Quote of the Week: Mourning

They buried Parradan Smith in a separate grave and piled a cairn of stones to mark it, on Burnbright's advice, she being the nearest expert on Mount Flame City gang customs. They felt badly leaving him there, in the shadow of the black mountain. Still, there is only so much one can do for the dead without joining them.

 - Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World, p.57

Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

I've written a lot about P.G. Wodehouse here over the years, mostly in reading through Overlook's marvelous Collector's Wodehouse series -- I believe they republished all or basically all of his hundred-plus books over the first couple of decades of this century in matching small hardcovers.

I've even written a bit about Wodehouse's series character Uncle Fred (the puckish Earl of Ickenham, who can accomplish anything, absolutely anything, in the springtime), with the novels Service with a Smile and Uncle Dynamite. But I seem to have read this book, the last time around, well before I started this blog fifteen years ago.

And, frankly, I don't think I can do justice to Uncle Fred in the Springtime here: it's one of Wodehouse's best novels, in which all of the gears of his plots mesh perfectly, his characters are amusingly quotable, the random observations are funny and true, and the sunniest of all possible worlds shines before us as if it could possibly be real.

It's about young people in love, of course, as with the best of Wodehouse. But also about the old people around them: the friendly ones, like Ickenham, trying to help them along to bliss. The grumpy ones, like the Duke of Dunstable, who must be gotten around to allow his nephew to marry. And the scatterbrained ones, like Lord Emsworth, who would be far happier if left just to think about and care for his beloved prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings.

There are impostors and the theft of the aforementioned pig. There is a major betting flurry on the clothing worn by a random gent temporarily trapped in a phone booth in the lobby of the Drones Club. There is a private detective who does not fit quite so smoothly into polite rural society as one might wish.

I'm not sure if Uncle Fred counts as a distinct series in Wodehouse's work, or if it's best characterized as an offshoot or cadet branch of the Blandings stories. There may perhaps be a major scholarly disagreement on exactly that point. But Uncle Fred is a wonderful character, and a character who shows to Jeeves-and-Wooster fans that Wodehouse had other arrows in his comedy quiver: he could spin complications almost as easily out of a man who could always talk his way out of trouble as he could with a man always talking his way into it.

This is a marvelous, funny book. Would that we all had Uncle Freds to smooth our paths, and that we could live forever in the Wodehousian springtime.

Earworm of the Day

We all get songs stuck in our heads. And when we do, we have the bizarre urge to share those songs, as if it were a parasite that could be induced to jump hosts.

So: here's what's been stuck in my head all day:

Note for people of my generation: yes, that is Merv Griffin singing; his first career was as a singer. The world is weird.

Note for people younger than me: yes, this is precisely as bizarre and random as you think it is. It's a novelty one-off song, despite sounding like it came from the middle of some 1950s musical.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Funny can age badly, because what each generation thinks is funny changes. The more generations, the more change, and eventually we need learned professors to explain to us that Shakespeare is approximately 15% dick-and-vagina jokes by volume.

The Dud Avocado is a humorous novel, in the based-on-my-life style, set in the early 1950s in Paris, narrated by a madcap young would-be actress named Sally Jay Gorce. How much of it is "really" what happened to author Elaine Dundy and how much is a fictionalization...who can say at this point? And who would care? What matters now is whether the people still connect, whether the funny stuff is still funny, the thoughtful stuff still thoughtful, and the emotional stuff still true.

The edition I read, the 2006 New York Review of Books trade paperback [1], notes that Dud Avocado is one of those cult novels that gets re-issued with minor fanfare every decade or so, and then mostly sinks beneath the waves before the next burst of cult interest. (Of course, most sixty-year-old books don't even get that: they got a first publication, and maybe a paperback, and possibly a reissue with the next book from the author, and then nothing at all from then on.) Terry Teachout, who said that in his introduction, makes it sound like a sad thing, but it's actually how novels live, for all but the biggest, most ubiquitous writers. They pop in and out of print, in and out of public discourse, because we can't think about or talk about everything at once.

