Beautiful Endings

I haven't read a lot of short stories or novels but I've managed to read a few and I'm often struck by how many of those I've read have such beautiful endings and how much I love them for their shear beauty alone.  (Yes, my favorite remains Ernest Hemingway, who may be master of the dying fade - could you end your novel better than "Yes," I said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" or "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." or "He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."?  But this isn't a post about Hemingway.)

The 'net is full of posts listing the top 10 or 20 or 30 final lines of literature.  I could argue against a few of them but what's the point?  You have your favorites; I have mine.  Let us live together in beautiful story ending peace.

But I bring this up because as part of a free trial of audible books, I downloaded and listened to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It.  While there are many beautiful passages that caught my ear - as well as a nice aside about the use of the word "beautiful" and how the father uses the word to describe the younger brother - I started thinking about beautiful endings to stories and novels that I love most.  I have room for only a few so let me start with what's probably the indisputable loveliest ending to a short story:

Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling into the dark muti­nous Shan­non waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely church­yard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and head­stones, on the spears of the lit­tle gate, on the bar­ren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead.

The Dead

James Joyce

Here's another:

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming — Diana and Helen — and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

Goodbye, My Brother

John Cheever

Beautiful, agree?  I thought you would.

But let me get back to the reason for this post in the first place.  Though this isn't an ending, this is a lovely passage from A River Runs Through It and it really hit close to home for me  - never mind why.  It's part of a sermon given by the Presbyterian minister father of the narrator of the story and it's the key to the entire story:

Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Which performs the duel duties of not only being beautiful but pretty much sums up our Christian belief.

But, no, what caught my ear was this: 

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. 

I am haunted by waters.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Beautiful, no?  And, c'mon, isn't that enough?  Beauty for the sake of beauty?

Oh, my brothers and sisters, how could you disagree?

(I don't think there's a coincidence that two passages I find beautiful have to do with brothers, or, at least, family members.  Tolstoy was right:  all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.  So it's no wonder that our most powerful stories have to do with our most powerful relationships: those relationships we have with our families.)  

Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehfrengraf - Book Review

I wanted to like this one - it's no secret I'm a fan of Lawrence Block and since I knew everyone would be reading his A Walk Among the Tombstones in anticipation of the movie (you've read the book, haven't you?  And seen the excellent move?  No?  Take my advice:  treat yourself to both.), I wanted to try something of his I hadn't read.  I was familiar with this character and may have even read an Ehfrengraf story or two in the dim past so I thought, why not?  Block hasn't let me down yet.

And he hasn't let me down with this book, either, I guess.  It's just not my thing.  Ehfrengraf is a defense attorney who, well, like the title says, defends the innocent.  Even if they're guilty.  And he'll stop at nothing to prove their innocence.  Which is the hook - how will Ehfrengraf be able to prove his client's innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence?  He's no Perry Mason and his methods are unconventional to say the least but after a story or two, you get what this is all about.  While he may come across as dapper and charming, he's a sociopath and I have no desire to read about sociopaths.

Block is skillful as always, keeping the action offstage but telling the stories in a way to keep you interested and so I admired that.  But I have to admit, I found myself trudging to the end and if it weren't for my goal to give the entire book a chance, I wouldn't have given the entire book a chance.  Block is a great writer.  This isn't a great book.

(I bought the Kindle version - I'm not sure there's a print edition - and I'm not sure if I'm pleased with the experience.  It's there on my Kindle if I want to re-read it again but I won't so now what do I do with it?)

Tatiana: Book Review

Tatiana is the latest in the Arkady Renko series written by Martin Cruz Smith.  (I mentioned briefly here the last book I'd read in the series.  To see all of my reviews on this series, click here.  Yeah, I like 'em.)  I liked this one as well as any in the series - no, it can't compare to the first but then none of them can - and you wouldn't do badly if you decided to dip in at this point.  As with all series, the asides and digressions will catch you up on who's who and what's happening but if you've been following the series, you may find these explanations tedious.  I did but then I always find these sections of a series book to be tedious.

Yep, there's a good mystery to be solved at the core and you'll probably figure it out before Renko does but go along for the ride anyway if you want to see the corruption of modern-day Russia and learn something along the way about Kaliningrad and chess and code-breaking and even high-class racing bicycles.  Smith's (Cruz Smith's? - I never know where to look for his books, under the C's or the S's) writing is smooth and swift and the story carries you along to a, well, not very spine-tingling climax but then you really didn't another shoot out did you?  No complaints:  the loose ends are tied up and all the characters accounted for and the pieces left in place for the next Arkady Renko adventure.

