The Nix - Nathan Hill

     2016; 625 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Dark Comedy; Family Secrets.  Laurels: 2016 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction – Los Angeles Times Book Prize (winner), NBCC Leonard Award for Best Debut of the Year (nominated).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    It’s 2011, and Samuel Anderson is doing pretty good in life.  He’s an assistant professor of English at the Illinois university called “Chicago Circle”, striving to impart a spark of excitement for classic literature in college students whose interest is generally limited to doing just enough to pass his course for their Humanities credit.

 

    Since he's a nerdy English teacher, it’s not surprising that Samuel’s favorite pastime is playing an internet roleplaying game called Elfscape for hours on end.  He’s gotten pretty good at it, although the real pro is one of his fellow gamers known as “Pwnage”.  Samuel mostly plays the game at home during evening hours, although he occasionally sneaks online to play it on his university computer if no one is looking.

 

    Samuel is also an aspiring author, and was talented enough to receive a significant cash advance from a publishing company after winning a high school writing contest some years back.  Alas, his publishers are getting impatient, having waited several years now for him to write a bestselling debut novel for them.  But perhaps Samuel’s writer’s block is due to a dark secret he’s been carrying for years.

 

   Long ago, his mother deserted him and his father.  No warning, no reason given.  She packed her bags, kissed young Samuel on the forehead, split the scene in the middle of the night, and never returned.  Where could she be?

 

    Samuel’s about to get an answer to that.  Some crazy lady’s just been arrested for assaulting a presidential candidate after throwing rocks at him in a Chicago public park.  Yes, it might be a coincidence - someone with the same name as Samuel’s mom.  But let’s be real here, how many other people can there be named Faye Andresen-Anderson?

 

What’s To Like...

   The main storyline in The Nix follows the efforts made by Samuel to learn why his mom ran off years ago, but there are long detours into the lives of several secondary characters, namely Bishop, Bethany, Samuel’s grandfather Frank/Fridtjof, Alice, and Pwnage.  The book is divided into ten parts, with varying numbers of chapters in each of those (89 chapters total), and with the time settings bouncing around between 2011 (the book’s present-day), 1988, and 1968.  Samuel meets his mom in Part 3, but that conversation mostly generates more questions instead of answering some things.

 

    I’d describe the writing style as “Proustian” – long, run-on sentences abound that are surprisingly easy to follow (unlike Proust’s), but nevertheless make for slow reading.  Indeed, in one chapter (Part 8.3) with only two sentences: the first one is eight words long; the second one spreads out over ten pages or so. Kerouac would be jealous.

 

    The mammoth sentence is just one a number of literary capers that Nathan Hill uses.  Other examples: a.) chronicling the thoughts going on in the head of a person suffering from Alzheimer's; b.) discussing the four types of problems and/or people (see below); c.) detailing the sixteen ways to defend yourself if you're caught by your professor plagiarizing an essay for a homework assignment; and d.) simulating a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for Samuel, leaving the reader to guess its last choice.

 

    If this all sounds confusingly complex, fear not: despite The Nix being Nathan Hill’s debut novel, the writing is masterly.  I suspect the 1968 protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, which figure prominently into the storyline, are before his time, although he seems to want to keep his age a secret – neither Wikipedia nor Amazon lists it.  Yet that was during my college years, and I felt he captured the mood perfectly.  Ditto for his descriptions of things like college dormitory living, the “free love” era in the late 60s, and the grittiness of going on patrol during the occupation of Iraq.

 

    I also loved the way Nathan Hill works an incredible amount of trivia into the story.  There are a slew of Book, Music, and Video Game references, including Allen Ginsburg (who is also a character in the book), Basho, Phil Ochs, Sun Ra, Max Bruch (who?), Mega Man, and Missile Command.  The “Chucky the Camel and the Campbell’s soup can” incident is both surreal and enlightening.  Things like the drowning stone, the “maarr”, TMJ, Max Bruch, and the pronunciation of “Pwnage” were new to me.  I liked that things like solfege, sulfides, and synesthesia got mentioned, and I suspect that things such as Molly Miller, the iFeel social app, and the “Pleisto Diet” are all products of the author's fertile imagination.

