Book recommendation: Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

I may not always have time to devote to in depth reviews, but I would like to have a book recommendation on a more consistent basis, perhaps once a week or so. (ETA: This turned out to be way longer than I had intended it to be. Don't expect something this long every week.)

Back in 2005, I began hearing a lot about a new writer that was making waves in the crime genre by the name of Charlie Huston, and I decided to check him out and see what the hubbub was about. I’m glad I did, because Caught Stealing turned out to be one of the most self assured modern day debut novels I had read up to that point, and marked the start of a bright new talent.

The plot follows Hank Thompson, everyday schlub and bartender, as he gets caught up in a game of cat and mouse with crooked police officers and gangsters over some stolen money he knows nothing about, but might be mixed up in anyways. The plot never quite veers off into unexpected territory, but Huston takes the time to craft a well thought out everyman protagonist with Thompson, and surrounds him with interesting, and often times outlandish, characters to bounce off of. I’m more than willing to deal with a derivative story, as long as it is well written, and for a first novel, Huston did a commendable job. That’s not to say the book is perfect, but Caught Stealing has dialogue that Tarantino would envy, a plot Hitchcock would be proud of, and a style all its own.

There are a couple of things I would like to draw attention to, one of them being the way Huston writes dialogue. I sincerely don’t think there’s a better writer out there for capturing the way people really speak, and it adds an element of realism to the story that cannot be underestimated. There’s a certain edge to some of it, but it would not be out of place coming out of the mouths of real people, unlike the dialogue found in Sin City or some other noir novels. The other thing is how violent the book is. An awful lot of books feature violence, but not many of them manage to make the reader cringe. Huston manages to do this, and he does it by making Thompson utterly human in his abilities and actions. The mystery genre, particularly the noir portion of it, has always had a certain amount of sadomasochism in it, where the protagonist is constantly beaten down, but never really any worse for the wear. Thompson may get beaten down, but it takes its toll, both physically and mentally.

While the quality of his later books contains many peaks and valleys, Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing remains one of the best examples of a new talent taking the crime genre by storm, and it’s one I would recommend without hesitation to anyone who likes a good, solid piece of noir. In the coming weeks, I will be talking a lot more about Charlie Huston and his progression as a writer, but this is the book that set him on the path that he took and deserves to be read.

Rating: Four bears caught stealing honey out of five.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

The Plot: Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. (Taken from the publisher’s website)

The Review: Reading more like a Narcotics Anonymous confession than a work of fiction, Johnson’s short story collection about addicts and loners sucks the reader in with its tales of depravity and forces them to ask how much of it is actually fiction and how much is real. Owing a debt to Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett’s style of clipped, punchy sentences, Johnson is able to create poignant stories that are seemingly autobiographical, if slightly fictionalized for publication. The stories never gloss over the worse parts of addiction and even offer redemption for those who are down, but not out.

Johnson does an admirable job of setting the scene, utilizing a general sense of surrealism in the earlier stories before the narrator gets clean, which lends itself to the character’s state of mind, where there is haziness due to imbibing drugs and drink in copious amounts. Actions have reactions, but they are done with a disconnection that only an addict could be a part of. For a good chunk of his life, the narrator floats above what happens, drifting like a Kerouac creation from event to event with little reason for being.

Even though the narrator is mired in the ugliness of addiction, where relationships fall apart and people get hurt, both emotionally and physically, Johnson offers glimpses of beauty and wonder throughout the book with his descriptions of the environments, as if to say that it is always there, if we just look hard enough:

This was in the spring of that year, the season when some varieties of cactus produced tiny blossoms out of their thorns. To catch the bus home each day I walked through a vacant lot, and sometimes I’d run right up on one-one small flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances. Dizzy, enchanted-I’d have felt the same if I’d been walking along and run into an elf out here sitting in a little chair. The desert days were already burning, but nothing could stifle these flowers.

Clocking in at a brisk 133 pages, Jesus’ Son doesn’t overstay its welcome and is better for it, because without a padded page count each of Johnson’s words counts for something and nothing is wasted, especially considering his economy of language. Being able to read the book in one sitting gives the narrator’s character arc an immediacy that wouldn’t be there if it was stretched over a longer period of time. Much like meeting someone at a bar and getting to know them in that short time period, knowing full well that you’ll never meet them again, the reader gets to know the narrator in the same manner. Johnson’s decision to have the narrator segue from a fully fledged addict to someone struggling with sobriety in between stories is an interesting one, because it forces the reader to fill in the blanks about the character themselves. The narrator’s epiphany or moment of clarity is shrouded in mystery, so the reader is forced to save him themselves. Redemption isn’t found within the pages, it is found within whatever the reader projects on the character.

