bookshelves: currently-reading
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bookshelves: currently-reading
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Ed Lacy, the pseudonym of Leonard S. Zinberg, apparently wrote some hard hitting mystery novels. A Woman Aroused was one of his first novels to get published (as Ed Lady, that is) and one that began his professional writing career. He's getting a resurgence of sorts with the increasing interest in e-books as so many of his novels are available online. The story revolves around a George Jackson, an ex-GI living in a house on 74th street in Manhattan (back when a copywriter could live in a house on 74th street in Manhattan). "[T:]his all began about the time when you could still remember getting on the subway for a nickel," George begins his tale, setting the stage. The characters are well crafted, the story tightly plotted even if the scenes drag on at times. George's friend Henry arrives one day and gives him $7000, an enormous sum now and probably as much as some people made in a year back then. Henry tells George that he wants him to keep the money away from his wife. He doesn't explain more, despite George's insistence on more information, and George writes an IOU for the money and keeps both the cash and the slip of paper on which he's promised to repay when asked. When Henry dies, George meets Lee, his widow, "tall, voluptuous. Next to her Lady Godiva looked like the winner of a baby contest." She's a big woman with a full figure who seems to be able to do only two things: eat and have sex. For a single man like George, this seems a perfect setup. Wanting to help his friend's widow and feeling sorry for Lee, he takes her into his home and pays her a stipend of sorts with Henry's money, the money he believes rightfully belongs to her anyway. This is the driving force of the novel, especially the last half, but the plot peters out in the end as though Lacy could not think of any other way to conclude it. There is literally no resolution between George and Lee and this made the end of the book feel empty to me.
The characters, however, are so richly drawn as to makeup in part for the weak conclusion to the plot. George himself likes to dance and there are some great scenes of him dancing in his basement and then drying himself under a sunlamp. His relationship with his ex-wife, Flo, is tumultuous. They love each other but seem to only be able to stand one another for a few days before they break into another fight and stop speaking for weeks at a time. George's friend Joe is "a middle-aged Romeo" whom George turns to for help. Joe's son Walt is one of two characters who has just returned from Europe, each with a different take on the post-war world. Walt was a shy, quiet kid before the war. However, the army apparently taught him a lot about life as he determines that college is not the place for him. He's got rackets and schemes dreamed up; he's ready to make money. Eddie, George's brother-in-law, also just returned from Europe, but his take on a post-war world are much different than the scheming Walt. Eddie is traumatized by his experience liberating Auschwitz and determines that what he saw there should never happen to another human being. He responds by embracing socialism. "Sure, if the world ran smoothly, if everybody had enough food, security, I'd say leave me alone, I'd say being selfish works. But we live in the midst of needless misery and want, and that's wrong...unnecessary!" Eddie is apparently a recurring character in Zinberg's work, a "maladjusted GI adapting to civilian life with mixed results."(Profile of Ed Lacy by Ed Lynskey)
Overall, I enjoyed the writing style and the character development. The story itself, too, kept me interested, but the ending left me sorely disappointed. Maybe all pulp fiction is like that: all build up but no resolution. I'll have to read more to find out. In any case, Lacy's work is perfect iPhone reading (available through Books from Munsey's on the Stanza app). ]]>
Jeff
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 101 |
| correct: | 71 (70.3%) |
| skipped: | 1 |
| best streak: | 13 |
| questions added: | 0 |
Fforde's novel is a wry sendup of everything that is great about genre fiction, especially my favorite genre, detective stories. Peppering his first novel with offbeat characters both from his own fertile imagination and from the pages of some of the great works of English literature, Fforde manages to create a world that is both real and oddball. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief for this novel, but do so and you won't be disappointed.
Thursday Next is a Special Operative in Literary Detection, a division of the SpecOps, a multi-leveled version of the CIA, FBI and NSA all wrapped up into one grand organization in this offbeat, alternate 1985. (An ironic time, perhaps. Back to the Future took place, partly, in 1985.) The story is complicated and involves a villain named Hades, the mysterious head of a corporation that seems to run England, and the kidnapping and murder of characters straight out of those very literary classics. Any book that can quote Shakespeare ("Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, that I might see my shadow, as I pass") and have a character named Jack Schitt (yes, you read that right, and Fforde makes wonderful use of his witticism) has got to be worth a read.
