Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Velvet Haven!

This is Paul Marron, a funny, articulate, down-to-earth guy with a pointy nose, a nasal voice, a limited but effective cooking repertoire, and a fine ear for music:



As you can see, he’s a good-looking young guy, but it’s only when you widen the frame and get him to take his shirt off (the latter being, it must be admitted, not particularly difficult) that an important extra point begins to dawn on you: Paul is rather gorgeous, in a well-sculpted, compact kind of way.



Paul himself must have realized this fairly early on, and it gives rise to a bit of irony: that this somewhat private, old-fashioned, and oddly shy guy (his sporadic attempts at blogging virtually scream ‘I really don’t much want to do this’) would make a very good living taking his clothes off and posing for pictures of his chiseled cheek-bones, his shapely shoulders, and most of all, his astounding abs. Readers of romance fiction can recognize those abs as quickly (and as fondly) as they recognize their own children, because Paul has appeared on innumerable paperback covers over the last few years.

Although the real-life details of his day-to-day are probably endearingly prosaic, Paul leads a vigorous double life as the characters in all these books, so it seems only natural (aesthetically and, um, otherwise) to peek in from time to time on those alternate adventures, just to see how busy the other Paul is keeping himself.

We could start anywhere, really (and not necessarily in romance – he’s popular on sci-fi covers too, as we shall see). At any given time in every bookstore in the United States, there are at least a dozen covers featuring Paul in one pose and costume or another. 2010 will see at least 50 such covers, and 2009 was the same way, with this one set of cheekbones magically morphing onto cover after cover.



So let’s start with Paul the magical being – in this case, code-named Bran, a prince of the otherworldly Sidhe (those of you who’re familiar with Celtic mythology need not get your hopes up, though) in Velvet Haven, the first book of Sophie Renwick’s “Immortals of Annwyn” series, issued as a trade paperback this year by Heat, a not-particularly-scholarly imprint of Penguin. Bran is described several times in the book as a handsome devil, and there’s Paul on the cover, flexing in leather pants and a leather vest-cape that looks like something his employers at Undergear would sell with a straight (well ….) face, plus a gigantic tattoo of a type Paul himself is perhaps a bit too squeamish (or is it sensible?) to inflict on his own body.

Paul is a bit of a jerk in this book, but perhaps with cause. It turns out he’s been cursed by Cailleach, his cool drink of water co-ruler back in the mystical realm of Annwyn, and the curse is just the type romance writers love to think up: he will never find true love, but his mystical powers will be energized by lots and lots of raw, passionate sex. David Copperfield never got that in his contract, but I bet he wishes he had.

So Paul is bitter – at Cailleach, at the evil twist of fate that has imprisoned his brother in stone for centuries, and at mortals in general, whom he despises even though they provide him with his magical Viagra. And when the ritually-murdered bodies of fellow Sidhe keep turning up in the mortal world Bran now calls home, he naturally suspects Cailleach of some further treachery – or perhaps the treachery starts with Suriel, the fallen angel who prowls the perimeter of the novel and steals every scene he’s in. Suriel is clearly playing his own game, and he can be refreshingly diabolical, as in the scene where he saves the badly-wounded Bran and then makes an inventively scientific threat when Bran refuses to do as he says:

“I wouldn’t make a deal with you if my last breath depended on it.”

Suriel laughed and stepped on his arm harder, making him scream inside. “So much pride,” he said. He clicked his tongue as if he were chiding a child. “It’ll be your downfall, you know. You’re not in Annwyn, King. You’re among mortals. And you know what mortals love? They love knowledge, science. They hunger for it. And wouldn’t you make a nice little science project for the doctors at the hospital.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Imagine what they would say once they started examining you, system by system.”

In the distance, Bran could see the big blue square with the large white H. “You blackmailing son of a bitch!”

OK, so Paul isn’t at his most articulate in Velvet Haven (nor his most poetic – at one point, in mid-coitus, he informs his bedmate “you fuck like a nymph”; even when the reference can be checked, it’s not the sort of thing a girl likes to hear right at that moment), but there’s a very good sense of word-rhythm on display in that center paragraph and many other such paragraphs in this smutty, smutty book. Renwick might not be able to show this novel to her mother (and if she can, I’d like to meet the woman), but she can hold her head up in the company of her romance author peers.

The key to the mystery in this book seems to be the mortal woman Mairi MacAuley, a knockout nurse with psychic powers (it’s all a bit much to take in, and it’s to Renwick’s credit that she never slows down and explains it all for more than a sentence or quick paragraph here and there – the story takes off running, and we get filled in on the bare minimum of exposition we need to keep up; science fiction and fantasy authors routinely pooh-pooh the romance genre, but Renwick unfolds her created world with a skill and control that most of those sci-fi authors couldn’t muster for all the gold-pressed latinum in the quadrant) who falls in love with Bran and may hold the key to lifting his curse.

Or at least providing him with lots and lots of acrobatic sex. Velvet Haven isn’t exactly a raunchy piece of straight-up porn – there’s too much plot for that, and the book’s two most interesting characters, Cailleach and Suriel, don’t even come within bodice-ripping distance of each other – but hoo boy, Paul gets several extended (so to speak) erotic workouts in the course of the book, including one climactic (so to speak) episode during which he’s tightly manacled.

And naturally in the course of the book (which very much has a first-chapter feel to it, intimating more “Immortals of Annwyn” books to come) Paul learns to un-harden (er, that is, soften) his heart and care for this mortal woman, despite his previous strictly dietary relationship with he species.

The archangel Gabriel puts in an appearance (he gets the worst of a verbal exchange with Suriel, as does everybody else), and the full extent of Cailleach’s villainy is gradually revealed. Paul doesn’t exactly end up happy at the end of the book, but that’s to be expected: although in real life he has an extremely infectious smile, happy endings don’t really match up well with the force-10 pout he’s got going on this book’s cover.

Will Paul find true happiness in his next adventure? I’ll keep you posted.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Spock Must Die!

From its publication date of 1970, you’d think Spock Must Die! by James Blish must certainly be the first original Star Trek novel. It’s true that Blish himself had been adapting the individual episode scripts into short stories for a year at that time, but the show itself had only just been cancelled by an indifferent parent company, which hardly left the time or inclination for a Star Trek novel.

