I have wanted to read Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 The Big Clock, the novel made into the great Ray Milland film of the same name, for years and years.  To my great delight, about eight or nine months ago I finally found an early 1960s printing at good ol’ Curious Books in East Lansing.  A few days ago, I got around to reading it...and somehow I remembered about Goodreads.com, and I did a review there, which I hadn’t done in two and a half years.

Originally, I was going to link and post the review in my blog, as I’ve done with others, but then I got an even better idea: Why not make a new page in the “My Writings” area that’s specifically for my occasional Goodreads reviews?

OK, so I did it.  Ta daaaaa.  Later reviews will be posted on the blog, hopefully, but for this one I’ll simply link to my new page.  Click there, and then just use the alpha-beta system to find The Big Clock​.

Hope you enjoy,

Rafeeq

Recently I have been wrapping up the last of the huge Bradbury project I have been working on for Salem Press since mid-October 2016—and during which, come to think of it, aside from my own writing and editing, I also ended up contributing three chapters to some other folks’ books—and at last I found some time for extra reading.

Therefore, with joy I grabbed one of the umpteen history texts I have on the shelf but which I hadn’t yet read: Operation Storm by John J. Geoghegan.

Below is the review I did a couple of days ago on Goodreads:    https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2048502335

Rafeeq

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John Geoghegan's Operation Storm: Japan's Top Secret Submarines and Its Plan to Change the Course of World War II provides a solid and fascinating account of Imperial Japan's bold though ultimately doomed attempt to bomb either the mainland United States or the Panama Canal--planners began with the former, then shifted to the latter--with aircraft carried to striking distance by huge submarines. Many interested in the Second World War will have heard of this scheme, though often only through a one- or two-line mention in a text focusing on, say, submarines or aircraft. Here, however, Geoghegan draws on previous book-length works, articles, and, perhaps most interestingly, his own interviews with surviving veterans on both sides of the final missions, to tell the whole story.

Some students of World War II will be familiar with the attempted Japanese firebombing of the great forests of the American Northwest. Although one of these jetstream-borne balloons did end up killing a family of picnickers, this naturally was hushed up at the time. What was not hushed up--and what, indeed, was front-page news, though now it often is forgotten--is that the Japanese also shelled the West Coast via submarine deck gun, and even dropped bombs from an airplane ferried aboard a sub. Like the Doolittle Raid, these attacks were designed to show that a seemingly distant enemy could touch not just the outposts of empire but the homeland itself; they also hoped to force the United States to spend naval resources defending itself on the West Coast rather than sending those ships and men across the Pacific into the main fight.

Although Geoghegan notes that the U.S. Navy indeed did end up convoying merchant ships in America's backyard against the threat of Japanese submarine attack, Japan's big plans focused on big subs, behemoths much larger than the submarines of other navies and capable of sailing around the world without refueling...and each carrying in a watertight hangar three catapult-launched floatplanes to drop bombs. The book chronicles not only the designing and building of the subs--whose fate in the Japanese naval bureaucracy at first was by no means certain--but also the production and testing of the specialized aircraft, which grew harder and harder to manufacture as American B-29 raids struck ever more devastatingly when Japan's defense perimeter collapsed.

Geoghegan explores the personalities of the man who captained the last of these boats and his ruthless unit commander, who also was aboard for the final mission, as well as the contrasting styles of the outgoing and incoming captains of the American submarine that finally captured the strange craft. We will hear details from surviving crew members from the big Japanese boats, pilots who saw their planned missions eventually turned into suicide attacks, and members of the American crew that chased and finally boarded the warship of an enemy that officially already had surrendered just days earlier.

Could these underwater aircraft carriers really have "Change[d] the Course of World War II," as Geoghegan's title so splashily suggests? No, of course not. By the time the project got rolling, the overwhelming might of a continent-wide nation already had pushed back far too deeply against a Japanese military that at first had seemed unstoppable; the discussion makes this clear from fairly early on.

