David Frum
Random House

David Frum’s 2003 book about George W. Bush may have been about the “surprise” presidency (though some would use the term “stolen”), but the real surprise to me was how much I enjoyed it.
Admittedly, I pretty much had to read it, and another Frum book, in anticipation of an interview with the author in Washington, D.C., otherwise I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to find it.  Having said that, I’m glad I did.
There are several reasons to like this account of Frum’s eighteen months working as an economic speechwriter in the Bush White House, not the least of which is his ability to tell a good story.  He also has a very good sense of humour.
The Right Man deftly describes the atmosphere in the Bush White House post-2000 election and pre-911. Frum had been asked by Bush’s chief speech-writer, Michael Gerson, to consider joining the speechwriting team.  He gets invited to have breakfast with Gerson in the West Wing mess and the first words he hears upon entering the White House are, “Missed you at Bible study.”  His appointment is at 8:10, not 8:15 or even 8:00.  The Bush White House divided the day into 5-minute increments.
Frum lists the differences between Bill Clinton’s White House and George W. Bush’s in a chapter entitled, “The Un-Clinton”:

            “Was Clinton famously unpunctual?  Bush was always on time.
Had Clinton liked to wander into the Oval Office in his sports clothes?  Bush required jackets and ties at all times, even weekends.
Did Clinton’s wife aspire to be co-president?  Bush’s wife moved the First Lady’s office back from the West Wing to the East Wing and eschewed any role at all in the making of public policy.
Were the Clintons morally slack?  Bush opened every Cabinet meeting with a prayer and scorned the petty untruths of the politician.”

That’s about as politically pointed as this book gets, which is another reason it is a good read.
Frum admires George W. for some of his attributes and is not fond of him for others.  He contends that Bush is not the dim-witted frat boy that many of his critics believe him to be.  He describes a man who is painstakingly precise in the use of language in his speeches and one who struggles to find the middle ground on some very serious issues. 
On energy, for instance, Frum tells how he suggested using the words “cheap energy” to describe the aims of the Bush policy. “He gave me a sharp, squinting look, as if he were trying to decide whether I was the very stupidest person he had heard from all day or only one of the top five.”  Bush then goes on to explain that from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile traveled but in the mid-90s that all came to a sudden end.  Why?  Because of gas-guzzling SUVs, Bush says.  And what made the SUV craze possible?  Frum gets it.  Cheap energy. 
That this fact would appall George W. Bush came as something of a revelation to me, I have to confess.  However, this was quickly ameliorated for me by Frum explaining Bush had no truck with environmentalists either, believing that energy conservation was not about Americans using less, but importing less.  Still.
Frum writes movingly about the morning of 911 and what it was like at the White House; he writes amusingly about some of the White House staff, including Karl Rove; and he writes revealingly about the single speech line that made him part of U.S. history – the “axis of evil”.
For the State of the Union speech, to be delivered in early 2002, the entire speechwriting contingent in the White House was brought into play.  There were many versions covering many scenarios and Frum’s was to write something that would, in Gerson’s words, “sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq.”  Re-reading FDR’s 1941 speech after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Frum began to see the relationship between terror groups and terror-supporting states as similar to the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome Axis of WWII.  The line he actually wrote was “axis of hatred” but when, to his amazement, his Iraq memo was incorporated almost verbatim into the speech, Gerson “wanted to use the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11 – so ‘axis of hatred’ became ‘axis of evil’.  North Korea was added to the axis last.”

In the final analysis, David Frum probably has as many reservations about George W. Bush as he does enthusiasms.  He says that Bush was disinclined to communicate his thoughts to the public but that if one were to read Bush’s major speeches only, it would be like Babe Ruth pointing to the stands before hitting a home run.  That being said, maintains Frum, Bush’s informal remarks can be “cryptic, if not unintelligible.”

Time for a little cross-promotion of my own:  if you want to hear more of David Frum’s revealing inside stories about the White House, and what it was like being raised by a mother who was also a legendary Canadian broadcaster, watch Rockburn Presents, Sunday, September 19th, at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific.

Scott Turow
Grand Central Publishing

More than two decades ago, lawyer and author Scott Turow burst upon the literary world with his complex novel Presumed Innocent, about a prosecutor charged with the murder of a female colleague with whom he had been having an illicit affair.
Three years later, Alan J. Pakula directed the film version of the story with Harrison Ford in the lead role as Rozat “Rusty” Sabich.
In subsequent years, Turow has written seven more novels and two non-fiction books, all the while continuing to work as a practicing lawyer in Chicago.
Now, twenty-three years later, Turow returns to that first conflict between Sabich, now a judge, and Tommy Molto, a former assistant prosecutor now the chief prosecutor. 
In Innocent, Turow takes the now 60-year-old Sabich into familiar territory: an affair with a much younger woman.  Those of us who remember the first novel know that it was his mentally unbalanced wife, Barbara, who actually perpetrated the murder in the first novel and that Sabich, not wanting to separate his young son from his mother, covers up the crime.  So, in 2008, when Barbara dies in her sleep beside her husband and he waits 24 hours before notifying the police, suspicions are once again raised.  After all, thinks Tommy Molto and his new pit-bull associate, Jim Brand, Sabich got away with murder once and he probably thinks he can do it again.  They become even more convinced of Sabich’s guilt when they uncover evidence of his infidelity and the fact that he had visited a divorce lawyer months before his wife’s death.
Innocent rolls out this complicated and engrossing story through the voices of several of its characters, including Rusty Sabich’s son, Nat, now in his twenties.  Turow brings back some familiar faces as well, including Barbara Sabich, Tommy Molto, and Sabich’s brilliant lawyer, Sandy Stern.
I don’t want to give away any more of the plot than I have so far, simply because Turow is so adept at describing the angst of a man who ages from sixty to sixty-two (uncomfortably, Rusty Sabich is just one month older that I am), as well as the ambitions of a young woman in her thirties and a young man barely into his twenties, that it is a joy to read.  In fact, if I had any quibble about the book at all, and it’s a tiny one, it’s that sometimes the voice of twenty-something Nat doesn’t quite ring true.  But then, I’m reading it as a sixty-three-year old, so what do I know?  And, like his first novel, Turow gives Innocent the full Turow treatment: plot twists, psychological mysteries, legal maneuvers, the works.  I recommend it highly.

Stanley Booth
Vintage Books
1985

Stanley Booth’s book about the Stones chronicles the band’s tour in 1968/69 that ended with the tragedy at Altamont, California, when a young black man in the audience was killed by Hell Angels, who had been hired to act as security.
You will note that the tour was in 1968/69 and the book was published some 16 years later.  Booth’s only explanation is that “events conspired to delay the completion of this book.”
Whatever.
For the most part this is an interesting snapshot a band at the height of its fame and influence, living in a non-stop river of indulgence and adulation.  If only you could excise Booth’s annoying passages – and there are many – wherein he relates his difficulties getting the Stones to all sign a letter that will allow him to write about them and thus get a publisher, or his lame attempts to wax poetic about Brian Jones or reflect on the angst of the times, you would have a decently engrossing book.  Of the things that stick in one’s mind, I would have to say I never knew Charlie Watts was Jewish, and I never knew Bill Wyman’s real last name was Perks.  From the portraits painted here, Charlie Watts is the most normal guy you could ever meet.  At one point, Jagger says he doesn’t trust somebody and, when asked why, he says, “Because Charlie doesn’t like him.  If Charlie doesn’t like him, there’s something wrong with him.”
The other notable and disturbing feature of the book is the amount of violence that surrounded the band even in its early days; kids getting mangled in riots at Stone’s concerts, fights breaking out, cars being trashed.  At one early concert Jagger throws his tambourine into the crowd and the sharp edges of the small metal cymbals slice through a girl’s hand scarring her for life. 
Most Stones fans have probably already read this – Lord knows it’s been out long enough – but if you haven’t and you can dig it up in a second-hand bookstore, it’s worth a quick read.

