Book Review: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

I've had sitting on my shelf for a couple years now an unread copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Much more recently, when Gentlemen of the Road caught my eye as another prospect, I was sold the minute I opened to the dedication. It said "To Michael Moorcock." Moorcock's a favorite author of mine since my high school days.

In an echo of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, Michael Chabon casts two very different sword-swinging wise-crackers. Both are Jews from disparate backgrounds. Amram is a hulking African who wields a Varangian axe and a command of languages far and wide (he's served the emperor of Byzantium). His counterpart is Zelikman, a lanky Frank physician with a gloomly disposition. Both are wildly clever and ably skilled. Chabon makes both endearing, but Zelikman usually steals the scenes with his obnoxious hat and anti-hero antics.

Chabon writes one hell of an adventure tale. Each chapter is a fun twist and a healthy dose of cliff-hanging. The tale is almost effortless in its tidyness, yet somehow manages not to be predictable. After swindling some townsfolk, the pair get caught up escorting a prince who is not everything he appears to be, and yet is more. By the end of the  tale, they've jaunted about the foothills of the Caucasus, allied themselves with elephants against Rus invaders, fought -- and then recruited -- Muslim knights, and ushered in a coup.

The banter is fun, the action exciting, and Chabon sneaks beneath it all some commentary on Jewishness (and Islam) quite relevant to today. His prose in the book is baroque and obscure, deliberately so. It's a nod, I think, to the idiosyncracies of many admirable pulp adventure writers. It's at once a joke and tribute, and it also manages to keep the text's voice lively and smart. It works.

Wonderfully, the book includes a brief afterword cum apologia by Chabon explaining his forays into the lands of adventure writing. He more famously treads in, as he calls it, late-century naturalism a la Wonder Boys. He also explains his only slightly tongue-in-cheek working title for the book, "Jews with Swords." The afterword is well worth a read for anyone on either side of that absurd divide between serious fiction and everything else.

Gentlemen of the Road: A-

Best writing books

If you're looking for books on writing, look no further than the one-two punch of The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner and What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. Oh, and don't let that subtitle fool you on Gardner's. It's the best text there is for any writer. Thing beginning writer maybe, rather than young writer.

Captain Molly McScowl and Her Birthday Adventure

This week, I'm the Mystery Reader at my daughter's 3rd grade class. So, I decided to write a story to read. It's a children's story about a sassy girl pirate. It may be a touch too immature for the sassy 3rd grader I know. She'll get over it.

Captain Molly McScowl and Her Birthday Adventure
By Matt Snyder

Not too far away, across the seas there was a fearsome scourge of a pirate named Molly McScowl. She sailed the pirate ship Terrible under the black flag of the skull and bones. She captained a crew of thirty-three pirate boys. She struck fear into the hearts of good ship captains across the southern seas. And most importantly of all, Molly McScowl was in the third grade.

Book Review: The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

I discovered Arturo Pérez-Reverte earlier this year with his endearing Spanish adventure novel, Captain Alatriste. My discovery started a chain that ended most recently with The Club Dumas. I now gather that Pérez-Reverte is a wildly successful author in Spain and elsewhere, and more recently finding success in the U.S. Of course, American editions are translations of his work in Spanish. I have no idea how capable they are as translations, but I do enjoy his books so far.

The Club Dumas is a mystery thriller with shades of the noir detective. In this case, protagonist Lucas Corso is a book detective. He's a mercenary hired by rich -- and usually corrupt -- book collectors to buy, sell, trade and find rare books. I found Corso fascinating. (My wife, who read the book with me, found him deplorable. Ce la guerre!) He's a weasel of a man, exceptionally clever, and lonely. He occupies his time drinking gin and romanticizing his Napoleonic ancestor. Oh yes, and books -- very expensive, very rare books.

The story begins with a book collector's suspicious suicide. Corso gets hired to verify the dead man's possession – a rare manuscript written by Alexandre Dumas. It's a chapter from The Three Musketeers. Subsequently, he's hired by an obsessive collector of the occult to discover which of three extant editions of The Book of Nine Doors is a forgery.

Thus begins a twin strand of narrative where Corso races to find eccentric book collectors and examine their occult tomes while he's pursued by a modern-day Milady and Rochefort (Dumas' famous villains) as a strange conspiracy re-enacts The Three Musketeers with him at the center. The eccentrics wind up dead, and Corso demonstrates his cleverness.

