Month: September 2005

Trust me, I am doing you a favor:

THE HUNKY IRISH PROFESSOR IS INHABITED BY THE ‘DEMONS OF SUPERSTITION’ WHO, IF HE DOES NOT ADHERE TO ALL SUPERSTITIOUS RITUALS, BURST FORTH FROM HIM AND KILL PEOPLE GRUESOMELY. TO FREE HIMSELF, HE MEETS, CHARMS, MARRIES, AND IMPREGNATES A GRAD STUDENT SO THEIR MALE OFFSPRING WILL INSTEAD BEAR THE BURDEN OF THE DEMON INFESTATION. ALSO, THE ‘SISTER’ HE LIVES WITH IS ACTUALLY HIS FIRST WIFE, SO HE’S NOT ONLY A DEMON-INFESTED USER OF INNOCENT WOMEN, HE’S ALSO A BIGAMIST.

If you had any inclination to read the book, I hope I’ve spoiled it for you.

I bought this book for $2.50 at the Y book fair a month or so back because I’ve read more horror in the last few years (see also my reviews of King and Koontz). I knew R.L. Stine’s name as a young adult horror writer and thought he’d be worth a try in adult fiction. Blech, was I wrong.

What’s wrong with the book?

• Stupid, ill-drawn, underused characters, many of whom are included for no reason. Why does the book spend so much time on the small town cop in over his head? No freaking reason.
• Sex scenes that are graphic, but pointless, and are also ill-drawn. Matter of fact, Sara eats an orange, Sara has the best sex in the world with Liam. How do you know? The third person, limited omniscient narrator tells you so!
• Sing-song narrative voice.
• Pointless details. Whole chapters that could have been and should have been cut because
• Repetition. It’s
  Chip’s hand.
  Chip’s hand.
  Chip’s hand.

  If you don’t get the point from this startling stylistic device at the end of the chapter in which the hand being Chip’s hand is revealed, on the first page of the next chapter, we get those same three sentences:

  Chip’s hand.
  Chip’s hand.
  Chip’s hand.

  To spice it up, a couple paragraphs later, it’s

  Chip’s hand, Chip’s hand, Chip’s hand.

  We get the freaking point.

• Meaningless cliffhangers that–surprise!–turn out not to be what accompanies the crashing mental chord imagined by Stine as he ended each chapter. The man, falling from gunshot wounds? Playing a joke. The hot-breathed beast with red eyes that leaps out of the darkness? A golden retriever whose owner insists he’s never done that before, nor will it again, because it only exists as the segue between one overblown, mostly meaningless chapter and the next.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate this book. I merely feel contempt for it. I read several passages to my beautiful wife as I was reading it, and the threats she made frightened me much more than anything within this book. As a matter of fact, the book is only tolerable because it’s so bad and because it didn’t take that long to read once I actually forced myself to sit down and read more of it.

I paid $4.95 for this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee one weekend when I accumulated a number of biographical pieces about Raymond Chandler. (See also my report on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe earlier this year.)

Perhaps this book could better be called The England of Raymond Chandler; twenty years after his death, it collects a few essays but a number of interviews and memories from people who met him in England in the year or so before he died. Perhaps I only think that because the book’s longest piece, “His Own Long Goodbye” by Natasha Spender, chronicles in excruciating detail the shape he was in in London in the late 1950s and how the writer of the piece and her friends helped him survive England. All right, it’s probably accurate in its detail of his failing health, his end-of-life melancholy and suicidal tendencies, but it’s not what I wanted to dwell on about Chandler.

Some of the essays do discuss Marlowe and the evolution of Chandler’s writing and his storied past, so it’s worth it if you’re a big fan of the man, but to the casual reader who likes hard-boiled mysteries, it’s a bust.

I read this book, its ninth printing from 1960, starting in February. I got bogged down around the time where Mr. Kennan began discussing what to do about the Soviet Union since I know how it turned out, but I buckled down and finished it last week.

The book starts with a brief recap of some of America’s oversights and missteps in foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, including the Spanish American War, missteps in China and the Orient (which is what they called Asia until 1960 or so), World War I, and World War II. It also proffers some plans for how to deal with the Soviet Union, including a brief history of Russian communism and its relationship to the native population.

Wow, it’s an intelligent book written by someone with a slightly different point of view, but I never felt like throwing the book. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the contemporary slums of political thought, but at no point did Kennan offend me with his politics. He explains his logic and frames his arguments on historical fact and his interpretation of him. One suspects one could have a discussion about the policies of containment versus confrontation without raising one’s voice–or maybe one could, if one remembered how gentlemen did it.

However, as a lifelong diplomat (and future ambassador to the Soviet Union), Kennan’s approach sees diplomacy as the end-all, be-all of international relations. As such, he would prefer that military force only be used at the behest of the diplomats and only as a sort of mailed-gauntlet slap at an international cocktail party. Undoubtedly, he would fit into the sort of philosophy that perplexes Mark Helprin:

If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart.

Instead, the stiffening of sinews and making like tigers might offend Kennan’s sensibilities or protocols of restraint, but that’s the nature of war. It is a last resort, it is very bad, and it must be prosecuted to its end.

Kennan argues passionately for engagement and containment with the Soviet Union, which ultimately worked to end communism. However, one must ask upon reviewing Kennan’s lessons from this book, originally a series of lectures, can we apply these lessons and these techniques to current rivals or enemies–China and non-stated organizations formed around radical Islam and other aggrieved groups. I would hesitate in trying, for the Soviet Union was a Western power, based in Western thought and philosophy, which we can easily understand. Modern and future opponents are not.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, I bought the book for a quarter at some yard sale or estate sale in the midterm past (probably after 2000). Occasionally I do try to elevate myself through reading, and this book helped.