Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 30

The Sense of an Ending

Here’s my book review of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

A few years ago, it won the Booker Prize. It was an inspiration for my own Clifford's Spiral, which won Distinguished Favorite in the Independent Press Awards last year.

It's about trying to make sense of what you remember about your life's experiences.

You will either be fascinated by The Sense of an Ending, or it just might infuriate you.

The resolution of this novel’s plot, if you can call it a resolution, will either intrigue you or frustrate you.

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Purgatory Gardens: It's not young love - What is it?

Is anyone still entertained by male-centered humorous fiction about "skirt-chasing?"

This comic novel centers on a love triangle in a retirement community. If you don't think that's ridiculous in itself, you'd better develop a sense of humor about old age before it sneaks up on you.

As were P. G. Wodehouse and Peter De Vries, Peter Lefcourt is a master of male-centered comedy, a genre that I’ve dubbed boychik lit.

Although this is a fur piece from Lefcourt's first rodeo, he's not quite ready to hang up his own spurs yet. In his previous books, the protagonists are typically male, and almost always misguided. I've said in print before that he's a master of a genre I call boychik lit – wise stories about young men with more chutzpah than brains. And although his heroes have tended to be middle – rather than teenaged, these men are all charmingly hapless, clueless, feckless, and frustratingly clueless.

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Consider, for example, the narrator of another of his books, Eleven Karens. He's a young man who ages too rapidly through eleven disappointing relationships, each with a different female name, Karen. Then there was the presumably more mature Senator Woody White in The Woody who has trouble with his, uh, drawers. My personal favorite has been the failing-ever-upward Hollywood producer Charlie Burns, who goes from failing to make a bad movie in The Deal to creating a truly horrific TV series about a family of terrorists in The Manhattan Beach Project.

This time out, Lefcourt's protagonist is an older but hardly wiser, New Jersey wiseguy, Salvatore Didziocomo. He's ratted out his boss, changed his name to Sammy Dee, and moved into a condo in Palm Springs, courtesy of the Feds. Lounging around the pool and hobnobbing at homeowner meetings, he gets partially aroused at the sight of the still-comely Marcy Gray, a fading Hollywood starlet who yet aspires to do any script Jane Fonda might turn down.

The staple of romantic comedy is the love triangle, as in the amusing antics in the Paradise Gardens retirement home of Lefcourt’s novel. My recent addition to the genre is Mick & Moira & Brad, with characters not so wizened who are contending in the dizzying world of showbiz.

But clouding Sammy's prospects for shining through is a tall, sophisticated African, one Didier Onyekachukwu. This charming fellow knows his fine wine and cuisine, dashing dance-floor moves, and art-curatorial arcana. And it doesn't take such refined taste or imagination for him to judge that Ms. Gray is the hotter number in the Paradise Gardens complex, also known as "Purgatory" to the residents who are willing to acknowledge their own mortality. So here we have the ultimate in male-centered comic frustration – two old guys who think about sex as often as teenage boys do, with the same result. They might get laid if by some miracle the moon turns as blue as their nether parts.

And they fight over Marcy's attention like two doofuses at a prom. I'll end the spoilers here by simply letting on that Sammy reverts to form and puts out a contract on Didier. Oh, and to make matters even more interesting, the intended victim may be at least as ruthless. At one time, his import-export business involved more nefarious commodities than old knickknacks.

Again, if you fail to see the comedy in all this, perhaps you should take out a long-term care policy and get on with life. Enough said about the plots.

Besides his honored rep as a writer of funny books, Mr. Lefcourt's career has also included writing and producing movies, television, and plays. His novel The Deal and his play Sweet Talk have already made it to the big and small screens. The rumor in town now is that The Dreyfus Affair,his comic novel about a gay baseball player, is in development. Please note that I predicted early on that Purgatory Gardens will follow suit. Think The Odd Couple meets Grace and Frankie – or, as Lefcourt fans will understand – CSI Desert Hot Springs.