I'm looking forward to it.

Books I've Read

According to this blog, it's been well over a year since I've read a book but that presumes a truth to the philosophical question:  if a book review is unposted, does that mean a book hasn't been read?

Ha!  I've read books.  I just haven't posted about them.  Here's a list, in no particular order, of what I've read in the last 16 months or so:

Stephen Hunter's latest Sniper's Honor.  Bob Lee Swagger learns about a Russian, female sniper from World War II which, of course, has modern day repercussions.  Plenty of shooting and sniper lore and a harrowing, surrealistic battle scene between Nazi tanks and Commie tanks.  You haven't read anything like this before.

Lawrence Block's The Thief Who Counted The Spoons.  Delightful, but then the whole series is which meant I had to re-read the other 10 Bernie Rhodenbarr novels in the series to confirm it. and that lead me to re-read A Ticket to the Boneyard, which is anticipation of the upcoming movie of his book, A Walk Among the Tombstones which should be pretty good.  I mean, it's Liam Neeson against the bad guys.  What more could you want?

For some reason I turned back to Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.  I've blogged here about the rest of the series but you don't really know how good the first was until you go back there and see for yourself what Smith managed to do.  As good as the series is, the first is the best.  

I don't know why I read Robert Harris' The Ghost.  I've like his other stuff:  Fatherland, Enigma, and Pompeii, all of which I must've read before this blog since I don't see where I posted my thoughts on these before.  But I'd blogged about the movie, which I liked, despite many reasons not to, and I read the Kindle version which means I must've gotten a deal on it.  Whatever.  I enjoyed it.  I especially liked the behind-the-scenes look at ghost-writing and the publishing world.  Nice twist at the end, too.

Both volumes of Hemingway's Complete Letters.  (Link goes only to the first volume but you can get to the second volume from there.)  Sorry.  For aficionados only.  

So by my count that's 17 books or a little over a book a month.  Not much of a pace but it'll do.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming - Book Review

Rod Dreher, in his very moving elegy to his sister, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, wants you to know this about her:

A long time ago - I must have been about seven years old, which would have made Ruthie five - I did something rotten to her.  What it was, I can't remember.  I teased her all the time, and she spent much of her childhood whaling the tar out of me for it.  Whatever happened that time, though, must have been awful, because our father told me to go lie down on my bed and wait for him.  The could mean only one thing:  that he was going to deliver one of his rare but highly effective spankings, with his belt.

I cannot recall what my offense was, but I well remember walking down the hallway and climbing onto the bed, knowing full well that I deserve it.  I always did.  Nothing to be done but to stretch out, face down  and take what I had coming.

And then it happened.  Ruthie ran into the bedroom just ahead of Paw and, sobbing, threw herself across me.

"Whip me!" she cried.  "Daddy, whip me!"

Paw gave no spanking that day.  He turned and walked away.  Ruthie left too.  There I sat, on the bed, wondering what had just happened.

Forty years later, I still do.

What follows is the story not only of Ruthie and her Little Way of living a Christ-like life in the face of certain death, but a portrait of Dreher's family, the town - St Francisville, Louisiana - in which he was born, and the people with whom he grew up.  Dreher explores the evolution of his faith and his tendency to over-intellectualize everything and compares it with his sister's simpler, more straightforward approach to hers.  It's the difference between thinking about living a good life and actually living that life.

I was an admirer of Dreher's when he was with National Review but I lost track of him during his Crunchy Con days and when he moved on to write editorials for The Dallas Morning News.  I don't know how I found him again but it was shortly after the death of Ruthie and I've been following the living and the writing of this book since its inception.  Dreher bothers me at times with his intellectualism but there's no doubt of his feelings for his sister or his faith in Christ.  This book is a work of love for both.

You're guaranteed to weep.

The Third Bullet - Book Review

Goodness me, has it really been over four months since I last posted a book review?  I suppose it has, though I must admit to having re-read Stephen Hunter's Soft Target during that time.  Is that all?  I guess so.  But it's more a testament to my inability to find anything worth reading rather than being too busy to read anything.  And if I don't post about it, it didn't happen.  So I'll have to plead guilty and try to do a better job and read more books.

