Contemporary Noir Done Right

Book Reviewed: Drive, by James Sallis

There's a lot of things that can go wrong in contemporary noir, and I'm not talking about the plot of the stories.  I'm talking about the writing itself.  Lazy characterization (often reverting to type); cutesy, overly-stylized writing; and too much reliance on mood or tone can all prove fatal to today's noir.  It's easy for this to happen when contemporary authors try too hard to show their love for an popular old style.  For all these reasons, I've never been a particularly big noir fan.  Too often, the high-conceptness of it gets to be too much for me.  But man, has James Sallis proved me wrong in my belief that all contemporary noir is overreaching. 

Drive is a ridiculous book.  Ridiculous in its great writing.  Ridiculous in its artful narrative construction.  Ridiculous in its surprisingly deep incite into the protagonist's mind.  You've probably seen posters or trailers for the new film version of Drive, starring the always-welcome Ryan Gosling.  Well, forget about the movie.  The book is its own thing, and it's pretty damn cool. 

At just over 150 pages, Sallis gets straight to the nitty-gritty, following a bad night had by our main character, a movie-stunt/get-away driver named...well, Driver, obviously.  The book begins right in the thick of things, with the fallout of a double-cross.  From there, Sallis goes back and forth in time, giving us not only the full story of this botched job, but the story of Driver, too.  Driver is fascinating in the way Sallis portrays him.  The book is told almost completely in action.  We see all of Driver's actions, but we almost never get all the way inside his head.  It's a master study of the whole "show, don't tell" advice writers get drilled into their heads.  In fact, this may be the single best example of that advice that I've ever seen.  I'm insanely jealous of the way Sallis handles his writing.

Admittedly, I had a hard time following the plot, even though it's relayed so tightly.  For some reason, in all forms of media - film, books, theater - I have trouble dealing with action plots, especially ones that involve double-crossings and whatnot.  Plot is not my strong point.  Luckily, that hardly mattered this time around.  Would I probably have been just that much more in love with the book if I had known what was going on?  Yeah, probably.  But overall, it didn't matter much to me.  Because I was too in awe of the way Sallis sets up the chronological narrative.  The book weaves forward and backwards in time, so that some chapters set up Driver's tragic backstory, then move right back into the current plot.  It's handled extremely well, and without confusion.  Also, Sallis uses all the potboiler language of the classic noir, but he does it in such a way that it seems artful rather than cheesy. 

I really enjoyed Drive.  I am currently recommending it to every other person I know, although no one seems particularly interested (I blame the movie for this, although I am excited to see it when it comes out on DVD next week).  Seriously, people, read Drive.  It's a lot of fun, but there's also some real meat to it. 

Poetry Round-Up

Books Reviewed: A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, by Johannes Goransson; Shake, by Joshua Beckman; Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters

I read so many poetry books these days that I find it difficult to post a comment about each one to this blog. So every once in a while, I'll do one of these poetry round-ups to let you know what I've been reading and to give a few brief thoughts on what I thought of each book.

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place:  Goransson is actually one of the teachers in my MFA program, so it seemed important that I finally get around to reading one of his books.  My poet friend Drew loves this book and lent it to me with a fair amount of excitement.  When I texted him about it a few weeks ago, I told him that it was a strange reading experience.  Goransson's long, sequence-y poems about living in the modern world are firmly in the realm of "inhuman" poetry (which, I would argue, isn't a category that actually exists, despite all the proponents of this kind of style in my program).  Some of the lines are really amazing ("my ambulance good looks" being one I particularly love), but other lines I absolutely hated.  It's a whiplash of a book, and I'm glad I read it.  This isn't the kind of poetry that's for everyone, but it also looks different from anything else out there.  It'll be interesting to take workshop with Johannes next semester. 