So Dud Avocado has stayed alive. It's been rediscovered multiple times, by two more generations, including a lot of people who didn't get to run off to Paris on family money the way Sally Jay (and maybe Dundy) did. So no matter what I say about it, my questions above about people and funny and thoughtful and emotional are "yes," for a sizable number of people, as recently as 2006. (And, to be frank, "people" is me being deliberately vague: I think Dundy and Dud Avocado speak more clearly to women than to men, more directly to young people than older people.)

Sally Jay is willful and scattered and free-wheeling and all-too-easily led, enthusiastic and prone to fall in love at the drop of a hat and enamored with her own bohemianism. She's also not nearly as self-reflective as she seems to be: I'm not sure whether that's Dundy's point or not. Even this far back, the scatterbrained young woman -- pretty enough for a lot of men to be interested in her, nutty enough to drive a lot of them away, clumsy as the standard endearing/quirky trait -- was the model, though I don't know if modern romantic comedy got that from Dundy or if there's an earlier incarnation I'm forgetting at the moment. She's a modern enough woman to fall into bed without much trouble, and Sally Jay seems to enjoy it though Dundy (writing in 1958, let's remember) leaves it clear that there was a falling-into-bed without saying much more.

The story of Dud Avocado is Sally Jay: her voice, her misadventures, her emotions, her love-affairs, all in one tangled ball. The through-line, such as it is, is bound up in an old friend named Larry Keevil: she meets him again in Paris on page 1, falls in love with him in the first chapter, gets pulled into his schemes (and vice versa) for a few hundred pages, wanders through Paris and some provincial towns doing things that may be scandalous to herself or her relatives back home or even the locals, and eventually learns unpleasant truths about Larry near the end. Those are all things that happen; what matters is how Sally Jay tells us about them and how she feels about them.

She's a mess, in that unformed early-twenties way: unsure what she wants but determined to get it right now. The whole book is in her voice, and the reader has to be able to go with that: to sympathize with what a less kind reader might call a sex-mad spoiled rich white girl on a tear overseas, sowing wild oats madly before inevitably settling down to domesticity and a blandly conventional American marriage. (Spoiler alert: there is something like settling down at the very end of the book, somewhat abruptly, though I misrepresent it here. It feels like Dundy knew she needed to end the book and wasn't able to figure out something more plausible than her own random marriage to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, and so just fictionalized that as best she could.)

I found Sally Jay a fun protagonist to spend 250 pages with, though she'd be exhausting in real life. (I went to Vassar; I knew girls not a million miles from Sally Jay.) I'm a huge fan of novels written in distinctive voices, and Dud Avocado hits all of those buttons. And, frankly, a lot of it was still funny, to a man born twenty years later, who never had a rich uncle to send him anywhere. I imagine even more of it would be funny to readers closer to the life Sally Jay lives, and I expect there will be another new edition of Dud Avocado in 2025 or so, popping it back up for the attention of yet another generation.


[1] For the people like me who wondered: no, the cover photo is not Dundy. It's an unnamed model in New York in 1962, photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld. I guess mid-century is mid-century, right? 1951 Paris, 1962 New York, comme ci, comme ca?

Bad Machinery, Book 8: The Case of the Modern Men by John Allison

I always ponder how far to get into history and minutia when I'm writing about, say, the eighth volume collecting a webcomic.

I mean, on the one hand I can just say go read the webcomic already, which is perfectly legitimate. But it makes for a very short post, if nothing else.

Or I can delve into the history of Bad Machinery, linking to my posts on the previous volumes (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven), talking about how it was the follow-up to creator John Allison's previous webcomic Scary-Go-Round (q.v.), and possibly even sidetracking into a discussion of the only-vaguely-related Giant Days (viz.).

It is a puzzlement.

