What Makes Sammy Run?

Budd Schulberg, who would go on to write the novel Waterfront & the screenplay from it On The Waterfront, shocked Hollywood in 1941 with this novel. It concerns the rise and rise of unscrupulous, out-for-himself Sammy Glick as he makes his way from copy-boy at a New York newspaper, clambering over bodies, to become a big-shot Hollywood producer. The pithy prose & vivid characters, along with a rolicking plot, make this novel a "read it all on one go" book.

The New York Times named it "best first-novel of the year". Schulberg's father, the legendary producer B.P. Schulberg, told him "You'll never work in this town again. How will you live?". He was fired by a purple-with-rage Sam Goldwyn, Hedda Hopper accosted him to harrumph "How dare you", and Louis Mayer wanted to "deport" him. He was attacked simultaneously by the Communist Party and John Wayne. In fact, even in the mid-sixties, Wayne tried to strangle Schulberg at a party, then challenged him to a duel.

Of great interest, though sobering, is Schulberg's Afterword, written in 1989. He laments "The book I had written as an attack on antisocial behavior has become a how-to book on Looking Out for Number 1."

Blindsight

Maurice Gee is one of new Zealand's best writers of fiction. In Blindsight he achingly unravels the entwined family relationships of the Ferrys, in particular the brother and sister, as narrated by the now old Alice. An unknown young man arrives on her doorstep and his soft insistence breaks open her carapace, and reveals the darkness at the heart of her family. "Father taught us how not to love" is the first line of this novel, and by the time it is repeated as the ending I felt wrenched by this story, yet strangely calm. Gee's prose is incisive and unsentimental - as is his protagonist. He has the ability to involve the reader with his characters, who scarcely seem to be characters but living beings with all their faults and regrets, yet all their painful ability to - yes - love.

The Restraint of Beasts

If you're after bone-dry wit, writing of surpassing economy, and all you need to know about burying bodies standing up in post holes, this is the book for you. Set in the cut-throat world of professional fencing, and featuring Magnus Mills' trademark odd shaggy specimens of Modern Man as characters, this book is a chilling joy, a creepy treat, an hilarious tragedy.

Then read All Quiet On The Orient Express. You won't be sorry.

Child of My Heart

Many years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. Now, many years later, I have read Child of My Heart. So you don't have to.

I'm not a big fan of sweetness and sentimentality. And I had an immediate antipathy to this book. But in despite of that, I plugged on.

The story isn't bad; children in the off-season in the Hamptons, the main character, the older girl, budding into adolescence.

But the problem with this book - and it is a large & ultimately insurmountable one - is that the narrator "I" character should have been the observed "she" character. In other words, if the writer wants to have a pretty, charming, beloved character, it's far better to have her observed by another ("she was pretty, charming and beloved") rather than be the narrator ("I am pretty, charming and beloved. Everybody thinks so.") Unless, of course, the narrator turns out to be unreliable, or their smug self-satisfaction is to be devastated by a rude awakening. How I longed for a very rude awakening. But the book continued sweet, sentimental & self-satisfied to the end.

Oh, and a kid dies in the book. Cheap.

Really lovely cover, though.

Wigfield

Oh happy happy joy joy. Read this immediately, it's a romp. Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert & Paul Dinello serve up a souffle of crack cracks. Come to Wigfield, with its three mayors, nine titty bars, and mysterious fires and gruesome deaths too numerous to enumerate. Our guide to Wigfield, Russell Hokes, races to write 50,000 words (as required by his reluctant publisher) before the damn Dam explodes in a shower of concrete and well-placed fireworks.

Thanks to Colonel Colonel for pointing us in the direction of Wigfield, the Can-Do Town that Just May Not.

Due Preparations For The Plague

Here is an uneasy meld of a thriller with the drama of the abandoned child, or in this case, children. A plane is highjacked and all the hostages eventually killed, excepting the children who are offloaded*.

With this one, I really don't know what I think. I would relish hearing the views of any of you who have read it.

