If Wishes Were Retail by Auston Habershaw

Alexandra Delmore just needs a job for the summer. She's a rising senior, a little too outspoken and grumpy and countercultural for the suburban somewhere she lives in. (From internal evidence, deepest Pennsylvania, not too close to any city you've heard of.) She doesn't have any close friends or serious skills, and her family are all deeply annoying in their own ways.

So she's been striking out in all her interviews, partially because of that outspokenness and partially due to the lack of specific skills. But then Alex answers one weird ad, and finds herself interviewing with the Jinn, formerly of the Ring of Khorad, for a position as his assistant in a kiosk at the local mall.

Selling wishes, of course. As you do.

Alex needs a job, and this is a job, and she's getting a bit desperate. So, despite an initially fiery conversation with the Jinn - he's demanding, and has very particular ideas of how to do things that are not necessarily in tune with the modern world - she does get the job.

This is a humorous fantasy, so it gets more complicated from there, of course. The first chapter is that interview - it's a great way to introduce the characters of both Alex and the Jinn, and to show how both of them are hot-headed, pushy, and narrow-minded in their own ways. If Wishes Were Retail spins out from there, with Alex and the Jinn sitting in a dying mall, waiting for customers and granting wishes, as Alex's home life adds its own spice to the mixture.

The kiosk is dead at first, because the whole mall is dead. But Alex engineers a viral moment, which draws attention, which draws customers - and that makes them first quite successful, and very quickly causes troubles with the mall management.

Because the granting of wishes causes some interesting, unusual....unprecedented situations in a mall, which are not happy or pleasant for everyone. So the wishes go big, the wishes go small - the wishes even go BOGO for a while.

Oh, and did I mention the gnomes? There are also gnomes in this novel. We don't know why they're around, just like we don't know why or how the Jinn got free of his ring after so many centuries, but he's not the only supernatural entity around. Frankly, I would have liked a bit more worldbuilding from author Auston Habershaw, because it feels like there should be something in the background that meant jinn and gnomes - and, as some characters mutter, maybe other creatures - are now common when they didn't use to be. But this novel doesn't get into that: it posits that there are jinn, and that this one, for reasons of his own (which we mostly learn) has decided to sell wishes in the human world. It also posits that there are gnomes, who do a whole lot of labor for a whole lot of people under conditions that seem to be a cross between Gilded Era-exploitative and Harry Potter house-elf exploitative. That also starts to be rectified by the end of the novel, and Alex has a small part in that.

More centrally, Alex learns that her family is not quite as horrible as she thinks they are, and that getting out isn't as simple and obvious as she hoped. The Jinn learns more about how humans work, and possibly ways that he can use his power more usefully and helpfully. And, like so many humorous fantasies, we readers all learn a bit ourselves, and get a happy ending. It's a fun, zippy fantasy novel set in a recognizable modern world, with amusing dialogue and a couple of believably hard-headed and often-clashing main characters in Alex and the Jinn. Anyone looking for a solid humorous fantasy that doesn't require too much suspension of disbelief is in for a good time here.

The Treasure of the Black Swan by Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral

I thought this was pure fiction, some kind of adventure story. That's what I'd expected from Paco Roca's other work, and the vague Tintin-esque vibes this book gave off reinforced that.

But The Treasure of the Black Swan is mostly true, if slightly fictionalized - the story of the real Black Swan Project, and the court battle between a US undersea salvage company and the Spanish government, after the former plundered a shipwreck they pretended was somewhere else and from a British ship. It was also the basis of a TV series, LA Fortuna, which I didn't know before reading it.

Roca just drew this project, as far as I can tell. His collaborator, Guillermo Corral, is a career diplomat who was involved in the case, and Corral wrote this book - wrote in a version of himself as Alex Ventura, a very junior staffer at the Spanish Ministry of Culture who is our viewpoint and central figure.

I very vaguely remember seeing the coverage of this case from 2007 through 2015, though Corral has changed the names here. (And possibly some facts - there's a plot point about some attempted ratfuckery by the salvage company through the US Senate passing a new law that I think would completely fail on the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws.)

Anyway, the salvage company, here called Ithaca - the real-world equivalent is Odyssey - salvaged roughly half a billion dollars worth of gold and silver coins from a wreck. We see some of their actions, and think they're being at least a bit shady, flying it out quietly and quickly to Florida, and possibly trying to obscure exactly where in the ocean they were exploring. The Spanish government learns of the find, and sues for its return in US court.

The rest is the story of the court fight, with a US lawyer who has been battling Ithaca for decades brought on board - despite Ithaca trying to entangle his firm with a conflict of interest. Alex works with an expert whom he comes to have a romance with, and there's a lot of delving into records and trying to prove what ship or ships this find could potentially have come from. (I detected what seem to be a lot of shady discovery actions, or more accurately avoidance of actions, by Ithaca in this book, and I note that the real-world Odyssey had to pay a million-dollar penalty after the end of the litigation for what seems to be primarily that.)

Anyway, it's long and complicated, full of details and experts and motions back and forth in various US courts, but in the end, the good guys (the Spanish government) win, and the treasure is flown back to Spain and deposited in a museum. Oh, and Alex gets the "girl" - she's almost a decade older than he is, and more settled in her career.

Roca, as always, has a pleasant storytelling style, though it comes across more meat-and-potatoes here, where he has a lot of details (both the technicalities of litigation and just what all of these specialized salvage devices and ancient coins look like) to get onto his pages. This is a denser, more serious book than the Tintin hints might imply, and wouldn't be my first choice for an introduction to Roca's work - though it's great for anyone already interested in marine archaeology, salvage, or complicated court cases.

Bad Break, Vol. 1 by Philippe Riche

Sometimes names just slow down a crime story. You've got three main characters, you can see who they are, and you know what they're doing. So why do you need names?

That may have been creator Philippe Riche's point, or maybe the laconic style he uses in Bad Break, Vol. 1 - minimal dialogue most of the time, few captions except when showing someone narrating past events, only the minimum explanations required - just meant the names never quite made their way into the book.

Bad Break opens outside a junkyard, somewhere in France. A man removes his bandages, fixes his clothes, walks towards the owner and his helper. He's our main character, though he's the most mysterious: a tall, gaunt, bald man in what was probably once a very nice suit, a dealer in antiquities, mostly of the human-remains kind.

The beefy young assistant at the junkyard helps the dealer find a specific junked car, from a wreck just the day before. The driver was killed. Well, the dealer was the driver, and he's not dead now. But, as we go further in Bad Break, we realize he was killed in the crash. He's probably been killed a number of times, but it doesn't take. The dealer retrieves a briefcase of important material from the car, and asks the assistant to help him get back to the city.

