David Schwinghammer's Blog, page 14

The Martian

Andy Weir is an inspiration for beginning writers. THE MARTIAN was his third novel, the first two were pretty bad, according to Mark. The rest of us call them practice novels.

Anyway, Andy is a space nut, so he had lots of information to insert in his plot to make it believable. Then he posted the chapters on his web site, where his small fan base could read them for nothing. Spoiled brats that they were they began to complain that his novel wasn't on Kindle, so he went ahead and had that done, selling it for the lowest amount possible, 99 cents. It sold like proverbial hotcakes. Soon he had publishers fighting over him; one guy wanted to publish the book and buy the movie rights. Andy was suspicious. If you've ever tried to get a book published, you know why. But, as you know, they guy was for real.

Mark Watney, the astronaut stranded on Mars is as smart as a whip, but if you're looking for supporting characters you might want to look elsewhere. This is all about saving Mark, who was inadvertently left behind for dead by his crew mates. He disappeared in a wind storm and the lander was beginning to tip; they had to get out why they could. Mark has about a year's supply of food, but the next mission isn't supposed to arrive in four years. Mark is a botanist and he's got some potatoes that he decides to make more potatoes out of. One of his jobs was to see if he could get ferns to grow on Mars. He's got soil from Earth that he mixes with Mars sand; it works. This is only one way Mark shoes his inventiveness. There are times in the novel he thinks he's a dead man for sure, but he always works his way out of it. He even establishes communication with NASA.

Okay, smart is good, but there's a reason THE MARTIAN was put in the comedy category at the Golden Globe Awards. Mark is funny, even when Mars is trying to kill him. One example would be the music Commander Lewis's left behind. She loved seventies music, including disco. He hates it. She also likes the worst of seventies TV. But when that's all you've got, you watch it.

There are some parts of the book you won't believe. Would the crew disobey their superiors at NASA? They have to or you don't have a story. Would the mother ship be able to dock with Mark's tin can of a lander on a flyby? Actually it's worse than a tin can. Part of the tin can is missing.

Despite the above, I loved it. Mark's sense of humor and inventiveness make him a wonderful character. if I were still watching DVDs, I'd certainly rent the movie.

The Bat

THE BAT is Jo Nesbo's first book in the Harry Hole (Holy) series. I started in the middle of the series with the SNOWMAN, in which Harry already has a terrible drug problem, so this first effort explains a lot.

In the ensuing novels Harry often refers to how he got to be the “go-to” guy in Norway when it came to serial killers. It all started in Australian where he was sent to “observe” the investigation of the murder of a Norwegian girl. Apparently a lot of Scandinavians migrated to Australia when jobs were scare in Sweden, Norway, Finland etc.

Harry is assigned a partner named Andrew who just happens to be an Aborigine. We learn quite a bit about Aborigines as the case progresses. Andrew tells Harry, for instance, that Aborigines are about as different as American Indians. They speak 250 languages, for one thing.

Harry and Andrew get a tip about a drug dealer who was seen with the girl shortly before she was murdered, and they go to the town where she worked in a strip joint. They stop to visit a circus and some boxing matches where we meet one of Andrew's boys Toowoomba who belongs to a club that takes on all comers. He breaks a big guy's nose after underestimating him. Toowoomba is so good he's a candidate for the national championship. Andrew used to box for the same club, and taught Toowoomba how to fight.

Andrew seems to be trying to tell Harry something about the murderer, but Harry can't figure out exactly what. There are several suspects, including a transvestite circus clown, and the drug pusher. In the process of investigating the murder, Harry meets Birgitta, a red-headed Swedish girl, whom he falls in love with. He also falls off the wagon; he already has a drinking problem.

There are several holes in the novel. Do you use your lover as bait to trap the murderer? I don't think so. Would you? Nesbo also pulls several twists, concerning the principal suspect, dismissing several on the basis of Harry's intuition. I was able to figure out who done it, because Nesbo practically tells you at one point. He also explains almost immediately why the book is called THE BAT. If you see one in the daytime, it means something in the Aborigine culture.

