Jack Pendarvis is One of Those Guys

I just can't hang. I don't know what happened to me. I want to say that when I was 23 I could tolerate or even enjoy these books organized on the principle of "what the hell." These novels that challenge what it means to be a novel, characters who defy the idea of a character, whose authors seem to make decisions because they're the ones holding the pen, and tee-hee who's going to stop them?

I know I dated guys who wrote books like this when I was in my 20s. But I also remember putting down The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a child, and only part of the reason was because I thought the sacrilege would send me to hell. I have a feeling that if the narrative truly compelled me, I would have dared to face the consequences.

The first book I read by Jack Pendarvis was Your Body is Changing, a collection of short stories. At first, I was really digging it. Yes, it tended a little toward the type of story collection that holds up one character after another saying, "Look at this idiot! Okay, now look at this idiot! Isn't he a tool? Now check out this guy -- what a tool!" But it was really imaginative and interesting. I particularly liked the story "Outsiders" about a woman who announces constantly that she's really someone who will "call you on your shit." Then I got to the title story, about an adolescent zealot who comes into age and cynicism in various har-har ways. And I started to wonder, is Jack Pendarvis one of those guys? One of those guys who produces desultory idylls revolving around randomness, irony, and a wry, intellectual detachment? One of those McSweeney's type guys? When the main character set off on a cross country journey in a goat cart, I had to face the truth: Jack Pendarvis is one of those guys.

Then I read his novel, Awesome, which is about a giant and his robot friend. Pendarvis' giant (named "Awesome") is as inaccessible as the prose itself, and unfortunately he tells his own story mixing low and high discourse like it's 1999. I couldn't finish Your Body is Changing, but I will admit I read to the end of Awesome, to see if penises are really like guns. You know the old plotting rule: If you show a gun in Act I, it has to go off in Act III, right? So, if you cut off your penis on a whim in Act I, does it have to return to you when you least expect it, in Act III? Answer: yes. Penises are just like guns in this respect.

Right after I had finished reading Awesome, a friend loaned me The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear. It was through realizing the proximity of the latter to The Hitchhiker's Guide that I realized the proximity of Awesome to this iconic work, and so I have to admit: There may be people out there who will find this book to be gorgeous, revelatory, and profound. I am not one of them. However, I salute MacAdam Cage for publishing it, I salute Pendarvis for writing it, and I'm glad it's out there on the bookshelves, in all its weirdness, in all its belligerent quirkiness, because the world doesn't need another mild romance, and Jack Pendarvis ain't no Nicholas Sparks.

Hamlet 2: Sometimes Even Catherine Keener Cannot Save You

Okay, I didn't like "Dogma" either. It's not that I'm prudish or can't appreciate a good satire, but "Hamlet 2" bored me, literally to sleep. That's the same way I felt about "Dogma," I realize. Bored. Steve Coogan (he was the little tiny Roman guy in "Night at the Museum") plays a failed actor who is now a drama teacher. But, OH NO! The drama program is in trouble. It's going to be eliminated from the school! Just when a bunch more kids have signed up for drama class, as shop and computer classes have also been eliminated!

So what do we do in a movie, if the drama program is in trouble? That's right. We put on a show to save it! Do we all have to pull together, and overcome our differences, and in the process do we all learn a little bit about ourselves?

I don't know, because right at that point I turned to Dan and said, "I didn't know this was going to be a movie about saving the community center." And then I fell asleep. I also didn't know the movie was going to be about children, or rather 26-year-olds pretending to be children. I also didn't know that Catherine Keener was going to be given such slim material to work on, not that she can't work with less, but still. A little brutal.

Good points in the movie: Elizabeth Shue plays herself, having given up Hollywood to become a nurse. Catherine Keener counts as a good point. She is always hilarious and perfect. Steve Coogan manages to be likeable in spite of the overwrought situation.

To me, it played like a Monty Python skit writ American and writ about a hundred times too long. Coogan definitely seemed to be channeling Terry Gilliam at times, but the character couldn't bear the weight of the entire movie. But then, I didn't watch the whole thing. Maybe I'm letting my bias against movies in which the community center must be saved hold me back from watching a great comedy. What do you think. Should I watch the rest of it?

Wait by Frank Turner Hollon

This is not a review. It's a reaction. There are spoilers. If you want a review, here it is: Wait is a worthwhile novel from an interesting mind, that will make you think about your soul, and the state of it, and the reasons why your soul may be in that state. It will make you look around your life with a new, healthy suspicion, and try to imagine your spouse with a gun in his hand, standing there blankly, ready to pull the trigger. So there's your review. Go get the book, and read it, and come back here and talk to me about it.

Frank Turner Hollon has written the life story of Early Winwood, a guy you might pass on the street without noticing, a character you might not think was worthy of having a novel written about him. A regular guy. The difference between Early and most regular guys is that right in the middle of the book, after living through a few dozen unremarkable years, Early does something very remarkable: he kills a man. Then, later, he kills another one.

