Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie

Tom Selleck, back in the day, was a babe. No one's going to argue that point. In the early 80's, he did for hairy chests and moustaches what vintage Bruce Willis did for receding hairlines and lipless smirks. But while most of those traits continued to echo as pseudo-sexy through pop culture from that point forward (and continued to echo through my personal life as I aged and started getting involved with men lacking lips and a full head of hair), the moustache remains a signifier of days-gone-by, porn stars, and gay men.

Jennifer Crusie's book, Manhunting, a recent reissue first published in 1993, offers an affable love interest in Jake Templeton, a man who is refreshingly low-key compared to heroine Kate Svenson's high-anxiety superficiality. He's a man's man, at least at first; a lawnmowing, beer-swilling, afternoon-napping hunk of a man with one fatal flaw. He's got a moustache. A big fuzzy Wyatt Earp-sized one. And somehow, through all of her hemming and hawing about whether or not Jake is her "type," Kate never seems to weigh that in the balance. And she weighs just about everything else. Odd.

Thrice engaged but finicky Kate is a daughter of a tycoon, set to inherit the whole kit and kaboodle of his empire. But her biological-- or certainly her marital-- clock is a-ticking. Challenged by her best friend to make a plan to find a man, she books a trip to a rustic-upscale Kentucky golf lodge that sounds more like Club Med (luaus and karaoke) than your usual staid corporate resort. Mr. Kate needs to be rich, handsome, liberated, ambitious, well-coiffed-- everything Jake, the groundskeeper of the Cabin Resort, is not.

Of course, in the long run, Jake isn't who he seems to be. Ambition takes a back seat to love. Priorities are reorganized and people meet each other halfway. It wouldn't be a romance novel, otherwise.

Crusie is always good for a laugh or two. Her fast-paced and witty prose allows you to zip through her books at a satisfying rate. I've taken a few classes from her, and she's a super-tough cookie. And most of her heroines are super-tough cookies too. Kate, not so much. Min Dobbs of Bet Me or Tilda Goodnight of Faking It are much more compelling characters than Kate Svenson.

In the introduction to this reissue (which begins memorably: "Fifteen years ago, I decided to write a romance novel. I was twelve. Okay, I was forty-one, but I was young at heart. ") Crusie expresses her sentimental love for the book; it clearly tickles her. But she also identifies the book as flawed. And it is. But it surfs by so quickly that you hardly notice. Although it's impossible not to notice the prairie dog under Jake's nose-- gives me the willies, it does.

Note: Crusie has a fantastic website and a strong fan base. You can visit both here.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

The "what the hell happened?" ending of Shutter Island is as thuddingly fantastic as the "what the heck was that?" ending of Bad Monkeys was terrible. This thrilling, terrifying book kept me on edge and confused (in a good way) from beginning to end.

Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, opens the book with a mystery and then plunges us back in time nearly forty years and begins again with a second mystery. Around eighty pages into this book, I was so hooked that I told Roommate: "This ought to be a series-- Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are so well-drawn." He just gave me a look and said, "Wait."

Wait, indeed.

Primarily set on a island in Boston Harbor, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Shutter Island takes place during a 1954 hurricane. Maybe. New partners, Daniels and Aule, US Marshalls, are called in to help find an escaped female inmate who has been hospitalized after murdering her four children. Maybe. Once on the island, trapped by the incoming storm, they're confronted by resistant faculty, the possibility of unethical practices, and a deeper, more personal mystery for Daniels. Sort of.

This cinematic novel is, appropriately enough, is in pre-production for a movie release in 2009. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie will reportedly star Leo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels (Leo seems too young for the part, to me) and Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule. Michelle Williams, the mother of the late Heath Ledger's child Mathilda, is slated to star as Teddy's wife. Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson have also been cast. (The movie name has reportedly just been changed to Ashecliffe).

I haven't read any of Lehane's other novels, but they're heading for my bullpen right now. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Lehane's keynote reading for Eckerd College's "Writers in Paradise" Workshop in St. Petersberg, Florida. He read a chapter from his upcoming historical fiction A Given Day about the 1919 Boston Police strike. Absolutely gripping stuff and he's a gifted, engaging reader. (And, I'm not too proud to say, easy on the ol' peepers.) This may be a book I buy in hardcover.