If there is one complaint about the book, it would be that there is no introduction or retrospective by Johnson to answer some of the questions that the book brings up. It is a minor complaint and has no bearing on my enjoyment of the book, but since this was a reissue of a book first published in 1992, a look back would seem fitting at this juncture.

The Package: The cover is rather striking in its simplicity, and I like the fact that the designer decided to let colours carry the cover instead of using an image. I’ve already lamented over the lack of extras above, so I won’t repeat myself here.

If You Liked This: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. While completely different stylistically, O’Brien also proved himself to be a master of the short story with this collection, which fictionalizes a lot of his experiences in the Vietnam War, capturing the same poignancy that Johnson did with his subject matter.

The Rating: Four Jesus’ daughters out of five. (Spoilers for The Da Vinci Code!)

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

The Plot: The story is told through the eyes of its protagonist, Lou Ford, a 29-year-old deputy sheriff in a small Texas town. Ford seems to be a regular, small-town cop leading an unremarkable existence. Beneath this facade, however, he is a cunning, intelligent and depraved sociopath. (Stolen from Wikipedia)

The Review: Reading a book almost always involves tempering expectations towards what sort of book you’re reading, and while pleasant surprises occur, you’ll generally know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book. With that in mind, no one reads Jim Thompson books and expects anything more than punchy, pulpy stories featuring terrible human beings doing terrible things. Shakespeare, he ain’t, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when you get an enjoyable, but ultimately superficial book that borders on forgettable. While Thompson is renowned within the genre, the problem with his novels is best summarized by the AV Club in an article about gateways to crime fiction, when they wrote “...his novels also suffer from the alcohol-fueled velocity at which he wrote them, and generally fall apart toward the end.”

To his credit, Thompson is able to create a truly chilling character in Ford despite the slapdash method of writing, and reminds the reader that insanity isn’t a complete abandonment of reason or lucidity. When Ford kills women, his psychosis take center stage, but he’s fully cognizant of his actions and in full control of his faculties. The way Thompson was able to balance the insanity with the rational mind is what makes Ford scary and effective as a character. Added to this mix is the fact that Ford is much more passive when killing men, which gives the character his defining characteristic: his misogyny. The undercurrent of misogyny in the murders is particularly horrifying, especially considering I read this book right after reading Margaret Atwood’s very feminist The Handmaid’s Tale. The worldviews between the two authors could not seemingly be farther apart and it was interesting to read the two back to back, inadvertently creating a situation where I felt I was reading the flipsides of two very different coins.

According to the publisher’s website, Thompson wrote the book in four weeks, which ties into the problem the AV Club mentioned above. The book is briskly plotted and the characters well defined, but the book lacks a lot of depth and is hard to review because of it. When I finished The Handmaid’s Tale I was left with a lot of questions that weren’t easily answered. When I finished The Killer Inside Me I was only left with the satisfaction of finishing the book. It may not be fair to compare Thompson directly to Atwood, but hamburgers don’t taste as good if you had filet mignon the night before. If you had an afternoon to kill and wanted a tale of pulp depravity, you could do a lot worse than any of Thompson’s books, but you have to realize you won’t be left with a memorable experience.

Oddly enough, I get the feeling from the book that it would work far better as a movie, where a director with a strong vision would be able to take the pieces of narrative and create a more atmospheric experience for the audience. The news that Casey Affleck is going to star in such a movie as Lou Ford gives me hope for a good movie, but we’ll have to see if those hopes will be validated.

The Package: I’m not overly fussy on the cover, but it’s not terribly offensive either. The placement of the publisher’s logo is questionable and obtrusive though, since it makes it look like Lou Ford has a lizard shaped mole on his face.

If You Liked This: Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale, the first book to feature his characters Hap and Leonard, who also hail from Texas.

The Rating: Two Casey Afflecks with a terrible mustache out of Five.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Plot: It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed. (Taken from the Seal Books website)

The Review: To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this book. Since I’m not a fan of most speculative fiction, the subject matter was something that didn’t necessarily interest me, and my memories of reading Atwood in high school were far from rosy. After the first 50 pages or so, I felt a bit validated in my preconceived notions because they were a bit of a slog to get through.