Along the way he finds the girl. The alluring woman gives Corso fictional names and careless excuses. She's slightly infuriating to read. Corso asks her questions I wanted to know, and she's just aloof. There are many hints that she's supernatural – a guardian angel maybe, or even the Devil. Through her shining, green-eyed seduction we learn that Corso once loved and lost. It explains his emptiness and callousness. And, in the end, explains why the green-eyed girl is so fond of him. She is, it turns out, rather diabolical.

Throughout the book, Corso works to unravel the pictorial mystery within The Book of Nine Doors. The book contains nine engravings, and the novel actually shows the images. This teases out one of the most captivating mysteries of the book. I desperately wanted Corso to unravel this occult puzzle. And, he does. But, the result is disappointing.

Pérez-Reverte gives us a lesson in narrative; I'm still not sure I needed it. At times, the characters actually imagine that their absurd situations are so dreadful that perhaps they're merely fictional characters in a book. Of course, they are. The author's teasing. This itself, I don't mind. He's not the first to dabble in post-modernism. But, Pérez-Reverte has another, grander trick up his sleeve. To spoil it for readers, his trick is a lesson in how we perceive narrative. Those twin strands of narrative are ruses. They're not intertwined. Corso – and therefore readers like me – have impressed upon these twin strands interconnectivity.

And what is the result? Corso, for all his cleverness, learns that he's lost his soul long ago. He's Faustian. And, in the end, he knows it. He's smitten with the girl, and she's pulling the strings behind it all, wrecking selfish interests for her own amusement. Let's just say the devil's in the details.

Like I said, I'm not sure I needed the lesson in constructing narrative. Fortunately, I the lesson entertained the hell out of me. It had all the wonderful trappings of that Umberto Eco style occult mystery (Eco himself actually has a cameo in the story!) in a tidy detective fiction package. It's a good read with some frayed ends.

The Club Dumas: B-

Intrepid Media

I joined up with Intrepid Media -- a long-standing independent writers and community site. My co-worker, Tracey Kelley, is an active member, and she introduced me. I just posted my first column there, a well-meaning rant about these crazy kids today: Generation Y not.

Book Review: On Writing by Stephen King

No doubt like every other aspiring wordsmith, I read Stephen King's On Writing. I've never been much of a King reader -- just a few short stories and The Gunslinger. Still, I appreciate his work and success.

His memoirs on writing amused me. They might even have inspired. It's not much of a book to review (Oh hell, ok: B+). But, it is full of great lines. Here are some of the best:

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializingm, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

You go on the third level, of course, and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn't you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don't build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like -- whole mansions, if you have the energy.

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well.

Book Review: Private Wars by Greg Rucka

Last time I covered A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka, an espionage thriller with a solid graphic novel pedigree from Rucka's Queen & Country.

I also tore through Private Wars, the next novel in the Tara Chace series.

Here, Tara Chace is out of the service with a baby. This is serious business given the thriller ending of the previous book. Meanwhile, Paul Crocker, her chain-smoking, hard ass boss deals with bureaucratic hell. His own boss is out to get him, and Tara's replacement sends an operation into chaos. These first several chapters make for the most interesting reading in this more uneven book. In particular, Crocker's at his most compelling here as Crocker plays politics and juggles his own home life some. He tends to be the best character in the series.

The rest of the thriller is set in Uzbekistan, where a dying dictator's daughter and son squabble over who will assume control of the country. The daughter is a Machiavellian nymphomaniac whose lover is a secret police sadist. Turns out, this guy's the real villain. So, the story pits Chace against him as she tries to smuggle the brother out of the country and maybe figure out where some rocket launchers are along the way.

The story is about Tara's comeback to special operations and Paul Crocker's desperation to avoid a lousy demotion. Again, Rucka is willing to do awful things to his protagonist. The effect is a build-up to Tara's torture and near rape at the hands of the secret police antagonist. It's tense, but it's a no-brainer figure out Rucka won't go that far. No rape is imminent, and her rescue is minutes away.

This willingness to torture Tara (figuratively and literally) is what makes Rucka's writing so great. Here, it almost works as well as the previous novel. But, not quite. The plot becomes too uneven, particularly at the fast-forward moment following Tara's rescue. Rucka actually interrupts the narrative chapters with a psychological profile about Chace, who has post-traumatic stress disorder (who wouldn't!) and a bloody obvious need for revenge. While a bit of interesting verisimilitude, the suspense suffers.