So since the last book I've read was by Stephen Hunter, it seems only appropriate that I've come roaring back with Stephen Hunter's latest, The Third Bullet.  A tale of the Kennedy assassination, Hunter isn't a conspiracy theorist and claims to be an believer in the Warren Commission Report and Bugliosi's and Posner's conspiracy debunking but he takes the set of known facts, looks at them through the eyes of a well-seasoned sniper, twists a motive here, adds a character there, and gives us an entirely plausible new theory to ponder.  Sure, it's fiction, but why couldn't things have happened the way Hunter describes?  (Hunter has some fun with the conspiracy theorists by detailing one theory of how a second shooter came from the future, a plot device right out of Terminator.  And, if you think about it, it's not too far-fetched.  If you believe in time travel.)

But forget all that.  You want to know if Hunter brings the shoot-em-ups and the best writing you're likely to find on guns and ammunition and sniper-ing.  Dang straight he does.  He takes great delight in killing off his first victim - a thriller-writer whose series' main character is a lot like Swagger.  Hmmm.  Who could this be?  (In interviews, Hunter denies any other purpose than to get the plot a'rollin'.  I think he's a bit too self-satisfied with that explanation.)  But most importantly, Hunter brings back Bob Lee Swagger and even for a few lines Swagger's father, Earl.  Fans, like me, of the Swagger mythos will rejoice and believe the ultimate reason why Swagger investigates the assassination:  no, not because of Kennedy but because of another government official who, like Swagger's daddy, was gunned down while doing his duty.

A slam-bang effort at taking another look at a popular myth.  (Okay, not myth - the assassination actually happened - but the events of that dreadful day have reached a near-myth level in this country.)

Graveyard Special - Book Review

The first line of James Lileks' Graveyard Special is worth the price of admission alone:

I poured the coffee, Dick wrecked the eggs.

I've been a longtime fan of James Lileks and I'd go just about anywhere he'd take me.  Essentially a light mystery, it's really Lileks' fictional remembrance of his college days in late 1980 in Dinky Town in Minneapolis.  Interweaving actual events with his plot-line, Lileks takes us for a nice little tour of this special place and time in his life, casting off memorable one-liners like he does in his columns and blog.  Novelist isn't Lileks primary profession - yes, yes, I know, he's published novels before but that's been a long time and the samples I've ready show he had yet to develop his novelist skills -  and it shows it parts with some lagging action and only mildly confusing plot-age.  The first in a promised series of linked novels, he's bound to improve.  I liked his asides on pop culture - the music of the time, the transition from pinball to video games - and the portrait of his protagonists parents was especially loving.  All this and a smashing climax with a Zamboni.   What else could you ask for?

 (This was second experience with Kindle reading and, like my first Kindle experience, it was equally meh.  I'll blame it on using my iPhone Kindle - after all, thousands of Kindle users can't be wrong, can they? - because who wants to read a book on their phone?  I do, apparently, since I haven't yet sprung for an actual Kindle.  But my limited experiences with this e-reader technology have been underwhelming.  I frankly don't see what the Kindle fuss is all about.  Sure, I got Graveyard Special at a good price and I was able to carry it around with me wherever I carried my phone but it turns out I carry my phone to all the same places I would have carried a dead-tree book.  Now I'm stuck with it.  I can't toss it up in the attic where stacks of other books gather dust or sell it at a discount book store or give it away as a gift to someone.  It just sits there on my phone.  Now what?)

Bob Greene's Quiet Comeback

I was a big fan of Bob Greene's before his fall 10 years ago but I'm glad to see he's quietly making a comeback.  (No, not Oprah's Bob Greene; this Bob Greene.)

Bob Greene thinks a lot these days about the colleagues he has lost — and probably about the career he lost, too.

Ten years ago this week, Greene’s public life crashed and burned on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Readers awoke that Sunday morning in mid-September to the news that he’d been fired after more than three decades as one of the best known and most widely read columnists in America.

A spectacular ride that had taken a kid from Bexley, Ohio, to a starring role at the Sun-Times by age 23, then to the Tribune and syndication in more than 200 newspapers, was suddenly and completely over.

Greene had been fired, according to the Tribune’s version of events, because he had abused his position by engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a girl he met when she came to interview him for her high school newspaper. 