But like many of the beliefs I had in high school, this one also turned out to be baseless.* Simply put, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is far better than I could ever have anticipated, and the novel is proving difficult for me to review since it hasn’t really left me in the few days since I finished reading it. It also turns out that my initial thoughts about the first fifty pages or so were also wrong, because once I finished the novel I re-read those parts and realized that while they are definitely slow, they also do an excellent job of world building. Atwood’s dystopia is a rare case of speculative fiction where everything seems fully realized.

Throughout the novel, Offred remembers her friend Moira, both in the time before and after the United States became the Republic of Gilead. By all accounts, Moira was the spirited one in the relationship, and when the change happened, she was the one to be proactive and attempt an escape. Her character arc seemed to be sliding towards one where she would end up being a symbol of hope for the Handmaids, but her story is just as tragic as any other. The question of what her character represents is a bit troubling to me since Moira doesn’t meet a happy ending, and if she’s supposed to represent the futility of struggling against patriarchal oppression, then I find that a woefully depressing interpretation.

I’ve read some views of Offred where people tend to see her as weak and undeserving of being saved, especially when contrasted against Moira, who was fiercely independent and seemed to be in more in charge of her own fate. I don’t find myself believing that though, because despite whatever faults Offred has, her passivity in relation to the situation handed to her are very much human. It is understandable for someone to distrust a measure of freedom after being indoctrinated against it. She manages to buck the rules when she can, but rather than take chances that would likely find her dead, she instead focuses on surviving. That is what she ends up being in the end, a survivor. Even though she had no idea of their fate, the memory of her husband and daughter is enough to keep her sane, and in the end that is enough.

Perhaps the thing I find most unsettling about the novel is how the attitudes towards women aren’t that far of a stretch from the ones many people hold today, and how they remain believable despite being taken to an extreme. The Republic’s objectification of women and desire to have them be nothing more than child bearers or housewives with no real responsibilities outside of the household is a wonderfully sly condemnation of traditional values by Atwood. Her ability to showcase how actuated ideals can be disastrous and hazardous to society is truly stunning.

Like I said above, this was a hard novel for me to review, so if my thoughts are poorly articulated, I’m sorry.

The Package: The cover itself might be a bit on the nose for the novel thematically, but it’s fairly attractive. Included at the back of the book are discussion questions, an author’s note and interview, and a short overview of Atwood’s career up to that point.

The Score: 4.5 Machines that Margaret Atwood uses instead of signing books herself out of 5.

*For the record, I’ve also come to accept the Russian’s aren’t out to get me.

Queen & Country by Greg Rucka and many others

Owing more to the TV series Spooks than the James Bond or Jason Bourne movies, Greg Rucka’s comic series Queen & Country has managed to carve itself out a niche in a superhero dominated medium by portraying the espionage community with intelligence. What sets the series apart from its counterparts is that while there is plenty of action for the people that crave it, politics and character interaction are the things that propel the plot forward more often than not.

Tara Chace, our protagonist, and the rest of the cast are introduced in the first trade as she attempts to assassinate a Russian arms dealer Kosovo. She gets the job done, and Rucka does a good job of showcasing where he’s going with the rest of the series: brief moments of action followed by the consequences, both in the personal and in the political realm, with a special emphasis on realism. It might seem weird to point to a comic book as being especially realistic, but Rucka does an inordinate amount of research for his scripts, which he provides for the reader as an extra in the third collection.

The interesting thing about the book is how Chace’s gender comes into play. Far too often, it is a trope that women, because of their gender, have to prove themselves worthy in what amounts to a man’s world. This isn’t the case in Q&C, where Chace’s abilities are never called into question unless her performance in the field leaves something to be desired. She’s more than capable and Rucka should be applauded for not saddling his creation with something that’s been beaten to death in other places. Anyone complaining about the lack of strong female characters in comic books would be well advised to pick this book up.

While the four collections are mostly well done, there is at least one niggling problem that would hinder the enjoyment of the series for readers both new and old. In between story arcs, Rucka also added to the Queen & Country series by writing two prose novels, and the third collection suffers because there gaps where the novels took place. Without any explanation as to what happened, certain events remain hazy and uncertain unless the reader is familiar with the novels. The emotional resonance that accompanies the death of a major character is rendered moot because there is no context for the audience to latch onto. This could have been mitigated by adding a simple recap page to the start of each arc, and it’s such a simple addition that it’s surprising the editors didn’t take the time to put it in.

