Thrilling Tales of Modern Men

 Thrilling Tales of Modern Men

By Danny McBride

This was a Father's Day gift from Erin. It's a collection of short stories by Danny McBride, the guy behind
Eastbound and Down and the Righteous Gemstones. He's hilarious in a very specific way. And these short stories are the same.

Trees

 Trees

By Percival Everett

Another Anthony Jeselnick book club recommendation. I didn't know it, but I'd read the author before: he

penned James.

This book also deals with racial justice. It takes place in Mississippi, where the descendants of those who killed Emmett Till wind up dead. Just like Till, they are wrapped in barbed wire and mutilated beyond recognition. Strangely, there is a black man at each murder scene. And each time, the man is holding the severed testicles of the "victim." In quotes here because all of them are not just the descendants of racists, but racists themselves. 

Which is strange enough. But even stranger is that the black man -- a witness? a participant -- keeps disappearing from the morgue in which he is placed. Since the local yokels can't solve the crime, two black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive. Followed by a a certified member of the FBI. 

Behind the murders is a local group. Soon, though, they spread. And soon, there are murders happening all across the country. The murders aren't ever really solved, but it appears as though they are the result of a mob of lynching victims who have somehow risen from the dead to exact retribution, even at the highest levels of power.

If it sounds absurd -- it is. Somehow, Everett manages to make a book about the legacy of lynching humorous. It worked well enough that I've picked up another of his novels.

Station Eleven

 Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel

I choose this one after reading, and very much enjoying, The Glass Hotel. This is the better known of
Mandel's books. It was a finalist for the National Book Award when it came out in 2014. 

The Glass Hotel was largely inspired by Bernie Madoff's well-publicized and far-reaching Ponzi scheme. I had assumed this book, in which a flu pandemic wipes out most of the earth's population, was also taken from headlines. I was, in fact, about to write that it seemed like one of the few books to meaningfully take on what might have happened in the wake of Covid-19. But in my brief research about the book, I learned that it came out well before the real-life pandemic. Which makes it eerily prescient.

The central scene in the book, to which the plot keeps returning, is a performance of King Lear in Toronto in which the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, suffers a fatal heart attack. In retrospect, it is a symbol/metaphor for what is to come. The play itself is about the breakdown of society. Leander, the most famous actor of his time, perhaps represents a sort of king figure. After three marriages, he, like Lear, is beset by internal anguish and moral blindness, and his downfall foretells the crumbling of the world order. For on the night of Arthur's death, the Georgia Flu, so named because it originated in Russia and Georgia, is discovered to have traveled widely. It is a fast acting and fatal disease. Within days, most of the world's human population is dead. With them goes the hallmarks of modern society: electricity, cars, planes, phones. The world is plunged into the dark ages.

The book follows Arthur's circle in both the lead up to and aftermath of these events. One of the main characters, Kirsten, was a child actor in the production of Lear. Within a few years, she joins a troupe of actors and musicians, known as the Symphony, who travels the area between the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare. Another is Jeevan Chaudry, a paparazzi turned celebrity journalist turned EMT; on the night of Arthur's death, he jumps on stage in an attempt to resuscitate him. Clark is Arthur's best friend from his formative years in a Toronto acting school. The Prophet, known as Tyler in the pre-pandemic years, is Arthur's son, who takes to traveling the countryside with his own band, claiming to be the light and using it as a justification for taking whatever he wants from whomever he wants. And Miranda, who does not survive the flu, is Arthur's first wife -- and, perhaps most importantly, the author of the eponymous comic book from which the book takes its title.

The novel converges at an airport outside of a once-small city in Michigan. It was there that Clark was unceremoniously dropped off in the first days of the pandemic, and he and his fellow travelers use it as a base to build a small community. It is a safe place. In a former lounge, he creates a museum to human's past civilization. In it, he places cell phones, newspaper clippings, and the like. When Kirsten arrives, she adds to it a copy of Station Eleven before heading off with the acting troupe once more.

