On "A Perfect Spy" by John le Carre ***

I'm a bit surprised sometimes by what manages to make it to best-seller lists. This is one of those books. Le Carre is no easy reading, engaging as he does in some high-end literary techniques. And what's left after all of it are a number of open-ended questions to ponder.

Usually, this is just my sort of balliwick, but I guess I was looking for something more absborbing. Much like some classic novels, like Pride and Prejudice, this one was a real slog until substantially into the text. I only felt compelled once I was about one hundred pages from the end. By then, a lot of the little things that le Carre had set up started to pay off. But that, of course, was part of what made the earlier passages so challenging. Why shift from sentence to sentence between first- and third-person, for instance? Who is Poppy? Wentworth? Other named people? As one gets toward the end, one starts to discover the meanings of these details.

The tail is essentially one of a spy who has decided to quit it all. He retreats to location unknown to anyone to do as he had always wanted: to write a novel (or maybe his memoirs), which is itself sort of a note to his son. Meanwhile, the spy world is all aflutter over his disappearance. Everyone wants him, because in their view he's done something heinous, but it appears at least initially that it's a hullabaloo about nothing. This two-pronged storytelling means that one set of chapters follows the current day, and the other follows the memoir. We get past and present occurrences. The difficulty is that from one chapter to the next, one is dropped in to a particular place and location without much background, meaning one is disoriented for about the first third of every chapter. When you finally start to figure out what's going on and maybe start to care, le Carre ends the chapter, and you're back in a spot of being lost. I suppose that's reflective of Magnus Pym's state (or really of many a spy), but it makes for a difficult and unsatisfying read.

In the course of the story, one runs across Magnus's conman father, his spy overseer and recruiter Brotherhood, his wife Mary, various lovers, and his best friend Axel. To what degree any of these people are who they seem, however, is difficult to know. Are his verious acquaintances and friends really that, or are they just using Magnus for their own agendas? Has Magnus actually managed to do anything of value with his life (and his spy career), or has he just been everyone's pawn?

On "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad ***

I was never able to get through Lord Jim, but I was a teen at the time, and then in college I read Heart of Darkness and came to admire it--but I think that was in part because I wrote a paper on it and as such read the book several times over. This book feels like it would need to be read more than once to truly appreciate it; unfortunately, it didn't bear so much interest in me that I felt compelled or desirous of reading it a second time.

The story is one of a secret agent named Verloc who involves himself with various revolutionary anarchist groups to feed, I suppose, information to the government. But that government isn't so impressed by the information that Verloc provides. He's threatened with being cut loose.

Reverse back a bit. Verloc is married and takes care of a wife, his wife's mother, and his wife's mentally challenged brother. The everyday front he has is an adult bookstore--racy photos, books, gifts, and other stuff that men might like, though don't want anyone else to know it.

We also meet along the way the various revolutionaries and some police and law enforcement types. In the middle of the book, a bomb goes off, and a man is blown into pieces. Some witnesses say another man was with him. Who was the other man? Who was the man blown up? Much of the rest of the plot revolves around this. In the process, we see more about Verloc's character, the character of those involved in law enforcement, those involved with the government, and those involved with the revolutionary movements. No one comes off looking very well, and one feels sad for those unwittingly caught up among them.

On “The Hot Kid” by Elmore Leonard ***

This is one of Leonard's later books and also one of his works of historical fiction. As a writer of westerns, Leonard would seem to have been a natural for the historical fiction genre. The difference, of course, is that instead of writing in that standard genre, he would now apply his crime-writing skills to something of an earlier era. In this case, we're talking 1930s America and the era of prohibition gangsters.

As with so much of Leonard's fiction, this one is built around a superhero: Carl(os) Webster, a U.S. marshal who is a quick draw and whose standard line is something along the lines of, “If I you make me pull out my gun, I shoot to kill.” And indeed, he does. In one instance, he manages to shoot four people before one of them gets a clean shot at him. His one misstep seems to have been when he was a teenager, when instead of shooting a guy to maim him, he kills him. But otherwise, he's fast and accurate.

The main antagonist is one Jack Belmont, the child of an oil baron who could have it all and easily, but he's enamored of the thrill of the criminal life, and so instead of taking a job in his dad's business, he opts to become a bank robber—and a literal joy killer: that is, a guy who enjoys killing for the joy of it.

Inevitably, the two men are to meet, and the novel dances around the eventual final confrontation until it finally happens.

