Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/28

Normally, since I missed yesterday for lazy-on-vacation reasons, I'd just roll these books over to next week. But next week is an entirely different year, and I'm also trying to procrastinate slightly less these days.

So enjoy this unprecedented Tuesday edition of Reviewing the Mail!

This time out, I have two books that came in the mail, in radically different genres, and four graphic novels that I bought for myself so that The Wife could give them to me for Christmas. (It's not the most surprising way to get gifts, but it can't be beaten for receiving things you actually want.)

From the Mail:

Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor is a collection of "revenge fantasies and essays" by the title character/individual/writer. I think it's just a quirkier take on the standard "fiction writer's random nonfiction works" book, but it could, I suppose, be a themed series of very detailed murder plots against people he hates. (That would be out of character for a Canadian, I suppose. Probably isn't.) From a quick glance at the intro, it looks like these pieces originally appeared on Watts's blog over the past decade and a half or so. And now they're all in this book, which was published by Tachyon in November.

Real Pigeons Fight Crime by Andrew McDonald and Ben Wood is one of those pseudo-graphic-novel thingies -- lots of illustrations on each page, with dynamic art that has some sequential elements but isn't laid out as panels, and typeset text running around and between that art -- for younger readers that are so popular these days. It is, as you might guess, about talking pigeons, and I gather that they do fight crime. It's also the first in a series: Eat Danger and Nest Hard are promised as forthcoming. It's coming from Random House Books for Young Readers in January 7, and it looks like a hoot for a certain kind of younger reader (or maybe a no-longer-younger reader, I won't judge).

Pressies (No, the other kind of pressies!):

Maria M. by Gilbert Hernandez -- the full noir story, originally promised as two volumes but eventually (after the first volume was published, and I bought it, and it sat on my shelf for several years waiting for the end so I could read the whole thing) published as one book this past year. I think this is part of his "fictional movies from the world of Palomar" series, or maybe an even weirder variation on that: it may be the movie Killer made about Maria, or an alternate version of that movie without Killer. I dunno; I'll have to read it.

O Josephine! is the latest collection of comics stories by Jason, the Norwegian cartoonist who is nearly impossible to Google. It has four roughly album-length stories in its hundred and eighty pages, three of which seem to be his usual fiction and one the non-fictional story of a walk he took in Ireland (either a follow-up or warm-up to his book On the Camino).

How I Tried to Be a Good Person is a big fat graphic memoir by Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust, and so basically a sequel to Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, covering a polyamorous love triangle she was involved with some time ago -- the book seems to be vague about exactly when, but I'd guess late '80s or early '90s given that Last Day took in place in 1984, when she was 17.

And last is Glen Ganges in: The River at Night by Kevin Huizenga, which includes the title character's name in the title as if it were a Batman comic when it is in fact about as far from a Batman comic as it is possible to be. (And that is a good thing.) Huizenga is thoughtful and philosophical and grounded and deeply human, and this book has gotten great reviews -- I'm looking forward to it.

Musica, Dein Kannst Lieblich Kunst

No, I don't speak German. (My younger son does, kind of. At least he took it for five years in school.) But my high school Madrigal group -- did I ever mention I was in a madrigal group in high school? I wasn't very good, and am retroactively surprised that they kept me around -- did that song, and it's been stuck in my head ever since.

It emerges randomly for no good reason, and I can't even sing the thing because I 1) don't remember the German well enough b) can't pronounce the German even if I did know the right words, and III) I can't now sing even as well as I did in high school, which (as I noted above) was not that good to begin with.

For instance, right now, when I'm trying to introduce a Spotify playlist of some of my favorite songs of the past decade, instead I'm rambling about a german choral piece that has nothing to do with any of it. One might think I'm doing this deliberately.

One might even be right....

A lot of people do lists like this at the end of a year, but I don't really listen to enough new music in any one year to make a decent list. However, I saw that the estimable John Scalzi (of whom you may have heard) recently did one for the last decade.

And I thought: "Aha, that's a trick worth stealing." And so I did.

Since the calendar is turning over two digits instead of one in about a week, suddenly any list covering 10 years is just as good -- maybe better -- than one covering this current year. (And, frankly, it wouldn't be hard for anything to be better than this current year.) So here I am.

I'm shamelessly stealing Scalzi's shtick: only one song per performer, that being my favorite for the past decade (but standing in for a lot of other stuff, obviously), and even using Spotify as my widget of choice, since it's free. My list however, is longer than his, because I'm lazier: my initial list had 56 songs, and after a first cut I had exactly fifty, which was such a nice round number I stopped.