Of course, Tara enacts her revenge, and regains her hard edge as Britain's finest "Minder" (Rucka's slang for special agent). Best of all, she sneaks in one surprise decision at the close of the story that turns out to be the clearest sign that Tara Chace really is back, motherhood and all.

Private Wars: B-

Iowa, the land where they let the children cry

The Internet is changing Des Moines, and it's about time. I've started using Twitter in the past few weeks. It took me a while to appreciate it beyond some freakish obsessive compulsion to share what we're all having for lunch. It turns out, it's a very interesting peep hole into a growing scene of digerati in Des Moines.

I now follow a bunch of strangers who are really excited about Internet technology and social media. And, that alone is pretty interesting to me. It's part of my profession, and how I spend far too much leisure time. But, along the way, I get glimpses of far more interesting things. What people are like. What they're doing. What they're passionate about.

None of that's particularly new. What's new is that they're right here in flyover country trying to get together with like-minded souls to make the most of their home town. I find it hopeful. Even a little inspiring to get discover some new things for myself.

Meet Tara Chace

Several months ago, I was flipping channels and watched coverage of a comic book convention on the G4 channel. One of the reporters shared her favorite pick of the convention with the show hosts in the studio. It was something called Queen & Country, a  hard-boiled modern espionage comic featuring female protagonist, Tara Chace.

The very brief review intrigued me.  I actually managed to remember the name of the book. It took me several weeks, but I tracked down Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition volume 1 at my local comic store. I was hooked.

I found volume 2 later on, and read it with the same enthusiasm. Tense writing, tough issues, modern relevance, and a complicated woman hero that was more interesting to read about than just the lady James Bond I first figured her to be. I still await volume 3. But, in the mean time, I caught on that author Greg Rucka penned two Queen & Country novels as well. I chewed through that 1,000 or so pages faster than any reading I've done in a while.

A Gentleman's Game is the first novel, which squeezes in somewhere between other mission "arcs" in the comic book volumes. It's easily the best Tara Chace story I've read (I later caught on that Rucka is more novelist than graphic novelist; fortunately he's no slouch either way). It's a story revolving around Tara Chace's need to feel useful, perhaps seek some revenge on Islamic fundamentalist terrorists active in the UK and beyond. And, it also has Chace chasing after a genuine love interest in her former colleague.

Rucka does an admirable job shifting perspective among Chace, her hard ass boss Paul Crocker, and an English born Muslim terrorist antagonist. Rucka's not shy about putting his protagonists in ugly territory, trusting that the reader will stick around. similarly, his work at making a messy character in the terrorist both utterly disgusting and fascinating. He manages to make a fanatic -- and the terrorist truly is that -- interesting. We get the inside voice on the terrorist's resolve, but we're not foolish enough to buy his madness and see it for the manipulative evil that he performs.

The book's a thriller, and fills that role well. While I saw the dramatic ending coming in those final chapters, the pacing and excitement throughout makes for a great read with enough carefully considered real-world relevance to avoid the escapism route.

A Gentleman's Game: A

Up next, Private Wars, the second Tara Chace novel, and a bit more about the woman character.

Fear and far

Over a month ago, my wife and I visited Colorado. We went to Ft. Collins and went rafting on the Cache le Poudre, a beautiful mountain river that turns out to be a lot of fun in a raft and wetsuit! Ft. Collins is a cozy little ag college town, and we had a fine time.

Then it was off to Denver to see my sister-in-law. She and her husband have lived in Aurora for a couple years now. We shopped and ate and saw a ball game. A wonderful  trip all around.

The whole thing had a particular purpose, though. We went to see Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at Red Rocks. The concert didn't disappoint. Krauss' voice is incredible live. Plant was infecting everyone with his grooving enthusiasm. And Red Rocks. It is the most spectacular venue in America. Breath taking. You could tell the performers were more excited to see this place than the audience was!

Now, all of that was great. I really hoped that would be my impression. But, they snuck one in on me, too. Plant and Krauss teamed up with T Bone Burnett. He's a legendary producer and a performer in his own right. They let him play a couple songs with just the band. The guy looked like an outlaw undertaker. He wore a long black coat, which just made his tall frame look leaner and meaner.

