Walking on the Moon

I’ve long enjoyed reading Mark Twain.  There is a combination of pulling for the hometown boy, in that he is buried in my hometown, and well, I just like the way he writes.

There’s a certain amount of Twain’s life that one soaks up living in Elmira, the way I assume one must soak it up living in any one of the many other towns in which he lived.  Any opportunity for a high school English or History class to spend a week talking about his life was taken.  As a result, I knew the broad outlines of Twain’s life before I picked up this book.  Ron Powers, the author of Mark Twain: A Life, seems to assume such passing familiarity without leaning on it.

Overall, Powers’s book is a fine gateway into Twain’s life and career.  His writing is clear and crisp, assumes the reader has heard something of the subject without being an expert.  From that basis he composes a biography that is conventional in form – birth to death telling of the major events – but light and discursive in content.  There is a daunting amount of scholarship about Twain, focusing on everything from his place in world literature to the motivations for the most trivial choices, and Powers points that out without getting drawn into the vortex of it.

For example, it’s really difficult to decide how to address the subject of this biography: Twain is fictional and says and does things that Clemens doesn’t.  Powers solves this elegantly by referring to the writings (and the writer) as “Twain,” the adult as “Clemens,” and the child as “Sammy.”  The last seems a little incongruous until one reflects on how Clemens’s childhood informed practically all his written work.  It’s a very useful convention through which Powers keeps the reader connected to the history and influences of the man simultaneously. A reader can also see how he has been driven into this convention by a mob of scholars willing to dispute any particular characterization.

Powers’s narrative is well composed, and he drops a few bits of Twainian dry wit in as well.  He relates the seminal events with detail and provides analysis as to how and why the world and the author consider them important.  He also covers smaller incidents that provide background and tone.  Overall one comes away with a solid impression of Twain’s importance, abilities, and flaws.

There are some seams visible as well.  The chapters occasionally restate material already covered in a way that another pass or two over the whole manuscript might have caught.  Powers also seems enamored of William Dean Howells as well.  I don’t know the story here, but I suspect that Powers is a student of Howells, and is also interested in writing about him more extensively, or has done so.  It’s never distracting; Powers never forgets whose story he’s telling.  But still, you can see him stealing verbal glances at the person he’d rather dance with.

These criticisms are more in the spirit of notes.  The work is interesting, enjoyable, and informative.

Recommended.

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University has a great hook: Brown Student spends a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and lives to tell.  It was certainly good enough to get me to pick it up.  The danger with a hook book is that it never becomes more than its gimmick. Disciple is so good that by the middle I’d forgotten that there was a hook at all.

Roose has many great qualities as a writer.  He’s inquisitive, intelligent, fair, and he writes clearly and with a sharp eye for the details that bring scenes alive.  Better than all of those things, though, he is fearlessly honest.  He puts himself into a situation where he keenly feels the prejudices of himself, his friends, and his family and works his way through it with us.

That sounds like Disciple is some Hallmark Channel journey of self discovery, but it’s more like a Bill Bryson travelogue.  There are interesting things to see, new people to meet, and moments that change one’s life.  Roose greets the points of interest with enthusiasm and wonder, sketches the people with lively economy, and earns the deep moments with great pacing and structured writing.  He hides all that structure behind an adventurous tone and brisk narrative.

Those kind of skills will serve a journalist well in any environment, but Roose has bitten off a big hunk of  discomfort and portent.  Liberty is uncomfortable to him because he, like many of his readers, believes that he’s heading into a world of hidebound intolerance. It is important because the group represented at Liberty is a significant segment of our society.  And the preconceptions matter because any time we demonize a group – and those preconceptions are demonization – we forget that these people are people.  Many excellent writers and good journalists would not be able to keep their integrity when confronting their own prejudices.  Roose acquits himself exceptionally.

