Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins

1984; 342 pages. New Author? : No. Genre : Modern Lit. Tom Robbins' 4th novel. Overall Rating : 9*/10.

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In an 8th-century kingdom in Bohemia, they have a strange custom. At the first sign of old age, the king is ritually killed and replaced with someone younger. In this way, the "spirit" of the tribe is kept strong.

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King Alobar has never had a problem with this edict. Until the day the first gray hair appeared in his beard. He plucked it out, but more took its place. Alobar discovers he is not quite ready to put his head on the chopping block, so he fakes his death and flees eastward. But Death can be a persistent chaser.

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Meanwhile, in the present, we are introduced to a waitress in Seattle, two Cajun ladies in New Orleans, and a French business family in Paris. All are trying to concoct the perfect jasmine perfume. How is Tom Robbins going to bring all three of these parties together, not to mention tying Alobar into the story as well? And what do the prominently-themed beets have to do with anything?

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What's To Like...

Jitterbug Perfume is a wonderful read, combining serious issues (religion, business ethics, philosophy, self-determination and above all, immortality) with some clever plot twists, literary devices (puns, metaphors, and similes), and hilarious topics (the secret of the beet, Einstein's last words, the "King of the Bean", and of course, perfumery).

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The supporting cast are as fun to follow as the main characters. You meet the Greek god Pan, Dr. Dannyboy Wiggs, Bingo Pajamas, and the dancing, chanting Bandaloop Doctors. There's also a love story. And a lot of sex. It keeps you young, you know.

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Kewlest New Word...

Loa : the spirits in the (Haitian) Voodoo world.

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Excerpts...

"Ricki, do you believe in immortality?"

"I'll try anything once." (pg. 113)

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Their quarreling chewed through the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse. (pg. 174)

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"One last thing about death, " said Wiggs.

"What's that?" Pris asked rather morosely. She was still staring at the spot where his teardrop had hit the water.

"After you die, your hair and your nails continue to grow."

"I've heard that."

"Yes. But your phone calls taper off." (pg. 285)

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"I may be mad ... but I prefer the sh*t of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next might offer." (pg. 29)

The clever wit of Jitterbug Perfume will keep you turning the pages as you read it in bed, but Tom Robbins' views on the serious themes will keep awake thinking long after you've turned out the light.

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Overall, his two main points seem to be : 1.) There is not a shred of empirical evidence that the afterlife exists, let along any solid details on what it's like. 2.) That being the case, all theological explanations - Salvation, Reincarnation, the pantheon of Greek Gods, etc.; are equally plausible.

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Jitterbug Perfume presents its own account of the afterlife, but you certainly don't get the impression that Robbins expects you to take it seriously. Indeed, the "moral" of the book is given in a single German-sounding made-up word : Erleichda. Which loosely translated means "Lighten up!"

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Jitterbug Perfume is a fine follow-up to Robbins' Still Life With Woodpecker (reviewed here). Highly recommended. 9 Stars.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

