Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

One of the things I am genuinely pleased by in the last year is the way AICN has made inroads at covering the world of books. Admittedly, we've just scratched the surface, but at least we opened the dialogue. At least we started, and we have the good work of one Mr. Frank Bascombe, our resident sportswriter and book reviewer.

Today, he's going to take a look back at the year that was, and he's also got some new reviews just for you. I'll leave you in his capable hands now, and want to both thank him and congratulate him for all his efforts over the past year.

It's been a year. That's right... 365 days since this column marched onto the AICN website (ok, maybe not exactly, but really close). In that time we've seen a lot of titles come and go, and things have changed dramatically and will continue, I'm sure, moving forward. Some of the books reviewed on this site have gone on to receive high acclaim. Others should be skipped, and thankfully were. Some, well, they got missed all together, and sometimes a list is the best way to remind people of what they should have picked up on, and what they didn't.

A SMALL LIST OF THE BETTER STUFF:

THE COLD SIX THOUSAND

KISSING IN MANHATTAN

EMPIRE FALLS

HOSTAGE

LIT LIFE

FIRE

MRS. PAINES GARAGE

A MULTITUDE OF SINS

THE CORRECTIONS

WETWARE

EDDIE'S WORLD

MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM

HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS

LULLABY

BIG IF

A SMALLER LIST OF THE OK STUFF

CHOKE

THE RACKETTS

HIGH MAINTENANCE

SUBVERSION

HOW TO BE GOOD

THUMBSUCKER

THE FOURTH HAND

THE WALKAWAY

STAY

THE SOUND OF THE TREES

YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE

THE DARK FIELDS

THE DISAPPEARING BODY

THE DRIFT

AND FINALLY, THE BAD STUFF

DOGWALKER

THE SUBJECT STEVE

JEREMY THRANE

HARD FEELINGS

LOOK AT ME

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAY

And bringing up the rear, and rightly so,

ALL I COULD GET

It's a varied and multifaceted list of titles that ranges from the absolutely bizarre to the completely outrageous to some of the finest work done in the last twenty years by any writers, anywhere. If I had to pick a best book of the last year, that would be tough to do, certainly, but for me it's a three-way tie between:

THE CORRECTIONS

BIG IF

HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS

You can take your chances with anything you'd like, or just shut up and watch The Osbournes; I don't care, really, but if you want a good read, any of the top three of the last year just mentioned will get you through and show you a perspective that is rarely seen. And until then, IT'S NOT A SECRET IF I DON'T TELL ANYONE...

ASH WEDNESDAY by Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke the actor. Ethan Hawke the writer. And, in a few months, Ethan Hawke the director.

So where do you start when examining his career? I could just run down the movies I liked. There was Gattaca, but it was the movie I liked, not him. Great Expectations was a sloppy excuse for a movie, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for the rags to riches story and for the image of Bobby coming out of the ocean in that orange prison jump suit. "Whisper, whisper!" I thought Dead Poets Society was a very mild and tasteless after school special. Most recently, of course, there was Training Day, where he was completely devoured by the merciless Denzel Washington.

Let's be honest. The only reason he got an Oscar nod is because of Denzel. Mr. Washington engulfed that picture; his performance is adrenaline fueled with nitro. Not a soul alive can match that intensity, and Mr. Hawke was just along for the ride, really. So does that deserve an Academy Award Nomination? I guess since Whoopi Goldberg actually won once, the floodgates are open. Here's what probably happened: Hawke got one more vote that Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, which was really a B level ensemble piece. Or the Academy Members just ran out of things to vote for and some softie from Manhattan wrote him in as a joke. COME ON! It's such a farce. How can it be taken seriously?

That said, this column is not about Mr. Hawke's lack of acting chops. Instead, today we're going to focus on his horrific lack of talent with the written word.

I read his first book about five years ago, and most of the time it felt like easy reading for beginners. I heard Richard Linklater told him to write a book about the stories Hawke was telling him while they were making Before Sunrise, probably just to get him to shut up. He didn't think Hawke would really write the damn thing.