I must admit my admiration of Peter Lecourt's male-centered satire. That's a genre which is not so popular today. Before him was the master Peter De Vries, whose Forever Panting is still the funniest novel I've ever read. It's about an unhappily married man who divorces his wife to marry his mother-in-law! Both of those guys informed my writing of the Rollo Hemphill satirical misadventure series: My Inflatable Friend, Rubber Babes, and Farnsworth's Revenge.

Rollo Hemphill is the classic boychik, a clueless male following the guidance of his most vulnerable body part. Problems compound when he fails continually upward. The ebook edition of My Inflatable Friend, the first in the series, is free.

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Trends Toward Authoritarian Rule

Historical fiction is all about today.

In A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré, the author creates historical fiction speculating how Nazism could rise there again. Written decades ago by the recently deceased author, its plot has chilling parallels to today's news. The story seemed far-fetched at the time.

A Small Town in Germany is one of le Carré's first novels, written not long after he left the employ of the British Foreign Service in 1964. One of his first postings was in Bonn, the postwar capital city of West Germany, and the small town of the title. In the past, I've been effusive in my praise for le Carré's writing style. My one criticism of this book is its occasionally strained efforts at poetic imagery. At times in his later career, the novelist's prose has been to spare. But in this early work, he's reaching for colorful analogies. The results too often come across as overwritten:

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No dawn is ever wholly ominous. The earth is too much its own master; the cries, the colors, and the sense too confident to sustain our grim foreboding.

The fictional premise is that Dr. Klaus Karfeld, a crowd-pleasing politician, is rising to power on a wave of renewed German nationalism. A younger generation resents economic malaise and their parents' having lost the war. Karfeld promises to break off ties with the Common Market, predecessor of the European Union, and pursue a new alliance with Russia.

The principal characters in the story are diplomats stationed at the British embassy, who are bewildered and threatened by the impending power shifts, including possible retaliation against the English occupiers. Most worrisome to these Brits, one of their employees, Leo Harting, a Polish-born German, has gone missing. Apparently, he took some secret files. They worry that the information in these files might not only embarrass the Queen's government, but also help Karfeld in his rise to power and repudiation of NATO.

Welshman Alan Turner, an undercover operative, is summoned on an official mission to find the missing man and the stolen files. Turner has all the skills, along with the surly and irreverent personality of the classic noir detective. (As far as I know, he doesn't reappear in any of the other le Carré novels.)

Turner runs afoul of almost everyone at the embassy, especially when he learns that, far from being a spy, Harting was hunting war criminals. He had uncovered Karfeld's secret past as a Nazi scientist. Turner's job changes from searching for a presumed defector to trying to prevent Karfeld's goons from finding and then killing Harting.

The cynical Turner begins to realize that the Brits want the missing files, but not the man who took them. And most disturbing of all, they don't want Karfeld's crimes dredged up, even if it means Harting's death. The Karfeld movement has gained too much popularity. The pragmatic diplomats are apparently ready to embrace the election's expected winner even though they know he once supervised a laboratory that tested the homicidal effects of poison gas.

It was a coincidence that I picked this book up again recently. Perhaps you've guessed by now why I think this story resonates with today's headlines. Comparisons with Nazi Germany can be glib, even cheap shots. But there's a message in the title of Upton Sinclair's novel, It Can't Happen Here. And then there's Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Not only can it happen here - it did. Whether it will grow and eat everything in its path is an open question. If it does, posts like this may simply disappear. And after a while, no one will remember there were ever voices that warned self-expression might be a transient privilege.

Not historical, but timely. Read all three (more coming).

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What century-old fakery still incites the mob?

Consider, "No one ever lost a buck telling people what they want to hear."

That said, how do you evaluate the promises of, say, a politician?

Here's my book review of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.

This novel is no less than an attempt to trace the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe over the last two centuries. Author Umberto Eco's story is a partially true but barely believable plot behind the multiple versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a racist tract that inspired Naziism. Eco's account is narrated by the one character he admits to being fictional, Simonini, a master forger who made a living not only creating official documents but also fabricating the facts and stories they contained. The plot suggests that this man was hired to create the The Protocols as a deliberate hoax to incite hatred and build a political power base.