I did not find this to be one of Leonard's better books. In many ways, it was predictable. The line between good and evil seems fairly obvious, even if Webster likes to dally with men of questionable ethics and prostitutes, and the women in the book seem to be interested in men merely for the degree of excitement they bring, no matter which side of the law they are on. I chose to read it, however, because the work centers on a couple of themes that were close to Leonard growing up: namely, the criminal underworld specifically of this era and baseball. So the idea was to see those interests play out in a book, which was likely a fun and worthy endeavour for Leonard as he was closing in on the end of his career.

On "Tishomingo Blues" by Elmore Leonard ***

I added this Leonard novel to my list because of the unavailability of some other books and, gladly, because this is the one Leonard lists as being his favorite among the books he wrote. I can see why. The book involves a lot of material about Civil War reenactments, the Dixie Mafia, and Tunica, Mississippi, all topics that interest me. But in that is the problem, because whereas Leonard likely enjoyed the research, the book itself didn't translate terribly well into fiction. I'd have rather read nonfiction books on each of these subjects. What's more, having lived in Mississippi for three years and the South for decades, I found Leonard's evocation of the Deep South to be a little superficial; it just didn't feel like the work of someone who knows the South, with all the complexities that come with the region (the Civil War focus probably didn't help with presenting a more nuanced view of the area).

The plot of this one didn't really grip me either. In the end, what it is about is two warring underworld factions, one gang essentially beating up on another to take over the other's turf. Crime pays, in much of Leonard's fiction, even if the criminal who gets paid in the end is the lesser of two evils--the person who happens in to a fortune rather than setting out to do bad stuff. This is true here, to an extent, but it's also true that some of the scummier people end up very well off; indeed, the book is full of scummy people, so it would be difficult to avoid such an end.

The central character of the book is Dennis Lenahan, a diver who takes his show on the road, playing to crowds at various attractions. A slow time finds him in Tunica, where he sets up as the attraction at a new casino/hotel. This is at a time when Tunica's fortunes were on the upswing, with legal gambling casinos along the river having brought much-needed tourists and money to the region. From his diving perch, Dennis witnesses a murder by a member of the so-called Dixie Mafia. Threatened if he dares to go to the authorities with what he's seen, Dennis stays quiet, dithering throughout the book about whether he should come clean and serve as a witness. News of his presence, however, leaks out anyway, which brings trouble for everyone.

Meanwhile, a man from Detroit named Robert befriends Dennis. Robert seems to know a lot about the Civil War, and he likes pushing the buttons of the folks he meets by claiming, for example, that a photograph he has of a lynching shows his grandfather (the lynchee) and the grandfather (the lyncher) of the persons to whom he shows the picture. Robert, though, isn't some civil rights provocateur; he's just another crook, looking to infiltrate the drug trade down South. The Civil War reenactment is a perfect cover to kill off the folks he needs to to pull off his plan, except of course that the southerners whose buttons he's pushed have similar plans for Robert and his crew. I didn't care about any of these jerks.

Dennis, in one way, is the worst of the bunch. He's not outright evil. In fact, he's dragged into the novel's events against his will. But it's his complicity that makes him so utterly frustrating. He doesn't seem to care as much about the right or wrong of any action as just staying out of trouble--but not because he seems scared. He comes off as a guy whose morality is governed simply by what is best for him. If he can get away with something, he'll do it, which makes him in a way a passive and less interesting character.

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 "The Trial" by Franz Kafka ***

Reading this work had been a long time coming for me. I just never got around to it. It was not exactly what I was expecting. Oddly, I read The Castle years ago, even though this was the book I really always intended to read; that one, someone had suggested in terms of helping me with a story I was writing at the time. Maddeningly, of course, as with so much of Kafka's work, The Castle has no proper ending. The Trial, as it turns out, is missing pieces too, but it does have an end.

Having read both that other novel and his complete stories, I should have known that I would not find the work completely satisfying. True, some authors do manage to write one great piece that towers over everything else, and The Trial is apparently that for Kafka--but it did not seem so to me.

The story is about a man, Joseph K., who is accused of a crime. No one will tell him what the crime is. I guess I was expecting more of a courtroom and jail room novel, but oddly, the man accused is allowed to continue living his regular life, mostly. He does, toward the start, enter a courtroom one time, but never a jail cell, and as the book continues on, he never enters the court again, though his life becomes consumed in many ways by his case. I guess, really, this makes for more interesting reading than if he'd have been locked up in some cell for the whole novel.