The dealer is being pursued by a gang he calls "head choppers" - large tattooed men, possibly of a different nationality. They want to kill him; they try to kill him. The assistant uses the dealer's gun to kill one of them in a confrontation at the train station.

The third is a porn actress. We see her on a poster that says "Reb X" - maybe that's her name? She has a tattoo, a very specific tattoo. The dealer has been tracing the history of similar tattoos, through an old book. We're not sure why. We don't know how the "head choppers" figure into it. But the three set off together to find out the true history of the tattoos, chasing down an old man the dealer once knew.

This is only the first half of the story; they don't find the answers by the end of these pages. They only just barely get together. We as readers know the vague shape of the mystery, understand that there's something at least mildly supernatural - how else does the dealer keep coming back from death?

Riche draws this in a loose, deeply assured line, with rough panel borders and grey tones. He can draw a lot of specifics: that's clear from the opening in the junkyard, with pieces of cars that experts could easily identify. But his focus is on these people, and their mysterious quest. It's not over yet: there's one more book to come. But this first half of the story is interesting, quirky, compelling, satisfying.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

If you can divide anything into two groups, then humorous novels can be split into the sweet and the tart. Sweet is more popular, I think - Wodehouse is the great British exemplar, the most relevant for today's discussion. But also think Three Men in a Boat or The Importance of Being Earnest: sweet humor is often silly (Douglas Adams is another example from a later generation), and the stakes in the book might be important, but they're rarely dangerous.

Tart humor can edge into the sour - and here I might start mentioning Evelyn Waugh - with an undertone of disgust and unhappiness with humanity in general. If sweet humor thinks people are generally amusing and is fond of them, tart humor thinks people are inherently flawed, broken things, and all you can do is laugh at the awful things they do. On my side of the Atlantic, the great tart humorous novel of the last century is Catch-22; a lot of Kurt Vonnegut falls into that category as well.

Waugh is one of the masters of the tart humorous novel, and Scoop is one of his best books. It was published in 1937, loosely based on a trip he took two years before to Ethiopia as a correspondent for the Daily Mail to cover an expected war there. It follows one of the traditional humorous novel plots: a naïf is tossed into a situation he doesn't expect or understand, where he is too innocent to see the true picture, and where he blunders through mostly due to that innocence.

You see, the novelist John Boot asks a friend, the wife of a cabinet minister - I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume he's also having an affair with her; if so, he's only one of perhaps dozens - to help get him out of the country quickly and on a newspaper's dime, to avoid a woman he has become entangled with. She pushes the appropriate levers, but the Beast newspaper's functionaries and proprietor (Lord Copper) instead send one William Boot, who writes a twee weekly here's-some-random-rural-color feature for the Beast from his ancestral manse somewhere in the green and pleasant heartlands.

William Boot is not a foreign correspondent, and not really a reporter of any kind. But he's outfitted at vast expense and to a massive extent, and packed off to Ishmaelia, where everyone who's anyone is sure a civil war is brewing. There is no sign of a civil war in Ishmaelia, where the Jackson family - originally imported from America a few generations ago, and having proliferated to the point where one of them runs nearly every major commercial operation or government agency, up to the Presidency - are firmly in control, and vaguely popular with the people.

But of course the joke is that journalists create wars by reporting on them, and that's more or less what happens in Ishmaelia. The Fascists and Communists - or one could say the Germans and Russians, if you want to be more geopolitical and less ideological - are maneuvering, we at first think to get Ishmaelia into their spheres of influence. (We later learn that they, and various capitalists, are much more interested in Ishmaelia's mineral wealth, which is the real source of all the conflict - money, and potentially a lot of it.)

Boot - William, who we follow for the majority of the novel - is thrown into Ishmaelia and into the society of reporters, most of whom are friendly but competitive. He falls in love with a young woman whose husband - they are possibly not quite legitimately married, and he may have run off on her - is conveniently away. He wanders through his life there, not filing any dispatches for long stretches of time because nothing is actually happening. (Of course, Waugh's point is that reporters' job is to make up things, because nothing is really happening.) This makes his masters back in London unhappy, but it's the mid-30s, so communication is by cable - a few words at huge expense - and transportation takes months, so they send oddly-worded threats demanding more and better news from him, which he often misses seeing in the first place.

Boot ends up reporting actual major news, when there actually is something like a coup in Ishmaelia, and does the reflexive right thing - as defined by Waugh - because he's that kind of decent upstanding rural British upper-class chappie, and eventually gets to go back to England, returning home to his decaying manse and collection of oddball relatives. It's more-or-less a happy ending; he doesn't get the girl, but she was someone else's wife to begin with.

Waugh tells this story in often very short scenes; he had the knack, so important in humor, of dropping into a scene, showing just exactly what he needed to, and then bouncing back out to something else. Humor relies on speed and contrast and insights and reversals and precision of language, all of which Waugh brings to bear brilliantly in Scoop. It is a tart novel, verging on a sour one, with a message that the world is essentially corrupt and horrible, but it gives us a deeply amusing, penetrating view of that world, distanced enough than the darts don't pain us.

Better Things: Pretty in Pink

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

It's not impossible that a re-recording would be better than the original - I can't think of any cases where a band re-did a song and made it better, but I might be forgetting something, and I will admit it's possible. But it's definitely not the way to bet: the first one is going to be the best one.

Case in point: the crunchy, jangly Pretty in Pink, the most famous song by the Psychedelic Furs, famously re-recorded not-quite-as-well for the movie named after it. Shame about that, really, but the original is still out there.

This is the iconic Furs song, and most of the time my favorite Furs song, but I have to give some love to the Furs' awesome, uncompromising first, self-titled record. In some other world, I might have picked India for this list.

(In some other, even quirkier world, I picked the entirely awesome Aeroplane (Dance Mix), which has been my favorite Furs song almost as often and almost as long as Pretty.)

But I'm here to talk about Pretty in Pink. It's a darker, sadder song than it sounds - darker than the remake, definitely. It's about a woman seen from outside, who's trying to be part of something, maybe to be loved, and is getting only disdain from the men she sleeps with. And it's not clear if she knows it, or cares.

That could be the positive spin, if you want: Caroline doesn't care that the men she sleeps with all

Talk of her notes and the
Flowers that they never sent

There's no sign in the song that this touches her. 

When I first heard this song, I took the title exclusively: these men are saying she's Pretty in Pink - i.e., she's attractive when she's naked, but only when she's naked. I'm not sure that's the only interpretation, but I still lean that way; the men's causal cruelty is central. This is a song of the male gaze, if you want to be reductive.