Shake:  Again, another book recommended by Drew (obviously, he reads way more hip poetry than I do).  I really enjoyed this one.  Beckman's style is deceptively plain, and he layers flat-out statements and subtle images in interesting ways.  Shake is made up of three sequences.  The titular first sequence is my least favorite, although it's still quite good.  The second part, "Let the People Die," is made up of non-rhyming/non-metered sonnets that are a lot of fun.  The last and best section, "New Haven," is really lovely.  If Beckman uses the first two sequences to show off what he can do, than he uses this final section to show how that wonderful style of his can still be capable of emotional expression.  These expressions are done so subtly and with such stark beauty that you can't help but be hypnotized by the voice in them.  Beneath this book's deceptive surfaces, painful love poems shine. 

Spoon River Anthology:  I can't believe I've made it all the way to graduate school before finally reading Master's super-famous 1915 collection of first-person poems about people buried in the Spoon River cemetery.  The poems are heavy in irony, and admittedly, they get a little old after awhile.  But there's still some awesome lines scattered throughout this book, and it's easy to see why Spoon River has endured as long as it has.

This Week in Trashy Reads 2012 #1

Trashy Read 2012 #1:  Unraveled, by Courtney Milan

My digital copy of Courtney Milan's Uncovered, my last trashy read, came with an excerpt from her latest book, Unraveled.  The excerpt was the length of the book's first chapter, and I was immediately hooked.  The hero had an actual job as a judge.  He's not a duke or a earl or in line to inherit anything!  This is not something you see very often in historical romance, so I was intrigued.  I bought a copy for my Kindle and read it in a matter of days.

Unraveled isn't particularly great, but what it does well it does very well.  The story of the hero and heroine's relationship stretches credibility at times, but I didn't find this to be particularly disconcerting.  Miranda works as a seamstress and wigmaker in a bad part of town, and she finds her life easier to live than many others in her position because she has the protection of a mysterious figure named the Patron.  The Patron controls the goings-on in the slums of Bristol, usually through super-illegal means.  The Patron's hand extends far, and Miranda uses her acting skills to serve as a  false witness in court when the Patron demands it.  Eventually, though, her scheme is figured out by the hardest magistrate in the local court, Smite Turner (which, by the way, is a great name for a cold-at-first romance hero).  Smite finds he can't stop thinking about Miranda once he first admonishes her, though, and eventually he proposes that she act as his mistress for one month in exchange for her ability to get herself and her ward, Robbie, out of the slums.  This works about as well as you can imagine, with the hero and heroine developing too strong feelings for each other and then angsting about it for 200 pages. 

Despite its business-as-usual romance plot, Milan does a great job of fitting in a more suspenseful plot about the Patron's identity and downfall.  Also, Smite's backstory is appropriately tragic without ever seeming overcooked.  Apparently, Milan has two books about Smite's very different brothers, which I will eventually have to look into (particularly the one featuring his older brother, Ash, who shows up in this one and seems pretty cool).  I didn't always understand the motivations of Miranda, but in general, I didn't find this particularly bothersome, especially as she turned into a more interesting character as the novel went forward.

Maybe the best thing about this book is something Miranda says to Smite at the very end, when they are declaring their love for each other.  "You anchor me without holding me down," she tells him.  Holy hell, if that's not exactly what the ideal turn-out should be in every romance.  I love that line, and I love Milan for writing it.  I am adding her to my list of romance writers to keep. 

The Art of Noveling

Book Reviewed: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach 

It might be uncool to say now, but back in the day, I used to be a huge John Irving fan.  Irving's novels are self-contained worlds; all the people you could possibly need to spend time with were right there in front of you, with nice and neat story arcs tied up in 500 pages.  It's been a while since I read a thick, meaty contemporary novel like that.  I didn't realize how much I missed those kinds of books until I picked up Chad Harbach's beloved 2011 novel, The Art of Fielding.

