Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Frank's going to start reviewing an occasional book that's actually already on shelves, something you can go wrap your grubby paws around right now, like the astonishing CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL by Glen David Gold that I'm halfway through. He'll still be giving you your first look at titles due out in the months ahead, though, so dig in...
IT’S NOT A SECRET IF I DON’T TELL ANYONE
THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen
In America today, bigger is certainly better from the Stock Market to the Internet and, of course, the movies. Just look up in the sky... is it a bird? A plane? Or is that A.I. plummeting from the stars. Like a stone, these over-hyped megahits come hurtling back to Earth, one after another. Several months ago, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, a barometer for what’s going on in the publishing world (the above board stuff, anyway), plunked a book down on its cover. Unusual? No. Different? No. This is a magazine in the business of talking about books. So now you're asking, “What’s the deal?” A book of fiction, literary fiction at that, even dare I say highbrow snobbish literary fiction, was this guest on its cover. People bandy around the term “literary snob” in my neck of the woods constantly. It’s like saying so and so is only interested in doing period pieces for Merchant-Ivory. Sure, most everything that comes out of the big houses these days is over blown, monster commercial publications with prints runs in the millions. That’s right... the millions. John Grisham is the master of the cookie cutter thriller, except for his disappointing last door stop, his stab a literature, and he's a big overblown pure as sugar money maker. Believe me, that check clears every time you take it to the bank.
A good book, one that’s really got something holding it together, has to be a great story, and when Jonathan Franzen wound up the buzz in the New York book world over the last month, everyone felt like they had to read it. At first, you hold this monster... and it’s a big one, 568 pages, a real tome.. and you think to yourself,“What does this guy know for 568 pages?” Franzen is now playing in the big leagues. He’s graduated up from the pamper room of literary marginality and can now sit on the top shelf. Two previous novels under his belt, THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY and STRONG MOTION, both very, very well received and critically hailed. He’s written a big book, like MASON/DIXON, UNDERWORLD, or A MAN IN FULL (which everyone from my wife to the guy who delivers my newspaper hated) or everydamnthing David Foster Wallace writes... did you see the size of those PREMIERE Magazine articles?! Franzen says he wants to piss at the stand-up toilets, and by god, he comes prepared to show you he can do it.
What blows you away is his knowledge of everything and his amazing, if not uncanny, ability to write about it in sordid detail, and make even the most mundane invention sound incredible. He covers deconstructionist theories, metallurgical inventions, railroad history, cooking expertise, Lithuanian politics, New York downtown disastrous social scenes, and yet still keeps the front porch light on and the home fire burning. He tells a story about a family... three generations of it actually: Alfred and Enid, the parents; Gary, Denise and Chip, the children. You're thinking to yourself, "This sounds very ONE LIFE TO LIVE," right? It may be on the surface, granted, but it’s an intense story that deals with love between women, sex between women, hatred between brothers and sisters, and the depravity of dealing with aging parents. What’s happened to the family story, the huge sprawling epic drama? The big picture that John Ford would have devoured? They're gone; everything is wrapped in little tight neurotic fictions. Franzen released the hounds with THE CORRECTIONS. He takes you from New York to the Midwest to Philadelphia to the war torn streets of Lithuania. To capture any mere snap shot of the story would be an insult.
Scott Rudin has snatched up the film rights to this book, as he does with almost everything. He lays in wait at a popular publishing fork and knife joint, wining and dining editors and mining the hot manuscripts. I guess everybody needs a hobby, something to collect. He can forget ever shooting this one, though. This book will never translate. It’s even bigger than BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES; it has more scope, more detail, more brilliance, more mother hump’n shine! While reading this, I awoke every morning wondering what would happen next. Franzen takes you on a journey through the heart of every character, examines every pimple, puts a microscope to every injury, and drives you down the road of an extremely frightening disease which afflicts Alfred, Parkinson’s. Sometimes when reading, you feel like you want to eat the book, take it in and have it forever; you fall in love. It’s really that simple.
What Jonathan Franzen has done with THE CORRECTIONS is announce his arrival as a voice of our generation. He writes to people just like you and me. He’s smart but not a show off, he’s funny without being nasty, and what is most important, above all else, he’s got a heart, and it’s big and warm and has emotional depth to it, real heat. Once every twenty or thirty years a novel comes along that just kills, and with this one, you must be a part of it. It’s not fashionable, it’s not hip, J-Lo won’t be reading this book, it won’t be a PEOPLE Magazine "beach book of the week." When I finished this book, it reminded me how I felt as the credits rolled on GOOD FELLAS; my eyes were watering, and I felt like I was just hit by lightning. This book is that good, and it’s out there right now. Go pick it up and see if I’m wrong.