But, most of all, it's a loud, thoughtful, gnarly, crunchy song - one you can let wash over you or listen to closely, depending on your mood. Either way, she's still pretty in pink. And the men who walk through in their coats might disdain that, but it's not nothing.

She doesn't have anything
You want to steal
Well, nothing you can touch

Quote of the Week: To Say the Least

As for foreign food, it should suffice to say that foreigners have been eating it for years, and yet manage to survive in large numbers.

 - K.R.G. Browne, How to Be a Motorist, p.107

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he's bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997...I'm wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up - checks notes - what looks like the very same month from Mirage. That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I'll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen's Story, is much like the books immediately preceding it. There's one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We've got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We've got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he's narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there's "The Last Ino Story," in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what's happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I'm vaguely dubious anything of this era is "the last" anything, but it's possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it - this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi - not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl's name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will...well, that's just the way of the samurai, isn't it?

How to Be a Motorist by Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

Humor can often date oddly - what one generation thinks is screamingly funny can fall flat with their children. Or worse, the cultural references shift or disappear, so the kids or grandkids are left wondering what was supposed to be funny.

Heath Robinson was a British illustrator and cartoonist in the first half of the twentieth century, specializing in over-complicated contraptions and odd combinations of items to do everyday things. (My understanding is that he had a solid career before that, and fell into the overcomplication line during The Great War, but I could easily be wrong.) At one point, the comparison was that Robinson was to UK illustration what Rube Goldberg was to US illustration - though I think both of them are half-forgotten these days, another two generations on.

So Robinson did a lot of illustrations and drawings, for magazines, for newspapers, probably for other outlets. They piled up, and fell into categories at least some of the time. Someone, possibly Robinson himself, thought it would be a jolly good thing to gather up those drawings and put them into a form people could continue to buy, so they could make him some more money.

And so there was a series of at least four short humorous "How to" books, with Robinson illustrations surrounded by new text by K.R.G. Browne. One of them was 1939's How to Be a Motorist, and I found a copy of that cheap recently, and read the thing.

It's a time capsule, necessarily. It's about the automobiles of 1939, which are somewhat different from those of eighty-five years later, and about the roads and rules of 1939 Britain, which are also somewhat different from the roads and rules near me, and are probably pretty different even from contemporary Britain. Browne says repeatedly that cars are more dependable and less dependent on the specialized knowledge of their operators than they used to be, which is true as far as it goes, but it went a lot father after that.

This is a book that very clearly started as a stack of drawings, which was organized into a sequence by Robinson or Browne or both, and then Browne wrote words to connect them all into a generally coherent narrative. It's also got a slightly musty tone to it, with Browne repeatedly referring to "my friend Mr. Heath Robinson" as if we might have forgotten why we bought the book. (It's always "Mr. Heath Robinson," too - stiff upper lip and all that.)

I was happy to find that it was still amusing, and that the problems of 1939 motoring are not vastly different - at least in exaggerated parody form - from those of today. Browne is working in a slightly stiffer mode than I'd prefer, but he was a British guy born in 1895, so one has to make allowances. This is a light silly book, just as much now as it was in 1939, but it's still generally funny.

I will say that the small format makes Robinson's drawings more cramped than I might have preferred - a bigger art-book style presentation is probably a stronger choice for Robinson appreciation, and, assuming I do go back to check out more Robinson, I'll probably head in that direction next time.

Thor by George O'Connor

When I wrote about the first of George O'Connor's Asgardian books, Odin, I said confidently that it would be a four-book series. This time, I tried to see if I could figure out where I saw that, and what the last two would be. (Number three is Loki, unsurprisingly - I got that from his publisher's website.) Perhaps my Google-fu is weak today, or the tide of AI slop is drowning out useful search results, but I can't now confirm that this will be a four-book series, or find any indications of what the last book will be.

I still think that is true, and that the fourth book will be about one specific Norse god - rather than being called Ragnarok, for example. My guesses are that it will either go to Frigg or Freyja, despite the few myths about either of them, so there can be at least one woman in this very boyish mythos, or that it will be basically the Ragnarok book under a different title, probably Balder or Tyr. On the other hand, O'Connor could throw us a curveball and do Frey. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Thor is the second book in the series: it was the obvious choice, as Odin was the obvious first choice. (Let's face it: if you do a four-book series about Norse gods, three of them have to be Thor, Odin, and Loki, period. The only thing to decide is that fourth one.)

Thor is a fun character, so this is an energetic, amusing book. O'Connor takes pains, especially in his back matter, to make it clear that his Thor - the mythic Thor - is not quite the came as '60s Donald Blake or the MCU Thor, but you can see their common aspects. Thor is big and straightforward and strong and driven by strong emotion and not exactly dumb, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer and pretty easily led. The cover is a great indication of that: O'Connor's Thor is the kind of guy with a huge grin on his face, doing something he loves - in this case, smashing things with a magical hammer, but you know how gods are.

As in O'Connor's other mythological books (Odin, obviously, and his epic earlier Olympians series about the Greek gods), he weaves myths together into a single narrative, keeping the sense of multiple overlapping stories while still making the book a single overall thing. This time out, Thor is on his way back from something - we'll find out what, eventually - wearing rags, hugely happy with himself, and he wants an old ferryman to get him across the river on the border of Jotunheim and Midgard. That leads to Thor telling stories to confirm who he is - or maybe just to boast; it's hard to tell with Thor - and the book flows out from there.

Again, Thor is fun to read about, the kind of mythological figure that generations of storytellers delighted in because his personality is so perfect for stories. O'Connor - here supported with colors by SJ Miller - places Thor in a believable world, bleaker and darker than the Olympians' but full of life and people, and tells a bunch of those stories, going back to the original source material as he always does.

O'Connor's mythological books are supposedly for younger readers - at least, they're made so as to be accessible to middle-graders, and published via an apparatus that's really good at getting books in front of middle-schoolers - but myths are deep and wondrous things, and should never be left only to children. O'Connor knows that well, and at the same time knows that children are smarter than you expect and more focused than you imagine. His books have an impressive array of backmatter, scholarly enough for the adults reading and accessible enough for the kids, to explain all of the references and send more dedicated readers back to the sources.

The Pnume by Jack Vance

I've somewhat run out over my skis, here - I'm typing this post on the fourth of the four "Planet of Adventure" novels by Jack Vance before my post on the third book, The Dirdir, publishes. But I can link you to the first two: City of the Chasch and Servants of the Wankh.