So, instead, I'll pretend to consider both options while actually putting them both in this post, and then dive into the current book: The Case of the Modern Men, the eighth case of the Tackleford Mystery Tweens Teens. It ran in the webcomic in early-mid 2014, with the core cast clearly teenaged and (as usual for teens) somewhat less interested in solving weird external mysteries and somewhat more interested in the more fleshy mysteries of their various innamorata (which, as also is usual with teens, were sometimes each other, though, also sadly usual, never reciprocally).

This story combines French exchange students with the thrill of the Mod lifestyle, in clothing and scooters and the music of The Whom. (Allison's world is much like, but not exactly the same as, our own.) Lottie's family hosts Mimi; Little Claire's hosts Camille. Those two young women had a previous conflict which flourishes quirkily in the fertile Tackleford soil. There is a fabled scooter that may perhaps be cursed, so that every rider becomes King of the Mods and is eventually beheaded.

The Mystery Teens do not exactly try to solve the mystery as try to help their friends, to stave off a riotous Rocker-Mod conflict throughout the surrounding borough, and to foil one of those French young women in her fiendish plans. In the end, at least no one is beheaded, and there have been some kisses exchanged.

In retrospect, this (or possibly the prior story, The Case of the Forked Road) is where Bad Machinery started coming apart. Allison always sets his stories in something like real time, so his cast will inevitably grow and change -- and he tends to write about young people (tweens, teens, twenties), so they have a lot of changing to do, and can do it very quickly. So when I say "coming apart," I mean the premise -- kids solve crimes -- rather than anything on the story level.

Here they were no longer kids. After an event in this story, solving crimes had much less appeal. And that's clear from the Bad Machinery page on Allison's site: right after this case, there was a sidebar story about Lottie and Shauna called "Space Is the Place," then one more case, then another sidebar (more of a Bobbins story, actually) under the ominous title "The Big Hiatus," and then the final Bad Machinery case.

Some creators -- naming no names here -- are content to keep their characters exactly the same age, in exactly the same relationships, for decades at a time, and many of them rake in buckets of sweet, sweet syndication money. (Or the trusts established to keep their descendants from ever working again do, in some cases.) John Allison will have no truck with that, and his work is vastly stronger for it. Every Allison story is set in a moment that will not recur -- just like every moment in each of our own real lives.

So I'm sad, even re-reading half a decade later, to remember that Bad Machinery must inevitably end. But all things must inevitably end. Allison is just better at the process along the way than many others.

Fifteenth Anniversaries

Yesterday, while doing something else, I realized today was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.

Now, I was once in the habit of writing long, discursive, link-filled posts for anniversaries -- see the entries for the first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years. But last year I dropped the ball, and (quirkily enough) I also bobbled the supposedly-significant fifth (missed entirely) and tenth (forgotten until a month later) years as well, as if some part of my brain was quite clearly sabotaging me.

I would typically list the number of posts by year after that, so...you know what? I will update that here:

2019-2020 -- 55 posts
2018-2019 -- 178 posts
2017-2018 -- 368 posts
2016-2017 -- 263 posts
2015-2016 -- 144 posts
2014-2015 -- 258 posts
2013-2014 -- 434 posts
2012-2013 -- 285 posts
2011-2012 -- 332 posts
2010-2011 -- 445 posts
2009-2010 -- 711 posts
2008-2009 -- 880 posts
2007-2008 -- 834 posts
2006-2007 -- 841 posts
2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I would previously then add in the posts from my other blog, Editorial Explanations, which ran from 2011 through 2013. But those numbers will not change now, so anyone who cares (no one) can look at one of the older posts to see the numbers.

And then I'd link back to posts of the past year, indulging myself by quoting sentences I particularly liked. Since the pickings are pretty meager the past couple of years -- not to mention the fact that my fingers are racing to get done before The Wife and I run out for the weekly grocery-shopping -- I'll leave that off this year.