A key theme of the book, written as a tattoo on Kirsten's arm, is a quotation from a Star Trek episode: Survival is not sufficient. The book explored the meaning of art and its role in keeping people truly alive, even in the wake of immense destruction. At one point, there is a debate about whether to pass on pre-pandemic culture. Isn't it just upsetting to know of what once was? The book seems to indicate that it isn't, that it in fact sustains us. 

The book ends on an optimistic note. Somehow, in the land to the south of Clark's airport, a town has found the means to light electric lamps. How? What does it mean for humanity? Kirsten sets out to explore.

What a wonderful book. I tore my way through it. I would like to explore more of Mandel's work.

The Glass Hotel

 The Glass Hotel

By Emily St. John Mandel

Another one of Anthony Jeselnik's book club picks. I am glad I picked it up.

The story ostensibly focuses on a brother and a sister: Paul and Vincent. At the outset, Paul is an addict and Vincent is a young women whose life has been sent off the rails a bit after the death of her mother in a small island town in British Colombia. 

After years apart, they find themselves working at the same hotel on their home island when a strange incident occurs. Someone has used an acid marker -- I do not know what this is -- to etch the words "Why don't you eat broken glass?" into one of the hotel's windows. It is a strange, unsettling message, one that stirs the managers of the hotel, which is for 1%ers, into a frenzy. Paul is blamed. He puts up no fight, but we, the reader, still don't quite know the truth about the incident until much later in the book.

Meanwhile, Vincent also soon leaves the hotel. But she leaves not in disgrace but on the arms of its owner, the Uber wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis. There is something shady about Alkaitis, but Vincent nevertheless dives into the world of money. She revels for a few years until that shadow comes out of hiding. Alkaitis was, as was a bit obvious to the reader, running a Ponzi scheme and had been for decades. It was only during a financial downturn, which caused some investors to pull their money, that it became untenable. 

Lives are, of course, ruined. In prison, Alkaitis begins to see the ghosts of his former investors, often on the day that they die. Vincent, meanwhile, takes to the sea and becomes a cook. Until one night, she disappears in stormy weather. Was her penchant for videoing 5-minute snippets of film to blame? Or was she pushed by an angry lover? We never really find out. 

The book was nothing short of mesmerizing, and I didn't do it justice here. I initially thought that the Alkaitis character, who pretty clearly resembled Bernie Madoff, would be a bit part, and was surprised when he became a central character. But I guess that's probably how his investors felt, too. He came from nowhere and soon became a key fixture in their lives, and remained so even after the money was gone. I so enjoyed this book that I picked up another one by Mandel called Station Eleven, which is better known. So far so good.

Crossroads

 Crossroads

By Jonathan Franzen

This one sat on my shelf for several years. Dad gave it to me one year for Valentine's Day and, knowing
what I know about Franzen, I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. For some reason, I decided to dig in this September.

Why is it called Crossroads? Because every character is at, wait for it, a crossroads in their life. Add to that fact that the patriarch of the family, Russ, is an associate minister at a Chicago-area church, and you get another layer. And then there is the fact that the youth program at the church is called, wait for it again, crossroads. It's a bit heavy handed.

I am writing this about three weeks after finishing the book, and I really don't feel like going into too much detail. How could I? The book is almost 600 pages! It alternates points of view. We hear from Russ, his drug-dealing son, his wife, another son, and a daughter. They're all pretty messed up. My favorite is the eldest son, whose name I don't recall at the moment. He's so self-righteous that he gives up his student deferment by dropping out of college and notifying the draft board of his decision. Thing is, the war is over. There isn't a draft anymore. And so the gesture, meant to be a kind of fuck-you to his father, who he deems irredeemable hypocrite, is, essentially, meaningless.

So it goes with the rest of them.

Russ' wife is perhaps the least believable characters. She was the daughter of privilege until the stock market crash in the 20s, which prompted her manic-depressive father to suicide. Farmed out to her uncle for raising, she, too, develops a mental illness. It manifests as an obsession with a married man, which leads to a need for an abortion, the need for which results in a stint of prostitution, which is followed by an institutionalization. She keeps it all secret, though, for some 30 years. Which seems a bit far-fetched.