 

    The ending is twisty, eye-opening, and heartwarming.  Samuel’s life has definitely changed, hopefully for the better.  Things stop a t a logical point, but very few plot threads are tied up.  That doesn't surprise or disappoint me – if you’re telling a story of a family, it is more realistic to end with “they continued on” than “they all lived happily ever after”.  What did impress me was Nathan Hill’s ability to tie all the plot threads together into a coherent conclusion.  The life stories of Pwnage, Laura, Faye, Samuel, Frank, and Bethany all merge together seamlessly.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Prognathic (adj.) : having jaws or mouth parts that project forward to a marked degree.

Others: Concomitant (adj);  Panopticon (n); Pullulation (n); TMJ (acronym).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 1,391 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.07/5 based on 60,804 ratings and 7,580 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “You can’t fail me because it’s the law.”

    “This meeting is over.”

    “You can’t fail me because I have a learning disability.”

    “You do not have a learning disability.”

    “I do.  I have trouble paying attention and keeping deadlines and reading and also I don’t make friends.”

    “That’s not true.”

    “It is true.  You can check.  It’s documented.”

    “What is the name of your learning disability?”

    “They don’t have a name for it yet.”

    “That’s convenient.”  (loc. 881)

 

    They wondered how many people would be showing up for the protest.  Five thousand?  Ten thousand?  Fifty thousand?  He told them a story.

    “Two men went into a garden,” he said.  “The first man began to count the mango trees, and how many mangoes each tree bore, and what the approximate value of the whole orchard might be.  The second man plucked some fruit and ate it.  Now which, do you think, was the wiser of these two?”

    The kids all looked at him, eyes as blank as lambs.

    “Eat mangoes!” he said.  (loc. 7512)

 

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, The Nix sells for $12.99 at Amazon.  I felt very fortunate to find it when it was temporarily on discount a couple months ago.  This appears to be Nathan Hill’s only novel to date, which surprises me in light of The Nix’s phenomenal reception back in 2016.

 

“Any problem in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap.  That’s it.  Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.” (loc. 3382)

    The quibbles are minor.  The reason for the book’s title eludes me.  A “nix” is a gnomish fairy-tale creature, and its presence in the story is tenuous at best.  There’s a “Discussion Questions” section in the back of the book, and is first one is “why the title”?  If I was in Samuel’s “Intro to Lit” class, I'm afraid I'd flunk that essay question.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing, and some references to sexual abuse and explicit sexual practices.  I thought it fit in nicely with the mood of the story, but prudes may disagree.  The main plotline, as mentioned, is Samuel’s family investigations, but there were times, such as when we’re riding along with his friend Bishop on patrol in Iraq, when I wondered just where the story was going.

 

    Finally, on an editing note, there seemed to be an equal split between the spellings of protesters/protestors.  Either is correct (English is a goofy language), but you’d think Nathan Hill would’ve chosen one way or the other, not both.  Admittedly, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when I’m griping about this sort of thing.

 

    9 Stars.  A great book which lived up to the hype I'd heard about it, and highly recommended.  I’d been wanting to read The Nix for quite some time, but my local libraries never had any copies in stock.  So it was a treat to find it discounted recently at Amazon.

I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron

   2006; 137 pages.  Full Title: I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Essays; Humorous American Literature.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Besides being a noted journalist and filmmaker, Nora Ephron (b.: 05/19/1942 – d.: 06/26/2012) was a prolific writer of screenplays (many with her sister, Delia Ephron), essays, drama, and one novel, Heartburn.

 

    Her most famous screenplays are probably Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You’ve Got Mail (1998), and in addition to screenwriting, she also directed those last two movies.

 

    Being an “essayist” usually means writing articles that appear in magazines and newspapers.  Eleven of the essays in I Feel Bad About My Neck are listed as having previously appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, O At Home, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue.

 

    I Feel Bad About My Neck made it all the way to #1 on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List on September 10, 2006.  In 2019, it was included as #100 in The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books in the 21^st Century.

 

What’s To Like...

    I Feel Bad About My Neck consists of 15 essays of varying lengths, ranging from 3 to 20 pages.  Each is well-written and with a lot of dry humor.  I’d describe the writing style as what you’d get if you picked up “next door neighbor-ish” Erma Bombeck and set her down in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.  The circumstances may be different, Nora was decidedly financially more affluent, but both authors had the talent to blend keen female insight about daily life with an abundance of folksy wit.

 

    My favorite essays from the book were:

    04 : On Maitenance

        All about mani-pedis are other beauty treatments.