Harbach's book got a lot of press when it dropped at the end of the summer, and I had a friend who read it and liked it a lot, so I knew it existed.  But it didn't really land on my radar until it began making every single best-of book list at the end of the year.  Every critic had the same thing to say about why they chose it: that it was a book full of great characters that a reader genuinely could care about.  Damn, I thought, I guess I'm gonna have to give this book a try.

Oh, this book is so good.  So very, very good.  At the fictional liberal arts institution of Westish College in Wisconsin, football/baseball player Mike Schwartz recruits Henry Skrimshander, a super-talented shortstop who never thought he'd go to college.  Schwartz helps shape Henry into a dutiful student and athlete, but he can't stop fate from intervening in the form of a throw gone wrong.  After said throw, Henry finds himself in a downward spiral that seems to pull everyone in: Schwartz, Henry's preternaturally calm roommate Owen, school president Guert Affenlight, and Guert's daughter, Pella.  As these characters make increasingly erratic and often self-destructive decisions, the book just pulls the reader in more and more.

I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book.  The characters are put together so well, and with such love, that you can't help but want the best for them.  Of course, this means everything bad that happens to them makes you want to throw the book across the room (which was really a problem, considering I was reading it on a Kindle).  When I was trying to decide if reading this book would be worth my time, my friend who had read it months earlier told me it was rewarding but required an incredible amount of empathy.  Man, was he right.  The final 100 pages or so began to feel like the sweetest, slowest torture possible.  I managed to finish this 500+ page book in four days because I couldn't stop at chapter breaks.  I obsessed over this book to the point that it began to make my stomach hurt some nights.  I adored Mike Schwartz so much that every time he showed up on the page, my palms sweated.

I don't think The Art of Fielding is a perfect book.  The last few chapters edge awfully close to over-sentimentality at times (although the book's final lines are well-earned and poignant), and the only female character - Pella - seemed awfully underwritten compared to her male counterparts.  But what the book does well - its strong writing, its amazing characters, its bittersweetness - is done so well that these issues barely register.  In some ways, this book encapsulates a certain kind of small, liberal-arts college experience so well that I could barely distinguish itfrom my own said experience.  How many times did I feel like Henry during my career at DePauw?  More times than I care to count.  This book is full of so many realistic, even painful, details that it makes up for some of the book's more fanciful plot points. 

I cannot recommend The Art of Fielding enough, especially for those of you who went to small Midwestern colleges or who are really passionate about something that might not come as naturally as you might have once imagined.  Yes, I just described myself.  That's how good this book is.  It's about my least favorite sport in the world, baseball, and I still managed to find myself in it.  I almost never feel this way about novels anymore.  God, I loved this book. 

Beth's Best Reads of 2011

By now, you all know the drill on this one.  Here's the rules: The books can be any age, but I had to read them for the first time in the calendar year of 2011. No re-reads allowed. The books are listed in a countdown fashion, so my favorite read is at the bottom of the list at #1. I'm also attaching my original review for each book.

2011 was a great reading year, mainly because my friends and family members were suggestion superstars this year, constantly tossing great books my way.  The pickings this year were so good that I expanded my usual list of 10 books to 15 this year. Of course, all these good books made it extra hard to decide what should top the list.  It was especially hard to decide a winner between my top 2 books, but one of them emerged the victor nevertheless.  I hope you enjoy this list, and please be sure to tell me what your favorite reads were this year!

15.  A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr.  My biggest weakness in fiction is for brief, poetic novels, and A Month in the Country is the perfect example of this type of book.  Carr tells the story of a physically, morally, and emotionally wounded World War I veteran in just a hundred and some pages, but it feels like the stuff of an epic.  What makes this novel so wonderful is the amount of things that go unsaid.  It's what the narrator doesn't tell us that is most devastating, making this one of the loneliest books I've ever read. 

