On “Rum Punch” by Elmore Leonard *****

The basis for Tarantino's Jackie Brown, this novel about Jackie follows the plot line at points fairly closely. It works better as a novel, I think, than it did as a movie, which I found disappointing. Still, as I am now through several Leonard works, I find that what perhaps makes his novels less interesting than they could be is his limited third-person omniscient point of view (that is, he wanders around from perspective to perspective). I find that the technique means that we are not ever for long with one person's perspective and thus rarely become emotionally connected to anyone. Thus, there's a degree to which the novels are more heavily plot dependent to sustain one's focus.

One issue with reading this novel so many years after seeing that movie is that I kept imaging certain actors as certain characters, even though Tarantino chose to change up some of the characters significantly. Jackie, for example, in the novel is a hot-looking fortysomething blonde; in the movie, she's a good-looking African American woman; my mind kept returning to the film rather than the book. The dynamic, however, is significantly different with the racial change.

The story is essentially that of a bail bondsman, a gun runner, federal agents, and the gun runner's associates. Max Cherry, the bondsman, has a run-in with Ordell, the gun runner, whose money is tied up overseas. That money comes in via Jackie, a flight attendant who sneaks it in in her luggage with each flight. She gets caught; Ordell posts bond; Cherry falls for the gal. Schemes are laid wherein multiple parties decide to abscond with the money Jackie brings in each month. It's uncertain really whose side each person is on until the end.

On “James” by Percival Everett ****

I “read” this book over a weekend car trip via audio listening. It was a great production in terms of the reader being very engaging. The book itself . . .

I'd been wanting to get around to Everett's work since seeing American Fiction (based on his novel Erasure). Of course, all the awards James won made me understand the degree to which I needed even more to get to Everett's work. One presentation I saw recently called his sell-out novel, much like the work discussed in Erasure, insofar as this is a historical novel about the African American experience that tends to gobble up awards and sales.

In James, Everett sets out to retell Huck Finn from Jim's point of view, or at least, that's how it begins. In that sense, the novel is a refreshing retelling of some of the troubling aspects of the iconic novel. As fun as Huck Finn is and as much as Huck Finn sets out to right American wrongs with regard to slavery, its infantalization of Jim has always been disturbing. Perhaps, there are minor signs that Jim isn't the innocent he's portrayed as in that novel, but if those signs exist, Everett makes them explicit here, sometimes to comic effect. The enslaved workers speak in a patois and act stupid around whites, but are elegant and clever around other enslaved people. Everett makes explicit that they are “signifying.” And there are some neat tricks, where Jim, at one point, is forced to pose as a white guy posing as a black guy—with numerous complications.

On the whole, the first half of the book follows Huck Finn's timeline rather closely. In a way, it's great to read the events from Jim's point of view. But there's also a certain predictiveness to it, given that it's simply following another book's plot. The second half of the book, however, breaks significantly with its source material, and the work becomes a slave revenge work. There's power in that, I suppose, but also at points a certain preachiness that makes the piece seem overwritten. I was left feeling torn between my sadness at not seeing the rest of the source novel from Jim's point of view and my relief that this novel went another direction and thus ended up not being as predictable. Neither solution, however, seemed like it would have been wholly satisfactory.

On “Get Shorty” by Elmore Leonard *****

 

I come to this work having already seen the movie, which colors the whole thing. Would my reaction to the work have been the same? I liked it, especially the characters (and especially the main character), and then again, I was not as enthralled as I have been by some other works, because I kind of knew where everything was headed (at least until the end). It was hard not to see Travolta and Hackman and Devito as the characters in their various roles.

Except, everything did not quite head in the same direction as the movie, at least as I remember it. The ending kind of fell apart, rather than tidying up everything as well as the movie did, but that's kind of the book's point. I like both the book and movie endings in their own way. They're doing somewhat different things and making a similar point.

Like the book La Brava, this one has something of a metafictional vibe, if the book were a movie. That is, Chili Palmer is a guy working for the mafia, enforcing the payment of extortionary loans. He goes to Hollywood to track one of the guys who hasn't paid up—a guy who faked his own death to get out of paying the loan and to grab his own pile of cash from an airliner for wrongful death. There, Palmer falls in love with the film industry and wants to become part of it. He pitches a movie to a producer/director of B movies. The film he pitches doesn't have an ending, because it's Chili Palmer's own story, the story of how he ended up in Hollywood via his attempt to track down this guy who faked his death. Everyone who hears the story loves it, up to the point that Palmer gets to, which is wherever Palmer himself is in the novel. As such, of course, there's never an ending—even at the book's end, which leaves quite a few things up in the air, like how Chili is going to fund a movie, what happened to a mafia guy who's tracking Chili and likely to turn him in after being set up, and so on.