Others hear of his being arrested and try to help. An uncle hires a lawyer for him. Various women spend time with him, talking about his case. Business clients set him up with others, including a painter, who gives Joseph K. some advice--namely that if he is innocent, he shouldn't worry, but then, contradictorily, notes that K. will never not be guilty in the eyes of the law and the best he can do is put off the verdict. Other people who have been accused offer advice, and at the end, even a priest, who tells a story about a man who is kept from advancing to another room by a gatekeeper but through persistence is eventually let past the door near the end of his life (when it no longer really matters). Much time is spent interpreting and reinterpreting this story in almost nonsensical fashion. Is the gatekeeper merciful? Cruel? The priest scene comes just before the end of the book, suggesting a kind of last rites being offered over Joseph K. In that sense, the book takes on the religious overtones I figured would make a greater part of the work, but Kafka doesn't make much of that tired trope. He skewers the legal system quite a bit, but not in a funny way. Mostly, it's just a sad theater of the absurd sort of book.

Perhaps, the best part of the work is the way that K. becomes, during the course of the events, more and more paranoid. He comes to think that others are looking to take his job, that some are spying on him, and so on. How could he not, after all, when so many know of his case and that he is awaiting trial. In that way, one gets a sense of how the court of public opinion works against a person even before being found guilty or not; in essence, it doesn't matter, which is the gist of K.'s experience.

On "Still Missing" by Beth Gutcheon ***

Here's an account that is in one sense all action. It starts with the disappearance of a child and barrels toward its conclusion. In between, however, is largely an exploration of the manner in which the child's disappearance affects a detective, a father, friends, coworkers, and most especially a mother. Gutcheon's focus on the emotional toll is something less often seen in the hard-boiled crime fiction I tend to read, so it's hard to pull off. In a way, I'd expect such reactions to be more muted, simply because of that. Gutcheon goes right on in.

With such a focus on the emotions, the work present characters in a way that is surprisingly passive. Sure, detectives span out across the city; the mother and friends place posters; the mother goes on television to plea for her child. But on the whole, there isn't a lot of buildup. The child is gone, and no one has a clue what's happened. There's no slow-whodunnit accumulation of facts that eventually lead to the child and the truth. Essentially, we're praying the whole way for a miracle.

Toward the end, after the police close in on a suspect, one is left with many questions. All facts seem to point to that suspect, but the suspect likewise has good explanations. The mother's own desires mean that she can't accept anything but a living son. Is she crazy? Or is everyone else just tired? If the story had ended there, with all these questions, it would have seemed quite true to the ambiguities of life and motivation. Alas, the work closes everything off with a nice denoument, one

On “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry ***

The last book on my selected westerns list, this for many is the quintessential western, the all-time classic. Surprisingly, it obtained the status though it was written just in 1986 or so. Perhaps, the miniseries had much to do with its overarching popularity within the genre, though I can see why folks would place it as the all-time best. It is a doorstop of a book and traffics in a huge collection of tropes from the genre: heroes, gamblers, gunfights, Indians (as faceless bad guys), cavalry, cowhands, horse thieves, bandits, rangers, sheriffs—it's got nearly everything you'd find in the genre. Beyond that, it's a kind of swan song to the period. It's set at the tail end of frontier days, when most but not all of the free-range buffalo are gone, when the Native Americans themselves are virtually all defeated, when there is little land left to settle. That's essentially the story: men from Texas making a cattle drive to Montana, where few have yet settled and good grazing land is apparently plentiful.

But it takes more than eight hundred pages to get there. One reason is that McMurtry follows a great number of characters. Ostensibly, the central character is Augustus (Gus), a talkative former Texas Ranger who is quick with a gun and mostly lazy when it comes to all else. But the plot veers away from him at various points for chapters at a time, following among them: a prostitute who seems to have all the men in love with her; an old love interest of Gus's who now lives with an invalid husband in Nebraska; Gus's business partner and another former Ranger named Call; another old friend/Ranger who is a terrific lothario named Jake; a youngster named Newt who is of doubtful parentage; various cowhands—Dish, Pea Eye, Po Campo; a young sheriff and his deputy who are after Jake or perhaps after the sheriff's runaway wife; an excellent African American horseman named Deets; a bandit named Blue Duck; and on and on. In other words, it's more of an ensemble novel. And beyond that any one of these characters might die at any time, making the plot somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes a good guy dies, sometimes a bad one. Sometimes that death is “offscreen” (some other minor character we come upon mentions it) and other times, we get the actual scene. Individual episodes—robberies, run-ins, fights, bad weather—can make for exciting adventure fiction.

This is all to say that I understand the appeal. But I haven't fallen big for McMurtry. I enjoyed this work more than his Last Picture Show, which for me dragged and focused way too much of sexual exploits. In this work, too much is too much. It takes nearly a quarter of the book before the cowboys finally, definitively decide to start the cattle drive to Montana, a drive I knew was coming from page 1. Get on with, I felt throughout. Characters come and go. Since there are so many, I never felt that connected to them or emotionally invested, even when certain main characters died, ones I didn't expect. And while men are the center of the book and I would not expect otherwise, the women characters generally seem to be there largely for sex appeal. Indeed, the end of the novel itself seemed a bit strange insofar as its focus turned to a very minor event regarding a character who by that time has been out of the plot for awhile. It left me feeling as if, well, okay, the point? (I'm sure I'm missing something, the way I was underwhelmed by the end of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying's, though of course it somehow is supposed to suggest new life and vibrancy.)