Elmore Leonard
Harper

I’ve mentioned in this column before that I am a big fan of certain crime fiction writers and tend to buy everything they put out.  Elmore “Dutch” Leonard is one such writer.  A while ago I began thinking that maybe I hadn’t been paying close enough attention and had missed something new by him.  I checked his website and noticed that there was a novel called “Swag” that seemed to have been published after “Road Dogs”, the last one I had bought.  So I ordered it online and was mildly irritated when I discovered that “Swag” was the new title of a 1977 Leonard novel called “Ryan’s Rules”.  So here I am reading a 33-year-old crime novel.  And it is vintage Elmore Leonard.  The protagonists are two guys, good looking, intelligent and crooked.  Like many of the characters that inhabit Leonard’s books, Ernest Stickley Jr., or Stick – the central figure in another Leonard book of the same name – and Frank Ryan seem to be too smart to be actually committing crimes to make money (think of George Clooney’s character Jack Foley in Out of Sight).  But it’s that flaw that makes them appealing.  In Swag, the two men’s belief in the perfect robbery, or robberies, gets overtaken by Ryan’s belief that they are untouchable and can’t be caught.  And, of course, there’s a woman involved.   But, like all of Leonard’s books, the pleasure is in the dialogue and the oddly unfolding situations.  And, despite Stick and Frank’s vocational proclivities, there is pleasure in their self-awareness.  Stick, at one point, tries to imagine what it is he really wants in life: “He didn’t see himself owning a cement company or a chicken farm or a restaurant.  He never thought much about owning things, having a big house and a powerboat.  He didn’t care one way or the other about clothes.  He’d never been much of a tourist.  The travel brochures made it look good and he could see himself under a thatched roof with a big rum drink and some colored guys banging on oil drums, but he’d end up thinking.  Then what do you do?  Go in and get dressed up and eat the American Plan dinner and listen to the fag with the hair-piece play his cocktail piano and get bombed for no reason and go to bed and get up and do it all over again the next day.”
It may have been written in 1977 but it reads like yesterday.

Don Winslow
Alfred A. Knopf

I’d never come across Don Winslow’s writing before until a friend sent me this 2005 novel all about the “War on Drugs” so popular during the Reagan administration.  The novel spans almost three decades from the mid-Seventies to about 2004.  One of the blurbs calls it a “pit bull of a book” and that it is.  It’s all about the flourishing of the narcotraficante culture in Mexico, particularly in Sinaloa, during the 1980’s.  According to the publishers, Winslow spent six years researching and writing the book and it shows in the complexity and breadth of the story. 
Like most good crime novels, The Power of the Dog features characters on both sides of the law who are almost interchangeable.  It is a trope of crime fiction, notably cop crime fiction, that to defeat the bad guys, the good guys have to become bad guys.  Winslow takes this old chestnut to a whole other level.
Aside from the fictional framework of the story, many of the characters in the novel are thinly veiled composites of actual people.  Anyone paying attention to the brutal wars, both drug and political, in Central America during the late Seventies and Eighties will see Oliver North or Father Posadas Ocampo – the priest murdered at the Guadalajara Airport in 1993 – or Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and many others.  The novel even incorporates the actual assassination in 1994 of Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio into the storyline, suggesting – like some of the theories surrounding the real assassination – that it was the work of the Tijuana drug cartel.
But it is Winslow’s unrelenting narrative that carries you along.  If the plot weren’t so complex and intricate, you could easily see The Power of the Dog being turned into a Stephen Soderbergh or Ridley Scott film.

Haruki Murakami
Vintage Books

How to review one of Murakami’s novels?  How to even describe them?  Waking hallucinations?  Fever dreams?
Let me give After Dark a shot.  The whole story takes place in Tokyo one night between midnight and seven A.M.  A young woman sits reading a book in an all-night Dennys and becomes engaged in a conversation with a young man she has met just once before.  The young man is on his way to a band practice in the basement of an abandoned building.  He plays trombone.  The young woman’s beautiful sister lies in a deep sleep at her parent’s home.  A television set in the bedroom begins to come alive, revealing a brightly lit room with two doors and a man sitting perfectly still in a straight-backed chair.  The man’s face is covered with a smooth mask or, as the book describes it, “Perhaps we should not call it a mask: it clings so closely to his face, it is more like a plastic wrap.”  Back at the Dennys, the young woman, who is conversant in Chinese, is asked to come to a “love hotel” or “love ho” to help translate the words of a young prostitute who has been beaten up by her john.  Back in the bedroom her sister, who has not awakened, has now moved traveled somehow through the TV screen into the brightly lit room.  She is still asleep.  The Man With No Face is gone.

See what I mean?  This is a story where the images of people in a mirror remain there after the people have left the room.   This is a story where a cell phone left on a grocery store shelf starts ringing and the person who answers it has his life threatened.  This is a story in which a young, beautiful girl one night says to her family, “I’m going to sleep now” and gets into bed and sleeps for weeks.

My first exposure to Haruki Murakami was years ago when I was given his novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I have been hooked ever since.  If you haven’t already, give him a try.  Seriously, you’ll be glad you did.

Tom Rachman
The Dial Press

It’s pretty easy to see why Brad Pitt and his company, Plan B, scooped up the film rights to Tom Rachman’s debut novel.  The Imperfectionists is constructed in a way that screams for a screenplay treatment.  But not in a bad way, not like a novelization or a Jackie Collins book.  And you have to hand it to the people at Dial Press.  Less than three weeks, maybe even two, after Christopher Buckley wrote a glowing review in the Sunday New York Times, the opening sentence of that review appears on the dust jacket of the novel.  No slouches, these.
Buckley said the book was so good he had to read it twice to figure out how Rachman had pulled it off.
Tom Rachman is a Vancouver-raised, U of T educated journalist who lives in Rome and, along with his other jobs with the Associated Press as a foreign correspondent, spent two years as an editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris.
The Imprerfectionists tells the story, actually stories – there are eleven of them, twelve if you count the one about how the paper came into being – of the staff at a newspaper very similar to the Herald Tribune but based in Rome.  Now here’s a rather astonishing fact, as I was about to write down the name of the fictitious paper I realized I couldn’t remember it.  Then I realized that I hadn’t seen a name for it anywhere in the entire novel.  I’m pretty damn sure it always just refers to “the paper” or “the newspaper”.  I just went back and flipped through the pages and I believe I’m right about this but if somebody out there reads it and discovers I’m wrong, please let me know.
Each chapter is a slice of the life of one of the staff at the newspaper, their professional entanglements and their personal difficulties, but as you work your way through them you begin to see the linkages.  A minor background character in one story becomes the central figure in a later story and this happens with such seamless beauty that, by the time you do reach the end, you really want to go back and start over just to see how the earlier characters saw the later characters. 
For anyone who has worked in a newsroom – print or broadcast – there are some very familiar people here as well; the fussy grammar expert, the brutal, cost-cutting finance officer, the outrageously self-absorbed “foreign correspondent” and so on.  One of my favorite lines comes from an editor who says, “The Internet is to newspapers what car horns are to music.”
But the most impressive thing about Rachman’s debut work is his skill in depicting human nature and his expertise in dialogue.  There are at least two stories here that, in the best tradition of Chekov’s short story writing, leave you reeling like you’ve been punched in the gut.  Each chapter is titled with a newspaper headline followed by the name and job of the character you are about to meet: “WORLD’S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126” Obituary Writer Arthur Gopal, or “GLOBAL WARMING GOOD FOR ICE CREAMS” Corrections Editor Herman Cohen.
These headlines might suggest that this is a comic novel but don’t be misled, it’s pretty somber stuff, the lives of these people who have nothing in common but their jobs at the same newspaper.  That being said, Rachman’s stories are so compelling you feel like you know each one of them.
I might just go back a read it all over again.