The widget seems to default to the order I put them in, which isn't definitive by any means. And I have no way of knowing if you will share any of my musical tastes: I go for either talky stuff or noisy instrumentals, across a few musical subgenres.

I hope you enjoy this; I was just reminded I wanted to do it by seeing webcomics genius John Allison do his list of forty albums for this year alone. And if you don't enjoy it...oh weell.

After the widget: three songs I would have added, but Spotify didn't have them.



The sadly missing:

Empty Space Orchestra, "Exit Strategy"

Yellow Ostrich, "'Til I Disappear" (the album version is longer, but this is the version I like better)


Harvey Danger, "The Show Must Not Go On" (their break-up song, released online something like a year after they actually broke up)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/14/19

I have a book to write about this week as well: a new SF novel.

Lost Helix is by Scott Coon, and I think it's his first novel. (The materials don't mention any earlier novels, and do mention multiple short fiction publications.) It's coming from Dancing Lemur Press in trade paperback, and will hit on June 2, 2020.

It sounds like general SF adventure: our hero is a young man named DJ, who grew up on an asteroid mining facility but isn't interested in any of the obvious life-paths on offer there. But he gets thrown into intrigue when he learns some things he wasn't supposed to, and is soon on the run from the relentless Agent Coreman. (DJ is also a musician, which looks like it could be important to the book -- he's not just some general slacker, but a specific guy with specific dreams.) This all sounds interplanetary rather than interstellar, but the description doesn't make it clear either way.

You will have to wait a bit for Lost Helix, I'm afraid, so if that sounds intriguing, set your calendar now.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/7/19

I aten't dead.

But this blog only exists in as much as I have something to say here, and I haven't had a lot of that lately. Work has been weird this year, in all sorts of ways, and that's disrupted my reading. And the outside world is even more of a dumpster fire in 2019 than it was before...and I don't want to go directly political here. So I've been quiet.

But I'm still here, and this blog will pick up when and if I have things to write about. If I start reading more, for example. Or if I get shiny new books.

As it happens, I have a shiny new book today: The Deep & Dark Blue, a middle-grade graphic novel by Niki Smith, Lambda-award-winning (well, as part of an anthology; does that count? maybe I should say "nominated" to be more strictly accurate) creator of Crossplay and other comics stories.

(I saw an early galley of the book back in the summer; that copy is still sitting unread on my shelf but will be replaced by the shiny new one in a moment...and I'd like to promise that the shiny new one will get read quickly, but...well, you know.)

This is an adventure story mixed with coming-out; twin tween nobles Hawke and Grayson are forced by a coup to flee and hide as Hanna and Grayce within the Communion of Blue, an all-female magical order whose powers manifest in weaving and other textile work. The coming-out part is that while Hawke seems to think of this as just a disguise, becoming Grayce is much more important, and central, to her. I expect it all ends up super-happy, since that's what middle-grade GNs do these days. (Woe is reserved for prose, and for a slightly older audience.)

The Deep and Dark Blue will be published in hardcover on January 7 by Little. Brown.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/18/19

Three books came in the mail last week -- all things I purchased -- and somehow I neglected to write about them last Sunday.  So here they are:

Very British Problems is the book extension of a multi-media project -- I think it was a Twitter feed first, in that very 21st century way, but there's TV and radio and probably tea-cozies and woolly jumpers and Very British package holidays as well by now. The book is written by Rob Temple, and it's deeply stereotyped, but it's by British people, so that's OK.I am not actually British in any normal sense, but I am emotionally quite British by nature, since northeastern WASPs are their first cousins. Anyway, the book is a collection of small embarrassing, self-effacing moments of the kind that are generally humorous.

Threesome is an old Lawrence Block novel, originally published as by Jill Emerson, and it's a sex book. Block wrote a lot of sex books starting in the late '50s and running through the early '70s, and his main professional activity the last few years seem to have been republishing them under his actual name. I'm a huge Block fan, and I have vague ideas about getting all of those books, since even his early semi-lousy books have interesting aspects. I'm definitely going to pick off a few of the ones that seems to be better-written and/or quirkier, like this one -- the story of a menage a trois told by the three participants alternately.