You’d be wrong on a couple of technicalities. A different licensing arm of that indifferent parent company had commissioned the release of a hardcover kids book called Mission to Horatius – it was called a Star Trek novel, and for that reason it would technically qualify as the first, but the physical description of the ship, the characters, the general fabric of known science … all of it was entirely generic throughout. It’s clearly a prefab space-opera scenario onto which some thankless, faceless Hasbro flunky hastily pasted on the specific brand-names of this obscure TV show. I suppose all beginnings are inauspicious, and perhaps I’m reacting naturally when I want to disavow Mission to Horatius as the first Star Trek novel (although, as we'll see, it was hardly the last cut-and-paste job in the series' publication history).

And if that’s the case, how much more must it apply to all the various Star Trek novels written but not professionally published prior to 1970? I refer to ‘fan fiction,’ of course, which by that point was already operating at a strong pitch. The novels it produced, however, though better versed in Star Trek specifics (indeed, often way, way too versed), were usually documents displaying deeply unbalanced psychological pathologies (and to those of you who say that applies to all science fiction, I say kroyka!). Again: unacceptably inauspicious.

No, in true Star Trek form, we’ll just have to settle for a couple of alternate beginnings to things. We’ll call James Blish’s book the first non-continuity Star Trek novel, and we’ll deal with an entirely different first book when we get to carefully numbered, continuity-safeguarded, corporate-overseen Star Trek novels.

First, we have the precursors, the trailblazers in the Wild West of Star Trek novels – and the first of those is Spock Must Die!

As you might be able to guess form the lurid title, it’s a deeply imperfect book – almost as inauspicious a start as all those Spock-whips-Kirk-unconscious-then-nurses-him-back-to-health weirdo fan fictions of the late ‘60s. The story opens with the Enterprise on standard cruising exercises ‘not far’ from the Klingon Empire but still enjoying the peace treaty imposed by the super energy-beings from the planet Organia (as seen in the episode “Errand of Mercy,” which introduced the Klingon commander Kor, played by veteran character actor John Collicos). It’s a peaceful interlude, during which Captain Kirk joins in a discussion between Commander Scott and Dr. McCoy (who’s called ‘Doc’ rather than ‘Bones’ throughout the entire book, revealing a little-known fact about pioneering fan favorite Blish: he never actually watched the show) about how the ship’s transporters are actually death-chambers, since they have to annihilate a person’s original body in order to reconstitute it elsewhere. But since the reconstitution is instantaneous and molecule-perfect, Scotty can’t see the problem. As he puts it, referencing Mr. Spock, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.”

McCoy, predictably, believes otherwise, and Kirk remains wisely uncommitted. But soon it’s everybody’s problem, when a transporter malfunction (where would plots be without those?) duplicates Mr. Spock. Suddenly, Kirk and the rest of the crew must deal with the moral and philosophical (as well as ship security) problems of having two identical Spocks, each claiming he’s the real one. The crisis is only heightened by a subplot involving a major disruption in the Organian Peace Treaty and the warlike return of some of the show’s best known Klingon bad guys.

The writing is competent enough (Blish was an old-school hack in the best sense of the word, never late with a deadline, never great, never unprintably awful – the periodic attempts to reappraise his writing at the level of artistry, usually by citing his novel A Case of Conscience as some kind of lost sci-fi masterpiece, are so misguided he himself would have chuckled at them); the book’s imperfections spring mainly from its unintended resemblances to Mission to Horatius. The problem here is that this is only nominally Star Trek: there are no physical descriptions of the characters, barely any character descriptions, and none of the interplay of character personalities that made the show special in the first place. Kirk is just Starship Captain X, Spock is just Victim of Anomaly X (the veneer of ‘logic’ Blish gives him is actually just a liscense to cut him out of cardboard and leave him that way), and poor ‘Doc’ is just a nameless, faceless exposition machine:

As a replicate, and a mirror image, he [one of the duplicated Spocks] was left-handed, just as we had guessed, but he was suppressing it, as we had also guessed. Now, Jim, handedness is the major physical expression of which hemisphere of man’s brain is the dominant one, the one chiefly in charge of his actions. It’s a transverse relationship; if the left hemisphere of your brain is dominant, as is usually the case, you will be right-handed – and vice versa. And so, Jim, the retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed – in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles – badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and among other bad outcomes, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering. You thought Spock One was stuttering from emotion or confusion, and that puzzled you. And well it might have. But in fact, he was stuttering because he was countertfeiting not being a mirror image, and hadn’t gotten all his reflexes for the impersonation established yet.

Sounds just like Bones, doesn’t it?

No, Blish’s intentions were undoubtedly good, but he, um, badly bollixed up his core characterizations (at one point Lieutenant Uhura hopes – aloud, on the bridge – that a new duty officer will be “cute”), and the core characterizations were the heart and soul of what differentiated Star Trek – and by extension Star Trek novels – from cookie-cutter pop sci-fi like Mission to Horatius.

Spock Must Die! did some things right – it was competent science fiction, for starters, playing some interesting speculation with some interesting ideas. And it was respectful to the original series, making plentiful references to pertinent episodes (the references came not only in the text itself but also as footnotes, the first time any popular TV series had prompted such textual respect … as we’ll see, Star Trek footnotes form an interesting little footnote in our ongoing history of the Star Trek novel). But it was the equivalent of that first Wright Brothers flight at Kill Devil Hills: sketchy, inexpert, and really, really short. A first trickle only – of a deluge the volume of which James Blish couldn’t have guessed in his darkest nightmares. We’ll continue to delve that deluge in our next thrilling chapter!

Cowardice Court!

Our book today is George Barr McCutcheon’s breezy little 1906 romance Cowardice Court, written at top speed by a seasoned professional (McCutcheon, the author of Brewster’s Millions, churned out an average of one novel a year in the first decade of the 20^th century, plus lots of plays, poems, and even pseudonymous reviews, the bounder) to please a burgeoning market. Grosset & Dunlap put the thing out and did so very handsomely, with four full-color illustrations by Harrison Fisher and every page prettily decorated along its borders.