I first came across Greene's columns in the pages of Esquire in the '80s.  I greatly enjoyed his collections of columns from that magazine and his work on the Tribune.  Up to his time of his dismissal, he was a tireless advocate for abused children and his series on the Baby Richard case touched me deeply as an adoptive parent.  I hungrily re-read his Good Morning, Merry Sunshine in those heady first weeks of Rachel's infancy and so his writing remains a part of that very special time.

No doubt, Greene's actions were a serious breech of ethics and terrible lapse of judgement but count me as one of those who thought his punishment was too harsh.  Certainly some kind of reprimand was in order, a lengthy suspension as well would have been called for, but his body of work up to that point was evidence enough that this may have been an isolated occurrence.  Add the fact that his wife passed away four months after his dismissal - her death likely had more to do with her month-long respiratory illness than Greene's crash-and-burn but that probably didn't help - and you're looking at a man who more than paid the price for his transgression.

Since then he's managed to publish four books and now writes a weekly column at CNN.  I guess you'd call it a comeback if you could call 10 years in the wilderness "looking for stories and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them" a comeback.  Call it redemption through work.  I guess that's all you can do, the best you can do, and that's enough.  It certainly seems to be the case for Bob Greene.

Soft Target - Book Review

Okay, so Soft Target is the last of the Stephen Hunter I haven't read and the real last of the series. So now I'm really disappointed to be finished - maybe I could start all over again? Nah. No point in treading over places I've already been. Gotta keep moving, reading-wise.

Soft Target is not so much a novel as a novel-length parable told in a feverish style. Hunter is at the top of his game here but it's a lightning quick read - about a hundred pages short of a typical thriller - because Hunter wants to get in, tell his story, make his point, and get the heck out. Ray Cruz carries on the Bob Lee Swagger story. Sure, it's a tired trope, Cruz being an unknown son of Swagger's, and so carries on the family sniper tradition but what're you gonna do? Get past that and Cruz is a great new series character to follow. Stoic, capable, flawed.  Everything you'd like to be.

But back to why Soft Target is more a parable than a story. Hunter thinly disguises his characters and they're obvious stand-ins for current politicians. (Heck, don't take my word for it. Take Hunter's.) His bad guys are the current crop of bad guys - radical Islamists - but there are also other bad guys, namely nihilist gamer youth, and so Hunter has a blast blasting away at what he sees are the biggest threats to civilized society. Don't agree? Write your own book then.

There's plenty of shooting and guns and 'splosions and helicopters to keep you amused and when the smoke clears the good guys are left standing and the bad guys have met their just reward. Can't ask for much more than that, can you?

Soft Target doesn't approach the epic grandeur of Hunter's finest but it'll do until the next one comes along.

Black Light - Book Review

Black Light is the second in Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series though it's the last one for me and the first one, too. Some years back I'd tried to start the series and had picked up this book but set it aside after a hundred pages or so - at the time, it just wasn't my kinda book. Amazing what time can do.

Having introduced the story of the death of Bob Lee's father in his first book, Hunter now takes up that story in detail and ties it to the present time of the book. (Hunter's prior published book, Dirty White Boys, is also tied to this Black Light, forming a sort of trilogy of Time to Hunt, Dirty White Boys, and Black Light. I've no desire to read Dirty White Boys and there's no need since the essentials of that book are detailed here.) It's a what-happened-years-ago-is-now-very-important-to-the-present-and-must-be-kept-secret-at-all-costs kind of plot. Swagger and his side kick follow the clues and fight the bad guys and there's some gunplay but not on the scale of Hunter's other Swagger books. Justice is delivered and arrangements are made and everybody's ready to move on to the next adventure by the end of the book.

Not Hunter's best and not near the top of the series but a decent enough place holder until the next book. Glad I read it. Glad I'm finished with it.

So that just about finishes my Stephen Hunter reading jag. I've got one more to go - his latest - and than my mild case of reading OCD will allow me to move on. Oh, it's been fun all right but the bad thing about finishing a series is that you're finished with the series. I'll be glad to look for another series but I was perfectly happy with this one.

Point of Impact - Book Review

Point of Impact is where it all started, the first book in Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series. Don't let the uninspired title keep you away. Sure, the plot-line is worn out - an innocent man is set up to take the fall by the government and he takes awesome revenge. (Hunter himself talks about how so well-used the plot is that he used it again in Dead Zero. As he points out, when you've got a good plot, you stick with it.) But this is not only an origin story, it's a good tale well-told with Hunter's trademark delirious prose. All of the highlights you've come to expect from this series is here: gun lore, exciting shoot outs, plot twists, Swagger outsmarting and outgunning his enemies. A great start to what's turned out to be a great series.