Another point that should be in the back of the reader's mind is, even supposing an aerial attack to have knocked the Panama Canal out of commission, whether these missions even could have had slowed the final defeat of the Japanese Empire to any worthwhile extent. Surely, after all, the U.S. already had plenty of military assets in the Pacific, either already closing in on the Home Islands or on the way from the States. And while men and materiel freed up from the surrender of Germany would go faster through the Canal than around South America or through the Indian Ocean, they were going to get there eventually--presuming, that is, the pre-nuclear expectation of "Golden Gate in '48"--so whether Operation Olympic began in this month or that in 1946 really would have made no difference in the end. Geoghegan admits this toward the end of the book, of course, but not until after a lot of previous breath-holding that the educated reader should find a bit misplaced or overblown.

Finally, while the writing here is generally good, and the single-line oh-so dramatic cliffhangers at the end of each chapter can be tolerated even when they get to be too much, one mechanical gaffe is more than a tad annoying: the failure to use a comma when though is used like however. When we say something like "This was important, though," that construction simply does require a comma. Period. I cannot fathom how the editors at Crown allowed the lack--maybe the prices on commas were too high that year?

Despite these couple of shortcomings, though, John's Geoghegan's Operation Storm is an able and fascinating revelation of a piece of World War II history that definitely deserves telling.

A couple of weeks ago I read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain for a piece of contract work on “place” in literature, so at last I got around to doing a review on Goodreads.  Here ’tis:








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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1555242731

** spoiler alert ** Philip Roth's 2000 The Human Stain is an artful, psychological tale of a Classics professor disgraced by a false accusation of racism, a novel that not only explores the conflicts of race and gender and class but also examines issues of hypocrisy, modern education, and, perhaps most important, the personal construction of "self."

After serving as professor at the traditionally ivied Athena College in picturesque rural New England, and then as the Dean who swept out the desiccated academic mummies shambling to class with decades-old lecture notes and replaced them with vigorous new talent, Dr. Coleman Silk planned to spend the last few semesters of his career in a return to teaching. One day, however, when the waggish Silk wonders aloud if two students who still have not appeared by the sixth week of class are merely "spooks," or ghosts, the remark somehow gets back to one of the students, who happens to be African-American, and soon the predictable charges of racism are thrown about until they pile up like kindling and spontaneously ignite. The President who once used Silk as a bulldozer for change is gone, the new Dean, an intellectually and sexually insecure Frenchwoman whom Silk now regrets ever hiring, becomes Silk's chief self-righteous persecutor, and none of his supposed fellow seekers of truth in the ranks of the faculty even attempt to defend him from the contrived accusations. Silk resigns in disgust, and shortly afterward his wife dies of a stroke that he bitterly blames on the scandal. For two years the former academic seethes, writing Spooks, the enraged memoir of the injustices done to him and to his supposedly martyred wife.

All of this is the quick background, though, for where Nathan Zuckerman, the professional novelist who narrates the story, really picks up the tale is with the affair the Viagra-reinvigorated 71-year-old man is having with Faunia Farley, the 34-year-old woman serving as janitor at Athena and part-time cleaner of the post office, who also helps with milking at the local dairy farm in exchange for rooming there. Yet not only is Faunia dirt-poor, but she also purports to be illiterate. Thus in addition to the May-December aspect of the relationship at which gossipers might sneer, the suspicious might consider the wealthy, well-educated Silk something of a calculating predator only a half-step up from a rapist. Aside from Lester Farley, Faunia's ex-husband who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from the Vietnam War and who sometimes stalks the pair, Silk's friend Zuckerman is the only one who knows about the secret relationship.