He conveys the dogmatic blinders in place at Liberty that lead to real world intolerance and violence, and he describes the unexpected openness and fellowship that draws the students there together just as clearly.  It is here that his skills as a writer and fairness as a journalist shine.  The transcendent surprising beauty of this world and its insular biases both come out as the natural constructions of human beings and human communities.  Through his prose we feel the tug of a community on his heart that he disagrees with in his soul.  Everything in his experience at Liberty is personal and human – the very antithesis of demonized.  One may still come away believing that the Liberty teachings are wrong, but not that the people are inhuman.

It is a remarkable book.

A must.

A week or two ago, I sat down on an LAX to IAD flight with a copy of Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur, and I left the plane in DC as a Klosterman fan, having devoured the book in the intervening couple hours.  I’d certainly heard interesting things about Klosterman as a thinking man’s commenter on popular culture, but I wasn’t prepared for how fast I’d take the hook or how deep it would sink.

Dinosaur is a collection of essays on a fairly broad range of topics running from the usefulness of time travel to the dichotomy of NFL football as the most conservative and liberal sport in America.  From the first few pages of the first essay, about what it means that people say anything at all in interviews, I was gripped by Klosterman’s serious approach to playful topics.  “Why would you ever talk to (say) Michael Moore?” is a question everyone’s asked.  Few people have interviewed Errol Morris and Ira Glass on the topic, and interwoven their own well reasoned thoughts into those interviews to form a compelling essay.

Klosterman is a man who takes ephemeral and sometimes frivolous things seriously, and then subjects them to a meticulous dissection under the light of a strong intellect.  Then he composes those thoughts in a way that is compelling and diverting.  He is, in short, a man after my own heart; more honestly, he is a man I would like to be.

Strongly recommended.

Another Philip Marlowe novel – Raymond Chandler, of course.  Like The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, this is a mystery with Marlowe trying to get to the bottom of it.  As with the other novels, Chandler’s style creates a high contrast world of lush language and minimal, beautiful scene-setting.  Unlike those books, we get a version of Marlowe who is much more vulnerable.

In Farewell, Marlowe is much more in the world he’s exploring.  In the other books I often had the feeling that Marlowe was above the proceedings, even when he was emotionally invested.  There were moments of physical peril, but I never felt it.  More to the point Marlowe never seems to feel it.  That’s not the case in Farewell.

Marlowe’s always been human enough to make some mistakes – and he makes some doozies in Farewell – but he generally is the smartest and highest minded guy in the room.  In Farewell, I came away feeling Marlowe was letting his demons have their way with him more than usual.  And he suffers for it more than usual.

The suffering is never just a plot point; it is the natural consequence of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.  It’s Marlowe’s reactions to it that are interesting.  There’s the plot stuff, of course, but more interesting is how it changes him and how he shows it.  Viewing these changes through the stylized idioms of another time makes the workings a little harder to make out, but invests them with more iconic power as well.

As always, if you want a whodunnit, Chandler delivers.  He does so with so much style and literary power – and drive to say new things with a comfortable character – that I’m happy to read it if the case is unsolved.

Strongly recommended.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Grapes of Wrath, which means that what I think of it doesn’t matter very much.  I have not come away from my recent brushes with Steinbeck particularly impressed, though I have enjoyed some of his work.  I confess that those brushes left me somewhat reluctant to read more of him, but after The Forgotten Man, I was kind of primed for the time period.

Grapes is extremely impressive.  It is well structured, well written, factual, and sympathetic.  It manages to capture the migration of poor farmers from the dust bowl to California and migrant farming during the depression at levels from the strain on individual families to the larger economic forces behind the change.  In fact, though I mentioned the dust bowl, Steinbeck doesn’t; to him, the economic forces were going to cause people to lose farms and migrate even without the drought and erosion of the dust bowl.

Capturing all this is a difficult balancing act.  Structurally, Steinbeck alternates chapters between the large trends and the plight of a specific family, the Joads.  The wide lens shows that the Joads are not alone in their plight and the close chapters show us the specifics troubles of a family in crisis.  He also moves the group successfully through the most informative points in the migration.  They aren’t placed at specific historic events like some early-thirties Forrest Gump, but Steinbeck brings his family into contact with realistic examples of the best and worst of the depression in California.  All the situations the family encounters follow from the real situations; everyone is motivated by real emotions and economics.  There are no mustache-twirling villains here, nor white-hatted heroes, just people dealing with real events as human beings.