Cowardice Court is set in the Adirondacks and opens with the transplanted family of diminutive blowhard Lord Brazelhurst experiencing a little turbulence. It doesn’t come from matrimonial tension, as it might in the hands of a writer striking out for deeper waters (Lady Brazelhurst is an American, the daughter of an uncultured New York millionaire; Lord Brazelhurst is not only a good deal older than she is, he’s also entirely dependent on her, since her money saved his debt-encumbered estates back in England) – no, the tension is due to a man: stalwart, handsome young Randolph Scott – er, I mean Shaw, Randolph Shaw. He owns the adjoining large mountain estate to Brazelhurst Villa, and the border between the two properties is a much-contested trout-stream. As it the novel begins, Lord Brazelhurst is furious that this “demmed American” (the British characters in the book all talk exactly like you’d expect an untraveled Hoosier would make them sound, and let’s not even get started on how many times his Lordship’s monocle pops off and falls into his drink) has been seen fishing on the Brazelhurst end of the river, and he instructs his groundskeeper to throw the interloper into the stream if he sees it happen again.

As Lord Brazelhurst storms into his own home fuming about the matter, he’s greeted by his imperious green-eyed wife, who coolly eggs him on in his outrage. Lady Brazelhurst is the villain of this book, although she’s only tentatively revealed as such. She’s altogether a more interesting character than the book’s nominal heroine, Penelope Brazelhurst (who’s very pretty, very spirited, and, inexplicably, very much younger than her brother the Lord) – maybe McCutcheon throttled back on developing her for fear she’d steal the novel. Or maybe he was writing so fast that he had no time to perceive the potential of the character he’d created. Or maybe he was just inept. He’s not around to ask (a useful collection of his private and public papers - plus some manuscripts - is in the keeping of the University of Texas at Austin, should anybody want to write the short, light biography this crabby, hustling writer deserves).



In short order, Lord Brazelhurst’s groundskeeper and his ruffian assistant stagger back to the Villa, roughed up and soaking wet. It seems they saw Randolph Scott trespassing again, offered their ordered threat, and got beaten up and dunked in the river for their trouble (and then saved from it, since neither one of them could swim). Young Penelope begins to like the spirit of this American she’s never even seen, but the Lord and Lady are furious:

“No one but a coward would permit this disagreeable Shaw creature to run affairs in such a high-handed way,” said her ladyship. “Of course Cecil [Lord Brazelhurst, to you] is not a coward.”

“Thank you, my dear. Never fear, ladies and gentlemen; I shall attend to this person. He won’t soon forget what I have to say to him,” promised Lord Brazelhurst, mentally estimating the number of brandies and soda it would require in preparation.

“This afternoon?” asked his wife, with cruel insistence.

“Yes, Evelyn – if I can find him.”

Lord Brazelhurst rides off alone to confront this ruffian, and he does indeed find him – and ingloriously attempts to flee from the man and his faithful dog Bonaparte. Randolph Shaw is happy but scornful of the ineffectual old coot, and he’s no sooner turned back from their encounter than who should he find trespassing on his land than Penelope! He takes hold of her horse’s bridle and tells her – with a good deal of light-hearted banter, that he shall have to escort her off his property. She goes willingly (“I am quite in your power”), but it’s clear the two young people have taken a liking to each other. Over the next few days, Penelope will contrive to escape the deadly boredom of Brazelhurst Villa and deliberately trespass on Shaw’s land, merely for the pleasure of having him show up every time and slowly escort her off again.

McCutcheon’s few scattered acidic comments about the company at Brazelhurst Villa constitute the closest that Cowardice Court comes to social satire. The place is full of the American version of the country house smart set, and it’s clear our author shares Penelope’s disgust with it all:

Nightfall brought half a dozen guests to Brazelhurst Villa. They were fashionable to the point where ennui is the chief characteristic, and they came only for bridge and sleep. There was a duke among them and also a French count, besides the bored New Yorkers; they wanted brandy and soda as soon as they got into the house, and they went to bed early because it was so much easier to sleep lying down than sitting up.

But even while love is blossoming between our game young things, trouble is brewing at the Villa: Lord Brazelhurst, infuriated at failing to intimidate his American neighbor, threatens to instruct his men to shoot him if he trespasses again. He knows he can’t very well give them such instructions – it’s six years into the 20^th century, after all! – and he’s unaware of the fact that Lady Macbeth takes those groundsmen aside and tells them they must indeed shoot on sight.

As luck would have it, Penelope hears the shots the next day and comes across Randolph crying over the dead body of his dog - “it’s as if he were a – a brother, Miss Drake. I loved him and he loved me” – and swearing bloody revenge against the cowards responsible.

Tensions are therefore high at dinner that evening, when Penelope becomes furious at the blasé comments of everyone present when they learn it was ‘only’ the man’s dog that was shot. Heated words are exchanged between Penelope and her haughty sister-in-law, and Penelope impulsively packs a bag and flees into the night and an oncoming storm, rather than remain one more moment in the house she’s scathingly named Cowardice Court.

Without really thinking about it, she makes her way to Shaw’s house through the gathering wind and rain, only barely making it in time – only to flee again when she realizes how her impulse action will make him look to everybody else. He hurries after her, and the two of them take refuge from the breaking storm under the porch of an old abandoned house nearby (like Aeneas and Dido, they finally yield to their passion while sheltering from the wind and rain). Long before the storm ends, they are pledged to each other, and to give McCutcheon his due, these scenes retain even now a hint of the fragile sweetness that once made this author a reliable seller in the bookstores of Boston, far away from his homeland of Indiana. Cowardice Court never sold out, never went into a second edition, but it didn’t pass its season on Earth unknown, etiher.

Time has moved on, of course – except as a period piece dripping in unintended irony, it’s impossible to conceive a book like Cowardice Court coming back into print in the 21^st century (where Penelope would be a lesbian and Shaw would waste no time cuckolding poor old Lord Brazelhurst and breaking the spirit of his redoubtable wife, probably on the pantry floor). But in its own day, it was a harmless, bubbly way to spend an afternoon, as innocent of ulterior motives as a bright summer cloud.  Seems to me the 21^st century could use some novels like that, once in a while.

July in Open Letters!