Last is By Night, Vol. 1, the first collection of a new series written by my favorite webcomicer, John Allison. Allison has been doing more floppy comics lately -- probably because those have a more dependable revenue stream, and who can blame him? -- but it's meant that I'm forgetting to keep up with his work, and that's annoying. (For example, shouldn't there be a fourth "Not on the Test Edition" of Giant Days by now? I intend to keep up with that series, but it become difficult if the publisher changes formats and plans randomly in the middle.) This is quite Allisonian, in that it's the story of two (probably headstrong and highly verbal) teen girls who get involved with a supernatural portal in what seems to be a normal small town, and at the same time much less Allisonian, since that small town is in South Dakota rather than the British Midlands.

14th Anniversary Post

I have an excessively tidy mind, but it manifests in pretty idiosyncratic ways.

For example, October 4th was the 14th anniversary of the blog, and on that date every year (except the fifth and tenth, which I missed because...I guess I'm just a normal neurotic human being who undercuts himself) I put up a long post looking back at the prior year.

Doing that post takes a while, so I try to put it into my drafts early, so I can work on it over a period of days, if not weeks.

This year, I did create a dummy post, at least a week early.

And never typed a word into it.

Until today, December 8th, a good two months late.

So this is not that anniversary post. It is, instead, a monument to the fact that apparently I couldn't just delete the empty draft post like a normal person, but instead had to type this.

See you next year, possibly.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

So, I've said this before, and I know it's weird about me: I will frequently read the memoirs or other miscellaneous nonfiction of a writer whose books I'm only vaguely familiar with.

The way this is supposed to work: you like a novelist, so you read all of the novels. Then, maybe, you move on to other things. The odds & sods collections of journalism, the memoirs, the travel puff pieces, and so on.

But I'm more likely to read one or two novels (in this case The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, six years ago), then buy a few other novels (making sure to get the ones in the same trade dress, because I'm also quirky that way), and meander along for a few years without reading any of those other novels until suddenly I pick up the nonfiction book and finish that.

My half-serious explanation is that I'm now a middle-aged man, and middle-aged men have a well-known and nigh-unstoppable tropism for non-fiction. It's just one of those things.

Anyway, that's why I read The Pigeon Tunnel, the 2016 memoirs of the man born David Cornwell and who has written a long series of literary spy thrillers as John Le Carre. It's a book primarily for people who have read those other books, obviously -- not least because it's by the man who spent his adult life writing those books. Cornwell/Le Carre was 85 when this book was published-- and is not dead as I type this; he has a new novel coming out before the end of the year -- but he's a public-school boy of the very old school, a former government employee, and a writer who has been burned by publicity many times. So this is a reticent book, an elliptical one, that has no overall structure or focus and which touches on Cornwell's childhood (the traditional wellspring of writers) hardly at all.

Instead, he has thirty-eight chapters of wildly variable lengths over the course of this book's roughly three hundred pages: some are short anecdotes while others, like the long chapter on his con-man father Ronnie, are full-fledged and well-formed essays. They range through his adult life almost randomly, and touch almost entirely on his professional life -- he does write about his parents (separately), but neither of his wives and nothing about his children. All of those pieces include only what Cornwell wants to tell. Even now, as an old man a generation after the Cold War ended and sixtyish years after he retired from government service, he's clear that he doesn't want to reveal any real secrets.

There are a lot of bits about real-life encounters and how those influenced or were incorporated into his novels: again, this will be most interesting to people who have actually read those novels. And those are mostly his novels of the '80s and '90s -- the Cold War books, the Smiley books in particular, the ones that may have come more out of his own experiences or knowledge, are the ones where he does not have anecdotes to tell us.

He does tell a few stories of his time in government service, though -- mostly escorting West German dignitaries through London in the years around 1960, acting as their translator to UK prime ministers or whorehouse madams. And he of course tells a few stories about the movies and TV shows made from his work: the usual stories of frantic activity that turns into nothing in the end, and some appreciations of Sir Alec Guinness.

I enjoyed reading The Pigeon Tunnel, but Cornwell is a reticent man at his core, and a reader should bring a lot more knowledge and experience to this book than I was able to in order to get the most out of it. It really is primarily for the Le Carre obsessed, I think.

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville

In 1933, a group of French Surrealists described various "irrational embellishments" of Paris, in their journal Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. Eighty years later, China Mieville decided to use it as the setting for a short novel.

That's reductive and probably not entirely true...but it's pretty close. Mieville was influenced by a lot more of Surrealism than just that one magazine issue, but it's clear that particular transformation was the seed of the book.

