by Lawrence Block
1977
Bernie Rhodenbarr, a dapper and skilled burglar with a taste for fine things and no propensity for violence, is found by the police in a Manhattan apartment which is not his own, with the legal occupant in the next room bludgeoned to death. He flees the scene and hides out in a friend’s building, where he meets a suspiciously helpful girl who urges him to find the real killer. Tracking down the man who apparently framed him, Bernie gets caught up in a scheme involving blackmail, kinky sex, and lots of money.
This is Lawrence’s more light-hearted series, the flip side of Matt Scudder’s gritty rough justice, and it’s an enjoyable “noir lite” leavened with wit and humor, courtesy of Bernie’s wry, self-effacing narration. The mystery is clever, and although one of the twists requires a rather far-fetched coincidence (of all the apartment buildings in all of New York, she had to walk into mine…), but the solution to the main whodunit was a pleasant surprise. Bernie is a sympathetic character because he’s intelligent and benevolently self-serving, so I’m not surprised Block went on to write a number of sequels.
four stars
[followed by The Burglar In the Closet]
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
1839
The famous tale of the titular orphan, born to a mother of uncertain origin but assumed to be low-born, who grows up mistreated and half-starved in the workhouses of the time. He is apprenticed out to a coffin-maker, where the contempt and bullying he undergoes impels him to flee to London. There, he is taken in by master criminal Fagin, who trains streets urchins to be pickpockets to enrich his own coffers. Fleeing Fagin and the harsh, brutal house-breaker Sikes, he is taken in by a gentleman and then a young lady in succession, where his lot improves, but the mystery of his parentage, and how he figures into the nefarious plans of Fagin, Sikes, and the mysterious man Monks, remain to be realized.
This novel is of course widely regarded as a classic, and though I don’t believe it to be of the same quality as Great Expectations, it’s not hard to see why it has endured: the villains of the story are vivid, fully realized, horrifying at times, and almost noble in their way at others. Dickens set out to present an honest account of vice with this novel, and he certainly succeeded: his willingness to give motives, fears, and conscience to the villains, rather than simply making them cartoonishly evil, is fairly modern. (Fagin is an absurd anti-Semitic stereotype, but I overlook that as a reflection of Dickens' time and place.) The novel also succeeds as social satire; especially at the beginning, with its descriptions of 19th century England’s treatment of the poor, he comes off as sharp, angry, and as full of black, biting wit as Twain or Swift. The book has its flaws, however. Despite his upbringing, young Twist himself is nearly a cipher, cartoonishly beatific and good; his personality borders on mawkishness, even sanctimoniousness. The same can be said for Miss Rose, the lady who takes him in, which makes them uninteresting as well as unrealistic. It’s no accident that Fagin and the Artful Dodger are as well-known to the general public as the titular hero himself. Finally, Dickens’ social satire is rather cut off at the knees due to his decision to make Twist the son of a gentleman, as if actual lower-class paupers don’t deserve happy endings and decent treatment. It’s a terrific story in its essence, though, with rich characters, suspense, and broad humor, as well as a righteous social satire and invective against hypocritical power mongers.
four stars
1839
The famous tale of the titular orphan, born to a mother of uncertain origin but assumed to be low-born, who grows up mistreated and half-starved in the workhouses of the time. He is apprenticed out to a coffin-maker, where the contempt and bullying he undergoes impels him to flee to London. There, he is taken in by master criminal Fagin, who trains streets urchins to be pickpockets to enrich his own coffers. Fleeing Fagin and the harsh, brutal house-breaker Sikes, he is taken in by a gentleman and then a young lady in succession, where his lot improves, but the mystery of his parentage, and how he figures into the nefarious plans of Fagin, Sikes, and the mysterious man Monks, remain to be realized.
This novel is of course widely regarded as a classic, and though I don’t believe it to be of the same quality as Great Expectations, it’s not hard to see why it has endured: the villains of the story are vivid, fully realized, horrifying at times, and almost noble in their way at others. Dickens set out to present an honest account of vice with this novel, and he certainly succeeded: his willingness to give motives, fears, and conscience to the villains, rather than simply making them cartoonishly evil, is fairly modern. (Fagin is an absurd anti-Semitic stereotype, but I overlook that as a reflection of Dickens' time and place.) The novel also succeeds as social satire; especially at the beginning, with its descriptions of 19th century England’s treatment of the poor, he comes off as sharp, angry, and as full of black, biting wit as Twain or Swift. The book has its flaws, however. Despite his upbringing, young Twist himself is nearly a cipher, cartoonishly beatific and good; his personality borders on mawkishness, even sanctimoniousness. The same can be said for Miss Rose, the lady who takes him in, which makes them uninteresting as well as unrealistic. It’s no accident that Fagin and the Artful Dodger are as well-known to the general public as the titular hero himself. Finally, Dickens’ social satire is rather cut off at the knees due to his decision to make Twist the son of a gentleman, as if actual lower-class paupers don’t deserve happy endings and decent treatment. It’s a terrific story in its essence, though, with rich characters, suspense, and broad humor, as well as a righteous social satire and invective against hypocritical power mongers.