The secret does come out, of course, and it is no plot spoiler to mention that the secret lovers will be dead only months after the book opens--Zuckerman, after all, clues us into this quite early on, so offhandedly that at first it almost could be missed. That life-and-death part of the plot holds up well, and yet so, too, does the narrative's investigation into the carefully hidden past of Coleman Silk, a curly-haired man apparently of Mediterranean descent, who for decades has identified as "white" and Jewish. Almost no character in the novel is who he or she outwardly appears, however--not Silk, with his origins as a high-achieving "colored" youth of the 1930s and '40s; not Faunia, with her two children killed while she was out cheating on her husband, and the diary that turns up after the supposedly illiterate woman's death; not Delphine Roux, whose hatred of Silk stems as much from her hidden attraction as from her trendy principles; not Herb Keble, the African-American professor hired by Silk long ago, who knows full well of Silk's innocence but does not come forward until too late; not even Zuckerman, intrepid and all-knowing narrator whose control of his own bladder has been robber by surgery for prostate cancer.

I would suggest that there is not a single thread in this tangle of characters, motivations, and secrets that fails to intrigue and delight. Roth's style is interesting, too, to readers of patience and open minds; paragraphs sometimes are huge and sentences long enough that sometimes they must be traced back and restarted for full comprehension, and references to Classical mythology are not entirely lacking, shall we say, but all of these things are perfectly appropriate in a "literary" work rather than one of middling, muddling style or lack thereof.

Point of view is perhaps even more of an artful puzzle, for while the novel begins with the first-person POV of Zuckerman as author, it soon dips into the secrets of Coleman's boyhood--which very near the end of the book, we learn that Zuckerman does yet even suspect until after the man is buried--and it also dips, in third-person-limited fashion, into the otherwise-unknowable inner lives of both Faunia and Les Farley. How can Zuckerman know these things, when Faunia, whom Zuckeman met only briefly, ends up killed in a car accident, and Les is portrayed as cagily insane? The meeting of Coleman's sister after the funeral explains one track, but for the other two...well, as Zuckerman comments, his job is telling stories, so apparently all the unknowable details of Faunia's and Les's thoughts, at first presented as narrated fact, have been fictionally extrapolated, hypothesized, or--let's face it--simply made up by Zuckerman. This, too, is part of the subtle art here, the final, somewhat surprising result making the supposedly real narrator little different from the godlike third-person-omniscient narrators floating disembodied in the narrative heavens high above other works.

In short, The Human Stain--by turns witty, gritty, lyrical, earthy and casually profane, and sorrowfully painful--is a fascinating novel for the reader of discernment as it plumbs the depths of the human mind and the conventions of modern academia and wider society alike.

​20 February 2016

A little while ago, I reread Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which I hadn’t done in probably 15 or 20 years.  And speaking of alternate-history Axis victories, thought I, what about that mystery/thriller I picked up a year or two ago...?  Last month, therefore, I finally got around to reading Fatherland by Richard Harris—a fascinating and enjoyable read.

Copied below is the review I did today at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1502761931

Rafeeq



​Robert Harris's 1992 Fatherland is a political thriller whose tension is clicked up a notch for being set is an alternate history of 1964 wherein Hitler won the war in Europe, and Germany rules over a Festung Europa bounded by vassal states to west and south, with a constant guerrilla war against the American-supported Red partisans simmering--its setbacks glossed over and its hushed-up casualties brought back by secret night trains--in the resettled lands of the Urals.

Xavier March, homicide detective for the Berlin Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo, is plagued with the classic failing of world-weary protagonists throughout the history of detective fiction: he is too inquisitive for his own good. Oh, he is a top-notch investigator, of course, but in his personal life he is far from the Party ideal--a Party which March, uninterested in totalizing ideologies, in promotions lost, or in the resulting sidelong glances of his colleagues, refuses to join. After serving as an aggressive young U-boat captain during the war, March drifted into the Kripo, where his restless mind might do some good. His marriage, whose fruitfulness should have been a duty to the Vaterland, has long since failed, and even ten-year-old Pili--Paul, his only child--knows that the comparative loner is an "asocial," a category only one step away from "traitor." With an honorary rank of Sturmbannfuhrer in the S.S. because of his profession, March most likely is the most sympathetic character ever to have worn the grim black uniform.