Eco has been a lifetime student of occultist movements and secret societies, including the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and various anti-clerical, anti-Papist, anti-royalist, anarchist, and, yes, anti-Semitic political and religious groups, including their agent provocateurs.

Behind this story is a general conclusion about the nature of conspiracy. In this web of loosely woven plots, conspiracy is not a masterfully directed and highly coordinated effort. It is, instead, a monstrous disease that has no direction other than its own propagation. It has no head and no permanently governing body. Spanning generations, it goes wherever it feeds best, and it serves whomever will feed and sustain it. It likewise destroys, not a specific enemy, but any person, group, or ideology the persecution of which will benefit, even for the short term, the feeders of conspiracy.

In short, it has been convenient for various groups at various times to promote hatred of marginalized social groups. But as Eco demonstrates, this agenda has much more to do with consolidating power than with persecuting or exterminating the victims.

Ultimately, it's about political expediency and rousing the emotions of the masses – not to destroy an enemy but to enrich their persecutors.

Related thought - It's appalling how old, disproven lies still work - centuries later! Bad actors have only to bring them back, dust them off, and give them a new coat of disguise. Stereotypes about religion, politics, and race persist long after they've been disproven or discredited.

A recent example is the accusation that certain cults eat babies or drink their blood. The Romans accused the new Christian insurgents of doing this two thousand years ago. Then the Christians, once they'd taken over, accused Jews of the practice. It was never true, but the imagery of this lie triggers such raw emotion that it can be used to fuel anger and then action.

Another related thought - Perhaps less vicious in intent but potentially just as damaging is broadcasting beliefs that the speaker does not hold. Are these lies or simply misrepresentations? We can certainly call it propaganda. A couple of anecdotes come to mind:

Q. What's the difference between a salesperson's promise and a lie?

A. Salespeople intend for you to get whatever it is you want - even if they don't feel responsible for delivering it.

Q. Why are there so few bestsellers about bad afterlife experiences?

A. No one ever lost a buck telling people what they want to hear.

Recently I revised my popular business text How to Lie with Charts by adding two chapters, one on false news and the other on abuse of metadata. (This book won a 2020 Eric Hoffer Award in Business.) In the chapter on propaganda, I describe eleven ways to manufacture it. One way is, in a press release for example, to reverse the order of two related events. The effect is to imply that the first event is the cause and the second event is its effect or consequence. The result is to cast the perpetrator of the first event (which you now say came second) as a victim. I punched you in the nose (for no apparent reason). You (understandably) called me a liar (and worse). Or - You called me a liar (so) I punched you in the nose.

So, in the revised version, as the real perpetrator, I'm admitting I punched you in the nose, but by reversing the order of events, I've implied my actions were justified.

It's all about reading between the lines!

Agnostic minister investigates curious crimes. Read all three in the series (more to come).

Do forgotten stories still motivate you?

Do the books you read in school but don’t remember influence your decisions today?

My Voice Will Go with You illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior – immediately, as well as long after you think you’ve forgotten them. The book’s commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story was effective in changing behavior.

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That's because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious.

What's baffling about the book - and about Erickson's practice - is that even Rosen can't explain how the analyst crafted the therapeutic stories. It would seem, psychiatry being something of a science, that at least a diagnostic template or a treatment protocol could be drafted to guide present-day practitioners. Sadly, Erickson is no longer around to instruct us.

I experienced this technique when I attended a series of self-help sessions led by NLP practitioner Christopher Howard. Like many followers of the Santa Cruz school, he had realized that healthcare therapy was not the way forward - presumably because traditionalist Freudian (and Jonesian) therapists regarded Ericksonian therapy as a glib "quick fix." Even though it was incredibly effective. Howard coached wealth creation instead. But during a Saturday seminar, I saw him interact with an audience member in an extremely powerful way. A woman stood up and he asked her what her complaint was. She said her teenage son never does what she asks him to do. Simple chores. She regards his behavior as defiant, it makes her angry, and their relationship continues to deteriorate through lack of communication.