While I found the story to be highly entertaining, I was not completely engrossed by it. I suppose one can't expect the action sequences to be that good when many of them, including the climactic chase sequence, take place in the pages of classic English literature. There was certainly enough here to keep me reading, to keep me interested, but not enough for me to put everything aside and pour through it in a day, which I think is easily possible. Still, the further away from Thursday Next I get, the more I want to read about her. The more I want to know how much farther Jasper Fforde is willing to go, how much further he can blur the line between reality and fiction. I'll have to pick up the next Next book to find out. ]]>
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bookshelves: to-read
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I came across this first novel by John Brandon through an issue of McSweeney's (the number escapes me at the moment) and was completely taken by the story. Swin and Kyle, two average American kids having been recruited as drivers for a mysterious drug dealer named Frog, go on their first drive together. Neither of them have ever had a partner. Despite a brief run-in with the law, the trip goes off swimmingly and the two become partners, eventually friends. They are assigned, as it were, to work for an odd-ball park ranger named Bright in a national park in Arkansas where they begin to lead a life of seeming normalcy, taking on assumed names as junior park rangers, cleaning the park, manning the ticket booth at the entrance. The story is compelling both for the tone it takes (two American kids grown up in the heartland) and for the sudden and almost inhumane violence. It's a classic crime thriller, as a drug deal goes bad and Swin and Kyle are left alone to figure out how to extricate themselves from a situation horribly out of their control.
For all that, I found the book disappointing. Despite the rather lengthy development of both Kyle and Swin, their characters are so similar that at times I had a hard time telling them apart. Swin is the smart one, Kyle the muscle. That's about all you need to know. Johnna, the nurse Swin falls for, has a dark streak and, like the boys, has a somewhat checkered past. She takes up with them seemingly out of boredom. When Swin proposes marriage, she is non-plussed. "We're still in the infatuation stage," she tells him. "We should wait until we're not attracted to each other to make a decision about marriage." It's a wonderful moment in the novel, when two characters who care deeply for each other, despite all the bad they are involved in, have an honest discussion about their future. Unfortunately, it comes too late in the story to make me care enough about her.
The middle of the book drags. I found myself able to read only a few pages at a time, wanting to skim over the personal stories of the two men who were virtually interchangeable in my mind. They clean the park. They make a home. They take in a stray dog. They clean the park some more. They try to find out what's going on in the rest of the organization. They clean the park again. There's an element of loss mixed in here, three people in the middle of a state none of them want to call home, desperately trying to make one. Trying to salvage the remnants of the lives they have left behind. It's a compelling arc to the characters, but it's not enough.
Mixed with this is the backstory of another character. Here, Brandon switches point-of-view, catching the reader off guard. "After graduation, you, Ken Hovan, stock groceries and build prefabricated sheds in the yards of rich guys out in Germantown." It doesn't take long to figure out who 'you' are in this novel, but I won't give that away here. The use of the second person seems more of a device to keep the reader interested than an organic product of the story itself. As though Brandon were saying, "Aha, I got you. You thought you knew how this story was going to unfold and now I'm going to play tricks with the narrator and you'll never figure it out." Rather than feel more interested in the plot, I felt further distanced from the story by the change in point-of-view. I found myself wanting more of Swin and Kyle. Ken Hovan's tale only serves to make the story feel like thirty kilos of cocaine you cannot drop while you try desperately to run from the police.
Brandon's writing is strong. The action sequences are first rate. My heart raced as I read the fight between Bright and the strange nephew. And the final confrontation left me breathless as I flipped each page to see what would happen next. However, there are too few of these scenes. As Swin and Kyle wait for something to happen, for someone to come for them, I found myself waiting, too, for something to happen, anything to happen. I had to wait too long and that made the book feel slow, like a car sinking into a muddy bog. At first it splashes, then it sits there, doing nothing for a long time, sinking so slowly it looks like it's not doing anything at all. Finally, suddenly, the mud breaks open and belches a last plop of air as the car vanishes beneath the surface.
If you like crime novels (I'm a huge fan of Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard), this is a good read. Not a great read, but a fine first novel. ]]>
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