Robert Stone
Harper Perennial

It’s been a few years, quite a few in fact, since I have read any of Robert Stone’s novels.  I own well thumbed editions of “Children of Light” and “Dog Soldiers” and loved Stone’s writing style in them, but nothing prepared me for the joy of reading his memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties”.
Written in 2007, “Prime Green” is the story of Stone’s life from the late 1950s to early 1971.  Born in 1937, Stone was the perfect age to straddle the Beat movement of the Fifties and the Hippies of the Sixties.  He knew Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey; he lived in New York, New Orleans and San Francisco; he smoked dope, dropped acid and was there when the Merry Pranksters bus left the west coast and again when it pulled up in front of his apartment in New York City months later; he worked for tabloids, sold encyclopedias, wrote novels and was wooed by Paul Newman to write the screenplay of the film version of his first novel.
But this book is no spotty, drug-addled collection of tattered memories.  Stone is a fine and humourous writer and some of the best passages – despite all of the photos, including the cover, being of the Merry Pranksters – are about his life scrabbling to make a living with a wife and two children in tow.
After leaving the Navy in the late Fifties, Stone returns to New York, his home.  “The sound of the street was different in those days,” he writes, “and so was the sound of New York speech – poils and ersters and so on.  Toity-toid Street.  I remember my mother correcting me, as an urchin, for employing the pronoun yez of which the singular was youse.”
Stone works for the right-wing Daily News where “threats were to be detected everywhere – in reefer madness, in immigrants, above all in the ameliorative schemes that threatened economic elites.”  The editors held their readership in contempt, as people “educated beyond their intelligence.”
In 1960, Stone and his new wife, Janice, move to New Orleans which was to provide the fodder for his first novel, “A Hall of Mirrors”. 
In 1962, Stone gets a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in California and he, Janice and their new daughter move to San Francisco.  And it is here that his life is altered forever.  He meets and becomes close friends with the novelist Ken Kesey, is introduced to LSD, peyote, jazz, and the transitioning period from the Beats to the Hippies. He neatly sums up the gestalt of the era: “I harbored another, a secret conviction; that authenticity, whatever it was, resided somewhere else, somewhere I was not. I’d know it when I saw it, I had even glimpsed it from afar in my travels, but it seemed to evaporate at my approach.”
He spends a brief time back in New York working for a tabloid he calls The National Thunder and concocting headlines like, MAD DENTIST YANKS GIRL’S TONGUE and SKYDIVER DEVOURED BY STARVING BIRDS. 
He gets a call from Paul Newman who wants to, and does, turn “A Hall of Mirrors” into a motion picture, “WUSA”.  The experience leaves Stone listless, unsatisfied and, worse, embarrassed.  “To people who were moved by the book and felt betrayed by the film, I offer my very real regret and apologies.  I felt badly about it, still do.”
By 1971, Stone and his family are living in London, England and he is trying to write or, as he prefers, not to write, his second novel.  He hooks up with a new publication called INK, modeled on New York’s Village Voice.  He buys a cheap ticket to Saigon and heads off to gather what he hopes will be first-hand material from the Vietnam war to inspire his next book.  The result, “Dog Soldiers” wins the National Book Award.
As Stone looks back on that decade and its hopes he writes, “Our expectations were too high, our demands excessive; things were harder than we expected.” And yet, “Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail.”
Robert Stone has given us a clear-eyed chronicle, flaws and all, of the most influential decade in the lives of virtually everyone over the age of sixty, a not unimpressive feat.  It is insightful, involving and, above all, written with gentle and humourous humanity.

Craig Ferguson
Chronicle Books

Back at Christmas I was given a PVR as a gift (a PVR for those of you who aren’t couch potatoes is a “personal video recorder”).  I was told by friends that it would change the way I watched television and it did.  I discovered that I could once again watch late-night talk shows during the day and I discovered that Craig Ferguson, who I had only know from the few times I had watched the old Drew Carey show, was perhaps the funniest and smartest one of the bunch.  He seemed genuinely nonplussed by his success as a talk show host, made the occasional joke that was literate as well as funny (he has a stuffed pig named after Gustav Flaubert who, he says, shares Flaubert’s distaste for the bourgeoisie), and he begins each interview by tearing up and throwing away the index cards upon which, one assumes, are the interview questions.  At one point he decided to do an entire show in the manner of the old-style late night talk-show hosts, without an audience and with only one guest.  That guest was the charming and erudite Stephen Fry and the program was wonderful.  Shortly thereafter, Ferguson won a Peabody Award for his interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
So I figured that I was I for a real treat when I was also given a copy of Ferguson’s novel, Between The Bridge and The River. 
Well, now I’m about to do something I have never done before.  I’m about to review a book that I haven’t finished.  Here’s why.
For starters, it’s never a good sign when you stop reading a book and are so reluctant to pick it back up that you read an entire other novel before you do.  I put down Ferguson’s book and read all 600 pages of the new Stieg Larsson novel.  This was for a couple of reasons; the first being that the Larsson book was addictive and engrossing, the second that the Ferguson novel was irritating and largely tasteless.
I admit that my lack of fervour for Between The Bridge and The River coincided with my waning admiration for Ferguson’s television show.  I realized that, after about four or five months of viewing, Ferguson has a handful of tropes (the tearing up of the index cards being one) that he continually falls back on.  He constantly refers to his audience as “hoboes” who are only there because they were promised “free chicken”.  He regularly refers to his show as “crap” and “the worst lit show on television”.  His perpetual mugging quickly wears thin and, finally – and this is probably the worst thing – he can’t seem to get through a single monologue without at least one or two references to his penis.  Why he feels the need to do this, when he is clearly capable of intelligent observations and piercing humour, is beyond me.  In fact, in a recent guest appearance, the motor-mouthed Jennifer Tilly, who seems like she’s perpetually on speed, pointed out to Ferguson, and I quote, “One thing I’ve noticed about you, Craig, is that you have words that you like.  You like to say ‘genitalia’, you like to say ‘penis’ and you like to say ‘testicles’.  I don’t know what that means…but…” 
And she wasn’t making any judgment, she was just making a passing comment.
So this brings me to The Between The Bridge and The River.  Like Ferguson himself, his novel is something of a contradiction.  At the end – which I confess I skipped to – there is actually a two-page reader’s guide in which he says, “I began the book with five statements.  Apologia, History, Confession, Time and Science. Why are these statements made so early?  Are they rules for the world we are about to enter? If they are, are they followed?  Are the statements truthful or accurate?  Does this matter?” 
Sounds impressive, right?
Yet this is a book filled with characters so repellent it makes you want to…well, stop reading about them.  There really aren’t any ordinary people in the story, just a collection of warped, damaged, revoltingly ill, disgustingly addicted, sexually perverse weirdoes.
I think perhaps Ferguson has been influenced mightily by Martin Amis, and his own personal experiences with alcoholism and addiction seem to have permanently coloured his story-telling.  But, frankly, this is the stuff you can catch twenty-four hours at day on A&E.
Ferguson says he wrote the book when his heart was broken.  Perhaps if he tried another novel when his heart has mended we might see his intelligence and generosity –which shines through his TV toilet humour – manifest in some characters we could sympathize with.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Stieg Larsson
Viking Canada

Well, the publishing world is in a tizzy about this third and (perhaps) final installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and reviews are popping up everywhere so I will keep mine brief.