The Last Days of New Paris is a 2016 novella about a city transformed by a Surrealist-powered bomb: we see it mostly in 1950, through the eyes of Thibault, a young Surrealist/partisan, with shorter interspersed chapters of the 1941 events leading up to the blast. This Paris has been invaded three times: by the Nazis, who are still around (even, apparently, outside the city, where WWII seems to be still chugging along in 1950); by the Nazi's demonic allies (about whom we don't learn nearly as much as this reader would have liked); and by the manifestations ("manifs," in the words of the locals) of Surrealism called up by that bomb.

And, yes, the Nazi demons do rather seem to have migrated from a slightly different alternate-WWII book, though they are necessary for parts of the plot. Mieville is as usual not interested in simple dichotomies, so there's no sense of Surrealism vs. Hell here: both are bizarre eruptions that Parisians must deal with, both are problematic, neither are as bad as actual Nazis. (In this Mieville is absolutely correct.)

Mieville does not concentrate on the details of the city: at time, it felt like his characters were racing through nature (a wood, perhaps, or overgrown meadows) and not down the streets of a major city. Perhaps they are; that would be very Surrealist, I suppose. But he very much does not have them ducking into and out of buildings, or climbing staircases to get a better view, or traipsing across rooftops, or using any of the other things one traditionally associates with cities. They are instead running through open ground, as if the vast majority of Paris has been leveled -- which is possible, I suppose, but makes it not particularly Paris.

He does have a lot of Surrealist imagery brought to awful life in his city, and there are more than twenty pages of endnotes (after a book barely 170 pages) to explain where they all came from and to bask in the glow of how clever he is.

Thibault's group, the Main a plume, claims to be both Surrealist and an anti-Nazi partisan force, but they are pretty much all dead by the time Last Days begins, and the various partisan groups in Paris come across more as scattered street gangs or tribes, the violence-oriented sector of the few people left alive in New Paris. (Frankly, I was a little surprised anyone could be alive after nine years in a city both entirely cordoned off from the outside world and overrun by Nazi soldiers, demons, and freakish Surrealist creations. There's no sign any of these people are growing food, for one thing.)

So Thibault runs around, to not much effect, and sees a lot of things that Mieville carefully annotates in the backmatter. He soon runs into Sam, a female American photographer who is obviously more than the disaster tourist she seems to be, though she's not the kind of more Thibault thinks she is. They learn some deep secrets of their world, gather a manif of their own -- it follows Thibault due to a leash made by Nazi manif-control science -- and, in the end, save the world, more or less.

The plot is hurried and consists mostly of running around for what never seems like adequate reasons. The world is potentially big and interesting, but Mieville presents it in staccato images, as if he's trying to fit all of his favorite Surrealist ideas into the shortest possible number of pages. The characters are few to begin with, and even the major ones are cyphers: Thibault is an Everyman as much as he's anything, and he's not much of that.

This is a thin book, even thinner than it looks at first, and the very definition of self-indulgent. It will be of primary interest to huge fans of Mieville or Surrealism, or (preferably) both.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

The really impressive creators are the ones who seem to be able to do anything -- who jump from genre to genre semi-randomly, going wherever their latest ideas take them.

My go-to example of that for the last couple of decades has been Neil Gaiman, whose first six book-sized objects were each honestly described as his first something. But I'm thinking that I might be able to freshen up that example if Tillie Walden continues the way she's been going.

Walden is young -- still on the uphill side of her twenties -- and burst into wide notice with her 2017 memoir in comics form, Spinning. Before that, she did a few shorter books, which I haven't seen yet. (I believe they're mostly in the vein of realistic fiction, but I'm starting to think that belief underestimates Walden.) Spinning was, more or less, the story of Walden's teen years: her life in competitive figure skating, her coming out, her realizing who she wanted to be. Her big follow-up to Spinning is this book: On a Sunbeam.

Now, if you come into the publishing world through the memoir door, there's a certain pressure and expectation to do that again the next time. Or, at least, to tell a fictional story about someone who could be you, in a world like the ones you know well.

Walden was having none of that.

On a Sunbeam is a soft-SF story, set in a wide universe sometime in the medium future, with weird technology that feels semi-biological and which Walden presents as thoroughly lived in. She never stoops to an infodump; this universe exists and the people in it do, too -- she may have figured out the details in her head (or maybe not; it's not necessary), but there's no look-at-how-clever-I-was-to-make-all-of-this-up gloating. She just has a story to tell, about a young woman named Mia who maybe has a little problem with impulse control.