On "Gunman's Reckoning" by Max Brand ***

I was long under the impression that Max Brand was a pulp writing active and working today. This is because years ago when I worked in a bookstore, Brand's books still came out about once a month, staying on the shelves about a year before going out of print in favor of some other title. (Our western section was very small, mostly made up of Louis Lamour, which was the only author who actually sold much.) Brand wrote a lot, I suppose, and the mass market company publishing his stuff was still pumping it out on a schedule--putting it back into print and then taking it back out of print. But in terms of when he was writing, well, that part I had dead wrong. His stuff goes back to the 1920s; the publisher was merely recycling old stuff.

I discovered this rather recently, as I started reading this list of westerns, a genre I haven't spent much time with. I'm reading mostly chronologically, so I had intended next to turn to Zane Grey, but I wanted to be devoted to that book, and Brand was available for free public domain download on my phone--I figured I'd read it in between the more serious other reading I was doing, that is, whenever I found myself in a waiting room with nothing but my phone in hand.

The text definitely is what I would have expected from a pulp western. It was rather silly overall, with lots of tough talk, lots of fighting, lots of plot twists, and characters who seem too over-the-top to be real. The book centers on one Donnegan, but it doesn't start off with him. Rather, we're introduced first to some hobo on a train who is out to murder a man who has broken up his gang. That man who is to be killed as it turns out to Donnegan, who remains a rather shadowy figure for much of the novel. He seems more like a sheriff in these early passages, but once he jettisons from the train, holding on to his life, he is seen for what he is: a hobo also, a wanderer of the world--but one with a keen ability to wield a gun, to see through people, and to manipulate people.

Donnegan finds his way to a house, where he meets a woman (Lou) whom he almost instantly falls for, even though they've barely spoken a word. He wants a place to stay, but that requires the approval of the woman's father (the colonel), who won't take visitors. Donnegan insists, and somehow the old man comes to view Donnegan as an asset who can help him reclaim a mine for himself and his daughter's fiancé (Landis) for herself. In fact, the woman is in love with this fiance, who in turn has gone to work in the mining town, fallen in love with yet someone else, and run off with the old man's fortune. Donnegan is on the trail to help. Sure, he wants the daughter, but since the daughter wants this other man, Donnegan, because he truly loves this woman, sets out to get this other man back for her. I can't say the motivation here really convinces me: men will do lots for folks they love, but for someone they've barely met and mostly to enable that person to have someone else? It seems rather crazy to take one's life in hand that way.

 Donnegan's plan essentially involves making himself into a "big" deal in the town, impressing folks with his gunwork and some money he comes into through a shady interaction with another shady character, a gambler whom Donnegan robs and sends away. This plan involves making the mining town woman (Nelly) who has run off with the fiancé (Landis) of the woman who is in love with him (Lou) fall in love with Donnegan himself. The plan largely works, it seems, but as it turns out, the woman, Nelly, who has taken the fiancé is actually just doing so as a ruse, as she's in love with yet another man (Nick), who in turn is absconding with the old man's mining interests through the fiancé but only because the old man himself had absconded with the mining interests of a friend of Nick's. More plot twists follow, and love seems to come and go quick for the men and women at the center of the story. In the end, of course, there's a reckoning, a shootout, and most all is sorted out (except maybe what happens to Landis in the end, but who cares--he's just a plot point).

On “Ramona” by Helen Hunt Jackson ***

This is the first in a list of westerns I intend on reading, a genre I've read little of. Jackson's book probably doesn't come to mind when one thinks of western tropes, I suppose, but it's set in the Old West, so I'm calling it one. It's a love story of sorts, but really, it's a screed meant to defend Native Americans and shame white America for its treatment of them. Jackson wrote a nonfiction work on a similar subject, got little traction, and so wrote this novel, which proved a success in terms of popularity but judging from history did little to change the tide of what was actually happening.

The work is about Native Americans and the manner in which they are mistreated by the white Americans moving into California. It centers around the person of Ramona, a half-Indian gal, but the story starts off being about Senora Moreno and her ranch, which her son runs in name but which she technically has control of. (I'm about to summarize the happenings, so avoid reading on if you don't want the work spoiled for you.) The Morenos are Mexicans who lost a huge chunk of land to white settlers as well. Juan Can, the main helper on the ranch is growing old and broken, and one day Felipe goes to help him, gets a heat stroke, and is in grave condition. In steps Alessandro, an Indian, who has been requisitioned to help with the sheep shearing. He suggests the Felipe sleep under the stars, like the Indians. The treatment works wonders.