14.  Silk Is for Seduction, by Loretta Chase.  Laugh all you want.  Just as I was losing faith in the historical romance, Loretta Chase's new book swooped in and saved the day this summer.  Marcelline is without a doubt my favorite in a long line of awesome Chase heroines, and her romance with Clevedon is organic and well-deserved.  This is just the first book in a new series by Chase, and if the others are half as good as this one, I will be a very happy Beth. 

13.  I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak.  I've made it no secret on this blog that I'm a huge Zusak fan.  His most famous novel, The Book Thief, topped this list last year.  I Am the Messenger is a deceptively simple story about a young man looking to make his life better.  The plot is implausible, but that doesn't matter.  Because this young adult novel is all about what it means to find the courage to change your life.  The narrator, Ed Kennedy, and his friends and family aren't always great people, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve the chance for forgiveness or love in their lives.  I love how non-cynical Markus Zusak is, and I think his streak of humanity is what makes his books so memorable. 

12.  The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson.  As an unflinching look at the mistakes parents can make in raising their children, The Family Fang can feel a little heavy at times.  Luckily, Wilson finds the humor and warmth in his two protagonists, the screwed-up siblings Annie and Buster Fang.  This novel can make you laugh and wince at the same time, which is no small feat. 

11.  Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link.  This book made the list simply for the fact that it contained my two favorite short stories I read this year: "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" and "Louise's Ghost."  The former is a series of love letters from beyond the grave and the second is an extremely bizarre examination of friendship and jealousy.  I think Link is one of the best short story writers out there, and I really wish she'd hurry up and publish a new book. 

10.  The River King, by Alice Hoffman.  If Neil Gaiman was the de facto master of my 2010 list, then Alice Hoffman has taken his place in 2011.  I went on a Hoffman rampage this summer (see No. 4 below), and even though this isn't her best work, I think it might just be her most evocative.  I've never read a book so deep in mood.  By the book's end, I felt as waterlogged as the drowned boy at the book's center.  Seriously, the pages began to smell like a mildewed dorm room while I was reading them.  Hoffman isn't afraid to go dark, and this book is a testament to her supernatural strengths as a straight-up storyteller. 

9.  A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan.  I was so impressed by the structure of this award-winning novel this summer that I was sure it would place higher on this list.  Unfortunately, it didn't stick with me on an emotional level the way a lot of the books on this list did.  But I still think Egan is crazy-talented, and the construction of Goon Squad blows me away just thinking about it.  The book has some really wonderful and moving chapters, even if it did feel overly clever as whole.  Egan shows just what narrative derring-do can accomplish in contemporary fiction.

8.  My Year of Flops: One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure, by Nathan Rabin.  I've been reading Nathan Rabin's AV Club column on movies that bombed at the box office since my freshman year of college, so I knew I'd eventually pick up the book that came out of those columns.  But what I wasn't expecting was how rewarding an experience this hilarious collection would be.  The first movie Rabin tore apart was Elizabethtown (which just so happens to be one of my least favorite movies ever), and this essay appears at the beginning of the book.  Then, after years of writing his flops column, Rabin rewatched Elizabethtown and found that his life had changed so much for the better that he could no longer mock the film's heart.  The resulting essay from that experience is actually quite moving.  Never in my life did I think the snarky Rabin would make me cry, but he did. 

7.  Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.  When I read this classic novel back in July, I never thought it would make this list.  I found the whole thing to be batshit crazy.  But you know what?  I haven't been able to stop thinking about Wuthering Heights since.  It features some of the least sympathetic characters of all time - crazypants Heathcliff, bitchy Catherine, annoyingly spineless Edgar Linton.  But the things that come out of these people's mouths ranks among some of the most beautiful sentences in literature, and the book certainly entertained the hell out of me.  Had anyone told me how nuts this book was, I never would have believed them.  I'm glad I finally found out for myself. 
6.  The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, by Brenda Coultas.  This strange little book - half poetry and half ghost stories - is unlike anything else I've encountered in recent poetry.  Coultas writes poems about Indiana and its surrounding states using the language of place and time, creating a kind of elegy for the abolition movement in her native Midwest.  The ghost stories in the second part of the book are creepy and elusive, hitting just the right nerves in their brief tellings.  Coultas lurks outside of the contemporary poetry scene, and this outsider perspective does wonders for her work, which is entirely her own. 