We first see Mia at about nineteen. She's just joined the crew of a ship -- whose name we don't learn for a long time, so I won't mention it here -- run by a small team that rehabilitate ruined buildings on assignment. (I don't want to say that On a Sunbeam's world doesn't make sense, because that's not the right way to put it. It does feel like we're in a very odd, quirky corner of that world, though -- the cultural equivalent of something like artisinal bread-making or microbrewing, a haven for oddballs and weirdos.) She's just out of school, and almost equal parts quietly confused and excitedly racing.

But we also see a younger Mia, about five years before,when she was still at her fancy private school Cleary's. (The school may fly around space on its own: this isn't entirely clear.) She was not a terribly good student, and she was not a terribly diligent student, but she did OK. She desperately wanted to play Lux, the weirdo sport that involves racing small fish-shaped flying spaceships through convoluted tunnels in the dark, and she was even more impulsive than she would be at nineteen, but the Cleary's plot -- despite at first seeming that way -- isn't the story of how she just barely avoided being expelled or worse.

No, it's the story of her first love: Grace, who showed up unexpectedly the middle of that year, quiet and self-contained and sure she was going to become a writer.

The two stories do intersect, and combine, before the end, as they must: that's how a book set in two time-periods works (particularly if they're so close in time as this one). Grace is from a particularly strange and dangerous part of this universe, and Mia's new crew has to go to that place before On a Sunbeam is over.

Walden does subvert the expected teen-love-conquers-all tropes looming over it all: more than once, actually. Mia and Grace are nothing like Romeo and Juliet, and nobody's going to die for love if any of the characters can help it.

They might die for other reasons: the planet called The Staircase can be pretty deadly.

There's one further quirky thing about this universe -- well, only quirky if you're not familiar with a long strand of SF, from Sheri Tepper on back through Joanna Russ all the way to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They're all women. [1] This is not mentioned or remarked on, the same way they never point out that they eat food to stay alive or that clothes are worn on the outside of the body. It's just the way this society is: men do not exist.

(I'll forgive Walden for erasing my entire gender, since it was in service of the story. As long as erasing huge swaths of humanity doesn't become a habit.)

On a Sunbeam has a lovely loose line, moody colors, an often over-enthusiastic young cast, a big weird universe to wander around, and a lovely (and completely non cloying) first love story to recommend it. So I do. And I expect the next Tillie Walden book will be something else both completely different and deeply familiar: some other young woman finding her way in a complex, messy world.


[1] One character, Elliott, is called non-binary, and "uses they/them pronouns". Both of those things seem entirely the wrong terms for this fictional world, frankly, and show a failure of Walden to think through what she's created. You can't be non-binary if everyone else is unitary.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/28/19

This time out, I have books in two categories: three newly-published books, and two that I paid for myself but just came in the mail.

New Books

I'll lead with the quirkiest thing, since that's how I roll: Mingus Fingers by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, coming from Fairwood Press in November. It's a short, small-format book -- probably a novellette -- and the speculative element seems to be,um, unique. It's about Charles Mingus, the jazz legend, who our narrator sees transform into a giraffe while playing...and Mingus thinks a young musician may be just as gifted. There's also, according to the back cover, something about boxing in it as well.

Meet Me in the Future is a story collection from Kameron Hurley, with sixteen stories originally published between 2006 and 2018. (Mostly 2015-2017, though, when she seems to have had a burst of short fiction.) It's from Tachyon, and I have a finished book in my hands, so I believe it is published already.

Also from Tachyon, coming in November, is a new anthology: The New Voices of Science Fiction, edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman. It reprints twenty stories by newer writers originally published over the past five years -- Rebecca Roanhorse, E. Lily Yu, Sarah Pinsker, Alice Sola Kim, and over a dozen more. It's the kind of book I didn't realize I needed until I saw it, but I hope I can get to it soon: I've been feeling disconnected from SF for a while, and thinking there's some cool new things going on over there that I should dig into.

Bought and Paid For

I was ordering something else from that hegemonic online retailer -- a widget for my home-office computer set-up, since I just got a new work laptop, and so something I needed ASAP -- and, as one does, I added a couple of things to the order. The one that's already arrived is Bad Machinery Vol. 8: The Case of the Modern Men by John Allison, the last of the major "cases" from that great webcomic to be reprinted in book form and the first one (I think) to only appear in the new smaller "pocket" format. (I liked the big format, myself, but it is more expensive, a tad unwieldy to read, and sticks out from the shelf -- so this is a change I can live with, though I reserve the right to grumble that my books don't match.) I've said it before, but John Allison is awesomely wonderful and you all should read lots of Bad Machinery.