1996; 981 pages (plus another 96 pages of notes). New Author? : Yes. Genre : Modern Literature. Laurels : Time Magazine calls it one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Overall Rating : 8*/10..
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Infinite Jest takes place in a slightly-alternate universe and slightly in the future. Most of the book is set in the greater Boston area - either at a teen Tennis Academy, or the halfway house for recovering addicts just down the hill therefrom..
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The main protagonist is one Hal Incandenza, an 18-year-old tennis prodigy; and we follow his whole family and a bunch more characters from the two aforementioned institutions, plus a pair of Quebecois terrorists (or are they double agents?) who for most of the book are in the desert night, just outside Tucson.
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Let's get the negatives out of the way first. Infinite Jest is bodaciously long; with a nebulous plot and a random ending point. It's hard to keep track of all the characters, and the storyline is non-linear. The writing style is atrocious. The book is over-cluttered with acronyms and profusely wordy. One run-on sentence runs a full five pages. Countless sentences begin with phrases like : "But yes so", "But and so", "Plus then", "And so but", etc. The 367 notes, all hundred pages of them, are a PITA, but sometimes whole chapters are hidden in them. For the record, I skipped most of the notes, and was (presumably) none the worse for it.
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And so yet...
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What's To Like...
Infinite Jest is a wonderful exposition on American culture. The teenage tennis phenoms are under mind-boggling pressure and treated like show dogs. There is a whole sub-culture of drug addicts (recovering and otherwise), crooks, and other assorted low-life. The Incandenza family is impressively dysfunctional.
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Northern New England is turned into a giant toxic dump, and canisters of waste are catapulted into it, with giant fans blowing the noxious fumes into Canada. For that matter, all of North America in now a single country, the USA having coerced Mexico and Canada into being weak sisters in the union. The government has long since gone broke and among other things now sells naming rights of individual years to corporations. For example, this year is called The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment ("YDAU").
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There are a slew of existential episodes to enjoy. The Quebec terrorists are all in wheelchairs and use giant mirrors to sabotage nighttime motorists. The academy kids play a great game called "Eschaton" which is like the board-game Risk played on multiple tennis courts. There is a "Cult of the Veil" which both men and women can join.
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All the characters are 3-D, complex, and "gray". I found reading the Wikipedia entry on Infinite Jest beforehand helped me grasp how the seemingly unrelated plotlines tied together.
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Kewlest Word...
Koan : a paradoxical anecdote or riddle which defies logical reasoning.
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Excerpts...
In the eighth American educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitters's dreamscape. (pg. 38).
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"So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he an I, Boo." (pg. 40)
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"Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?"
"It's not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?"
"My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss." (pg. 776)
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Poor me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink. (pg. 839)
Life is like tennis; those who serve best usually win. (pg. 952)
At its core, Infinite Jest is a work of Modern Absurdism. The terrorists are absurd; the addicts are absurd; the tennis prodigies are absurd; the dysfunctional Incandenza's are absurd (papa I. commits suicide by nuking his head in a microwave). And like any piece of existential literature, the storyline is subsumed in the pointlessness of the lives of the characters.
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In that respect, it is a masterpiece. Yes, it's a slow, difficult read, but I kept coming back for more. It took me just over a month to read Infinite Jest, but IMHO it was a worthwhile trek. 8 Stars.

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues - Tom Robbins

1976; 416 pages. Genre : Modern Lit. A Counter-Culture Classic. Overall Rating : B.

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ECGTB is the story of one Sissy Hankshaw, who's the Tiger Woods of hitchhiking, thanks to two super-sized thumbs and a love for the open highway. In her travels, she crosses paths with the all-girl Rubber Rose Ranch, the last flock of migrating whooping cranes, the author posing as a psychiatrist, a lust-crazed Japanese guru that everyone thinks is Chinese, a full-blooded Mohawk whom she marries, a peyote queen, and a Countess who's a "he".

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What's To Like...

When he's advancing the plot, Robbins has the rawness of Bukowski, the humor of Vonnegut, the word-weaving wit of Plath, and the simile and metaphor magic of Pratchett. Wow. In addition, he sprinkles in some interesting ancedotes (some maybe even factual) such as Robert Schumann doing finger-stretching exercises, and F. Scott Fitzgerald dying while eating a Butterfingers candy bar. He also occasionally engages in "verbing" (which I still think should be called 'verbalizing').

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There is a lot of sex here, and all sorts of it - straight, gay, bi, group, and auto. The sex passages fit in well, but this is not a book for the kiddies. Robbins takes on religion and all sorts of hippie-days issues, such as "finding oneself". He doesn't have much use for us westerners getting into Eastern gurus, suggesting that we instead should reconnect with our pagan past.

