Book Review: You Like it Darker

   By Stephen King

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Nobel, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: If you have to ask ...  

 *****

  

   Random thoughts that arose while reading King's latest collection. (May contain spoilers, but I tried to make them non-specific.)

    It's a collection of stories by Stephen King, so tropes will abound. But aliens? Aliens who save us? 

    Indeed, some of King's worst flaws -- overwriting, repetition, and echoes of and references to  previous tales -- abound and get a little tiresome after a while. An editor could fix that. Perhaps listen to her?

    Geography nitpick. If you live in Upper Manhattan, you cannot walk nine blocks to Central Park. 

    Too many of the stories centered around the fears and meanderings of an old white guy. (OK, some were about middle-aged white guys.)  Rattlesnakes, the sequel to Cujo, highlighted this trend. It went on and on and on and on -- and on and on -- sort of like the original. 

    The bizarre "I had a dream" alibi in the midst of a police procedural led by a bizarre police detective was, well, quite bizarre.

   Starting a story about a man named Finn (should have been Fionn) with a nod to the Pogues is brilliant.

     Laurie -- an oddly overly detailed story about an old man getting a dog -- may be the worst King story ever written. And yes, I believe I have read them all.  

     The final two stories, Dreamers and The Answer Man, are easily the best of the lot. They bumped the number of stars to the midpoint. 

    The title made little sense for this collection. I didn't find any of the stories particularly dark. King has written quite a few, but these don't measure up.

Book Review: The Gloaming

   By Melanie Finn

• Pub Date: 2016

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: Gloaming is one of my favorite words 

 *****

    Let me tell you about how I first came across the word gloaming. I'm an old baseball fan, and one of the old baseball stories I read early in life is about "The Homer in the Gloamin'"

    Gloaming is the twilight of the day. In his recent book, Lark Ascending, Silas House has his character use the word. A second character expressed ignorance, asking what it meant. She told him. He asked why she didn't just say dusk. She responded, correctly, that "the word gloaming is so much lovelier." 

    Anyway, baseball. Back in the 1930s, most ballparks did not have lights. Wrigley Field was a case in point -- indeed it was the last modern park to put in lights, in 1988. So the park was dark at night. But late in the 1938 season, the Cubs and Pirates were in a pennant race, with the Pirates half a game ahead of the Cubs. So game 2 of their series would determine which team moved into first place. 

    The game was tied. As nighttime approached and the ninth inning started, the umps said that if neither team scored, they would rule it a tie. And since baseball did not allow for tie games, it would be played all over the next day as part of a doubleheader.

    Top of the ninth, the Pirates failed to scored. Bottom of the ninth, the first two Cubs went hitless. Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs player-manager, was up, and down to his last strike.

    He hit the next pitch into the bleachers, and as he ran the bases and fans swarmed the field to celebrate the victory and move into first place, a reporter for the Associated Press started writing his game story. He dubbed Hartnett's blast, "The Homer in the Gloamin'" 

    So, the legend lives on from the banks of the lake they call Michigan.

__________________________________

    Ok, now about the book, which is not about baseball, and has neither a pennant race nor a home run. 

    What it does have is some good stories and  decent writing. It starts slowly with a series of flashbacks and present time settings. 

    Bit I am somewhat uncomfortable with her settings in Africa, where her descriptions portray a continent of dirty, backwards, violent people. It's the story of a white savior.

    The protagonist and narrator, Pilgrim Jones, is a white woman who has traveled the world with her husband, a human rights lawyer. We learn this, and why, over time. We also learn that while traveling in Africa, she simply decides to abandon her companions and stay in a country village.

    The explanation comes through as she meets a series of characters, most of whom are more interesting than Pilgrim. They all have backgrounds of trauma or bad choices -- and some have both. The first half of the book tells the tales from Pilgrim's perspective, while the latter part reveals details of the rest of the cast.

    The second part is infinitely better. Some of the tales are about people people causing pain and living with it, or perhaps seeking and finding redemption. Others are those who choose to be called victims, but find ways to go on -- or not.

    It hard what to make of this book. Pilgrim's character almost feels like a cliche, a trope. The others are more real, if a mite exaggerated. 

Book Review: Thirteen Ways of Looking

  By Colum McCann

• Pub Date: 2015

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I love me a good collection of Irish short stories. 