The vaporous, malodorous, sulphurous month of July opens bright and fresh today with a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Hoo-ray! What better way to celebrate America’s birth than by taking your iPad out to Central Park and reading our big, bursting issue as the beautiful day unfolds? We’ve got something for everybody in this issue: pieces on two aspects of the American Revolution, a wonderful appreciation of the great, fun novel Vanity Fair, a round-up of critical responses to Martin Amis’ new novel, a sensitive reading of the latest God-bothering tract from Marilyn Robinson, some scintillating common sense (don’t believe they can go together? Read this piece!) on the much-vexed subject of President Obama, even some of my usual tub-thumping on our old friends the Tudors – and don’t under any circumstances miss Brad Jones’ jazz column: it’ll teach you stuff, make you laugh, and put a lump in your throat. All this, plus lots more! It all awaits you in the July issue of Open Letters, so click on over and read, read, read!

Believing the hype in the Penny Press!

The Penny Press bounced around quite a bit last week on the profundity scale (or rather I did the bouncing, by reading all kinds of stuff), and of course near the low end of that scale is where you’ll always find anything connected with the latest Hollywood micro-phenomenon, pint-sized himbo Taylor Lautner.



In the latest GQ, Mickey Rapkin is given the thankless task of sleepwalking through yet another high-profile interview with this kid, who’s clearly been given a somber talking-to since he nearly outed himself under Neil Strauss’ careful supervision in Rolling Stone. As a result, Rapkin gets absolutely nothing for his trouble except the standard entirely hypocritical “I’m just amazed to be here!” line. At one point Lautner self-servingly exclaims, “Is this really happening? Am I really here?” In response (to us, not to Lautner, who would have burst into tears), Rapkin gets in a good observation:

Those are pretty good questions. He might also ask: What on earth did I do to deserve that $7.5 million contract and the adoration of millions? He’s handsome, yes. But in two Twilight films, Lautner has logged fifty minutes of screen time. Total. In the first movie, he spoke 239 words.

In other words, the hype associated with this tiny little packet of muscle and mindless ambition far, far exceeds any thespian payoff that’s yet happened or is ever likely to happen. Apart from the Twilight saga, Lautner’s next movie is a special effects extravaganza called Stretch Armstrong – but then, Tom Cruise did Legend and still ended up being a gigantic pain in the ass.

And we’re not free of hype even at the opposite end of the profundity scale! In last week’s TLS, Iain McGilchrist turns in a witty, wonderful review of Raymond Tallis’ Michelangelo’s Finger, a popular science book touching on many subjects, mostly related to the particularly human capacity to charge a pointing gesture with meaning. McGilchrist is chugging along just fine until he gets to the subject of non-human animals – one species especially:

Dogs are particularly sensitive to human attention, to the direction of our gaze, and, for example, whether we will be able to see them stealing meat. They make use of a very human feature, the whites of the eyes, thought to have developed precisely because of our sensitivity to gaze direction, a remarkable turn of events that Tallis oddly does not mention. Tallis says dogs don’t – can’t on principle – understand “meant meaning” associated with a sign, the basis of human communication. But the evidence suggests they almost certainly do just that. Without any training, they will fetch things if merely shown a photograph, or presented with a replica, and, of course, they understand the intentional nature of words and commands. Walkies, anyone?

I don’t know what canines McGilchrist has been hanging out with, but if any dog in the history of the world has ever, “without any training,” gone and fetched an item after being shown a photograph of that item, I’ve never met that dog. I doubt even Taylor Lautner could do that, although he probably understands what ‘walkies’ means.

Soft Porn in the Book Review!

As anyone involved in the thankless task will tell you, there are several kinds of book reviews. There shouldn’t be; they should all be voiced with and motivated by the exact same tone and tenor of honest inquiry, regardless of their subject matter or their author’s fame. But that would only happen in a dream-world where, say, the fiction editor of a literary journal wrote his own reviews – otherwise, all book reviewers have to deal with editors, and whereas the ideal book reviewer has only one motivation for writing a review (I read this book, here’s what I think is important about it), an editor can have several kinds of motivations for running one. Is the author a big name, making the book something your journal can’t simply ignore without looking foolishly provincial? Is the author a friendly person (or even a friend) whose therapy bills will skyrocket if some earnest tyro parses his every typo? Is the author’s publishing house one from which the editor in question wants a long and fruitful relationship (perhaps for future publication of the editor’s own book? Who knows – the poor schmuck writer certainly doesn’t)? Will a savaging of some new book get you dropped from that publisher’s list of future books (a calamity, since if an editor had to buy even a single book, ever, the world would come screeching to a halt)?

Editors tend to accommodate these various intervening factors by developing several kinds of book reviews. There’s the standard straight-up rave, where the only real challenge is to clutch some small strand of dignity to the dancing and cheering of the piece; there’s the roundhouse slam of a once-popular author’s latest, usually done when a) the publisher in question is too big to stop all its galley copies, and b) the author is somehow perceived has having it coming (we don’t beat up on saintly elderly Japanese writers, for instance, even though they’re all completely untalented, but a snotty young white American is fair game – Nick McDonnell won’t be able to breathe easy until he’s collecting Social Security); there’s the undisguised placeholder review, where the book in question is too ‘big’ or ‘buzzworthy’ to ignore but the only reviewer who could deliver a piece in time was an incompetent nincompoop who does nothing more than summarize the plot; and then there’s the ever-popular ‘soft pan’ review, in which the reviewer seems to have mightily disliked the book but is being charmingly coy about it.

I admit, that last kind really bothers me – because the only possible motivation for such a reviewer to obscure what he thinks is naked self-interest: I can’t bash this book because I might meet its author at an Upper West Side literary soiree, or I might want to sleep with its author, or I might want a favor from its author for my own forthcoming collection of elegiac interconnected short stories. It’s perfectly fine to watch out for such eventualities, but not in a full-length essay that’s supposed to be a review of a book. Facebook instead, I always want to shout.

In any given week, you’ll find good examples of all of these various book review types in that bête noir of all serious readers, the New York Times Book Review. That’s why I love it so: every issue gives you a little survey course in the natural history of book reviewing.