If you are among the millions and millions who have consumed the first two books, this will not disappoint.

Mikael Blomkvist, Lisbeth Salander, et. al. are back to bring the entire complex and excruciatingly detailed story to a satisfactory conclusion.

The one slightly sour note is that several sections of the book are prefaced with page-long histories of the role of women as warriors in ancient societies. This comes across as a bit heavy-handed, given the strong themes of feminism and women’s rights that course through all three novels. And, as has been pointed out in some reviews, Larsson probably could have used an editor to cut out some of the more extraneous material. Just one small example: Blomkvist has to find a way to communicate with Salander while she is being kept under guard in a hospital. He discovers (in that oddly convenient way he has) that he can reach a man who sweeps the floors on Salander’s ward. He visits the man and makes the deal. But Larsson spends two pages outlining in great detail this character’s background – Turkish Kurd whose family was tortured, fled to Sweden, trained as a professional whatever but has to work as janitor, etc etc. This is a character who never reappears in the novel. That entire two pages could have been excised with no damage to the story.

But, again, I quibble. This is worth the wait and worth the money.

And, by the way, the Swedish film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is almost a perfect rendering of the novel. See it before Hollywood releases it’s version on the world.

Jonathan Lethem
DoubleDay

First of all, how can you not like a book in which the protagonist is named Chase Insteadman and his various friends and acquaintances have names like Perkus Tooth, Rossmoor Danzig, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji, Oona Laszlo and Strabo Blandiana?
Jonathan Lethem is the author of about a dozen other novels, including the amazing Motherless Brooklyn (in which he eerily captures the cadences of a person with Tourette’s) and The Fortress of Solitude (much loved by Nick Hornby).
Chronic City is New York City, Manhattan to be precise, and it is peopled with characters thinly patterned on real life figures. Mayor Arnheim – a first name is never assigned to him – is a mirror image of Michael Bloomberg. The arts commissioner is one Russ Grinspoon the “lamer half of a well-forgotten seventies smooth-rock duo, Grinspoon and Hale”. See if you can place him from these descriptions: “A snippet of ‘The Night Takes Back What You Said,’ the act’s early, Dylanesque hit and one tolerable song, now ran through my brain. Grinspoon was the guy doing the high lilting harmonies, not the ‘genius’ one who’d written the lyrics – sort of the girl in the act, I’d always thought.” “He still had the languor of a congenital sidekick…and I could restore his frizzy reddish halo of hair and Nehru jacket in mind’s eye easily enough.” Artie Garfunkel step forward.
Chase Insteadman is a good-looking former child star who lives off the residuals of his long-running sitcom, Martyr & Pesty. He is listless and affectless, wandering through Manhattan’s social scene with little purpose while his personal life plays out on the pages of the city’s tabloids and the “War Free” edition of the New York Times. Insteadman’s high school sweetheart and wife, the beautiful and gutsy astronaut, Janice Trumbull, is trapped with her Russian colleagues on the International Space Station, hemmed in for all eternity by a field of magnetic Chinese mines. Her letters to Chase become front page newsprint fodder for the city.
Insteadman’s life is forever altered upon meeting Perkus Tooth, a former rock critic for Rolling Stone with one wonky eye and a massive consumer rate of high-grade marijuana, who has raging paranoia and mind-altering conspiracy theories (Is Marlon Brando really dead? Is that really a tiger on the loose on the Upper East Side?). Perkus leads Insteadman and the other central characters down a vortex of confusion towards what he believes is The Truth (in a scene near the end of the book a hospital orderly mistakenly calls him Pincus Truth). I’ve been re-reading Lester Bangs old rock columns lately and was startled to realize how much Tooth resembles Bangs (Tooth and Bangs, now that’s a band name). The drug-fuelled screeds of both have a similar tone, though Bangs seemed to always be busy ripping Lou Reed a new one while Perkus riffs on the nature of reality and illusion.
Lethem’s Manhattan is a strange place, just slightly off centre. At one point the air is filled for weeks with the smell of chocolate, though to some people it manifests as a high ringing sound. Snow begins falling in March and seems to continue for months, giving the last half of the novel a claustrophobic feel that heightens the surreal atmosphere. Chase begins an affair with the ghostwriter, Oona Laszlo, and vacillates between lust for her and guilt over his wife’s predicament and his increasing indifference to it.
At one point the group, including Perkus’s friend, Richard Abneg, the former lefty agitator now a fixer for the mayor, becomes transfixed by vase-like vessels called ‘chaldrons’, which seem to have mystical powers. They spend hours on eBay bidding unsuccessfully on these items only to discover much later that they are all just holograms, part of a hugely popular and lucrative on-line universe called Yet Another World.
The newspapers alternate between printing Janice Trumbull’s letters to Chase and documenting the latest attack by the at-loose tiger, which has been terrorizing only certain neighbourhoods. But, in a moment of apparent honesty, Richard Abneg reveals to Chase that it’s not really a tiger, it’s an underground drill like the ones used to create the Chunnel between France and England. According to Abneg, the tiger is a cover story because the runaway drill is destroying properties that bureaucratic red tape would otherwise protect for years.
When Janice Trumbull contracts cancer in her foot and her space station colleagues have to amputate, Chase finds Perkus living in a dog hotel (where the homeless have to hide from the dog walkers), caring for a three-legged pit bull named Ana.
The fine line between reality and illusion is carried through in almost every sub-plot of the story.
The ‘artist’, Laird Noteless, is renowned for his ‘urban fjords’, huge crevasses in the earth. Chase, under-whelmed by Noteless, suggests that Yet Another World, the virtual universe, might be the perfect place for the next fjord because he wouldn’t need to apply for permits and no one would be inconvenienced. “’I don’t work in pixels,’ intoned Noteless, with the self-regard of a Stella Adler student declaring he refused to consider commercials.”
Chronic City reads like an articulate fever dream, filled with irony, humour and insight.
Did I like it? Yes.
Did I know what it was about? Not a clue.

