Walking on the Moon

Will Not Attend is a well composed set of personal essays. Adam Resnick tells each story with a careful pacing and a clear narrative.  They have tone appropriate to the incidents and he tuns many clever phrases.  These are beautifully written memoir essays.

While I got a lot out of the collection, I never got to the point where I was rooting for Resnick.  These are all necessarily told from his point of view, but I really can’t call him a protagonist.  Even after spending a book with him, I never come over to his side.

I also get the feeling this may be intentional.

He writes so well, that he may be trying to make these the memoirs of an unlikeable man just to show he can.  That’s not easy to pull off.  People want to be liked. Writers know how to manipulate sympathies.  If he indeed set out to write these pieces to achieve that effect, it’s an impressive feat.

I’m impressed, but not delighted.

It didn’t take long to read Douglas Coupland’s Worst. Person. Ever. He has a breezy, snarky style, turns a clever phrase, and keeps his plot twisting and turning alluringly.  The short chapters are like potato chips, easy to down and pick up the next. It would have been a great book to have on a transcontinental flight.

There are a lot of similarities between Person and Irvine Welsh’s Filth. Both feature reprobates from the United Kingdom.  They take some joy in taking the reader on a tour of the seedy side of their point of view character’s psyche, and both take no prisoners doing it.  Coupland, however, is writing a more superficial book.  There’s none of the subtext and misdirection that turns Filth on a dime in the last third.  None of these characters change meaningfully, nor do they ever garner much sympathy.

There are pleasures to be had in Person, for sure.  This is some quality snark and some snappy dialogue. The coincidences bring a demented bit of Dickens into the mix, and there are moments of enjoyable satire.  But as a whole, Coupland’s targets are a bit to east to skewer and his brush too broad for me.

More importantly, his characters are all pretty insufferable.  While it’s always clear who he’d like us to be rooting for, I wasn’t ever convinced.  I didn’t connect with any of these characters.  Hiaasen also writes some broad and often unlikeable characters, but he always sinks enough of a hook in me so that I have a stake in their fate.  I don’t much care what happens to any of the characters in Person.

I don’t regret reading Person at all – it was good fun while it lasted.  I suspect I won’t remember it in a month, though.

Samuel R. Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand is a classic of SF that I hadn’t read.  It was nice that Jo Walton reminded me it was out there and added her compelling thoughts on what makes it worth reading. I recall seeing it as a kid, but didn’t know anything about it beyond the evocative title.  And it’s evocative indeed if I remembered it after 30 years.

Delany builds a truly alien society in Stars and drops us into the middle of it to slowly sort it all out. It’s alien across the board, from the species co-existing on the worlds, to the mores of the societies, to the use of pronouns.  I’m not going to get into more plot details or specifics than that, because the disorientation of working through the setting is a considerable amount of the experience.

I’m oversimplifying when I say Delany builds an alien society.  He actually builds multiple distinct alien societies that his protagonist takes us through.  That protagonist is a diplomat, which means Delany gives the reader more of a drive-by view of the societies, but the reader always gets the impression that there is a full society that underlies the glimpse.  One feels that there is a galaxy (or more) of people who interact.

The plot turns on some fairly world-shaking events, and should one focus on the galactic politics one suspects that there is plenty to ponder –  Jo Walton says this is a book that rewards rereading – but I found myself more consumed by the interplay of customs and interpersonal interactions.  “Interpersonal interactions” covers everything from professional negotiations to the inevitability of a hookup to the possibilities of love to welcoming a stranger to a beloved passtime. Similarly “customs” covers everything from the formal etiquette of an alien state dinner party to wondering if a particular visual tic is a subconscious comment or an explicit insult.

This focus on the interplay of characters and customs forces one to reflect on the analogues in one’s own society.  One of the great powers of SF is to lead a reader to see the world we do inhabit in a new way, and Stars did that for me spectacularly. Despite the disorientation of being dropped into a world where he and she work differently, the changes always led to interesting patterns of thought about our world and our people.  This is SF that makes you think about people, not equations.

I suspect that there is more here to find on a rereading as well.

Strongly recommended.

I’m probably a somewhat unusual Daniel Handler fan.  I fell in love with his writing in The Basic Eight, not his more lucrative children’s literature. I haven’t picked anything of his up for a while, but Adverbs finally bubbled to the top of my queue.

Adverbs is kind of an experimental piece of work. It’s constructed as a series of vignettes circling around similar, but maybe not identical, characters who are all confronting love, catastrophe, taxis, and pop music to varying degrees.  The book is definitely an odd reading experience. Each vignette is thematically connected and written in a similar style, but the particulars are mostly echoes and allusions rather than a sustained narrative.  Each succeeding interlude subtly changes the players, focus, and stakes without changing tone and style.  The whole thing feels rather dreamlike.