The Pnume ends the series. I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but it began with an exploratory starship from Earth arriving at the planet Tschai, circling the star Carina 4269. An attack from the planet killed all but one of the crew. Adam Reith crash-landed on the planet, and the series is his story, as he learns about the various alien races living there - it had been invaded, over and over, for millennia, and currently has three invader races somewhat squabbling with each other and watched by the original inhabitants, the Pnume.

Gersen wants to get off Tschai and back to Earth. For the usual reasons, of course, but also to warn the unnamed spacefaring organization to which he belongs about the threat from the various races of Tschai. As Pnume opens, he's nearly ready - the plan to build a starship from The Dirdir is almost complete. But there is some treachery from the merchant who already betrayed him once near the end of Dirdir, and Reith is kidnaped, tossed into a sack and spirited away into the underground tunnels inhabited by the Pnume.

Well, he's run through the three main invader races already, so surely he has to have encounters with the aboriginals before he can finally make it off-planet, right?

Reith, as usual the hyper-competent Earthman of his era of SF, quickly escapes captivity, but getting back to the surface will be a more difficult task. He gains the aid of a "girl" - a young human woman of the Pnumekin, the human slaves/servants/undercaste - and drags her along with him as a guide. She eventually gets a name, which is not typical for Pnumekin, when Reith starts calling her Zap 210 based on her Pnume designation.

The two travel extensively through Pnume tunnels to find an exit, and then have a similarly danger-packed journey aboveground to get back to the city where Reith and his allies were building the ship. Human servants of the Pnume do chase them, of course, but, obviously, a 1960s adventure SF novel series ends with the hero succeeding at everything and taking his new girl off with him away from the alien world.

And so he does.

This series isn't exactly minor Vance - it's from his most productive era, and is full of inventive touches, fine scenes, and thoughtful descriptions - but it is very much an adventure story, told quickly and mostly straightforwardly, following a well-worn path. It's a decent introduction to Vance, but doesn't showcase the things he does best, or that are more particular to his work. Still, the whole series is available in a single volume, which is nice and convenient.

Better Things: Next To You

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I grew up in the '70s and '80s; there was going to be a Police song somewhere in one of these series. I always gravitated towards the loud and the noisy, so it would be from their earlier days. Not that Message in a Bottle isn't iconic; it is. And De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da is one of the perfect pop songs.

But if I'm picking one song, it has to be Next To You.

And I usually start out with lyrics, but what's most impressive about Next To You is Stewart Copeland's drumming - fast, intricate, detailed, precise. He stops and starts more than once, but is always in time, in this very fast time. It's frankly awe-inspiring.

It's a punky, loud, fast song of longing, all quick notes and that relentless chorus.

I sold my house, I sold my motor too
All I want is to be next to you
I'd rob a bank, maybe steal a plane
You took me over, think I'm goin' insane

All energy, all longing, all power, all done in less than three minutes. What more could you want from a punky single?

What can I do?
All I want is to be next to you

Quote of the Week: Wanting

The heat pounded into his room from outside. Today it was almost too hot and humid to bear. He wished he could afford air-conditioning. He wished he could afford anything. He also wished that Kerry had not punched him in the face. Dinnie might have been inexperienced but he knew that this was a poor start to a relationship. It had not made him like her any less.

 - Martin Millar, The Good Fairies of New York, p.130

Anna by Mia Oberländer

Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you're not quite sure exactly what they're a metaphor for.

I think Anna is Mia Oberländer's first major graphic novel - it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences - so I don't have any prior work to check, to see what her usual method of working is. (The edition of Anna I read was translated by a person whose name was printed, vertically, in a fussy scripty font - apologies if I get it wrong but it seems to be Nika Knight.)

In the German mountain town of Bad Hohenheim, we see three generations of women, all named Anna. Perhaps for clarity, the grandmother is Anna1, her daughter Anna2, and our blonde narrator Anna3. And we immediately think that this will not be a naturalistic, straightforward story.

Anna2, and eventually Anna3, are exceptionally tall. Extraordinarily tall, strikingly tall, unusually tall, remarkably tall, uncomfortably tall. They have gangly super-long legs and torsos maybe a bit longer than normal. They tower over all of the rest of the people in the town - even the men, I think, though the point seems to be that they're too tall for women, and that makes them generally unattractive to men and that they stand out in a way women shouldn't.

There's clearly an element of feminism in this metaphor - there's a TV talking head who has an extended sequence giving advice to exceptionally tall girls which is the clearest indication of that part of the theme - but Anna2 and Anna3 are also clearly meant to be strange for women, outside of the norms, different in an unsettling way. They can't be feminine in the way their society expects - they're too big, taking up too much space, gangling randomly about, clearly out of place. We see Anna2's size being commented on when she's still a baby, her long legs erupting from a carriage to splay all over.

Is the metaphor about women who "take up too much space" - who are too big, too dominant, too much not deferential and quietly "feminine?" Maybe, but I think Oberländer's point is more focused on tall than big - it's tricky to know her connotations for both words, since she originally worked in German, but height is important here.

This is a mountain village, after all. Mountains are tall. Mountains can be climbed, perhaps more easily with long legs. Tall people can see farther at the top of mountains, and may be more at home there.

Oberländer tells this story in chapters, skipping around in time. We see Anna2 as a baby, Anna1 as a young girl with a dog with equally long and gangly legs, Anna3 as a young woman telling us the story and looking for love herself. Oberländer has a conversational tone in her captions, as if Anna3 was telling us this, in fits and starts, coming back to one thread and then another, telling us her family's history.

Oberländer tells her story in big blocky drawings, characters often seen head-on. She typically has only a few panels to each page, jammed next to each other with thin ruled borders. Her lettering is florid, scripty, a bit difficult to read to slow the reader down. The drawing, though, is much cleaner, clearer: the pictures are understood instantly, while the words take just that bit of effort.

Again, I can't tell you exactly what the metaphor means. It may not be that precise, to have a single meaning, in the first place. It's a story about women that stick up, that can never hide in the crowd, that are out of place where they grew up and need to make or find places for themselves. That's the general territory: a family of women, how they interact, what the "normal" grandmother thinks and does and says when her daughter and then granddaughter are notably different, when they stick up out of normal life so much it can't be overlooked.

The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar

I had two ways I could start with this novel, but then I realized they were both complaints. I could note the reason I originally picked it up was an introduction by Neil Gaiman, which seemed like a positive thing in 2006 when this edition was published and in 2012 when I bought it. (But is no longer.) Or I could mention that this 1992 novel's US edition gives it a 2006 copyright date, and that sloppiness seems to extend to a lot of the events and actions in the book, which don't always seem to happen exactly in the right order or for adequate reasons.