Since this was written in the early '90s, it's interesting to see who the bad guys are.  Remember when things were heating up in Central America?  There was a time when that part of the world seemed so very important to the United States.  My how the world has turned.

(The movie version is Shooter, which I didn't see, which was directed by Antoine Fuqua, a more-than-able thriller movie director starring Mark Wahlberg, the more than adequate action movie star. I understand it wasn't very good. Oh, well.)

Time to Hunt - Book Review

I'm continuing with my out-of-order reading of Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series - I read 'em when I can get 'em - and the next one I had on hand was Time to Hunt . It's the third in the series and Hunter would break off for three books to explore the goings on of Bob Lee's father Earl, who I've already written about.

This time around, Bob Lee's family is in jeopardy. His wife and daughter are out in the wilderness riding horses and thanks to a narrative trick we believe that Bob Lee is mortally wounded within the first few pages. Then Hunter takes us on a long flashback, back-filling Swagger's Vietnam experience as well as Swagger's spotter, Donny. All of this sidetracking is vitally important to the present day story so that when Hunter brings us back, we know exactly who the players are and what's at stake. Picking up the narrative, Hunter takes us headlong into the thriller territory we've come to know and the twists and payoffs and very satisfying. Oh, and then there's all that gun lore that's so important to the series.

No, this one doesn't disappoint at all. One of his best. And the book that's probably the key to the whole Bob Lee Swagger character.

The 47th Samurai - Book Review

Back to Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series. Next up: The 47th Samurai. (It follows Havana in publishing chronology but it's a return to the series after a three-book hiatus. I'll get the story chronology straight when I'm through with the series in about three books or so.)

Hunter's plans for Bob Lee seem similar to his plans for Earl - place his character in a new setting and turn 'im loose. In this case, Hunter plunks Bob Lee in the middle of Japan and the traditions of the samurai. (D'uh.) He ties the Earl Swagger series to the Bob Lee series with a prologue involving Earl and the plot drives from those scenes. Hunter spins his magic with the new setting and old characters and makes the implausible plot and events and climax seem doable in its own world. Just try not to think too much about it after you close the book. He seems to know as much stuff about swords as he does guns and that's quite a bit and I always find that part of his books to be the most interesting.  There's the usual trouble you'll find in series fiction - events shape and grow the characters yet essentially they remain unchanged at their core.  Minor characters age and their actions must be explained and tracked and at the end there's a new character to wonder about.  (Which is no wonder if you've read the subsequent books like I have.)

A solid installment in the series.

Now, to backfill the remaining three prior books.

Havana - Book Review

Havana, the last of Stephen Hunter's Earl Swagger novels, is set in, well, Havana, where this time Earl is recruited by CIA types to take out none other than, who else, Fidel Castro.

Need to know about Havana in the early 50s, before Castro came to power? (You know, around the time as it's depicted in Godfather 2?) Here's your book! Full of gangsters and government-types and revolutionaries, and mojitos and cigars all under a blazing tropical sun it's Hunter's fever dream of the era, mixed with real events and his fictional character, all wrapped up with a nice show down between our hero and the bad guys. No, it can't come near Hunter's masterpiece in the series, it'still a fine example of Hunter's writing powers.  Sadly, though, it's apparently the last we'll see of ol' Earl in a book of his own. In his next book, Hunter will then pick up where he left off with Earl's son, Bob Lee, but now we know as we read those books more about this larger-than-life hero that looms so large in Bob Lee's mind.

Stick around to the end:  Hunter includes two articles he wrote for The Washington Post that resulted from his research trips to Havana - one about Castro's raid on the  Moncada Barracks and another on the Shanghai Theater.  I hope the links work but if you click through you'll get a good sense of Hunter's writing style.    

Pale Horse Coming - Book Review

Next in Stephen Hunter's Earl Swagger is Pale Horse Coming and it's a doozy.

The bare bones plot borrows from the real life events of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (per Wikipedia. Click through that link if you want a synopsis of the entire plot.)  See, there's this prison in the deepest, darkest reaches of, uh, Mississippi, and Earl's friend has been wrongfully taken prisoner.  There's a break out, a capture, much misery, another break out, a break in and then it's all Apocalypse now with the world ending in fire and flood and whole lot of shooting thrown in for good measure.