But he did, and it was called The Hottest State. On its cover was a big bold sketch of a bleeding heart along with his name. After I picked it up, the book kept me rapt with laughter for hours. It was a goofy little story about a boy and a girl. The boy is in love with the girl, but she leaves him because he's a useless dick, a complete waste of time. He throws himself around the rest of the story recklessly until Hawke runs out of things for him to do and the novel ends, thank God. He prose style is sort of a cross between a lame attempt to be "downtown beat" and modern-day English 101, with some big words thrown in to make it sound like he's got a handle on the dictionary on his desk. You need to make a splash with your first book, do something interesting; don't give me a novelization of a Dawson's Creek episode with beer and the word fuck thrown in to make it sound more grown-up.

Well, he's gone and done it again. This time, Hawke has takes us back to the land of the young and stupid, presenting us with Ash Wednesday, and the comic styling of Jimmy and Christy. What really impresses me is that for 274 pages Hawke makes the reader believe that these people are really deep and thoughtful and concerned with very high moral issues. He describes Jimmy and his failings to us over and over. How his father died, how he has always been a womanizer, his taste for drugs and booze. And Hawke can't help but throw in another facet of Jimmy's personality; he's a die-hard New York Knicks fan.

Of course, the defining moment for any Knicks fan of the last ten years has to be the NBA Finals with Houston, where John Starks blows it. Jimmy describes this in detail to Christy, who could care less, and when she's not telling Jimmy she could care less, she's telling herself. I agree with Hawke about one thing: John Starks did lose the championship for New York, and the moment after he missed that shot in the closing seconds of game seven, I gave up on the Knicks. Now I just sit back and laugh at them while the rest of the league runs through them.

Christy is a horse of another color. She's got this sort of "abused, stupid, but I'm really smart" vibe hanging around her. She seems to be amusing herself with Jimmy, and he takes her attention so seriously that he goes AWOL from the Army to be with her.

Most of this book is about the marriage Jimmy so desperately wants to push through to become Christy's husband. Jimmy stops every five or six pages to tell us about his thoughts on God, and how fucked up his life is. Christy listens and laughs, and meanwhile they screw like rabbits, and she gets pregnant.

And if you're still coherent by the time you reach page 117, which is where the REALLY deep philosopichal musings kick in, then more power to you.

Here's the most glaring problem with this book. Hawke has created two very normal, bland, banal characters. He's thrown them into a story that has no fire to keep it going. As well, he's written chunk after chunk of dialogue that these two uneducated, mashed-potato-sandwich-eating pseudo-white trash hillbillies WOULD NEVER SPEAK, even if they spent ten years at the Choate boarding school for wayward teens.

If Hawke wanted to write a book about God and his feelings on Religion, then why didn't he just write it? Why did he have to include these cardboard cut-out characters that no one will believe could EVER exist? I have a hard time separating Hawke the actor from Hawke the writer, and that may be a problem he'll always have with people who read his books unless he starts writing under another name. If Ethan Hawke were not a Z-list Hollywood Actor, this book would never get published. Random House Inc. is more to blame than he is for allowing this book to see the light of day. They think his name will sell copies, and it will, but at what price to credentials of the literary form? He's not showing me anything with this wafer-thin attempt at the novel form, and this is strike number two.

This book will disappear like a fart in a blizzard, and good riddance; it's a waste of your time.

THE 25th HOUR by David Benioff

This is the wonderful part of reading... making discoveries like this one, a debut novel from an incredibly talented newcomer. Published by the continually impressive and independent publisher Carrol and Graf in hardcover, The 25th Hour is a tight little masterpiece along the lines of Richard Price's Ladies Man. That's certainly not to say that it's the same language or narrative, but I got the same jolt of energy and excitement from this as I did from Price's book. Now in paperback, and a very affordable read (or check out your local library, ya cheap bastid; like Detective Mills said, "Anyone can get a library card. Doesn't make 'em Yoda."), I think it's safe to say you should try this one out, and here's why.