four stars
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex
by Mary Roach
A cheery analysis of how and why scientists have observed, recorded, and theorized about human sex behavior, since gynecologist Robert Dickinson’s case studies in the 1890s, through the Masters and Johnson reach, Kinsey’s questionnaires, Marie Bonaparte’s studies on the relation of clitoral position to enjoyment of sex, and so on. Roach travels to Denmark where she observes pig inseminators sexually stimulating the sows for better results; watches penile enhancement surgery in Taipei; peeks into the small and unsettling world of sex machine hobbyists; interviews the maker of a suction device for women (to increase blood flow to the clitoris); discusses the strange history of testicle grafts; and opens many other windows into the vast array of human sexuality. Stuffed with the kind of tidbits of information that make you cross your legs and squirm (there is a great deal of historical insertions of objects into urethras, for example), and told in vivid, bold, often hilarious prose, this is a hugely entertaining book. It’s not exactly a definitive study of human sexuality, being wide in scope but not deep and with very little in the way of general thesis; however, Roach’s winking, irreverent prose style, her wisecracks, and her wordplay set this book in the highest ranks of popular science surveys.
four stars
A cheery analysis of how and why scientists have observed, recorded, and theorized about human sex behavior, since gynecologist Robert Dickinson’s case studies in the 1890s, through the Masters and Johnson reach, Kinsey’s questionnaires, Marie Bonaparte’s studies on the relation of clitoral position to enjoyment of sex, and so on. Roach travels to Denmark where she observes pig inseminators sexually stimulating the sows for better results; watches penile enhancement surgery in Taipei; peeks into the small and unsettling world of sex machine hobbyists; interviews the maker of a suction device for women (to increase blood flow to the clitoris); discusses the strange history of testicle grafts; and opens many other windows into the vast array of human sexuality. Stuffed with the kind of tidbits of information that make you cross your legs and squirm (there is a great deal of historical insertions of objects into urethras, for example), and told in vivid, bold, often hilarious prose, this is a hugely entertaining book. It’s not exactly a definitive study of human sexuality, being wide in scope but not deep and with very little in the way of general thesis; however, Roach’s winking, irreverent prose style, her wisecracks, and her wordplay set this book in the highest ranks of popular science surveys.
four stars
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
What Language Is: And What it Isn't and What it Could Be
by John McWhorter
A linguist explains for the layman, in easy, readable prose and affable wit, the professional view on languages: they are Ingrown, Disheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. He tries to dispel the ludicrous and unfounded belief that some languages are more “real” than others (which are thought of as “primitive”) simply because they are better known or have a tradition of literature. Rationally, with no dogmatic axe to grind, he explains the prescriptivist view of language – all languages – as ever-changing oral traditions, most of them a macedoine of borrowings from neighbors, colonists, conquerors, and subcultures. He inverts the layman’s suppositions about “primitive” creoles – it’s writing which is the perversion of language, not the other way around; and it’s the baffling impenetrability of, say, Navajo that is unusual, rather than the more simplistic grammars of Persian and English - which have been streamlined over time by an influx of adult immigrants who honed off some of the intricacies while learning them orally, as well as infusing some of their own language into the pot.
This is a terrific book, full of fascinating tidbits about individual languages (the English word “notch” used to be “otch” but the initial n was transferred to the indefinite article; Mandarin uses some shape-based classifiers for its numbered nouns; the African language Serer has ten genders; Twi uses various particles to indicate how you have come to know a statement; Berik nouns specify the time of day things happened to them) as well as wise, compelling pronouncements on language as whole. McWhorter looks at a language’s entire background – its history of colonization or conquest, its geographic setting – to explain its own individual quirks. As McWhorter notes, languages have fetishes over different things – English's insistence on differentiating the indefinite and definite articles of nouns baffles Mandarin and Russian speakers, who don’t use any articles, while other languages are anal about specific counting words or the relations of objects to the speaker. This doesn’t make them “strange” or not “real” languages, just individual, and it’s that variation that is so endlessly fascinating to us language geeks. Where I think McWhorter fails to convince is in his argument that textspeak and the slipping of written standards results in just as “real” a language than the AP Manual of Style; this may be true, from a linguistic point of view, but the actual criticism is that slipping standards are worse, not less real, than the heavy precedent of our vast, complex written tradition, which has ennobled us, and which is being forgotten. This aside, the book is charming, captivating, and compelling; anyone who makes misinformed comments about what language is – and that is so many otherwise perfectly rational people – should be forced to read it.