    07 : Moving On

        Living in an upscale apartment in NYC.

    12 : The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu

        Marcel Proust meets Cabbage Strudel.

   13 : On Rapture

        The bliss of reading a good book.

    15 : Considering the Alternative

        Thoughts about one's mortality.

 

    I found that last essay especially poignant.  Yes, it’s lighthearted, but it is also Nora Ephron telling you about the reality of being an “elderly person”.  It seems a fitting close to these essays, and it left a lump in my throat.  The second excerpt below gives you a taste of her musings.

 

    The book also has an informative slant.  The term “mouse potato” was new to me; and unsurprisingly, I'd never heard of “Kelly bags”.  One of Nora Ephron first jobs was as an intern in the JFK White House, and it was enlightening to get an “inside peek” at what that job entailed.  On a lighter note, I learned what birth control pills and Julia Child’s first cookbook have in common.

 

    There’s a bit of French thrown into the text, with both a nod to Edith Piaf and the phrase “Le sac, c’est moi.”.  Nora Ephron was a bookaholic (“I need a book to keep me company”), and I always enjoy learning what books impressed other bibliophiles.  Here, the author loved Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (so did I!), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (haven’t read it, but looks good!), and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (well, two out of three ain’t bad).

 

Excerpts...

    According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that’s that.  You can put makeup on your face and concealer under your eyes and dye on your hair, you can shoot collagen and Botox and Restylane into your wrinkles and creases, but short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck.  The neck is a dead giveaway.  Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.  (pg. 5)

 

    She said, “You know what drives me nuts?  Why do women our age say, ‘In my day…’?  This is our day.”

    But it isn’t our day.  We can’t wear tank tops, we have no idea who 50 Cent is, and we don’t know how to use almost any of the functions on our cell phones.  If we hit the wrong button on the remote control and the television screen turns to snow, we have no idea how to get the television set back to where it was in the first place.  This is the true nightmare of the empty nest: Your children are gone, and they were the only people in the house who knew how to use the remote control.  (pg. 129)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.3/5 based on 1,565 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.71/5 based on 49,392 ratings and 5,748 reviews.

 

My first husband is a perfectly nice person, although he’s pathologically attached to his cats.  (pg. 104 )

    I Feel Bad About My Neck is a quick and easy read, an ideal option if you have a book report due tomorrow and haven’t even opened a book yet.  Ironically. that’s probably my main gripe – at 137 pages, it’s simply too short.  Even Erma Bombeck’s books usually run 200-250 pages.

 

    The language is just short of squeaky clean.  I only noted two cuss words, and if you’re looking for “tell-all” bits of the author's personal life (she was married three times), you’ll be disappointed, although she's not above shooting a spousal zinger now and then.

 

    Finally, it should be noted that, as the book’s subtitle points out, I am not the target audience.  This is a woman, writing about being a woman, and hoping it resonates with other women.

 

    Nevertheless, I was entertained from page 1 through page 137, and it’s always a pleasure to come across a talented author that I hadn't gotten around to reading before.  I was unaware that Nora Ephron only ever wrote one novel, but if I come across any more of her “essay” collections at the used-book store, I will undoubtedly pick them up.

 

    8½ Stars.  I have one Erma Bombeck book, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, collecting dust on my Kindle.  It's been a while since I read anything by her, so maybe it's time to get reacquainted with her essays.

Grunt - Mary Roach

   2016; 272 pages.  Full Title: Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Military History; Scientific Research; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    There are all sorts of ways to get killed or horribly disabled while serving in the US Armed Forces.  The most obvious are the direct ones: the enemy can shoot you,  stab you, or blow you up with bombs which he can either drop on you, detonate under your vehicle, or launch at you from the side.

 

    The indirect ways are often the more lethal ones.  Horrible wounds such as loss of limbs leave the victim prone to infection and a long-term struggle to live a normal life.  And this assumes the medic who’s treating you on the battlefield remains level-headed and professional while giving you emergency first aid.

 

    Mother Nature can also be a killer.  Fighting in the desert heat affects a soldier’s performance, the loud noises of the machines of war can cause subtle hearing loss leading to lethal mistakes, and flies and diarrhea due to unclean conditions historically claim just as many lives as bombs and bullets.  Even birds, both alone and in groups, crash into Air Force jets thousands of times each year, usually at the most critical times: landing and taking-off.

