I’m not usually attracted to horror stories, but Joe Hill’s debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box
, really pulled me in. That's not entirely a surprise, Hill is the son of horror-writer Steven King. He's clearly learned from the master.
The book opens with 54-year-old death metal rocker Jude Coyne, né Justin Cowzynski, buying a ghost that his assistant has found at an online auction site. The ghost comes with a black Sunday suit – just Jude’s size, coincidentally – mailed by the seller, the ghost’s step-daughter, who is sure he will follow. It’s probably a rip-off, but it’s only $1,000 – nine grand cheaper than the winning eBay bid for a decade-old grilled cheese sandwich purportedly featuring the image of Jesus’ mother – and Jude is really into death artifacts. Anyway, as befits a man whose last name is a numismatic homonym, money is no object.
Heart-Shaped
Box:
A Novel
Jude proudly displays sketches of the Seven Dwarfs that John Wayne Gacy drew while in jail and sent to him. He keeps his pens jammed into the hole of an actual skull of a sixteenth century peasant who had been trepanned to let the demons out. He owns a noose used to hang a man in England in the 1800s and even an actual snuff film, a gift from a fan who worked in law enforcement. Despite his taste for death memorabilia, Jude isn’t exactly untroubled by owning the snuff film. But he hasn’t got rid of it either.
A death metal musician with a taste for the macabre, not only in his public persona but in private life as well, sounds like a caricature. Add that, his girlfriend is a Goth ex-stripper half his age. But Hill is very good at investing this character with a real personality. Despite the grim trappings, we actually care about his life and his plight.
And, as it turns out, Jude is haunted by more than what is in the heart-shaped box the UPS man delivers to fulfill Jude's spectral purchase.
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Lexicographer Erin McKean’s latest book, That's Amore! is available just in time for Valentine’s Day. It’s the perfect gift about, as the subtitle says, “The Language of Love for Lovers of Language.”
In this slender volume McKean has collected some of the more vivid and interesting expressions about love from more than forty different languages. And what phrasebook could be more important? After all, as Christopher J. Moore suggests in his brief introduction, those in love are so often at a loss for words yet never far from the need to communicate their feelings.
That's
Amore!
McKean helpfully organizes the phrases into categories: Love at First Sight, Courtship and Seduction, Pain and Rejection, Declarations and Proposals, and Terms of Endearment.
Looking for a ready term to describe love at first sight? Try mamihlapinatapai [mah-mee-lah-pee-nah-tah-PYE], from the now extinct Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego: "Listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the 'most succinct word,' this expresses the befuddlement that can strike us when love at first sight hits. It describes the sensation of being 'at a loss which way to go'.”
For the not-so-innocent, That’s Amore! notes the word for flirt in several languages. In Greek, a kamaki [kah-MAH-kee] is “a man who spends his time ‘fishing’ for young women,” whereas a “fickle flirt in French” is said to “avoir un couer d’artichaut” [ah-vwahr uhnh keur dahr-tee-SHOH] – “have an artichoke heart.” In Spanish, un picaflor refers to a “flower picker.”
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No fan of the private detective novel should miss the “John March mysteries.” Author Peter Spiegelman just keeps getting better with each outing.
Spiegelman introduced John March, a Manhattan-based private eye, in Black Maps. In that book, March’s client was a wealthy investment banker threatened by blackmail. March survived that case and reappeared in Death's Little Helpers for a more challenging assignment - and with a new girlfriend. Now March is back in Red Cat, this time with his unbeloved brother David as the client in what sets up as another extortion scheme. The girlfriend is gone, replaced with a part-time lover whose needs are more compatible with March’s.
"Red Cat
The melancholy March fits right in with his noirish New York. “Everyone was in a bad mood,” opens Black Maps. “It was a palpable thing in midtown, pungent as the bus exhaust on the cold evening air and as loud as the traffic.” The air in the first sentence of Death’s Little Helpers is just as toxic: “'As a husband, he was a lying, selfish prick,' Nina Sachs said, and lit yet another cigarette.” No carcinogens pollute the atmosphere in the first lines of Red Cat, and it’s just as well: the tension in the air between John and David March is enough to cause cancer.
Continue reading "Black Apple: Manhattan Noir" »
Last year the Criterion Collection released the long-awaited DVD of The Fallen Idol, the 1948 film directed by Carol Reed and adapted for the screen in collaboration with Graham Greene from his story, “The Basement Room.” It may be my favorite of all the DVDs released in 2006.