On "Akiva" by Reuven Hammer ***

This is the second biography of Akiva that I read, and it is the more straightforward of the two. That is, it goes a bit more chronologically, though like the other, it too works off a number of themes. It also seemed a bit more hagiographic. I won't rehearse the contractions regarding Akiva's life, since I did that when discussing the other book, though this author tends to be more willing to say something is legend versus something is probably fact than Holtz was. Still, there are many things neither author knows or even guesses at.

Instead, broader picture emerges. Akiva grew up poorly educated but became learned as an adult. He married at least once and was devoted to his wife. He had many followers. He helped (indeed, was instrumental in) create the Mishnah, the collection of topically arranged Jewish teachings were the foundation for the Talmud. He didn't oppose the Bar Kokhba Revolt, although the degree to which he supported it as uncertain. He likely did call Kokhba the Messiah. Akiva died a martyr, for teaching the law when it was illegal, though he likely died in prison, facing trial, before execution.

Hammer writes quite a bit more about Akiva's relationship with Christianity. Part of the motivation for the Mishnah appears to have been Christianity and its competing books. For Akiva, the law (oral and written) was sufficient and good; no sacrifice was needed. Indeed, Akiva didn't really believe in an oral law--it was part of the written law, he would have claimed, in there all along. Still, other passages in the Talmud show how the Sages placed themselves even above God in places in terms of their importance to that law. At the same time, the law came directly from heaven, for Akiva; it wasn't the work of inspired humans, as some sages would claim--it was God's actual words. By fashioning so much importance on these subjects, Akiva could deny the various claims of Christians.

On “The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered” edited by Peter Schafer ***

I'm not generally a fan of edited volumes, as they don't lay out a coherent argument and sometimes seems rather slapdash in terms of contents (as in, these are the subtopics on this topic that were available given the author we had). Schafer's book fits into that category; however, it is one of the few more recent books on the subject of the Bar Kokhba War, so I felt obligated to read it, given the paucity of other sources.

As Schafer lays out in his introduction, our knowledge of the war is scant. There is no exhaustive, though unreliable account, like there is of the First Jewish War. Instead, we have hints in the Talmud and mentions in various Christian sources and an abbreviated account in the Roman historian Cassius Dio. This means that what little we know beyond this comes from archeology, which there are frequently new finds in, though the importance of said finds can differ substantially.

The book starts off with several chapters that rehash points I was largely familiar with and some of the authors come to conclusions that question some previous assumptions, while others contradict other authors in the volume. So at least one gets a sence that many of these ideas are not settled.

Some takeaways: The question of whether Hadrian originally intended Aelia as a punishment of the rebellious Jews or a misunderstoond Hellenized restoration of the city that was reconfigured into a fully Roman city after the revolt remains open. Whether the ban on circumcision preceded the revolt or followed it or whether there ever was a ban is also open, though the argument that a ban preceded the revolt is pretty well dismissed when one scholar notes that had there been one that was empire wide before the revolt, that revolt would not have occurred only in Judea. More likely, whatever “ban” there was, it related to a more general Roman law regarding the making of eunuchs; and such a ban never applied to ethnic Jews and their own children—just to converted Jews. There's a chapter on what the dates for the revolt should be. A couple of other articles detail the scope of the rebellion, which seems to have largely existed only in Judea but may have drawn on resources in other areas and also been accompanied by a revolt in Perea/Nabatea/Arabia.

The most interesting parts of the book come toward the end and draw heavily on archeology, looking at the underground hideouts and the refuge caves. Although we find such hideouts in Galilee, the heaviest concentration is in the area Bar Kokhba came to rule. Some have posited that the hideouts in Galilee may date to other time periods, such as the First Jewish War, but there isn't evidence that they were used for wartime purposes then, nor were they used in the Second Jewish War, however, as Galilee did not rebel. One author concludes that they largely stem from the interwar period but that the Galileans weren't motivated to rebel and those who were migrated south to the conflict. The penultimate article argues that the temple mount was never part of Aelia and that no temple of Jupiter was built on it; instead, Aelia shifted the center of the former city to the northwest, leaving the old center in tatters.