Harry gets beat up quite a bit in all of his novels, but he keeps coming back for more; I guess that's the appeal of the novel. Action sequences instead of introspection about the meaning of life, which we find in quite a few mystery novels these days. There is some of that here, but it's unique, coming from Andrew and Toowoomba who have a different slant on life.

West of Sunset

Stewart O'Nan does best when he writes about ordinary people as he did in LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER. When I read that, I couldn't tell if it was fiction or non-fiction. That's not the case in WEST OF SUNSET, about F. Scott Fitzgerald's last days.

He's out West trying to make some money as a screenwriter to pay for his daughter Scottie's college and Zelda's stay at a sanitarium.

The only time he actually got a screen credit was for THE THREE COMRADES, which was supposed to star Spencer Tracy who bowed out because of appendicitis. Scott was plagued by a co-writer, whom he considered a hack. The man questioned most of Scott's scenes. Apparently this was payback for when Scott used the man's real name in one of his books, portraying him as a doofus. But the film made money, and it got good reviews. Joseph Mankiewicz also had a penchant for making changes while he directed, thusly the references to the nazis were deleted. One of the financiers was German.

Sheila Graham is also a major figure in the book, as is Zelda. Sheila portrayed herself as a high-classed Englishwoman, but she eventually tells Scott Sheila Graham wasn't her real name; she was born Cockney and worked her way up from the bottom. They fight over Scott's drinking and she doesn't let him move in with her until his heart begins to give out.

Scott doesn't start working on THE LAST TYCOON until the last part of the book. He had to borrow money from Maxwell Perkins in order to pay for Scottie's tuition and Zelda's care. He tried to serialize the book in some of the major magazines but was turned down, which mortified him. He had been pretty much blackballed as a screenwriter because of his drinking.

Familiar people keep popping up. If you remember the golden age of television, you'll recognize screenwriter Budd Schulberg who worked with Scott on a picture set at Dartmouth University; it was about the winter carnival; everybody was drinking, a bad place for Scott and Budd as they were both eventually fired for imbibing more than writing.

Everybody wants to know about Zelda. I know it's sounds like Scott was unfaithful, but he remembered the young and vibrant Zelda, and he went to see her out East quite often. Most of the time, she sounds normal, calling him by his nickname, Do-Do, but then she lapses. She has a big one when they finally let her go home to visit her mother and sisters in Alabama.

A big surprise is that Scott worked on GONE WITH THE WIND. It was “all hands on deck” as Scott's boss at Metro told Scott, but he only lasted a few weeks.

There's a cute little sequence toward the end when Scott hires a college student as a secretary to work on LAST TYCOON. He calls her Francois, her real name being Francis. She calls him monsieur. She's a great sounding board, as he interprets her body language when she reads back what he's written. Sheila is jealous.

Despite the above, I don't think there's enough here to merit a book. You're probably better off reading one of the many biographies. The biggest outrage seems to be that the doctor's weren't honest with Scott. He thought he had angina. Maybe if he knew he had serious heart disease he would have taken better care of himself. After all he'd had a heart attack at a movie theater the same day he died. Instead of going to the hospital, he made an appointment with his cardiologist for the next day.

Avenue of Mysteries

John Irving hasn't written such a contentious book (at least one that I've read) since CIDER HOUSE RULES, which in my mind was a brave book, risking Irving's livelihood, as it was brazenly pro-choice.

Irving does this again here as he targets Benedict XVI's ambiguous approach toward the poor in his banning of the use of contraceptives. But Irving doesn't go all agnostic against the church as there's quite a bit of mysticism in AVENUE OF MYSTERIES. That's where Dorothy and Miriam come in. They're literary groupies of noted author Juan Diego Guerrero whom he meets in a trip to the Philippines to honor the father of a diseased friend of his. Dorothy and Miriam can't be seen in a mirror and they don't show up in a picture taken by a tourist with Juan Diego. What the heck is going on here? He has sex with both, but the mother, especially, appears out of nowhere.