If you’re a long time reader of the Legion of Super-Heroes, this is a recognizable feeling.  That franchise of DC Comics has been restarted and its most popular tales retold many times.  Each restart and retelling comes from different continuity and features different interpretations of its sizeable cast. Each vignette in Adverbs feels like a rebooted continuity from comics. The reader can see how it all relates, but a lot of the fun is seeing what’s different.

It helps enormously that Handler turns a brilliant phrase and is a keen observer of people.  Adverbs doesn’t follow characters through a conventional growth arc and hit the reader with emotional revelations.  Handler can break your heart with a one-line simile though, and he does.

Overall, it reads a little like Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish in that simple forms give way to powerful drama.  Adverbs never builds on itself the way Love does, though, so it remains an interesting diversion more than a literary event.

Recommended.

What Makes This Book So Great is a collection of  Jo Walton’s blog posts about rereading works of SF great and obscure.  While the essays are insightful analyses of works of SF, this is not really a critical work.  Walton is quick to point this out herself, and the missing element is any sense of distance.  While she consistently marshals considerable insight about the specific works she’s reading and about SF and literature in general, she’s unabashedly a fan of the genre and a skilled writer as well.  As you can tell from the title, there are no negative reviews in the set.  This is about neat books she found while rereading.

One of the first things Walton makes clear is that she is always rereading.  If you poke around SF and reading in general, you’ll eventually run into someone like her.  They are always reading something.  They can easily read 10 books a week and usually do.  For those of us nearer the mean of the books per week curve, it can be daunting to see and hear.  But the truth is that folks like Walton are tearing through a frightening amount of text at all times.

While there are readers with Walton’s appetite, there are few with her insight and enthusiasm for SF.  Her reviews are honest, well informed and accessible.  The balance between the latter is particularly helpful.  She knows a lot about writing and SF history and puts the various works into useful juxtaposition with one another.  But she does it in a way that’s inviting and interesting.  She’s not showing off that she can make these connections, just pointing out what she saw and inviting you to play along.  It’s a very tricky line to walk, and she does it consistently.

I came away with a list of new things to read and an appreciation for the breadth of SF.  If you have any interest in that, have a look.

Recommended.

Teju Cole has created a beautiful, low key, memoir of a visit to his home country of Nigeria.  Each chapter is a short vignette capturing a facet of himself or Nigeria, or both.

Cole write clearly, beautifully and almost hypnotically.  Each chapter captures a moment or a day in his time there cleanly and clearly without unnecessary fireworks.  The overall feeling is that you have joined Cole on his trip invisibly and intimately.

He speaks of his concern for the country’s corruption and shallowness, but the condemnation is not one of an angry activist.  His goal seems to be illumination, not rallying.  The result is a powerful view that leaves the reader more interpretive space than I expected.

Recommended.

The Fuller Memorandum is another Library Files novel from Charles Stross. I like the Laundry Files because they seem like Stross is having great fun writing them.  On their surface they’re exciting stories set in a well-imagined modern fantasy setting seasoned with the sorts of geek culture that appeal to me.  They’re much more than simple time-wasters, though.  Each one I’ve read so far is actually an almost mimetic commentary on some form of adventure genre or author.  The Jennifer Morgue played with the James Bond franchise with verve and insight.  The earthy, trust no one spy thriller a la LeCarre gets the business here.

Accordingly, the mood in Fuller is more oppressive than in Jennifer.   If Fleming and his cinematic heirs  are escapist, LeCarre and his camp are brutalist. Bringing the same set of characters through those sets of tone is a beautiful display of  writing skill.  Sometimes I think that Stross started writing these to practice exactly that sort of flexibility.  If so, he’s gotten remarkably good at it.

In addition to putting the Laundry folks through a wringer where actions have more consequences and trust is scarce, Stross shows us the whole Laundry world from a more depressing angle.  The feeling of whistling past the graveyard is more one of staring thoughtfully at the stones.  A universe with such a Lovecraftian epistemology is bound to be depressing, and the tone lets Stross run with it.

All of this is actually quite fun, though a different kind of fun than Jennifer. Everyone is still recognizable as the engaging characters from other Laundry novels, and there are still plenty of winks, nods, and in-jokes running around.  In addition to the (meta-)commentary, it’s a taut modern fantasy thriller.

Strongly Recommended.

