Google Search

Thursday, December 2, 2010

"Lord of Misrule," "The Sleepwalkers," more


ArcaMax Publishing, Inc.
Wine and Dine Video
How To Make Fruit Spring Rolls
Play Now!


Alert. Email is incomplete due to blocked images. Add to safe sender list now.
Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday December 2, 2010
    LORD OF MISRULE
    Jaimy Gordon
    McPherson
    ISBN 978-0451225726
    294 pages
    $25

    Reviewed by Jane Smiley
    There are racetracks and there are racetracks, and in all eras, they are worlds apart from the world most of us live in. The racetrack in Jaimy Gordon's "Lord of Misrule" is a half-mile oval only tangentially in the same game as Churchill Downs or Santa Anita, but even though Bing Crosby or Penny Chenery may have never been to a place like Gordon's fictional Indian Mound Downs, chances are some horses they knew would recognize it. Indian Mound Downs is the last stop and the lowliest venue; the horses who run there are expected to be drugged and lame, while their trainers are expected to be crooked. All forms of cheating and violence against people and animals are so routine that anything unusual, like a horse with talent, sparks fear.
    Into this world comes an innocent, Maggie Koderer, girlfriend of Tommy Hansel, a peripatetic trainer who has been sent to Indian Mound with a string of possibly superior horses to win some purse money and get some experience. Maggie and Tommy are young and good-looking, and the old groom, Medicine Ed, expects that they will come to grief. The only question is how.
    I first encountered the material in this novel in 1994, when I was judging for "Best American Short Stories" (1995). The judging was blind, but I remember being struck by how the easy, colloquial tone of "A Night's Work" (first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review) unfolded the dramatic action. Gordon, who was born and raised in Baltimore, has since published a well-regarded novel, "Bogeywoman" (2000), about a teenaged girl who makes trouble at her summer camp by emerging as a lesbian.
    That novel was notable for its narrative panache. As befits a writer who has been pondering her material for at least 15 years, Gordon has completely mastered the language of the racetrack, and formed it into an evocative and idiosyncratic style. "Lord of Misrule," a finalist for Wednesday's National Book Award for fiction, abounds with observations and aphorisms about horses, money and luck. It's replete with the rhythm and wisdom of this way of looking at life, but Gordon has thought so thoroughly about her characters that each voice dips into racetrack lingo in a distinctive way. It is an impressive performance.
    She has an eye for a horse, too. Her four horse characters -- Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter and Lord of Misrule -- are bursting with personality. I wish my favorite were Pelter, the horse with both talent and good sense, but really it's Little Spinoza, son of a great stallion, too neurotic to run a decent race but always tempting owners and riders into thinking he will finally make something of himself and them. "By the time they turned into the paddock," Gordon writes, "Little Spinoza looked offended and suspicious, and after the tattoo man rolled up his lip-naturally he didn't like for anyone he didn't know to poke around his mouth-his eyes opened wide. Wide and round and blank."
    Gordon seems to adhere to my sports rule, which is that there are no unimportant races. Every race in these pages is strangely dramatic, no matter how cheap, and the races she describes are not only cheap, but also corrupt. Maybe the key is that the horses don't know that they are not supposed to try, and so they run themselves to the edge of their capacities just because they've been asked to. The result is that "Lord of Misrule" is a very somber novel, easy to like but hard to take. Maggie Koderer's innocence is there to be destroyed; Tommy Hansel's good looks and nice clothing are a very bad omen. Even Medicine Ed, who has both years of experience and extra powers, is trapped. When the racing is fine and the money is good, still he knows: "The little hairs stand up and wave on the back of Medicine Ed's neck."
    One problem is that Gordon's chosen form, which is to tell her story through several alternating points of view, allows for immediacy but not for perspective. The wisdom these characters offer is limited by the narrowness of their world. They feel doomed, they are doomed, and the novel is their elegy. Whether this is a valid portrait of horse racing is debatable, but as a storytelling strategy it is limited because choices don't matter. Unfortunately, the man making most of the choices, Tommy, is the least known character. He's offstage during crucial scenes, and what he's deciding out there is never fully explored.
    "Lord of Misrule" is such a beautifully written novel that I wish I could say that every element works to perfection; I can't. But for that sense of being steeped in a specific and alien world, it is remarkable.
    Jane Smiley is the author of "Horse Heaven," "Private Life," "A Good Horse," and many other novels and works of nonfiction.

    Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

    Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top
    THE SLEEPWALKERS
    Paul Grossman
    St. Martin's
    ISBN 978-0312601904
    309 pages
    $24.99

    Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
    Talk about a world gone wrong. Weimar Germany in 1932 makes Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles look like a petting zoo. Chandler's Philip Marlowe only had to fend off femme fatales and trigger-happy tough guys. Willi Kraus, the Berlin police detective who stars in Paul Grossman's inventive first mystery, "The Sleepwalkers," has to outwit Nazis -- a job made all the more dicey by the fact that Willi is Jewish. No wonder so many of his friends are urging him to get out of town. But, as an exasperated Willi asks himself: "His family had been here what, since the time of Charlemagne? Why would anyone think he'd just pack up and run? And yet ... if he really did have to leave ... where would he go?"
    Drawing on historical accounts of the period, "The Sleepwalkers" summons up what must have been the surreal quality and anxious self-delusions of everyday life during the last days of the Weimar Republic. Willi is a decorated "Inspektor-Detektiv" in the police force, a middle-age widower whose two young sons are being raised in luxury by their wealthy maternal grandparents. Everything is settled, even a bit boring, in Willi's world, so long as he can shut out the shouts of the Brown Shirts gathering on city streets and the sudden eruptions of anti-Semitism at his sons' school.
    Still, the law is the law. Or is it? Jumping on a city streetcar to reach the scene of a crime quickly, Willi makes the mistake of looking over a fellow passenger's shoulder to read a newspaper headline that asks the frantic political question of the day: "Who Will Lead?" Wrong move:
    "' What the hell do you think you're doing, Jew?' Every head in the streetcar turned. (Willi) looked to see whom the sharp-faced man in a black derby ... was accusing, then got it. ' Get your dirty Jew nose out of my newspaper!'
    "Willi was stunned. He barely even thought of his Jewishness, except on High Holidays. But his dark eyes and curly, dark hair advertised it as clearly as any flashing sign on the Ku-damm. ... He pulled out his Kripo badge. The change on the guy's face was almost worth the insult.
    "'Oh, pardon me, Herr Inspektor-Detektiv.' The man removed his derby and held it trembling. 'I had no idea to whom I was speaking. I meant nothing by it. ...'
    "How German it was to torment the weaker and grovel before the more powerful."
    Throughout "The Sleepwalkers," Willi comes to realize that it's only a matter of months, perhaps days, before his police badge will be as effective as a library card in fending off the thugs coming to power during that fateful autumn in Germany. Before he finds himself transformed into the pursued, rather than the pursuer, he is determined to solve a bizarre crime spree bedeviling Berlin: A number of people have simply vanished, some of them walking away from their lives, apparently under hypnotic suggestion.
    Early in the novel, the corpse of a young woman, one of the disappeared, turns up in the River Spree and, as a nauseated Willi observes, her legs beneath the knee have been mutilated -- amputated and reattached backward -- "as if someone had taken giant pliers and turned the fibula around."
    Though the puzzle of these vanished Berliners is involving, it's the period atmosphere that really distinguishes "The Sleepwalkers." Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Goering and even Hitler make cameo appearances. Every locale Willi visits in Berlin crackles with dread, and many of the landmarks dear to him -- the Gloria Palast, Berlin's most famous movie theater; the grand public square called the Alexanderplatz; the imposing Tietz department store -- mutate overnight into sinister simulacra of their former glorious selves.
    Willi stumbles through this nightmare, struggling to find safe haven for his family while, at the same time, fiercely holding onto his professional identity as a detective. The fact that we know more than he does about the disastrous future looming on the horizon in late 1932 adds an urgency to this story far beyond the mechanics of the mystery plot. Many characters "sleepwalk" through the murky world of this novel; it's a testament to how endearing the industrious Willi is that readers will find themselves wanting to shake him by the shoulders and tell him to wake up before it's too late.
    Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University.

    Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

    Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top
    A VERY SIMPLE CRIME
    Grant Jerkins
    Berkley
    ISBN 978-0425238301
    264 pages
    $14

    Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers for The Washington Post
    I'm not sure which is more interesting, Grant Jerkins' first novel, "A Very Simple Crime," or the ongoing saga of its emergence. Here's the latter, in brief, as the Atlanta-based author described it in an interview with Collin Kelley of Atlanta INtown magazine. Jerkins wrote the novel and submitted it to the Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition. The novel won the fiction prize, and the group submitted it to agents and publishers but found no takers.
    The author took over the quest and the rejections continued: "They all said essentially the same thing: It's too dark. There's no one to root for. We need a rootable character. I grew to hate the word 'rootable.'"
    Then the miracle: The novel reached an agent who liked it and sold it to Berkley, which was previously best known for publishing cozies, i.e., mysteries for readers who don't like violence. "A Very Simple Crime" -- trust me -- is no cozy.
    Good news and bad news followed. Screenwriter Nicholas Kazan liked the novel and proceeded to write a screenplay, in collaboration with playwright Terry Curtis Fox. Kazan sent the screenplay to director Barbet Schroeder, with whom he'd worked on the 1990 film "Reversal of Fortune" (both men were nominated for Academy Awards). Schroeder agreed to direct but thus far he has not found the money needed to proceed, perhaps because Jerkins' story is a good deal darker than even "Reversal of Fortune."
    Just how unrootable is this novel? Well, the publisher calls it "dark, warped, and at times graphic" -- all true -- and advance readers have added "nasty" and "chilling." The novel is at best Gothic and is obsessed with madness, violence, sadism and revenge. The story centers on one gloriously dysfunctional family, the Lees of Atlanta: sinister Adam, who narrates much of the novel; his troubled wife, Rachel; his mentally disabled son, Arthur; and his brother, Monty, a lawyer whom Adam credits with teaching him, as a child, about "degradation, cruelty, and spite."
    We learn at the outset that Adam is on trial for murdering his wife and that his brother is representing him. We return to the couple's courtship and marriage and in time learn whether Adam was in fact the killer or if the killer was his son or his brother, both of whom come under suspicion.
    Adam, in his narration, does not hide the essential coldness of his nature. He says of his courtship of Rachel, "Her love for me, from the very beginning, was fanatical. ... Can I admit it now? Can I acknowledge that on some level, even then, I was attracted to her mental illness? ... Darkness is drawn to darkness." When Adam looks admiringly at a shopgirl, Rachel screams, rages, tears out her hair until her scalp bleeds. Adam rises to a senior executive job in his father-in-law's financial-services firm. Arthur is born and proves to have serious problems: "And when he reached age fourteen, we had the perfect five-year-old." Only after Albert smashes his mother's skull with a crystal ashtray is he institutionalized. Only after he kills his roommate there is he sent to a more punitive institution where he is kept semiconscious by powerful drugs. (The author, be it noted, works as an advocate of adults with developmental disabilities.)
    Rachel's father dies and leaves her $40 million. She grows more unstable, drinks excessively and almost never leaves home. Adam considers divorce. Visiting his son, he finds a young nurse gratifying the boy sexually -- it relaxes him, she explains. Adam begins an affair with the nurse, Violet. When Arthur comes home for a weekend visit, Adam takes Violet to an isolated cabin where: "I commit unspeakable acts." Afterward, "she crawls to a cold dirty corner and weeps quietly."
    Returning home, Adam finds his wife dead. Poor troubled, drugged-out Arthur ("this lumbering giant") seems to have killed her -- but this, of course, is Adam's version of events. Here, a quarter of the way into the novel, an embittered assistant prosecutor named Leo Hewitt enters the story. He has his own problems, having bungled a major murder case and almost lost his job. He decides that Adam killed Rachel, not Arthur. ("I don't think Junior iced Mom.") He persuades his superiors to bring Adam to trial. The novel becomes a legal thriller, with various surprises, as we try to puzzle out who did in fact ice Mom, but the legal battles are never as compelling as the horrific family portrait that begins the tale.
    If you're looking for people to like or a hero to root for, you won't find them here. These are unattractive individuals who do terrible things to one another. But the story is well told and you have to admire the purity of Jerkins' writing: He's determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.

    Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

    Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top


    Recent Stories
    Small Arrow   AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN: Volume 1
    Small Arrow   THREE MEMOIRS BY WOMEN
    Small Arrow   AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance -- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
    Small Arrow   LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE
    Small Arrow   KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals





    As Seen On TV Stem Cell Therapy - The secret to rejuvenating aging skin. - Click here for details...
    Quick Clicks
    Free Rachael Ray 14-Piece Cookware Set
    URGENT: Just Add PayPal Info To Collect Your Payments Now!
    Can Anyone Win The Lottery? They may with "The Lottery Black Book"


    Copyright © 2009 ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.