Meanwhile, Ramona falls for Alessandro, even as she once had an interest in Felipe. Senora Moreno opposes this love affair. Ramona shall not marry an Indian, as that is below her station, but at the same time, she would never be able to marry Filipe, because he is above hers. One wonders who would possibly be appropriate, since she is half-Indian and half-white. Moreno threatens to send Ramona to the nuns and also to cut off her inheritance. (It turns out that her father had left her a large dowry. Senora Moreno agreed to take Ramona in when Moreno's sister, who had keep the the gal, died. There is no love for her, however.)

Ramona runs off. Alessandro is a leader among his people and fairly well off, but the Indians of Temucula, whom he brings her to, it turns out, have been kicked off their land. The U.S. government doesn't recognize their property rights, and white Americans are moving in. Alessandro and Ramona flee to San Pasqual, where the same thing happens again.

Flustered and angry, the couple move to the high mountains, where the trails are difficult to navigate. At last, they should find piece. But the couple's baby grows sick, a white doctor offers no real help, and Alessandro goes crazy. Eventually, the leads him to mistake another man's horse for his own and he is shot as a horse thief.

Meanwhile, Senora Moreno dies. Filipe regrets letting Alessandro and Ramona be sent away, so he goes in search for them, which is complicated by the fact that they covered their tracks (even changing Ramona's name) so as not to be caught. It is shortly after Alessandro's death that he finds Ramona and brings her back to his ranch to take care of. He admits his love for her and marries her. He also concludes that California is no longer a good place for people of his ethnic background, so he sells out to Americans and heads to Mexico to live.

The work is in many ways very melodramatic, reminding me a bit of the plays one sees at Old West amusement parks.

On "Playing for Thrills" by Wang Shuo ***

This book starts off with a very interesting premise, arguably even a good one. It's a mystery. A guy finds out he's the major suspect in a murder case, the death of a friend of his ten years ago. He's got to clear his name, find an alibi. The week of the supposed murder, however, he doesn't remember. Where was he? What was he doing? Could he have been the one who murdered his friend?

Imagine The Hangover as a murder mystery, and you've got kind of the gist of this work. The protagonist doesn't have a great memory. Of course, I probably wouldn't know my whereabouts from a given week ten years ago either, except that I live a very humdrum life and so could probably point to being at work, but after work? I would have no idea and little way to track that down if I hadn't taken notes in some way. Or maybe the main character was on a bender. The novel then tracks his attempts to find out what he was doing that week, as he interviews friends he knew and places that he frequented at the time.

The protagonist is something of a ne'er-do-well, a guy who spends most of his time gambling and playing around with friends, and when he can still manage, chasing tail. So are most of the characters in the novel. This makes for some degree of difficulty telling the characters apart. There's a man in a striped shirt whom nobody knows who was at the last dinner at which they saw the murdered man. But later in the book, other friends wear such a shirt, the murdered man does in a dream/memory, and even the protagonist. The characters are in a way interchangeable, which makes them a bit less interesting.

And when one doesn't have characters to root for, it all becomes about the plot. This plot is loose and goofy but substantive enough to sustain two-thirds of the book. But at that point, the novel takes an odd turn, one that plays well with the kind of players all these people are but that blows all the suspense in the book and makes it, well, not terribly interesting anymore. One gets the sense that even the author isn't all that interested anymore, from the way the last few pages of the book go.

There's probably a lot here that is missing in translation. Footnotes explain some of the cultural context, some of which I knew but most of which I didn't. There are jokes that flew right by me, not being Chinese, references to classic works and authors. Such makes me appreciate all the more works that manage to speak to a person in translation, because they speak not just to the culture in which they arose but to the human experience. This book didn't really do that, even though it made a stab at trying to say something about identity and jokes and other human things; there wasn't, in the end, enough heart.

On "The Dream of the Red Chamber" by Cao Xaoqin ***

Credit working a second job and general length of the book for making me take so long to get through this one. Or perhaps credit the fact that this book, although a classic of Chinese literature, goes nowhere. It reminded me of the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji, insofar as it is largely about court intrigues and relationships among a well-to-do family. Single chapters are great. Indeed, I read an excerpt from this book in an anthology, which made me look forward to reading this text. But the episodic nature of the book and the fact that the writer often introduces plot points that go nowhere ultimately make this something of a frustrating read.