The first is a shrug: what can you do? The second is more central: I think The Good Fairies of New York needed a good structural edit back in 1992 to tweak and tighten it, tie up some loose ends, and rein in author Martin Millar's tendency to write lots of short scenes that are individually fun and zippy but don't necessarily follow from each other or move his narrative forward.

On the other hand, Good Fairies is a comic fantasy, and that style makes it funny and quick and engaging - for readers who aren't thinking deeply about continuity and "wait, how did that happen?" in particular, which I think is a good description of the core audience for British funny fantasy.

This is a novel about New York by a Scotsman who lives in London, and it lives up to most of the stereotypes that you are likely to be wondering about right now. It does have Scots fairies, who are musically-gifted, hair-tempered little punkers and get the most in-depth characterization in the book, which is not saying very much. The New York they wander through is cartoonish, one part generic big city and one part US-melting-pot-of-immigrants as seen by a foreigner who doesn't quite get what that means to locals. It has a plot that is not as complex as it might seem, but is full of complication, as Millar runs through the same few McGuffins repeatedly.

So, our main ingredients are:

• Morag MacPherson and Heather MacKintosh, those two Scottish fairies, who appear suddenly in an Alphabet City apartment and vomit on the carpet. They're fleeing the Scottish fairy authorities for reasons both specific (they damaged a priceless heirloom of another clan) and general (they cause trouble and fight everywhere they go).
• Dinnie MacKintosh, the fat and unpleasant young man whose apartment they landed in. Heather ends up sticking with him when Morag and Heather inevitably fight after a few pages.
• Kerry, a young woman with Crohn's disease who lives right across the street. She wants to win a local arts competition with her Celtic floral alphabet, the creation of which entails a lot of small fetch quests and the centerpiece flower of which is the biggest and most mobile McGuffin of the book. Morag befriends her after the two fairies split.
• Magenta, a crazy bag lady who thinks she's general of the Greek forces against the Persians, and is actually being pursed by a homeless guy named Joshua, because she stole his formula for a magic potion. She mostly exists to facilitate multiple shifts in ownership of the McGuffin flower.
• Petal and Tulip, the heirs to the fairy king of Cornwall, in exile due to political turmoil at home and accompanied by three Irish fairies - Brannoc and Maeve and Padraig - I think mostly so Millar can make some pan-Celtic jokes and stereotypes that went over my head.
• Cal, Kerry's ex, who runs a theatre downstairs from Dinnie and could have been a major antagonist if he ever showed up on the page. He's entering a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the arts contest, and is assumed to be Kerry's major competition there.
• Tala, the king of the fairies of Cornwall, who has instituted an unpleasant factory-town capitalism, which led both to his aforementioned heirs fleeing and to....
• the Cornish Fairy Resistance Movement, led by Aelric, whose characterization is limited to a passion for the king's stepdaughter and a zeal for distributing handbills.
• Johnny Thunders, the dead guitarist for the New York Dolls, who is in New York in ghostly form, having hitched a ride with Chinese ghosts coming for the Hungry Ghost Festival. He wants to get his favorite guitar back. He does not.

There are also, eventually, local clans of New York fairies - Italian and Chinese and Ghanaian - who Morag and/or Heather steal from and piss off and eventually charm.

There is a lot of running about. Dinnie wants to date Kerry, and the two fairies each try to facilitate that for different reasons. Scottish fairy hunters (hunters who are fairies and who also hunt fairies) arrive to capture Morag and Heather to bring them back for punishment for their various crimes back home. A mercenary force from Cornwall arrives and almost immediately leaves for inadequate reasons. At the climax, a massive Cornish fairy army invades, setting up for a grand-scale battle against the combined forces of the rebels, all of the New York fairy clans, and probably the Greek hoplites too....which then fizzles and doesn't happen.

On the positive side, Millar writes very amusing sentences and paragraphs and scenes. Every little bit of Good Fairies is fun, but all of the bits don't quite cohere into a single overall narrative, which is a bit disappointing.

Thinking About Thinking by Grant Snider

I didn't think Grant Snider made comics quickly enough to put out a book every year - he's a working orthodontist, as I always find a way to fit in when I write about his work, since it's such a highly-skilled, well-paid, and useful career and yet anti-glamorous and low profile at the same time - but this one came less than a year after the last one. So he may be more productive even than I give him credit for.

If I call Snider a cartoonist of introspection and hard-fought positivity, that might sound like spinach, or like the kind of thing you'd find in the New Age store next to the singing bowls and horrible incense. But he is, and his work is much better, more grounded, than that description might imply. Maybe because he's from Kansas City: there's an inherently Midwestern sensibleness and focus on real, everyday life in his work. Snider never feels like he's intellectualizing, even as he does entire books about poetry (last year's Poetry Comics) or creativity (The Shape of Ideas) or even the potentially-pretentiously titled The Art of Living. All his work is personal - often because he has his self-insert character at the middle of his comics, but even his other characters walk that difficult line between Everypeople and particular.

Thinking About Thinking, like several of Snider's books, is "organized" by a single exemplary comic up front, which provides chapter titles into which everything else slots. In this case, it's a single page headed "I think, therefore..." with nine panels of different endings to that sentence, from "I overthink" to "I am." Each one of those panels turns into a half-title for a section of the book, with thematically related comics afterward.

It's all thematically related, of course: the overall theme is, like so much of Snider's work, those intertwined desires: to be happy, to do meaningful things in our lives, to be better, to be present, to be authentically ourselves, to just be without twisting ourselves into knots along the way with all of those desires. This time out, the focus is on thinking, mostly overthinking, given those themes and modern life in general.

Snider's little figures, especially that author-insert and the others drawn to that scale, always remind me of R.O. Blechman - Snider has the same energy and looseness, his people equally able to go anywhere and do anything within their little boxes. He uses color well, usually just a few within a single strip, and his palette shifts by his subject matter - I've mostly seen him use flat, comic-style colors, but he also does watercolor-looking strips and some newer pieces with color gradients in the backgrounds.

You have to be willing to be positive to read Snider's comics, to be willing to want to be better and to want to connect with other people and the world. That may be a big ask these days, especially for the kind of people who are defined by their own anger and hatred. I would like to think Snider's work can help put people into the right mood and mindset, but I know the world is far too full of people who are never introspective, never thinking about the consequences of their actions, never concerned with other people at all. But that's just yet another way that this world, and living in it, is difficult and painful...and, nevertheless, worth it. That's what Snider's work is all about, in the end: how to live in the world well, even with all the obstacles the world and ourselves throw up. That's heroic in its way, and deeply necessary, and entirely admirable. Thinking About Thinking is another fine collection of work in that project.