But I'm counting this as not a failure this year, since I actually remembered ahead of time. It might be smaller, it might be less impressive, but it is a thing that exists, and that's good enough for me in the annus horribilis 2020.

Quote of the Week: Did Not Even Adjust Its Blood Level Away

(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn't have time to think about anything else.)

(Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

 - Martha Wells, Network Effect, p.205

Carrizozo: An Illustrated History by Rick Geary

Carrizozo is the country seat of Lincoln, which comprises a full quarter of the state of New Mexico. But it's a small town, once a moderately important stop on a then-important train line and now a place best described as quaint and artsy, cheap enough for artistic types from across the country to move to and make their stuff there.

This book exists because of one of them: the cartoonist Rick Geary. Geary moved to Carrizozo a decade or so ago -- I think from San Diego, though he was originally born in Kansas City. And he clearly likes the place enough to research and draw a sixty-page book about it.

But, for the rest of us, this is the cartoon version of those small-published books that sit in the Local History section of the independent book store,  the ones typically with old-timey sepia photos of local landmarks on the cover and a lot of random local trivia (local famous families and how long some of them have been mayor! what that big stone building in the center of town was originally! careful tap dancing around a despicable history of racial animus! historical photos of groups of people, some of whom you may be distantly related to!).

Which is to say: this is a book that I assume will be sold in Carrizozo's local tourist office, and was sold to Geary's nutty fans [1], and otherwise will be beneath the notice of everyone else in the world. (And, let's be honest: every single book is beneath the notice of the vast majority of the world. Only a tiny few of them will ever hit 10% market penetration, the marketer in me wants to point out.)

So: Carrizozo! Jewel of the Tularosa Basin! Named for a local plant, with an extra "zo" thrown on the end for emphasis! Once site of a major roundhouse for the mighty El Paso and Southwestern Railway! Peaking in population at 2000 in 1920! [2] This is the book that will tell you all those things and more.

I can honestly say that this is the only book about Carrizozo you will ever need, unless by some bizarre quirk of fate you are the town historian of Carrizozo. If, by some bizarre chance, you are the town historian of Carrizozo, please update your website to include your name.

I don't have my usual Amazon link this time, but, if you are as nutty as I am, Carrizozo: An Illustrated History can be purchased directly from the author's website.


[1] Of whom I clearly am one. I debated backing the Kickstarter for quite a while: I usually back Geary's as soon as I see them, but I was close to the deadline on this one. Of course, how long you debated before doing a silly thing is obviously not evidence that you didn't do the silly thing.

[2] I live in what's considered a small town in New Jersey, and we have 10,000 people here. You likely live somewhere as large or larger; most people do.

The Night and the Music: The Matthew Scudder Stories by Lawrence Block

Matthew Scudder is a creature of novels. All series characters have a length they work best in -- short novels, long novels, novelettes, short stories, drabbles. And Scudder's creator Lawrence Block has characters that work at different lengths: Bernie Rhodenbarr is made for short, frothy novels; Martin Ehrengraf for sharp short stories; and Keller, in my opinion, for novellas.

And, again, Scudder is a creature of novels -- medium-length mysteries (or thrillers, some of the time), with depth of characterization, larger casts, and room for the moral dilemmas that are most important to his stories. Scudder is an ex-cop, a product of the murky 1970s, and has a complicated relationship with honesty, sobriety, and the law -- but a very deep, central relationship with doing the right thing, which has led him down a lot of roads as an unlicensed private eye. He was created for an initial clutch of three novels -- The Sins of the Fathers, Time to Murder and Create, and In the Midst of Death -- and has appeared in fourteen more in the five decades since.

But Scudder also appeared in three novellas, during the initial book hiatuses of the late '70s and early '80s, and, as Block's most popular character, also popped up in shorter, slighter pieces since then.