A final article on historical memory, which was little of my concern, actually proved to be one of the most interesting. The author points to how the Bar Kokhba legend was adopted by Zionists near the modern reestablishment of Israel. Bar Kokhba becomes a hero in textbooks, one who defends Israel against the hated Romans and even defeats a lion. His eventual loss and the devastation brought to Judea as a result is glossed over or wholly ignored. A holiday for another figure has been almost wholly refashioned to celebrate Bar Kokhba. As the state has existed longer, a more complex and complete protrayal of Bar Kokhba has emerged in textbooks, noting not just the heroism but the problems his revolt engendered. It reminds me of how in the United States, our Founders are glorified and simplified, but how over time historians, and in turn textbooks, have complicated that vision. As in Israel, so in the United States: Some are not happy about the fuller view being provided in classrooms.

On "The Origins of the Bible" by John W. Miller ***

I have read quite a few works recently on the canonization of the New Testament, but I haven't put much time into reading so many works about the Old Testament. That was this book's focus. Miller falls in line with some of the common scholarly thinking that posits various editors or authors for the Old Testament aligned with various political/religious interests. In Miller's case, the Bible is in large part the result of a competition between the Aaronic priesthood and the Levitical priesthood. Each wrote various sections of the Bible espousing their particular points of view.

At the end of the process, around the time that Judah returned to the Promised Land to rebuild the temple, the two groups finally put an end to their significant fighting (though there were lingering issues, Miller brings out using certain Nehemiah verses and incidents). Both groups' writings were essentially canonized. So although the Levitical Deuteronomy was written first, the Aaronic Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers were integrated with the collection and placed earlier, and so on. Some prophets were Levite sympathizers, some Aaron sympathizers, and so on.

I don't buy much of this argument, but even so, there was much I learned here. Miller is of a mind that the Jewish Bible was completed by (or at) the time of the Macabees. The late writing posited for Daniel and Esther is pretty well accepted in academic discourse, though it was interesting to see how Miller worked these two works into Macabean times (Esther, for example, while telling us about Purim actually tells us about the defeat of Nicanor, which happened on the eve of Purim, thus setting up the importance of that day). This means that the Old Testament canon was complete by about 200 BCE, not something that was completed in the second century CE in response to Christianity, as another book I read recently claimed.

Miller appears to be a post-millennialist. He ends his book by claiming that the real point of the New Testament comes in its Pentateuch, where its true ending resides, at the end of the book of Acts. That book ends with a kind of openness, showing how Christianity is open to all, even as the last few books of the Jewish Bible were essentially trying to claim; all the world eventually will come to see God's way and then the Messiah will return. God is patient; he will wait.

On "Freaky Deaky" by Elmore Leonard ***

The superhero in this book is a guy named Chris, ex-bomb squad, looking for another spot in the police force--preferably homicide, but settling for the moment for sex crimes. Chris can essentially read the criminal mind, knows what's going to happen before it does. The rest of his life, though, isn't much together.

The book ends strongly and starts strongly. But it lacks a strong epilogue and in between is not quite as enthralling as one might hope, given that the characters are somewhat predictable. The majority of them, of the crooks that is, are sixties radical burnouts who have turned to money making, but unlike those who sold out and went to Wall Street and the like, these radicals took their knowledge of illegal activities to take advantage of others, run cons, and steal big.

Robin has her sites on a couple of rich guys named Mark and Woody, who were sort of on the edge of protest movements back in the day. For her scheme, she enlists Skip, a demolitions expert. Both spent a bit of time in jail.

Back up: Chris is on his last day on the job in the bomb squad. A guy blows up, because the cops don't quite know how to defuse the bomb and the guy loses patience. Now in the sex crimes division, a hot-looking gal comes to report a rape. Chris ends up trying to arrest her assailant Woody on a trumped-up charge. Woody is an all-out drunk but rich. That richness gives him a bit of authority, enough to get Chris suspended for his arrest attempt. Mark, Woody's brother, got little of the inheritance from their mom and fancies himself a theater producer, but Woody, who got most of the inheritance, funds the productions. Donnell is Woody's caretaker, an ex-Black Panther who is also looking to steal as much as he can from Woody.