Last for this week is The Wallace Mystery, the latest in Rick Geary's series of Kickstarted books of historical murders. (The longer books come out from NBM, these days under the "Library of XXth Century Murder" series title, and the self-published books are a bit shorter, use typeset captions and only a couple of large panels to the page, with a series title of "Little Murder Library.") You probably can't buy this right now, but here are links to the completed Kickstarter campaign and to Geary's general webstore, where it may turn up some day.

Service With a Smile by P.G. Wodehouse

I will never write a Wodehousian novel: I know that. But the one in my head that I would write, if I were capable, would be the Unified Field Theory Wodehouse book, in which Psmith's plots collide with Jeeves's, with Uncle Fred kibitzing on one side and probably Mr. Mulliner narrating large chunks of the story.

Wodehouse himself never did that, largely because even his normal books were over-complicated and fussy, requiring a lot of time and attention to get all of the silly plot details exactly right, so that everything felt plausible in Wodehouse's least plausible (and most sunny) of all possible worlds. But it's a beautiful dream, and I wish somebody was capable of doing it at the level of the Wodehouse of about 1940, because that would be a kick-ass book.

I was reminded of that while reading Service With a Smile, because this is a crossover book in a smaller way: it brings Uncle Fred (aka the Earl of Ickenham) to Blandings, to spread sweetness and light there in his own way. This is fairly late Wodehouse (1961), so it ends up being an Uncle Fred book that takes place at Blandings -- Lord Emsworth is basically a minor character, and his brother Galahad entirely absent -- rather than the equally-blended souffle of my dreams.

As always, the joys of Wodehouse are in his books' frivolity and lightness: the worst thing that can happen in a Wodehouse novel is that two young people will not marry the people they love...well, that they love deeply and passionately, but intermittently, since they're always breaking engagements at the drop of a hat (and forming multiple engagements as well, as in this book). In this case, it's primarily Uncle Fred's young friend Bill Bailey, a poor vicar engaged to the daughter of an Wall Street tycoon -- she's is at Blandings under the tutelage of Emsworth's formidable sister Lady Constance, who of course does not approve of the match. Uncle Fred and Bill of course are at Blandings themselves, the latter, inevitably, under an alias.

There is also, as there must be, a plot to steal the famous pig The Empress of Blandings, led by the unpleasant Duke of Dunstable, also currently a guest at Blandings, and aided by Emsworth's current horrible secretary, Lavender Briggss, who I am sorry to say has a very distinctive speech pattern that Wodehouse may have meant to indicate a particular social or physical origin. (This is less than clear to an American sixty years later, frankly.)

The plots -- there are a few minor ones I've neglected to mention, as well -- circle each other in that inimitable Wodehouse fashion, as the marriage possibilities and the career-advancement possibilities and the making-money-by-stealing-a-pig possibilities all get tangled up in each other until it seems that there's no way for sweetness and light to win out in the end.

But of course it does: this is Wodehouse after all, and Uncle Fred's plots do find happiness for all of the characters who deserve it (and possibly even one or two the reader would not think deserve it).

This is a late Wodehouse novel, from two of his lesser-known series: if you've never read him before, don't start here. My general advice has been to begin with Joy in the Morning, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, or Leave It To Psmith, but you could also grab any random Jeeves book from before 1960. If you haven't tried Wodehouse, and like silliness, you should try at least one, once.

Quote of the Week: Secret Shocks

Everything's been electric lately. Lately everything I touch gives off an electric shock: doorknobs, the railings of stairs, the water from the faucet, the car when I get out. I put my finger to the object, raise it to my lips: electricity. I slap things first to ground myself. I assault the metal around me on a constant basis, before it can strike me back, The keys on my ring hum with voltage; I must grab them with my teeth clenched, before dropping them in my pocket where they might ignite a naked nerve. My day's filled with hitting things. Only at night, on a mattress that  holds no current, do I confront a different electricity altogether.

 - Steve Erickson, Leap Year, p.10

Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson

It's easy to pretend to be more radical, more transgressive than everyone else: you just have to say that you are. Living up to it is another thing.

Chuck Thompson's 2007 memoir/collection of travel essays Smile When You're Lying positions him as the one truth-speaker among travel writers. The one who doesn't use superlatives like candy (except when he does, later in the book, describing the people of each place he likes as the best in the world at something he particularly respects). The one who will tell the truth about why people go to places like Thailand (for sex; he never mentions this again after bringing it up in his fiery intro and is remarkably quiet about drugs as well). The one who is fearless and unafraid to burn bridges (except for the very long list of editors he effusively thanks at the end).