four stars
A linguist explains for the layman, in easy, readable prose and affable wit, the professional view on languages: they are Ingrown, Disheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. He tries to dispel the ludicrous and unfounded belief that some languages are more “real” than others (which are thought of as “primitive”) simply because they are better known or have a tradition of literature. Rationally, with no dogmatic axe to grind, he explains the prescriptivist view of language – all languages – as ever-changing oral traditions, most of them a macedoine of borrowings from neighbors, colonists, conquerors, and subcultures. He inverts the layman’s suppositions about “primitive” creoles – it’s writing which is the perversion of language, not the other way around; and it’s the baffling impenetrability of, say, Navajo that is unusual, rather than the more simplistic grammars of Persian and English - which have been streamlined over time by an influx of adult immigrants who honed off some of the intricacies while learning them orally, as well as infusing some of their own language into the pot.
This is a terrific book, full of fascinating tidbits about individual languages (the English word “notch” used to be “otch” but the initial n was transferred to the indefinite article; Mandarin uses some shape-based classifiers for its numbered nouns; the African language Serer has ten genders; Twi uses various particles to indicate how you have come to know a statement; Berik nouns specify the time of day things happened to them) as well as wise, compelling pronouncements on language as whole. McWhorter looks at a language’s entire background – its history of colonization or conquest, its geographic setting – to explain its own individual quirks. As McWhorter notes, languages have fetishes over different things – English's insistence on differentiating the indefinite and definite articles of nouns baffles Mandarin and Russian speakers, who don’t use any articles, while other languages are anal about specific counting words or the relations of objects to the speaker. This doesn’t make them “strange” or not “real” languages, just individual, and it’s that variation that is so endlessly fascinating to us language geeks. Where I think McWhorter fails to convince is in his argument that textspeak and the slipping of written standards results in just as “real” a language than the AP Manual of Style; this may be true, from a linguistic point of view, but the actual criticism is that slipping standards are worse, not less real, than the heavy precedent of our vast, complex written tradition, which has ennobled us, and which is being forgotten. This aside, the book is charming, captivating, and compelling; anyone who makes misinformed comments about what language is – and that is so many otherwise perfectly rational people – should be forced to read it.
four stars
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Flat Crazy
by Ben Rehder
2004
The third Blanco Country mystery. In this episode of game warden John Marlin’s adventures in law enforcement, a corrupt hunting guide named Duke Waldrip kills an angry client who demands a refund after discovering his mounted head was faked; the country goes loco after a chupacabra sighting makes national news thanks to a less-than-dignified gossip show’s attention; loveable redneck crooks Billy Don and Red try to catch the goat-sucker with typically amateurish planning; a man specializing in Asian midget porn procures some deer antlers as an aphrodisiac for an unconfident star; and someone has been illegally shipping in and shooting exotic animals (which just might explain the chupacabra sightings).
It’s another strong entry in Rehder’s series – not actually a mystery, since the murderer is known from the beginning (except for a small twist at the end) and it’s pretty clear what the chupacabra actually is – but it’s a great amount of fun. The criminal is both dumb and devious; the hillbillies are self-centered, goofy and endearing; Marlin is an everyman, unlucky in love but optimistic, who doesn’t want to solve homicides but deep down enjoys the thrill. As Rehder brings the disparate plot lines together and apart and together again in brief, staccato flashes of drama and chaos (the porn plot thread impacts the case only tangentially but quite viscerally), the madcap energy keeps the pages turning. Comic madness plus suspense equals enthralling.
four stars
2004
The third Blanco Country mystery. In this episode of game warden John Marlin’s adventures in law enforcement, a corrupt hunting guide named Duke Waldrip kills an angry client who demands a refund after discovering his mounted head was faked; the country goes loco after a chupacabra sighting makes national news thanks to a less-than-dignified gossip show’s attention; loveable redneck crooks Billy Don and Red try to catch the goat-sucker with typically amateurish planning; a man specializing in Asian midget porn procures some deer antlers as an aphrodisiac for an unconfident star; and someone has been illegally shipping in and shooting exotic animals (which just might explain the chupacabra sightings).