Robin plans to use Skip to blow stuff up around Mark and Woody, threatening them essentially until they give her a nice chunk of cash. It's a dumb plan that slowly gets better the more things fall part. Rather than blowing up stuff around the two, for example, Robin ends up planning to kill off Woody and Donnell, so that Mark garners the inheritance--in other words, she enrolls Mark in a pay-to-kill scheme. But things don't go as planned.

Meanwhile, Chris's meeting with Woody ends up getting him suspended from the police force--mostly because Chris has broken up with his girlfriend and has to move out and thus out of the city and can't be on the force. This info becomes public knowledge via Woody's associates. So Chris strikes out on his own to "save" the gal he's fallen for, which is what brings him in contact with the bomb pro Skip and his associates and their schemes.

On “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque ***

So a film based on this book has been up at the top of the charts on Netflix for a few months. I have known about and seen the book for years, but I never got around to reading it. At least one of my kids read it for school, however, so we had a copy on our shelf, and looking for something to read while on vacation, I settled on it.

As far as being a harrowing portrait of war and particularly World War I, this is a fine book. It has a little of the zaniness that is typical of many war books—practical jokes played among the troops, trying to get off or away from oversight to get a little extra food or sex, and so on. But the whole thing is tinged with a spirit of sadness and despair. These are men—barely more than boys, really, as they are typically 17 or so—who are discovering not the joys of life but its end, way too early.

And that is where this book is perhaps slightly more unique. It indites the culture that would send such young people to war, sometimes against their will, and certainly with a great deal of encouragement about the need to serve country and people, even as the older people stay home to “make decisions.” The main character, Paul Baumer, is part of a company of one hundred men, many of them from the same school. They've barely had a life. As the novel progresses, we watch the company slowly shrink, the boys become hardened (even as newcomers join the fray). Those moment of levity and spread thin across more moments of simply tedium punctuated by other moments of terror and plenty of descriptions of it: grisly ones of body parts strewn across the landscape where another company has just been. We have the coming home on leave section, where Paul hardly knows how to explain what he's been through and yet plenty of people want to hear about his “adventures.” We have Paul coming face to face with a man he kills and wishing he hadn't; indeed, trying to save his enemy. We have Paul trying to save many of his comrades—which brings us back to his company. I believe we join the action when there are roughly 38 or so such men left; we leave off action when there are 7. Such is life on the front lines—or indeed, in World War I, when a generation of young men were essentially wiped out in war. It is a hopeless book.

That hopelessness isn't what caused me to rank the book as relatively average. It is a powerful depiction of war, no doubt. It is not, however, much of a novel. I never really felt I came to know Paul's comrades (or even Paul) that well, which kills some of the pathos one would otherwise feel. There is also not much in the way of plot. Episode follows episode but without much of a buildup or structure. I suppose one could make a case for such a plot being not unlike (the) war itself, but the lack of character development really does seem a weakness. Yes, men come and go, but Paul seems very attached to those around him; I wish I could have felt the same way. Instead, they were names of people come and gone.

On "Glitz" by Elmore Leonard ****

Having now read six Leonard novels, I'm coming to see a pattern, which is not unlike most novels in the Western genre, even though Leonard moved over to writing crime fiction. At the center of each book is a superhero, some man is simply so full of incredible insight and ability that he makes everything in his world work out for the right. Most of these men also have a bit of a weakness that gets them into a little bit of trouble, and usually that weakness is a woman--though often a source of their strength is also a woman. I go right back to the main character in 52 Pickup, for example, whose affair is really the start of all that man's troubles, but the blackmailers have picked on the wrong guy, and he's helped along throughout his ordeal by his strong wife. Or think of La Brava, who falls for a not-so-good movie star, but again, she and her cronies have picked on the wrong guy.

In Glitz that man is Vincent Mora, a cop from Miami, who is recovering from an injury in Puerto Rico. (The novel starts off with a great hook--Mora getting shot while being mugged on his way home from the grocery store.) He falls for a twenty-one-year-old prostitute who is simply after a money and the better life it will bring. Mora is her ticket, until something better comes along: an opportunity to work in Atlantic City. Like the girls trapped in Epstein's web, this is not the opportunity it appears, Mora warns her, and sure enough, she ends up dead a few days later, which is what brings Mora up to New Jersey to investigate her death. There are a cache of mob characters Mora investigates on his way toward solving the crime, each of whom doesn't really know what he's up against. Tough guys they are, they are no match for the tougher and smarter Mora, who knows how to turn them against one another for his own gain.