This book is telling me one of two things. No, there are no other interpretations:

1. The narrator is unreliable. The book is psychological study that takes us deep under cover in the mind of a murderer, to show us how he, twisted and inhuman as he is, sees himself as normal, fitting snugly into the fabric of society. I have two bits of evidence for this interpretation. First, the ambiguity of his relationship to Kate Shepherd, and the fact that this drug user turned model citizen at one point tells the court he is a kidnapper and a stalker. The second is the way the murders really fail to haunt the guy, at least fail to haunt him to the extent that a murder would haunt me. Or maybe a murder wouldn't really haunt me that much, which brings me to possibility #2.

2. Early is a murderer, and Early is an average guy. Both. One does not preclude the other. Murder is closer to you than you think it is, reader, and only a thin hair of opportunity and impetus stands between you and the act itself. Looking back on the book, this explanation seems more elegant. It is as if the whole plot of this man's life was constructed to be a doughy, bland container for that one act of violence, so that the blandness leaks into the violence, and makes it ordinary, all part of the whole.

I don't know which one is the correct reading but I hope it's two. It's not that I agree with him, in fact I don't like the idea that we're all base, we're all murderers, we're all that low, as vile as the least of us is vile. I don't agree. But I think that makes the more perfect novel, and I've never read a book constructed like this, with so much fire-retardant wadding packed around a fuel cell on fire.

The book fails me in a couple of ways -- the second "murder" doesn't seem to fit either of my explanations, and it blurs the lines of what's a reasonable excuse to commit the crime. I was disappointed also a little bit in the lesser characters, in Early's fake son and fake daughter. I never knew what lens I was seeing them through, and Early's take on it seemed more suspect when he was describing these relationships than it did when he was talking about Kate.

Ultimately, a very interesting book and a book that worked my brain. I will have to try another by this author.

Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott

There are two fine lines that Abbott had to navigate when writing Sin in the Second City, a historical account of the Everleigh Club, the fanciest and most infamous brothel in Chicago at the turn of the century.

The first line is between two moral positions.

Abbott has two heroines here: Minna and Ada Everleigh, the jewel-encrusted madams who elevated their little corner of the vice district beyond the dirty dance hall and onto a level of elegance and sophistication that attracted millionaire visitors and international attention. Minna and Ada are characters that the author clearly loves. As we follow their story from a mysterious lowly past to their glorious position as quiet, powerful queens of vice in a vicious city, we are invited to fall in love with them as well. There are pimps and madams that we can scorn, lesser characters who live down the street from the Everleighs, who run shitty dives and beat their girls, drug their customers and stick to their own floors. But the Everleighs are a different breed: smart, ethical, pure.

If the Everleighs are the heroes, then the villains must be the reformers, the demonstrators and politicians who were trying to eliminate the vice district and "save" the girls who had "fallen" there as prostitutes. Among the characters on this team are pastors and evangelists, pious ladies, and also city officials trying to look good and crack down on crime. The problem with villainizing this side of the fight is that they actually did have a point. The danger with making a madam your hero is that there actually was a lot of horrifying stuff going on in these houses, stuff you don't want to cheer for, and can't fall in love with.

So, as a writer, do you position yourself with the madams, and giggle and titter your way through the book, pretending it's all so naughty and wry, and those stuffy old reformers are just party poopers? Or do you position yourself with the reformers, and spend the book pushing out that really new and interesting concept that prostitution is bad? Maybe there's a third solution, to just report what happened, be historically accurate, and educate us all so we can make... oh, wait, I just fell asleep while suggesting that as an option. So, none of those are books that I would want to read.

Fortunately, Abbott is smart. Very smart. And her smart book can present all these possibilities simultaneously. This is not an expose of the horrors of segregated vice in turn of the century Chicago. Nor is this a blushing homage to all those fabulous madams and the sexual excesses of the times. No one is exempt from criticism here. Abbott tells the stories of those vainglorious preachers and the hypocritical politicians, but also shines an unforgiving fluorescent light into the depths of vice: the strip-and-whip fights where girls lashed each other bloody for an audience, the girl's palm rotting from syphilis while still performing its handjob, the lies, the greed, the corruption, and all of it.

No one is exempt, that is, except the Everleighs themselves. In understanding this, I began to understand where the moral compass of the book truly points. I believe that Abbott would say that the sins of the vice district were black enough -- the sins of the white slavers and the opium dealers and the lower madams operating their 50 cent dives. The Everleighs, however, weren't doing anything very wrong, and in shutting down their clean, sophisticated, elegant club, where the men were treated fairly and the girls lined up to get a job, where the health and well being of the harlots was a priority and the customers were treated like customers, not sinners, the authorities threw the baby out with the bathwater. That is, I think, the way the book gets out of its predicament.