Robert B. Parker
Berkley

Robert B. Parker
Putnam

I’m writing about these novels because I felt it was my duty to read Parker’s last two Spenser stories.  As I mentioned previously (scroll below), there were suggestions that Parker had at least one more unpublished novel done before he passed away recently at the age of 77.  If that is the case then The Professional will not have been Spenser’s swan song.  Which is likely too bad because it is one of Parker’s better books.
But first let me deal with Rough Weather.  Published by Putnam in hardcover in 2008, this one is almost a throwback to the super-hero Spenser, that one-named, literate, charming, self-effacing and tough-as-nails P.I. in Boston and his iconic, African-American buddy with the gleaming shaved dome and granite pecs, Hawk.
Hired by a well-heeled socialite as a sort of bodyguard during her daughter’s wedding on an island off the Massachusetts coast, Spenser is witness to a full-bore kidnapping/terrorist attack perpetrated by a former nemesis, the Gray Man, otherwise known as Rugar.  When no ransom demand is forthcoming, it is left to our hero to figure out just what is really going on and why, when the socialite had her own security team on the island, he was even asked to be there.  Intrigue ensues.
I have previously mentioned that back in the late 1980s, Parker was aware of the criticism that he had turned Spenser into some kind of immortal, James Bondian character who was light years away from his original creation.  Parker seemed to take those comments to heart and in subsequent years cranked down the action and cranked up the intelligence.  But Rough Weather is a slide right back into that cartoonish former landscape and I was beginning to think that Parker had lost the touch.
Luckily this turned out not to be the case.  His next outing, The Professional, published late last year, is classic Spenser.
Let me first give you a little Spenser primer, for those unfamiliar with the books.  Spenser (as in the poet) has no first name.  He is a former cop and boxer who works out of a small office in Boston, works out at Henry Cimoli’s gym, hangs out with Hawk – the classic white-guy/black-guy bonding scenario – and is deeply in love with, but not married to, psychiatrist and drop-dead knockout, Susan Silverman.  He is witty and quick-witted, tough and sentimental, idealistic and jaded.
The Professional tells the story of a good-looking charmer and all around cad whose name may or may not be Gary Eisenhower, who is sleeping with four women who are all married to rich, older men.  Eisenhower ups the ante by threatening to blackmail the women with video and audio tapes of their assignations.  The women come to Spenser for help.  He tracks the guy down, confronts him and – this part is so typical of Parker’s ability to throw you a curve – discovers that he likes the guy.  The guy is a professional.  And, as the story slowly unfolds over several months, the moral ambiguity becomes thicker and harder for Spenser to see through.  Parker doesn’t give you a neat and tidy ending with all of the questions answered.  Instead he leaves you, and his protagonist, with the slightly disconcerting sense that some kind of ethical compromise has been made. 
As for the writing, Parker over the years has managed to out Hemingway Hemingway.  His style is so pared down that if a chapter is more than three pages, you feel like you’ve gotten a bonus.  The descriptions are spare, the dialogue terse and laconic. 
Here’s a random sample:

“What can you tell me about her?” I said.
“Bitch,” her mother said.
I nodded.  If Beth was thirty-six, this woman was probably sixty, maybe younger.  She looked older than Angkor Wat.
“Why bitch?” I said.
“Whore.”
This wasn’t going terribly well.
“How about Mr. Boudreau?” I said.
She drank port and stared at me.
“He around?” I said.
“No.”
“Dead?”
“Don’t know.”
“Can you tell me anything about him?” I said.
“Bastard.” she said.
“Could you tell me where to find him?”
“No.”

See what I mean?  With clipped dialogue like that you could find yourself a hundred pages into the story before you’ve stopped to sip your coffee.
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who has not already read Parker’s Spenser novels picking up one this far into the series and being able to understand the interplay between the characters, but it must be possible.

Stieg Larsson
Vintage Crime

Alright, this will be short and sweet. This is the second of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and, it turns out, is a true trilogy in that it is a continuation of the story in the first book.

This one in paperback weighs in at 724 pages and, I am not making this up, will have you staying up late into the night to finish. I read the last 250 pages in the one hour and fifteen minute flight from Halifax to St. John’s.

The story is gripping, the writing – and this is especially noteworthy since it’s a translation – flows easily, and the plot is very clever. If I had any complaint, and it’s a tiny one, is that the plethora of Swedish names makes it sometimes difficult to remember who is who. I think the average North American reader would have a bit of trouble differentiating between the Ericssons and the Ekstroms, the Hedstroms and the Bohmans. But this is niggling. The book is long enough for you to eventually adapt, and you do.

This one ends with a few pages from the third installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and it is enough to make you crave more. According to my neighbourhood bookstore, the third volume comes out in Canada on May 25. Something to look forward to.

Stieg Larsson
Penguin Canada

Have you ever felt like you’re the last one at the party? This has happened to me most of my life and it’s mainly my own fault.

Back in the Seventies, when The Lord of the Rings was hugely popular, I refused to read it for that very reason. I know. Very mature. Anyway, when I ended up reading the trilogy eight years later, I realized exactly how brilliant it was.

So this is basically how I was feeling about the late Stieg Larsson’s novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book of his Millennium Trilogy. There are millions copies of this book out there, millions. According to the cover of the paperback I bought, twenty-one million copies. Okay, maybe that’s not this particular book, maybe it’s copies of the entire trilogy, but still. I have been told by innumerable friends that I should read it. It sits in piles in every bookstore I’ve walked through. It’s only saving grace is that it doesn’t have Oprah’s stamp of approval on its cover.

But for me its overwhelming popularity was off-putting. And then, in an attempt to wash away the bad taste of Carol Leifer’s book, I finally picked one up. At 841 pages in paperback, this is a bit daunting. Not to mention that my last experience with a Swedish writer (see below: The Abominable Man) was less than satisfying. But this was The Lord of the Rings all over again. I plowed through this thing in two-and-a-half days.

This is a complex, detailed and compelling novel that pulls you in quickly and never lets you go. And the amazing thing is that a great deal of it involves the arcane and complicated world of finance and banking.

There’s probably not a lot of point in going into any great detail for the four or five of you still left out there who haven’t read it, so I’ll make this brief.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the story of Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist behind the rogue financial magazine, Millennium. He is convicted of libeling a captain of industry and he withdraws to let the dust settle and serve his brief prison sentence. During this interregnum he is hired by yet another Swedish financial and industrial magnate to write the family history, which is just a smokescreen for an investigation into the disappearance of the man’s niece some forty years in the past. He falls into an odd partnership with the twenty-something, post-punk, anti-social, computer-savvy, pierced and perpetually crabby Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the you-know-what tattoo.

The Stieg Larsson back story is almost at interesting as his novels. A vehement anti-fascist and anti-right wing campaigner, he lectured extensively on the threat posed by the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden and across Europe. He and his partner were the targets of death threats for years and his sudden death at the age of 50 of a heart attack, not long after he had turned in his trilogy manuscripts, has unleashed the Internet pajama people conspiracy crackpots in full force.

All three of Larsson’s novels have been turned into films, Swedish not American, and have brought even more people to the books. The film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in Canada in early April but I would suggest scarfing down the novels first, then hitting the multiplex for the movie. It always works out better that way.

Me, I’m off to the bookstore to buy the second and third novels. Stay tuned.

Carol Leifer
Villard Books

Stuck at the cottage on a spring day with nothing to read but this collection of essays by comedian Carol Leifer, I was impressed by the blurbs on the cover, front and back.

Tip #1: never be impressed by blurbs on the cover.
On the front, Jerry Seinfeld says, “one of the most uniquely hilarious minds of anyone I’ve ever met”.
On the back, Larry David refers to “this profound, insightful and hilarious book.” Bill Maher calls it “hysterically funny”.
The fact that Jerry Seinfeld is responsible for The Marriage Ref and that Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm jumped the shark last year should have been my tip off.

None of those blurbs is true. The only really funny line in the book was used as the title.

Don’t waste your money.