That all would be fine: we expect a little showmanship from our writers, particularly those (like travel writers) who are always aiming for the new and the hot.

But I unfortunately read this book, which presents itself as an expose about how travel magazines are a big profitable business that stifle contrarian views in favor of relentless puffery [1], more than a decade after Thompson wrote it. The magazine market of 2019 is not what it was in 2006 when Thompson wrote this book -- hell, no business in the world is what it was in 2006, purely because of 2006, but magazines, and print periodicals in general, were already on a downward trend due to the rise of the Internet and a massive advertising transition there.

Thompson shows no sign of seeing that his entire world was about to change: he presents a monolithic, massively profitable entity when we all know it was nothing of the sort. (And I think that transition hit Thompson as well: he seems to have spent much of the last decade transitioning into TV/Internet himself, as executive producer of CNN Travel and editorial director of CNNGo.com.)

So he wasn't prescient: how many of us were?

Smile When You're Lying is still fun, a loose assemblage of stories vaguely organized around travel and Thompson's life, with no actual structure (geographical, historical, thematic) to be discerned. It is divided into three sections by airline seat -- Aisle, Middle, and Window -- but my high-powered instruments were not able to detect the actual differences between them.

Thompson, as one might guess once one realizes he has spent most of his career as a reasonably connected travel editor/producer himself, is not actually as radical in practice as he is in rhetoric. (Again: how many of us are?) Smile When You're Lying has a reasonable hook, which Thompson uses to hang some loosely-related material, and he's pretty entertaining along the way. I suspect that if he'd instead written a more traditional "how I grew up and got out" memoir -- he's from Juneau, and had an interesting background from the glimpses he gives here -- it would have been more coherent and focused, but it probably also would have been more personal, and Thompson would rather be bold than personal.

Instead, each of the eleven chapters is supposedly about something but ends up pulling together a bunch of stories from a particular time and place in his life -- again, generally related to his travel-writing career, but taking that very broadly to start with an ill-fated cross-country car trip when he was about eighteen and including a couple of years spent teaching English in rural Japan. It does start out more fire-breathing than it ends, with digs at various periodicals and book lines (that this reader started to think wouldn't hire him, or where he has personal conflicts with major editors), before it settles down into more stories about stuff he did, or, more accurately, stuff that happened while he was there to see it. (He's a writer: they're much more likely to hang back and observe.)

It's entertaining and rabble-rousing, and contains possibly a few facts that might be useful to the reader later on. Just don't spent any time buying into his introductory screed: it doesn't go anywhere, in this book or in real life.


[1] It's not actually that: it's a loose baggy collection of stories from Thompson's life, most of which happened during his career as a travel writer and all of which happened somewhere other than his house. Thus it is a travel book.

Leap Year by Steve Erickson

I doubt anyone has noticed this -- or cares -- but I've been using Wednesdays this year for reviews of SF/F books, or of fantastika more generally. So far it's worked out, though I'm not tailoring my reading to fill specific slots, and I obviously had a lot of dead air earlier this year.

Today, though, I have a book with possibly the oddest set of tags in the history of this blog. Today I'm here to write about Steve Erickson's 1989 supposedly non-fiction book Leap Year, the story of the previous year's presidential election (Dukakis vs. Bush I, though we had no idea there'd be a II at that point), narrated by Erickson, who traveled the country in the occasional company of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress. [1]

Erickson uses Hemings as a lens on the corrosive effect of race and slavery on the USA, but that's only one thread of a very discursive, circling book. Erickson spends very little time actually with the candidates or out on the trail talking to "regular Americans" in the usual campaign-lit way. (He fails to even get press credentials for the Republican Convention, and so misses that entirely.) Leap Year is instead a deep look inside the head of one man, conflicted about his country, as he travels around that country. Oh, and pursued by a revenge-driven Al Gore, in case you think it couldn't get any weirder.

It has no chapters. Its paragraphs sometimes run for pages; its sentences almost that long. The book itself isn't long -- only 192 pages -- but every page is hard-fought, full of depths Erickson had to dig out with pick and shovel in the mine of his idea of America. Erickson is wrestling with himself and his country the whole time, and Leap Year contains some of his best thoughts and writing of his career. It doesn't have much of shape, unfortunately: the election itself turned out to be a snoozer, bland primaries leading to the obvious candidates nominated on both sides, and then Dukakis utterly failing to come across as a plausible President or provide a single compelling reason to vote for him. So the external conflicts Erickson probably was counting on in his book pitch fizzled out, leaving him alone in the dark night of Reaganite America, full of racist dog whistles and the coming apotheosis of the Southern Strategy.