Benioff has done something quite unusual; he's flipped the normal cookie cutter crime thriller format on its head and made it okay to sympathize with the villain. Monty (Montgomery) Brogan is a drug dealer, and he's from the right side of the tracks no less. He peddles "black tar" and other mind-bending substances. It's presented to us in a very matter-of-fact way, not that hard to swallow.

Slowly, over the course of the first few chapters, we learn that Monty is going to jail for a seven-year stretch. He got his tit caught in the ringer, so to speak. What transpires after this is basically the narrative equivalent of a personal count down, a stock inventory of Monty's life done by Monty and his close friends Jake and Slattery and Naturelle, his girlfriend. He'll be thirty-four when he comes out of gray bar mansion, and he knows in that time everything will be changed for him, violated, and permanent scar tissue will grow over. His friends, his father, and his girlfriend aren't so sure. They think he'll be able to get back on his feet; they think he'll still be "young".

Monty is a drug dealer, number one. He broke the law, number two. The world will have passed him over by the time he gets out, number three. It's a sad commentary that we as a society ruin a person's life for giving people what they basically can't rid themselves of, or "get shut of," as Mamet says. People like drugs. They like the effect, they like the high, the need, the act of scoring... everything about it. It will never stop; no amount of rehab or government warning labels will change that.

The human desire for something, the sheer force of will, is uncombatible. And it's a tragedy when some one OD's, right? Maybe not. After all, they did it. They made that choice. Did the dealer chain them to the floor and force the needle in their arm? No. Does Phillip Morris get seven years for killing people with their product? Or does Budweiser get a suspended sentence for fetal alcohol syndrome in a new born caused by a teenage girl drinking every weekend during college, then accidentally getting knocked up? No. Oh, wait... that's right; the government legalized those drugs. Here's a radical idea... privatize all drugs. Make them available over the counter at your local CVS, and allow Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson to reap the monetary benefits. That way, when you OD, it's your fault, and the government can make a profit taxing these products instead of spending tax payers' hard-earned cabbage (estimated at $100 million a year) enforcing ridiculous drug laws.

This really is the heart of what I perceived this story to be about. Monty is a cool guy, someone that I would have hung out with in High School. Hell, you probably did hang out with some one like this. We all did. He drives a beautiful Corvette, lives in a beautiful apartment, spends money on his girlfriend lavishly, and it's all sponsored by his job as a dealer. Monty is the guy who women all turn their heads for, from grade school on up. He's the guy who can walk onto an inner city basketball court and hit three three-pointers in a row, all while wearing loafers and a camel hair overcoat. He's a guy that just got blessed with all the right moves.

And it just so happens, he fucked up.

He went out of his way to do what he knew was wrong. This book traces that tragic arc from him getting kicked out of private school (which he attended with Jake and Slattery) for selling weed to finally getting caught due to close friends' loose lips. You know this guy is good at heart, and a couple of character traits that will remain unmentioned here prove that. If I can be bold enough to say for any Hollywood types are reading this, cast John Cusak in the role of Monty; this role is his career-maker. Benioff is someone who imagined it all, and if I were Carrol and Graf, I'd be giving this guy the moon and stars, because the next thing he does might just be the book that everyone reads... E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E.

BAGMEN

By John Flood

In the canon of first novels, you're lucky to find one that really widens the gap between itself and its peers, and you're even luckier if it's followed up by a second novel that can legitimately compete with the first.

John Flood gets high marks all around for this scathing portrayal of Boston Police Department at the start of the 1960's. Last month in this column, BIG IF was reviewed, glowingly, and a mention of Mark Costello's first novel was made. Well, this is it. John Flood is Mark Costello. Why he chose to write under a different name is a question only he can answer. All the same, he's written two kick ass books.

