Summer Reading: 'The Psychopath Plague,' 'The Eyre Affair,' 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men'
It's a decent, with a standard issue Jack-of-all-trades ex-soldier hero, an orange alien butler (who is a giant plant-loving pacificist and generally the best thing about the book), and a sudden worldwide increase in violence.
The story is pretty good, but lacks emotional continuity. To be fair, within the context of the hysteria surrounding the psychopath plague, emotions aren't necessarily going to be consistent, but the romance is incredibly pastede-on-yay: the hero and heroine (mysterious beautiful society woman) meet exactly three times before the hero starts thinking about leaving his adventurous life behind and settling down with her off Earth. (There's also the fact that he almost rapes her and she tries to stab him. Awkward.) The book has some weird relationship stuff going on with the hero and his old college buddies but as I don't have the book I can't pinpoint it exactly.
The bigger issue,however, is the speech characteristic to the Chirpones, who are the mysterious alien traders under suspicion for having started the plague.They talk like this:
"You see, Mr. Kane, we have had to be vewy careful. We foolishly permitted our wish to expwess fwiendship towesult in the death of one of our most tweasured associates.... We are... a wace of cowards. I tell you this without shame or apology; in our vocabulawy cowardice bears no connotation of disgwace as it does in yours." (pg. 33)
Ugh. It's like Tweety Bird entered the world of sci-fi. It's also frustrating that the replace'w's for 'r's isn't consistent; though all the 'r's at the beginning of words are switched and all those at the end of words are kept, there'snot a clear-cut pattern for those in the middle. I had originally thought that there might be some rule like: "'R's that can be rolledare now 'w's where as connecting/ stopping 'r's remain," but it appearsto be a pretty slap-dash operation which I am spending too much time thinking about, anyway. It also doesn't help that the hero actually states the problem in the middle of the story: He'd had the thought several times: Why did the translator device in his ear handle every nuance of phonology except for the r's? (pg. 75)
Fortunately, this incredibly irritating character trait wasn't written in for a lark; it serves a plot point. It's either a very major or very lame one, depending on how forgiving you are after the climax during which a Chirpone exclaims something to the effect of: "Impewator, as an impowtant wepwesentative of my soveweign and foweign wace, I weject this wascal's attempt to wuin our welationship... "-- which is affectation overkill if I ever read it.
Buy it/check it out here.
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
-from the back cover
I liked this book. It's very, very clever and time-travel, lit-travel and alt-history (especially with dodos) is fun. The political aspects are good, too, although I'm beginning to wonder if veteran heroes and heroines are par for the course in sci-fi novels-- one was excellent, two was still okay, three makes a pattern, I think. I'm also not crazy about the romance in this novel (there is, thankfully, no attempted rape), but at least the Big Misunderstanding between Thursday and her mostly-off-again romantic interest is a legitimate source of contention. I know that TEA is the first novel in a series, but I'm not particularly in a rush to read the following books; it was a very full reading and I'm not sure I could make it through all the books without being overwhelmed by the puns, etc., in such a short time period.
Buy it/check it out here.
A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
(pg 0)
Hunh. It was hard to read this, and I have to admit that I didn't get through all of it. David Foster Wallace has talent; he has an ear for dialects and conversation and he's very good at description. The problem is tone-- everything is just so bleak-- there's no hope for anything like happiness or dignity or even hope. Also, the choice of focus in the stories. (I mean, obviously he's going to write what he wants to write and his technical skill is not lacking, but there comes a point when post-modernist exhibitionism becomes less cute and more really, really fucking irritating. As a final note, the writing is overwhelmingly masculine in a way that's difficult to sit through for extended amounts of time.
Buy it/check it here.