 

    Serving in the navy has its own risks.  Ships can sink, making survivors floating shark bait.  Any mistake by a sleep-deprived sailor on a submarine can instantly create a death trap for all his shipmates.

 

    What sort of research is the military doing to deal with all this?  That’s what Mary Roach wanted to know, and Grunt details what she found out.

 

What’s To Like...

    Mary Roach divides her research efforts for Grunt into 14 chapters, plus an Introduction, each with a catchy title and subtitle.  A couple of examples:

    Chapter 1 : Second Skin: What to Wear to War

    Chapter 5 : It Could Get Weird: A Salute to Genital Transplants

    Chapter 8 : Leaky Seals: Diarrhea as a Threat to National Security

    Chapter 12 : That Sinking Feeling: When Things Go Wrong Under the Sea

 

    There’s a nice balance in the text between humor and seriousness.  Kevlar underwear made me chuckle, so did blue camouflage uniforms used by the US Navy (“so no one can see you if you fall overboard”).   But hearing from men who have lost limbs or are facing genital reconstruction (or a transplant?) was sobering, such as when a survivor describes what it’s like to step on an IED.

 

    Acronyms abound in the military.  Mary Roach had fun getting used to them, some of which are: BASH, BAM, FRACU, JUON, MRAP, WIAMan, TCAPs, WBGT, HULC, SALSA, JETT, and many more.  FYI, “BASH” stands for “Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard”.  You can learn what the rest mean either by reading the book or enlisting. 

 

    I particularly liked how the Scientific Method was applied in the studies.  How do you accurately evaluate the impact a turkey vulture has on a jet taking off?  How do you determine what attracts sharks to the water around a ship that’s just sunk?  How do you measure which type of clothing will keep you the coolest in the Iraqi desert?  The answer to that last one, BTW, is by using something called a Thermes rectal probe, which the author got to try out firsthand.

 

    Grunt is incredibly informative.  I enjoyed reading about the biochemistry of sweating.  The use of maggots as an anti-infection measure amazed me.  I rolled my eyes when I read the official “US Army Appearance and Grooming Policies”.  And both Mary Roach and I learned that the phrase “going kinetic” is Army-speak for “people are firing guns at you”.

 

     Each chapter begins with an intriguing and usually historical photograph or drawing.  There are lots of footnotes, which are both informative, and at a Terry Pratchett-level of witty.  Do not skip them!

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Sisyphean (adj.) : of a task such that it can never be completed.

Others: Wicks (as a verb).

 

Excerpts...

    The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery plane.  While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill.  On the contrary, the chicken gun was designed to keep people alive.  The carcasses are fired at jets, standing empty or occupied by “simulated crew” to test their ability to withstand what the Air Force and the aviation industry, with signature clipped machismo, call birdstrike.  The chickens are stunt doubles for geese, gulls, ducks, and the rest of the collective bird mass that three thousand or so times a year collide with Air Force jets.  (pg. 13, and the book's opening sentences)

 

    Jack passes me the M16.  “Have you shot a gun like this before?”  I shake my very heavy head.  He hands me a magazine and shows me where to load it.  I’ve seen this in movies – the quick slap with the heel of the hand.

    Hmm.

    “Other way.  So the bullets are facing forward.”  (pg. 67)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 764 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.92/5 based on 17,129 ratings and 2,153 reviews.

 

“If you want to destroy every last bacterium and shred of dead tissue, a maggot is your man.”  (pg. 174)

    Grunt was my third Mary Roach book, and there’s never much to quibble about in any of her books.  If you’re utterly offended by cusswords in what you're reading, be aware that there were 20 or so instances here, most of which were in remarks uttered by servicemen and half of which referenced fecal matter.

 

    Naturally, I found some of the chapters more interesting than others.  Your faves will be different from mine.  The research into making stink bombs to drop on any enemy, anywhere seemed silly to me, and I wondered whether other submarines had the “sleep deprivation” problem to the same degree as Mary Roach observed during her time aboard the USS Tennessee.  There's a teaser about this at the end of this review.

 

    Overall, I found Grunt to be a fascinating read, easily on a par with the other two Mary Roach books I’ve read Bonk and Gulp (reviewed here and here).  Three more of her books are on my TBR shelf, but I do find one thing worrying:  per the Wikipedia page on her it seems like she hasn’t written any more books since Grunt came out in 2016.  I for one would be bummed if she’s discontinued her writing career.