The early chapters of the book recount the disappearance of a young woman and the family's reaction to it. It's a great set-up (where'd she go? what happened? don't know), but eventually, we end up spending time mostly with the family of one Pao-yu Secundus, a fifteen-year-old with many female cousins and servants who sloughs off at his schooling and displeases his father. As a portrait of this portion of China at this time, it's intriguing. Pao-yu forges a close friendship with one other male at one point, who then traipses off to other places. He forges close relationships with his various maids and cousins. They get together to write poetry and start a poetry club. Families of the maids visit. One lower-class mother of one of the maids visits, gets drunk, and makes a full of herself.  One maid is given the opportunity to be the second wife to a rich older man, which she rejects, much to the shock of others. Pao-yu travels far off to a temple, unbeknownst to his family, indeed, hiding the very fact. Each of these things is told in discrete chapters, which alone are interesting enough. Together, not so much. Court life is tedious.

The book ends--or at least the version of the book I read--ends with Pao-yu meeting a doppelganger, another boy named Pao-yu, this one twelve years old, but otherwise similar in personality and looks and even class situation. He is even, at one point, somewhat mistaken for the other boy. Intriguing. But alas, it was just a dream. Not so intriguing. "And if you'd like to know what happens next, reader, you'll need to turn to the next chapter." That is, the book ends with the same ending that all other chapters carry, as if the author were writing a serial that was cancelled in its midst, with discrete chapters that feature the same characters but not always plot points that go from start to finish.

On “The Kill-Off” by Jim Thompson ***

As the back of this book denotes, this is not so much a who done it as a who will do it. The victim of the murder is alive for two-thirds of the book, though fearful of her impending murder. Through various points of view, Thompson shows that multiple people have reasons to kill the woman, a gossiper who has ruined many a reputation and life among those living in the town. Her younger husband might kill her to get her money (and also the money owed to him that she has confiscated from his work for herself), in part to run off with a new love interest. That love interest might kill her because she's not a very innocent gal and obviously wants to be able to marry her lover. The son of another local might kill her in order to steal money from her to be able to run away with a gal he has an interest in. And so on.

The conceit is an original one, but alas, the characters seem here prisoners to it and to the plot that Thompson has set out. As such, the book doesn't quite live up to its full potential.

On "The Criminal" by Jim Thompson ***

This multiperspective narrative is not a mystery or thriller in any conventional sense. It's actually rather predictable. It's more of a character study and an indictment of the criminal justice system.

The tale revolves around the rape and murder of a young woman. Each character has his or her own view as to whether the young man charged deserves to be. His parents recount how the son grew apart from the father and how he has been skipping school and how they had conflicts with the parents of the woman killed. The son describes how the event occurred, but the tale leaves off at a crucial moment, such that we as readers don't know whether the man did or did not do the killing; what we do learn, though, is that the man was seduced and the woman was not so innocent as one might think. Enter the legal system and the newspapermen. The latter want a good story to tell and thus promote a rape and murder scenario with the young man at the center. This means that though the DA may well have thought the man innocent, the legal system feels obligated to charge the teen. Nothing is about justice so much as about money and individuals' jobs and careers.

On "Unconditional Surrender" by Evelyn Waugh ***

In the final book of Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy, we finally see a direct tie to the sword. I'd thought Waugh one to actually believe in some kind of efficacy of war to personal manhood--something a bit different for post-World War II literature--but I think the sword and the last book probably brings satire back to the fore. The sword is something on display during the World War II in Britain, something everyone wants to go to see, but it isn't really British. It's a gift of sorts, a commodity, as so much else in this war is. Take, for example, a hero named Trimmer, whose heroism is trumped up by the military after what is actually a bad accident, even still in this third book.

The main character, Guy Crouchback, however, remains the center of attention. Keen on joining the army and being part of the action at the start, he still finds himself interested in such even in this third book. But by the novel's end, his interests and devotion turn elsewhere. Making his life have meaning becomes doing good for others, not in battle but in the realm of the family.

A retelling of Waugh's short story "Compassion" plays a large role in this novel's ending--and this transformation. Guy becomes the main character of that story, helping Jewish refugees find food. That sort of compassion is also what leads to the familial ending.

The ongoing subplot about Guy's ex-wife also finds center stage for much of the book, as she find herself in difficult circumstances that continue to become more difficult, her life of vacuity and immorality finally catching up with her. The subplot regarding Guy's being taken for a spy also gets some play, but it never reaches proportions that make it wholly satisfying--it keeps him from some work but usually also puts him back into the same work, depending on the characters interpreting the data for their own purposes. Satire, I'm guessing, is Waugh's main concern here, but the fact that this subplot rolls through the background without ever really coming to the fore makes it something of a disappointing set of twists.