This moral subtlety allows the book to transcend that "choice" between the whores and the reformers, and allows the story of the characters to flourish without the weight of a judgment or the tension of the absence of judgment.

The second line that Abbott dances down is a literary one. She is, of course, telling the true story of actual people, and the research that went into this book is amazing. One look at the bibliography and your jaw will drop. However, there are things that cannot be known from research. The biographer's job is to tell the story in an engaging way that will live on the page, without embellishing the facts too much, to navigate between too strict a focus on reality and too fanciful an elaboration. Abbott accomplishes this brilliantly. Everything in quotation marks, in the book, was actually said by the real Everleighs, or other characters, and recorded in court documents, journals, or letters. But Abbott's story goes beyond the bare facts and delivers a prose that reads like fiction. None of the "we can't possibly know" or "it's unclear" but loads of vibrant descriptions, delightful details, and a narrative sense that really brings the landscape of the levee to life.

Sin in the Second City exploded my expectations. You know I loves me some violated dichotomies, yo. By defying the obvious choices, and creating her own rules, Abbott pays the Everleigh sisters great honor by putting them in the context they deserve.

Shopgirl and Broken English: What is Wrong with these Movies?

What is up with you, Ms. Zoe Cassevetes? What is going on, Mr. Steve Martin? There are actually six movies here, each of these stories being broken down into three different mismatching parts, so variant that they're almost in disagreement with each other.

"Broken English" is not a movie in three acts, it's a movie in three movies. In the first movie, Parker Posey stars as a drunk, irritated single girl in her thirties who's striking out in love. She dates a gay guy. She dates a guy who is hung up on his ex. She dates a famous guy who has another girlfriend. She dates a marmoset. It's wacky, it's dry, and everyone is walking around with a cocktail having good lines. I am all over it. Whee!

Then Parker Posey meets Julian, this French guy in a straw hat who is wearing a linen or, wait, was it seersucker blazer over a grey v-neck t-shirt. I don't even want to talk about his shoes or his scrawny bullet head. We are comfortably assuming that he's going to be another awful lesson in what not to date, when we realize, wait, we are supposed to be loving him. This is when movie #2 begins, which is about their very serious and interesting and important romance, except that I never buy they are in love, because of his bobbly head and her constant drunkenness. Movie #2 goes on way too long. They take a bath together. He keeps kissing her on the forehead. I get fidgety. All the shots are very close and making me regret our HDTV. Parker Posey has a panic attack over a plate of cannolis and I know what she's going through.

Fortunately, movie #3 is about to begin. Suddenly, Julian McFrencherton is leaving for Paris immediately and after he shakes off the unflattering Parker Posey hanging on his abdomen, he goes. He leaves her a number to reach her in Paris. Now the camera backs up to a comfortable distance and the movie becomes a Lifetime TV Drama about how Parker Posey must now go off to Paris and find him. Except drat! She loses his number. Most of movie #3 is about Parker Posey and her totally best superfriend, who looks like what Portia de Rossi would have looked like if she had turned to drastic cosmetic surgery to make her look the way she looks, trip around Paris. It is neither picturesque nor droll. It is kind of desperate. Skintight Portia de Rossi leaves, Parker Posey stays, and there are scenes on public transportation where the Eiffel tower is seen going by.

She finds him. They have a conversation in a deli. The end. What do all three of these movies have in common? In all of them, I love Parker Posey, but I hate what she's doing to me.

Now, on to Shopgirl I, II, and III.

In Shopgirl I, Claire Danes is a moist, long-eared gazelle who works at Saks and has trouble finding a boyfriend. She briefly dates Steve Carrell, played by Jason Schwartzman, but he's so flaky. It is from this movie that most of the trailer is harvested, making us think the movie is a comedy. There is a funny bit with the cat.

In Shopgirl II, Claire Danes is a pensive gazelle who works at Saks and has a weird, tense relationship with a rich and taciturn Steve Martin, who gets to kiss her, fondle her, and pretend to have sex with her. At one point, she stops taking her anti-depressants and has some kind of awful breakdown. Awkward for them, awkward for us. But at least, during that scene, she had a facial expression.

In Shopgirl III, Claire Danes is an emotionally matured gazelle who realizes that Steve Martin is never going to love her properly, so goes back to Steve Carrell, played by Jason Schwartzman. He has fortunately spent the second movie on tour with a band listening to self help tapes, and now knows how to comb his hair and wear white suits. She becomes a famous artist and is happy with her dopey boyfriend, although she still secretly deeply tragically hopelesly pines for the immortal pleasures of Steve Martin and his old richness.

What do these three movies have in common? Claire Danes' hair is never mussed. Steve Martin's voice is never raised. And Steve Carrell looks even hairier than he normally does.

I understand a three act structure, I really do. But if I go to the bathroom watching "Singles" I don't want to come back to "Remains of the Day."