 

    9 Stars.  The promised teaser:  What was the average daily sleep time on a US submarine when it was monitored in 1949?  And what was the average daily sleep time on the USS Tennessee when Mary Roach was doing her research?  Answers in the comments.

Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison

   1966; 285 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Dystopian Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    New York City in the not-so-distant future is a crowded place.  35 million people are crammed together within its city limits.  That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and that's just one of many problems.

 

    There’s not enough food, especially “real” sustenance such as honest-to-goodness meat.  There’s not enough water, and what is available is of suspect purity.  There’s not enough living space either, but where can the homeless go – the rest of the country is in just as bad shape as the Big Apple.  Nobody drives anymore because gasoline is almost impossible to find.  Even paper is rationed because there are very few trees left to chop down.

 

    So unless you’re very, very rich, you survive by the grace of government-issued ration cards.  Alas, they keep cutting the size of the rations you can obtain this way, and the lines to do so keep getting longer and longer.

 

    There’s one other way of surviving if you’re poor: break into the dwellings of the wealthy and steal their stuff.  If it can’t be eaten, it can always be hocked on the black market.

 

    But that carries an inherent risk: if your breaking-and-entering goes awry, the consequences can only be bad.

 

What’s To Like...

    As the book cover shown above correctly claims, Make Room! Make Room! is the basis for the fantastic Charlton Heston film, Soylent Green.  Let’s be clear though, the movie is not a screen adaptation of this book, the storylines are completely different.  True, some of the book’s characters make the leap to the silver screen: Detective Kulozik, Shirl, Tab Fielding, Judge Santini, and Sol, although the latter gets a different last name.  Noticeably absent from the movie are the book’s two main characters, Detective Andy Rusch and Billy Chung.

 

    There are three main plotlines to follow: 1.) who killed Big Mike, 2.) who behind the scenes is pushing for a major investigation into the murder (and why?), and 3.) how’s New York, and the rest of the world for that matter, going to deal with hordes of starving citizens that are resorting to protests?

    This is not a whodunit; the reader knows who the murderer is from the start, and Detective Rusch figures it out fairly early on.  But knowing who did it and locating/arresting him are two different things.

 

    I liked the story’s premise: that the underlying problem is overpopulation due to the use of birth control being outlawed.  I was amused that the “near future” setting was 1999, which is old news to some now, but not when Make Room! Make Room! was first published in 1966.  FYI, the population of NYC today (2018, actually) is a mere 8.3 million or so, not the book's 35 million, so at least part of Harry Harrison's scenario didn't play out.  And curiously, sending telegrams was still a common means of communication in Make Room! Make Room!

 

    It was interesting to learn that the term “Soylent” is a portmanteau of “soy (beans)” and “lentils”, the two main components of it.  At least that’s what “they” want you to believe.  There are soylent burgers and soylent steaks, but of course, they’re a poor substitute for the meat-based counterparts.  I laughed at LSD still being a popular (and illicit) drug.  Billy Chung’s first acid trip shows that Harry Harrison did some good research.  Finally, the whole idea of “meatleggers” was hauntingly intriguing.

 

    The ending is okay, but not great.  There are no twists, nor any happy conclusion.  1999 segues into a new millennium, and the world doesn't come to an end.  That may seem trivial in nowadays, but I recall religious zealots and computer programmers being scared to death that 12/31/99 would usher in Armageddon.  Harry Harrison at least got that part right.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Gonif (n.) : a disreputable or dishonest person

Others: Astrakhan (adj.).

 

Excerpts...

    The man in the black uniform stood in an exaggerated position of attention, but there was the slightest edge of rudeness to his words.  “I’m just a messenger, sir, I was told to go to the nearest police station and deliver the following message.  “There has been some trouble.  Send a detective at once.”

    “Do you people in Chelsea Park think you can give orders to the police department?”  The messenger didn’t answer because they both knew that the answer was yes and it was better left unspoken.  (loc. 820)

 

    “Some of our neighbors can be dangerous.”

    “The guards?”