It’s another strong entry in Rehder’s series – not actually a mystery, since the murderer is known from the beginning (except for a small twist at the end) and it’s pretty clear what the chupacabra actually is – but it’s a great amount of fun. The criminal is both dumb and devious; the hillbillies are self-centered, goofy and endearing; Marlin is an everyman, unlucky in love but optimistic, who doesn’t want to solve homicides but deep down enjoys the thrill. As Rehder brings the disparate plot lines together and apart and together again in brief, staccato flashes of drama and chaos (the porn plot thread impacts the case only tangentially but quite viscerally), the madcap energy keeps the pages turning. Comic madness plus suspense equals enthralling.
four stars
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Something To Answer For
by P.H. Newby
1969
The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor. With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes. On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Britain’s knowledge or lack thereof of the Final Solution in 1942. Townrow is incensed that anyone would believe the British government to be capable of colluding in genocide, while the Israeli and Greek are more cynical. In Port Said, on the Canal, he goes to a bar he used to frequent, whose Greek proprietor spins him a yarn about Mrs K’s taking Elie’s body, along with a fortune in coins, to Lebanon though the Canal, which directly led to Nasser’s decision to nationalize it, precipitating the looming French and British invasion. Townrow drinks until he blacks out – it seems likely to the reader that the bar owner drugged him – and awakens naked and bleeding in the desert, and is attacked by a startled camel driver, causing his head and eye to be bandaged for most of the rest of the novel. After this incident, the novel becomes much more dream-like in its narrative, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who gives false names, who cannot remember his nationality (though he asserts that he is Irish as part of a scam he tries to run on Mrs K), nor his age, nor whether his mother is alive. He imagines that Elie is still alive, or that he is watching the burial at sea. He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah Strauss, who is married to an American locked in an asylum back home. She repels his attentions, though apparently she later becomes his lover, and she an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest (and kills a man, though apparently nothing comes of it), is arrested as a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with detachment. At the end of the novel, Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself and his own actions to answer for.
I don’t usually write such a detailed plot summary in a review, but this book, with its scenes that seemed to go nowhere but had huge influence on what came after, seemed to call for it. This is a somewhat bewildering novel, as it is difficult to tell how much of what was related actually took place or how much was a fever or drunken dream. Did Townrow really dig up the body, or watch a burial? Did he really kill a rioter accidentally? The book is very much Graham Greene – efficient British man gets in way over his head in a post-colonial foreign country because he doesn’t understand the history and culture the way he thinks he does – but a Greene novel as co-directed by Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. I understand that this is a story of self-discovery, and it’s written with skill and erudition, and its message that a person is responsible for his or her own morality is welcome enough, but there’s always a part of me that resents books which make no distinction between internal and external processes. How can the reader judge whether Townrow’s choices are apt and his journey worth taking when we can’t even know what’s happened to him?
three stars
1969
The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor. With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes. On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Britain’s knowledge or lack thereof of the Final Solution in 1942. Townrow is incensed that anyone would believe the British government to be capable of colluding in genocide, while the Israeli and Greek are more cynical. In Port Said, on the Canal, he goes to a bar he used to frequent, whose Greek proprietor spins him a yarn about Mrs K’s taking Elie’s body, along with a fortune in coins, to Lebanon though the Canal, which directly led to Nasser’s decision to nationalize it, precipitating the looming French and British invasion. Townrow drinks until he blacks out – it seems likely to the reader that the bar owner drugged him – and awakens naked and bleeding in the desert, and is attacked by a startled camel driver, causing his head and eye to be bandaged for most of the rest of the novel. After this incident, the novel becomes much more dream-like in its narrative, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who gives false names, who cannot remember his nationality (though he asserts that he is Irish as part of a scam he tries to run on Mrs K), nor his age, nor whether his mother is alive. He imagines that Elie is still alive, or that he is watching the burial at sea. He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah Strauss, who is married to an American locked in an asylum back home. She repels his attentions, though apparently she later becomes his lover, and she an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest (and kills a man, though apparently nothing comes of it), is arrested as a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with detachment. At the end of the novel, Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself and his own actions to answer for.