 *****

 

  I am sad that I was generally disappointed in this collection of a novella and three short stories. I have liked several of the author's previous works.

    OK. The stories themselves were decent. The last one, Treaty, about a aging Catholic nun who comes face-to-face with her living nightmare, was thoughtful and compelling. But that one suffered from a flaw the others were far more guilty of, and unexpected from such an accomplished writer: A general lack of focus, using too many words, too much excess description, too much meaningless detail and too many strained metaphors  

    But let's start with the good. Treaty involves Sister Beverly, a nun living in a care home in Long Island, concerned about her health and wondering if her religious life has been a waste. She's forgetful, ill at ease, and unable to feel comfortable in her old age. Then on the television, she sees a man who looks very much like an older version of person who raped her a long time ago. 

    The story deals with perception, pain, horror, and regret. She relives her pain, but does not want to dwell on it as the defining point of her life. Would God want her to reveal the monster -- if that is what he is -- or forgive his actions? Her thoughts and behaviors are deeply compelling, and McCann's tale paints a masterful image.

    Contrast that to the main story, about Peter J. Mendelssohn,  an aging white guy, an immigrant, a Jew, a lawyer, and a former judge in Brooklyn. He's retired, and now living -- and dying -- in a fancy apartment on the Upper East Side. He's had a good life, despite an upbringing in anti-Semitic Europe. But now his days are all about his pains, his diminished capacity, his beloved but now dead wife, and his terse relationship with his egotistical son. 

    But unlike Sister Beverly, his story is not about reflection and regret. It's about him, his thoughts, and his dying. And, quite frankly, his life and story are not all that interesting for the amount of effort it takes to read about it.

    The other two stories, Sh'khol, and What Time is it Now, Where are You? also fall flat.

Book Review: The Ghosts of Belfast

 By Stuart Neville

• Pub Date: 2009 in Great Britain; 2023 in the United States

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: It is a rare find -- a contemporary novel about Northern Ireland

*******

 

  Gerry Fegan is a republican hero in Catholic West Belfast -- during The Troubles he was responsible for a dozen sectarian killings of cops, loyalist paramilitaries, British soldiers, and ordinary civilians. He quietly served 12 years in prison before being pardoned and released as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

    Now, a decade after that agreement was signed, he's seeing ghosts. 

    Literally.

    The spirits of the people he killed want him to kill again. He tries to drink them away, but they stick around. He tries to reason with them, but it does no good. He's beginning to gain a second reputation, as a drunk who talks to the wind.

    But the ghosts are clear in what they want -- the deaths of the men who ordered Fegan to kill, men who are now seen as players, politicians and peacemakers. But to the ghosts, they are cold, hard men who lived violently and killed without remorse. Their justification was Ireland's cause, and their petty power.

    So Fegan obeys them and does his duty, which he has always seen himself as doing. The hard men quickly figure out who's now killing them, and move to protect their new, respectable standings. 

    This was Neville's first book, and the native of County Armagh is now known as the "king of Belfast noir." But this is a violent, unsentimental book, full of bombings and shootings and beatings. It's sometimes hard to read, but it's well worth it.

    The Ghosts ... portray The Troubles as vicious time, and its volunteers and leaders mostly as criminal thugs who used "Ireland's Cause" as an excuse to torture and slaughter their enemies.

Book Review: Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

 By James Hannaham

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books & Coffee, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked the optimistic title

******

    

    Carlotta Mercedes is a transwoman getting out of the joint in upstate New York after 20 years behind bars. 

    In her first couple of days of freedom, she has to return to her family's home in a changed Brooklyn, reintroduce herself to her son, Ibe -- who last knew her as his father, Dustin -- figure out the intricacies of the parole system, find a job, and stay on the straight and narrow path. All of this happens during the July 4th weekend, while her family is holding a combination holiday party and wake for a man she doesn't recall knowing.

    We hear her frustrations, her joys, her confusion, her anger, her bitterness, and her dreams as she explores Brooklyn and her old stomping grounds, the gentrified Fort Greene section.

    It's a new world for Carlotta, who last roamed the streets in the late 1990s, partying, dancing and listening to the latest music, while exploring and questioning her sexuality and gender identification. Then she got caught in her cousin's robbing of a liquor store, and wound up testifying against him but still getting a 20-year sentence because her cousin shot the clerk.