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Alas, after a stellar first third of the book, Robbins starts halting the storyline to go Dan-Brown preachy on us, often for 20 pages or so at a pop. Most notable and lengthy are the Sissy-and-the shrink and Sissy-and-the-Ch*nk diatribes. Hasn't he heard of "show, don't tell"? Some of his philosophical mush is probably good, but there are also things like "I believe in everything, nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing, everything is sacred." That reminds me of Inspector Clousseau's (Pink Panther) line : "I suspect everybody. I suspect nobody." Yeah, they both have equal merit as far as life-guiding advice goes.

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Excerpts...

In the evenings, light from an ever-increasing number of television sets inflicted a misleading frostiness on the air. It has been said that true albinos produce light of similar luminescence when they move their bowels.

Middays, the city felt like the inside of a napalmed watermelon. (pg. 42, describing South Richmond)

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"You're either for us or a Guinness." (pg. 311)

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New/Cool Words...

Atavistic (the reappearance of a characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence); Pellucid (crystalline, transmitting light); Limbic (of the interconnected brain structures involved with emotions, motivation, etc.); Impastoed (applied via thick layers of pigment to a canvas or other surface); Gloaming (twilight); Extirpate (to pull up by the roots). There was also "mambaskin" which means, straightforwardly enough, "the skin of a mamba". For some reason when I read it, I broke it down into "mam - baskin" and drew a total blank.

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"Ha ha, ho ho, and hee hee"

This seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it book for most readers. I found it to be both. When he was moving the storyline forward, it was a great read. But the philosophical exegesis and the ending were both self-indulgent. I give it a "B"(or one giant Sissy Hankshaw 'thumbs up'), since the good parts are more prevalent than the bad parts.

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Even Cowgirls Get The Blues broke new ground when it came out in 1976, especially regarding lesbian and bisexual relationships. But it's written by a heterosexual male, and I wonder whether today Robbins' views would seem dated to GLBT readers.

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

2002; 328 pages. Genre : Modern Literature. Awards : winner of the 'Richard & Judy Best Read Award' (whatever that is). Rating : A-.

   ."My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer."

   .The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's first novel, examines the devastating effect the murder has on the victim's family, neighbors, and high school friends. It is told in the first-person, through the mind and eyes of Susie, as she looks down on the world from her self-realized heaven. Sebold draws upon personal experience in writing this novel; she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University.

.What's To Like...
The story is both heartwarming and brutal. The pacing is good and the ending isn't what I expected. There is emphasis on character studies, especially of Susie's family, each of whom reacts in a different way to the tragedy. The family unit is shattered, then works at putting itself back together. Susie matures as the book goes along, as is evidenced is in her writing.

.It isn't a perfect book. Parts of the ending seem forced, and if you're looking for a Crichton-esque technical explanation of how Susie flits around our world, time-hops, and reads people's minds, you'll be disappointed. Some people were critical that Sebold's depiction of heaven wasn't more "religious" in nature. Pooh to them; Sebold's vision of the afterlife is a pleasant non-preachy change.

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"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence : the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." (page 320).

.This is a story about hope and strength, and draws upon Sebold's actions in coping with her college rape. You can read the Wiki article about her here. The writing had a poetic feel to it, which I liked.
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I give The Lovely Bones a solid "A-". Highly recommended, provided that the violence of Susie's death doesn't bother you. And in closing, I've heard that the movie version of it will be coming out later this year.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

2000; 437 pages. Awards : NY Times #1 Bestseller; nominated for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction). Genre : Memoir; Fictional Non-Fiction (yeah I know, that's an oxymoron). Overall Rating : B..

    This is David Eggers' break-out book, giving his reflections on about an 8-year period of his life, starting around age 22. His parents die within a few weeks/months of each other, leaving their four children orphaned. Dave's older brother (Bill) has a full-time job, and his older sister (Beth) is just starting law school, so it falls to our author to be the family guardian of 8-year Christopher ("Toph"), despite having no parenting skills. It's a coming-of-age tale, as Eggers struggles to be both a mentor and a buddy to Toph, while also starting up an off-beat magazine ("Might", patterned after "Wired"), holding down various jobs to make ends meet, and somehow finding time to pursue the opposite sex.