When his telephone rings at 6:15 a.m., the Sturmbannfuhrer has been lying, unable to sleep, listening to the rain, in his bed in a dingy apartment rented long ago by a Jewish family that somehow had disappeared without a trace. Rather than send the night duty officer on to his partner, the slovenly but amiable Max Jaeger, March is glad to take the case of the body found washed ashore on the muddy bank of Lake Havel--anything to fill the long, lonely hours of the dark morning, in which the mind otherwise might think.

This fat, well-fed body still clad in swim trunks, however, obviously is no mere vagrant. Indeed, March's discreet check of fingerprints proves that the man was a prominent alter Kampfer, an old fighter, or comrade from the very founding of the National Socialist German Workers Party; and while Josef Buhler's blood shows extreme intoxication, the former high official of the wartime occupation of Poland was a known teetotaler. And when furtive inquiry reveals that several other old colleagues of Buhler have died recently, many in conveniently random-seeming circumstances such as a hit-and-run traffic "accident," casual street crime, and the like...well, clearly something strange is going on.

A wiser officer of the Third Reich might shrug and chalk it up carefully to "accidental drowning," similar to the way that no one seems to know exactly where the Jews went after they were "resettled" in the East during the war. Not Zavi March, though. Doggedly he calls in favors, snoops through archives, conducts a little surreptitious breaking-and-entering at Buhler's estate after pretending not to have heard the radio message dismissing him from the case, and even ends up entangled with Charlie Maguire, the famous female journalist from America.

March's doggedness is admirable, but in the context of the literally murderous internecine intrigues of Nazi politics, it is a tad difficult to believe, just as it is difficult to believe that Herr Sturmbannfuhrer March simply would not have met with a handy accident or received a 9mm slug in the base of the brain one dark night. It is the thriller's necessity of the suspension of disbelief that for me reduces this gripping novel from a 5-star read to one of 4 or 4.5 stars; I confess that I also am a little put off by Harris's repeated use of the iconic Luger as police sidearm, for the elegant but outdated pistol was being replaced by the Walther P-38 from 1938 onward and never would have been in service in 1964--a minor thing, but an annoyance for certain students of history.

Such quibbles notwithstanding, Robert Harris's Fatherland is a fascinating, compelling read. Xavier March is suspicious, even privately contemptuous, of the Nazi Party, and hence is the perfect protagonist for a tale set in Berlin on the eve of the celebration of Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday, when the upcoming visit of American President Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., is about to bring detente to the nuclear-armed Cold War powers. This alternate world of 1964, wherein the Greater German Reich stands as the respected political, economic, and cultural center of Europe, able to establish solemn memorial museums to the millions killed in the Soviet gulags, is exquisitely ironic and believable. And the deeply buried secret that March and Charlotte Maguire uncover? It may be a bit anticlimactic now in our own history--which says something about the nature of reality, I suppose--but this truth should be shattering to any sane person, and it might even shake the foundations of the two most powerful nations in the world.

9 January 2016

I read The Caine Mutiny about three weeks ago and did a a very quick post on Goodreads, but now I finally got the chance to go back in to update and expand and I really needed: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1281337606.

Enjoy,

Rafeeq


I've always enjoyed the film version of The Caine Mutiny and hence was excited at last to find an old 1951 printing of the novel itself. As I rather expected, Herman Wouk indeed had done a marvelous job, both more detailed and also subtler than the ensuing film.

To anyone who only has seen the movie, for example, the depiction here of Willie Keith's initial shallowness and then slow growth to maturity will come as a wry delight. Willie in the film, after all, is something of a Mama's boy, and certainly unused to real effort or discipline, but he also seems a young man proud to receive his naval commission and at last take the fight to the Japanese. The original novel, however, first introduces the Princeton graduate's naval career as merely a stratagem to avoid being drafted for presumably even more dangerous combat in the Army.