Other characters who played large roles throughout the trilogy end up writing torrid novels about their experiences, dying in meaningless battles, or dying simply of old age (Guy's father). The various ends are tied up, but I found myself more interested in simply finishing the book to have it done than in caring much about what happens to any one of the characters.

On "Men at Arms" by Evelyn Waugh ***

The first novel Waugh's trilogy Sword of Honor, this one essentially provides an account of Guy Crouchback's training in the military at the start of World War II. In many ways, the timeline matches that in Waugh's own life. Too young to fight in World War I and too old to fight in World War II, Waugh/Crouchback joined a untraditional group of soldiers for officer training.

Crouchback is divorced without kids. He suffers from a kind of feeling of worthlessness of life. The military, fighting for a cause, will give him something to live for. Alas, it doesn't want him. It is only after a relative tells him of this special brigade that he is able to get in.

What follows are a series of humorous little stories about training. Particularly funny scenes involve one in which Crouchback is about to get back with his former wife but keeps getting interrupted by phone calls from his best army buddy. Another involves the friend's thunder box, which the brigadier takes a liking to and which Crouchback and his friend constantly try to hide.

Overall, one gets the sense that the military is a rather funny place. This is the Bill Bailey type military, one that succeeds, when it does, despite incompetence. There didn't seem to be much in the way of angst here, except a tiny bit toward the very end--and that mostly personal rather the military/war related. As such, the book didn't seem as tied in to most of the other post-1900 war literature I've read.

On "A Handful of Dust" by Evelyn Waugh ***

Were it not for the masterfully cold ending--one that is an almost verbatim casting of Waugh's great story "The Man Who Liked Dickens"--this novel likely would have been almost entirely forgettable. This is not Waugh the humorist at work here; this is Waugh the bitter divorcee. There is plenty of commentary about English high society, and the story itself is compelling enough to keep one reading, but the book consists in large chunks of dialogue and much of it not very good. Characters speak for paragraphs, expositorily telling the story: "I am going to do X, and then because I feel this way, I will do Y. Do you think that will please my spouse or will it make for hurt? I do so hope for hurt." "I believe that your husband will find your actions to be difficult to adjust to. He has always been . . ." And several of the central characters in the story have little to recommend themselves as people.

The book is forged mostly around the Lasts--Tony and Brenda--who maintain an estate called Hetton and throw regular parties. A man named Beaver comes to visit Tony, a man whom Tony barely knows. Brenda takes a kind of liking to him. He is young and difficult to make love her, and that is precisely why she likes him.

Bored by life in the country and wanting to take up with Beaver, Brenda arranges to rent a flat in London that the family can barely afford. She tells Tony it is so that she can study economics. More and more time is spent away from him--and more and more time with Beaver. Tony never seems to catch on, even as Brenda and Beaver become the talk of high society.

Brenda attempts to set Tony up with another woman. The efforts fails masterfully.

Meanwhile, their son John (whose age is hard to fathom since he too speaks in complete paragraphs) is left without a mom. Reared by nannies and butlers, he has a great liking for horse riding. And it is a tragedy involving him that brings the whole affair to light.

So little sympathy can be thrown Brenda's way by the time that divorce is in the offing, Waugh's description of her next acts make her utterly detestable. She's conned her husband of money for months, ignored her child, and taken up with another man. And now Tony agrees to go through with setting up a divorce for her by faking his own affair. The attempt does not go well, but rather than be happy with the alimony Tony is offering, Brenda opts to sue him for an amount that will force Tony to put the family estate on the auction block, this so that she can be supported in the manner in which she is used to and so that her lover, Beaver, can be supported as well (since he has no means of support for himself). It is this that pushes Tony to run away to the jungles of Brazil, where the story's final tragic ending comes into being.

What readers get then is a sense of the utter desolation that divorce works on a man, one that is put into metaphor by Tony's experiences in the jungle. But because the text seems so one sided, the characters fail ultimately to feel fully forged.

On "The People in the Trees" by Hanya Yanagihara ***

This is a disturbing book. Yanagihara makes the idea of raping a culture for one's own ends physical--makes the metaphor potentially real. Alas, where some books manage to be disturbing but to somehow keep one fascinated via language or character development, I was left rather cold by the main character throughout.

Norton Perina writes his life story at the urging of a colleague, who serves as the editor of his biography. Perina has been jailed for a sex crime against his adopted children--children that he has gathered from a Pacific Island nation that he has helped to destroy through his quest for knowledge. As readers, one is left somewhat in the dark with regard to whether Perina is actually guilty of the crime for which he's been jailed until the very end; part of me wishes that Yanagihara had left us in the dark.