Take today’s issue, for example. You can see the political statement right away: the cover is given to a debut novel by Adam Ross rather than to Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (and if you don’t think the cover spot is a coveted status symbol, you’ve been listening to too many lyingly self-deprecating authors). The review is by a woolgathering Scott Turow, and it’s mostly plot summary and vapid boilerplate (“Mr. Peanut is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage”), with a few nonsense-mysticisms thrown in (“The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality”). The point of the piece isn’t to review the book (I’ve read Mr. Peanut, and trust me: it only inhabits the reality-plane of puerile crapola) but to anoint the author, a benediction the Book Review is better situated than anybody to bestow.

(By contrast, the Ellis review was handed to the literary editor of the OTHER Times, Erica Wagner, who pays proper acknoweldgement to the cultural landmark-status of Less Than Zero and then proceeds to pulverize its new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, ending with a school-mistress admonition of a type only the Brits can pull off: “’History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.” Hee.)



But the type of review most prominently on display this time around is the aforementioned ‘soft pan.’ This would be annoying enough in the Book Review under any circumstances, but two of the times it happens today really irk. First, David Carr turns in a full-length review of Bill Clegg’s new memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and resolutely stops short of slamming a book he obviously disliked. Clegg’s memoir details his descent from cutie-patootie hotshot literary agent to slightly unkempt crack addict, and you might think the reason Carr goes soft on it is because he has high hopes for a similar book of his own – but no: he already wrote that book, Night of the Gun, and it’s considerably, comfortably better than Clegg’s book. And yet, everywhere in his review he stops just short of calling Clegg narcissist pedaling a third-rate survivor’s tale, and it becomes so noticeable it starts to beg for explanation. My best guess is that Carr is a nice guy who didn’t want to beat up on a fellow recovering drug addict. For which, if true, I say again: Facebook, not the New York Times Book Review.

The second ‘soft pan’ is mercifully shorter – Mike Peed’s seven-paragraph notice of Justin Cronin’s 700-page new novel The Passage. For the privilege of getting to watch an author sell his soul in public, the entertainment industry has showered The Passage with the kind of adoration usually reserved for incarnations of the Buddha (although I’m going to hope there was an element of irony in Stephen King’s “The best book EVER WRITTEN! The best book that ever CAN be written!”), and Peed clearly knows this (“If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it”). And yet, his seven paragraphs condemn nothing about the book. Instead, all is gentle plot summary (no spoilers!) and guarded pretension (“The Passage, then, is fundamentally an investigation into the creation and destruction of a flawed race”). To put it mildly, a book that was written for the sole purpose of getting its author piles of money deserves rougher handling. And the reason it doesn’t get such handling here is likely connected to the ad revenues generated for the Times by Ballantine Books in promoting The Passage. Plus, you don’t want to be the only person who didn’t like such a hot, hot book, do you? You won’t get invited to any of its parties!

Still, the Book Review this time around ends with a fun piece about how boring, watery Borges loved fantastic, vital Robert Louis Stevenson – if that piece prompts even one of Borges’ pretentious name-dropping fans to try Stevenson, some good will come out of this issue after all.

Geographica!

Another amazing issue of National Geographic hitting stands this week, and it starts off in true mind-expanding Geographica fashion with three little pieces on three different kinds of contamination.



First is the evil, lunatic idea being pursued by Project Tauros, a European scientific consortium currently dedicating their efforts towards using existing Limiana and Maremmana cattle-stock to bring an extinct form of cattle back into the world. The dead animal in question is the auroch, a massive bovine that once roamed Europe’s forests – the last remnants of its population died out many centuries ago, but Project Tauros wants to use bits of the animal’s DNA ginned up from miscellaneous auroch teeth, combined with the random auroch genes still carried by the aforementioned cattle-breeds, to breed the species again. Juli Berwald, the little article’s author, tries to put a positive ecological spin on things:

Aurochs were herbivorous behemoths, and in the past they browed on beech, a type of tree now choking Europe’s woods. Today such housecleaning would help regrow native flora – as one resurrected species gives other, threatened ones a chance at survival.

But you’d have to have the brain of an auroch to buy that for a moment. None of these Frankensteined creatures will ever come within ten miles of unrestricted European woodland – aurochs averaged half a ton heavier than modern cattle: these poor magnificent creatures are obviously being brought back from extinction in order to be crammed into slaughter pens and carved up alive to satisfy mankind’s endless appetite for cheap meat. And even if some ‘wild’ aurochs were released into those European forests, what they’d eat would be anybody’s guess – they fed primarily on beech centuries and millennia ago because it was natural for them to do so, in their natural environment. Maybe they hated it but had no choice because the enormous woolly rhinoceros of the time ate all the really good stuff. And even if they do somehow target beech, what happens when they do their job? Europe no longer boasts saber-toothed tigers or dire wolves capable of taking down a bull the size of an SUV - so we get just another hapless animal to cull whenever they decide to live in a way mankind finds untidy.



The second kind of contamination in this issue was certainly meant in a much lighter tone, although its implications are just as sickening – literally. National Geographic takes on the infamous “five-second rule” that states if you drop a piece of food onto the floor and immediately scoop it up, you can still safely eat it.

Not so, says Catherine Barker, this delightful piece’s author. It turns out “salmonella and other bacteria can survive up to four weeks on dry surfaces and transfer to food immediately upon contact.” The lip of a shared cup of water (or any other beverage – like all the cheap beer found in those innumerable red plastic cups going into use by the thousands in Allston and Brighton as we speak, it being a Friday night) can have more than 10,000 bacteria; even chopsticks can be swimming in germs (they don’t come in cellophane wrappers, after all). Barker doesn’t mention the risks you’d be running with your first auroch burger, but I wouldn’t be hopeful.



The third kind of contamination is of a decidedly bigger scale than the bacteriological. Michael Lemonick turns in a fascinating, disturbing piece on the vast shroud of man-made, man-launched, man-forgotten space junk currently orbiting the planet (and Sean McNaughton provides a fantastic graphic that will stop you dead in your tracks – it’s exactly the kind of weird, instinctively-effective visual at which National Geographic excels). The numbers are staggering: 11,000 objects in low orbit, and another 10,000 further out, all of them flying around at thousands of miles an hour, some of them slamming into each other harmlessly, but still … it’s only a matter of time until, say, five of them smash together simultaneously and give everybody a bigger problem to worry about than chopsticks.