Prior to his belated, seemingly patriotic gesture, Willie was but a shallow playboy, someone feeling very grown-up to be receiving an actual salary for banging out pleasantly obscene ditties on nightclub pianos...a pittance more than supplemented by the allowance from his mommy, in whose house he still lives. He has "passed the first war year peacefully" as only a man with "one of the highest draft numbers in the land" can (9); after all, "A very high draft number, in those days, helped a man to keep calm about the war" (10). After Pearl Harbor he had made a brief show of considering joining up so that he can be talked out of it, whereupon Wouk archly gives us one of the best lines in the entire book: "So it was that Willie Keith sang and played for the customers of the Club Tahiti from December 1941 to April 1942 while the Japanese conquered the Philippines, and the Prince of Wales and the Repulse sank, and Singapore fell, and the cremation ovens of the Germans consumed men, women, and children at full blast, thousands every day" (10-11).

Clearly, then, it will be a long, long climb into manhood. Wouk handles it all very nicely: the indignation of the pampered college boy unused to criticism from this lessers, the confused understandings, the eventual maturity so slowly and subtly arrived at that no one, least of all Willie, could point to a single defining incident and say, "That was it." After long sea duty, though, when the now-skilled sailor looks over some newly arrived crewmen much like his earlier self, Willie doesn't like what he sees, and we therefore see how far he has come.

In depicting the painful growth of shallow young Willie Keith, who must learn much before he can find integrity and purpose and even love, Herman Wouk explores the conflicting emotions and the self-deception common to humanity, and he occasionally turns a beautiful phrase well worth a wry smile. Willie's first glimpse of the slovenly deck of the Caine, where "[o]aths, blasphemies, and one recurring four-letter word filled the air like fog" (66), is memorable in its own way, yet so, too, in another way, later, is the surprisingly touching evocation of the strange loss of purpose that accompanies the end of the war, along with the equally poignant scene of the final decommissioning of the aged and battered ship. The Caine Mutiny is a five-star read that captures powerfully the conflict within as men struggle in the conflict without that decided the course of our modern world.

24 May 2015

Trying to get caught up on rolling some recent Goodreads reviews to the blog--here is one I did on a completely random little 1950s novel called A Matter of Morals https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25556059-a-matter-of-morals.

Rafeeq



The splashily packaged 1951 A Matter of Morals by Joseph Gies is an interesting little read--not great art, of course, yet definitely not the soft-core porno suggested by its beautifully leering cover art or its overblown, even misleading back blurb.

The cover of my 1953 Popular Library reprint depicts a professor-type fellow in the woods passionately kissing some bent-back gal while a letterman and his good-girl girlfriend hurry disapprovingly down the trail. Despite their obvious disapproval--it is a matter of morals, after all--the supposedly shocked coed looks open-mouthed over her shoulder rather more than is polite, and the artist has painted her blouse opened so deeply at the neck that no brassiere possibly could be worn. Ah, furtive Fifties semi-sleaze!

The novel itself really is only semi-sleazy, though. Yes, there's some drinkin' and some neckin' after the big game in automobiles on lonely roads and on the wide verandas of sorority houses; the secretary of the Chair of History has had a few affairs; and youngish Assistant Professor Vic Townsend does indeed entertain certain stray thoughts of flirtation and perhaps more when his wife and children are out of town for the week. Despite the promises of the first page of advertising blurb, however, there exists no "Delta Gamma 'Love Couch'" upon which "almost every man" supposedly enjoys the sorority queen, and conflicted, rather wishy-washy Dr. Townsend is no "Greek god," let alone "ready to take off the glasses at a moment's notice. If a coed was interested, that is..." (1).