.What's To Like...
    The literary style is unique. Eggers deftly weaves stream-of-consciousness and techniques like the "Fourth Wall" into the narrative. There are philosophical musings - the Might crew strives hard to adhere to a "we're doing this for Art's sake, not for financial reward", all the while knowing that without readers and advertisers, the magazine is toast.
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There's a gentle self-deprecating humor running throughout the book. Eggers recounts the foibles of his love life, dealing with his Mom's ashes ("cremains"), baby-sitter anxiety, and his I'm-gonna-die experience which turned out instead to be passing a kidney stone.

.The writing is polished (see below), which seems surprising, given that Eggers was still in his 20's when he wrote this. Last but not least, be sure to check out the "dull" sections of the book - the copyright page, the acknowledgements, etc. Eggers' wit is there as well.
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OTOH, Eggers can get quite wordy at times (the contrived transcript of the MTV interview being a salient example). Lots of people found AHWOSG to be too self-indulgent (but isn't that what a memoir is all about?). By his own account, Eggers also takes substantial "literary license" with the facts here (but isn't that what an 'authorized' memoir is all about?).
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Finally, I suggest skipping the 40-odd page prologue, in which Eggers self-analyzes himself and his book, and go directly to page 1. If at the end, you've been thrilled by the story, you can always go back and read the intro. .Excerpt (first two sentences, actually) :

"Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic. Exhaust from the dryer billows out of the house and up, breaking apart while tumbling into the white sky." Sigh. I wish I could write like that.
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You'll like AHWOSG if...
    The style reminded me a lot of A Confederacy of Dunces, or perhaps a David Sedaris book, but with mellower humor. I'm not big on reading biographies and memoirs, but I liked AHWOSG. The Americana descriptiveness is nice, and I can see how this would appeal to the Pulitzer peeps. So I'll give it a "B", and wonder just how good of a writer Eggers will be when he's gotten a couple decades of experience under his belt.

Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut

1952, 320 pages. Genre : Dystopian Lit. Overall Rating : B.

   .This was Kurt Vonnegut's first pubished novel, and is set in Ilium, New York, where it follows the misadventures of Dr. Paul Proteus in a 1984-esque world. The back-cover blurb on my book calls it as "a cross between Animal Farm and Alice In Wonderland," and that's a fair description.
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What's To Like...
   This is "applied dystopia". Whereas Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984 all have essentially the same mood, books like Player Piano (satire added) and Animal Farm (um... animals added) at least give the Big Brother story a new ambiance. Also, Vonnegut sticks to a straight chronological timeline here, which is not true in quite a few of his novels. I know chrono-hopping can be confusing to you non-time-travelers out there.
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Best of all are the characters themselves. The good guys have their faults; the bad guys have their endearing traits. Proteus has few, if any, outstanding qualities. Gray is a nice change from the black-or-white characters in most stories.

.What's Not To Like...
    This is not Vonnegut's best effort. He self-rates it a "B", and I'm inclined to agree. It's a good first stab, but it lacks the polish of his later work. The most glaring weakness is the tired, well-trodden dystopian plot. I keep waiting for a book in this genre to come up with something different for a storyline. Anything different.
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When I look into my crystal ball, I see...
As with any book in this genre, it's fun to see which parts of the future the author got right, and which parts he didn't. For brevity's sake, we'll limit ourselves here to some of his hits.
.1.) The Back To Nature Movement. At one point, Proteus decides to "cleanse" himself, and purchases an old farm that doesn't even have electricity. Jaded flower children followed suit 20 years later. With an equal lack of success. Eva Gabor, where are you today?