I don’t usually write such a detailed plot summary in a review, but this book, with its scenes that seemed to go nowhere but had huge influence on what came after, seemed to call for it. This is a somewhat bewildering novel, as it is difficult to tell how much of what was related actually took place or how much was a fever or drunken dream. Did Townrow really dig up the body, or watch a burial? Did he really kill a rioter accidentally? The book is very much Graham Greene – efficient British man gets in way over his head in a post-colonial foreign country because he doesn’t understand the history and culture the way he thinks he does – but a Greene novel as co-directed by Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. I understand that this is a story of self-discovery, and it’s written with skill and erudition, and its message that a person is responsible for his or her own morality is welcome enough, but there’s always a part of me that resents books which make no distinction between internal and external processes. How can the reader judge whether Townrow’s choices are apt and his journey worth taking when we can’t even know what’s happened to him?
three stars
Monday, February 18, 2013
The Fixer
by Bernard Malamud
1966
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this novel set during the end of Tsarist Russia concerns the titular handyman, Yakov Bok, an agnostic Jew who leaves his village where he’s had nothing but personal and financial failure and tries his luck in Kiev. There in the big anti-Semitic city, Yakov poses as a goy Russian and becomes a brickyard foreman, not through deliberate machinations but a series of events and lies of omission which make this the easiest and safest course for him. But after a young boy is brutally murdered in the region, the authorities seize on Yakov, a Jew living illegally under false pretenses, as their scapegoat and charge him with killing the boy for magical Jewish blood rituals. He sits imprisoned with little hope, though one or two fair-minded officials sympathize with the injustice of his arrest.
This is a powerful novel, and it is compelling reading because the eventual plight of Yakov is of such interest. In Malamud’s setting, the system and its drivers are not clever or all-seeing, merely thuggish, ignorant, and hypocritical. Though there are bits of circumstantial evidence that hurt Yakov’s credibility (he had previously chased the boy out of the brickyard for vandalism, he took in an old Jew who had been beaten and stanched his bloody head with his own shirt), basically the case against him is made up of whole cloth, invented baseless lies about him personally and the Jewish religion in general. This is particularly ironic and brutal for Yakov because, as noted, he doesn’t consider himself a religious Jew: “From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.” One of the book’s most powerful and moving scenes is when Yakov is visited by his humble, God-fearing father-in-law, whom Yakov sends away, saying God is an invention and that he hates him in any case for killing Job’s children, “not to mention ten thousand pogroms.” The book’s purpose, I believe is to expose injustice and to exhort all fair-minded people, especially Jews, to work against it: “there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew,” Yakov thinks to himself near the end of the book. “You can’t sit still and see yourself destroyed.” And yet, because Malamud has shown that the system is not just weighted against the oppressed but completely unrestrained by any duty to truth or even credibility, that it can manufacture and disseminate inventions, I wonder whether this moral works. What is there to fight, if facts don’t matter and lone voices are silenced? The novel ends on an ambiguous note, but where this scintilla of hope may come from seems unfounded given the rest of Yakov’s experiences.
four stars
1966
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this novel set during the end of Tsarist Russia concerns the titular handyman, Yakov Bok, an agnostic Jew who leaves his village where he’s had nothing but personal and financial failure and tries his luck in Kiev. There in the big anti-Semitic city, Yakov poses as a goy Russian and becomes a brickyard foreman, not through deliberate machinations but a series of events and lies of omission which make this the easiest and safest course for him. But after a young boy is brutally murdered in the region, the authorities seize on Yakov, a Jew living illegally under false pretenses, as their scapegoat and charge him with killing the boy for magical Jewish blood rituals. He sits imprisoned with little hope, though one or two fair-minded officials sympathize with the injustice of his arrest.
This is a powerful novel, and it is compelling reading because the eventual plight of Yakov is of such interest. In Malamud’s setting, the system and its drivers are not clever or all-seeing, merely thuggish, ignorant, and hypocritical. Though there are bits of circumstantial evidence that hurt Yakov’s credibility (he had previously chased the boy out of the brickyard for vandalism, he took in an old Jew who had been beaten and stanched his bloody head with his own shirt), basically the case against him is made up of whole cloth, invented baseless lies about him personally and the Jewish religion in general. This is particularly ironic and brutal for Yakov because, as noted, he doesn’t consider himself a religious Jew: “From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.” One of the book’s most powerful and moving scenes is when Yakov is visited by his humble, God-fearing father-in-law, whom Yakov sends away, saying God is an invention and that he hates him in any case for killing Job’s children, “not to mention ten thousand pogroms.” The book’s purpose, I believe is to expose injustice and to exhort all fair-minded people, especially Jews, to work against it: “there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew,” Yakov thinks to himself near the end of the book. “You can’t sit still and see yourself destroyed.” And yet, because Malamud has shown that the system is not just weighted against the oppressed but completely unrestrained by any duty to truth or even credibility, that it can manufacture and disseminate inventions, I wonder whether this moral works. What is there to fight, if facts don’t matter and lone voices are silenced? The novel ends on an ambiguous note, but where this scintilla of hope may come from seems unfounded given the rest of Yakov’s experiences.
four stars
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