    “No, they are of no importance.  Their work is a sinecure, and they have no more wish to bother us than we have to bother them.  As long as they do not see us we are not here, so just stay away from them.  You’ll find that they don’t look very hard, they can collect their money without putting themselves in any danger – so why should they?  Sensible men.  Anything worth stealing or removing vanished years ago.  The guards remain only because no one has ever decided what to do with this place and the easiest solution is just to forget about it.”  (loc. 2199)

 

Kindle Details…

    Make Room! Make Room! sells for $7.99 right now at Amazon.  Harry Harrison was a very popular science fiction/fantasy writer for many decades, and there are dozens of his novels available for the Kindle.  Individual e-books range in price from $1.99 to $13.99, and you can also get several “bundles” (typically 10-12 books) for  a mere $0.99 to $1.99.  Also, some of his books are now classified as “public domain”, which means you can download them for free.

 

“Men should be spoiled, it makes them easier to live with.”  (loc. 1930 )

    There are a couple of quibbles.

 

    First, there were an above-average amount of typos for a non-self-published book.  This was my second “Rosetta” book, both of which had this problem, so I suspect Rosetta’s to blame, not the Harry Harrison or the original publisher.

 

    OTOH, it should be noted that two of the three main storylines are not resolved, and that's the author's responsibility.  The book screams for a sequel to answer what becomes of Rusch, Shirl, and the world as a whole.  Alas, AFAIK no “Book 2” was ever written, although one might consider the movie as doing that.

 

    Also, Harry Harrison gets a little “preachy” late in the story when it comes to the idiocy of outlawing birth control.  I happen to agree with his views on this, but the “sermon” still slowed things down.

 

    Finally, while there wasn’t a lot of cussing in the story (only 5 instances in the first 20%),  there were several ethnic slurs in the text that made me cringe a bit.  Yet I have to say, dialogue back in 1966 included a lot more of these slurs than our present-day speech patterns do.

 

    7½ Stars.  I enjoyed Make Room! Make Room!, but I wasn’t blown away by it.  Maybe my letdown is a function of how much I enjoyed Soylent Green.  My main beef is with the ending coupled with a lack of a (written) sequel.  Perhaps one of these days someone will pick up the gauntlet and write one.

Rabbit, Run - John Updike

   1960; 255 pages.  Book 1 (out of 5) in the “Rabbit” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; Americana.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

 

    He’s only 26 years old, and already Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom feels like his life is in a rut.  It wasn’t always this way; just a few short years ago he was the star of his high school basketball team, setting a local scoring record not once, but twice.

 

    But those days are gone, and now he finds himself both a husband and a father.  Lately his wife Janice bores him.  He loves his 2½-year old son, but taking care of a toddler is a lot of stress.  And now Janice is pregnant again, so he’s about relive the joys of raising a newborn.

 

    His job bores him even more.  His career consists of making the rounds to demonstrate a device called a “MagiPeel Peeler”, with which you too can experience the bliss that comes from paring vegetables and fruit.  Yawn.

 

    Harry can feel it, there’s a better life out there somewhere, waiting for him.  He just has to go find it.  But how can he do that, what with a wife, soon-to-be two kids, and a dead-end job tying him down?

 

    Run!  Rabbit, run!

 

What’s To Like...

    Rabbit, Run was published in 1960, is arguably John Updike’s most famous novel, and was such an immediate hit that he developed it into a 5-book series.  This book’s been on my TBR shelf for quite a while; I decided to read it after learning that its fictional setting – the city of Brewer – is patterned after Reading, Pennsylvania, birthplace to both the author and myself.

 

    It was fun to experience life in 1959 America again.  Diners had jukeboxes that cost you a dime per song; smoking in a hospital waiting room was normal; you could fill your car’s gas tank at the local Esso or Amoco station for $3.90; and enjoy the night’s cool breeze by hand-cranking down the car window.  “Gay” in those days meant “merry”, and you could buy a brand new paperback novel for 35 cents.  Indeed, the price printed on the paperback that I read, a 1962 issue, was “60¢”.

 

    Brewer/Reading is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and that means both shoo fly pie and fosnachts get mentioned.  On Rabbit’s first “run”, he takes the very real “Route 222” to get away, and considers going to nearby places such as Pottstown, West Chester, Bird in Hand, Paradise, Mascot, and (my personal favorite) Intercourse, all of which do exist in southeastern Pennsylvania.

 

    Harry of course is the central character, but several secondary ones get a lot of personal attention as well, including his wife, son, high school basketball coach, fallback lover, and an Episcopalian minister.  The book’s theme reminds me of another highbrow novel I read a couple years ago, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (set in the 1920’s and reviewed here).  In both books, the protagonist becomes jaded with living the great American lifestyle, and seeks alternatives.