Ocultos by Laura Pérez

I thought Ocultos was a single narrative, but the back cover describes it as "an array of stories," which means my attempts while reading it to figure out how all of these people are connected to each other might not have been useful, or fruitful.

Laura Pérez is a Spanish cartoonist and illustrator - her work most famously seen recently in the credits for the TV show Only Murders in the Building - of mostly moody and allusive work, light pencil lines anchored by big blocks of solid colors, with particular attention to inky blacks. I saw her book Totem not long ago - that is a single narrative, and is actually a slightly later book originally than Ocultos, though their publication was flipped for the US.

Ocultos was a 2019 book - a collection rather than a single thing, as I noted, though clearly a themed collection with a central idea - that was translated by Andrea Rosenberg for this 2024 US edition. It has about a hundred and fifty story pages, including blanks and title pages between stories, all in a horizontal, half-size format that mostly uses panels conventionally rather than trying to be cinematic or otherwise break the form.

The woman on the cover is central. I think she's Daira - that name is used once, and it is reasonable to assume that all of the women that look like her are her. But this is a book of secret and occult connections, of "hidden worlds full of unknown forces," as the publisher's description puts it. So it, like Totem, is a book to be experienced and felt rather than intellectualized or explicated.

All of the characters in Ocultos have encounters with the inexplicable, or are looking to have encounters with the inexplicable. A store - Daira works there, I think - with an extensive occult section shows up multiple times, with events involving crowds all wearing masks. Characters talk to themselves or to each other about odd things they have witnessed: not the same kinds of things, just unexplained events.

This is not a book about ghosts or aliens or nature spirits or anything else like that - it's about all of them and none of them, in a very non-specific way. None of the people in Occultos put names or definitions to their experiences; they just have things happen to them, and we either see those fleeting odd moments or hear them talk about their experiences afterward.

And most of these people don't have names. We don't know who they are, or how they connect. The point is the moments, all of the connection points to the numinous, rather than how they connect to each other in the normal, everyday world. Unfortunately, I am very much an everyday-world kind of reader, looking for actual narrative and named characters doing identifiable things that have connections to other things happening in the same book. So I was left somewhat cold by Ocultos: it is very pretty, and evocative at times, and many of the stories in it are interesting and all of them are well-constructed and thoughtful. But it doesn't seem to add up to anything in particular; it's just a clump of stories that mostly seemed to me to end with "and something happened I didn't understand; oh well; on to the next thing." Your reaction may be different, particularly if you have a higher tolerance for mysticism and vagueness.

Better Things: Tuesday Morning

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This isn't the first song I heard by The Pogues. It's not the first song anyone thinks of when they think of The Pogues. And, yeah, Fairytale of New York is awesome and several of their versions of traditional tunes, like South Australia and Young Ned of the Hill and Medley, rock out vastly more than any folk song can be expected to. (And The Sick Bed of Cuchuliann is a masterpiece about a certain kind of person.)

But the Pogues song I love the most, the one that actually makes me smile, is from that era after Shane MacGowan left the band, the least obvious bit of Pogues history.

It's Tuesday Morning, a mostly happy song about love and caring for someone, no matter what life throws at you:

But I knew that you
With your heart beating
And your eyes shining
Would be dreaming of me
Lying with you
On a Tuesday morning

It all has that uniquely Pogues sound to it - both folk and rock, but nothing like "folk rock." It's from the era when there were less punky than they started out, but it's not too smooth - just true and pure and real. It's a happy song despite itself, a song about finding, or maybe making happiness, out of whatever you have at hand...even if it's just a Tuesday morning.

Books Read: June 2025

The monthly index returns again - as always, I really doubt anyone other than me ever looks at these posts. But here's what I read last month:

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Thor (6/1)

Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Be a Motorist (6/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story (digital, 6/7)

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (6/7)

Philiipe Riche, Bad Break, Vol. 1 (digital, 6/8)

Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral, The Treasure of the Black Swan (digital, 6/14)

Auston Habershaw, If Wishes Were Retail (6/14)

Cathy Malkasian, Temperance (digital, 6/15)

Frank Conniff, Twenty-Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever (6/15)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Sex Day (digital, 6/19)

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (in Complete Novels, 6/19)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol.1 (digtal, 6/20)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol.4: Holiday in Budapest (digital, 6/21)

Hope Larson and Tintin Pantoja, Who Is AC? (6/22)

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (6/22)

Annie Goetzinger, The Provocative Colette (digital, 6/28)

James Albon, Love Languages (digital, 6/29)

Next month there will be more books. And some of the names above will have links added once my posts go live.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 5, 2025

One book came in the mail this week - this is it.

From the folks at Tachyon, and coming out at the beginning of September is Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! Interviews with Science Fiction Legends, edited by Richard Wolinsky. Wolinsky ran a radio show called Probabilities from 1977 through about 2000 - the main series ended in 1995, but a spin-off kept going a few years longer, less often and not as focused on SF. This is a blended history of SF based on those interviews - Wolinsky has edited it all together chronologically, with a lot of linking and explanatory material, rather than running fifty or so short radio interviews separately.

Interviews were originally conducted by Wolinsky, SF writer Richard A. Lupoff (who also provided a foreword before his 2019 death) and Lawrence Davidson, who I think was from the radio station itself.

This basically is an oral history of early SF, recorded beginning almost fifty years ago but covering primarily the years ten to fifty years earlier than that - this is as I understand it. It's an interesting thing, pulled out of the archives, and a lot of major names participated - from Ackerman to Zelazny, with Bradbury and Carr and Dick and Ellison and Freas and so forth in the middle of the alphabet. I wouldn't expect much from any one person - these were radio interviews - but the accumulated weight is impressive.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Your Best Advisor

I opened my fortune cookie. Don't hesitate to correct errors. I looked up to my living room wall. Horrendously grotesque as the painting itself was, I had begun to enjoy the excitement of a continuing party and felt I could not act on my fortune cookie instructions, which is a mistake, always obey your fortune cookie, it is as disinterested an adviser as you're likely to have.

 - William Kotzwinkle, The Midnight Examiner, p.70

Quote of the Week: Rustic Splendor

The single sitting-room of the cottage certainly bore out the promise of the exterior. It contained a table with a red cloth, a chair, three stuffed birds in a glass case on the wall, and a small horsehair sofa. A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, p.278

The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle

Eras have zeitgeists - some artistic works are more purely of their time than others. That doesn't mean they necessarily get outdated more quickly when the zeitgeist shifts, but they embody the world they were made in, and have to be seen in that context.

