Michael Kevane

Very long. For the first 300 pages I was really enjoying it. My kind of novel: some science fiction (AI surveilled society), some time travel (to ancient times), some style (I had just finished Chandler, and as first Harkaway channeled some of that), lots of wordplay, and very intellectual. But… it went on and on, and after awhile I was jumping chunks of 3-4 pages, nope, nope, nope…. So where Jorge Luis Borges could have crafted the same story into 40 pages, Gnomon is about 670. I don’t regret spending a couple weeks on it. But you might.

“God’s Caravan” by Tiphanie Yanique  November 4, 2019 The New Yorker.

I really enjoyed the story (I listened to Yanique reading it on the podcast). It starts slow, and slowly builds, adding layers of complexity as you move along. With small details you get quick deepening of the characters, Brent with the Rubik’s cube, the Dodge van, Earl’s memories, the marbles in his pocket, Pop and the cane. She does a lot with that. The themes are wonderful: finding identity and self, navigating family, living at the margins, prophetic tradition and its place in the world… The more I listened the more “literary” I kept thinking the story might be, in the sense that I could feel myself making a lot of connections to other works of literature. I guess all this is the poetry background coming through?

“The Bunty Club” by Tessa Hadley from the October 28, 2019 issue of The New Yorker.  Hadley has several stories with fugue states embedded in them, where the narrator and reader are no longer sure that the continuation of the story is really the same story or a fairy tale or a dream. Here she does it with the line, “Then Pippa became absorbed…” and she falls asleep and when the doorbell rings she (by the description of the hallway) is now in a castle, with emeralds, topaz, rubies and a heron, kingfisher, and swan. And a handsome peasant at the door. There is no other way to read her description of Sean! So the three princesses …. and later, “Her question couldn’t be answered without invoking the whole fabric of everything.” And the ending, back to the fugue state. The Bunty Club is there standing in for our wonderful capacity as humans to make our own realities? The three women in recalling the Club are making it anew, but Gillian doesn’t want to or can’t until, alone with the call for the hospital, she recreates a quite different Bunty Club, very solitary, with just her in it. I love how Hadley seems to generously invite the reader to fill in so many holes in the lives of these three women (and Sean too!).

“Are You Experienced?” by David Means from the October 21, 2019 issue of The New Yorker. Rather a slight story, presumably part of a novel. A roam through recent times, the 1960s, an era that surprisingly does not show up much in short stories (is my impression). Almost like the mind-bending and sitting around doing nothing is too challenging for fiction. And there is certainly a lot of talking here and commenting and thinking about talking, and the one thing that is done (the theft) is not described and has no consequences, in the story. At the end of the story, I wondered about “the initial opening question” that Means refers to. There does not seem to be an initial question, but there is an “initial waiting,” as Meg waits for the “Keep On Truckin’” character to start moving!

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Joyce Carol Oates from the October 14, 2019 issue of The New Yorker.  I think the “incantations” of the illnesses and procedures is perhaps meant to remind the reader of the distance between the mystical, emotional appreciation of death of the pre-modern era, the “death and and the maiden” era where metaphor and tone were how we humans communicated and shared these powerful occasions of loss, and the modern, medicalized, prosaic era. And, yet, isn’t the theme of the story to remind us that the named illnesses are just a different version of the parent shushing the child: “Have no fear, that is just the fog, the birch, the dappled sunlight, and not the Erlking….” We lullaby ourselves to the ultimate sleep, with new songs. A rakish, mocking, masked Andrew appears at the end. Luce is digging. Black-eyed Susans in the miasma. The second to last paragraph, the tarantella? Is it really Andrew? Or…

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, by C.A. Fletcher. Enthralling dystopia set in a future England with very few humans left. More for the young adult audience. The ending a little too pat for my taste, but that is the generic problem of dystopias, unless you are going to stay true to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and its unremitting grimness.

Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler. Definitely second-rate Chandler. The Big Sleep was much better. Amusing for the historical snippets, not amusing for the casual bigotry, and the writing is sloppier than The Big Sleep. Plot also more convoluted: let’s make it an eleven,

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid. Billed as a “literary thriller” I thought this might be a good read after some more mundane books. But I was wrong. The novel was interesting for awhile, but then it started to get gratuitously creepy, and by the end I felt like I was in a bad version of Shutter Island (a movie which actually I have only seen previews and snippets of, for good reason). So I am sure there i an audience for novels like this, but not me.

My neighborhood book group read this and we had a fun discussion. This is a great novel. Sure some parts are no longer politically correct, but you have to read past that. Chandler’s writing is so literary: crafted, thoughtful, evocative. Practically every page the modern reader is impressed by his sentences, vocabulary, metaphors, and style. And the plot is convoluted enough that you are impelled to go back to certain sections and read them again, and get a wonderful feeling of satisfaction as you see pieces link together. And it’s LA….

From 2006. Not the best-written book. Lots of vignettes, often little narrative flow. He drops characters that he should be coming back to: Cheney is never mentioned after page 100 for example. I don’t think any Iraqi leaders other than Chalabi and Moqtada al-Sadr are mentioned, and even then only tangentially. But if you want to be convinced that the whole invasion and occupation was a fiasco, and the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were responsible, this is a great introduction and heard to beat. I was convinced. Usually I am pretty skeptical. I remember my parents had The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer (they kept it out of sight, in the garage… imagine!), and that kind of a book about the Iraq invasion would be worth reading.

From a great blog post on the film The Big Sleep: http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/bigsleep.htm

Agnes Lowzier, the saleslady at Geiger’s bookstore and Joe Brody’s accomplice, played by Sonia Darrin. Although her face is very familiar it’s difficult to find information on her. She’s appeared in only seven films, all but one of which were uncredited. It’s odd she was uncredited in The Big Sleep because she had as much screen time and dialog as Carmen.

Mystery Solved!

In 2016 Ms. Alice Griffin very kindly contacted me to provide a link to an article with an interview with Sonia Darrin explaining why she didn’t receive screen credits. After filming but before the first release, Ms. Darrin’s agent got into a violent argument with studio head Jack Warner. As a consequence, Mr. Warner declared he would never hire anyone connected with the agent and had Ms. Darrin’s name stricken from the screen credits. He might have gone as far as cutting her from the movie altogether, but her scenes were too important to do so. Ms. Darrin’s career never took off after that and she moved to New York, where she was successful as a top model. I’d like to express my profound appreciation to Alice Griffin for resolving this mystery. (Thanks, Alice!)