    So, in this award-winning novel, she talks about the hellhole that the state prison system is, a world of bartering, suffering, and danger. She is raped by both the inmates and the guards. She spends time in solitary, which for her is torture. She does find a lover, but wonders if he is worth it because he's unlikely to get out.

    All of this is told in flashbacks, in a long-winded, almost stream-of-consciousness style. We also hear her rambling about her current situation, wondering how she can get through the weekend, fix her problems, and still follow the parole rules. She is ill-equipped to do so.

    This is a story of transitions: Her gender transition. Her move from prison back to the streets, her youth now gone, but her mind still back in her early adulthood. The changes in her neighborhood, and her lamentations about all her friends who died too young over the years, including the rappers who helped make the neighborhood famous.

    Still, we can easily root for her, despite her flaws. She is in some ways not a good person, but she tries, and often her heart is in the right place. The book shows how the system isn't made for the likes of Carlotta, almost forcing her to break the rules that seem rigged against her.

    The book is her voice. Hannaham does a fine job of representing her, catching the cadence and rhythms of her language.

Book Review: Highway 61 Resurfaced

  By Bill Fitzhugh

• Pub Date: 2005

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books & Coffee, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I love old Dylan tunes

*****

    If you're going to call your novel "southern noir," it appears you should have the following themes or characters involved.

    * A kinda shady private investigator who performs the job as a sideline to his first love, which is in a dying profession that never was a lucrative life. 

    * A drugged out, wild-eyed killer who isn't very bright.

    * A rich, old, antebellum family that once ruled the roost in its small town, but since has fallen on hard times. If some of them are racist, all the better. 

    * A slightly pathetic, somewhat mangy, but still lovable pet. 

    * The plot must be convoluted and involve music -- particularly traditional, down-home music.

    * It must -- must. mind you -- have a racially-motivated injustice from long ago that is ripe to be avenged.

    * It should have guns. Lots of guns. And, if possible, a shootout.

    This sharp and sometimes comic mystery novel contains all of that, and more. Much, much more. 

    In short, the plot involves a 50-year-old murder, some lost tapes of a supposed blues recording from long ago, and a disc jockey-private investigator trying to make sense of it all. Rick Shannon, a radio DJ in the mode of Harry Chapin's W*O*L*D, has landed back in Vicksburg, Miss., at classic rock station WVBR-FM. To supplement his income, he opens Rockin' Vestigations to find missing personsand skulk around cheating spouses.

    That's how he gets involved in a case that includes several murders, lots of history and music, and the LeFleur family. The action takes him around the sweltering Delta of Mississippi, and Fitzhugh, Mississippi born-and-bred, describes its people and places well. 

    The writing is good and solid, moving the story along with ease. That story is complicated, but Shannon's steady, structured investigation, following one clue to the next one, pieces it together well.

    The result is a fun and easy read that could be used to train real investigators.

Book Review: The Thin Man

 

• By Dashiell Hammett

• Pub Date: 1933

• Where I bought this book: Conveyor Belt Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I found this new bookstore, and felt I had to buy something.

****

    Too many characters for such a short book (201 pages) make this old dime-store novel confusing and difficult to follow. Yes, I know Hammett is considered one of the best of the hard-core crime novelists of his time, but it seems this particular gumshoe tale long ago passed its prime.

    While its writing is plain, straight-forward, and linear for the most part, it is jumbled by introducing some characters almost as an aside, using different descriptions or identifications for some, and having others float in and out of the story at random.

    The by-now cliches of the genre can be annoying, but are understood as part of the era when it was written.

    This is a detective story that uses lots of dialogue, and it isn't always clear who is talking, or whom they are referring to. Following along is confusing, and I found myself repeatedly asking, "Who now?" 

    At one point near the end, two colleagues meet, and their tone and relationship seem to have changed so much that I turned back pages to see what I'd missed. I'm still not sure what happened.

    But Hammett's descriptions of 1930s New York, and its cops and gangsters and dames and detectives is arresting. The style is compelling, and it is easy to get immersed in the tale, even if you sometimes feel lost in the twists and turns.

Book Review: Quantum Girl Theory

 

•  Author: Erin Kate Ryan
• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I liked the title, and the plot of a missing girl who finds other missing girls 

***

   This book tries really hard, but it turns out a muddled mess.

    Oh, it has its strong points. It's a great concept -- a women, who disappeared as a teen-ager, spends her life running and searching for missing girls. But it really doesn't know what it wants to do.

