do you question the fabric of Auster’s tale. In many ways, this is the most heart-felt, most touching of Auster’s many books, and I think it may end up being the most accessible and most well-received of his books. Although not his most original tale, it may be my favorite, if only because it has such a rich emotional core.

Some Great Quotes:

“I am not a heavy drinker, but there are moments in a man’s life when alcohol is more nourishing than food.”

“Intellectuals suck, Nathan. They’re the most boring people in the world.”

“Idleness breeds thought, and thoughts can be dangerous, as anyone who lives alone will readily understand.”

A Better Comic or Graphic Novel?

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has long amazed people with his work in the comic book industry. His groundbreaking Sandman helped pave the way for the current mainstream acceptance of comic books as something not merely for children or meant to be an interest hidden from sight, so people did not judge you: Comics are suddenly more influential in the media, especially within the movie industry, than quite possibly any other creative form. When Gaiman crossed over into novels, many fans crossed over with him and his first novel, Neverwhere, met with some critical success.

Here, Gaiman describes the present day, but a behind-the-scenes look if you will. The premise is interesting, something straight out of a comic: America is teeming with gods, both the old, brought over with various peoples when they first came over to the United States, and newer ones, representing the exponential growth in technology. At the center is a man named Shadow, who is just released from prison and is the most important player in this struggle between the old and the new.

The plot is incredibly original and at the beginning, you really are drawn in. But then something goes awry: Gaiman creates an opportunity to dazzle us and really go into detail about these characters and creatures he has created, but instead leaves us with skeletal descriptions, leaning heavily on past conceptions of what these gods would have looked like in the present day. In some sense, you wonder if Gaiman’s writing is too dependent on an artist that is not there to provide some sort of visual context.

I myself bought this book because I needed a fast read, which Gaiman does provide. It’s mainstream fiction, something meant to entertain, but not challenge in any way. I think my disappointment comes from the potential Gaiman’s opening pages creates to the sudden drop off and lackluster ending. You want something bold and visionary and instead you are left with “bleh.”

Read this when you need a break, but don’t think that going in you’re getting something along the lines of Ender’s Game or even the Lord of the Rings.

Some interesting quotes:

“The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed.” (255)

“People only fight over imaginary things.” (427)

“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after awhile, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.” (585)

Slow and Tedious

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

This is the first book by Neal Stephenson I have ever read, or I should say I have ever attempted to read. I got to page 400 and had to stop. I probably should have put the book down after 100 pages, but after so many glowing reviews and endorsements, most notably from the New York Review of Books, I thought I would give it as much of a chance as I could. What a mistake.

Maybe I should even go back farther in time – I purchased the book thinking it would be an incredibly fast read, something in the same vein as a Dan Brown or Stephen King book. I was sadly disappointed to find that all of the people who said that this 1000-page monstrosity would be a quick read were terribly, terribly wrong (I also found at least two other people who thought the same thing and I wish I had listened to them when they told me to stop).

The book bounces back and forth between World War II and the present day, between grandparents and grandchildren in an all-over-the-map techno-thriller that is simply too dense to be readable. The pacing can only be described as plodding. I find Dickens a quicker read.

I think I may have started reading this with the wrong-mind set and maybe I should give it another go in a few years. But for all those looking for a nice-light read, stay away. And for those looking for something that makes you think or something where you can enjoy the texture of the language, stay away as well. Go out and pick up some Virginia Woolf or even some Dickens. It will be time much better spent.

An Epic Comic If I Ever Read One

The Ultimates 2
Written by Mark Millar. Drawn by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary
Collects Ultimates 2 Issus 1-6.

Unlike the previous Batman collection I read (see previous post), The Ultimates 2 collection was fantastic. Stories like these are what have started to bring people back to comics again following the disastrous market crash of the 1990’s when people became fed up with generic art and horribly written titles.

This arc picks up 12 months following the last Ultimates book and much has happened in the Ultimates’ universe. Bruce Banner is locked away and awaiting trial, Thor has broken away from the team, and Dr. Pym continues to try to find a way to rejoin the team. Captain America, Iron Man and the other Ultimates find themselves at the center of numerous debates concerning the problems with the American government and other nations pursuing super-powered groups and how they should be used, if at all. Although Bryan Hitch’s art is quite strong, what separates this book from many other things on the shelf is the writing. I used to be highly critical of many of the comics being sold because the writing was often weak and depended so heavily on the art to carry the book. Now, in many ways, books like this and the work of Bendis and Miller keep producing, comics have reached the point where the writing is as strong if not stronger than the art, making the medium that much richer and more entertaining. Millar does a fantastic job of keeping an epic feel to everything and at no point do we lose sight of how all-encompassing a team that contains many of Marvel’s most important icons should be. At the same time, we see the moments when everyone, including Captain America, seems all too human.

I think this is a fantastic collection and highly recommend it to seasoned and new comic readers alike.

Batman without the Backbone and without the Soul

Batman: Officer Down

Written by Greg Rucka et al. Drawn by Rick Burchett et al.

I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t been reading much Batman other than the newest series by Frank Miller and Jim Lee (which, regardless of what comic sales say, has been an utter disappointment). After hearing such buzz about Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker’s work on Batman, I thought I would go ahead and try some of it out. Unfortunately, this outing was a major disappointment. Maybe I should have started with the No Man’s Land story-arc, but after this, I doubt that I’m going to even try that out.

This story-arc starts with Commissioner Gordon’s birthday, which ends with him lying in an alleyway with three bullets in his back and Catwoman standing over his body. In many ways, the story is a weak attempt at a mystery tale in the same vein as Identity Crisis. Batman and the rest of Gotham City’s masked must now come together and figure out what happened.

What really irks me about this is the effort put in giving Batman a deeper emotional core, but everything ends up feeling rushed and underdeveloped. Batman standing over Commissioner Gordon’s hospital bed and barking orders wasn’t enough for me to see how deep a friendship the two men had. If it wasn’t for my familiarity with the Batman mythos, I would likely have no understanding of what was happening, with the result being I would likely never had finished reading the story. I’m certainly glad I did not buy the issues individually and purchased the graphic novel with a heavy discount. In many ways, this looked like a way of starting a new era of Batman in that the writers really change some of the familiar character dynamics we have all come to love. There are many reasons why the newest Batman movies have turned to the older material rather than the new stuff – the new stuff is awful.

Skip this. I wish I had.