Reviews, and a superhero dream
Last night’s dream: I was watching a group of superheroes. The first and second in command were Batman-Superman types (aren’t they always?), and the second in command was very depressed for some reason. They were above a neutrally hostile country - the country was not pleased to have them there, but wasn’t going to do anything first. Instead, it sent sentries, city-sized dark red robots. The robots hovered in the air, but horizontally, with their eyes closed, sleeping, waiting for something to happen.
The 2IC fell from the sky, plunging down through a high school and deep into the ground. The country sent an operative in to find out what was happening, and she was telepathic and didn’t speak the same language as the superheroes, so when the rest of the group showed up, she talked to the leader using the 2IC’s mental names for the members: “Fantastic” for the leader, “Lucky” for the Flash character - and it was so obviously revealing that the leader got her to stop before she said more.
Then I woke up.
Allegra Goodman, Intuition: The fortunes of cancer researchers at a Harvard-affiliated lab rise and fall in ways only loosely connected to the scientific experiments they’re doing. When great results seem to offer the next big hope, shifting loyalties lead one researcher to call attention to apparent inconsistencies in the work, with escalating consequences. Goodman writes sympathetically about the day-to-day work of doing science, respecting it without any illusions of its “purity,” giving all her characters a chance to explain themselves, from the grant-seeking showman (who does want to do good, but also to do well), to the disillusioned whistleblower dismayed by the witchhunt she unleashes, to the Chinese immigrant who wants to avoid undue attention and whose distance from the others both protects him and makes him vulnerable. This is not a whodunit; though the specter of scientific fraud is raised, the novel is concerned with things that are difficult to know, that can only be seen by indirect observation, and that may take years to confirm or disprove - not just science, but the human condition.
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Blue Van Meer is a brilliant young woman who travels around the country with her academic father as he visits an endless succession of minor colleges. In her senior year, they settle down for a full year; Blue gets drawn into a circle of other students centered around an oddly charismatic film teacher; then disaster strikes, leaving Blue with a mystery and a terribly disrupted life. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about the book, but I kept reading through over 500 pages; Pessl’s got talent, even if I appreciate it more than I like it. Aside from the plot holes (Blue doesn’t see key evidence -- evidence that would obviously have come up earlier in her research, which covers almost everything else -- until the very end) there are solid reasons for the two things that began to annoy me:
First, Blue’s promiscuous use of metaphors and similes, which individually are often fresh and striking but eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, shoot well past “too clever by half” to “too clever by 300%.” I realize that this complaint is something on the order of the pot calling the kettle kitchenware, but let’s call it experience instead of hypocrisy, ok? Here is an example:
I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums - nectarines, I don’t know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I was the sides of a carnival ride and he didn’t want to fall out.
And yet this isn’t a mistake of craft; it is part of the character. Blue doesn’t shape her metaphors to the situation because, for all her book-learning and apparent observational sharpness, everything she sees is really about her, and she has no idea who she is. She’s a confused teen throwing out grappling hooks of meaning everywhere she can. Blue is a vivid character and everyone else is a sort of a blur because she hasn’t yet learned to see other people. So it works; I just got tired of it.
Second, the repeated citations to and quotations from made-up books to buttress or establish some proposition. All the chapter titles came from famous books - famous in our world - which contributes to the characterization of Blue as someone who lives only through her mind, or wants to do so anyway; the fame also serves to establish that Blue either has good judgment or has unreflectively absorbed her overwhelming father’s values, maybe both. Using real referents helps us figure out who Blue thinks she is, whereas the fake referents just confuse and distract. When she kept talking about obviously fake books and events, I found it harder to see Blue as well-educated. On the other hand it was important to the plot that a few of those things were true in her world. I think, though this is a judgment call, that Pessl would have been better served to limit the fake stuff to the things she had to make up for the plot to work.
In the end, this was both a frustrating and a compelling book. I will probably read Pessl’s next endeavor to see if she can give me more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t.
Richard Bachman, Blaze: Stephen King dusted off this early novel, with some revisions, and put it out as a Bachman book because it retains his 1960s-70s style - for context, his next book after this was a little semi-epistolary novel about a girl and her high school prom. Blaze is a man brain-damaged by his father’s abuse. After drifting through a life of crime, he hooks up with a partner who cooks up one last scheme: kidnapping the baby of a local millionaire. When his partner George dies, Blaze starts seeing his ghost and decides to go through with the plan, even though he’s incapable of thinking things through. At points this book was excruciating to read because of the tension it generated; I had no confidence the baby would survive, as I usually would, because I remember Cujo. And I’m a little touchy on the subject of babies. King’s prose is simpler here, as fits his subject, and he doesn’t evoke a particular world by piling on details and brand names and memories as he came to do in later years. Some of that is deliberate timelessness, since he says in the intro that he didn’t want the book to be so obviously dated, even though it clearly precedes the cellphone and the internet. Overall, it’s a decent enough story, though I wouldn’t have looked at it twice if not for the names on the cover.