    Is it a tale ripped from the headlines of 1946? Is it a broadside against violence against women and the havoc and ruined lives it reaps? Is it a character study of how women rebel against that violence, and the harm that comes to them and society? Is it a tale of racism and questions about why some missing girls are searched for and others seem to disappear without anyone caring?

    Or is it a woman who has the gift of Sight, who can see and feel and experience the terror of being stalked and assaulted, and lives her life in fear of its  recurring?

    Yes, it's about all of them. Well, it tries to be. But over a short 257 pages, it roams and rambles, introduces new characters every chapter, mixes memory and reality, jumps around in time, and altogether just can't seem to keep a solid narrative for long.

    Indeed, it often reads like a collection of interconnected short stories. And as individual stories, they are quite good. The problem comes when you try to figure out what is happening and follow the overall story.

    It just doesn't seem worth it.

Book Review: The Apollo Murders

 

•  Author: Chris Hadfield

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Hadfield played guitar and sang Bowie in space, so I gave the book a chance.

******

    Gunfights in space! Mysterious holes on the moon! Communists literally hanging on to an American spacecraft orbiting Earth! A Russian lunar rover investigating the potential for nuclear power on the moon!

    And this is no far-fetched, Spaceman Spiff adventure in the far future. This is history.

    Well, an alternative history, with an extra Apollo mission landing on the moon with the idea to keep the Soviets in line -- with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev appearing in the background, and the CIA and KGB pulling and unwinding each other's strings.

    So it's not really history, but it could be. And Chris Hadfield -- retired Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, former commander of the International Space Shuttle, a guy who has walked in space, and who sang a version of Space Oddity while in orbit around the Earth -- is just the guy who could pull it off.

    He does.

    This is a fun book. When you're able to look back on U.S.-Soviet relations and treat them as satire, you know you're having a good time. When you make plain ole trips to the moon, even spacewalks on the moon, seem tame by comparison, you've done a good job.

    But Hadfield also takes his science seriously, and does nothing that could be considered impossible. Yes, he sometimes gets carried away in the descriptions of flying and space flight, but I cut the guy a break -- he's actually been there, done that.

    In brief, Lieutenant Commander Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis is a fighter pilot and wanna-be astronaut with one eye blown out when a bird got in the way of his plane. (Oops. So he can no longer fly in space.) But he knows everything about Apollo, so he gets to be in mission control, along with Al Shepard and a bunch of other real guys. (Lots of people and stuff is real in this book. It's all laid out in the end.)

    But Apollo 18 is part of the fiction. Hadfield sees it as an added mission to the moon, to do science and other things. But the Russians, who have a landed a rover on the moon and running it via a special satellite, are acting like they are up to something. So the Apollo crew are tasked with finding out what's really going on.

    A lot of other things are happening on Earth with the U.S flight crew, and when they go to space and discover the Soviet satellite actually has real live cosmonauts on it, things get dicey.

    But Hadfield holds it all together. The various real and imagined characters play well. When events threaten to overtake the American mission, Hadfield reels them back in. 

    It's a good balancing act. An exciting thriller, without the thriller problems that induce eye-rolling and a please-get-this-over-with feeling. Hadfield writes tightly and plots nicely.

    It's not Bowie in space, but it's just as cool.  

Book Review: Alternative Ulster Noir

 

•  Authors: Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Sharon Dempsey, Gerard Brennan, Kelly Creighton, James Murphy, and Simon Maltman

• Where I bought this book: bookshop.org (Check it out; it's like a local bookstore online.)

• Why I bought this book: It had a story by Colin Bateman, one of my favorite NI writers 

*******

    One of the difficulties of reading a short story collection by different writers is trying to get into their individual heads and attune yourself to their separate styles.

    This is particularly true when you're unfamiliar with most of the writers, and while the settings have a vague familiarity, it's not like they are outside your front door. But the idea of stories inspired by or based on songs is quite original, so you're willing to give it a shot.

    Which is a good choice.

__________________________________________________________________

Hot tip: Listen to the songs first -- they are all online. It'll get you in the mood.

 Hot tip #2: Listen again after you've read the stories. It'll give a new perspective.

__________________________________________________________________

    With that said, let me tell you: This tiny little volume (120 pages) full of short (10-15 pages each) stories is well worth your time. It's unique, contains lots of weird stuff, and is chock-a-block full of original writing and dark interpretations from a merry band of writers from Northern Ireland.