The Night and the Music was published in 2011, around the same time as the last Scudder novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, to collect all of those bits of string between two covers. There's since been one Scudder novella published as a book, A Time to Scatter Stones, but I believe that's it. It came out from Telemachus Press, a self-publishing outfit. Block has since published a lot of books himself, both his old quirky backlist and some new books -- those have tended since to be more clearly published by the author, since that's a good trust signal to his audience.

Night opens with the three strongest stories -- all novelette length -- and then drops into shorter pieces, some of which Block actually calls "vignettes" in his informative afterword. All of it is in strong Block prose, all of it is interesting, all of it features Scudder. But most of it is not stories in the clearest sense: it's a record of a few things that happened with Scudder in them, and most of the time, those things include one death and the way Scudder figures out details of that death. Some of the pieces don't even have that.

But this is the rest of Scudder. If you've read the seventeen novels, this is what's left. And those three stories up front are actually really good -- though the third one, "By the Dawn's Early Light," formed the core of the novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, and so will likely be familiar to Scudder fans. Those three stories are also about half the book; the other eight pieces take up roughly the other hundred pages here.

If you're a Scudder fan, and didn't know this book existed, I imagine you're happy. If you're not a Scudder fan, try Nine Million Ways to Die or The Sins of the Father or When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. He is, as I've said twice before, really a creature of novels.

Berlin, Book Three: City of Light by Jason Lutes

I keep hitting reading roadblocks, no matter what I do. I used to have a life with a lot of dedicated time for reading and eyes that could stare at pages of text for hours on end, but the past decade has repeatedly broken all of my reading mechanisms, culminating in the minor apocalypse of the past two years. I went from reading 433 books in the Book-A-Day year of 2018 to, um, 43 the year afterward. And 2020 could possibly be even worse.

On top of that, I keep finding new things to stymie me. For example, who would predict that a graphic novel about Berlin sliding into fascism, intolerance, and sectarian violence in the early '30s would be so resonant, and unpleasant, in 2020?

I'm sure Jason Lutes, planning out this giant project back in 1996, would have expected and wanted modern history to go differently, but, as it is, Berlin Book Three: City of Light is immediately relevant to 2020 in ways that are deeply dispiriting and depressing.

Worse for me, the fact that this is the third of three books collecting a story that has been running for over twenty years -- and the fact that Lutes uses a naturalistic style and doesn't go out of his way to introduce characters that I last saw in a book I read in 2008 (see my review on ComicMix) -- means that I only have a vague sense of who these people are and what they're doing. It's a couple of years later in their own lives as well, since Light is set in 1933 and Smoke was mostly set in 1930.

So I respected City of Light and I appreciated City of Light but I had the damndest time getting myself to read City of Light. I don't want to see characters I like struggling as their society plunges into a totalitarian hellhole. (If I want that, I can just read Twitter.)

And let me say explicitly what I alluded to in my review of City of Smoke and what Lutes never says, but hangs ominously over the whole enterprise: every character we like in Berlin is probably doomed. They will all be killed by the Nazis, one way or another, sooner or later.

That's what Berlin is about. How fascism smashes norms, destroys lives, agitates its followers and gets them to do the unspeakable in the name of blood and country. It's a powerful message, especially in 2020, but I don't want to read about it right now.

The way to read Berlin now is to get the big single-volume edition and run right through it -- that will solve my problems of character identification. The other problems, I hope, will start to be solved on November 3rd, and not by a book.

Quote of the Week: It Was Already This Bad in 1997

America wearies of democracy. Thirty years after a war that wounded its heart, twenty years after a scandal that scarred its conscience, ten years after fiscal policies that ridiculed its sense of responsibility and fairness, the country has nearly exhausted the qualities by which democracy survives and flourishes. America feels at the end of its power, and the result is a hysteria of which we're barely conscious, a hysteria in which democracy appears as a spectacle of impotence and corruption. As Americans we have come to act more oppressed by freedom than exhilarated by it, more concerned with freedom from than freedom to. We divide between the vast and growing majority of us who -- out of a sense of futility, confusion, or indifference -- are so disengaged from democracy we never vote at all, and those of us who vote not to thoughtfully resolve complicated issues but to express our rage.