Patti Smith
Ecco
An Imprint of HarperCollins

Back in the late Eighties, when I was working in private radio, I had a chance to do a phone interview with Patti Smith.
I hate phone interviews.  You can never establish the same kind of personal connection with your guest that you can when you’re sitting face-to-face. 
But this one was worse than most. 
Patti Smith had just released an album called Dream of Life and she was doing the obligatory round of interviews with rock stations to promote it.  It was evident from the sound of her voice that she had already done plenty and most, if not all of them, were stinkers.  I prided myself on the ability to do decent and even, sometimes, exceptional interviews but I was so intimidated by her silence on the other end of the line that I flailed around like a gaffed flounder.  It was not a career high point.
But some twenty-odd years later – just last week in fact – I discovered that it probably wasn’t my disjointed questioning that made her taciturn, it was probably what she was going through personally at the time.
Just Kids is Patti Smith’s memoir of the years between 1967 and 1979, with a brief endnote in which she talks about Robert Mapplethorpe’s death of AIDS in 1989. The book is both Smith’s autobiography and a biography of Mapplethorpe, the controversial photographer whose life was inextricably entwined with hers.  Of his death she writes, “The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time.  Robert dying; creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.” 
Who would want to do telephone interviews about a record after that, I ask you?
Smith’s debut album, Horses, was released in 1975 and threw her immediately into the glare of the rock spotlight.  She was a pre-punk diva, soul poet, iconoclast who struck us all as humourless and angry. True, she has certainly given her life to her art, but it comes as something of a surprise to discover that she’s also got a pretty decent sense of the comic.
Just Kids is a very well written, thoughtful and highly personal chronicle of Smith’s hard scrabble beginnings in New York.  She left the comfort of her New Jersey family with romantic dreams of the artistic life of the big city.  “My parents had raised us in an atmosphere of religious dialogue, of compassion, of civil rights but the general feel of rural South Jersey was hardly pro-artist.”
She lived for months on the streets of New York, sleeping in doorways and on park benches, and fortuitously meeting the beautiful young man who would become her lover, her muse and her lifelong soulmate, Robert Mapplethorpe.  The book is rich with colour and detail, following the couple as they move from the horror of the junkie-infested Allerton Hotel to digs at the legendary Chelsea Hotel and finally to places of their own.
The cast of characters is large and vivid: Harry Smith, compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music, Janis Joplin (was Smith really the first one to call her ‘Pearl”?), Sam Shepard, Jim Carroll, William Burroughs, Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, the stable of Warhol’s Factory entourage (though Andy himself only appears off-stage) and many more.  There is a funny vignette about Allen Ginsberg trying to pick her up in an automat by buying her a sandwich and then discovering that she’s a girl and not a good-looking boy.
But the core of Just Kids is Smith’s complex relationship with Mapplethorpe, as she pursues her poetic inclinations and he gradually accepts, then revels in, his homosexuality as he pursues fame and glory.  Smith seems curiously unimpressed with her own talent.  She documents her almost accidental ascent to stardom in a detached manner but is passionate about what Mapplethorpe is trying to accomplish.  When she makes a breakthrough poetry reading (with Lenny Kaye on guitar, their first collaboration) at St. Mark’s Church and the offers come pouring in, she is guilt-stricken.  “It came, I felt, too easy.  Nothing had come to Robert so easily.  Or for the poets I had embraced.  I decided to back off.”
The lives of Smith and Mapplethorpe diverged in the late Seventies.  She became a successful rock star, married Fred Sonic Smith of MC5, moved to Detroit and raised two children.  He fell into a long-term relationship with his patron, Sam Wagstaff, and became the enfant terrible of the art world that he always wanted to be.
But time and distance did not extinguish the connection between them and the final pages of Just Kids stand as an eloquent definition of true friendship. 

A Swingin’ Showbiz Saga
Paul Shaffer
Flying Dolphin Press

Okay, I know what you’re thinking.  I had the same thought as soon as I laid down my money for this memoir. 
“What the hell are you doing?!”
But wait, I say.
True, Paul Shaffer -that Thunder Bay-born, Jewish Doc Severinson (was Doc Jewish?) - seems like the epitome of the unctuous, insincere, Vegas lounge-meister. And, in a way, he is.  But this doesn’t detract from some great show biz stories.
Shaffer is savvy enough (or perhaps it’s his co-writer, David Ritz) not to recount his life in chronological order.  Instead, he begins with a short chapter relating all of his encounters with Bob Dylan.  There’s not a lot there, frankly, and I recall saying to my wife that if I decided to save the three-plus hours I was spending going to see ‘Avatar’ that day, I could probably finish the book before supper.
Yet by the time I was fifty or sixty pages into it I realized I was enjoying it immensely.
Shaffer, despite – or perhaps because of – his upbringing in Thunder Bay in the Fifties, has managed to capture the zeitgeist of the glitzy, lounge acts that he saw in Las Vegas and Miami Beach when his parents took him there as a boy.  He makes no apologies for the real loves of his life:  Jerry Lewis, Don Ho, Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Keely Smith, Peggy Lee, Wayne Newton…the list is an almost endless roster of Vegas kitsch. 
His parents, Bernie and Shirley Shaffer, were the parents many of us would have liked to have had in that era: swinging (in the musical sense), hip, and not averse to supporting their son’s musical predilections.
How many kids could attest to going to a late-night, after-hours, Vegas show for the glitterati showcasing a nearly nude Juliet Prowse?  None that I can think of.
Shaffer manages to parse out interesting glimpses of some of the best-known personalities in the music world without burning any bridges.  He has things to say about Phil Spector, John Belushi, Miles Davis, James Brown and a host of others.  He recounts his enduring friendships with Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Harry Shearer and David Letterman.  Though the interesting gap in the book is any sort of insight into his actual relationship with Letterman.  The closest he comes is in this passage, when he was hired to front Letterman’s in-house band on the late night NBC show:

‘When I walked in, Dave gave me a big smile.  He couldn’t have been more relaxed – dressed in gray T-shirt, jeans, and Adidas wrestling shoes.
“Glad to see you, Paul,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”
He made me feel welcome.  That, of course, is his great gift.  He said simply, “What are your ideas about a band?”’

Riveting stuff.
But when he’s not glossing over some significant events ((“I regret all the tragedy that has surrounded Phil (Spector) in recent years.  We’re not as in touch, but the mad genius will always be my friend.”)), he’s actually capable of telling some very revealing stories. 
My favorite involves the 1989 “reunion” on the Letterman show of Sonny and Cher.  You can check it out on YouTube.  Shaffer describes Cher doing “a great panel” with Letterman, then Sonny joined them and Letterman, “sensing the mood”, asked if they would sing together.  Writes Shaffer, “The tremendous energy released by Dave’s request was too much for Cher to resist.  She and Sonny got up and performed their immortal hit (‘I Got You, Babe’).  When he sang, ‘Put your little hand in mine’, he actually grabbed her hand.  As Doc Pomus would say, it was a ‘Magic Moment.’  As LaVerne Baker would say, ‘I Cried a Tear’.”
Okay, so if you watch the performance on YouTube you can clearly witness the fact that the two of them are singing the lyrics from cue cards.  So it wasn’t quite the dramatic, spontaneous moment Shaffer would have us believe.  Even when writing about it decades later, Shaffer can’t seem to bring himself to admit that it was staged sentiment.  They both knew in advance they would be singing together.
Still, the real impact of the anecdote comes when Shaffer describes the scene after the show.  He and his band have to race to the airport to catch a plane to go to a pre-ordained gig.  The limo is not there.  Sonny gives them his and says he’ll catch a lift with Cher.  Shaffer watches as “first Cher got in, then her wardrobe gal, then her makeup artist, then her manager, her agent, then her press agent, then daughter Chastity, and then, finally, squeezing in where there could not have been an inch of extra room, was her former husband, mentor, and producer – the gallant Mr. Sonny Bono.”
Watch the duet on YouTube and tell me that this story is not brutal.
The only real sour note for me in the entire book comes from two anecdotes Shaffer tells about roasts that he was involved with, one for his close pal, Richard Belzer, the other for Chevy Chase.  Suddenly the gracious-if-salivating tone of the narrative turns bright blue.  What likely might be the real nature of some of these folks bleeds through and is, for me at least, highly repugnant.