The premise of the book and it's plot, I must say, are a bit ridiculous and unbelievable. And yet I made it almost 600 pages. How? There is something mesmerizing about Franzen's writing and his ability to get you inside the head of his characters that keeps you reading. I didn't love the book. But I certainly don't regret reading it.

Savages

 Savages

By Don Winslow

Another Anthony Jeselnik recommendation. It was very different from the rest of his list. As one Reddit

reviewer wrote: It was one star and five stars simultaneously.

Why one star? Because so much of it seemed pretty god-awful. The main characters are one dimensional and don't really evolve or change through the novel. And the premise is ridiculous: A couple of California weed growers try to take on a Mexican cartel and (kind of) succeed. It's set in Orange County. One of the main characters, O (for Ophelia) is a sex-crazed stoner with unlimited funds and appetites. She is best friends-with-benefits of Chon, an ex-Seal who did several stints in Afghanistan, and Ben, the genius grower. They were happily making millions off their product when the cartel decides it wants to take some. The author also makes some weird stylistic choices, like every now and again moving into movie-script mode, changing "chapters" every page or so, using line breaks like a poet, and trying a bit too hard to make the book seem "hard boiled".

Why Five? Because I couldn't put it down. I ripped through it. The pacing and action is pretty much non-stop. I've read online that maybe some of his other books are better; perhaps I'll check out another one when I need something engrossing and quick. 

Something We Said

 Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me

By Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

I first heard the author, who is Richard Pryor's daughter, on Fresh Air. I am glad I picked up the book.

First of all: Being Richard Pryor's daughter sounds like it was a pretty wild experience. I am somewhat familiar with Pryor's work, mainly through his collaborations with Mel Brooks, but knew very little about him outside of that. He was a complicated figure to say the least. He was raised in a Chicago-area brothel. It was a violent, traumatic upbringing that seems pretty clearly connected to some of his "hang ups", as he described them, later in life. The first was his relationship to women. He was never with one very long, and fathered children by lots of them. To his credit, he seemed willing to maintain relationships with the mothers of his children, but infidelity and conflict were constants in his love life. The second, of course, was drugs. Cocaine and alcohol were a big part of his life until the infamous night that he lit himself on fire -- whether intentionally or as a result of a free-basing accident I still don't know -- and, in the painful aftermath, went sober.

All of this turmoil makes you wonder how he was able to maintain enough time and energy for his pretty significant creative output.

But that's not what this book is about. It's about the author's complicated relationship to her father and, to a lesser extent her mother, particularly in light of his pioneering use of what we now can call the N-word. Using it -- the full IT -- was a mainstay of his comedy; it was part of what made him groundbreaking and edgy. During the first part of his career, Pryor's use of it was a kind of re-appropriation, a way to harness the power of the word and use it as a way to fight against racism rather than gird it up. That changed, though, after a trip to Africa, where he realized that, despite being surrounded by black people, the N-word was absent. He disavowed it, explaining that using it, even in the context of re-appropriation, still somehow reinforced America's peculiar racial hierarchy.

Liz, as she is known, traces not only her father's use of the word, but her very personal experience with it. She switches between vignettes about her childhood, her first days teaching at Smith College, and the historical progression of the word and its meaning. All of it is powerful. She does a great job of highlighting what are, now, shameful moments and explaining what she learned and how she grew from them. As a teacher, I was particularly struck by her initial reaction to and subsequent reflection on the first time she heard a student -- and a white student at that -- use it in her classroom; it was a quotation from Richard Pryor's role in Blazing Saddles. In the moment, she basically did nothing. But it set her on a path of figuring out how to do better. I am not black, have never been called the N-word -- but I still can identify with this.

I was also fascinated by the historical "Interludes". I learned a lot about the N-word -- such as the fact that the "N-word" as a way to refer to it became popular as a result of the prosecutor's use of it during the OJ Simpson trial. Huh?! And that there is a historical record of black people re-appropriating the word as far back as the 1800s. I'm hoping to use some of these in my class next year. 

Anyway -- a great, thought-provoking read.