Let's back up a bit. Juan Diego is a slum kid who with his sister, Lupe, lived in a dump in Oaxaca, Mexico, with their protector, Rivera, who sincerely loved them. His mother worked as a cleaning woman for the Jesuits during the day and as a prostitute at night. There's some question whether Rivera is Juan's father. But Juan Diego teaches himself to read by rescuing books mostly thrown out by the Jesuits who have a school and an orphanage nearby. There's further weirdness in that Lupe can read minds, and no one can understand her except Juan Diego. She seems to be speaking an ancient Aztec language. The Jesuits want Juan to go to their school because he's one of the smartest of the smartest; he even teaches himself to read English.

Lupe hates the statue of the “Big Mary” in the Jesuit church, probably because the statue of the Lady of Guadalupe is much smaller and relegated to an inferior part of the church. The weirdness continues. Big Mary seems to come alive at times. Then there's Edward Bonshaw, a priest in training, who falls in love with a transvestite. He and Flor eventually raise Juan Diego in Iowa City where Edward is an English professor. Somebody decides the best place for the kids is probably the circus, where Lupe would function as a mind reader and Juan Diego would be her interpreter, but the real reason she eventually gets the job is because the lion tamer is afraid of the male lion and he wants Lupe to read his mind. She can; she can also read the minds of the female lions. The lion tamer is one bad dude and he gets his just desserts, destroying the circus in the process.

As an older man Juan Diego is on beta blockers for his heart, but he feels diminished and tired when he takes them. He also takes half of a Viagra tablet. When he meets Miriam and Dorothy he increasingly forgets to take the beta blockers that diminish his sex drive.

The final major character in the novel is Clark French a former student of Juan Diego's who is a more accomplished author in the Philippines than Juan Diego. Clark is religious and he won't shut up. He also managed Juan Diego's affairs on the islands. He and Clark argue religion constantly and literature. Juan Diego thinks literature is always influenced by the author's life (as was Irving's in THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP); Clark insists that it's about the imagination, his reason for denouncing Mark Twain as a major writer. Juan Diego was happiest in Oaxaca; most of the book is about his dreams about his former life; it's the real reason he doesn't take the beta blockers. They interfere with his dreams. A key clue to the import of Miriam and Dorothy is that they're both wearing black at the end; I wouldn't have been surprised to see them carrying cycles and sporting hoods.

There's an argument among authors. Should you outline or plan your novel or should you let the characters tell the story. This book is so weird that Irving was obvious choosing the second approach.

The Witches, Salem 1692

The Salem witch trials were much more complicated than what I had been led to believe. Stacy Schiff sorts out all the variables for us with her extenstive research, thwarted somewhat by Massachusetts Bay's inability to preserve or outright destruction of court records.

The first culprit in the happening was Samuel Parris, the Salem village minister, whose niece, Abigail Williams, was struck with strange afflictions, along with her nine-year old cousin, Parris's daughter Betty. “The cousins complained of bites and pinches by 'invisible agents' They barked and yelped. ..” We single out Samuel because he may have been overzealous as a minister, taking his job home with him. He also told his flock they had a duty to love him. Puritans were encouraged to examine their behavior and that of others for evidence of evil. An Indian slave, Tituba, made it worse by embellishing in elaborate detail on the witchcraft she'd seen as the girls and others of their ilk began to finger neighbors and even family members as witches and warlocks. Poor George Burrough's, Salem village's first minister, was labeled as the devil. His major crime may have been his rejection of Salem village when he left of his own accord, tired of the back-biting and the rumor mongering.

As we know, 19 men and women were eventually hanged, including two ministers, and an old man was crushed to death.

Then there's good old Cotton Mather, who couldn't seem to stop publishing, Over four hundred books, according to Schiff. At first Mather was rather helpful, when he insisted that “spectral evidence” such as witches flying through the air on boards was not reliable evidence. Later he changed his mind or seemed to anyway. He was also positive that the end times were near. As St. Augustine had feared when Revelation was added to the New Testament, its contents were viewed as literal. Just when you're thinking Mather is an utter ninny, the smallpox epidemic runs rampant in Massachusetts Bay. Mather, who had had some medical training, was for inoculations. He paid the price. Puritans didn't like to interfere in God's providence.