    The stories are set in Northern Ireland, and tell of crimes and other dastardly deeds, some in or around Belfast, and they may or may not have secular connotations. They are also based, some more and some less, on songs by Northern Ireland-based artists.

    For instance, James Murphy's contribution takes the title of the song How to Be Dead by the band Snow Patrol and turns into a chilling suggestion of the nature of a witness protection program. 

    My favorite story, Black Dog Sin, by Gerard Brennan, starts with a man in the throes of a grief-and-alcohol-fueled binge, and ends with a strange, dark and cynical twist. It closely follows the song by Joshua Burnside, but then takes a warped turn.

    And the penultimate story, by Simon Maltman, who also edited the collection, tells a darkly humorous tale about a serial killer who tags along on a tour -- of which Maltman is the illustrious guide -- of Northern Ireland's noir haunts in Belfast. Based on Trigger Inside, by the punk band Therapy?, it literally takes a line from the song to give insight into the killer's mind. 

Book Review: Rockaway Blue

 Rockaway Blue, by Larry Kirwan

    It's almost three years after the 9/11 attacks, and the Murphy family remains in turmoil.

    Police Lt. Brian Murphy lies in his grave. His widow Rose and young son Liam remain lost in their big house by the ocean, unable to live up to the memory of the man who is revered as a martyred hero. His younger brother Kevin, a firefighter, still lives and works in his Rockaway neighborhood, fending off adulthood and his brother's shadow.

 

   His parents, NYPD Detective Sgt. Jimmy Murphy, retired, and childhood sweetheart Maggie, find themselves floundering, their Irish Catholism hanging heavy on their souls; growing old, growing apart, and unclear of both their futures and their pasts.

    Into this steps Kirwan, himself an Irish emigrant who moved to New York in the 1970s, and lived the authentic immigrant experience. 

    Kirwan is a polymath. He's a singer and songwriter, the founder and force of the Irish American rock band Black 47. He's a playwright and novelist. He wrote Paradise Square, a musical about the convergence of Irish and African music in the mid-19th Century, which is opening in Chicago. He is the host of Celtic Crush, a widely popular radio program on SiriusXM.

    In Rockaway, Kirwan wants to write of the Irish community's falling apart, losing its ethnic sense, and no longer dominating the city's police and fire brigades. But the overwhelming novel tries to do too much. Its themes run the gamut -- questions of faith and family, of community and identity, of the changing definitions of manhood and womanhood, of love and marriage, of the shifting cultures, even of the rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees.

    Still, it centers around a single, burning question: Why was Brian -- who died a hero because he ran back inside after leading people to safety -- at the World Trade Center before the first plane hit? Detective Sgt. Murphy's unofficial investigation raises the hackles of his former tribe as he delves into the issues described above. and his efforts at easing his family's guilt and heartbreak sometimes makes them worse.

    It's an uneasy tension that careens through the book, showing that life, tragedy, and death isn't always as clear-cut as it seems.

Book Review: Later

Later, by Stephen King

    You read Stephen King for the writing, of course. His is elegantly simple, using a working class language of good, useful words and descriptive phrases. It's not a style in which you pause and savor every word, but it gets the job done.

    And you read King's books for the stories, and the plots. Sure, sometimes he repeats anecdotes or plays with different perspectives of the tale, but it's always a story where he pulls you along and has you eager to get to the end. 

    King is typecast as a horror writer, but that has rarely been true. And now that he's often switching genres -- he's really gotten into detective and mystery tales recently -- it's even less true. He is, as one critic wrote, just a guy who puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances -- usually with a twist of the supernatural, or tearing a hole in reality to show another dimension.

    But mostly, you read King for the characters. One never tires of, or forgets, King's characters. Sometimes, they come back.

    I won't deny he uses tropes -- the magical Negro, the disabled child with mental superpowers. But he has has a cast of characters that often look like America -- and he is getting better at that. He shows strong people who are good, and evil people who are bad. Mostly, though, you can identify with his characters because you know them. They are based on regular people, with their thoughts and fears and biases

    And sometimes those ordinary people have a mystical or supernatural power. It's a King thing, OK?

