No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

Another book in which the author declines to use quotation marks. I seem to be making an unconscious habit of these.

Mr. McCarthy also gives the apostrophe a pass. On the one hand, I want to go through the entire book with a red pen making corrections. On the other, No County for Old Men is so spare and stripped down that I forgive his stylistic indulgence. This is storytelling and characterization reduced to their bare essentials, with meaning occupying the spaces between the words rather than being inherent in them. This is not a criticism.

No Country for Old Men tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong, and the people caught up in its aftermath. It’s a story that begins with one character’s bad decision, which sets a killer on his path. This in turn brings a Texas sheriff into the story, and to confront not only a series of crimes, but a type of criminal beyond the scope of his understanding.

The last fifth of the book is more about the sheriff’s meditations on a changing world than about the circumstances that require such meditation. This sequence is an essential part of the story, but exists at a remove from the rest of the action. In some ways, parts of this segment of the book read more like short stories (I’m thinking in particular of a confessional conversation the sheriff has with his uncle) than a continuation of the narrative, but they are necessary to complete the story.

I suspect that when I see the film based on this novel, I will find the execution to be similar; what the characters don’t say, and how they say what they do, will carry more weight than the actual words.

Earlier this year, I read Mr. McCarthy’s novel The Road. I did not care for it. At the time, I made the mistake of assuming I did not care for Mr. McCarthy’s style, which seemed overly bleak. Now I’m not so sure. I still don’t care for the story told in The Road, but I’m no longer willing to fault Mr. McCarthy’s style. It takes great skill and equal confidence to tell complex stories so simply. In particular, it takes tremendous confidence to show the resolution of one character’s story as elliptically as Mr. McCarthy chose to do, to build toward a showdown and then look away at the last moment. His confidence was justified.

A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

I wonder: would I have believed the story contained in this book had I read it before the revelation that Mr. Frey fabricated portions of his rehab memoir? Like everyone, I like to believe I have a strong bullshit detector, and in retrospect there is more than a whiff of bovine effluvium wafting off this story. While some elements of the story seem fantastic — the alliance between fellow patients who operate on either side of the law that spares Mr. Frey serious jail time, his rule-breaking romance with another patient, the revelation of a childhood trauma that may have contributed to his addictive behaviors, the persistence of his recovery despite rejecting twelve step programs — and others strain credulity — his late-night infiltration of a crack den to rescue his girlfriend, a revelation of attempted abuse — life is often fantastic and credulity-straining. That may explain why people were taken in by the story initially — it’s believable from a weird world point of view.

It’s not the individual threads that make Mr. Frey’s story suspect (to a reader primed to suspect it), but the entirety of the tapestry. Taken together, the pieces don’t quite fit. They’re authentic, but a little too pat. As a novel, I would read this and believe, because fiction demands belief. As a memoir, I’m left with doubt. But again, I brought that doubt with me. Without external knowledge to justify my doubt, would I believe?

Truth and lies aside, I will also note that the format of the book — lack of quotation marks around dialogue, an insistence on capitalizing common Nouns — may well reflect the unstructured nature of the addictive thought process, but as a Reader, I found it trying.

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson (Haiku Review)

Builder and killer
Destinies shaped by the Fair
Chicago’s moment

Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill

All the cool kids and smart people have weighed in on this already, but I needed time to reflect. Saying anything sooner would have been like trying to deconstruct a multi-course gourmet meal while your stomach is still full. It’s possible to break down the experience, but you’re still to close to it. Better to get some rest, have a Bromo, and wait until the concept of food is no longer so uncomfortably immediate.

That Alan Moore creates on his own special level, there can be no doubt. That Kevin O’Neill is an equal partner in chronicling the case history of the League(s) of Extraordinary Gentlemen is equally self-evident.

That’s the first thing; there’s just a hell of a lot going on in this book, which covers thousands of years of public (and not so public) domain stories, stitched together by Mr. Moore’s and Mr. O’Neill’s imagination and creativity. I would call this a crazy quilt, but the seams between each panel are too neat and tight, and the panels themselves so internally consistent and true to the various source materials to which they owe credit, that the result is something damned impressive, and also damned frustrating.

