On "Out of Sight" by Elmore Leonard *****

My favorite film based on an Elmore Leonard book, at least among those I've seen, is this one--perhaps, in part, because it was directed by Steven Soderberg. The film takes liberty with the order in which the story is presented and works really well as a result (this is one film where the previews did it a great disservice: it looked like a slick and ridiculous movie to me, but good reviews and Soderberg's name compelled me to see it after all, and I was happy to have done so). I am glad also now to have read the book, these many years later, even if it's hard not to picture George Clooney in the role of Jack Foley. The book, unlike the movie, is a straight chronological tale.

There are a few things not to like about the novel even so. One is a complaint I'd have about most all of Leonard's work. That is that the story in the end doesn't emotionally resonate. Leonard tells a good tale, but one never gets too close to any of the characters that one actually ends up crying. That said, some of the characters are least likeable, most especially Foley, such that one does wish him well. He's a man who made bad choices in life and now feels he has no choice but to continue down the same road, even though he wishes he could do something else.

The other issue is that I don't really buy the relationship that is forged between the bank robber Foley and the U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco. Two conversations and a few hours of time are certainly enough to make one fall madly for some other person; it is possible. But even so, it's hard for me quite to figure that either of them would risk as much as they do for each other based on a couple of encounters, Sisco's penchant for falling for crooks, as she has in the past, notwithstanding.

Still, Foley is the real soul of this story to me, a guy who seems to have a good heart but who doesn't feel he can make better choices, who in essence has a kind of death wish and a desire to be someone else and somewhere else. Given a "chance" to break out of prison, he takes it, claiming that he'd rather die than ever go back. Once out, it's back to robbing banks (he's very good at it, having done something like two hundred heists), but he finds himself dragged into something much more sinister by the ex-cons with whom he associates.

On “Inside Roman Libraries” by George W. Houston ****

I didn't quite get what I was looking for from this book, but I didn't think I would. (I'm really wanting to know more about how Christian books were spread and what role a libraries may have played. Clearly, many individual churches had such works, as they read from them at a services, and clearly those works reached beyond the church, because other writers refer to them or Christians refer other people to them, as if they could be obtained. But claims that such books were deposited in libraries, as I've read, never seem to be backed up with hard evidence.) Houston does exactly as his title suggests: He explores Roman libraries as they existed between roughly 100 BCE to about 400 CE. The first chapter is excellent, as are the later chapters. That first chapter lays out some basics about such libraries—how they were financed, how they could be quasi-public, how manuscripts were obtained. There weren't really “public” libraries in the way that we think of libraries, but there were libraries that were open to the public, and there were libraries that were open to a small set of users (say, the people who were part of a specific society). Libraries (that is, people who collected books) could obtain books via professional booksellers/scribes, via copying a book out for themselves, via having a slave copy it out for them; the emperor had his own collection, and that might be obtained also through government seizure for crime or as plunder from war. Sometimes these books would also be sold off.

After that, Houston focuses for several chapters on some very specific collections, looking particularly at lists of books that were maintained for particular libraries. Such lists were not, as he notes, catalogs; books likely were organized by subject and author but similarly loosely. Houston focuses on scrolls, not codices, which were not so popular during this period. (I read somewhere, now I don't remember, that even Christian writers used scrolls rather than codices except for for works of Scripture, which is interesting.) He goes into how scrolls were stored and what might damage them and so on. But because the focus is on specific lists—a collection of mostly philosophy, a collection of mostly comedy, and so on—these middle sections are a bit dry.

Finally, he steps back again and looks at the architecture of such libraries. He notes that they usually had windows for ease of reading—and that these windows actually had glass or were very thin marble, allowing for light but keeping out rain and insects. This was news to me. Often, statues were in such facilities—of the sponsor, the emperor, a god, or of authors. There were likely seats but perhaps not so much tables; scribes might play a role in some libraries but not in most.

Then he goes into the personnel. There was a commissioner of the library for the emperor. Local libraries likely had directors. Then there were likely slaves underneath them working. Books were likely not free to be handled by patrons in terms of browsing and they certainly weren't available to be checked out; rather, a reader would ask a worker to get the book for him or her, and then that person would read the work on site. Books, after all, were super expensive, with each being copied out by hand. Most lasted about a century before being worn out. When trying to obtain a book from which to make one's own copy, much effort often was expended. Some copies were poorly transcribed. That was one purpose of the emperor's collection: as a resource to the government but it also served as a resource from which to find decently accurate works. I'm glad books are so much easier to obtain today.

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.