Greene’s original story, available online as well as in a Penguin edition with The Third Man, is a fine work by this master writer, and it is a joy to see a great author turn a very good story into an even better film. There are several significant changes from the original story to the film version, and they are all to the good. One example: there are no animals in this story about the loss – or myth – of innocence, yet for the film the child Philip has a beloved pet snake. No Eden, it seems, can do without one.
The Fallen Idol
Criterion
Collection
It's worth looking at both the original story and the version that Reed and Greene brought to the screen to appreciate how brilliantly they take the plot to a new level.
“The Basement Room” opens with Philip, his parents away on a holiday, left alone in “the great Belgravia house” with the butler Baines and Mrs. Baines. Initially told from Philip’s point of view, we learn that Baines is his favorite and Mrs. Baines is a shrew to her husband and an unstable tyrant to the boy. Baines regales young Philip with tales from days gone by when he lived in the tropics. Not exactly paradise – as usual, it’s not the heat but the humidity – but at least in those days Baines had forty natives under his command, he tells Philip, and a gun. It all changed when he married Mrs. Baines. Paradise lost.
Mrs. Baines may indeed be an ill-tempered shrew, but seven-year-old Philip certainly can be trying. Defying Mrs. Baines, does not go to his room as told but instead sneaks off to wander around town. Later, Philip happens to peer through the window of a tea shop and sees Baines, not as the beaten-down spouse but invigorated: “This was a happy, bold, and buccaneering Baines, even though it was, when you looked closer, a desperate Baines.” Baines’ elixir is of course “Emmy,” who Philip guesses is Baines’ niece, of whom he has once heard. Baines allows Philip to hold on to that notion, though he suggests the encounter remain between them. “Baines said, ‘I don't ask you to say what isn't true. But you needn't actually tell Mrs. Baines you met us here.’"
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Jeffrey Rosen’s compelling new book, The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America, offers a model by which we should evaluate Supreme Court Justices. If you want to understand a Justice’s success on the high court, Rosen suggests the place to start is not with his or her judicial philosophy, ideology, or party identification: instead, ask whether the Justice is “a judicial pragmatist” or one with “a less accommodating temperament.”
Set aside the usual dichotomies like activist or originalist, conservative or liberal, or Democratic or Republican: the more effective Justices will build consensus, cultivate their colleagues, demonstrate political savvy, and not be sticklers for principle. The more effective Justices, perhaps not coincidentally, will not be the brainiest on the Court, either.
Rosen assembles four pairings to illustrate his point. John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice (appointed in 1801), and Thomas Jefferson, not a Justice of course, but Marshall’s primary antagonist in the early shaping of our constitutional law, are the first pairing. The second pairing, John Marshall Harlan (appointed to the Court in 1877) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (appointed 1902), served together for almost a decade. Roosevelt appointees Hugo Black and William O. Douglas constitute the third pairing, and William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia make up the fourth.
The early sections of the book are especially engaging for the savaging Rosen metes out to two American icons, Thomas Jefferson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rosen notes in his conclusion that “Jefferson and Holmes are among the greatest men in American history, and both represent important and admirable strains in American political thought that continue to inspire people today,” but a reader wholly unfamiliar with these great Americans would never deduce such an assessment from the earlier chapters.
"The Supreme Court:
The Personalities
and Rivalries,
That Defined America"
Rosen is of course arguing a brief, so perhaps he overstates the case for Marshall and Harlan at the expense of Jefferson and Holmes. And it may be easier to pull off that argument because the Nineteenth Century is so much more difficult to appreciate than our own time. So Jefferson the slaveholder and Holmes the Social Darwinian, features of their backgrounds that Rosen underlines, suffer in our eyes. The two more recent pairings belong to a world more recognizable to us.
Even then, Rosen is more generous in providing context when the stain is on one of his favored Justice’s biography. For example, Hugo Black’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan is cast in a more thorough and sympathetic context than Holmes’ Social Darwinism even though the latter’s error was an intellectual failure and not something Holmes adopted to advance his career. Likewise, Rosen mentions but doesn’t offer an opinion on charges that Rehnquist “challenged black and Hispanic voters as an Arizona poll watcher and on his account of the pro-segregation memos he had written [as a clerk] for Justice Jackson….”
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M. Night Shyamalan is living my dream. He writes screenplays that he directs himself for studios which pay him a lot of money – I mean, a lot of money – and allow him to hire top shelf actors. And he has a large audience of followers who will see any movie by the writer-director who thrilled them with The Sixth Sense, the 25th most popular film in history as gauged by world-wide box office gross sales.
And yet, in my view, The Sixth Sense is vastly overrated. Still, I feel a great deal of sympathy for Shyamalan because his best effort, Unbreakable – it’s actually his only movie that I really liked – was the least successful of his first four major releases.