HARD FEELINGS by Jason Starr
What a concept... to write a thriller, a nasty little scab of a story, and not to even care how it ridiculous it turns out. They say the first time is always the best. Remember the first time you felt up your girlfriend all those years ago in high school, or the first time you hit a homerun in kick ball during recess? Or how about the first time you narrowly escaped a massive head on collision after hydroplaning down the freeway during a rainstorm? Remember how your heart nearly leapt from your chest? Or the first time you read POP. 1280 by Jim Thompson, how hardcore the thing was, how nasty and empty the sheriff was, and it was such a tight little gem, like a good shiner. Well, if you want to sound like Jim Thompson and end up writing like Carrie Fisher, then you’ll be happy to have signed your name to something like HARD FEELINGS, and mine are after reading this tipsy little spin on the genre. It’s a thriller, it’s a mystery, it’s a hard-boiled piece of crime noir... lord, that phrase has worn out its welcome.
Andrew Vachss is crime noir with a bullet. Jason Starr wouldn’t know a well-told thrilling narrative if it jumped out of the fridge (in front of which he seems to be passed out) and bit him on the Johnson. Richard Segal, our sometimes hero and full-time moron, seems to be bouncing through life at the hands of a computer consulting job, trapped in mid-level management, but he can’t seem to sell a damn thing. His wife, on the other hand, is busy hitting it out of the park over on her rung of the corporate ladder. I guess it’s true... women always seen to get the first lick on the opportunity blow-pop. Richard is a stressed out salesman with a disturbing past at the hands of an old childhood neighbor. This part of the story is supposed to boil our blood, but all it does is caress the calluses that have already formed over our worn-out frontal lobes, numb from watching all of the uncivilized compost on
television. By the time Richard does what he needs to do, the wheels come off this story so fast that if you're not paying attention, you could be asleep. You stop caring what happens, and if you're unlucky, you plow through till the end, which is, as previously mentioned, so ridiculous that you have to laugh. Here... try this: Step 1, come up with an original idea; Step 2, write it convincingly enough to suspend the readers' belief without them catching on; Step 3, try not to rob everyone in the field who’s come before you, please. Jason Starr might have a ray of hope in these literary battles, but it will only get slimmer if he continues down this very narrow path.
WETWARE by Craig Nova
A few years ago, a pleasantly paced novel about getting bit by a snake and the antidotes there after was released into the book world. It was about doctors, men and women, with a slant towards the technical, and dealt with being a universal blood donor. UNIVERSAL DONOR was a book that was soon forgotten by the buying public, but its author never will be. Mr. Nova has written numerous books, dating back to before this reviewer entered the breathing world. He’s been tucked away quite comfortably in Vermont, living a very focused literary life. I first discovered him while reading his brilliant novel INCANDESCENCE, and ever since I’ve wondered where a man like this gets his ideas.
Recommending his prior works goes with out saying, but you’ll be hard pressed to find them. He’s mostly out of print, but obscure bookshops, second hand stores, and off-mainstream websites devoted to literary first editions will definitely know him. Some will most likely even have all of his books. Read TURKEY HASH, THE GEEK, TROMBOBE, (how about those titles, right?) but start with INCANDESCENCE. If that New York story (told with the same verve as Scorsese’s own short film) doesn’t kick your ass, nothing will. Nova writes like a man consumed; he’s part magician, part visionary, and mostly detailed storyteller. He writes with such ease about the beauties of the material world and the people who have only simple luscious feelings for it.
In his latest jewel, WETWARE, Nova writes a story set in the future, a place not unlike where we are now, with mostly everyone and everything getting a little harder. His star, his leading man... he has plans and he has a heart and he has knowledge, the surface of which is barely being scratched by his employers. Briggs is a scientist, a creator, working for a company whose business is synthetic reality... humans created, not born. WETWARE at first has echoes of BLADERUNNER, but it goes much further, and does it with more intelligence and wit. The company has designed the perfect human, made from and born out of chemicals. These machines fill the jobs that are deemed too dangerous in society or low level, and they act less like machines and more like children whom have never fully developed mentally but have the bodies of full grown adults. They’re not androids; they have brains that think and skin that sweats. Briggs has designed two humans in more or less his image and is about to let them out into the garden, although it’s certainly not Eden.
Briggs has taken his love for music and his feelings on obsessive love and programmed them into Kay and Jack, deep into the fibers of their beings. Kay and Jack get unleashed into the world, not knowing a thing. You feel that this is the life that Deckard and Rachael would have led if things had been different. Kay and Jack learn as they go, and personality asserts itself: Jack shows a skill at violence, and Kay her talent at the piano. Briggs has set them up to come back to him, or at least for Kay to do so. What happens when creator meets his creation? What happens when a synthetic man has sex with a woman made of flesh and bone? This is a book about things that may just come true in our lifetime. What happens when we clone something? Is it right? Is it moral? Depends on whose morals you quote. Nova leaves the door slightly open and gives your imagination something to feed on. He’s written a novel with warmth and feeling, knowledge and brains, wit and creativity. Don’t be surprised; he’s been doing this for a very long time and he is due some long-delayed accolades. John Updike called Craig Nova the greatest living writer of this century. You may not find yourself aligned directly with Updike on other things, but that’s a title I’d happily pin on Craig Nova.