Of course the rest of the issue is marvelous as well (National Geographic being, as I’ve said before, the world’s only actually perfect magazine)(sorry Open Letters! I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em!), including a very funny little essay by Virginia Morrell (with arresting photos by Tim Laman) about the male bowerbirds of New Guinea, who frantically, obsessively, and masterfully create elaborate nest-decorations in the hopes of attracting females willing to settle down and start laying eggs. The bowerbirds will use anything shiny to further their home-decorating efforts, including discarded CDs and, um, glistening caterpillar feces (the things you learn …), and reading about them is always a treat. And they aren’t even remotely endangered … which helps, in this day and age.

Comics! Superman #700!

Well, I could hardly let this one go, could I?

This week in comics, Superman turns a whopping 700, numbered with pretty much nebulous continuity since the title premiered around A.D. 645, and DC Comics gave the occasion an oddly appealing low-key commemoration.

It’s odd: Batman turned 700 last week with an issue that couldn’t have been more generic and scatterbrained if it wanted to – an incredible milestone (what American comics ever reach 700, for the love of Mike?) treated almost entirely negligently. In Batman’s case, the cause was easy enough to see: missed deadlines and work delays (read: pampered, spoiled writers and artists) made it impossible for Bruce Wayne to show up for his own mega-anniversary: he’s still trapped back in time, struggling to endure his way back to the cape and cowl in the 21st century. The perfect culmination of that story line would have been for it to move right into issue 700, starting things fresh for the post-700 future. But instead, Bruce Wayne won’t return to his own comic until probably issue 704 or 705 – an odd anticlimax, that.

The same thing very nearly happens in Superman 700 – the whole thing feels like a string of epilogues, because that’s exactly what it is. In the recent big Superman story line, the lost Kryptonian city of Kandor was found and restored to health and well-being – along with its thousands and thousands of Kryptonian inhabitants, who all instantly gained Superman-level powers. Kandor and all its Supermen-in-waiting was one of the dumbest ideas legendary Superman editor Mort Weisinger ever had; it pretty much totally undercuts the point, drama, and interest of Superman himself. When the Superman mythos underwent its drastic pruning back in the 1980s, I was glad to see the whole idea get quietly dropped (the loss of Superboy, a dreamy Midwestern team flying around in skintight lycra? Not so much. The loss of Krypto, the Super-Dog? Let’s not even talk about it)(fortunately, as you can see on this issue’s cover, Krypto is back)(and as you can tell from this recent cover of Adventure Comics, Superboy is back in the continuity of Superman’s past … and, shall we say, dramatically improved). I don’t know what possessed the current DC editorial board to resurrect it.

But they did, and suddenly the DC universe was flooded with superpowered Kryptonians, not all of whom were as altruistic as Superman. Tensions arose, naturally, since Earth would be pretty much defenseless against even a small fraction of such a population turned bad (and the current DC lineup of super-heroes features exactly six characters who can go toe-to-toe with even one such rogue Kryptonian, let alone hundreds of them). A new planet was found on which the Kandorians could settle, and Superman decided to go with them and help them do that – with the result that Superman himself has been missing from his regular comic titles. Superman 700 marks his big return.

So I guess I was expecting more high drama. Instead, Superman saves Lois Lane from the Parasite and the Prankster (although note to this issue’s many writers: Superman punching the Parasite, even in a triumphant 700th issue, should only make the villain stronger … the whole ‘absorbs superpowers’ thing, remember? Hence the guy’s name?), takes her home and pretty much immediately beds her, then complains for the rest of the issue about how hard the conflicts were that he had with his fellow Kryptonians. The issue featured a very pretty full-page panel of Superman hovering over Metropolis with Lois Lane in his arms, a very nice Ulysses-home-at-last feel to it. But there was no sense of introduction, no attempt to plant the character squarely center stage, and certainly no feeling of optimism for the next 700 issues. Don’t let the issue’s cover fool you: Superman spends most of the issue moping (and what’s with that cover, anyway? Why does artist Gary Frank have the two of them doing the Mashed Potato? Or is it the Shurg?).



I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the upcoming third mega-milestone in DC’s summer, Wonder Woman 600. Hope she doesn’t cry in her Amazon beer the whole issue.

A Room of One's Own!

Ah,  the two faces of home!





Now,  let the posting resume!

With a Little Help From My Friends!

Well!

After a nearly-terminal interruptus, Stevereads has returned!

Many people (two of them canine) helped to sustain me during said interruptus, and of course they deserve their thanks, but Stevereads being Stevereads, it seems only fitting that I pause here to thank those other invaluable old friends, who provided - as they always do - havens and safe harbors during 90-plus days and nights of worry and strain. As much to these old friends as to anybody else,  I owe my sanity and survival throughout this horrible, horrible spring.

So let's have a round of applause, and regular posting will resume here forthwith!

The Golden City!

Our book today is Henry Hope Read’s wonderful, prickly 1959 classic The Golden City, one long screed against the drift of architecture in his day away from the glories of classicism and into the uncharted function-driven wastelands of Modernism. Read fussed over this book for most of his life (our picture here is of a revised edition issued in 1970), but his main jeremiad was always the same: that modern architecture, forgetting the theatrical (“nay, operatic”) role of all art, has abandoned its own traditions in favor of ridiculous fads or barren utilitarianism.

He wrote, of course, during a heyday of so-called ‘urban renewal’ that cost American cities a great many beautiful streets and buildings, and the delightful fire of outrage kindles every page of his book. He looked at all the shapeless, unfinished monstrosities going up all around him in New York City (although it needn’t have been only there – in Boston, we’ve got a ‘new’ Public Library extension that manages to have four walls, a ceiling, and a skylight and absolutely nothing else … for the purpose of housing great works of literature and sheltering scholars, a less inspiring building would be hard to imagine), and he pined not only for the misguidedness of it all but also for the actual property loss necessary to bring it about:

The saddest consequence of originality is the element of destruction. Visual disorder, too much with us under any circumstance, has been compounded. Chaos reigns supreme as the drive to be original destroys the harmony we have inherited, not only in individual buildings but also in the urban scene and in the landscape. Today, not content with excusing the past, we must strike out at the work of our predecessors and try to crush it. “In order to get organize architecture born,” Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has told us, “intelligent architects will be forced to turn their backs on antique rubbish heaps with which classic eclecticism has encumbered our new ground.”

