Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Here’s our buddy, Frank, with his book column. Again... I missed the date Frank wanted this up. All I can do is apologize. I hate keeping good stuff on the shelf, and I’m glad I finally get to share.
I'm still recovering from the this year’s Academy Awards celebration. How does a man like Martin Scorsese not have an Oscar? Mercedes Reuhl, Anna Paquin, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Palance, Mira Sorvino... they all have one, Phil Collins has one, too. Makes me sick. Call GONY what ever you want; too long, flawed, historically inaccurate, and I won't even go into what Bill Goldman said. Say all that, but it was still the most ambitious movie to come out this year, thanks to Martin Scorsese and his fluid direction. That movie is nominated how many times? It wins nothing?
Oh, right, if you have sex with a minor, run from the law, elude judgement because you’re a coward, and live in exile, you win an Academy Award. Wow! Marty has his work cut out for him. Even if his Howard Hughes biopic makes $500 million at the box office, and he gets down on his knees to beg, and Weinstein goes door to door for him, he still won't win. It's a sympathy Thalberg for Marty, and that's too big a crime for me to accept. Jessica Lange made an astute comment during an interview about Marty for VANITY FAIR prior to the release of CAPE FEAR. That is, he is escaping the mediocrity that is the Academy Awards. She couldn't be more on point.
Back in the world of sanity that is quickly becoming the book business, I've discovered a few examples that will pique your interest, I hope. Advance warning and advice can always come in handy when approaching the book shelves nearest you. Until you return...
IT'S NOT A SECRET IF I DON'T TELL ANYONE!!
BAY OF SOULS by Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin, 249 pages.
If you honestly feel the need to try and express your masculinity, then reading Robert Stone would be one way to express those feelings. If you'd like to read a prickly tale about a guy on the wrong side of the tracks, trying to express his long lost masculine identity, then you can read Robert Stone's BAY OF SOULS. You may be familiar with some of his more popular books like OUTERBRIDGE REACH, BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTERS, and DAMASCUS GATE. I wonder if Stone in his more urgent days took longer to express his characters than he does in this often-truncated exploration into the darker side of intellectual infidelity? Tim O'Brien did wonders for the cheating man in TOMCAT IN LOVE, and here, Stone does take a trip across the white picket fence for a grass is always greener look at a suburban cheating affair. This story is not about a cheater. It's more about a man caught so deeply in his own beliefs that he's too blind to see himself as the hypocrite he really is. What makes him hypocritical? He pretends to live a clean life, keeping the home fires burning, and then turns around and lies to his wife and child about almost everything, occasionally validating it with a turn to the church pew for religious cleansing, or intellectual flexing on a nearby college campus.
What happens to the educated male when he finds himself in a small college town, teaching students half his age? In Francine Prose's masterful novel, THE BLUE ANGEL, they lie and cheat and screw young undergraduates, all the while reading wonderfully insightful writing from the same twenty-somethings they’re screwing. Which begs me to ask the question... are there any other kind of twenty something's? In Michael Chabon’s WONDER BOYS, as told by Curtis Hanson, they lie and cheat and screw the Dean's wife. All of this is done by fostering the idea that it's somehow acceptable if you’re writing an epic novel, or in Grady Tripp's case, if you've written a stunning collection of books but seem to be stuck on the "big one". Stone's hero, Michael Ahearn, is not writing a novel. He's not even tripping the light creative. What Stone presents in this brilliant first part of the story is a man so void of anything that he will commit himself to the first beautiful object that pays him the slightest bit of attention.
Lara Purcell, another professor at his own school begins to flirt with him while they both sit on a students’s thesis committee. Suddenly, as if the guilt and pain attached to stepping out on your wife has been forgiven, the amnesiac Michael jumps in the sack with this Caribbean beauty. She stuns him with her mind and her physicality on the racquetball court. Meanwhile, he's out in the woods trying to kill a deer, but he won't. He's too caught up in his morals to do that; you know the "all living things" excuse. But he'll ruin his marriage without even a second thought. This is the part of the story that captures what I think Stone might be trying to convey about the American Intellectual Male. Sadly, this is the point when the book stops making sense.
Stone's editor must have taken at least a third of this story and cut it to shreds. Why? Or did the author sew things up so neatly that this is all that remains? Quickly this story takes a detour to a Caribbean island where Lara's ancestry and brother are embroiled in some sort of political mumbo jumbo. We all end up in places that we shouldn't. But how does Michael, an educated man, a man or morals and common sense, wind up on St. Trinity in the middle of a civil war? He's there, presumably to snorkel with Lara. She's also in town to bury her brother who's died of AIDS and left her the family hotel. Politics don't mix well with this story, especially since it seems like Stone intentionally tossed both of his main characters off a cliff, expecting them to fly. They don't, and it's too bad. Everyone stops caring about this book when we get to St. Trinity. Michael is supposed to be lost in a fever dream, overwhelmed by the mystery and religion of the island and its lore. What really happens? The reader gets confused and then overwhelmed by the sleight of hand that Stone attempts with bad results. You genuinely like Michael. And Lara? She's a woman bent on using everyone around her for her own needs, and ends up getting used by the people and the system that St. Trinity is swimming in. Am I to believe that a wife with a child who's unruly and filled with teen angst is going to let her husband disappear into thin air for an open-ended snorkeling vacation? He is already under suspicion, but she lets him go anyway. If Michael had turned out to be a spy, someone in pursuit of something other than middle of the road, namby-pamby soapbox spiritualism, then I would have bought this, hook line and sinker.