A Martin Beck Police Mystery
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Vintage Crime

This is the seventh of the ten-book series collectively known as The Story of Crime.  Per Wahloo was a Swedish reporter, playwright and novelist who died in 1975.  His wife, Maj Sjowall is a poet.  Of all the blurbs on the cover extolling the series, the one that jumps out at Canadians is from Michael Ondaatje, who called the books “the first great series of police thrillers”.  And Michael Connelly calls them “one of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedurals ever accomplished.”
I love a good police procedural and this particular book was heavily sold to me by a good friend who said it worked on a number of levels.
This turned out to be partly true. 
The books are set in Stockholm in the late sixties and early seventies so, not only do you have the oddity of reading about cops having to do their jobs in the era of pay phones and typewriters, you also have the strangeness of the events taking place in a country and city which is for most North American readers, totally foreign.
There is also a sub-text to this novel – and evidently the others – having to do with the destruction of Stockholm in the wake of the “urban renewal” movement that was so popular in the sixties and seventies.  The central characters are given to describing their city in scathing terms, like “insane” or “psychotic” and Sjowall and Wahloo flesh out the profile of Stockholm with damning descriptions of water pollution and the razing of heritage buildings.
The story is pretty basic, in fact, almost too basic.  A former hard-assed police captain is brutally murdered (is there any other way?) and the National Homicide Squad sets out to find the killer, who turns out to be one of their own.  This is giving nothing away, believe me.  The plot is very straightforward, there are no surprises and very little by way of explanation. 
Where the novel catches your attention is through the dynamics of the characters.  Perhaps it would have been better to start with the first novel of the series because at this point, seven books into it, the relationships between the main protagonist - Chief Inspector Martin Beck - and his subordinates - Einar Ronn, Lennart Kollberg, Gunvald Larsson and Fredrik Melander - seem already set in stone and somewhat difficult to decipher.  Each man has his personality quirks and each has his suspicions and dislikes about the others.  If anything, this is highly reminiscent of the British series, “Prime Suspect”, with Helen Mirren.  When violence comes in this world, it comes quickly and is over quickly, leaving a dull, listless, almost hopeless patina over everything.  As Beck thinks to himself: “Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system.”
When “The Abominable Man” came to its sudden end, I found myself unsatisfied.  It felt like I should go back several pages and look for something that I might have missed that would explain the outcome.
Given the high praise lavished on these books I’m inclined to think that the entire series must be read to appreciate its impact.  But I wouldn’t recommend pulling one out of the deck all by itself.

How design can transform your life, and maybe even the world
Featuring the ideas and wisdom of design visionary Bruce Mau.
Warren Berger
The Penguin Press

I read this book because I was preparing for an interview with Bruce Mau, the Sudbury-born designer who has worked with Frank Gehry and others and whose ideas about design form the backbone of Berger’s thesis.
I confess to being a bit put off by the sub-title, especially the word “visionary” which these days is applied like peanut butter to white bread at a Boy Scout camp.
But, holy cow, was I wrong.
Glimmer is the kind of book that will having you turning to strangers on a bus and saying things like, “Listen to this!”
It is part compendium and part illumination. 
The compendium is an unrelenting documentation of the variety and complexity of labour-saving, environment-saving and sometimes life-saving designs that have been created or “re-combined” by a new generation of designers with social consciences.  You discover that UPS redesigned its delivery routes to eliminate wherever possible left-hand turns.  That simple act saved vast amounts of time, gas, gas emissions and money.  You hear how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, designers from all over began work, without being asked or being paid, to design and build houses for the homeless that would be comfortable, affordable and sustainable.  And they did it successfully.
The illumination part of the book has, almost exclusively, to do with Bruce Mau.  If you haven’t heard of Bruce Mau, you need to.
In 1998, Mau wrote what he called his “incomplete manifesto”.  It is all over the Internet and very easy to find.  It is several pages long and aimed at helping creative people free up their minds to envision solutions to problems that plague us all.  It is McLuhanesque in its simplicity.  Here are just a couple of its tenets:

Forget about good – Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

Go deep – The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

Drift – Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

And one of my personal favorites:

Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

I won’t tell you more because that would ruin the pleasure of this fascinating read.  When I finally met Bruce Mau, at one of his two design studios (one in Toronto, the other in Chicago), we ended up shooting a full hour of conversation, which will air this coming summer on Rockburn Presents on CPAC.

Glimmer is perhaps the most optimistic book I have read in years.  If you want to recharge your soul and kick at the darkness ‘til you see daylight, start with this book.

Graham Greene
William Heinemann Ltd.
1958

This is just a short note about this book because I had never read it and when I did, I was in Havana.
I love that it’s described by the author, right under the title, as ‘an entertainment’.  In his opening disclaimer, Greene even refers to it as a ‘fairy-story’.
You can gulp this book down in a day and love every minute of it.  It is Greene’s story of a gormless vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who is recruited by the British Secret Service and who proceeds to invent agents in order to get enough money to pay for his up-scale daughter’s lifestyle.
If you saw Matt Damon in “The Informant” you will recognize just the type of character James Wormold is.  And Greene nails the British bureaucrat to a tee (or tea?).
If, like me, you loved it enough to order the movie version (with Alec Guinness as Wormold), you will also love that the DVD comes as part of the “Martini Movie” series.  Now that’s entertainment.

The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
Michael Chabon
Harper Collins

I traveled to Toronto a while ago to visit a friend and my 19-year-old son, who is going to Ryerson, met me at the train station and he and I and my friend went for a Chinese lunch.  We walked out onto the street when we were done, my buddy and I heading to his place and my son heading back to classes.  Experience told me to hold out my hand to him for a shake goodbye and, to my wonderment, he stepped forward and gave me a hug.  I found myself so moved that I could barely speak.  I suddenly realized that my son was no longer a kid trying to avoid being seen with his dad, he had become a young man, unafraid to show affection.
I was thinking about this little vignette as I read Michael Chabon’s collection of essays, Manhood For Amateurs because in it he has a section entitled, ‘Exercises in Masculine Affection’.  In the five essays in that section, he quite movingly discusses; his attachment to his former father-in-law – an attachment that inevitably had to end when the marriage did; his strong connection to his younger brother; what happens when a woman comes between the friendships of two men; how he tried to instill what his friend, Joe the Lion, referred to as tristeza into his life; and a significant 28th birthday gift from his father.
I should probably mention that I suspect this book appeals to men more than women, and not just because of the title.  It is the journey of an articulate, thoughtful male human being from childhood to fatherhood and middle-age.  Chabon approaches each of his topics – from the dilemma of circumcision to admitting to your kids that you smoked dope to why D.C. Comics Big Barda is a better female super hero than either Super Girl or Wonder Woman – with warmth and humour and understanding.  But there is no question that he views all of these things, the small and the significant, through the eyes of a husband, father and son.
As an aside, there are at least three references to other books that have appeared on this site.  Chabon talks about the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, John Irving’s predilection towards bears and he even makes a reference to the Believer magazine, wherein Nick Hornby wrote his book reviews.
Chabon sets up his essays nicely with a short piece called ‘The Loser’s Club’ in which he, as a young boy, created the Columbia Comic Book Club in an effort to, unsuccessfully, get together with other like-minded nerds.  He writes, “In my heart, to this day, I am always sitting at a big table in a roomful of chairs, behind a pile of errors, lies, and exclamation points, watching an empty doorway.  My story and my stories are all, in one way or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.”
But these essays are nothing of the kind; these essays speak of connection, of human-ness, of love and longing and self-awareness and joy.  As he writes in his last essay: “This is our life happening…and it’s happening right now.”