The greatest strength of The Golden City (and the book abounds in strengths) is the author’s perception that philosophy must lie at the heart of any change as sweeping as Modernism – well, that and his willingness to chase down and belabor some of the most sacred cows producing those philosophies:

William James is the probably source of the fallacy that busyness with its acceptance of disorder is reality. In defining the nature of his philosophy, pragmatism, he compares it with “the world of concrete personal experiences,” that is, the life “in the street”; the traditional philosophical approach, termed “transcendental idealism,” he likens to “a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.” William James notwithstanding, the marble temple on the hill is as much a part of concrete personal experience as is the life of the street. To destroy the temple is to rob us of aim, and to take away aim is to deny reality with its attendant, mortality.

This isn’t meant to be a fun book, but even so – watching someone with Read’s intellect and passion take a sledge hammer to so many fraudulent institutions does end up being very amusing. Despite the fact that he often drew uproarious laughs at his lectures, Read viewed the process he was charting as a purely tragic one – as he was right to do, since the impoverishment of modern architecture in turn impoverishes everybody who uses it. So there’s heartache, yes, but also smiles when Read offers a kind of pictorial ‘before’ and ‘after’ segment, expanded for the 1970 edition.  There’s Port Authority, for instance:

One of the largest bus terminals in the world and the entrance to a great city, it offers a large front of brick and stone trim. There is no sculpture, no sculptural detail, and no ornament of any kind outside and none inside.

Which is naturally compared with Grand Central Station:

An elaborate entablature has as its central feature a broken round pediment, with a clock insert, which supports a colossal Mercury and two reclining figures. Swags and garlands of fruit, laurel wreaths, and voluted keystones decorate various parts of the façade.

And there’s the Great Hall of the Cunard Building:

The decoration is in a variety of classical detail mainly in cream, red, and blue, while placed in the ceiling at regular intervals are murals, with nudes and marine symbols in relief framed by lozenges.

Which is compared with the main lobby of the Secretariat Building at the U.N.:

No comment.

Hee. Sorry Henry, but I'm chuckling just a bit. You fought the good fight, but fads are stronger still.

June 2010 in Open Letters!

Morning has broken on a new month, and you know what that means! There in the comfort of your own legally-rented apartment or lawfully-bought house, you get to fire up your Tandy5000 and click on over to a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Our June issue is huge, just perfect for a nice long intellectual wallow in the summertime. We have a batch of pieces on topics from history (Napoleon, World War I, World War II, the current war in Afghanistan) and biography (the Queen Mother at one end of the spectrum and Artie Shaw at the other!), in addition to which two genres get their biographical due: the novel, and the posthumous fame of Jane Austen.  There are regular features on new mystery novels, new developments in the world of perfume, new movies about video game characters and zombies, and a new look at another short novel. And there’s lots more, all capped with a poem by Tomas Transtromer and a striking ‘cover’ photo. So take advantage of the privacy guaranteed you by Magna Carta (and heavily implied in your Constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure) to snuggle up in the privacy of your own personal space and have a nice long read with us!

Comics! Two new teams!

Comics this week included the start of two new teams from Marvel Comics – a company which has learned that nothing sells like excess and can now be counted upon to give us multiple X-Men teams, multiple Spider-Man teams, about 100 different upcoming graphic novels of the various splinters of “Dark Reign,” and, somewhat belatedly, about half a dozen new post-“Dark Reign” super-teams.

The first of these new teams isn’t a first issue – it’s just business as usual for “Thunderbolts” (issue #144! When did that happen? Can there really be that many virgins out there with disposable income?), a book built on the idea of super-villains forming a super-hero team for one reason or another (to dupe the public, to redeem their souls, etc). In the wake of “Dark Reign” and the downfall of Norman Osborn, a new team of Thunderbolts is formed in this issue under the leadership of good guy Luke Cage, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. Of course, I just-in-general like the way Marvel has been increasing its usage of Cage, but the idea of putting him in charge of a new team – at least as written by Jeff Parker (with surprisingly retro art by Ken Walker)– really works.

Of course, the main draw of any new team book is the team itself, the picks, the potential chemistry. That draw is all the more dramatic when the team in question is composed mostly of villains or quasi-villains, most of whom certainly aren’t trustworthy. This time around there are some characters I barely recognize – Mach V, Ghost, Songbird (I know the last only from the epic “Avengers Forever” – no idea what’s her deal in normal continuity), Moonstone, Crossbones – although the way Parker writes them makes me at least curious to know more. The team has its resident in-house genius (in this case Hank Pym) and at least two surprising additions that I, for one, didn’t see coming: the Juggernaut, here portrayed as physically immense and pretty openly threatening (in the ‘real world,’ there’s simply no way Luke Cage would allow onto his team a grinning schemer with Hulk-level strength, but hey …), and … the Man-Thing, a non-sentient muck-monster who can’t speak, can’t understand speech, and has virtually no powers to speak of. Not exactly a team player (although he’s been on a team before! I may be the only person here old enough to remember that, however).



Add such wrinkles to the mix and throw in a genuinely didn’t-see-it-coming cliffhanger ending, and I’m certainly hooked enough to read the next issue.



The second new team really is new: a freshly not-dead Steve Rogers, given a free hand by the President, forms a “Secret Avengers” team meant for covert operations and strategic pre-emptive strikes at the bad guys, sort of a Black Ops version of the higher-profile Avengers. It’s a great idea (although ironically enough, the premise for it given in this issue – which kicks off Marvel’s new “Heroic Age” – is that the world in the 21st century has grown so rotten and un-heroic that such a team is necessary), and it’s a premise obviously being enjoyed by writer Ed Brubaker and “Dark Avengers” artist Mike Deodato (when “Dark Avengers” came to its end, I really hoped Marvel would find another team-book to put Deodato on … the fact that it goes right on being the Avengers is all the sweeter).



And again, the main point is the roll-call. In this case it’s Steve Rogers – dressed in a kind of generic-superhero suit and not carrying his famous Captain America shield (or even a really, really tough duplicate, which is the least you’d think he’d do, considering that his entire fighting style is built around having the thing on one arm) – and a team of Marvel second-and third-stringers: Moon Knight, a kid in Hank Pym’s old Ant-Man get-up, Jim Rhodes and the Black Widow (from this summer’s “Iron Man 2”), the Beast from the X-Men (doing duty here as the requisite in-house genius), Nova, and … in another surprise move I find fascinating, the Valkyrie, an Asgardian warrior-woman and long-time criminally underused member of the Defenders (the Marvel group the Secret Avengers most closely resembles, naturally) – it’ll be interesting to see how Brubaker develops her character.