So during this brief, interactive session - with perhaps a thousand people in the room listening - Howard asks her to recreate a situation that infuriates her. He says, "Tell me how to role-play. Teach me, step by step, how to be you in this situation." So she tells him, when she walks into the kitchen, there's the sink full of unwashed dishes. So, he says, "Let's make a sound that expresses how you feel." And he comes back with a Middle-Eastern wailing at scream level, "U-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh!"

And she LAUGHS! A fit of giggles!

Then he prompts her to repeat the noise. And she does. Giggles again. Can't help herself. Then he says, "Will you promise me, every time you see those dirty dishes in the sink, to make that noise?"

And she grins gratefully and sits down.

The noise disconnects her from her feeling of anger, reconnects her with this feeling of silliness, and defuses the situation.

It took less than five minutes. I would guess she was cured. Or, at least, she was on her way to controlling her emotions, dealing with her anger, and then being calm enough to have a discussion with her son about whatever important issue might matter to either of them.

And there's another aspect of Ericksonian thinking. Consider his belief that forgotten stories are more powerful. Aren't many of us students of the Western tradition in literature? We were taught Moby Dick, Great Expectations, and Huckleberry Finn. Who of us can quickly recall the plot - or even significant details - from any of these famous works? But the lessons of these stories still inform our actions. "Morality" is not an innate response. It's learned. Here is the legacy of Dead White Men. It might not be PC these days, but, for sure, it's not valueless!

My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does!

Available in Kindle, EPUB, and trade paperback. Book #1 is also an audiobook.

Guest Post from Moscow: Dating, Friendship...

Well, perhaps the meaning of life might be elusive, but there’s lots to think about here.

This episode hosted by our correspondent Inna Logunova’s podcast Being Modern, Being Human started with a conversation about modern dating and romantic relationships but organically turned to broader issues of contemporary society, such as inequality and the growing role of artificial intelligence.

This is the second episode with yours truly, from what turned out to be her mini-series of “Talks with a Writer.”

In our previous interview, we discussed the phenomenon of stardom and the intricacies of showbiz. Check it out here:

Episode #23 The journey to stardom: Exploring showbiz, Hollywood, and the art of storytelling:

You may also decide you want to subscribe to Being Modern, Being Human to keep current on all of Inna’s lively discussions.

How’s this for an “engine of comedy:” Searching for the love of his life, poor Rollo fails continually upward! Need we mention that the first novel in this series is available as Kindle or EPUB for free?

What Excuse Can I Give for My Inflatable Friend?

When the notion of reissuing Rollo Hemphill’s misadventures floated past in my stream of consciousness, my next thought was, Hey, those stories are evergreen — why not?  But more practical considerations of the publishing marketplace prevailed, necessitating this explanatory note.

My concern isn’t that the characters won’t be relatable or their follies any less funny in the glare of freshly fired-up high-wattage attention. No, the problem is one of perceived technological obsolescence. The first novel in the series — My Inflatable Friend — was released in 2007. To some of you in the shivering audience for whom first impressions can be cool if not downright cold, that era might not seem so long ago. But to others, the crusty tale might as well have occurred just before the undocumented end of the last Ice Age. (There have been more than one, I’m told. Hence the rush to print again, lest the next big freeze overtake us. Hmm. Some in fire, some in ice. We probably don’t get to pick.)

The original release of the first book in the Rollo Hemphill Misadventures predated the introduction of the iPhone. How were hookups even possible back then?

When the first novel in the series was released, cell phones existed but weren’t yet what you’d call smart. Email was a thing, surely, but social media had not yet turned the world’s great newspapers into ezines for old folks.

Some Luddites still clung to their fax (facsimile) machines, especially those who insisted that electronic signature was an oxymoron.

Some movie crews who were filming were still actually using film. Likewise for shows taping.