The intertwined tales of nervous Townsend and his acidic wife, the vulnerable yet hot-to-trot secretary of his boss, the unctuously overbearing Dean Telfer, and the staff of the independent student newspaper are tolerable fiction of the middling three-star variety. For 1951 it probably is a tad racy, though sex is mainly offstage, except for brief, chapter-closing hints, as when at the end of a double-date, the half-drunk boy in the back seat with the sleeping date blinks into the front seat at the heavily breathing, shadowy form that turns out to be two figures, "one superimposed upon the other" (65), or when the professor who comes in out of the rain suddenly realizes that the secretary has no other clothing beneath her robe, and "[h]is trembling hand slip[s] inside" (108), or when the once-shy undergrad reporter finally gets to second base with the glossy blonde sorority girl: "It was the first time he had ever touched a woman's breast; it was indescribable" (132).

Easy as it is to be waggish about the titillation of yore, one should note that A Matter of Morals has some positives. One is the conflicted natures of Townsend, secretary Evelyn, editor Emmering, and reporter Slidell; each has a great deal of indecision and self-doubt beneath a seemingly composed and confident exterior, which is a nice touch, though Gies sometimes does spread it on a bit thick. The time of setting is intriguing, too--the novel begins in October 1938, just days after the Munich Conference--and yet despite some characters' discussion of appeasement, the Spanish Civil War, and whatnot, these tantalizing threads go nowhere. There are occasional potentially interesting whiffs as well of Red panic, casual anti-Semitism, classism, and easily hushed-up police brutality, but, frustratingly, these lead nowhere either. Finally, stylistically, point of view bops around from head to head rather much, which weakens the work for the reader of discernment.

For a period-piece quickie-read, A Matter of Morals is not that bad at all, though lasting literature it ain't, and the gap between the mild raciness of the actual text and the campus-Sodom-and-Gomorrah schtick of the completely misleading packaging sits rather strangely indeed...


17 May 2015

At last I got around to finishing the second volume of William H. Patterson’s biography of Robert A. Heinlein, and it was wonderful.

Below is the review I did on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1222027415

Rafeeq




The second volume of William H. Patterson's Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century is an enjoyable and informative read for anyone with an interest in Heinlein, and especially those who have read the first volume. I confess that I probably enjoyed the first volume over this one just a hair more, but I believe this is simply a natural product of the material. The details of Heinlein's early period, after all--his naval career, his marriage to Eleanor Curry and then to Leslyn MacDonald, his early political ideas, his entry into the pulps--are less known to most of us than the later period, and for me, at least, they make perhaps the fractionally better read.

Nevertheless, the second half of Heinlein's life is well worth study, and Patterson's heavily footnoted tome provides details large and small, woven together engagingly. Oh, every now and then we might quibble over a turn of phrase that is not quite as adroit as it could be, and yet while reviewers occasionally comment on Patterson's seeming agreement with, say, Heinlein's distaste of Alexei Panshin or H. Bruce Franklin or his support of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, I doubt that the same people would fault him for sympathizing with Heinlein's zeal to defeat the Axis in the Second World War--I myself prefer to allow a biographer his opinions, as I would any other human. And of course the final chapters, detailing Heinlein's decline in health, and ultimate death, and painful--and yet they must be read.

In short, Patterson's two-volume biography of Robert A. Heinlein is wide and deep, an invaluable resource to any reader of the most famous and influential name in modern science fiction, and the second half is an grand a treat as the first.


7 March 2015

At the same time that I have been working on other projects, I also have been reading the two-volume biography of Robert A. Heinlein by the late William H. Patterson, Jr.—absolutely fascinating, and so worth acquiring for anyone really interested in Heinlein.

Below is the review I did of the first volume on Goodreads: 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1186185286

Rafeeq





The first volume of William H. Patterson's Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century is a fascinating read for anyone interested in perhaps the most famous and influential name in modern science fiction. Based upon wide research in Heinlein's personal correspondence, and also upon seemingly countless interviews and e-mails with Ginny Heinlein and others, the text is engagingly written, and backed up with copious footnotes well worth examining. After giving a useful little history of the family into which Heinlein was to be born, Patterson takes us from the birth of the author-to-be in 1907 through 1947, his breakout from the "pulps" like Astounding Science-Fiction and into prestigious "slicks" such as The Saturday Evening Post.