Perhaps the man who bares the brunt of the blame is William Stoughton, the head magistrate of the trials. He was also acting governor and supreme court justice. When Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty, Stoughton called the jury back, pointing out that Rebecca had recognized two other accused witches when they entered the court and said something like “What are you doing here?” She had been in prison with them for months. Anyway, he sent them back to contemplate some more and she was found guilty. Stoughton's motto seemed to be “guilty until proven innocent”and sometimes not even then.

Another variable was the animosity between the Putnam family of Salem Town and the Town family of Salem Village. This was a litigious society and the Towns and Putnams were constantly squabbling about property rights. Rebecca Nurse maiden name was Town.

Stacy Schiff goes into extensive detail about what might have possessed the young girls who testified about the accused witches. She never quite says they were faking, as were the Swedish girls that Mather mentioned in his book on previous unexplained phenomena. But she implies that the girls might have had some adult help. Every time an accused witch entered the courtroom, they sent into convulsions as if they'd been coached. They also knew enough to calm down during the “touch test.” Supposedly, if you were a witch, and you touched a victim, your venom would bounce back on you and the victim would appear normal.

Schiff also implies that this sort of hysteria has happened before, as in the Communism scare of the early fifties which resulted in the hearings on Un-American activities and McCarthyism; she never does say they're happening now with the paranoia involving ISIS, but she does say Americans have a penchant for this type of hysteria.

Rock With Wings

In her second attempt at continuing the Leaphorn/Chee/Mauelito saga, Anne Hillerman centers on several plots and subplots.

The first one involves a speeding citation Bernie Mauelito issues to a man named Miller who has a gun in his glove box and a rifle in his trunk with two boxes full of seeming dirt. It's against the law to carry a gun in your car on the Navajo reservation. Although there's a drug sting going on, the FBI doesn't seem at all interested in Miller, but Bernie won't let it go.

She and Jim Chee are planning a vacation in Monument Valley, one of the most beautiful areas on the reservation. But a motion picture is being made there, involving zombies of course, and some violence seems to have occurred at one of the hotels. The Navajo police are short on investigators so Chee is asked to handle it. Chee finds blood and later a body. Their vacation is cut short when Bernie receives a call from a neighbor telling her her sister, Darlene, has left her mother alone. Another rather mundane plot involves a new tourist business Chee's clan brother has set up. Chee tries to fix the ancient people mover his clan brother wants to use to take the tourists to the sites.

Oh, yes, Chee also finds a grave at one of the tourist sites. It's been recently dug. Chee is suspicious the movie company wants to use the grave site for publicity. Then they find the residue of human bones. Once again Joe Leaphorn doesn't see a whole lot of action, although Chee does ask him for his opinion on the grave and items found there. This time Anne Hillerman has an excuse; he was shot in the head in the last episode and can't speak. When they get him a new laptop he is revitalized and makes some important contributions.

Back in Shiprock, Bernie finds a burning car near an elderly Navajo's house. He claims a skinwalker did it. Coincidentally the car belongs to Miller.

All in all there are too many subplots and the resolutions to some of them leave a lot to be desired. During a climax scene at the old Navajo's house, no body seems to recognize the so-called skinwalker who comes to the rescue. Bernie doesn't put two and two together, even when she's sitting behind the “skinwalker” in a car later on. The skinwalker's motivation is also suspect. Why would he/she come to their rescue when he was shot at previously?

Don't give up on our favorite character's involvement in the next episode, if there is one. The Lieutenant has asked Joe Leaphorn to work part-time at his own pace, and he has accepted.

Finders Keepers

MISERY has always been my favorite Stephen King book, mainly because it wasn't about some dopey clown sticking his head out of a sewer grating. It was about an obsessed fan who happened to find her favorite writer in dire straights after a car accident and refused to let him go until he promised to continue her favorite series, which he had discontinued. It was plausible, in other words.

FINDERS KEEPERS is also about an obsessed fan who sets out to rob a J.D. Salinger like novelist who had been out of the public eye for twenty years. Morris Bellamy is more interested in a continuation of the Jimmy God novels (think Holden Caulfield), the last of which seemed to him to have been a sellout. John Rothstein keeps his writing and some money in a safe which Morris and his friends break into; Morris then dispatches his literary hero with a bullet to the brain and hides the money and the moleskin notebooks in a trunk buried beneath a tree. But he's arrested for a brutal rape and spends the next thirty-five years in jail.