Into this latter-day Age of Innocence schlepped poor Rollo, whose challenges getting attention from females, then avoiding journalists and G-men, could no doubt have been helped by the option of sending the occasional exculpatory text message. Emojis wouldn’t have hurt his cause either, and an amusing animation, especially if cloned onto his bodily image as a wisecracking avatar, might have put him right over the top. (Or on the bottom. At the outset, positional advantage was far from his foremost concern.)

Back then, climate change could have been mitigated — or didn’t exist — depending on which talking head you credited. In fact, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it was mostly a worn-out sci-fi theme, hardly a topic of almost unremitting daily conversation. A pandemic was a post-WWI episode, not feared to be repeated because threats such as Ebola and AIDS had presumably been contained. The James Bond movie franchise was still going strong because male guilt, belatedly dredged up by #MeToo, had not yet made it necessary (spoiler alert!) to kill the legendary rapist off.

And — perhaps most significant for the sake of Rollo’s first episode — lifelike robots designed for intimate uses may have been in development but were certainly not yet ready for the likes of Rollo.

Mind you, Rollo’s stories need not be read in sequence. Rubber Babes exists in its own quirky paranoid reality, and Farnsworth’s Revenge is no less sweet when not saved for last, but the through-line of Rollo’s lurching character development does flow in a bobbing chronology through these books. Wise readers will know better than to regard him as a role model. Rollo’s problem — if you insist on calling it that — is paradoxical: No matter what scheme he tries or how it fails — he persists in falling ever-upward.

I could wonder, though, whether male-centered comic humor can be written anymore. Men seem more pathetic than funny now, as do some who oddly claim to be both white and marginalized. Satire might still be a useful term, but nowadays its connotations tend to be political. Rollo does get enmeshed in complications on an international scale — but he has no agenda other than self-preservation.

My original inspiration for these novels was my admiration for the novelist and poet Peter De Vries. In the mid-twentieth century, his male-centered comic novels ridiculed religion and extramarital sex — often in the same book. However, the whiff of controversy, so delicious in his day, has not aged well, and some would say positively reeks. In Forever Panting (my favorite), an out-of-work actor divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law, continuing to lust after his ex. In Slouching Toward Kalamazoo, a female high-school teacher carries on an affair with her tender-aged male student.

Such themes are not exactly fodder for popular humor these days.

Only one of several possible answers to the question, What or who is his inflatable friend?

Lest you think I’m preoccupied with peters, I’ll confess that the works of Peter Lefcourt also influenced me. The Woody is brilliant, and by virtue of its inside-the-Beltway setting, it qualifies as legitimately political satire. (Alas, whether Lefcourt was satirizing Gary Hart or Bill Clinton or both is a question not likely to be explored by any contemporary book club.) And he wrote Eleven Karens when it was still possible to bestow the name on a newborn girl.

As well, when I began to stir the pot of silliness on my own, the publishing business had finally been taken over by women — along with the belated recognition that, for decades if not since Gutenberg, the most avid readers have been women. The genre chick-lit had come full flower. Appreciating the polar opposites such as De Vries and Lefcourt, I coined the term boychik lit as a lodestar for sinking ships helmed by ill-fated peters.

So, by way of further explanation — as if any more of my rants were needed to cheer you on to root for Rollo — I append my essay “Boychik Lit” at the end of this volume.

Thank you for the use of the genre. If Rollo’s exploits bring a smile, you needn’t tell anyone.

The first book in this series of silly comedies is permafree—permanently free as Kindle or EPUB ebook. (Or, at least, indefinitely, temporarily zero bucks.)

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Looking back now, it appears I was ahead of my time:

Kazakh bodybuilder's 'marriage' to sex doll girlfriend on hold because of coronavirus

Is this fake news?

Book Review: The Map and the Territory

Michel Houellebecq was so confused he put himself in as a principal character in this book.

What's the appeal of literary fiction?

Especially if you get all the way through the book and have no idea what's going on!

It's perhaps a stereotype that great artists are tortured souls. Here's a murky book by a quirky novelist. And it's fascinating, even if I don't quite understand it all.