Jeanette Turner Hospital is such a great writer, that the strength of the prose alone carried me along. It's a good story, while disturbing. The thriller aspect works only to a certain degree. But I found I didn't really connect with or care for any of the characters - maybe that is deliberate & we are supposed to regard the events dispassionately. Maybe. I like the idea of interconnectedness, and so I enjoyed that aspect of the book. There is a set piece in an underground bunker filled with nerve gas. This section I found poignant and genuinely thrilling, & the part where I was emotionally involved. However, when I finished reading I laid the book down with a "meh".

Anyone else read it?

*This is not a spoiler as we discover this in the first chapter.

Atonement

I came late to Ian McEwan. I read Enduring Love last year & was enraptured. I bought The Innocent (paying retail price!) and was left gasping for breath (in a good way.) Each McEwan I read become my favourite, and so it is with Atonement. The story is involved and the characters complex, yet he writes with such utter simplicity. This is a superb book on the nature of ourselves as flawed human beings. I cried at the end - not only for the lives of these imaginary people (ain't it strange?) but also because the book was finished & I would never again read it for the first time.

After finishing Atonement, I picked up and put aside four books after reading a page or two. I was restless & hungry for more transporting writing. Luckily I've landed on Blndsight by Maurice Gee, a delicious follow-on.

The Lighthouse

Phyllis Dorothy is an old favourite of mine, a very reliable procedural writer. My crime fiction taste runs as much to this Restrained English style as to Hardboiled American or Tartan Noir (via Larrikan Aussie, naturally). But somehow I found The Lighthouse, though well plotted & apparently imaginative, did not grab me, grip me or even pluck at my sleeve. I don't want to put you off this book, or indeed any of P.D.James' wonderful canon, but for me this one was bland. We love a great crime novel, and The Lighthouse is, perhaps, simply predictably good.

Don't Let The Pigeon Stay Up Late

Following the scintillating brilliance of Pigeon's first outing Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus, Mo Willems' story here exposes the machinations of our mini-Machiavelli Pigeon as he tries to wheedle, threaten, demand, charm and skive his way into staying up late. Line destined to become a classic: "You wouldn't say no to a bunny, would you?"

The Steep Approach To Garbadale

Iain Banks, in his writerly guise or in his sci-fi Iain M Banks hat, is a marvelous writer. Here, writing marvelously, he has fastened onto a good story. He tells of the extended family Wopuld, bound by relationship and by the family business, seen through the eyes of one son who rejected family and business, but finds he needs to reconcile himself in order to live in a good manner. Banks is unsentimental, and the language and images are powerful and clear-eyed. A surprising narrative device satisfies and pays off on the last page. There is relish in the telling and in the reading of this tale, and there is authenticity. Banks considers questions we may also have - on our place in the family, their influence in our shaping, and the line between loyalty and suffocation. Oh, and a couple of good non-squirmy sex scenes.

The Two Minute Rule

I love Robert Crais' investigator Elvis Cole and the series of LA-set crime novels in which he appears. Here in The Two Minute Rule, Crais creates a new character, a reformed bank robber trying to go straight, investigating the murder of his policeman son in the face of official stonewalling. I read it. I enjoyed it mildly. The book is well crafted, the characters set up to be interesting. But somehow for me this one doesn't have the Divine Spark of Life. Yes, it is only a crime novel, but the best of the kind are marvelous literature. This is more a quick snack to fill the gap, then forget.

The Turn of The Screw

I have never read any Henry James before. This spooky novella was a marvelous introduction. I relished his prose, which must sometimes be followed like a twisted string leading the reader gently on to - oh my god what's that outside the window! It is unutterably creepy, stark and yet ambiguous. At a Christmas party, an 'I' narrator tells of his friend, who reads out the written account of an unnamed woman. This makes the work at once immediate, and ungraspable. And there's no creepy like two creepy kids. (shudder). What shall I read next of Mr James?

Mister Pip

Lloyd Jones writes in the voice of a young black girl. The impersonation is riveting, without a false note. Out of simple language he builds ecstasy and horror, resilience and compassion. This is a beautiful novel, with a strong story simply told. It speaks of the power of stories themselves, the anguished love of divided families, and the hope for a moment of benevolence from Fate, even if it's just a floating log.