Personally, while I’m impressed with Mr. Moore’s setting for the framing story that serves as the foundation for Black Dossier — a jump forward in time from the end of the second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume — I miss the earlier turn of the century steampunk wonder of the earlier stories. Seeing Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray rejuvenated in a post-Orwellian England is interesting, to be sure, but it’s difficult to connect these eponymous characters with their precursors.

The various accounts of Leagues past are hit or miss. I quite liked Mr. Moore’s ability to write in a credible Shakespearean idiom in the “lost” play Fairy’s Fortune’s Founded, while also connecting Prospero from The Tempest to a stalwart of contemporary popular fiction. “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss,” a synthesis of H.P Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse, is similarly compelling, while maintaining absolute fidelity to its respective source materials. On the other hand, the extract from the faux Beat novel The Crazy Wilde Forever is all but unreadable for any reason other than sheer bloody-mindedness.

The other extracts are equally effective, but of less interest to me personally. Depending on how you score such things, that is either a strength or a weakness of the book. I suspect any reader willing to make the investment of time and attention — as funnybooks go, Black Dossier is text-intensive, with quite a lot of text packed into each page — will find something to appeal. At the same time, the book as a whole does not add up to a single coherent narrative, which may frustrate readers who find themselves engaging with some aspect of the story only to be swept into another mode with little transition between them.

My pal Scott tells me there’s a TARDIS hidden somewhere in the final sequence of the book, but I haven’t managed to locate it yet.

Stone Cold, by Robert B. Parker

And so I return after a brief hiatus to the world of Jesse Stone. Having returned, I again ask myself, “Why?”

I’m truly puzzled. While I like the main character, and several of the supporting characters, the central relationship in the book (between Stone and his ex-but-not-out-of-his-life-although-she’s-thoroughly-unlikeable wife) is a lead weight that drags down an otherwise interesting enough to keep my coming back despite myself series.

Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde

Forget the story, which provides the usual blend of puns, word play, time travel, and social commentary. If you enjoy these things, and can overlook the author’s occasional tendency to get overly precious and smug, you’ll enjoy the book. If you enjoy these things and aren’t familiar with the Thursday Next series, I refer you to The Eyre Affair, the first novel in the series.

What really matters here is that Mr. Fforde slipped one past me. He set up a joke I was predicting in a way that eluded me until I reached the payoff. I would like to say this was a testament to his cleverness and skill, but it was really a case of my being insufficently observant. Bastard.

Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

I admire true obsessives. There is something pure, and simultaneously frightening and awe inspiring about people who are able to give themselves over to the comprehensive study of minutia relating to a single topic. Taken to an extreme, such behavior is addictive and unhealthy, but as long as the obessive keeps a stray brain cell or two attuned to the occasional tracking signal from Earth, it’s ultimately harmless.

Personally, I lack the commitment it takes to get wholly fixated about any one particular thing. I have friends who immerse themselves in the statistical ebb and flow of baseball, but I’ve always been more interested in the point in time experience of watching a good game, divorced as much as possible from the deeper meaning. It’s why my fantasy baseball team remains mired in mediocrity season after season; I care enough to keep from sinking all the way into the basement, while not giving nearly enough of a damn to be a contender. I like comics, and science fiction, and stories featuring axe wielding dwarves. I even enjoy getting my geek on by talking about such things with friends occasionally. But when I put down the book, or when our conversation drifts to other topics, I don’t feel the need to steer things back that way. I like poker, but aside from the occasional game — which is itself as much an excuse to drink a couple of beers and socialize as it is about the thrill and risk inherent in games of chance — it doesn’t occupy much of my time.

For Sarah Vowell, presidential assassination is among her pet obsessions. Assassination Vacation presents a survey of the people, places, and details surrounding the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. While she romanticizes neither the acts nor the respective perpetrators of those acts, she has a definite fascination with this aspect of American history. The result is interesting, to be sure, but also almost uncomfortably personal. At times, Ms. Vowell’s accounts feel more like reading someone’s diary, but without all the voyeuristic fun that implies.