5.  A Short Autobiography, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Edited by James L.W. West III).  Rumors of this book began way back in 2010, and I was literally counting down the days until it came out this summer.  Fitzgerald scholar James West put together Fitzgerald's most personal essays in chronological order, creating the first ever view of Fitzgerald's life as told from the author's own point of view.  This book seems tailor-made for a Fitzgerald fan, and I really appreciate its existence.  The essay "Author's House," a feigned interview between a fictional reporter and a one-time famous writer who is clearly Fitzgerald himself, is particularly heartbreaking and worth the price of admission alone. 

4.  The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman.  This is one of those books that flies well below the critical radar, which I think is unfortunate.  Alice Hoffman might not be a future classic author, but she creates atmosphere in her books like no one else writing right now.  The Red Garden is immensely entertaining, an unfolding of characters and moments centered on the ficitonal town of Blackwell, Massachusetts.  This series of connected short stories features some really lovely scenes, ones that I've carried around with me since I read the book back in May.  If you're looking for a book that just tells a great story, this is the one for you. 

3.  Crush, by Richard Siken.  Yes, this book has been around since 2005.  But I didn't pick it up to read until this last February.  I should never have waited so long.  This is a truly great collection of poetry.  Violent, erotic, and energetic, the lines in Crush continually knocked me out while I was reading them.  Poems like "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" feel completely vital to not just contemporary poetry, but to the longer view of poetry as well.  Crush is the kind of book that really exemplifies what poetry is capable of doing. 

2.  The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy.  The second I finished Percy's 1961 novel, I knew it was making this list.  I really, really love this book.  Jack "Binx" Bolling is in the middle of a life crisis just before his 30th birthday.  Unhappy with his womanizing, his constant moviegoing, and his transitory ways, he's forced to reckon with his soul and his lifestyle.  The thing that sets this novel apart from other similar stories is its beautiful writing.  Some of Percy's sentences had my head spinning from their sheer perfection.  The Moviegoer is the kind of short, rich novel that deserves to be savored slowly. 

1.  The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker.  This short, conversational novel just barely managed to beat out The Moviegoer as my favorite book I read this year.  It won based solely on what it meant to me personally.  Baker's story about Paul Chowder, a poet who agonizes over writing the introduction for an anthology of rhyming poems, is funny and sad in equal measure.  Baker gets into the head of a poet in a way I rarely encounter, and the things Chowder says about poetry are the kinds of arguments poets have been having for centuries.  But whether you're a poetry fan or not, this novel manages to be entertaining in its breezy and fast style.  I read The Anthologist at just the right time in my life, and it's become the best kind of book to read: the kind that becomes a friend.

This Week in Trashy Reads 2011 #8

Trashy Read 2011 #8: Unlocked, by Courtney Milan

It sounds silly to say, but the historical romance writer Courtney Milan was the biggest reason I decided it was finally time to look into getting an e-reader.  When her novella Unlocked came out in e-book form only a few months ago, it got great reviews.  I had to get my hands on this book, and if getting an e-reader meant finally having a chance to read stuff I couldn't get in paper form, than so be it.  I would get an e-reader.

So it's no surprise that Unlocked is one of the first books I bought for my Kindle (the fact that it only cost 99 cents helped as well).  It's a short, simple little story, but I appreciated how sweet it was.  I've mentioned before on this blog that I enjoy reading Nora Roberts because she always writes protagonists who are good people.  They remind me of the kind of people I'm attracted to in real life.  Unlocked works for the exact same reason.  There's not much of anything in the way of plot going on in this novella, and the actual character development is pretty weak because of the length.  But the hero and heroine are likable and you want good things for them, which goes a long way in my opinion.