John Irving
Knopf Canada

John Irving says he always begins writing a novel knowing what the final sentence is going to be.  That’s the way his protagonist in this book, Danny Angel, works as well.  In fact, despite Irving’s protestations in interviews and through the voice of his central character that real people are never as fully realized as those entirely made-up, this is Irving at his most autobiographical.
Last Night in Twisted River is chock-a-block full of familiar Irving images – bears, wrestling, vehicular fellatio, a door in the floor, abortion and, of course, a seminal act of violence (or in this case, four of them) that propels the action of the story.  But, oddly, or at least oddly for me given that I’ve had a hard time with the last few of Irving’s novels, all of these tropes don’t get in the way of a decent and involving yarn.
Last Night in Twisted River begins in a logging camp in the Fifties and ends in a cottage in the dead of winter in 2005.  It tells the story of a cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son, who becomes the famous novelist Danny Angel, and their decades-long flight from a psychopathic lawman, Constable Carl, known as ‘The Cowboy’.  The story careens from the Italian neighbourhoods of Boston, to the rough and tumble logging towns of New Hampshire and Vermont, to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (where, like Irving himself, Danny Angel has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher) to the hills of Colorado and, finally, to Toronto and the Georgian Bay. 
Irving ladles on the detail without hesitation and, at times, you start thinking, ‘Why do I need to know this?  What possible relevance does it have to the story?’  But the cumulative effect is salutary; after awhile you know so much about the derivations and permutations of Dominic’s last name, or the way logs are cut, skidded and processed that you start to appreciate the larger picture, the world that Irving has created.  And the crowd of characters that populate the book suddenly becomes less of an annoyance and more of an asset.  I thought back to Nick Hornby’s piece in The Polysyllabic Spree where he talks about Dickens: “Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes?  Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. If you want to talk about books in terms of back-breaking labour, then maybe we should think about how hard it is to write a lot – long books, teeming with exuberance and energy and life and comedy”. 
While there is not much comedy in this or any of the last few John Irving novels, there certainly is energy and life, plus fear, anxiety and dread.  Danny Angel spends his non-writing life bouncing like a pinball between the aftereffects of his mother’s death and his fear of losing his father and his son.  Irving has made no secret of his own fear of losing a child, something that has never happened to the 67-year-old writer, and his near obsession with writing about it.
Last Night in Twisted River also has its own Greek chorus, in the form of a wild and wooly lumberman named Ketchum, who is Yosemite Sam to Dominic’s tsk-tsking chef.  Ketchum is inextricably bound to the lives of both Dominic and Danny in ways that don’t get thoroughly revealed until near the end of the novel.
And, frankly, by the time I got near the end, I found myself not wanting to leave these characters and their complications.
            So while there may be a little too much of John Irving in Danny Angel – or Daniel Baciagalupo, the name he re-appropriates in his later career – in the mid-section of the novel, the fullness of the characters and the quality of the story-telling overcome the autobiographical flourishes.
            If, like me, you had mostly given up on John Irving somewhere around A Son of the Circus, you might want to reconsider him.  Last Night in Twisted River stands with The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany as one of his best.

Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books

A couple of months back when I began this website exercise (note how I continue to avoid that word), I told the story of going to Woodstock, New York with an old friend to attend one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles but also to go take a look at Big Pink, the house where Dylan and The Band lived while they recorded a whole bunch of seminal Sixties music.  When I announced the trip my wife responded with some comment along the lines of “pathetic old farts” or some such.
Well all it took was about ten pages into Nick Hornby’s new novel for me to begin squirming like a toad on the road.
Juliet, Naked is the story of Duncan, a man obsessed with the music of a musician who has been in seclusion for twenty-two years, his long-suffering partner, Annie – both of whom live in a tiny English seaside town – and Tucker Crowe, the musician in question.
We all know guys like Duncan.  Hell, if Duncan is ten on a scale of ten, I’m probably a seven-point-five or an eight.  I have always been fixated on the music of Bob Dylan and, to a slightly lesser degree, The Band.  I once flew from Ottawa to Seattle just to interview Robbie Robertson.  I knew a guy who spent most of his twenties following Springsteen from concert to concert across North America.
I’ve always suspected that Nick Hornby is a guy like that too.  He nailed the personality profile in High Fidelity and showed us his own musical proclivities in Song Book.
Juliet, Naked quite convincingly tells the story of how this obsessive behavior disrupts the lives of not just the obsessed, but also the women they live with (because this behavior is always from guys), and even the object of the obsession.
This is shown brilliantly in a passage early in the novel when an advance copy of the first Tucker Crowe CD in twenty-two years, Juliet, Naked, is sent to Duncan and Annie decides, since Duncan is not at home, to listen to if first. “She was so stirred up by the act of playing the CD, the drama and the treachery of it, that she forgot to listen to the music…” Annie knows that this is betrayal of the highest order in Duncan’s world; she has heard it before him.  When Duncan finds out he is apoplectic.  “He didn’t want to listen to Juliet, Naked straightaway.  He was still to angry both with Annie and, more obscurely, with the album itself, which seemed to belong more to her than to him.”
Hornby once again details, with spot-on dialogue and realistic situations, the vicissitudes of modern romance; from the neurotic uncertainties implicit in hero-worship to the romantic uncertainties of childless, middle-age women to the emptiness of a life sacrificed on the alter of art. 
Read Juliet, Naked and see how many of your friends, or even yourself, you recognize.

Nick Hornby
Believer Books

This is not exactly a new bit of writing from Nick Hornby – it was published in 2004 – but I got it the same time as Juliet, Naked and I’m glad I did.  The subtitle of this collection of essays from The Believer magazine is “A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle with the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read”.
Hornby would have us believe that The Polysyllabic Spree are “the ninety-nine young and menacingly serene people who run the Believer”.  At one point the Spree take him out for a night on the town, which turns out to be a literary event comprised of readings from all the nominees for the National Book Critic’s Circle Awards.  “They stood and they wept, and they hugged each other, and occasionally they even danced – to the poetry recitals, and some of the more up-tempo biography nominees.”
Therein lays Hornby’s genius, a sentence like that one.  He is a writer that many would describe as ‘accessible’ but I would describe as ‘humane’.  There is a gentle, honest quality to his writing that makes you feel like you’re listening to a funny friend whose opinions you respect.
He begins each of his essays with two lists: books that he bought that month and books that he read that month. Often the two are totally different.  Like many of us, he can’t stop himself from picking up old paperback copies of books he’s intrigued by when on shopping trips for other things.  The result, of course, is an abundance of books and a paucity of time in which to read them.
When Hornby likes a book, or a particular author, he commits whole-heartedly.  “Patrick Hamilton, who died in 1962, is my new best friend”, he writes of the author of Hangover Square (a book that shows up on the reading list of the central character in Juliet, Naked, written five years later).  He discovers, or re-discovers, Dickens and when he’s finished reading David Copperfield he is so bereft that it takes him a couple of months to read fiction again, and when he does he chooses carefully.
But Hornby is no literary snob either and that’s what makes him wonderful.  How can you not admire a man who will quote from Chekhov’s letters at one point and at another write this: “Why hasn’t anyone ever told me that Mystic River is right up there with Presumed Innocent and Red Dragon?  Because I don’t know the right kind of people, that’s why.”
I think everyone should buy this book and read everything Nick Hornby says you should.