I had never heard his music before. It was good. Probably still not my style, but I enjoyed it. But, he played a song that just knocked me out. It's called The Primitives. I had to go look it up later; the studio version is just as stirring. The chorus makes me smile and damn near frown at the same time:

Primitives dress in feathers and masks
To scare away their enemies
The frightening thing is not dying
The frightening thing is not living
Scientists guess which is worse we will ask
The medicine or the disease
The frightening thing is not dying
The frightening thing is not living

I'll drink to that.

Memorial Daze

It's Memorial Day, and I finally remembered to actually continue with Riverwords.

I haven't posted in some time. Time has a way of knocking a fellow around. I managed to read a few things in the meanwhile, and endure some ups and downs in life. I've been fighting a minor medical malady that doesn't seem so minor sometimes. And, stress piles on among a blast of joys. Oh! And graduate school sneaks in there, too. I'm pursuing my MBA part-time, which started in Janurary.

Anyway, since I last posted, I've only managed to read about one book from my reading list from last year. But, I did manage to read a couple other books, too.

I finished White Noise a few months ago, but never posted my review. (I did bother to post a grade of C+ on the reading list entry.)

Of course, the problem with collecting my thoughts on a book I finished a few months ago is that they're as fleeting as a dream now. The book is clever. Delillo's nothing if not clever. The protagonist's friends and family suffer all manner pop-culture neuroses, the most obvious of which is the mysterious chemical explosion that erupts over their town.

The post-nearly-apocalypse for the family becomes a tense affair between the protagonist and his wife (among which are nestled bizarre hypochondriac interludes involving mainly his children), and I think I started to suffer my own neurosis because I wanted the characters to stop talking like clever Don Delillo and start acting like smart people who are frustrated and unhappy.

When I finished the book, I tried to describe it to someone like this. "Well, it's entertaining and funny, I guess. But, I just wanted the characters to stop talking like a writer and start talking like people."

Delillo has something to say here, and I think there are times I agree with his black humor commentary on modern existence, consumerism, and family. I even giggle a little. But, whether or not his quirky academic protagonist and quirkier (if possible) friends and family have a point, I just can't bring myself to care about their plight. Or, thus, ours. And, considering the climactic love-affair-gone-attempted-murder, I think I should. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to smack them around a little bit for being fools.

White Noise: C+

It could be worse. I still think Delillo's a highly admirable writer. I can't say that of Paul Coelho. The wife and I decided that we needed a hobby together. So, we thought reading a book together to talk it over would be a good way to go. We toured Borders and settled on The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I had suspicions then that this was a thinly disguised self-help book, which I don't see as a benefit.

Turns out I was right. I caught on pretty quickly. Coelho’s tale is a well-meaning fable of a Spanish shepherd boy who learns his Personal Legend (capital letters and all) is to seek out treasure buried near the Pyramids. So, he goes out to seek his Personal Legend and travels across Gibraltar and through the Sahara.

I don’t mind the tale. Oh, it’s contrived, certainly. But, the short little narrative is reasonably entertaining with it's adventurous romp. The boy encounters some personal calamity, and waivers on whether to continue his Personal Legend. He meets others variously failing and succeeding on their own Personal Legend. He meets a terribly uninteresting love in the desert. He meets other mostly uninteresting characters, too. And, in the end, he finds his treasure after learning some accept-it-on-faith lesson about wisdom and patience (or something).

The tale is inscrutable. It’s exactly the kind of book that, when faced with criticism, can be answered with something nonsensical like “Well, then you just aren’t pursuing your Personal Legend.”

I can’t say the book didn’t make me think about what I’d like to accomplish in life. For that, I give it credit. I can say that the book reminded me that one of the things I want to accomplish in life is not to succeed by attributing success to interpreting omens set before me by supernatural agency!

The Alchemist: D

I think I needed to get those reviews out of my system and flush out frustrations I had about not posting here. I look forward to posting more frequently now.

Are you ready for the Country? Because it's time to go

A while back, a co-worker told me about Blood Meridien by Cormac McCarthy.

This guy was older than me, like most of my co-workers at the time. He was thin, and had a kempt beard as long as I knew him. He had a bleak sense of humor, and as I got to know him over the couple of years I appreciated it more and more. He and his counterpart co-worker used to leave this mannequin in various hilarious poses. It was funny to find Al, as they called the dummy, sitting in chairs, wearing ties, bivouacking in a file cabinet. But, mostly, that damn mannequin made me jump out of my skin when I caught him out of the corner of my eye where nobody was supposed to be.