 

    If you like anti-heroes, Harry’s your guy.  He thinks he’s irresistible to women (and in fairness, sometimes it seems like he is), he flees from his wife and son on the spur of the moment, everything is always somebody else’s fault, and at one point he flirts with the minister’s wife by slapping her on her fanny.  He’s not very likeable, yet there is a certain charismatic optimism about him.

 

    The ending is good, but not great.  Harry hasn’t improved one bit and about all you can say is that he’s now resolved to start thinking about resolving the issues in his life.  I’m guessing that sets up the next book in the series, at least I hope so.

 

Excerpts...

    The door is locked.  In fitting the little key into the lock his hand trembles, pulsing with unusual exertion, and the metal scratches.  But when he opens the door he sees his wife sitting in an armchair with an Old-fashioned, watching television turned down low.

    “You’re here,” he says.  “What’s the door locked for?”

    She looks to one side of him with vague dark eyes reddened by the friction of watching.  “It just locked itself.”  (pg. 10)

 

    “The boy’s taken his truck,” he tells Mrs. Springer.

    “Well let him get it himself,” she says.  “He must learn.  I can’t be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they have been at it like that all afternoon.”

    “Billy.”  The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles’ male voice.  “Give it back.”  Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately.  “Now, please.”  Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.  (pg. 128)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4*/5, based on 413 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.58*/5, based on 52,620 ratings and 3,256 reviews.

 

“It’s a strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”  (pg. 108 )

    I found an unexpected number of nits to pick with Rabbit, Run.

 

    For starters, John Updike’s writing style is both unusual and difficult.  The sentences are often long, descriptive passages abound, chapters are nonexistent, even paragraph breaks are rare, and there are only three dividing spots, coming at pages 7, 114, and 221.  The present tense is deliberately overused for the sake of presenting Harry’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts.  Despite all this, John Updike’s skill at writing makes the reading bearable; lesser writers are not encouraged to emulate him.

 

    None of the plot threads get tied up.  Who will Harry go back to: Janice, Lucy, or Ruth?  Or maybe all the above?  How well will Jack Eccles’ Christian faith hold up through all of this?  Will Marty Tothero recover from his stroke?  Or next time will Rabbit run farther and longer than he’s ever run before?

 

    Again, I’m assuming these things will be dealt with in the subsequent books in the series.  But the fact that there are four more books makes me fear that nothing is going to get resolved very quickly.

 

    5½ Stars.  So why was Rabbit, Run such a mega-hit when it came out in 1960?  I suspect it was due to the fact that it has a bunch of cussing and fairly-explicit sexual situations in it, which was rare for a highbrow novel written towards the end of the Eisenhower era.  Back then there was no such thing as an R-rated movie and the Rolling Stones were forced to change the lyrics of their hit to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  But by the end of the decade the musical Hair would have full frontal nudity and California's Haight-Ashbury area would be celebrating its “Summer of Love”.  The times they were a-changin’.

Pan's Labyrinth - Cornelia Funke & Guillermo del Toro

   2019; 262 pages.  New Authors? : Yes and Yes.  Genres : Dark Fantasy; Historical Fiction (Spanish Civil War); YA; Fairy Tales.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    It should’ve been one of the happiest days in 13-year-old Ofelia’s life.  She and her mother are on their way to meet up with the man who will become Ofelia’s stepfather, Captain Ernesto Vidal.

 

    It’s a dangerous undertaking for her mother, Carmen Cardoso.  She’s both sick and pregnant, but the baby is Vidal’s, and is almost due.  Urgent times require urgent measures, and Carmen is overjoyed at the thought of marrying Vidal, whom she loves dearly.

 

    Ofelia is less enamored.  Captain Vidal cares only about the son that’s about to be born to him, and once that happens, Ofelia’s afraid she’ll become unwanted baggage.  Maybe some handsome prince will come along, sweep her off her feet, and carry her off to his magical castle.

 

    But that’s just a young girl’s fairy tale dream, isn’t it?  And Ofelia’s mother says fairy tales don’t have anything to do with the world.

 

    Ofelia knows better, though.  She 's a bookworm and those fairy tales she’s read in her books have taught her everything she knows about this world.

 

What’s To Like...