I don't know if William Kotzwinkle works in that mode more often than most writers - I've only read a few of his books. But The Fan Man is a book that could only have come out of the early '70s, all congealed counterculture and past-its-sell-by-date enthusiasm. And The Bear Went Over the Mountain is from a completely different era twenty years later, a satire of quintessentially '90s go-go capitalism and the "what's next?" school of publishing.

So I came to 1989's The Midnight Examiner - thirty-some years late, obviously - somewhat expecting it would be more 1980s than other books.

I was not disappointed.

This is a loose, short, oddball novel about the employees of Chameleon Publications, a New York-based publisher of all kinds of low-end magazines for readers who are not overly thoughtful or intelligent. The title publication is a weekly newspaper, along the lines of that era's National Enquirer or Weekly World News, but most of what Chameleon does is narrowcast to very specific audiences: Young Nurse Romance, Brides Tell All, Beauty Secrets, Real Detective. And it's employees are similar odd and quirky: we see them all through the viewpoint of the editor in chief, Howard Halliday, who edits things as disparate as Macho Man (which sounds something like Soldier of Fortune, only far more for wannabes) and the very softcore Knockers and Bottoms (which airbrushes scanty underwear onto its nude photos in anticipation of a potential swing to the puritanical in society).

The front half of the novel is mostly a tour of this world, and an examination of all of the Chameleon oddballs - there are a number of them, and they are all quite odd. It's fun and full of quirky details and amusing moments, but the reader may wonder if there's any substantial plot coming. That hits in the back half of the novel.

To simplify substantially, there's a model, Mitzi Mouse, who poses for a lot of photos for these magazines, and also does some porn for a local mafioso. She gets into an altercation with the mafioso and flees to the protection of Chameleon, whose editorial staff are more comprehensively - though very, very weirdly - armed than you would expect. The initial attack is thwarted, and those goons deposited with a local voodoo queen - she advertises in Chameleon publications - to be reprogrammed and set free. But the mafioso then kidnaps Mitzi and one of the female Chameleon editors - the very one Howard has been trying to get to date him - and so the whole staff gathers, with the aid of a kleptomaniac Egyptian cabbie and his electronics-device fence preteen daughter, to assault the mafioso's palatial Long Island home. This leads to a long infiltrating-the-enemy-headquarters section, with shocking reversals, threats of and actual acts of violence, lots of running about and sneaking through oversized air ducts, and so forth, before coming to an appropriately magazine-ish and happy ending.

A lot of Midnight Examiner is too much; that's the point. The names are silly, the action is weird, the whole thing is a cartoon. Kotzwinkle is not going for psychological realism at any point in this novel: this is a novel version of the overheated stories from tabloids like the ones Chameleon publishes.

You might have needed to be there - to see this kind of publication, to live in a world where these sort of half-baked ideas came out regularly on newsstands rather than hitting you in face with random little on-line pop-ups - to really appreciate Midnight Examiner. It's about and set entirely in a media landscape that's inescapably gone, where there was good money - well, at least money - from hacking out generic goofy ideas to a specific audience over and over again for as long as you could stand it.

But, if you know where it's going and can appreciate the vibe, Midnight Examiner is a nice slab of very 80s wacky fun, silly names and all. Kotzwinkle's writing is amusing and zippy throughout; he doesn't exactly take it all seriously but he does play it straight. This is the story he's telling here, and he's going to tell it the way it deserves.

Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo by Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave

When I read the big 20th anniversary Cyanide & Happiness book a couple months back, I noted that I didn't think the strip had ended, but that I hadn't seen it in a long time. Well, the library app I use has a bunch of C&H books, so I figured I'd read at least one more.

I picked Punching Zoo, because it seemed to be the oldest one there - there are some new anniversary editions of older books, too, but this was the actual 2014 collection, still available in the same format, as it was when Boom! Box published it a decade ago. Back in 2014, all four founding cartoonists were still involved: Kris Wilson, Rob DenBlyker, Matt Melvin, and Dave McElfatrick. Sometime between then and now, Melvin dropped out of the mix - I have no idea when or how, if it was big and splashy or quiet and barely noticeable.

Punching Zoo collects 119 Cyanide & Happiness strips as they originally appeared online, each one signed by the creator, so you can tell which of the four did that one. (They also have slightly different art styles, so, if you paid attention, you could probably figure them all out even without the credits.) Also included were thirty then-new exclusive strips - they might have appeared online later; I'm not about to comb through the C&H archives to check - and a "Chew Your Own Adventure" story called The Hot Date that takes up the last forty-one pages of the book.

Cyanide & Happiness has a distinctive tone and style - it's one small step up from stick figures, with often inappropriately smiling characters in a usually blank landscape, and it's nearly always Internet-mediated "sick" humor. Some strips occasionally dip into potentially-offensive material, but C&H stakes out its territory as offensive material, and roams freely through all of the subsectors of that land. Some jokes are about sex, some about death, some about poop or suicide or religion - but every strip is likely to offend someone. That was the original point, and in 2014, they were still solidly in that mode - from the 20th anniversary book, I think they've broadened slightly (only slightly) since then, under the weight of publishing so many different jokes and needing them to be at least slightly different from each other.

I don't want to say all Cyanide & Happiness books are basically the same, except the way any strip collection - Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, The Born Loser - are basically the same. But if you know the typical jokes and style, you know what you'll get, and you read the book to get it. That's the case here. The additional material means you get a big chunk of material you can't find on the website, but it's all the same kind of thing with the same sensibility. You probably don't need multiple C&H books within a short period, unless you're a huge fan of this style of humor. But one of 'em, once in a while, can be fun and amusing.

Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Psmith was one of the first and now probably the least-known of P.G. Wodehouse's series characters [1]: he appeared in four novels, and is part of Wodehouse's transition from his original style of school stories into the wider comedic novels of his mature period.

Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.

We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.

Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!

That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.

Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.

Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.

This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.

Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.

[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.

Beat It, Rufus by Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver has a muse of cringe and self-obsession; that can't be easy. His characters often have boundless and unsupported faith in their own meagre abilities, a disinclination to look solidly at the world that actually exists, and a pugnacious optimism untethered by any kind of sense or reason. Fante Bukowski is his most famous example.