Along come Pete Saubers who lives in Morrie's old house; he finds the trunk and the money as the bank beneath the tree has eroded revealing the trunk. Wonder of wonders Pete is also a big Rothstein fan, but he needs the money more to help his parents. His dad just happens to be a victim of the Mr. Mercedes attack; he can barely walk and has been laid off his job as a real estate salesman, thanks to the recession. His wife still has a job but just barely. Pete decides to send them five hundred a month, anonymously, and it pulls them through. By the time he's ready for college it's running out and his little sister wants to go to a private school; she's bullied at the public school she goes to.

Pete wants to go to college to become a heinous (j.k) literary critic, as he doesn't quite have the talent to imitate his hero, Rothstein. He decides to sell some of the moleskin notebooks; he asks his former hippie teacher to whom he might sell them without too many questions being asked. Coincidentally (he said sarcastically) the teacher recommends a former friend of Morrie's who now owns a rare books store. He's wise to Pete immediately and sets out to blackmail him into giving him all of the notebooks. There are two new Jimmy Gold books, the second of which is his best, in Pete's estimation.

I know you're asking, Where the heck is Bill Hodges and his gang from MR. MERCEDES?, as was I. It takes over a hundred pages before he makes an appearance. Tina, Pete's little sister, the one who gets bullied, is friends with Barbara Robinson from the first book. Of course she is. She's noticed Pete is losing weight, his acne has resurfaced and he talks in his sleep. Holly who brained Mr. Mercedes with a sock containing ball bearings is now Bill's assistant, and she's gaining confidence every day. Jerome, Bill's lawn care boy from the first book is Barb's older brother, now in college. He returns to help out.

I think you know by now my main objection to the book is the unusual number of coincidences. But this is Stephen King, and he's got to be the best writer I've ever read at hooking you on the first page. Besides, Bill is an ex-cop who was suicidal at the beginning of MR. MERCEDES; Holly is somehow related to the woman Bill fell in love with in that book who came to a sad end. Bill blames himself. There's a cliffhanger at the end; I hate cliffhangers, but this is a three-book project, and the cliffhanger involves Mr. Mercedes, Brady Hartsfield, who's supposed to be brain dead; Bill isn't so sure. The John Rothstein plot has been fully resolved.

The Incarnations

Author Susan Barber spent several years learning about its culture and history; she's also of Chinese-Malaysian-British descent.

This book is about a taxi driver named Wang who thinks he's being stalked. Someone is leaving packets for him detailing his supposed previous lives. Wang is a former college student who spent at least seven hours a day studying. He had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a mental asylum where he had a homosexual affair. Ten years later he's married with a daughter, but he bumps into his former lover/musician who is now a barber and immediately blames him for the stalking.

The book travels back in time at least a thousand years, but it's not just Wang's story. There is another person who leads a parallel life with Wang. I will bet you a dollar to a doughnut you will never guess who the other person is.

One of the most interesting incarnations is when Wang is a concubine in Emperor Jiajing's court. She and fifteen others plot to poison the emperor who has a bad habit of torturing his sexual partners with knives, sometimes forcing another concubine to do it. I had trouble telling the difference between Wang alternative character and the other reincarnated person, but she/he is telling the story so if you pay close attention you can figure it out.

The other most interesting interlude was when Wang is a young woman during Mao Tse Dung's Red Guard revolution. Wang is the daughter of a high level member of the party, and she falls in love with Yi Moon whose father has been imprisoned because the Communists bureaucrats needed to fulfill their quota. Yi Moon is quiet and unassuming; Wang is a young communist leader with charisma. She must recognize Yi Moon as a kindred spirit. They're soon having sex.

The sexual attraction between the two characters continues from incarnation to incarnation. I'm not quite sure what Davis was getting at. Is she trying to make some sort of point, or is this just gratuitous sex to liven up her story? It seemed like it to me. The ending was a real surprise, and it put an end to the ongoing sexual attraction theory.

I know Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but there's no mention of that religion in the story. It does make for an original story. Another factor is how similar the modern Chinese are to Americans, despite the political differences.