    Pan’s Labyrinth is an ambitious blending of the Historical Fiction and Dark Fantasy genres.  It is set in 1944 northern Spain, at the height of the bitter Spanish Civil War, with Captain Vidal commanding a small group of royalist troops holding an abandoned mill against an equally-sized band of rebels.  The Dark Fantasy aspect is …well… quite dark.  There are magical creatures, they have their own agenda, and while Ofelia is a key part of that, her well-being takes a backseat to the completion of their task.

 

    There are three storylines to follow.  1.) Carmen desperately wants to marry again; it is a dangerous time to be a lone adult female with child; 2.)  Captain Vidal desperately wants to uphold his late father’s legacy by wiping out the rebels; 3.) Ofelia enters Pan’s Labyrinth and agrees to complete three tasks, the usual number in every fantasy tale she's read.

 

    The book is divided into 49 chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue.  That works out to about 5 pages per chapter, so you never have to worry about finding a good place to stop.  There are some neat drawings along the way, and credit should be given to the gifted illustrator, Allen Williams.

 

    You’ll learn a smattering of Spanish vocabulary and one neat Latin phrase, which is given below.  I liked the way the “Book of Crossroads” that the Faun gives to Ofelia works.  There is some violence – people are killed and some torture - but hey, there’s a war going. The cussing a sparse;  I think I counted only ten instances in the entire book, two of them in Spanish.

 

    The ending is bittersweet, powerful, undeniably dark, and rather clever.  I found it surprising, despite it being what you could call a standard fairy tale ending.  All the plot threads are tied up.  I don’t see that a sequel is called for, although Wikipedia indicates that Guillermo del Toro contemplated one for a while but later abandoned the idea.

 

Excerpts...

    It was time to fulfill the task for which she’d been sent to the mill.  She fluttered toward the girl with her new wings and addressed her with vehemence.  Come along! She gestured, giving her signal all the urgency her master’s orders demanded.  He wasn’t the most patient one.

    “You want me to follow you?  Outside?  Where?”

    So many questions.  Humans asked them about everything, but they usually weren’t half as good at finding the answers.  (loc. 476)

 

    Maybe the Faun had heard about those books.  He usually didn’t come to Caraméz’s workshop.  The Faun didn’t believe in books.  He was much older than the oldest manuscripts in the queen’s library and could rightfully claim that he knew so much more about the world than all their yellowed pages.  But one day he suddenly stood in the door of the bookbinder’s workshop.  Caraméz was slightly afraid of the Faun.  He was never sure whether he could trust those pale blue eyes.  In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Fauns eat bookbinders.  (loc. 1784)

 

Kindle Details…

    Pan’s Labyrinth currently sells for $9.99 at Amazon.  Cornelia Funke has a dozen or more other e-books available at Amazon; most or all of which appear to be children’s fantasy novels, and in the price range of $3.99 to $10.99.  Guillermo del Toro has seven other e-books at Amazon, all with co-authors.  I’m guessing that means for the most part, he wrote the screenplay and the co-authors “novelized” it.

 

Ratings:

    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 458 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.30*/5, based on 7,095 ratings and 1,429 reviews.

 

“In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est.”  ("In our choices lie our fate.")  (loc. 158 )

    I can only come up with one thing to quibble about, and it’s something the authors have no control over: the genres listed at Amazon for this book are totally bogus.  One of them reads “United States Colonial and Revolutionary Period Historical Fiction”.  I think someone forgot to edit their cut-&-paste step when developing the Amazon blurb.  Really guys, doesn’t anyone double-check these things?

 

    Pan’s Labyrinth originally came out as a movie in 2006, and I remember being blown away when I watched it, along with just about every critic who reviewed it. This book version came out in 2019, and I can’t think of any other case where a book adaptation was published more than ten years after the movie.  I don’t recall much of the details in the movie version, although I thought that the fantasy storyline played a bigger role in it.  I think I’ll check to see if Netflix carries it.

 

    Regardless, I highly recommend both the book and the movie.  Amazon lists it as a “Teen and Young Adult” book, and I’ll go along with that, adding that adults will enjoy it as well.  But it's probably too violent for sensitive juveniles.

 

    8 Stars.  I’m assuming that the listing of two authors means that Guillermo del Toro wrote the movie script and Cornelia Funke converted it into novel form.  The value of Ms. Funke’s effort cannot be overstated.  I’ve read a couple other “adapted from a movie script” books where it was done in a cursory manner, and frankly, reading those books was a real chore.