As with Hitchcock and other auteurs, we know from his distinctive style when we're watching a Shyamalan picture. In fact, the only thing standing in the way of the writer-director earning his own adjective – think Hitchcovian or Spielbergian – is that the coinage (Shyamalanian) sounds like the chorus' refrain in a doo-wop song.
M. Night
Shyamalan's
The Sixth Sense
Signs
Unbreakable
But auteur status has it perils, primarily: no one can tell the auteur when he makes mistakes. Even when he makes a lot of mistakes. Or, at least the auteur doesn’t have to listen – until his audience goes away. Which may be happening to Shyamalan: his most recent film, Lady in the Water, wasn’t even at the cinema long enough for me to see it. I finally watched it on the recently-released DVD and I understand why it disappointed the critics and audiences last year.
It looks as if Lady in the Water will be even less popular than Unbreakable, the only one of Shyamalan’s major pictures to gross under $100 million domestically.
SPOILER ALERT: What follows gives away significant elements from The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water.
Unbreakable
The Sixth Sense
Continue reading "M. Night Shyamalan's Best Movie" »
What compels a novelist to try to retell another writer's story? I can imagine a number of reasons to take as one's inspiration a well-known story, including: as an homage, as a goof or a spoof, to expose the ideological or political underpinnings of the original work, or simply because the earlier story is so good that mimicking it is irresistible.
One of my favorite examples of a twice-told tale — James Joyce's Ulysses — is as much a light-hearted goof as it is an homage to a great classical work. Ulysses is of course the Latinized version of Odysseus, and Joyce's novel contains many overt as well as subtle nods to Homer's Odyssey. One of the many clever gambits in Ulysses is that it takes place in one ordinary day — June 16, 1904 — whereas the Odyssey ranges around the Peloponnese for ten years, many of them full of extraordinary adventures.
A new telling of an old story can also reveal the biases, perhaps unconscious, in the original tale. The scholar Lovalerie King mentioned two such examples elsewhere: Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, which spoofs Gone With the Wind while exposing the more famous novel's apparent fondness for the antebellum South, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which "uses passages from the Fun With Dick and Jane primer to frame the story of a little black girl who desires blue eyes, the blue eyes that she believes would make her valued and lovable."
The Dead
Fathers Club
Then there are Shakespeare's children. Matt Haig, whose forthcoming novel, The Dead Fathers Club, owes a debt to Hamlet, has made the smart and sensible point that "there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare, because to a considerable degree he shaped that language. As that's the case, a top 10 list of novels influenced by Shakespeare might look identical to a top 10 list of novels full stop."
Continue reading "Double Duty: Twice-Told Tales" »
If Duane Swierczynki's new book The Blonde hasn't been optioned by a movie producer yet, Hollywood's paid novel readers aren't doing their jobs. And once they do "discover" this book, I hope they'll hire me to write the adapted screenplay. Why? Because the story will make a cracking good movie and the screenplay almost writes itself.
The Blonde starts with a classic high
"The Blonde"
(Amazon U.K.)
Click & Buy
concept hook. A guy walks into a bar. And is poisoned. By a blonde...whose head will literally explode if the guy doesn't stay within ten feet of her. And if she dies, the secret antidote to his poison goes with her and the guy dies, too.
Other novels would take a chapter setting up the situation, explaining how the blonde got in this predicament, and who this newly poisoned guy is and why - or why not - he deserves his plight. All the adapting screenwriter has to sort all that out and get us to the central life-or-death conflict within twenty pages or less. Swierczynski saves that labor. He sets it up on page one, on line one: "I poisoned your drink." Now, that's not a line one hears everyday from a stranger in a Philadelphia airport bar.
Of course the guy, Jack Eisley, doesn't believe the blonde really poisoned him. Yet he can't figure out if she's just kidding, if that's her way of shaking off guys who flirt with her at airport bars, if she's running a con, or if - maybe just maybe - she really is some kind of psychopathic killer. Jack is a pretty rational guy and figures she can't be serious, so he decides to head to his hotel and get some sleep before his important breakfast meeting. The blonde tells him he's in for some pretty unpleasant gastrointestinal distress and, if he doesn't get the antidote, a trip to the morgue in ten hours.
That's one pretty good dramatic conflict established in the first five minutes, all presented in snappy boy-meets-girl dialogue that the screenwriter simply has to copy from the novel. Less dramatic conflicts have carried movies before. What will happen to Jack? Is he really poisoned? Why? Will he get the antidote or will he die?