Perhaps that was a subplot, and to me it would make sense. Maybe Stone cut that out of the story, maybe not. At 249 pages, this story reeks of economy. It could have been much longer, twice as long, at least. Then the politics abroad and in the wilds of the Caribbean could have been fleshed out and made at least some sense. A peripheral character in the second half asks Michael a very poignant question: "How does one man inhabit another man’s paradise?" There is no answer worth repeating, because Michael is more lost than he can possible imagine by the time Robert Stone is done with him. Maybe the point of this story is that while a man is searching for what matters, trying to fill that void which grows from comfort and complaisance, it's what he's already got that he should be thankful for.
THE GETAWAY MAN by Andrew Vachss
Vintage, 193 pages
Andrew Vachss is a force of nature unto himself. A born defender, you only need to read one of his books to understand the power he wields. His job, or the one he does to pay the bills, mentally and physically, is as federal investigator, defending the youth who are too young to defend themselves. He's many things, he works on cases that no one else will, and he's defiant about it. You may know his work. If you don't, take a look at the Burke series, and you'll understand what it means to be prolific. He's best known for his crusading Burke, a hardened man with a past filled with unmentionable events and a conscience to match. Vachss likes his heroes flawed, on the run, walking the fine line between crime and punishment. His men save women from other men who abuse them mentally, physically and sexually. Whether it's daughters, wives, hookers or someone's five-year kid fresh out elementary school. His vision makes you wince, and sometimes you look away, shamed, but you always look back. He's an honest man, writing about the bad things that happen to some people, sometimes more than you know.
I heard a story about Vachss that gave me a better understanding to just how devoted he was to his beliefs. A crime writer who wound up dead hanging outside his Chicago office, Eugene Izzi, was published at one time by the same publisher that backed Vachss. Izzi was to come to New York the day before he did, and as usual, he sent his gun Fed-X to his editor. He never left home without it. He was going to meet Vachss and another man who would become the President of Sales at Random House. Izzi had a gambling problem, and Vachss went along for the ride, for a little R&R. These three men set out for Belmont Racetrack to bet and watch the day's races. After the fifth race, Vachss wanted to leave. Now Izzi and his publishing pal wanted to stay, bet the full ten races. Vachss tells them that he would rather not stay to watch all these men at the track, who are nothing but losers, who all leave losers, and go home and beat their wives and children. On that note, they left. This type of stuff, these nasty things, are on his mind all the time. That's why I was surprised to come across this original paperback, THE GETAWAY MAN. Vachss has no reason to write this book. He pumps out a Burke novel once a year, and he probably has his hands full with his protection duties. So why write this you might ask? Vachss is a writer, a creative force, so finely tuned it would seem that he can't do anything else. He writes in paragraphs, he writes quickly with no descriptive exposition, and nothing is left to chance in his stories. There aren't any unwanted strings to tangle up the characters.
It's a simple set up. Eddie is a dead end simpleton. We met him as he breaks into the ranks of low life carjacker, thief, and tag along. Eddie get caught up with two kids from the neighborhood who know only one way out, and that's to steal. In short bursts, Vachss delivers Eddie to us as a virgin to the world he’s being violently tossed around. Jail, kiddy academys, and becoming someone's "boy" are all just signs on the road of life for Eddie. Prison spits Eddie out and he runs into his old pal from the yard, J.C. This relationship spans the rest of the book, and it becomes clear to everyone involved, even Eddie, that it's a bad partnership, one that inevitably leads to someone's death. J.C. and his partner plan on robbing an armored car, and they'll use Eddie as the getaway driver. About halfway through this book I wondered where the women were. No worries there; Vachss supplies us with one, and she's a killer. They plan and scheme, the hope and dream that this will be their "last big score". It is, and sadly, everyone pays the price for living in a life of crime. Eddie is characterized so flatly and without any brains, wits or smarts, that you almost have to sympathize with him, for no other reason than he's just a sorry sack of wet mice. The other characters are typical, usual suspects, people we've seen time and time again, over and over living life in the small towns that populate the vacant wasteland of this country. One thing that Vachss does have going for him is a style. Albeit, it's airless, tough, no bullshit, and filled with people who have only one person in mind. The frequency which which Vachss manages to write novels, short stories and graphic novels, is a tough one to ignore. His books cover the spectrum of the marginalized and destitute of this world, and it's a shallow and grim terrain to cover as often as he does.
Don't get me wrong; if you like this stuff, and I do, (in limited amounts), then Vachss is your man. I'd never ask him to write something with a happy ending. We can all agree that things wouldn't end if they didn't badly. For me, Vachss is that guy waiting, standing at the end of the line. He'll ultimately remind you of Eddie Bunker, another crime writer who knows the life from the inside out. Nothing they have to say is pretty, but it needs to be said all the same.
If you want to talk books, movies, what ever drop me a line.