But there's also a serial killer on the loose, one who has it out for Mora, who busted him a decade ago and who is out on an easy sentence and constant good fortune that allows him to stay free. And there's a lounge singer with whom Mora takes up. The lounge singer turns out to the be the strong woman who saves/aids Mora, and the serial killer, Teddy, his arch nemesis, whose main skill is not so much smarts as luck. Leonard does a neat, common trick and brings us back to the novel's start at the end, but with echoes of new meaning and resonance.

There is much to like in this book, but as I noted, there does seem like something of a formula to it--and also, the constant violence wears a bit thin. If shootings and deaths and fights really were this common in everyday America we'd be in sad shape and have no reason ever to venture beyond our homes outside of bare necessities. I'm finally getting around to Leonard at a time in my life when I am less willing to give such things as much of a pass.

On "Rabbi Akiva" by Barry W. Holtz ***

I'm reading two biographies of Rabbi Akiva at the same time and managed to complete this one first,  but as such, I find myself getting somewhat confused between the two, since they share accounts of similar events and statements. The big difference between the two is that this one seems the more topical, the less biographical. That's because of the author's method in writing the work.

You see, the problem with Akiva is that our information about him comes largely from the Talmud. In fact, he's referenced more than one thousand times in the Babylonian Talmud and more than four hundred times in the shorter Jerusalem Talmud (at least as I remember the count both books gave). But those references are contradictory. They don't present any sort of biographical portrait as we would think of it. As such, knowing just who and what Akiva did is difficult--perhaps even impossible--although he was clearly important to rabbinic Judaism's formation.

While the other biography takes a chance on trying to sort truth from error, Holtz doesn't bother. He's more interested, as he says, in what the various portraits of Akiva say about the writers than what they say about Akiva. As such, all the contradictions are presented, but they are less often weighed. More often, Holtz discusses what they mean to the particular audience they are aimed at.
So some of the contractions (again, I may be mixing up books at this point, as both cover similar ground): 

Akiva was born poor but he ended up rich. He was anti-intellectual but ended up the most intellectual of all rabbis. His wife would only marry him if he went to a Jewish academy, or he went to a Jewish academy and abandoned his wife. He grew rich when his father-in-law, who disapproved of him early on, accepted him as a great rabbi and then gave him lots of money. Or he was poor until he remarried--the ex-wife of a Roman governor of Judea, the same one who would put him to death.

I mostly turned to Akiva because I wanted to know a bit more about the Bar Kochba revolt, which he supposedly supported. But Holtz only quotes one passage in that regard, and he's less certain--in fact, he seems rather tepid toward the idea--that Akiva actually contributed to the Jewish rebel cause. Maybe he leaned toward Bar Kochba because of his early experiences, but it doesn't seem like he actually encouraged uprising. When he is put to death, it is unclear whether that is after or before the war or during the war. He is put to death for not giving up the law, for preaching publically, which seems more likely after the war, but there are not any sources outside the Talmud that confirm that this was ever against the law. Was Akiva even put to death? Such are the many mysteries of this man both authors think one of the greatest Jewish thinkers/sages ever.

On "La Brava" by Elmore Leonard ****

This one took a bit longer to get into than the previous works I've read of Leonard's. The plot doesn't really get ticking till halfway through. Instead, Leonard spends a good deal of space introducing us to the characters involved. There's Joseph La Brava, the cameraman and ex-government agent. There's his friend Maurice. There's some woman named Jean Shaw, a former actress. And then there's this other plot going on, with Richard Nobles and a guy named Cundo. They're the seeming crooks in this narrative, but it's hard to know exactly what their angle is in terms of what they're plotting other than some small-time bad stuff.

Meanwhile, La Brava finds himself being pulled into Jean Shaw's life--romantically--in part because he was a big fan of hers as a teen, and to be involved with a movie star, even one fifteen or twenty years his senior, is a real turn-on, like being in her movies themselves. But clearly, Maurice, an old friend of hers, has the hots for her too, though she generally just rebuts his advances while taking advantage of his friendship.

About halfway through the book, the plot with the crooks begins to converge, and we learn that things aren't quite what they seem, even as real life begins to converge more and more with Shaw's past films, as the novel becomes almost metafictional. What counts as real? What counts as acting? The book grows hard to put down at that point, until the final, somewhat emotionally unsatisfying close.