Long and thrilling, Hunter is clearly having fun with his series and when an artist is having fun great things happen and no doubt Hunter is an artist in this genre.  For shooting fans, there's the usual gun lore to be found and for movie fans Hunter borrows from his day job as a movie reviewer and pays homage to those movies where a group of guys (and a girl!) go up against impossible odds and prevail.   Sure, it's all preposterous.  So?  It's also epic and could very well be Hunter's masterpiece of his series.

Hot Springs - Book Review

Chewing through more of the Stephen Hunter list, I opted to change things up a bit and shift over to the Earl Swagger portion of his series. (Earl Swagger is the father of Bob Lee Swagger; Hunter runs two series where they intersect somewhere down the line in Black Light. Black Light is the third in the Bob Lee Swagger series and was written before the Earl Swagger series though it takes place years later. Got that?)

So Hot Springs is the first in the Earl Swagger series and introduces more in full to a character that Bob Lee Swagger fans already know about. Earl's a World War II hero, returned home to Arkansas after being recruited by law enforcement to help clear out that hotbed of sin known as Hot Springs. Hunter does his usual bang up (heh) job of getting the story underway and showing us why Earl's such a hero while keeping us interested in the gun lore about which Hunter is an expert. There are plot twists aplenty as well as cameos from real life gangsters, heckalacious gun fights, a portrait of post World War II Hot Springs, rural Arkansas and a very fine climax. An excellent start to this series as well as a primer on an offstage character that looms so large in the Bob Lee series.

Night of Thunder - Book Review

Some post-filing season catching up:

In keeping with my intent to fill in some of the spaces in the Bob Lee Swagger series, I finished Night of Thunder, a not-bad entry in the series but one which his fans, according to the comments on the Amazon.com page, thought was one of his weaker efforts. But, like Hunter says in his Afterword, he decided what a NASCAR event needed was a good gunfight and, by gosh, that's exactly what he's accomplished. If that's not your thing, well, that's not your thing and there's not much to be done about it, but Hunter's prose reaches a feverish pitch here and, though my experience in this culture is limited, I imagine his descriptions of the event and the people involved with it are about the best you'll find anywhere. Oh, and there's a corking good gunfight thrown in there as well.

And, as usual, there's the heavy baggage of updating readers on the tangled relationships of the series character with those around him. Once those are sorted out, though, it's a wild ride. Sure, of the books in this series I've read this may be the weakest but it's very entertaining and a solid entry. Nothing wrong with that.

Dead Zero - Book Review

After nine months I've managed to return to Stephen Hunter and his Bob Lee Swagger series. The latest is Dead Zero and it doesn't disappoint. This time around Swagger has to track down some rogue element within the government who can't stand to have the possibility of peace in the sandbox and complications ensue. Plenty of the stuff I've come to expect from Hunter: shooting, guns, 'splosions, sure, but it's his writing style that I'd admire the most. Keeping things from going over the top, but barely, Hunter tells his story with great enthusiasm. Sure, there's the usual problems of a series character - all of the baggage Swagger's managed to pick up over the series has to be commented on and sometimes updated and there's yet another surprise about family relations. That kind of plot twist and is old and tired but if you like that sort of thing, well, that sort of thing is there for you. Hunter knows what he's doing. Who am I to say otherwise?

But I'm back to my original dilemma: now that I'm current with the series, should I go back and fill in the spaces. I know back in February I said I didn't see the point but I'm enjoying this series so much I just might have to go back and read about Swagger's origins for myself instead of relying on a passing comments in the newer books.

We'll see. There's a lot of other books I'd like to read.

Hemingway's Boat - Book Review

It seems to me the Hemingway biography industry has run dry - the last I remember reading was Michael Reynolds final volume of his wonderful biography - but just when you think there can't possibly be anything to add to life of Hemingway along comes Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat and that changes everything.