 - Steve Erickson, American Nomad, p.29

Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang by Jonathan Bernstein

Hey wait -- I just realized the oddest thing about this 2006 book by an ex-pat British writer then living in LA. It was originally published first in the UK.

Don't...don't they already understand their own slang? Wouldn't that be like Random Penguin publishing Shit Americans Say? Who would actually buy that?

(In other news: I haven't worked in trade publishing for a decade, and clearly my is-this-a-viable-product detector is no longer reliable, since this is a thing that happened already.)

Anyway: the book is Knickers in a Twist. The author is Jonathan Bernstein, who I think is the same guy who wrote Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.

It collects a whole bunch of both current and recent-historical slang used by people in various corners of the UK -- pretty much all things that people who are not yet dead might actually say or at least clearly remember people saying within their lifetimes -- organized into about three dozen thematic chapters to make looking for a term alphabetically more difficult but with an index to make that possible again. Bernstein apparently relied on his own knowledge and asking other British people for research, with possibly an intensive program of taking notes while watching Carry On movies and Two Ronnies re-runs.

I am not British. So if I say that this book seemed entirely plausible to me, as a person living in an entirely different country with a somewhat different culture who has a vague interest in words-in-general and Britishness in particular...well, you can add as many grains of salt as your taste requires.

It is often funny, and it's a quick read, and it will at the very least introduce or re-introduce you to some colorful terms that you can use in your own life, probably confusing everyone around you. I read it in the smallest room of the house, and it was admirably suited to that purpose. I can enthusiastically recommend it on those bases.

The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker

My biggest surprise: that I'm still angry that Kage Baker died, even a decade later. It was so senseless, so clearly wrong, that I wish I believed in some anthropomorphic personification so that I could blame that being for doing something so horrible. But I don't, and I know the world is pointless and random, that cruelty is only a human term, a way of looking at things that just are.

None of that changes an emotional reaction, of course. It never does, and never will. And that reaction has nothing to do with any of her books: she's gone, but they will endure. (Let's hope something similar can be said for all of us.)

The Anvil of the World was Baker's first fantasy novel, originally published in 2003. She later wrote two more novels set in the same world, The House of the Stag and The Bird of the River. I read Bird when it was published, and read other short pieces set in that world over the years, but I'd been saving Anvil and House so that I would still have Baker novels to look forward to reading. After ten years, I decided it was time for this one.

Anvil is officially a novel, but actually three related novellas -- very clearly and obviously so. The first one was published separately as "The Caravan from Troon," but I don't think the others appeared separately. So this is not actually a fix-up; just a novella that grew sequels and turned into a longer book.

Baker was always a great writer of novellas, that most SFFnal length, so this is entirely a good thing.

Baker's unnamed world is fantastic, but mildly so -- there are gods, somewhere outside the world, but they don't interfere directly. (There are, however, demigods that are very much in the world, living very long lives and shaping entire societies, so I may be making a distinction without a difference.) In the region that we've seen in her novels and stories, there are three distinct races, all of which can interbreed. First are the demons, the original inhabitants, who are said to be nonhuman, and at least the upper ranks of their society are made up of persons who are effectively immortal and have at least some limited shapeshifting ability. Next are the Children of the Sun, an expansionist and inventive human race who spread like locusts over a century or three until some cataclysm kills most of them off -- said cataclysms generally caused by the Children. Last are the green-skinned Yendri, who live in the forests of this part of the world and are subject to religious manias -- they're not quite the Good Indigenous People to be seen in contrast to the expansionist, casually destructive Children, but they're in that general region and individual Yendri certainly use that line of rhetorical attack during Anvil.