Evan Carlton, the Earl of Westfield, returns home after years spent mountain climbing in the Alps.  Before he left England, he was in love with a girl named Elaine Warren.  Unfortunately, Elaine wasn't among the more popular members of the ton, so Evan found himself all too frequently making fun of her with his friends.  He made her life miserable.  So he comes back to make amends.  Elaine is suspicious of him, but she attempts to befriend him eventually.  Of course, she finds she loves him too.  They get a pretty speedy happily ever after.  I really liked the character of Elaine because she should have been a cliched wallflower but Milan never took her in that direction.  Sure, she's easily embarrassed and wary of social events, but she's still smart and funny and enjoys life.  She and Evan are so damn agreeable that you have to root for them.  Also, Evan does something for Elaine and her family about half-way through the book that made my heart jump a little.  I usually roll my eyes at the cheesy stuff in romance novels, but even I had to admit his act was incredibly sweet.

Overall, it's a nice if inconsequential little romance.  Milan is a fairly new writer, and she's won a crazy amount of fans since her 2010 debut.  I will most definitely be reading more of her in the future.  She's not quite as witty or fun as Loretta Chase, but if she keeps doing a Nora Roberts and creating warm, inviting little romances, I'll be a fan for sure. 

Creepy But Slightly Overrated

Book Reviewed: Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake

I got a Kindle from my parents for Christmas, and so far I love having it.  It's cheaper and easier for me to buy romances and new books, and my library has digital lending, which means I can now access library books on the go and carry them around in one place.  I will still be buying trade paperbacks and poetry in paper form, but the Kindle should do wonders for my reading habits, I think. 

This is all background to the fact that the first book I bought for my Kindle was a teen paranormal romance.  Kendare Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood made NPR's best-of-2011 young adult books list, and the book's description sounded right up my geeky alley.  Cas Lowood, a teenage ghost hunter, goes to Thunder Bay, Ontario, in pursuit of an infamous ghost with the creepy moniker of Anna Dressed in Blood.  Cas is cynical and avoids attachment, focusing only on his goal of one day going after the spirit that killed his father.  In the meantime, he travels all over North America, hunting down violent ghosts.  Basically, this book's set-up sounds like Supernatural fanfiction.  Which is exactly why it appealed to me.

However, when Cas gets to Thunder Bay, his plans don't quite work out.  First, he accidentally makes some real friends with the popular but loyal Carmel and dorky, lonely Thomas.  Then, Anna doesn't turn out to be what Cas expected.  Yes, she's a violent killer.  But that's only because of a complicated and tragic past that trapped her in her haunted house.  Cas eventually falls for and helps Anna, but when his own scary past catches up with him and his new friends, he struggles to figure out just what his new life of friendships and a false sense of security might mean.  Anna Dressed in Blood is the first part of what looks to be a longer series (the next book comes out sometime in 2012), so it's got a rushed ending that isn't wholly satisfying.  Also, while I couldn't help but like Cas, I had trouble with the character of Anna.  It's easy to see how their two lives would endear them to each other, but I'm not sure I quite believed the romantic angle in the second half of the book.  Same goes with the budding relationship between Thomas and Carmel.

Anna Dressed in Blood is not a great book, and I'm not exactly sure why it got so much end-of-the-year praise.  Despite that, it was still a fun read.  There are some genuinely terrifying moments in this novel, and Blake knows how to write creepy in a way most pure horror writers can't even manage.  (This might actually be one of the book's weaknesses: the horror stuff is so good that you can't help but wonder why the book wasn't geared more toward that genre).  I think the relationship between Cas and Anna has the potential to expand in more interesting ways in the later books, though, so I will probably follow the rest of the series as it goes along. 

Note: I am once again working at the library and if any paranormal-reading teens ask me for recommendations, I am throwing this one their way for sure.