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Kate Atkinson, the author of my favorite novel of 2004, Case Histories, has produced a new novel, One Good Turn. It's a sequel of sorts, not quite as good as its predecessor - which Stephen King called "the best mystery of the decade" - yet still an extremely enjoyable read.
Sequel may not be the correct term: both books are ensemble affairs with several important characters and two of these characters have returned in One Good Turn. The two novels are literary mysteries, with Atkinson using a lighter touch in the second but the structure of both novels is similar. Case Histories is much more tender, even heart-breaking - a three-year-old child goes missing, a beloved daughter is killed in her father’s presence. The violence and threat of violence in One Good Turn is more present yet the pull on our emotions is less powerful in the new novel, probably because much of the pain is visited on unsympathetic characters.
Case Histories:
A Novel
Not that sympathetic characters don’t get hurt as well: Jackson Brodie, the private investigator in Case Histories, now retired, gets more than a little banged up by a thug, and we are led to believe that a drowned girl he finds, then loses to the tides, did not deserve her early demise. The emotional pain is liberally distributed among the many characters as well. Still, there is more humor in this story than in its predecessor; sometimes the human condition makes you laugh, sometimes it makes you cry.
One Good Turn is set in Edinburgh during the Festival Fringe, reputedly the largest arts festival in the world. Jackson is there with his bohemian girlfriend Julia, whose sister’s death is one of the mysteries powering Case Histories. They are not exactly a matched pair: Jackson worries about other people and, even when he has decided not to, winds up helping them; Julia worries more about herself and is a less-developed character.
One Good Turn
A minor case of urban road rage sets the story in motion. Seemingly inoffensive “Paul Bradley” (an alias, we learn immediately) is involved in a minor fender-bender with a cartoonishly large and violent Honda driver…who happens to have a baseball bat at hand. The encounter puts Paul in the emergency room with a concussion. If not for the intervention of Martin Canning, a bystander who throws his computer laptop at Honda Man, Paul would likely have wound up in the morgue.
Continue reading "A Jolly Murder Mystery" »
I am usually wary when someone recommends a comic novel to me. Unlike other fiction, the ultimate objective of the comic novel is not so much to tell a well told tale as to make the reader laugh - and story comes first for me. Yet despite my resistance, I know a few very engaging comic novels and I’m not shy about encouraging others to give them a chance.
Two of my all-time favorites are classics, both available in fresh translations: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov and Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert. Oblomov, by general agreement Goncharov's greatest work and his only book still widely read, was published in 1859. That's fifteen years or so after Flaubert hit on the idea for his novel yet twenty-plus years before Bouvard et Pécuchet was published, unfinished, at the time of the author’s death. Which itself makes for rich comic irony, since the eponymous Oblomov is notable for his inertia - and his body is rarely set in motion - while the titular Frenchmen are all about earnest industry.
Bouvard et Pécuchet
Flaubert
The novelist (and eminent Flaubertiste) Julian Barnes says Bouvard et Pécuchet is "about stubbornness - the indefatigable attempt by two retired Parisian clerks to master and subdue the whole of human knowledge, a task in which they persevere despite constant failure and discouragement." The premise is simple: these two forty-seven-year-old clerks happen to sit on the same park bench and establish an emotional connection. A friendship forms and, after Bouvard inherits a small fortune a year later, they retire and embark on an investigation of areas of experience and learning that they never could undertake as middle-class office workers. As it turns out, the need to earn a living was not the only obstacle to their greater edification and enlightenment. They are simply a couple of doofuses.
Much of the humor in the book concerns what these two men attempt and what happens to them - including the romantic adventures of Pécuchet, the 59-year-old virgin - but the reader who only laughs at Bouvard and Pécuchet misses part of Flaubert’s point. The wiser reader will think, “Bouvard et Pécuchet, c’est moi.”
Oblomov
Oblomov has greater self-awareness than the Frenchmen. As the scholar Galya Diment observes, Oblomov “is a not a caricature but, in fact, a very likable character who is smart and has a well-defined sense of irony.” Sure, he spends most of the first part of the novel on the couch dreaming of his happy childhood back on the family estate, but he has very good intentions - to look after his estate, to listen to his friend Stoltz, to avoid being swindled out of his inheritance, and to attend to Olga, with whom he falls in love. Any honest procrastinator will know how it all turns out.
Chekov said “[Goncharov] is ten heads above me in talent," and Tolstoy held that "Oblomov is a truly great work, the likes of which one has not seen for a long, long time. ... I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it." The praise is over-generous in my view but who am I to argue with these masters?
Continue reading "Funny Pages: Great Comic Novels" »