David Finkel’s Thank You For Your Service shows us a cost of war that’s easy to miss or to misunderstand.  While there is an element of polemic to Service, this is a much deeper book than a simple call to arms.  Finkel is able take us into the lives of soldiers who have suffered horrifically in war but have also done so invisibly.  They are invisible because their wounds are internal.  They bear the traumas of nightmare experiences and of physical but internal brain injuries.

I’m not the writer or the journalist that Finkel is, so this review contains a lot of my conclusions from taking what he showed me and rolling it around in my head for a while.  Essentially I’m cooking in my biases and handing that information out. All readers of Service will do this. They will be able to do that because Finkel has been absorb the lives of these people and to depict them unflinchingly.  He has his biases, certainly, but his presentation is multi-faceted and nuanced.  One comes away with an understanding of the mammoth scope of the damage done, the people fighting to make it better, and the enormous and unexpected challenges facing the damaged and those trying to help.

One of the key things Finkel shows is how real the injuries of these people are.  It is difficult to explain how experiences that leave no physical marks are as debilitating and as clinical as amputations. I suspect many of you are not convinced by these sentences, which is why it’s worth reading his.  Initial skepticism – warranted though it may be – just cannot reasonably hold up against the unrelenting evidence that one sees when you follow these people for a while.  Basic functions of their brains are impaired; the evidence becomes too much to ignore. These aren’t touchy-feely or subtle injuries.  They are as clear and obvious as a severed limb once you take the time to look.  Finkel took the time to look and presents the facts in ways that cannot be ignored.

The resources being spent to fix these problems are woefully small compared to the problem.  One suspects that the people handing out the money don’t completely understand that these are real battlefield injuries, not people who are just sick of war.  In addition to having to face life damaged, the survivors are fighting to get even the smallest assistance learning to compensate for their injuries. Facing that with damaged brains only makes matters worse.

Finkel also alludes to a bigger problem.  It’s clear that even with all the money in the world we just don’t know how to help these people.  These people’s brains are damaged in ways no oone knows how to fix.  They will never have proper memory function again; we don’t know how to reset that breaker.

All of this makes this human cost more clear and tragic – there are many, many soldiers from our wars who are permanently and invisibly damaged.  Their injuries crush them, their spouses, and their friends while making it appear that they are merely irresponsible, not permanently injured.  The resources to help them are well beyond inadequate, but even with infinite resources, we don’t know what to do.

We need to stop doing this to people if we can avoid it.

All of this Finkel shows us without lecturing us.  He makes us figure it out and see it ourselves.

Strongly Recommended.

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple was one of the most insightful and compassionate books I’ve read. Once you see a writer produce something like that, you have to give his next book a read no matter what.  Young Money is a look at entry level jobs on Wall Street and the people who took them in the middle of the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.

We start by meeting a set of new financiers who were willing to let Roose “embed” with them for a couple years of writing.  It’s clear that he was looking for a diverse lot, and does well at finding them.  He finds several women and minorities as well as people well off the Ivy League path that so often leads to these particular corridors of power. Roose connects us to these folks quickly and believably, and takes us with them on their trip into (and maybe back out of) high finance.

In addition we get a look at the combination of hazing, indoctrination, and training that is the entry level Wall Street experience.  Though Roose does his best to bring out the unique aspects of Wall Street, I was often struck by how much the young peoples’ experience resembled my graduate school experience.  Long hours, busy work, demands placed on you just to get you to demonstrate loyalty – yep, been there.  Of course, I wasn’t making $100K and living in New York, but …

All of this is well done and informative, but the key facet that Roose brings to this whole endeavour is his humanism and compassion.  The reader can tell that his biases are to dislike these folks.  He wants them to be greed-driven pirates who would run the country’s economy into the ground to gather money.  But he can’t do it.  Much as he did at Liberty University, he cannot stop seeing these story elements as young people.  He never loses their humanity.

They have their faults, and Roose puts those out there honestly.  But even when he’s relating the most boorish behavior exhibited by the most entrenched Wall Street villains – who probably did wreck the economy to make a fast buck – he can’t demonize them.  It’s a powerful skill and helps the book and the reader maintain a sense of perspective about the subject and the system.

Strongly Recommended.

I like reading Carl Hiaasen’s writing.  It’s always smooth, clear, and seasoned with perfect sentences.  His heroes are loveable rogues who wander the magical land of South Florida, savoring its beauty; his villains are short-sighted opportunists out to metaphorically strip-mine the place.  The plots are dazzling clockwork that brings these elements together in a charming dance.

The particulars always differ some, food inspectors as agents of justice, bilking Medicare instead of gouging hurricane victims, but the essential elements of a Hiaasen novel are all here.  Enjoy.  I did.

Recommended.