    Which gets us to Later. It's about a boy who sees -- and can hear and talk to -- dead people. We first meet Jamie Conklin as a young child, but it is his older self telling the story. He introduces us to his mother, Tia Conklin -- a white woman of privilege and single mother who had fallen on hard times. We also meet her lover, Elizabeth "Liz" Dutton, a police officer with questionable ethics.

    This being King, we can probably tell what is going to happen -- someone will want to exploit Jamie's abilities. But that's something King can tell us, better than I could, and better than most writers.

    It's a short book for King, clocking in at less than 250 pages. 

    So pick it up and enjoy. You know you will.

Book Review: Flight or Fright

Flight or Fright, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

    In 1963, the Twilight Zone aired an episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which an airplane passenger, played by William Shatner, saw a gremlin tearing off part of the wing. Some 20 years later,  Twilight Zone: The Movie remade the episode, this time starring John Lithgow as the passenger.

    Flash forward to TV 16 years later, when Lithgow was starring in "Third Rock From the Sun," a show about an alien visiting earth. In one episode, his boss, The Big Giant Head, played by Shatner, came to visit, thus rendering one of the best inside jokes ever on the networks.

    The Big Giant Head was asked how his trip went. His response: "Horrifying at first. I looked out the window and I saw something on the side of the plane." To which Lithgow's character responded in horror, "The same thing happened to me!"

    You can read that original story, first published in 1961 by Richard Matheson, in this uneven anthology of airplane horror stories. It ranges from a brief 19th Century story by Ambrose Bierce, to a tale of envisioned "Air Jungles" above 30,000 feet written in 1913 by Sir Arther Conan Doyle (yes, the Sherlock Holmes writer) to a 2018 tale of being on an airplane when the world ends, by Joe Hill.

    I know many people dislike short stories, but I think they hold a place of honor. A good one is hard to write -- with a few words and fewer character, a writer must tell a tale with a grab-you-by-the-neck beginning, a now-sit-there-and-listen middle, and a see-I-told-you ending. This book has some of those, but a fair amount of WTF stories that leave you empty, and a couple of tales that never get off the ground.

    There are some out-and-out horror tales, some that are more wild imaginings, and a couple of hang-on-for-dear-life adventures. One of the best is a simple detective story, with an opening that pulls you in, a middle that keeps you wondering, and an ending that is satisfying and believable. It doesn't lead you around in circles, but tell the story and gets to the point like a good short story should.

    As an added bonus, you get to read a new tale by Stephen King, a good one that reaches into the supernatural heights, but makes you wonder just how much of what he writes is true.

Book Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

    The six-word summation of this book is: "Rich man makes bad life decisions."

    I mostly enjoyed this book, although it is perhaps the whitest book I have ever read. Imagine, if you will, this synopsis: The father of a young teenage child deserts his family. Later, the boy and his mother are the victims of a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mother dies; the child grabs a famous painting and escapes.

   

It's a lot of book

      Picture that happening to a black child. Now, as in this book, imagine the child is white. Yep. Two different stories, never meeting nor crossing paths. 

    This story is the white one.

    Simply put, it's about a child with an obsession about the stolen painting. Or more accurately, it's about a child cum man with an obsession about his obsession about his stolen painting.

    It did win a Pulitzer Prize, and it's not hard to see why: It's a grand, overarching book about family, love, desire, hope, and hopelessness. It's a sprawling book that moves from New York to Las Vegas, back to New York, and then to Europe. It's about the lifestyles of the wealthy, and the privileged way they walk through life.

    But it's also overwritten, meandering on for 771 pages. Just about every experience is overdone, every scene over-described. For someone who prefers tight writing, as I do, it's a slog to get through. At the end, Tartt grows increasingly philosophical, and you wonder if she is furiously adding on pages as you read. You fear the book might never end.

    That all said, however, it is a good story, with a handful of interesting characters; albeit none very likeable. It's no doubt a good book for the times we are in -- something that will remain with you through the long, shut-in days of quarantine.     

Book Review: The Good People

The Good People, by Hannah Kent

    Although she was born and lives in Australia, Hannah Kent deserves at least an honorary place in the pantheon of great Irish novelists.

    She brings all five senses to her writing.

    She uses her eyes for the intricacies of the Irish language, her ear for the turn of a phrase, her smell for the land, the animals, and the bog, her taste for the medicinal herbs, and her touch with a sensitivity for the rural Irish culture.