Rufus Baxter is another in that mold. He was the guitarist and asshole driving force of the hair metal band Funky Cool, almost forty years ago, when they got a deal with an exploitative minor-league label to record a cassette-only release before a plane crash killed the other two-thirds of the band. Since then, apparently, he's been gigging constantly, with no actual success. He has an agent...who books him for things like weddings two states away on one day's notice, because that's all Rufus is good for.

Rufus, of course, believes he's the last great rocker, a titan of the industry, a man who's had a few bad breaks (ancient car on the verge of death, living in a storage unit because he has no money, no friends or family or support structure of any kind). He's wrong. Comprehensively wrong, in almost every possibly way. But he's a Van Sciver main character, so realizing that will never happen.

Beat It, Rufus is the story of Rufus's cross-country odyssey over a few days. It follows the usual pattern: he loses what little he has, and goes on an epic journey to reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his (the expected massive royalties from that cassette), having various adventures and losing even more along the way. He reconnects with the girlfriend he had just before he "hit big," is repeatedly visited by the devil (and, much later and to less effect, the angel) on his shoulder, plays a random show with a random band, tracks down the office of that (long-failed) record label, and learns that one of his two bandmates actually survived the crash.

That bandmate, "Doing it to the Max" Eckhart, is an actually successful musician, with a big house and a home studio and a bestselling "how I recovered" memoir and a thriving career writing jingles - all the things Rufus reflexively loathes, but takes advantage of at the end of his draining and self-destructive odyssey.

It all ends in a "Lady and the Tiger" ending - Rufus is scheming to steal from and take advantage of Max, even as Max is willing to help out Rufus in ways that we readers think would actually be more productive and useful.

But that's the point of characters like Rufus: they don't learn, they can't learn. The humor is because they always do the wrong thing. I find that kind of humor wearying, especially when, as with Van Sciver, it's pitched in a relatively realistic mode - Rufus isn't a cartoon to bounce back up from any hardship, but a real person in a real world, getting older and hurtling headlong toward the kind of death that will leave people vaguely happy but uneasy about it.

This is funny, and realistic: it moves well, Rufus is entirely believable, and the various scenes are all told well. But he's so self-delusional, such an asshole, that I felt like I needed a bath when I was done reading it. How any reader responds to it will largely depend on how much they like cringe comedy: this is all cringe, all the time.

Better Things: The Mermaid Parade

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This week is something almost random. As always, it's a song I love, and think I might have something to say about. But it's not famous - it's just a song I found, and that spoke to me, and that I've kept listening to for years.

It's The Mermaid Parade by Phosphorescent, a 2010 song that, as is so common for this series, is yet another song about a breakup.

No, I wound up walking
out by the ocean today
and there were naked women
dancing in the Mermaid Parade.

It's a story-song, but the story is short and specific: the singer is in NYC, soon after a Mexican vacation with his wife Amanda. She's in LA - we don't know if that's where they both live, or she's there for some other reason, just that's where she is. And he buys a ticket to go see her, but ends up missing his flight, and we think giving up on the marriage, to instead watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.(Which is still going strong; this year's version just happened a week ago.)

Like so many of the best break-up songs, we don't know why. We don't know whose "fault" it is. We just get the emotion, the moment, the brokenness.

but god damn it, Amanda;
oh, god damn it all.

It's a song about how things can break, irrevocably, in a short time. It doesn't say why or how it broke...but I have to wonder if "those naked women dancing" had something to do with it....

Quote of the Hour: Late-Night Excursions

To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-colored pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, and he seethed in furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had manoeuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant kick. Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether there was any way of getting in - short of banging the knocker and rousing the house, a line of action which did not recommend itself to him.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, pp.253-4

Quote of the Hour: Visitor's Seat

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

 - Raymond Chandler, The High Window, pp.1005 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Succession

It was such a relief that they [her parents] were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

 - Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p.12

Quote of the Hour: Courage!

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.114

Quote of the Hour: Not Quite a Credo

 "....Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."

 - The Continental Op, speaking in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, p.342 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: There Was Only One Catch

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but he hadn't painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines with a blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the game. You see, the catch about portrait-painting - I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start painting portraits trill people come along and ask you to, and they won't come along and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. That makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Leave It to Jeeves," pp.11-12 in My Man Jeeves

Quote of the Hour: Gossip

In this rich African setting were jumbled together, for a few days, people of every race and temper, all involved in one way or another in that complex of hysteria and apathy, majesty and farce; a company shot through with every degree of animosity and suspicion. There were continual rumors born of the general uncertainty; rumors about the date and place of every ceremony; rumors of dissention in high places; rumors that, in the absence at Addis Ababa of all the responsible officials, the interior was seething with brigandage; rumors that Sir Percival Phillips had used the legation wireless; that the Ethiopian Minister to Paris had been refused admittance to Addis Ababa; that the royal coachman had not had his wages for two months and had given in his notice; that the airmen from Aden were secretly prospecting for a service between the capital and the coast; that one of the legations had refused to receive the empress's first lady-in-waiting; above all, there was the great Flea Sandal and the Indiscretion about the Duke of Gloucester's Cook.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.228-229 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: In Which a Narrator Denies Being Scared

But it was very quiet in the house. I had never noticed all the noises when there were people. I was not scared, of course, but it was a little spooky. More spooky yet were the noises that interrupted the silence. House noises. The house itself made sounds. Some of them I could figure out, like the refrigerator, apparently there is a motor in refrigerators, and it goes on and off. I had never noticed it before. Then, there were sounds that the house itself seemed to make. Creaks, and thumps, and clicks. This did not scare me, but I could imagine a person not as brave as I am, a person around my age, someone who has never been alone in their house at night, possibly being a little nervous.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, pp.74-75

Quote of the Hour: The Divide

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn't see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.854 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Non-Conformists

Only two girls in my grade came from there - the Raybern sisters, twins - and though they were impeccably neat, they wore homemade calf-length skirts, pleated button-down blouses and belted cardigans as if they were already spinsters. If they had been smart we would have understood them, but they were C students, and therefore weird for no real reason.

 -Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels, p.62

Quote of the Hour: A Flock of Newsmen

Reporters in large groups are ill at ease, and they try to make up for it by acting too easy. Each is preoccupied with his own time situation - his paper's deadlines and the accessibility of telephones. Each, before a public conference, shapes in his mind what would make a good story if the principal said it, and how he can trap him into saying it. If the principal delays his appearance, the reporter begins to wonder whether he will have time to write the story, Then, with further delay, he begins to wonder if he will have time to telephone. Next he gets angry, He resents his subjection to the whims of his inferiors, and he vents his resentment by a show of elaborate contempt.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.315 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Commercial Premises

My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer - if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, pp. 717-718 in Stories & Early Novels