BAGMEN was the start of something incredible, and sadly, this book is nearly out of print. The paperback publisher Delta, a sub quadrant of Bantam/Dell, has let the stock run down so low that the only place you'll find it is in a second hand store. Bantam/Dell is run by a coven of money-grubbing mass-market drones, spearheaded by a Jabba The Hutt-like force of nature, turning out mass-market cookies, all cut from the same old tin, year after year, season after season. Sure… someone has to publish these books, and there is something to be said for a publisher who consistently fobs bad books off on the American buying public. BAGMEN was put out by the "old" Delacorte (before it became a part of Bantam/Dell), before the merger, prior to Carole Baron's untimely and completely unwarranted departure. Mrs. Baron had the luxury and ability to take chances. Hell, she published Elmore Leonard, Nicholas Evans (I know, I know, he's mashed potatoes for the mind), Danielle Steel (it's a franchise, even if you don't read it), all of which opens the door for small guys like John Flood AKA Mark Costello. You can rest assured that this guy will make a huge splash with BIG IF, and if you need something juicy, tight, thrilling, thought-provoking, widely critical, sharp and accurate in the meantime, then pick up BAGMEN somehow… anyhow.

Ray Dunn is the son of a legendary police officer who took some pay-offs from bookmakers, hence the name Bagmen. All the while, he was a good father to his sons Ray and Biff. Now Ray is working for a real dirty-under-the-nails Irish gangster named Johnny Cahill, who just happens to be the District Attorney.

Set in Boston in a time just after Ward and June Cleaver moved to the suburbs, when fedoras were on the outs and the VW Bug was coming in, Ray Dunn is fighting radical softies who are trying to peace, love and happy their way into his home and the panties of his wife, and he's got to do all the dirty work for his boss, seeming to never do enough, always finding himself a dollar short.

All the while, Catholicism and the Catholic Church loom in the shadows above everyone in Ray's world. A preacher ends up on the tarmac taking a dirt nap, and thus begins Ray's journey to the heart of the chemical '60's and his own soul as a man. Things changed so subtly in the '60's that if you were not careful, you woke up one morning and found a bunch of barefoot longhairs camping on your front lawn, talking about "visions" and taking a "good trip". Men from the '50's... real men... were always wearing suits, coming home at seven to a warm meal and a clean house to find their wives doing the crossword puzzle on the plastic covered sofa. This is Ray, and this is the life he wants, but things change, even if people never do.

Running parallel to these fading '50's, these values under assault, is a seed of radical change that gets planted by the author to explain how LSD was introduced to the America drug-taking public at the absolute perfect time. LSD was a completely new drug, new enough that the cops don't even know what it is, what it does, or how to test for it. Ray learns the hard way, running narcotics division captains under him, doing surveillance, working with the hardened dealers, and gradually learns that discovery is sometimes better than actually enjoying something.

What happens over the next tightly woven 250 pages will leave you gasping for air. As LSD is introduced to the unwitting public in a religious fashion, you wonder where everything went haywire, just like Ray does. John Flood works a magically fantastic slight-of-hand, keeping everyone including the participants guessing until the very end. Some of the descriptive narrative runs a bit long towards the latter half of the book, but pay close attention, because buried in the dead-on Boston accents is some of the finest writing I've read in years.

Another great column by our man Frank. In the last year, I've had my ass handed to me by books like Scott Phillips's bleak noir joke THE ICE HARVEST and Chuck P's upcoming nightmare grenade LULLABY and the excellent collection of short fiction KISSING IN MANHATTAN, and I sincerely hope that Bascombe is able to steer me towards some equal delights as this year unfolds.

Also, just a quick note about THE 25th HOUR, since Frank didn't seem to already know this. Spike Lee is going to be making the film, and Ed Norton has signed to play Monty. It's funny that Frank compared 25TH HOUR to the work of Richard Price, since that author's CLOCKERS is the source for one of Lee's better films. Let's hope he strikes gold with this one as well.

"Moriarty" out.