One's distaste for Perina begins not just with the first-page revelation of what he's been accused of but for the tone of superiority that he maintains throughout the book. This is extended further as he goes about his scientific tasks.

Perina is invited to accompany some anthropologists to a South Pacific island as a medical doctor and aid. On the island, he and his colleagues discover a group of people who appear to be about sixty but who turn out to be much older, yet whose cognitive functions are less than to be desired. These people live in a native culture that has eschewed Western ways in, what we might say, both good and bad ways. The longevity of the people, however, is what most fascinates the researchers, most especially Perina, however, and his desire to find the reason leads him not only to the answer but to fame as he publishes papers on the subject. That fame, however, comes at a cost to the island and the islanders themselves, as it is then dredged by Western companies for the secret drug that they hope to create from what Perina has found. It is this destruction that is so hard to read about (and that inspires a great deal of pity), especially when described by someone as egocentric as Perina. One wishes he had been jailed long before the accusations fly that ruin his life, whether they be true or not.

As an indictment of Western colonialism, this work is as damning as any novel could hope to be.

On "Blood and Guts in High School" by Kathy Acker ***

I've read about Acker for years, mentioned generally in relation to things like post-postmodernism (alongside Bret Easton Ellis), which I'm not sure is a thing that really exists. And so I've finally given her a spin--and certainly what's she's written is different from most things of I've read before. It's a collage of sorts, a mix of styles and speakers and ideas and pictures and words, all put together in one text.

I was reminded of two other things while reading this book. I was reminded of some photocopied literary journals that I would come across in Los Angeles when I was in my early twenties and idealistic. These journals generally aimed to be shocking in some way, dropping swear words vicariously and including pornographic drawings and generally being anticapitalist, antiwar, antisociety. The purveyors of these magazines were somehow going to change the world. I wanted to change the world too but not in such an anarchistic way. This book looked like one of those journals. I would immediately not have liked it as a young man--mostly because it was too lewd in a coarse obvious way.

The other thing the book reminded me of was a David Lynch movie, something akin to Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire. The movie makes sense at the beginning and is interesting because it's so strange, but as the film continues, it becomes stranger and stranger and more and more impossible to follow. Eventually, we don't know what's going on--and we're left with just bits and pieces we were introduced to early on that show up from time to time that we can sort of wrap around our minds around to give the piece structure.

And that's what happens here in Acker's book. We're introduced straight off to Janey, a ten-year-old who is in a sexual relationship with her father/boyfriend. Acker, of course, is looking to shock right from the start. But as I read, I saw the relationship as in some ways not really literal, as I saw the book as not being literal. Acker walks in the realm of dream and desire, as Lynch does. Sure, we have an incestuous/pedophilic relationship at the center of the piece, but what Acker is doing is making psychological theory literal. The book then at the start is about how women, in relationships, are seeking their fathers, at least as some psychologists might theorize. A boyfriend is simply an image of the father who raised the woman. Read that way, the early sections are theoretically interesting (is what we look for in a relationship inevitably a mirror image of a parent?), especially as Janey's boyfriend breaks up with her to pursue another woman who is sexier and who allows him more freedom. This could be any relationship. (I particularly enjoyed a paragraph that was repeated multiple times as a refrain throughout certain pages as the relationship comes to an end--a set of incidents being played over and over, the way we tend to obsess over breakups, looking for meaning.)

As the novel continues, however, we begin to lose sight of Janey at times. And we descend more and more often into the realm of dream--Acker even provides us with some sketches of dreamscapes. Janey leaves her father to go to school in New York, where she works, falls in with a group called the Scorpions, has lots of sex, and eventually loses all her acquaintances in an auto accident.

Janey is kidnapped by a couple of men who intend to turn her into a prostitute/sex slave. She is kept in a room by a Persian man. She writes poetry, a book. She gets cancer, and the Persian man leaves her. She ends up walking around Tunisia with Genet, but not having a passport, she can't go back to the United States. And then she dies. And then she goes into some kind of Egyptian otherworld, where of course sex and death meet, because they often do in literature. Meanwhile, Acker gives us asides on President Carter, The Scarlet Letter, and other famous works, people, and ideas, often without really identifying how these necessarily fit in with the narrative or who the particular speaker is.

It's nice to read something that is not a straightforward narrative from time to time, and I enjoyed some of the writing just for its sheer inventiveness. But in many ways, I did not feel invested in the book--just wanting to get through it. Had I slowed down, I'm sure I'd have picked up on more themes, and were I to trace some of the motifs, I'm sure I could make more of what's here, but given the lack of investment I generally felt, the book does not lend itself to me wanting to reread it, which is what would be required to dig those ideas out.