It was a little weird, seeing a Marvel team-book with no marquee names at all – I assume these characters were chosen by Brubaker specifically on the condition that he could mess around with them to a greater degree than he could with the usual roster of Avengers, and I’ll be looking forward to that in the next issue. This issue also ends with a heck of a cliffhanger, so I’ll definitely be around next time.

A Tale of Two Echoes in the Penny Press!

It’s become entirely natural to bump into correspondences between Open Letters and the rest of the book-review world. After all, publicists want every critic to read their pet books and rave about them (they want it so badly they’re willing to risk the alternative, when a book hits a critic on the wrong day and gets savaged about the head and neck for 700 words). They send advance copies of those pet works to as many critical journals as possible, hoping for a bite – or, if Santa’s been very good to them this year, a cascade-effect.

Consequently, a week doesn’t go by when I don’t see a long review in The American Scholar or The New Republic or the London Review of Books and think, “Hey, I know that book! Almost had a reviewer for it, but …” and then, usually, one of the following conclusions: a) the freelancer talked the talk but ended up declining to walk the walk, b) the ‘review’ turned out to be written by the book’s author’s pining (or furious) ex-lover – or worse, by one of those ever-hopeful publicists, or c) the editor in question reads the book first and decides against running a review of it before it ever gets considered for a freelancer (if, say, the book is the tenth in a murder-mystery series, or about post-Industrial Revolution finial design, or just plain bad).

If Option C ever applied to the author Andre Aciman, it certainly doesn’t anymore: he proved himself to be noticeably, memorably talented with his previous novel, Call Me By Your Name, and his new novel, Eight White Nights, is a stylistic tour de force plopped right onto the same bookshelves as Vince Flynn and Nora Roberts. It was just barely possible to think of Call Me By Your Name as something of a ‘hidden’ classic, a slim, unhyped novel flying below the radar and yet accomplishing things fiction critics wish a lot more writers would try. That’s not possible with Eight White Nights – this novel clearly marks Aciman’s entrance into the Big Leagues.

I thought it was poetic, irritating, almost disturbingly insightful, and wildly, extravagantly good. Naturally, I kept an eye out for what kind of critical reception it got.

So my proverbial heart was in my proverbial throat when Open Letters’ own Sam Sacks decided to review it. There’s a reason Sacks’ fiction reviews are starting to appear everywhere: he misses nothing that an author does on the page – which is good news because he’s sure to see all the work the author put in, all the subtlety perhaps missed by other critics, but it’s also bad news, because their failures and shortcomings and deceptions will likewise come under that same level of invasive scrutiny. And to make things even worse (or better?), Sacks virtually never simply eviscerates a bad author – instead, he wraps the anvil in layer upon layer of gorgeous, velvety prose before he drops it on their head. They still end up crushed, but they almost feel like thanking him.

So when I read the latest New York Review of Books and saw that Michael Dirda, their foremost critic of contemporary fiction, had a review of Eight White Nights, I was doubly curious. Not only was Dirda reviewing the same book Sacks reviewed back in April, but Dirda himself had been reviewed by Sacks way back in 2007, and not entirely favorably (“Far too often, Dirda writes with propitiating caution, as though he thinks that a single lapse into complexity and his entire audience will start playing cell-phone Tetris,” etc.).

But Dirda’s piece is as safely anodyne as everything else the man writes – and for what it’s worth (at least something, to me: it’s a frustrating thing to like a book nobody else likes), he likes Eight White Nights a great deal. In fact, much of what he wrote about it struck familiar chords. In his initial notes of praise, he of course catches the requisite Russian echoes:

Eight White Nights is a bravura recreation of all the feints and counter-feints, yearnings and frustrations, of modern courtship. It possesses the psychological acuity and intensity one associates not just with Proust but also with Dostoevsky (its title and serial structure pay homage to “White Nights,” his story of overly tentative love).

Back in April, Sacks caught those same notes, in just a slightly different register:

the narrator leaves the Christmas Eve party in the small hours and sits in a nearby park experiencing a euphoria so strong it could melt the snow around him. The novel’s title and premise is evidently borrowed from an early Dostoyevsky story called “White Nights”; but here I thought of Tolstoy. After Levin learns in Anna Karenina that Kitty loves him, he wanders Moscow in dizzy ecstasy, transfiguring all the mundane, even grubby, sights with supernatural radiance: “Two children going to school, some pigeons that flew down from the roof, and a few loaves put outside a baker’s window by an invisible hand touched him particularly. These loaves, the pigeons, and the two boys seemed creatures not of this earth.”

(In fairness to Aciman’s literary acumen, it should be pointed out that almost no effort is required to prompt Sacks to say, “I thought of Tolstoy” … an average trip through the supermarket aisles will elicit it at least once)(writers and their go-to favorite writers! Feh! Glad I don't do that!)



Dirda paints a picture of a critic trying to resist the intoxicating, saturating enchantment Aciman is trying to weave from his novel’s first paragraph:

By the second or third of the white nights, I could still see all the things that bothered me about Aciman’s writing, but they began to seem increasingly unimportant. I was caught up by the unfolding story.

Back in April, Sacks also found himself falling under that spell:

It seems a bit much. And in truth, in the cold light of day about 95 percent of Eight White Nights seems a bit much. But Aciman’s refusal to allow in any of the emotional ambivalence that is the modern-day hallmark of realism is crucial to the spell he’s trying to cast.

I couldn’t agree more, with both of these critics (although as usual, Sacks’ piece is itself beautifully written, whereas most of Dirda’s reads like deadline prose), and I was hugely relieved at that. No feeling quite as rotten as loving a book and then having heavyweight critics cudgel it into the mud.

On a much lesser note of coincidence, this same issue of the NYRB has an ad for the latest title in their stellar reprint series – none other than The Murderess, byAlexandros Papadiamantis! So for once, when I praise an obscure title here at Stevereads, you’ll have easy, push-button access to it!