The 2IC fell from the sky, plunging down through a high school and deep into the ground. The country sent an operative in to find out what was happening, and she was telepathic and didn’t speak the same language as the superheroes, so when the rest of the group showed up, she talked to the leader using the 2IC’s mental names for the members: “Fantastic” for the leader, “Lucky” for the Flash character - and it was so obviously revealing that the leader got her to stop before she said more.
Then I woke up.
Allegra Goodman, Intuition: The fortunes of cancer researchers at a Harvard-affiliated lab rise and fall in ways only loosely connected to the scientific experiments they’re doing. When great results seem to offer the next big hope, shifting loyalties lead one researcher to call attention to apparent inconsistencies in the work, with escalating consequences. Goodman writes sympathetically about the day-to-day work of doing science, respecting it without any illusions of its “purity,” giving all her characters a chance to explain themselves, from the grant-seeking showman (who does want to do good, but also to do well), to the disillusioned whistleblower dismayed by the witchhunt she unleashes, to the Chinese immigrant who wants to avoid undue attention and whose distance from the others both protects him and makes him vulnerable. This is not a whodunit; though the specter of scientific fraud is raised, the novel is concerned with things that are difficult to know, that can only be seen by indirect observation, and that may take years to confirm or disprove - not just science, but the human condition.
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Blue Van Meer is a brilliant young woman who travels around the country with her academic father as he visits an endless succession of minor colleges. In her senior year, they settle down for a full year; Blue gets drawn into a circle of other students centered around an oddly charismatic film teacher; then disaster strikes, leaving Blue with a mystery and a terribly disrupted life. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about the book, but I kept reading through over 500 pages; Pessl’s got talent, even if I appreciate it more than I like it. Aside from the plot holes (Blue doesn’t see key evidence -- evidence that would obviously have come up earlier in her research, which covers almost everything else -- until the very end) there are solid reasons for the two things that began to annoy me:
First, Blue’s promiscuous use of metaphors and similes, which individually are often fresh and striking but eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, shoot well past “too clever by half” to “too clever by 300%.” I realize that this complaint is something on the order of the pot calling the kettle kitchenware, but let’s call it experience instead of hypocrisy, ok? Here is an example:
I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums - nectarines, I don’t know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I was the sides of a carnival ride and he didn’t want to fall out.
And yet this isn’t a mistake of craft; it is part of the character. Blue doesn’t shape her metaphors to the situation because, for all her book-learning and apparent observational sharpness, everything she sees is really about her, and she has no idea who she is. She’s a confused teen throwing out grappling hooks of meaning everywhere she can. Blue is a vivid character and everyone else is a sort of a blur because she hasn’t yet learned to see other people. So it works; I just got tired of it.
Second, the repeated citations to and quotations from made-up books to buttress or establish some proposition. All the chapter titles came from famous books - famous in our world - which contributes to the characterization of Blue as someone who lives only through her mind, or wants to do so anyway; the fame also serves to establish that Blue either has good judgment or has unreflectively absorbed her overwhelming father’s values, maybe both. Using real referents helps us figure out who Blue thinks she is, whereas the fake referents just confuse and distract. When she kept talking about obviously fake books and events, I found it harder to see Blue as well-educated. On the other hand it was important to the plot that a few of those things were true in her world. I think, though this is a judgment call, that Pessl would have been better served to limit the fake stuff to the things she had to make up for the plot to work.
In the end, this was both a frustrating and a compelling book. I will probably read Pessl’s next endeavor to see if she can give me more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t.
Richard Bachman, Blaze: Stephen King dusted off this early novel, with some revisions, and put it out as a Bachman book because it retains his 1960s-70s style - for context, his next book after this was a little semi-epistolary novel about a girl and her high school prom. Blaze is a man brain-damaged by his father’s abuse. After drifting through a life of crime, he hooks up with a partner who cooks up one last scheme: kidnapping the baby of a local millionaire. When his partner George dies, Blaze starts seeing his ghost and decides to go through with the plan, even though he’s incapable of thinking things through. At points this book was excruciating to read because of the tension it generated; I had no confidence the baby would survive, as I usually would, because I remember Cujo. And I’m a little touchy on the subject of babies. King’s prose is simpler here, as fits his subject, and he doesn’t evoke a particular world by piling on details and brand names and memories as he came to do in later years. Some of that is deliberate timelessness, since he says in the intro that he didn’t want the book to be so obviously dated, even though it clearly precedes the cellphone and the internet. Overall, it’s a decent enough story, though I wouldn’t have looked at it twice if not for the names on the cover.