Our main character is a man of the Children, now calling himself Smith. He's in his early middle years, and is trying to get away from what are told was a very successful and eventful career as a professional assassin in various city-states of the Children. (There are many of those cities scattered across this continent, and the Children fight among each other as much if not more than they fight with others.) Smith is almost preternaturally good at killing people, but he wants to stop doing it. So, as the first section begins, he's taken on a new job, under his new name, as a caravan master from Troon to Salesh-by-the-Sea. It's a somewhat dangerous journey, through a semi-wilderness populated by Yendri tribes and bandits (mostly half-breed demons), but no more so than a long sea journey of the 18th century.

His passengers on that trip, though, are a mixed and strange group, including a courier who is clearly a member of a dangerous Children gang, a Yendri herbalist with his own secrets, and the reclusive, supposedly sickly young Lord Ermenweyr and his Nurse Balnshik. More than one of those passengers attract unwanted, violent attention on the route, and Ermenweyr turns out to be the half-demon son of the Master of the Mountain, the fabled leader of a slave rebellion turned into a cross between a bandit king and a feudal lord, as well as one of the demigods I alluded to before. (Ermenweyr's mother is also a demigod, of a very different kind, and whose history with the Master is complicated and threads throughout all of Baker's fantasy stories -- he either abducted her as a bride or she came to marry him on purpose to tame him, or possibly both.)

Since I've already mentioned that Anvil has the structure of three novellas, it should not be a surprise if I say the caravan does reach Salesh, more or less as planned.

At that point, Smith and his crew settle down there to run the Hotel Grandview, with an eye to a life that will be less fraught with danger. But Smith will not be able to avoid danger, not least because he's now something like a friend (or something like a pet, or something like a distant vassal) of Ermenweyr, who will return to Salesh in search of excitement and fun of the kinds only a teenage demigod and powerful natural mage can contemplate.

So the second section sees the Grandview during Festival time, a particularly raucous and public celebration of fecundity in all of its forms. (Baker is particularly amusing in describing this: she doesn't go in for body parts but gives a kaleidoscopic overview of the all-encompassing festivities.) [1] Ermenweyr arrives for a visit at the same time, hiding out from a wizard's duel with a rival he semi-inadvertently offended. And a guest dies mysteriously, right as the Grandview is undergoing a major inspection. Smith must solve all of those problems by the end of Festival, and he does so very amusingly.

The third, longest portion of the book is less amusing, on purpose. Ermenweyr essentially kidnaps Smith and Willowspear, the Yendri apothecary attached to the hotel, supposedly to save his sister from Yendri fanatics...though Ermenweyr's story does change somewhat in the course of their journey. Smith's amazing facility with murder gets a deeper examination, and a deeper purpose. And something like the fate of the world -- or the world of at least a large portion of the cast -- is eventually at stake.

(Well, I did say it was a fantasy novel. Such things are traditional.)

Baker had the gift of always being readable; she was one of those writers whose each sentence just leads to the next one, seemingly effortlessly, making it easier to just keep reading than to ever stop. Her people are quirky and specific, embedded in their particular worlds but reminiscent of our own. And her plots are full of complications and reversals both funny and frightening; she was a master of tone and could switch it up almost on a dime.

Anvil is a lovely book. I'm happy to live in a world where there are two more novels set in the same world, but we all should live in the world where a still-healthy Baker has written another one every two or three years since, and will keep doing so for another couple of decades. Sadly, "should" never enters into it, does it?


[1] Oh, all right. Have a quote, from p.175:

Next came rolling a half-sized replica of the famous war galley Duke Rakut's Pride, its decks crowded with sailors and mermaids, waving cheerfully at the crowd despite their various amatory entanglements.

American Nomad by Steve Erickson

In a better world, there would be more books like American Nomad -- it's the "sequel" to Leap Year, with novelist Steve Erickson following the 1996 US presidential race in a kaleidoscopic fashion once again. If he'd done that every eight years since (it would be horrible to have to experience every Presidential election that way), we'd have books for 2004 and 2012 and he'd be working on one for this year.

