Celestin, Ray: Dead Man's Blues: A Novel
Dead Man's Blues is as good, or maybe better, than the first in the series. Author Ray Celestin continues to trace the black diaspora North from New Orleans to Chicago, and uses history effectively (rather than drowning us in fustian).
Louis Armstrong, who was, history attests, on good terms with Al Capone, reappears, and the mobster, too, takes a turn. I'm eager to move on with Celestin and his characters, to a new city, New York City, and a decade further on to the place and time where the next novel is set.
Ames, Jonathan: The Wheel of Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 2)
Happy Doll, having lost his private eye license after his shenanigans in the previous book is now a "security consultant." His new calling takes him to the Pacific Northwest, but there are still lots of good LA moments, including a bit in Marina del Rey where my parents lived for a while. One understands, somewhat in advance of detective Happy Doll, who the villains are in this book, but that doesn't matter. The fun is watching him find out, and then react. I wonder when book 3 will be out.
Ames, Jonathan: A Man Named Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 1)
I'm a sucker for LA noir, so when I heard about Jonathan Ames's Doll series I dove right in. In this, the first of the two Ames has written so far, Doll spends a lot of time close to my old neighborhood, so it was fun to read things like "went up Hillhurst and made a right on Los Feliz." The action is action, and the plots are well-wrought, but the main attraction is the pot-smoking dog-loving detective named Happy Doll. He sometimes uses the name "Hank" in this book, but by book two (spoiler alert) he's decided to own his given name.
The implausible enters the book in how Doll manages to commit the many crimes he does in solving the big crime with few or no repercussions. But in this kind of book one waves that sort of thing away and buckles in for the ride. Also implausible was Doll's beloved dog George (spoiler alert) coming back to life after having been poisoned and presumed dead. But I was willing to accept this, because George is one of the book's most compelling characters.
Erskine, John: The Private Life of Helen of Troy
This odd novel, written mostly in the form of conversations between the characters, was published just five years after American women got the vote. One imagines the "radical" women who made this happen were an object of interest at the time, and perhaps that's why Helen, in Erskine's account, seems more like a modern and progressive (circa 1926) woman, and also why the novel seems to be as much about the mid-1920s as it does about the ancient Greeks, who were surely much too different from us to be slotted into the sort of family drama that Erskine has written. Still, it's an interesting retelling of the story of Helen and those around her.
Hartley, L.P.: Eustace and Hilda: A Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics)
This is a lovely novel (for the three works were collected after initially being published separately) and it is lovely largely for the delicacy with which Hartley gives us the lives of the siblings Eustace and Hilda. One is tempted to call Hartley's delicacy Jamesian, but his prose is never as convoluted. The novel is largely about class, and the difficulty people not born to that estate might have negotiating it (without, sometimes, realizing that they are are having difficulties). This sort of thing can be played as slapstick or tragedy, or even used by a lesser author to convey a "message," but Hartley never employs a cudgel. The upper-class folks, like those from less exalted circles, are nice people doing their best. Hartley is genuinely fond of all his characters: It is refreshing to read a book that has no villains.
Celestin, Ray: The Axeman
A novel about a serial killer in which Louis Armstrong is a character seemed a bit too precious. I finally succumbed, though, when I learned that the fourth novel in the quartet of which this is the first is set in Los Angeles, and is reputed to be a tour de force. The good news is that Satchmo (still "Lil Lewis" in this novel) is a minor, albeit well-done, character who doesn't distract from the other denizens of the novel's New Orleans, the well-executed plot, or the exquisite prose of author Ray Celestin. I'm looking forward to continuing through the quartet, each book of which takes place in a different city, each a stop in the migrations of the African diaspora in North America.
Adair, Gilbert: A Closed Book
I nearly closed this book (ahem) halfway through, but just a page or two after the halfway point the penny dropped. Once I got what Adair was doing he had me. One wishes Hitchcock was still around to make a film of this, though so much takes place on the page it wouldn't have been an easy translation.It's the story of a writer who is not only blind but eyeless and the amanuensis he hires to help him complete what he believes will be his last book. But maybe the helper is not only there to help. And maybe he's not the only one recording the writer's words.
- Twight, Mark F.: Poison: Sermons on Suffering
I hate self-help books, and really, the whole concept of "self-help" as it seems generally to be understood, so I could try to finesse this by calling Poison a book of essays or philosophy. I wouldn't be lying if I did, but Twight's pieces *are* essays that are intended to help people live better lives, so yeah, self-help, I guess. What enabled me to make my way through more than 400 pages of these sermons? First, I admire the author, Mark Twight, a world-renowned climber. I respect what he did in the mountains, which was, as he boils it down, trying to see how light he could go. He also explored how long he—and by extension, we—could go, climbing continuously for 24, then 40, then 60 hours, breaking records and nabbing first ascents along the way. I find this sort of achievement easier to admire than the qualifications that self-help gurus usually boast (gave a TedX talk, got a YouTube Creator award . . . ). Then there's the fact that Twight is not about offering easy answers—all you have to do is: get rid of a bunch of stuff, quit eating gluten, sit on a cushion and space out for fifteen minutes a day, journal every morning . . . . He says stuff like: "Sometimes I get sick. / Mostly other people make me sick. / They don't give me germs. / They give me poison. / They poison me with their excuses.Their laziness. They want the result without the work. / They believe their desire can change the nature of things. / Just because they want it. / Suddenly." Those last three lines sound a lot like the advise of a lot self-help hucksters, all those Deepak Chopraites and believers in "The Secret." I like that Twight is as disgusted with that sort of guff as I am. I like the way that Twight tells his truths, too: "Style is the man himself," as some Frenchman said. I may have mentioned in my review of Twight's Kiss or Kill that he's very much school of Bukowski as filtered through punk rock (the soundtrack for many of his climbs). Finally, though Twight is much more goal-driven than me, and his goals are not mine, his advice is sensible and bracing in its harshness: Not clean your room or—Lord pickle and preserve me—make your bed, but push yourself harder than you have ever pushed yourself, harder than you ever believed you could push yourself. That's inspiring and maybe helpful advice.
Johnson, Joyce: Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
This is a much better book about the Beat milieu than On the Road. I'm glad that Johnson never took Kerouac's advice that she shouldn't revise, and that her model as a writer was James (Henry) and not Jack. The memoir does lag a bit when she's recounting the year-and-a-half or so that she was involved with Kerouac. That's how profoundly uninteresting he is. That she never really calls him out for being the shit that he was says a lot for her maturity and balance. It may also speak to Kerouac's charisma: he does seem to have charmed a lot of people.
Kerouac, Jack: On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics)
The great mystery is why this mediocre book is so widely loved by so many people who should know better. The prose, for all Kerouac's blathering on about his technique, or lack thereof, is profoundly uninteresting. (It's telling that fans who quote from this book always quote the same line: "The only people that interest me . . . .") The "minor characters" as Joyce Johnson in her much better book of that title might have called them—women, Mexicans, Blacks, country people—are patronized, and for all the furious trips back and forth across the country, the novel is strangely static. A friend recently remarked that it really belongs in the YA section, but even there it would be outclassed. Beat poetry > Beat prose.
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by Robert S. Lopez:
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