Steinbeck’s grasp of the specific situations and the larger forces would make this a textbook if he didn’t populate the world with believeable characters.  There are certainly characters here who act as symbols as well as people, but with the possible exception of Casey the ex-preacher, everyone reacts like a person to the situations around them. The reality of the characters’ reactions helps make his large scale descriptions comprehensible, even as it humanizes their effects.

Despite craft that makes it appear as though Steinbeck is relaying truth to readers, he certainly has a point of view.  I believe he plays fair, explaining comprehensible and even sympathetic motivations for even the least likeable characters.  Still, he is on the side of government help for people in trouble and for those people banding together to help themselves at the expense of farm owners and financiers.

Personally, I am sympathetic to that position, but even if you aren’t Grapes is a vivid, thoughtful description of a trying time in America.  Themes and situations in here apply today as well as they did in the 30s.

Strongly recommended.

The Long Goodbye is the Raymond Chandler novel that most people have heard of that isn’t The Big Sleep. After reading Sleep I was pretty sure that I’d like anything Chandler wrote, and Goodbye didn’t change that impression.

There are many similarities between the two.  Chandler’s voice is the same voice, and Marlowe’s the same character.  There’s a mystery and dames and lots of stylized tough guy talk.  The Los Angeles  setting conveys a sense of place to the point that LA is nearly a character.  In short, all Chandler’s strengths as a writer are here.

The differences are in tone and theme.  The Long Goodbye really couldn’t be titled anything else.  The pacing and tone make the reader feel the passage of time; the plot proceeds episodically over weeks, not the frantic rush of many mysteries.  The revelation is slow and lurching, as one finds out secrets about ones friends and relations in life.

The titular farewell also echoes through the text.  This is a book about absent friends, and not idealized ones.  The friend in question wasn’t Marlowe’s blood brother, nor did they see eye-to-eye. Their connection was made by chance, and develops awkwardly in fits. Yet friendship and decency impose obligations and attachments on men like Marlowe even when the relationship is rough hewn and haphazard.

The two themes play off one another as Marlowe discharges his debts and pays his respects in the fits and starts by which our lives all progress.  Chandler’s exploration of these uses a a clever traditional mystery plot in his unique style.  I never try to figure out whodunnit, but I was pleasantly surprised by the big reveal.  The trip is more interesting than the destination.

Strongly recommended.

Amity Shales’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression takes a critical look at the handling of the Depression by Roosevelt.  Assessing Roosevelt’s economic policy from the a laissez-faire position is timely, and much in vogue, but such an analysis runs counter to the conventional narrative of Roosevelt’s presidency.  It needs to be exemplary to be heard at all, and this work isn’t quite up to that level.

There are ideas worth hearing here, though.  Hoover and Roosevelt both misstepped on what we know to be fundamental economic principals now, including freeing up the money supply in a recession, and made good faith efforts to get people working again through public works. The difference between the two was the extent to which Roosevelt was willing to push his agenda.  Questions about how far he was willing to push constitutional limits of federal power and trade collective versus property rights are interesting to hash out.  It’s also important to try to assess the effectiveness of those actions – moral or immoral.

As a collection of facts and context, The Forgotten Man is fairly sound, and though Shales seems to be sympathetic to the property rights side of the arguments, there seems to be major hunks missing or taken on faith.  I know this is not an economics text or paper, but I would prefer more concrete facts on the table regarding outcomes.

Similarly, it would be helpful to understand the key personalities more clearly so that their decisions are more fathomable.  Arguments about the defensibility of these actions must have come from these actors, and understanding their motivations and justifications is of considerable interest.  Shales goes more for breadth than depth here, bringing many different players on stage rather than deeply analyzing a few.