    The Good People is set in Ireland of the 1820s, when the fairies battled with the Catholic Church over truth and morality, and a close knit people battled with themselves over much the same things. Kent explains that The Good People were what the Irish natives called their fairies and their stories.

Irish fairy lore was (and remains) a deeply complex, ambiguous system of folk belief -- there is little that is twee or childish about it. ... In writing this work of fiction, I have tried to portray fairy and folk belief as part of the fabric of everyday rural nineteenth-century life, rather than as anomalous.

    In her novel, Kent addresses issues of poverty, rural life, gossip, religious power and hypocrisy, and female empowerment. Her characters include a teenage girl brought into a strange situation in a new community that involves an old woman wildly considered to be a witch, a widowed woman grieving over the death of her husband, her daughter, and the loss of her grandson to illness, and that boy, who may be a changling.

    Having a changling -- someone stolen and replaced by the fairies -- brings in additional issues of belief, magic, and superstition.

    Resolving them involves some truth -- the novel is based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1826 in County Kerry, Ireland. But of course, it includes literary license, all written in a fine style that causes one to stop to appreciate the writer's grace and talent.

Book Review: Little Red Chairs

The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien

A foreigner, handsome and debonair, moves to small-town Ireland.

Now, Dr. Vlad is a bit strange, who portrays himself as a philosopher, a poet, and a sage. He seems eager to open the natives up to a new world. Soon -- to at least one lonely woman -- he becomes a companion and, eventually, a lover.

But then he is outed as a monster. For Dr. Vlad is not the refugee from Eastern Europe that he claims. He is not a victim but a war criminal, who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of his people.

None of the preceeding is a spoiler -- it's all there in the blurbs for the book. Indeed, the title relates to a piece of performance art that lined up 11,541 little red chairs to symbolize the 11,541 people who were killed in the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992. (Indeed, Dr. Vlad closely resembles Radovan Karadzic -- the Serbian president during the Bosnian war, who was convicted of war crimes.)

During his own war-crimes trial, there is this passage about Dr. Vlad and his delusions:

Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved, and every shell that fell there hurt him personally, As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

This is quite a confounding book. On the one hand, it is lovely -- exquisitely written, capturing the voices of the meglomaniac and his enablers, along with the fears and dreams of the Irish villagers. O'Brien shows how hatred and division can be both universal and invisible. Despair and hope co-exist. Compassion, madness, and evil make their appearances.

But some parts literally make you cringe. She describes some brutally gruesome scenes of horror from both the past -- and the present -- as the result of Dr. Vlad's followers and henchmen. These descriptions are so explicit that I cannot imagine how she wrote them.

I do not think they are needed to provide one with the horror of the war and its atrocities, and including them make the book almost unreadable. Indeed, in two places, I saw what was coming and managed to skip over them.

Book Review: The Singer's Gun

The Singer's Gun, by Emily St. John Mandel

First off, this is a good book. It's well written, and its story hits all the strong points -- family, love, crime, and travel.

Yet, it has a couple of failings. Some of the characters' actions make you wonder what they -- or their creator -- were thinking. Mandel's characters tend to be passive kettles for the actions of others. For instance, Anton Waker, the protagomist in this book, seems to go through life accepting that things just happen to him. He may not like them; he doesn't really want them to continue, but he seems unable or unwilling to do anything about them.

The book also contains gaping plots holes that make you look askance, twist your face into a quizzical grimace, and ask, "what the ???" Story arcs seem contrived to further a dilemma, but the easiest solution is ignored. Important decisions are pre-ordained, despite a character's disinclination to take that route. Even when the original problem is resolved, the character continues on the ill-chosen path, with severe consequences.

The novel tells the story of Waker, the Brooklyn-born son of an immigrant couple who traffic in stolen artifacts. The parents are minor characters in the tale, but their adoption of a niece left behind when her parents are deported give them a benevolent sheen over their criminality. 

The niece, Aria, starts out as a street-wise urchin, but turns into a woman who runs her own criminal enterprise, which involves Anton more or less against his will. Anton finds a temporary way out, but Aria wants to drag him back in, and he feels forced to go along. 

Thus we wind up in Ischia, a tiny tourist village on a small island off the coast of Naples. A good part of the story occurs here, and the setting is beautiful. We understand why Anton feels compelled to stay.

But we fail to understand his hemming and hawing, his refusal to make a decision, and his inclination to just wait until something happens. When it does, we are neither surprised nor sympathetic.