Leap Year is the book of that moment in time, and that's why Hemings is in it. You can say that every great country has a thousand weirdly specific, quirky things that can only be explained by one, big, central fact that everyone pretends is dead and buried -- for the UK, it's the class system, for the US, it's slavery. Erickson never lays out that theory explicitly in Leap Year, but its spirit is behind every word: remember that 1988 was also the year of Jesse Jackson's greatest prominence in Democratic presidential politics, the year he came as close as he ever could to being the nominee.

Erickson is at his most prescient when he's talking fantastically about the current day, so Leap Year still reads like a bolt of electricity now, after Obama and during a Republican administration that has taken all of the lessons of Reagan, coarsened them and pushed them past any logical limits, and has given up entirely on even the idea of truth.

I doubt many people will read Leap Year for the coming presidential election year. They should.


[1] "Mistress" makes it sound like she had a choice in the matter: in Erickson's telling, she did. What she thought about that choice, and what that choice meant for her and for all America, are important in the book.

This is also a decent place to point out that Hemings was three-quarters European, the generation-younger half-sister of Jefferson's wife, who came into Jefferson's household as an infant with that marriage and who he apparently began sleeping with in Paris, when she was fifteen. Erikson's male main characters are always flawed men who fail disastrously at the things they think are most important: Jefferson fits that mold perfectly, horribly.

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks

P.G. Wodehouse died in 1975, after writing only fourteen Jeeves and Wooster novels among his roughly hundred books during a seventy-plus year career as a working writer. It was difficult for his estate to claim then that there wasn't enough Wodehouse, so they busied themselves with licensing the existing books to publishers around the world, commissioning a quite good TV series in the early '90s, and other activities.

But time marches on, and the bottomless gullet of book publishing is always hungry for new works. And so, eventually, the Wodehouse estate, for whatever reasons we may want to attribute to them, decided that, maybe, just maybe, there weren't quite enough Jeeves and Wooster books after all.

Maybe they had a beauty parade of would-be Wodehouses, maybe they quietly asked a few well-connected agents to recommend authors who might be interested, maybe they just threw darts at a Sunday Times bestseller list. In any case, Sebastian Faulks was anointed as the Man with the Plan. (One might surmise that his previous sharecropping work, the James Bond novel Devil May Care, somehow figured into the decision.)

Again, we don't know how many drafts he wrote, how picky the Wodehouse estate was, or any of the other really juicy behind-the-scenes details. But, in 2013, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells was published, a full 38 years after Wodehouse's final novel, the minor Jeeves and Wooster book Aunts Aren't Gentlemen.

Faulks is a "real" novelist in a way Wodehouse wasn't, which has its pluses and minuses. Faulks seems to want to have characters that grow and change, and that are actually living in a specific point in time -- those are all things that Wodehouse studiously avoided, and one might consider that, as it were, an important gap in the literature that creates the overall Wodehouse gestalt. On the other hand, Faulks is also serious enough to write a deeply Wodehousian book, full of impostors at country homes, sundered loves, quotes from improving books from Jeeves, young people engaged to the wrong other young people, and the usual tangle of would-be marriages and unhappy guardians to be all put right in the end.

Wedding Bells is Wodehousian without ever quite turning into a Wodehouse novel: Bertie has emotional depths, which I found deeply distracting, and Faulks doesn't quite manage the Wodehousian two-step of telling the book from Bertie's point of view while still showing how confused and dim he actually is. His prose, also, is Wodehouse-esque without trying to closely ape the same style: this is probably a good thing.

All in all, Wedding Bells feels like an alternate-world Jeeves novel, one written in a universe where there is a consistent Wodehouse shared world, where each book can be placed at a moment in time (likely all in the interwar period), and where major characters change from book to book. That's not the world we live in -- and I for one am very happy I don't have to contemplate the book in which the Empress of Blandings has gotten too old and must be put down -- but it was pleasant to visit for the space of one book.

But Wedding Bells, like most posthumous sharecropped books, is at best a thin replica of something distinctive. What it most does is remind us of how inimitable Wodehouse was, and send us back to reading his real books. (And, come to think of it, that's probably precisely what his estate wanted. Tricky fellows!)