The beginnings of Heinlein's career are interesting, of course, and yet so, too, are the details of the boy's relentless self-education, the youth's career in the Navy before being invalided out due to tuberculosis, and--though, at least for myself, to a lesser extent--his early Leftist political activity. Patterson reveals Heinlein's 1929 marriage to Eleanor Curry, a year-long union that was lost to history until the twenty-first century, but it is the story of his 1932-1947 marriage to Leslyn MacDonald that is particularly eye-opening. Heinlein's second marriage--which for decades was called his first--is something about which most fans knew only vaguely, as his marriage to Virginia Gerstenfeld from 1948 onward always loomed largest. Robert and Leslyn were, however, married for fifteen years, and it is quite touching to see, not just from Patterson's evaluation but also even from Robert's letters to Ginny after the breakup, how truly devoted they were for so long. It is interesting as well--though not surprising, perhaps, to anyone who has read Heinlein's fiction from the 1960s onward--to learn that Robert and Leslyn occasionally visited nudist resorts, and that his first two marriages were open, or "swinging," relationships. Most likely Heinlein was a fairly private person in any event, but such details help explain his drive to bury so thoroughly the history of his life with Leslyn. These were things that a children's author of the late 1940s and 1950s simply could not afford to have noised about.

Patterson's book follows the Heinleins' work as civilian employees for the Naval Air Experimental Station during the Second World War, Robert's momentous move into the "slicks" and the beginning of what was to be a twelve-year association with Scribner's for a series of "juvenile" novels, and Leslyn's decline into alcoholism and the simultaneous growth of the relationship between Robert and Ginny. The ultimate failure of Heinlein's second marriage is surprisingly bittersweet after reading of the long years of such companionship and support, but of course we, the readers of half a century later, knew it was coming. The rise of Heinlein's final love, however, is perhaps even more reassuring, and thus a fine place for this first volume to end.

31 January 2015

A couple of weeks ago I found a lovely old 1948 Signet edition of Charles Jackson’s 1944 The Lost Weekend at the Reading Place in Charlotte, MI, for $4—a terrific buy.  The cover is one of those colorful paintings bootstrapped from the film version, so just as my similar copy of Treasure of the Sierra Madre features Bogart, this one features Ray Milland.  After seeing the film so many times, though, it is a surprise to discover that the protagonist actually has a mustache...  In any event, the novel is an exquisite 5-star read.

Below is the review I did on Goodreads: 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1147722336

Rafeeq


Charles Jackson's 1944 The Lost Weekend is a gripping probe into the mind of an alcoholic--the euphoria and the terror, the self-congratulation and the remorse, the understanding and the turning away. Really, as long as the term probe is used, one might reach next for lancet or scalpel, but of course such would not be fitting. These tools, after all, slice straight and clean, yet Jackson's artful third-person-limited prose and the artfully tipsy stagger of his plotting that hints, reveals, withholds, reveals in bits again is like a corkscrew, or perhaps some piece of fractal geometry that slithers into the corrugations of the brain, and somehow opens the gray matter up for inspection.

Many are familiar with the film adaptation starring Ray Milland, which of course is superb for its day, but of course Jackson's original novel is better. Avoiding spoilers, let us just say...well, that the book may not be quite as cheery as the film, perhaps. Many memorable images and scenes from the movie indeed do come straight out of the text: the bottle on the string--but, oh, how long we will wait for this in the book!--the planned trip to the country with brother Wick, the disappointing of bar "hostess" Gloria, the endless sweating stagger to pawnshops closed for Yom Kippur, the woozily confident purse caper in the restaurant, the fall down the stairs and the meeting of the creepy, faintly predatory male nurse Bim, the delirum tremens-induced vision of squeaking, bleeding mouse devoured by carnivorous bat.