Shutter Island wins the prize for the best book I've read in the past few months. I've read a bunch of clunkers, I'm afraid. Yes, The Road may be the "best" book that I've read lately, but it left me feeling so thoroughly roughed-up that I can't classify it as a "good read." Important, yes. Good, not so much.

Lou's been blurbed

Lordy that sounds so dirty.

A quote from my review of Jack Getze's Big Numbers has made its way on Getze's website. Tee hee.

I wasn't aware of this until I saw Jack this past weekend. He was talking about good blurbs and he said, "I love this one: 'Indiana Jones has his whip and Luke Skywalker has his light saber, but for Austin Carr...the 'full-boat Carr grin' is his weapon of choice.' I use it in all my promotional material."

Lou laughed like a goofball and said, "Oh yeah, that's a good one."

It was that at that point that Jack said: "Yeah, you wrote it."

I do not know who this Melissa person is.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

As I mentioned in my post about Bad Monkeys, I hereby announce that I will not read any more books that are compared to Catcher in the Rye. But, at least I got the allusion when it came to Bad Monkeys; there was a little Holden Caufield in Jane Charlotte, a subconscious desire to catch the little kids before they tumbled off the cliff.

There is no such good will in Lee Fiora. She's a teenaged loner and misanthrope without the bad-ass sex appeal that might normally go along with that sort of "outsider" status. Lee's just not a particularly good kid at all. She's a mediocre student from South Bend, Indiana, who applied to New England prep schools in order circumvent the lower-middle class banal existence of her family (who come across as far cooler and more likable than she ever does, despite the fact that she's perpetually embarrassed by them). She ends up at the New England blue blood boarding school Ault as a "scholarship kid." She never really fits in. Never. The book spans 416 tedious pages and her four years of high school and Lee doesn't change. She doesn't grow-- or doesn't grow much. And worst of all, nothing happens. Seriously. Nothing of note happens. A suicide attempt by a friend. Loss of virginity to a jerk-off. Opportunities missed and ignored. Friends made and alienated. Family insulted. That's the plot, folks.

But Lou, you may be saying, Lee's a teenager. All teenagers are shits.

Herein may have lain the problem for me: I work with teens every day (and no, they are not all shits) and this "window onto a teen's life" bored me senseless. I have front row seats to teens' lives every day. And they grow and change and things happen to them beyond the routine things that happened to Lee. I was also a scholarship kid at a tony New England prep school (although it was a day school). I wasn't as much of an outsider as Lee, but I was definitely in the "unpopular" clique. And shit happened to me too. And I changed and grew during the course of my four years there. At the end of the book (I don't consider this a spoiler) when she nearly flunks out her senior year for giving up on her math exam, I couldn't believe that she was the exact same train wreck that she was when she first came to Ault.

To say this book was hyped is understatement. Sittenfeld has been compared to Salinger, Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion, Carson McCullers, Melissa Bank, Wally Lamb, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolf, Judy Blume. The list makes the mind whirl. The book was well written, yes. But a classic? Innovative? Fresh? No.

My burning question: Why wasn't this YA? It is, indeed, a far sight better than the Gossip Girls crap my kids are reading these days.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Jonathan Ames of the New York Times Book Review called this: "something of a science fiction Catcher in the Rye" and maybe my problems with the genius author Matt Ruff's latest book starts there. (Maybe henceforth I should avoid all books that are compared to Salinger's classic, as I'm about to review and likewise grumble about Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld which was similarly lauded).

Ruff's Fool on the Hill may be my favorite book of all time. Let me qualify that: there are books that I adore that are "better" books, classics or more likely to become classics. But no book speaks to my sensibilities as a reader more than Ruff's debut novel, Fool. It's magical. It's hilarious. And it's superbly written. Oozes charm. It's like a better-written (sorry mega-fans) Douglas Adams' book only rooted in fantasy rather than sci-fi. In my opinion, though, Ruff's subsequent three books have been increasingly disappointing, and Bad Monkeys, although well-reviewed and prize-winning (2008 PBNA and 2008 Alex winner), felt a little insulting.