Hendrickson singular take is to begin in 1934 when Hemingway acquired his beloved boat, Pilar, and then work his way forwards and backwards and, sometimes, sideways. For that effort alone, Hendrickson should be applauded - he more than makes his case that everything that came before Pilar and that came after had a profound effect on Hemingway and his boat is what ties it all together. Passing characters in Hemingway's life get a closer look. Arnold Samuelson, who spent a memorable Summer with Hemingway in Key West which both Hemingway and Samuelson would write about, changes from a sometimes comic character to a tragic one. And there are new characters on the scene - Walter and Nita Houk, a couple who Hemingway befriended in the early 50s, that provide a sweet counterpoint to an ugly time of Hemingway's life. If Hemingway was capable of great cruelty, he was also capable of great gallantry. As Hendrickson points out, Walter Houk is still alive today, one of the few people who are who were around during those days and can provide a firsthand account of how things really were. But because Houk's story sheds a positive light on Hemingway, his and his wife's story has been overlooked by other biographers. That's too bad.

And then there are the final chapters about Hemingway's sad youngest son, Gregory, and the intriguing theory that perhaps the two shared similar impulses. It's too easy to say that Hemingway's overt macho-ism was a response to his mother's dressing him up as a girl when he was a toddler and later trying to twin him with is younger sister that led to his very real mental problems. Certainly his own father's struggle with mental illness had more to do with that than anything. But how do you explain Gregory's penchant for transvestism taken to the final extreme of transexualism at the end of his tragic life? Hendrickson says that Hemingway's impulses may have found an outlet in his writing; Gregory's impulses, alas, didn't, and he ended up acting them out in a most dramatic manner. Still, Hendrickson believes, and I do as well, that despite the distance between the two, neither could really give up on the other.

No doubt the Hemingway family was a strange family, driven by impulses they couldn't understand. Hemingway, whether he knew it or not, did the best he could to come to terms with those impulses through the life he lead and his writings. He was really a confessional writer before Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton forced the term to be coined.

Here's a review from OpinionJournal that delves deeper into the book than I do here and which summarizes and makes the final point about the book far better than I can:

This is persuasive. Yet there may be a simpler and more common explanation for the artistic decline and the despair it engendered: that Hemingway exhausted his material. It is a common fate for novelists, especially novelists who achieve early success. Most go on publishing, pretending that their new work is as good as their old. Hemingway, who told so many lies in his books, couldn't tell this lie to himself. He continued to write, at far greater length than in the good years, in the hope that the work would come out fine. It didn't. So the reams of manuscript and typescript were locked away in the bank. Even so, the gods had not altogether deserted him; he was granted that late miracle, "A Moveable Feast."

For Mr. Hendrickson, discovering just how unhappy and unsettled Hemingway was for so long makes him more of a hero. He states his case persuasively, which is why this book is so good. Certainly one cannot help admiring the way in which Hemingway stuck, grimly and doggedly, to his métier, even as his powers failed.

There are two sentences that sum up what happened to Hemingway. They were written neither by himself nor by Mr. Hendrickson but by Fitzgerald, whose own weaknesses Hemingway, his friend and rival, admirer and denigrator, threw in his face. They were words that Fitzgerald gave to Dick Diver in "Tender Is the Night" to explain his decline: "The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks."

No, you won't read this book about Hemingway because Hemingway doesn't mean anything to you. Even so, to miss it is to miss an extraordinary book about an extraordinary American writer.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff - Book Review

Why, lookee here, I finally got a book read. Actually, I've read more than one book since my last book-related post - I just haven't said anything about them. Looks like I've got some catching up to do. Not that I've read that many but still.

Anyway, just finished Lawrence Block's latest Matthew Scudder novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff. It looks like I haven't posted anything about Block though I know I've read within recent memory the last installment in his Keller series. He hasn't written a Scudder novel in quite some time so it's good to get back to the character. And, ingeniously, Block manages to take us back to a time where Scudder was really setting himself apart from the other private investigator characters of other mystery series: 30 years ago, when Scudder was first struggling with his sobriety. The mystery at the core of the novel is less important than Scudder's personal struggle and it's a delight to visit New York City back in those days. Bracketed by scenes in current time, it's a nice contrast to the way things used to be. Better? Not at all. But interesting nonetheless.

Honestly, I'd grown a little weary with the evolution of the Scudder character in recent books; domesticity doesn't really suit him. This is a nice way to re-visit him without having to go back to the old novels. Block's writing is effortless, as always, and while there's no real surprises to be had - and I wasn't as pleased as I'd like to be with the plot's resolution - Block remains a pro and he brings everything, and everyone, in for a safe landing.

Hard Stuff is good stuff.