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2.) Let's sing the company song! Thank God, I never had to do this. But it's big over in Japan, and I have a friend who used to work for Wal-Mart, and claims they started every day off by singing the Wal-Mart song. Whatever that is. Oh, and Wal-Mart used to pick a different person each morning to lead the singing. So the trick was to scrunch down behind other patsies to avoid being called upon.

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3.) The ultimate anathema. In Player Piano, the label-of-death was being called a saboteur. It didn't matter whether you actually were one or not. Today, of course, we call anyone who doesn't go along with us a terrorist.

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4.) Everyone's a doctor. Vonnegut just barely missed on this one. Everyone in the privileged category in Player Piano gets a PhD. Whether it has any use/meaning or not. Nowadays, we don't have garbage collectors; we have sanitation engineers. Secretaries aren't secretaries; they're administrative facilitators. Same sort of thing.

.Bottom line - this is a good book to read if you're already hooked on Vonnegut ( I am), but Slaughterhouse-5, The Sirens of Titan, or Breakfast of Champions are all better introductions to him.

The Thin Place - Kathryn Davis

2006, 275 pages. Genre : Fiction, American Literature. Overall Rating : A-..Kathyrn Davis' 6th novel examines a cross-section of humanity in a bevy of people (and a number of animals) in a town steeped in Americana.

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What's To Like...
    This book is hard to characterize. It's about three girls/friends coming of age; but it's not Chick-Lit. It's about one of those girls being able to bring people and animals back to life; but that's really just incidental to the story.

.It gives the hyperactive, mischievous thoughts of dogs; it has a resolute beaver that never loses hope even when caught in a trap; and there's a feline who tests the saying, "Curiosity kills the cat". But this isn't Dr. Doolittle. It has a 92-year-old lady still full of life, but this isn't On Golden Pond.
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What's Not To Like...
There's not much of a plot. It's more of a snapshot of a small New Englandesque town (although the exact location of it is never really given). With about 50 pages to go, things start to build towards a climax, but even that is ...um... anticlimactic. If you're seeking for swashbuckling action, look elsewhere.

.There are a lot people who, for some reason, expected The Thin Place to have a spiritualistic overtone - good-vs.evil; demons & angels; etc. True, there's a bit of that here, but this is more mystical than metaphysical.

.Finally, this is not an easy read. The story demands your full attention, as it swirls from one being to another in almost random fashion. Clive Cussler fans should avoid this one at all costs.
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Overall Rating : A-.  There's no middle ground. You'll either love The Thin Place, or give it up after 50 pages. It reminds me of Waiting For Godot, but instead of witty dialogue to substitute for a plot, Ms. Davis treats you to some beautiful writing. This is an excellent book for a quiet evening with New Age music playing in the background. But don't try to read it while watching TV.

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Overall Rating : B.

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Oh, the absurdity of war! John Yossarian is a bombadier, stationed in the Mediterranean during the last half of World War 2. He spends his time bombing the northern half of Italy, falling in love with various whores in Rome, agonizing that his next mission will end in his death, and trying to figure out how to convince the military to ship him back to the states.

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There is a way out, of course. If you're found to be insane, that's an instant ticket home. Alas, by attempting to show that you're insane, you demonstrate your sanity. That's Catch-22, and that means it is impossible for Yossarian to ever get himself discharged.

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What's To Like...

Yossarian is a classic anti-hero : full of faults, scared of dying, and anti-establishment. The group he's stuck with (the "Fighting 256th") has country bumpkins, back-stabbers, buxom nurses, milquetoast chaplains, incompetent Generals (anyone remember the Peter Principle?), ambitious Colonels, capitalistic Majors, and a host of other engaging characters to become acquainted with.

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If you like paradoxes, there are a couple billion of them in this book. Then there are the Catch-22's themselves, which are similar to, yet different, from paradoxes. BTW, a "Catch-22" is entirely fictional. FWIW, Heller tried quite a few numbers as the title prior to the book being released - Catch-11; Catch-14; etc.