One Good Turn

I like Kate Atkinson's work tremendously, and this novel, while not my favourite, was a thoroughly satisfying read. Here she makes a further foray into the crime genre she exploited so brilliantly in Case Histories. One Good Turn is set in Edinburgh during the Festival, and if you've ever been that adds to the pleasure. Beginning with a hideous incident of road rage, we follow those involved and those watching on. Atkinson twines her disparate and seemingly unrelated charcters into a tight coil, climaxing with a smart crack of the whip. Mixed in with her gripping plot, Atkinson's sly humour delights.

All Quiet on the Orient Express

I scoffed Magnus Mill's book in one shuddering gulp. The dead-pan, drought-dry prose stuck in my throat and made me want to throw the book across the room whilst simultaneously devouring it. Plodding, literal sentences build one on the other, and slowly slowly the creeping dread invades the reader's mind and body. Horrifyingly ordinary, hypnotically plain, subtle and electric. The voice that calls "Look behind you!" in the cinema is constantly on one's lips, viz "For god's sake, Unnamed Narrator, get out of there!". Top marks.

As recommended by Colonel Colonel. Well done, that man.

Ulysses, chapter one

There's these fellows in a Martello tower. Buck Mulligan has a shave. There is some chat about milk and Irishness. They go out and lock the door with a big key. Buck Mulligan has a swim. Stephen Dedelas teaches schoolboys Latin. And sums. In the headmaster's room, under the watchful eye of a portrait of Albert Edward Prince of Wales, British parsimony is praised. Dedelas walks on the crunchy shore with his eyes closed. When he opens them, the world is still there. He thinks of a visit to his bedridden uncle. He thinks about a time in Paris, with the Absinthe and the gunpowder cigarettes. A dog sniffs at a dead dog like a dog.

Joyce: "History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Joyce: "the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head";
Joyce: "Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeis, ooos."

I always intended to read Ulysses. I have finally started. I don't understand it. There is Latin & French, as well as Joyce's own idiolect. I've been reading chapter one for a week. But I am surrendering to it. It is compelling, divine. Some descriptive paragraphs leap vividly from the page, making me feel that this is the only way such a thing can be rendered in words. I'll post each chapter as I get through it. My coarse summary cannot begin to indcate the luscious, voluptuous, ineffable dark brilliance of the book.

The End

I have been a faithful reader of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events since The Bad Beginning. His dark playfulness tickles me in the right places. His love of language is infectious and silly. The dedication in each book to his lost love Beatrice is an object lesson in razor's edge navigation between humour and horror. It was with melancholy satisfaction that I finished The End, the thirteenth and last book in the series. In this one, Snicket (Daniel Handler) displays an encompassing compassion which is moving without being sentimental, and is a perfect grace note to the series.

As always, Brett Helquist illustrates with disturbing charm.

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson's voluptuous prose drew me into this simple story. Late in the book she asks "When did I become so unlike other people?", and it is the peculiar ones, the outsiders, the transients who shine in Housekeeping. The drowned ones in the lake by Fingerbone hold sway over the tight little town. And where is there room for Ruthie, growing up like her drifter aunt Sylvie, looking like her mother Helen who drove a car into that lake. For Lucille, survival means clothing herself in the appearance of conformity, and fleeing the shifting house built by her railwayman grandfather. This gorgeous little book makes me want to read Robinson's other novel, Gilead. And I'll let you know when I do.

Lords and Ladies

I've just ripped through Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett, one of his Disc World novels. He never fails to amuse and entertain. Here is his delicious take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream where the Elves are really nasty. Naturally the witches save the day. I particularly like the advice of old crone Nanny Ogg to the new Bride-To-Be: "'I gave her a few tips. Always wear something in bed. Keeps a man interested.' 'You always wore your hat.' 'Right.'" And later, more on the hat, viz: "Nanny Ogg raised her hat and carefully lifted down a bowl of cream, custard and jelly which she had secreted there. She was a great picker-up of unconsidered trifles."