Stuff I've Been Reading August

Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen, is another of Larry McMurtry’s slight semi memoirs which pop up in this column with the regularity of crab grass. Unlike some of the others though, this was actually a pretty good read. Eschewing the purposeful aloofness that plagues his later memoirs, Walter Benjamin finds McMurtry fully engaged, or at least as fully engaged as the laconic McMurtry allows himself to become.

Using the famous Essay on the death of the storyteller as a jumping off point McMurtry explores the vagaries of his life and art. A lot of this is material and anecdotes that I’ve read before, though this is as much my fault as McMurtry’s as he had the wisdom to put years in between these slight little reflections, and I have perhaps unwisely chosen to read them all in close proximity.

Still he seems more invested in their telling this time around. So if you insist on reading one of McMurtry’s nonfiction work, you could do worse then this one.

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The Seventh isn’t quite the bold reinvention that Stark seemed to promise at the end of The Jugger. Despite the huge loss that Parker suffered at the end of that novel, he finds himself back on familiar ground at the beginning of The Seventh, relaxing in the aftermath of a heist.

The Seventh ends up being a fulfillment in a more important way though, creating for the second time in a row a Parker who is truly out of his element. In the field Parker is meticulous, leaving nothing to chance and indeed the heist in The Seventh goes off like clockwork. Its in the aftermath, when the loot is stolen in conjunction with a random crime that things go awry. As in The Jugger the real problem is good ole human stupidity. Which is something not even Parker can guard against.

What proceeds is such a slapstick tragedy of happenstance that it reads almost like the most ghastly Dortmunder book ever written, rather then the usual Parker novel.

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Catching Fire the middle installment in The Hunger Games, aka the young adult sensation that’s actually good, carries over a lot of the same problems that the first installment did.

The first person present tense prose is distracting and declarative. The world Katniss inhabits is a patchwork one with pieces cribbed whole cloth from Battle Royale, 1984, V For Vendetta and The Chrysilads. Added to the problem is the fact that this feels like two books crammed uncomfortably into one. The first about the formenting revolution, which isn’t given nearly enough time, breathing room, or for that matter evidence to feel organic. The second the return to the arena which just feels like a rushed “greatest hits” version of the first installment.

But, and this is a big but, it doesn’t really matter. For all the flaws and nitpicks Catching Fire remains as propulsive a read as the first installment. And even if the world is cribbed it does so with a savagery and intent that honors its influences. It earns them, it doesn’t just parrot them.

The Games may not be perfect, but unlike a lot of the young adult dreck out there it feels like Fuel for the imagination not an anesthetic for it. Ideally it’ll act as a primer, leading the reader to other greater works, and in all fairness that’s exactly what it promises to do.

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I reread Gone Baby Gone in preparation for my screening of it. I don’t want to talk about it too much right now, I said a lot of what I have to say about the novel in this article and I plan on revisiting the entirety of the Kenzie and Gennaro series in the run up to Moonlight Mile, so I want to save some of my comments for then.

Suffice to say Gone Baby Gone remains a brutally moving novel. The dark beating heart of the Kenzie and Gennaro saga and a master class in crime fiction. Dennis Lehane is a God.

Yes that’s a recommendation.

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The Corrections is a Literary novel with a capital L. A densely packed encoded work that pulls off the difficult task of being just as clever as it thinks it is. It would be tempting to cosign it to the genre of “Horrible People Doing Terrible Things.” But the remarkable thing about it is that every time you’re sure that its about to overplay its hand and dip into distasteful miserabilism, it somehow manages to pull back and keep its balance with humanity and grace.

If this seems a slight review, that’s because it is. The Corrections is the type of novel one writes about in a fifty page dissertation or a blurb, the middle ground does not satisfy, and I have not the time for a fifty page dissertation. It’s a witty, literate, moving novel that manages to fit in more unhappiness per square inch of page then anyone since Chekov. And its more or less as good as you’ve heard.
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And remember I also read An Object Of Beauty (Yay), The Fall (yay) and Tales Of Woe (Fuck you).

The Hunter

There are few things I love more then Crime Fiction. There are few things in that genre that I love more then the great Don Westlake’s Parker novels. Written under the pseudonym Richard Stark and spanning twenty four novels, the series follows professional thief Parker from job to job.

The books themselves vary little, most follow a pretty set formula Where in, A) Parker takes a job. B) Some poor fool crosses him. C) We follow said poor fool as we watch him try to escape from Parker’s wrath. D) The Poor Son Of Bitch Thinks he’s escaped Parker’s wrath. E) He finds out he hasn’t. F) We double back in time with Parker to find out just how he found the poor fool and how he’s going to make the poor fool wish he’d never been born.

What makes The Parker books unique, is their utter lack of sentimentality. Parker is not a thief with a heart of gold, not even remotely. He’s a cold, mean and often times pure nasty son of a bitch, who extracts vengeance like someone pulling out teeth with a claw hammer.

Parker at the core of his character is simply someone who doesn’t give a fuck. He’s like Tom Ripley without delusions of grandeur. He will straight up murder you and your family. Not because he hates you, not because you made him mad, not because he’s crazy but because he’s a professional thief with no delusions about what he does, and if you need to die so he can do what he does, well that’s a price he’s more then willing to pay.

How cold is he? Upon finding his wife’s dead body he expresses his grief by carving up her face so the police can’t put her picture in the paper and then dumping her body in the park. Just so his quarry won’t know he’s coming.

Based on the first novel in the series, Darwyn Cooke’s The Hunter, his retelling of the first Parker story, ends up being as perfect of an adaptation as Parker is ever going to have. Cooke’s retro style and clean line drawn artwork ends up being the perfect conduit for Stark’s efficient, clean, hard prose, and dark pitiless storytelling. There are sequences here, like Parker's wordless entry into New York, that are done so perfectly they almost hurt.

The first book starts with Parker gunning for revenge. Betrayed and left for dead by his partner and spouse, Parker decides to get some good ole fashioned vengeance, even if he has to kill half of the gangsters in New York to get it.

As he did in his seminal New Frontier, Cooke art perfectly captures the time period. It’s not just set in the early sixties, it looks like it was made then. With it’s overripe dames, hard cut men, and purty purty style The Hunter manages to look like something that escaped from Mad Men’s raging id. The warmth of the retro style is perfectly off set by Starks cold merciless story which Cooke perserve’s perfectly. The last thing you see in the book is Parker’s cold unforgiving eyes staring out from the back of the book, announcing the next chapter is coming out in a year. I can hardly wait.

An old favorite is all well and good, something that lets you look at an old favorite as though it’s the first time is something to be truly cherished.