This sci-fi thriller mystery is told during a series of therapy sessions while Jane Charlotte is locked up in the Las Vegas County Jail. It traces her journey from her troubled youth to her recruitment and subsequent (maybe) betrayal by the "Bad Monkeys," a code name for a department of a top-secret organization bent on leveling out the playing field between good and evil. Is Jane sane? Is she a mercenary who murders with a gun whose "ammunition" is meant to mimic death by natural causes? Is she absolutely out of her gourd? How could a lunatic craft such a detailed and elaborate life fiction? Why does so little of her story check out? All these questions are presented to Dr Vale, her psychotherapist. But are the answered satisfactorily by the end?

The end. Hmph. The most common complaint on the book's Amazon reviews site (I'm a curmudgeon clearly, the book is averaging 4-stars) is the end. And I admit, while I was disappointed in the whole book, it was the end that made me nuts. I could handle the Shutter Island/Life of Pi level "what's really going on here" type questions. In fact, I love books that leave you wondering. But Monkeys dumps you in the middle of that quandary right away and instead of leaving us wondering, it wrapped things up in, what was in my mind, a ludicrous and unpredictable (in a bad way) way.

It's easier to be disappointed by a writer that you love than a writer you're ambivalent about. One of the things that really burned my buns is that the book is chock-full of the Ruff-ness that I love; the ludicrously clever ideas, the real-as-life dialogue, the Big Thoughts tossed around so casually. But the plot, for me, just didn't hold up.

Read Fool on the Hill instead. I do, about once every two or three years.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I've been meaning to get a little McCarthy under my belt for years, but it's hard to get psyched up to read books that I know are dark and violent. When No Country for Old Men came out as a movie by the Coen brothers a couple months ago, I pulled The Road-- the book that seems to be most highly recommended by my friends-- off the shelf and put it in the bullpen.

Ooof. It seems like the only way to properly describe the effect that this book had on me is to make unintelligible, grunty, despairing sounds. Oooof. Uuhhh. Shhhh. Ohhhhh. Insert long, deep, desperate sigh here.

I can't remember the last time I was so rattled by a book. At first I had to read it in small doses because of weight of every single page. This stilted progress is problematic as the book is written in teeny tiny scenes, each just a few paragraphs, sometimes a few words, and each as relatively non-descript as the next. McCarthy uses this jarring, indistinct form to mirror the daily monotony and lack of hope of the two (and practically only) characters, the man and the boy. These characters are unnamed, of course, because why would names matter in a post-apocolyptic America? They are also relatively characterless and historyless. Likewise (semi-spoiler here) we never find out what has destroyed nearly all of humanity save a few rogue bands of murderous survivors and the even fewer lone wanderers and has scorched the earth so much that dead bodies, at times, are seared to the blacktop of highways, mummified and twisted in pain.

I read the last chunk of the book in a single sitting in Starbucks. Huge mistake. Unwilling to sob in public as I turned the last few pages, I swallowed my despair and ended up haunted by it for days. Don't take that comment lightly. Quite literally, I went home, made myself comfort food, and then curled on the couch, despondant, for the rest of the evening. Simply revisiting the book right now has hurled me into a funk.

The book is more prose poetry than fiction. There are few writers who use verbs more vividly:

"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.
Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over
the blacktop... Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the
ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his
warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

Frankly, I don't know what to do with a book like this. A book about a boy of 6 or 7 who knows how to shoot himself in the mouth if he is taken captive by the murderous others. A book about an earth so destroyed that nothing-- not flora nor fauna-- survives. A book that in my opinion (in contrast to the opinions of many reviewers) ends on a note that is thoroughly devoid of even a sliver of hope-- not just for the characters, but for humanity as a whole. I can't not recommend this book. It's exquisite. But, seriously, have either a bottle of Jack Daniels and a whole lot of hangover time or the collected works of Monty Python available for you after you've finished.