The Fall of Princes

I have read Robert Goolrick's two previous novels, HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL and A RELIABLE WIFE. If I had still been doing a top twenty List Mania for Amazon, I would have put both of them on the list for the year they were published.

Alhough not as readable as the previous two, THE FALL OF PRINCES is more significant in that it addresses an ongoing controversy: how rich do you have to be before enough is enough? Rooney, the major character in the novel, works as a Wall Street trader. At one point he does well enough to earn a “yard and a half” bonus at the end of the year. A yard is a million dollars. But, alas, the partying got to him and he was fired, ending up working as a manager for Barnes and Noble.

Rooney never wanted to be a Wall Street wheeler dealer. He had a fellowship to work on his art in Europe for two years. He thought his work was crap and took his father's advise and went to business school. But business school didn't get him his job; the Firm he went to work for didn't take investments under ten million dollars. He got his job because he beat his boss at a poker hand. You'll have to read the book to find out how he did that.

There's also lots of sex involved in the book; Rooney wasn't very selective at the height of the AIDS epidemic; he was bi-sexual, although he does not mention any of his male partners. He was also married to one of the richest women in high society. She ditched him when he got fired, but he claims he'll always love her. We meet her again, but she doesn't seem all that lovable to me.

Rooney really isn't such a bad guy. He forms a relationship with a transexual prostitute named Holly, and they become platonic friends. She works on the street when it's kind of cold out, and he let's her warm up in his apartment once or twice a week. She even cleans his ratty apartment without being asked. Ultimately she tells him she's fallen in love. Again. She ruined her first relationship when her lover gave her money to have the operation, and she spent it on a couple of sailors she met on the way. Who has she fallen in love with? It's Rooney, and he considers it the highest compliment he's ever received. And when he gets down, he knows that somebody loves him. Inexplicably she disappears right after she tells him.

The ending is rather confusing. Rooney insists on buying good sheets, the one rich person habit he refuses to give up; at one point he says only one part of his bed gets mussed. So then he's asexual, right? But when he meets his ex-wife, Carmela, at the book store, he tells her he's a homosexual, but he's not any good at it. He was much better with women. So, is he or isn't he?

I've read an uncomplimentary review about this book, but I get the impression that the author has some experience in this milieu, if his acknowledgments mean anything. So we get to learn something about Wall Street that confirms the old saw: money won't make you happy.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

I've read reviews of THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB that argue Lagercrantz's book is on a par with the previous Lisbeth Salander novels. I beg to disagree.
For on thing Lagercrantz is more of a journalist and celebrity biographer than a novelist and it shows. A big no-no in the mystery craft is not to try to use dialogue to provide backstory. Lagercrantz does this over and over. No reporter would let his source carry the interview like the Blomkvist interviews.
Also, once again, Salander, the star of the show, doesn't get enough time on stage. Too much of the book is about Blomkvist whining about Millennium possibly going under and stories in celebrity mags that claim he's over the hill. He hasn't had a big story since Lisbeth's Russian gangster father was revealed as a major crime figure and eliminated.
This story is about cyber hacking, mainly of the NSA. They're really bad guys in the story, so bad that the story is rather unbelievable. Yes, they snoop on everybody, but they don't steal intellectual property.
The intellectual property we're speaking of is artificial intelligence and a scientist named Franz Balder has made great strides in the field. But he's developed a conscience. All he wants to do is help his autistic son August. Surprisingly his ex-wife isn't opposed to the idea. But then he's murdered and Lisbeth swoops in to save August. There's also lots of information on how to hack into a file. Of course August is a savante (isn't everybody?) and he helps Salander decipher an important NSA file.
We are also treated to another nasty villain, Camilla, Lisbeth's beautiful, psychotic twin sister. She's inherited her father's crime syndicate, but she's so beautiful and shy looking that nobody believes what a criminal mastermind she is. She hates her sister and a confrontation is imminent.
That's another thing that's wrong with the book. The ending just fades out without a real confrontation. There is one, but it's not between the sisters. That's what I hate about series mysteries. Some of them have cliff hangers, and you have to buy the next book to find out what happens. Lagercrantz is doing well enough with this one for that to be inevitable. Not that I won't read it.