The choices of the players who get the focus is pretty unusual.  There’s a running narrative thread centered on Wendell Willkie who opposes Roosevelt in the 1940 election.  Willkie seems to be an interesting figure, from roots in the power utility to the sorts of changes that make a man a political contender, but as a laissez-faire standard bearer he seems to lack conviction and success.  There’s also a sizeable amout of aside time spent on William Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Again, an interesting figure, but strangely out of place in an economic story.

Now, perhaps I am misreading Shales intent.  Perhaps she intended this as a broad history of this period.  If so, her sweep seems to stick on a few areas; if not there’s many a quirky point that doesn’t seem to belong.

As I say, there are many interesting points made in the work.  I definitely learned things reading it, but, for me, it raises more questions than answers.

After my recent good experience with Chandler, it seemed like another noir classic was worth a look.  And so we come to Hammett.

You can’t mistake Hammett for Chandler.  Hammett’s prose is more pedestrian and not inclined to the poetic – even the poetry of a tough guy in the rough city.  After the joy of finding Chandler, it was something of a disappointment to find that Hammett was something else entirely.  The disappointment wore off pretty quickly as I discovered the joys of Hammett.

Hammett is more grounded in the characters than in the literature.  His Sam Spade is a much more flawed character than Chandler’s Marlowe.  One gets the impression that at his core Marlowe’s a Boy Scout; no one gets that impression about Spade.  Spade’s a tough guy to get along with, and not always because there’s some principle at stake.  Sometimes Spade is just ornery.  You get the impression people are surprised when Spade does the right thing; you also get the impression that they’re surprised often.

It doesn’t help his likeability that my 21st century eyes see a pretty chauvinist guy.  I understand the differences of the times, but even accounting for that, Spade views women mostly as sex objects, and not often ones he enjoys being around.  He’s a well enough drawn character that one can dislike him honestly.  I don’t think I’d enjoy hanging out with him, but I believe him.

Some of the other characters are somewhat broad, but never overly so.  No one’s completely what they seem, and the plot twists a great deal more than The Big Sleep.  I definitely had to pay more attention to who was doing what to whom in Falcon.

Overall I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon quite a bit, but it was much less of a transcendent experience than The Big Sleep. An awful lot of this discussion has been comparing Falcon to Sleep, and that’s not particularly fair.  They’re different in focus and perhaps in goals.  I obviously incline toward Sleep‘s rich language and sense of place, but Falcon‘s unflinchingly real lead character and attention to plot is also rewarding.  Both are worth one’s time.

Recommended.

Yep, back to the Napoleonic Wars, with Bernard Cornwell.  It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Sharpe and the boys, and honestly, they seem to have gotten a little whinier than I remember.  Sharpe’s always been worried about his fate and his love life, but I seem to recall more of this having been resolved last time.  This all felt more like a replay than new worries.

Overall this was much more like a Twilight book than I was expecting. Both of our leading men spend a lot of time weighing their motives in trying to join a Forlorn Hope, and primary meaning aside, it was rather more introspective than I wanted, and their concerns had been played before.

As much as I liked the Twilight series, I prefer my men of action to brood less and fight more.  Hopefully this was just a brief slacking of the action.  We did learn a bunch about siege warfare, though.

I’ve read a bunch of these, and I’ll probably keep doing so, even if a fair number of the stories in each are somewhat predictable formula bits, or somewhat over-engineered literary writing.  There’s always a gem or two in here.

I rather liked Galgut’s “The Lover,” which starts without soul and slowly won me over, and Rash’s “Into The Gorge,” which was solid and moving.  Alice Monroe and Annie Proulx are here again, turning in solid work, though I found Proulx’s “Them Old Country Songs” covered ground she’d covered better before.  Monroe’s “Some Women” was a really nice bit of work.  Probably my favorite was Ladsun’s “Oh, Death,” which manages to be elegiac without being overly sad.

Others will find different gold, I’m sure, but there is something to like in here if you’re interested in looking.

Recommended.