Of course, in an even better world, the US wouldn't be so screwed up that we'd need books like Erickson's to explicate it, but I'm wishing for things in the realm of possibility here.

American Nomad is deeply out of print and mostly forgotten, maybe even more so than Leap Year. I expect only fans of Erickson's novels even know it exists, or have ever read it. It never had a paperback edition. The cover I'm showing here is, as far as I know, the only one it ever had: deeply '90s in all of the good and bad ways.

And that's too bad, because in his visionary way, Erickson saw more clearly what America was, and all the ways it was tearing itself into pieces, almost twenty-five years ago, than most of us can on any given day.

Look, I posted the opening sentences here as a "Quote of the Week" last year -- go read that and come right back.

See what I mean? That's not 2016 -- it was 1996. It was true since 1980, but it took someone like Erickson to make it so clear.

American Nomad is not a book of reportage: one strand of it is Erickson's flameout as Rolling Stone's reporter on the race, hired to provide a unique novelistic take and then immediately subject to publisher Jann Wenner's mercurial demands, most of which were to be more like a reporter. (There's also a cutting quote, from some other reporter, to the effect that Wenner's not sure if he wants to publish great journalism or get invited to the White House after the election.) And that's probably the most factual strand of the book.

Erickson was always a visionary writer rather than a plotty one -- things happen in his book, and are always inevitable in their bizarre glory, but they happen due to buried rules of deeply unknowable universes and secret underground connections and the pure force of human desire. In his novels, they happen to characters that he invents and that live lives separate from their author. In Leap Year, they happened largely to a fictionalized, out-of-time version of Sally Hemings, who was Erickson's conscience or guide or muse.

American Nomad has only Erickson: it's a book taking place in his head, as he travels across America covering the race, or wonders what to do after being fired from covering the race, or half-assedly covering the race anyway without press credentials, or just blasting out full-force Ericksonisms about the way the world really is.

And, like Leap Year, 1996 turned out to be much less of a race than anyone expected, or any of the political reporters Erickson ran with wanted: it was another snoozer, the ending never in doubt. So what Erickson had for American Nomad was the contents of his own head: luckily, those were brilliant.

If you want to understand the buried politics of America, you could do far worse than to read Leap Year and American Nomad. You will likely disagree with lots of Erickson's thoughts -- I did, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did, too, now or even at the time. But he gets the apocalyptic fervor of American politics, the burn-the-whole-damn-thing-down energy from both ends of the spectrum, better than anyone more factual, and brings that to imaginative life on every page.

Quote of the Week: Job Opportunities

In the late seventies, Miami, like other American cities, had a steady increase in the sort of murders that occur when, say, an armed man panics while he is robbing a convenience store. It also had some political bombings and some shootings between outfits that were, depending on your point of view, either running drugs to raise money for fighting Fidel or using the fight against Fidel as cover for running drugs. At the end of the decade, Dade County's murder rate took an astonishing upturn. Around that time, the Colombians who manufactured the drugs being distributed in Miami by Cubans decided to eliminate the middleman, and, given a peculiar viciousness in the way they customarily operated, that sometimes meant eliminating the middleman's wife and whoever else happened to be around. Within a couple of years after the Colombians began their campaign to reduce overhead, Miami was hit with the Mariel Boatlift refugees. In 1977, there were two hundred and eleven murders in Dade County., By 1981, the high point of Dade murder, there were six hundred and twenty-one. That meant, according to one homicide detective I spoke to, that Miami experienced the greatest increase in murders per capita that any city had ever recorded. It also meant that Miami had the highest murder rate in the country. It also meant that a police reporter could drive to work in the morning knowing that there would almost certainly be at least one murder to write about.

 - Calvin Trillin, "Covering the Cops" (Feb 1986, profile of Edna Buchanan), in Killings, pp.284-5