Anyway, this co-worker of mine was quite the reader. And, it took even longer for me to catch on he was quite the writer, too. Turns out he was a playwright and screenwriter, and a local director filmed his movie. I still haven't seen his movie. I really want to.

They laid him off one day about two years ago. He had great taste in books, and he and my old boss used to exchange notes. They let me in on the gag once in a while. I had to go look up his name, because I forgot it. It was two years ago, and I forgot. It's funny how long something feels when you get wrapped up in a place like work.

I picked up Blood Meridien right before he was laid off. When I did, a newer novel of McCarthy's caught my eye. It was No Country For Old Men. That was in my Western buying phase. I bought several novels I thought would help inspire me for Dust Devils, a Western role-playing game I created. So, I made a note that it looked like a good candidate for later on.

Fast forward many months. Last year, I was strolling through my favorite used book store, and I found a nice trade paperback edition of No Country For Old Men. It was a little worn, but it sure was cheap. I'd heard a movie was coming out, and I wanted the edition before all the copies were blasted with movie marketing and actors for the cover. It's a small vanity, I know.

I read it. I strayed from my reading list, but I wanted to have it in my brain before the movie tainted anything. More vanity.

I was taken with with that book -- the kind of adoration you feel when something hurts you, moves you out of comfort to confront some hard ideas. It stuck to my ribs. I couldn't get it out of my head, because I was very troubled by the fate of Llewellyn Moss, and even more troubled by Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff whose story it really is.

I knew I wanted to see it in the theater when the movie came out. So, two weeks ago, on a cold and blustery friday, I found myself alone from my wife and kids. She took them to her sister's for supper and movies with the girls. After work, I shuttled around in the winter weather for a quick bite of tacos, then off to the theater to stand in a long line that nearly made me walk away for fear of missing any part of the movie.

I watched it alone, seated in the second row to the right. It was marvelous. As close a match as any novel-to-film translation I've seen.

When it was over, there was silence. Dead silence. The end scene took the air out of the room. I don't know all the baby boomer couples there with me were as shocked I felt them to be. But, it seemed to me they sat theredumbstruck, as though they'd been tricked into watching a "good movie" and gotten suckerpunched instead. For me, having read the book, it was no shock. Just another kick in the soul. That's how I described it to my wife.

I can't really describe it here. It disturbs me greatly. Oh, yes, the book and the movie are disturbing. There's terrible, heartless violence, and the tale doesn't end well. But, that's not quite what I'm getting at. Not quite. What disturbs me is that I have no quibble with it. I have nothing to add. I just have to shrug and nod and think, yep, that's how things are.

I would be a damn fool to think no one else is affected as much as me. That's more vanity, and really awful vanity at that. But, still, No Country For Old Men resonates with me. It hits close to home. I can say I admire the film and the novel, and I say that because I find it both to be powerfully true as art. I believe they hit close to home to me especially (among others, no doubt). But, in very brief and few discussions with others, they seem less affected, less troubled and more wowed by a great movie they're enthusiastic about. Maybe I just need to talk with others more.

I do not think I'll be able to see the movie again soon. I feel as though it spoke directly to someone like me, someone with my particular impression of the world. It's not because my life is teetering on the edge of violence like that in the novel and film. But, it hits me harder and closer than any other art I've experienced.

And, I hate that idea, that I'm just one of those suckers who sees some movie and tells all his friend it changed his life. That's so useless to me. It didn't change me. I didn't walk out the door and think, you know what, I really out to go climb a mountain before I die. What horseshit that'd be.

I just drove home with the radio off. Felt like thunder in my chest for a little while there. Going alone was probably both the wisest and the stupidest thing I could have done.

At midnight, When my wife brought the kids home -- one asleep on her shoulder and bundled up, the other staggering half-awake -- she said "What's wrong?" She knew I really wanted to see it. "Didn't you like it?"

I couldn't form an answer. I don't like it. It's not something I can talk about like I can with other movies. I don't love it. It haunts me. I told her I didn't want her to see it, ever. I said it was because I think I'm afraid of what she'll think, and that it might ruin some secret hope I have that maybe I'm wrong about it all. Like seeing it might take away her innocence or something.

If you've seen the movie, and think anything like I do about it, you'll know it's a false hope.

She looked at me like I was crazy, but then she shrugged. "Well, I don't want to see it now!"

And, I think I'm fine with that.