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I suspect if you've ever been in the service, you'll find this book hilariously close to how things really were. I'm not a vet (both the Army and me are stronger because of this), so there's a limited amount of relevancy here for me.

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What's Not To Like...

It's a slow read. As with the other Heller book I've read ("God Knows"), its way too repetitious. You could slice 150 pages out of C-22, and it would be much better. You'll find yourself skipping "text" paragraphs to get to the dialogue parts.

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There's no plot for the first 75% of the book. There's humor and wit, but no progression in the tale at all. To be fair, Heller wakes up around page 330, and things finally begin to unfold. The book gets markedly darker after that, which IMNSHO is a plus.

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Finally, the ending just plain sucks. I know this is a farce, but it was a believable farce until... well, no spoilers here.

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It's The History, Stupid...

If you judge Catch-22 solely on its literary merits. it doesn't stand the test of time very well. Joseph Heller was destined never to repeat his initial smash hit. I'd go as far to say that the success of C-22 was due more to good timing than good writing. Of course, I say that about Seinfeld too.

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But Catch-22 is a breakthrough opus. Along with authors like Kurt Vonnegut, there was finally something distinctive about American literature. Yeah, the Brits figured this out before we did, but hey, they've had more practice at this sort of thing.

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You can see the influence of Catch-22 in M*A*S*H, and maybe-just-maybe, even in Dilbert. So we'll remember its time-period, and give it a shaky B. With Heller, Vonnegut, and Hunter S. Thompson all now departed, maybe it's time for a new generation of talented American authors to emerge.

Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth

Overall Rating : C.

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Philip Roth's best-known work caused a sensation when it came out in 1969, for its shock value, sexually-taboo subjects, and Jewish humor. The book is essentially a 300-page monologue by the book's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, to his shrink, one Dr. Spielvogel. Alex recounts his life, in more-or-less chronological order, focusing extensively on his four favorite sex partners - "The Monkey", "The Pilgrim", "The Lieutenant" (attempted only), and his hand. We won't mention the liver, the cored apple, the bottle, and his sister's bra.

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What's To Like...

If you like the Mel Brooks style of humor, you'll enjoy PC. One-line zingers abound, such as, "The perfect couple : she puts the id back in Yid; I put the oy back in goy."

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The book was banned in Australia when it came out, which naturally stimulated sales Down Under. It is self-deprecating, and obviously semi-autobiographical; so you'll have fun trying to figure out how much of this was drawn from Roth's life. You'll meet his domineering mother, his Willy Loman-esque father, and his plain-and-patient sister. You laugh as Alex tries to cope with his Jewish heritage and survive in a goy world.

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What's Not To Like...

It's a monologue. A very lonnnnnggggg monologue. Try imagining having to listen to a Mel Brooksian rant for, say, 12 hours straight. It may be funny at first, but it grates on one's nerves before very long.

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There's no plot. There's little progression, other than Alex grows older. And if you're looking for Alex to impart to you some grains of experiential enlightenment, forgetaboutit!

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So. Now vee may perhaps to begin, Yes?

I think the book's chief value lies in its ground-breaking impact when it came out. Up till then, American literature was pretty tame. And boring. No cuss words, nothing to offend the WASP and the Jewish communities, and above all, nothing about S-E-X. Portnoy's Complaint burst through all that phony Puritanical bullsh*t, and made people laugh while doing so. And the rabbis and Jewish leaders couldn't call it anti-Semitic, cuz Philip Roth is Jewish.

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Nevertheless, the book didn't age well. The shock-threshold has long been exceeded, and without that, the limitations of a chapterless, 300-page monologue are exposed. As you tire of the same themes and the same humor, you'll find it difficult to keep reading the book. I did complete it, and I'm happy about that, but it'll be a long time before I read another Philip Roth book.