Whereas Milland's character in his youth actually had been a promising writer, however, with a story published in the Atlantic Monthly, here Don Birnam is a nothing and a nobody. Oh, he had potential, certainly--everyone could see it. His second-grade teacher even wrote a gushing letter to Don's mother, saying that he was the brightest and most promising pupil she had ever had. At age ten the sensitive lad studied his face in the mirror as he cried at the realization that his father truly had abandoned the family and would never come back, and as a teenager he made it a point to write a poem every night, no matter how late he had to stay up. He knows his "Poe and Keats, Byron, Dawson, Chatterton--all the gifted miserable and reckless men who had burned themselves out in tragic brilliance early and with finality"--and this brand of genius of course has an allure to "[t]he romantic boy."

Don did not have even a year in college--that little incident with an upperclassman in his fraternity, wherein seemingly natural hero-worship led to a letter rather too warm not to lead to scandal and disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. Nevertheless, he is well traveled and beautifully well read. Switzerland, France, England, Greenwich Village--been there. Shakespeare, Byron, Chekov, Joyce, Fitzgerald--read 'em. But he can imagine being a writer, and writing the great novel of drunkenness and promise and self-deception and revelation, only when half-soused...just as he imagines being a master concert pianist despite not yet having learned to play, or being a great actor despite never having performed, or professing to a class on F. Scott Fitzgerald despite not even having earned a B.A. degree. Many a film makes such alcoholic pretension seem humorous, but just as the Milland version does not, neither has the source novel. The ironies are sad and grim, the situation frustratingly inescapable.

Jackson, then, is the great literary revealer that Don Birnam, regardless of his French and his German and his jaunty allusions to works up and down the canon, cannot be. How can a single drink just to start the fun lead to another of seemingly benign effect, then to a larger one, another taken in a gulp, and a few more no longer counted, as reason jumps by flea-hops from topic to topic, grows elliptical, finally sinks into the mire of a blackout? Jackson shows us, in a deeply introspective style that deftly pulls to the surface his central character's submerged motivations, his strengths, and his weaknesses with the same eye for detail that gives us an irresistible seven-page travelogue of the 65-block stagger lower, ever lower, through the socioeconomic strata of New York City. In the end it is Charles Jackson's gritty, forthright, and yet delicately rendered novel itself, not the actions of Don Birnam, that give any hope for the future.

30 December 2014

I happened to read Jonathan R. Eller’s two-volume of Ray Bradbury out of order, but of course the first half is as solid and entertaining as the second.

Below is the little review I did on Goodreads yesterday:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1142232577?book_show_action=true&page=1

Rafeeq






Jonathan R. Eller's Becoming Ray Bradbury a very fine literary biography that focuses not on picayune personal matters--issue such as those sniffed at by the Russian Formalist critics of the 1930s, like whether Pushkin smoked--but instead on how a once-unknown, bookish mama's boy evolved into a writer whose work millions love and whose very name even more millions at least recognize.

Eller is a top-notch scholar of Bradbury's work, and as he delineates the events and relationships that shaped the development of this author's distinctive craft, he is able to bring in useful bits and pieces formerly lost to history. Who but Eller, for example, can refer casually to the "[m]ore than 200 known pages of discards moving forward from 'The Fireman' toward Fahrenheit 451..." (277-78), or can show us the first page of the story draft, composed back in 1943, of the tale that eventually became the final chapter of the 1950 The Martian Chronicles? At the same time, though, Eller illuminates the broad trends as well: the sometimes-fractious multiculturalism of Bradbury's prewar Los Angeles, the evolution of the pulp-magazine science fiction and fantasy genres of the 1930s and '40s, the mechanics of postwar book publishing...and of course the McCarthyism of the 1950s that made Fahrenheit 451 so timely.

With eminently readable prose, and using easily digestible 6- or 8-page chapters, Eller takes us from the aspiring high school author to the young man who, still in his early 30s, finally is growing beyond genre restrictions and into recognition by the wider literary world. Becoming Ray Bradbury then culminates with the publication of the man's most famous and enduring novel--and from there, the second of the two-volume biography,Ray Bradbury Unbound, ably takes over.

26 December 2014