Rating: 3.5 Kate Beckinsales starring in Whiteout out of five. (In the original comic, written by Rucka, a British spy shows up and was originally supposed to be Tara Chace, but once work began on Queen & Country Rucka changed his mind.)

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I was, without a doubt, sorely disappointed by Dennis Lehane’s last book, Shutter Island. It was a suspense novel without any tension, and Lehane has no one to blame but himself because it was the writing that let the story down. It was as if he were writing on automatic and figured the gimmicky ending would be enough to get people talking. Unfortunately, the ending was telegraphed far too early and should be easily guessed by anyone with a passing knowledge of the clichés inherent to the genre. This is a shame, since there is a good story buried in there somewhere, but it never materializes into something worth reading. With the talent involved in the movie, there’s a good chance it’ll be one of the rare cases of the film being better than the book.

So there was a large amount of trepidation when I picked up The Given Day almost immediately after finishing Shutter Island, but I was curious to see what Lehane could do given a change of subject matter.

Eschewing his past as a mystery writer, Lehane decided to shift gears and make The Given Day a sprawling 700 page historical epic set in 1919. Using events from the time period, mostly the attempts to unionize the Boston Police Department and the strike that followed, Lehane plays to his strengths and avoids many of the pratfalls from his previous work.

Where Shutter Island had the sense of predictability, The Given Day instead has the sense of inevitability, in regard to both the plot and the character arcs. Each tragedy and triumph that happens to the characters feels earned and organic, and this unto itself should be lauded considering the large cast he manages to flesh out.

I’ve never felt Lehane’s writing could ever be described as anything other than workmanlike, but The Given Day features some of his best writing yet. Many passages bring the era to life, and while no one would ever accuse the prose of being flowery, it provides the reader with a vivid look at a time long past, with all the grime and grittiness that remind the reader that the working conditions in the early 1900s were far from pristine, or even humane.

Perhaps the best compliment I could give to this novel is that reading it made me want to look into the actual events to see how they stack up against what happens in the book. Lehane has said in interviews The Given Day took him six years to research and write and the attention to detail bears that out.

I won’t be happy with it, but if it takes another six years for a book of this quality, I’m willing to wait.

Rating: Four Sean Penns overacting in Mystic River out of Five.

Just an introduction

I have no problems admitting it: I am a consumer whore.

Working at a bookstore has provided me with far too many opportunities to buy books I really don't need, or even necessarily want but bought them I have, and it's high time I sit down and actually plow through them.

I'd like to keep a schedule of how often I post reviews of the books, but how quickly I read them will be dictated by my work schedule and my social life, which varies from hectic to non-existent.

So, here is the list of books I plan on reading in the next year or so:

Bissell, Tom - The Father of All Things (My love of books dealing with the Vietnam War lead me to pick this book up. I never really started it.)
Carr, Caleb - The Alienist (I got this book the first year I started working at the bookstore based off of a co-worker's recommendation. I have no idea why I never started it, but I trust her opinion, so I have high hopes for it.)
Chabon, Michael - Werewolves in their Youth, Maps and Legends (I read Werewolves quite a few years ago, but I enjoy a lot of Chabon's work so I'll re-read it. Maps and Legends was just not engaging, so I never finished it. Maybe this time I'll like it.)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment (I bought these one summer when I was trying to read as many classics as possible. The language is fairly dense, so I never devoted time to it. My bad. As it stands, I use them to trick people into thinking I'm smart when they see my bookshelf.)
Ellroy, James - The Big Nowhere, Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz (With the exemption of The Big Nowhere, all these books were $3 and my love of noir wouldn't let me pass up the chance to buy them. I've read a couple of his other books but haven't been overly impressed, but they were lesser works from what I gather.)
Ferguson, Niall - The War of the World (I love non-fiction history books, but they can be daunting and all too easily put away.)
Grahame-Smith, Seth - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (I started reading it but the jokes stopped being funny about 100 pages into it. This book has the distinction of being the one I least look forward to reading.)
Haldeman, Joe - The Forever War (I enjoy sci-fi when it's done well, so I'm at a loss as to why I never finished this one. I remember enjoying it before I just stopped reading it.)
Hammett, Dashiell - Nightmare Town (I bought this for a couple of dollars at a used bookstore, but I had already read a few of the stories in other collections. One day, I'll sit down and figure out which ones I haven't seen before.)
Heinemann, Larry - Close Quarters (Once again, I bought this because of my forbidden love of the Vietnam War. The writing wasn't great and I put it down, never to pick it up again. Until now.)
Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not (I've read all of these, but several years ago. I remember nothing!)
Huxley, Aldous - A Brave New World (Another one of those books I read years ago but deserves a revisit.)
Johnson, Denis - Nobody Move, Tree of Smoke (I bought Tree because it was $5 and sounded good, while I bought Nobody because I had a bunch of gift cards. Of the two, Tree was actually pretty good while Nobody was a plodding mess. The first halves of the books, at least.)
Kidd, Chip - The Learners (I actually DO judge books by their covers and this one was pretty sweet.)
Larson, Erik - The Devil in the White City (I got this book for free so I never felt obliged to really read it. My logic is infallible.)
Mailer, Norman - Why Are We in Vietnam, The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, The Armies of the Night (Jesus, why did I buy so many Mailer books? I've been using The Executioner's Song as a doorstop, it's so thick. I'm not entirely sure why I can't get into The Naked and the Dead.)
Maraniss, David - They Marched into Sunlight (Another Vietnam book, but with a lot of hippies. Cursed by my own hubris!)
McCarthy, Cormac - The Orchid Keeper (I was reading the back of the book and I couldn't recall if I've read it. If that's the case, I probably didn't, right? Which is weird since I've read all his other ones.)
McNamara, Robert S. - In Retrospect (HUBRIS.)
McSweeny's - One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box (I've read the Dave Egger's portion, but not the others.)
Miller Jr., Walter M. - A Canticle for Leibowitz (A good sci-fi novel that I read years ago and warrants a revisit.)
Mitchell, David - Cloud Atlas (A free book I never muddled through. I have no excuse.)
O'Brien, Tim - Going After Cacciato (I have enjoyed a few of his other books, but this one never clicked with me. BAH.)
Packer, George - The Assassin's Gate (I used some gift certificates to buy this book when I was reading a lot of books about the Iraq War. I got burned out on the subject, but that was a couple of years ago.)
Parker, Matthew - Monte Cassino (Another victim of my war burnout. A really interesting battle during the Second World War though. I look forward to this one.)
Pirsig, Robert M. - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I bought the paperback because I was missing the days of philosophy class, but wasn't missing the prospect of reading textbooks.)
Price, Richard - Lush Life, Clockers (I got these books because of my deep, abiding love of The Wire. I've tried reading both books a couple times and enjoyed them but they always end up being put down. Once again, I have no excuse.)
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 (This book was a gift, and it doesn't keep on giving.)
Ricks, Thomas E. - Fiasco (Damn you summer of war books. Thank god for giftcards.)
Shaara, Michael - The Killer Angels (I've never had a real fondness of the Civil War, but I bought it because it is a classic.)
Stark, Richard - The Man with the Getaway Face, The Outfit (I bought these at the same time as The Hunter, but stopped reading the series after that. This would probably make a good theme week.)
Thompson, Jim - The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280 (I got two of these books as a gift and haven't actually received them yet. I'll make this another theme week if I can put aside my dislike of reading too much of the same writer's work in too short a time period.)
Westlake, Donald E. - 361 (I read it, but can't recall a gosh darned thing.)

Actually, it turns out I do have a problem admitting I'm a consumer whore. That's a lot of books.

There's a list to make about movies I haven't watched either, but that can wait for now.

ETA - It seems that I've listed many authors, but not a single one of them is a woman. This is a glaring oversight on my part and not an intentional one.
As such, I will make it a point to try finding more books written by females.

So far I have:
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (I meant to pick this up when I bought the zombie version, but neglected to do so. I could give this an honest go.)
Highsmith, Patrica - The Talented Mr. Ripley (This is another book I've been meaning to read, since it seems to fall on the fringes of noir that I enjoy. I honestly think I could go either way on this one based on the description, but at least it would be something different.)
Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid's Tale (I've been told this book is comparable to Brave New World, so I'm fairly excited.)
Wharton, Edith - Age of Innocence (Up until ten minutes ago I had never even read the description of the book, but it comes highly recommended and there's no one I trust more, so I'm more than willing to read it.)