Here's my review of The Map and the Territory by contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

This author is unabashedly and unashamedly literary and intellectual. Those of us on this side of the pond who fret about novels and commercialism and fads and attention spans and the general lack of receptiveness for ideas can only envy the opportunity to wax philosophical and not only get away with it, but also actually sell books.

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Not Quite After Lisette: A Short Story - Part 2

Conclusion, continued from last Sunday’s post…

The dormitory phone rang a long time. Anyone who has lived in a dorm knows this means the place is far from being deserted. When things are active, no one thinks to pick up the phone. When the place is almost empty, the poor slob who's left behind answers the phone like a shot.

Eventually, "Yeah?"

"Andy Evans, please."

No response, at least not directly to me. Instead, a loud call, "Hey Evans. Stop pullin' your meat and answer the phone. I think it's your dad." Muffled chuckles. Early adolescence is a disease beyond eradication by any known method except the unbearably slow passage of time.

A chagrined voice: "Hi, Dad." More muffled chuckles in the background, followed by another more distant witticism by the same voice: "Don't forget to tell him you need money to buy drugs." Chuckles build to hysteria.

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Book Review: 'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer

Greer won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for this novel.

It’s a fictional, third-person memoir about a midlist author, Arthur Less, who is on the cusp of his fiftieth birthday, and dreading it. His young lover, Freddy Pelu, who is half his age, has left him to marry Tom, who is not characterized further in the story. Less hopes to ease the pain of separation by embarking on a world tour, having accepted several invitations for author appearances at literary events. Realizing at this point in his life that his works are less than stellar, Less has minimal ambition. His purpose in setting off on the tour is mainly to avoid attending Freddy’s wedding. The fact that his birthday will occur while he’s on the road is also comforting because he won’t have to spend it in the company of those same wedding guests.

The persistent theme throughout the story is loneliness and longing. But Less is so directionless he can’t identify anything that might give him satisfaction. He has been working on a novel that was rejected by his publisher, and the one tangible goal he sets is to find some time during this trip to rewrite it.

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The persistent theme of ‘Less’ is longing and loneliness.

Recently I heard Greer speak on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Like Less, he is tall and lanky, with carrot-colored hair and a sardonic wit. He remarked that he admired Don Quixote, saying, “It’s a hoot.” And like Cervantes, Greer unfolds his plot as a picaresque adventure, a series of only loosely connected episodes. (Picaresque implies a roguish main character, but Less is a rogue only in that his attitude is antisocial.) Arthur stumbles from one involvement to another. Years ago, when he was Freddy’s age, he fell into a love affair with a writer who is now considered a major poet, Robert Brownburn. The affair extricated the famous man from a marriage to the dutiful Marian, whose permissiveness not only lets him go with her blessing but also makes her stick by him until his death.

Now as Less accepts celebrity bookings, he fears he’s being welcomed not as the artist he aspires to be but as a lesser talent who will go down in the history books as Brownburn’s longstanding lover. The older man left Less after years of faithfulness when presumably his ardor cooled, and he apparently blessed the new relationship with Freddy, which mirrored their May-September age difference.

In his travels, Less goes to Mexico City, then Paris, Berlin, Marrakech, a nameless village in India, and Kyoto before returning home to San Francisco, where Brownburn is dying (and perhaps Freddy is waiting). In each location, he falls in with a local group of gay men but oddly also encounters other friends from his past, despite his intentions to avoid them. Besides Marian, there is only one notable female character—Zohra, whom he meets on a camel trip in the Sahara. She is also staring down her fiftieth birthday, her female lover having left her recently for a more passionate relationship with another woman. Another mirror image.

It won’t be much of a spoiler to share that Arthur Less’s life seems pointless, which is very much Greer’s point. Life happens, then you die. The theme is existentialist, not unfamiliar in confessional memoirs.

What should you expect from life? Less.

Whatever meaning you find may be all there is. It’s not valueless. Does Arthur Less ever understand this? Perhaps not.

Middle-aged Harry Gardner travels to East Africa expecting a sex vacation. He stays for more serious reasons.

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