Uncorrected Personality Traits

Summer's here, and the TV's off, and so:

Dan Simmons - Drood. I'd been plugging away at this book, some 770 pages plus, since March. I took several breaks, as I snuck in some other, shorter books and spent some time righting wrongs along the Rio Bravo. Drood is a fictionalized rendering of the last five years of Charles Dicken's life, with a lot of fun Victoriana and a supernatural/horror vibe. The book is narrated by (and, as with The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, truly "about") Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone. There's a boldness in the book, in that Simmons has the moxie to make up stories about an actual great 19th century writer in the voice of a near-great 19th century-writer, playing with both the historical record and the fictional tropes of the modern horror novel and the 19th century social novel. There's a lot to admire in Simmon's use of the manners of the period, in which speakers hide their envy and suspicions and pettiness behind a mask of jovial niceties. I do sort of wish that Simmons had let himself be a little bit freer with the historical record -- there are times when he as author draws the reader to the edge of suspecting Charles Dickens, author of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, of mass murder, only to quickly draw away again. (Similarly, the supernatural aspects of the novel are mostly explained away and excised at the book's end, and one feels that 770 is a long way to go for an ending that more or less boils down to "It was all a dream, a vivid and horrible dream.") Simmons does, though, turn Wilkie Collins into a more fascinating persona than I would have imagined back during Brit Lit coursework. At one point in the reading of this book, I was on the cusp of being led to the works of Dickens and Collins, particularly The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Pickwick Papers and The Lady in White. Either sadly or not, that impulse ultimately passed, somewhat in the manner of a bit of undigested beef.

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Victor LaValle -- Big Machine. This has been on my "To Read" list for quite a while, as it begins with the unlikely premise of a scholarly society of African-Americans living in secret in northern Vermont. LaValle's very funny, and very weird -- things get stranger and stranger as the book goes on. There is an absolutely engaging backstory regarding the narrator's upbringing in a religious cult, itself worth the cost of admission. (The founders of the cult rewrite the Bible, recasting its character and place names with American/African-American equivalents, such that Noah parts the Mississippi, etc. One finds oneself wishing that Bible actually existed.) LaValle, who cops to having been a "weird black kid" with heroes including Fishbone and Phil Lynott in his end-of-book acknowledgements, is included as one of the "20 More Under 40" by the Millions website.

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Dan Chaon -- Await Your Reply. As with LaValle's novel, the storyline of Await Your Reply is probably better discovered than reported. Suffice to say, it's a page-turner. I would call it the ultimate in beach reads, except that I read it mostly on front porches or aside swimming pools and I'm therefore not qualified to suggest how it might hold up atop sand. I knew nothing going into this book, had no expectations, and suggest you enter into it the same way.

I'm sure someone somewhere has written a good long essay on the prevalence of orphans in fiction (and in Disney movies), and I hope that essay is of recent enough vintage to consider AYR within its focus.

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Charles Burns -- Black Hole. I've been waiting to read this for awhile, but scared off by the price of a hardcover graphic novel vs. time invested in reading said graphic novel. This is a weird economic argument, I know, and particularly weird given other things I've chosen to spend money on, but for whatever reason I wasn't willing to buy this book for its $29.95 list price because I felt I would burn through its 352 pages in about an hour of reading time. Thankfully, I came across it in the library, and so I was able to read this at state expense. Thanks, taxpayers!

Burns draws wondrously creepy panels, and the story he tells of a body-morphing sexually transmitted disease spreading among the teenagers of the Pacific Northwest in the 1970's is likewise wondrously creepy. It also turns in unexpected ways, playing off ones expectations of high school roles and stereotypical teenage narratives. The good girl is not named queen of the prom in the end, and the well-intentioned stoner nerd does not get his plucky reward.

As someone who spent quite a bit of his adolescence drinking in either the nearby woods or in the vacant lot / treacherously muddy drop-off / patch of sand known to us as "B.A. Beach" just up on Lake Drive or in the BMX dirt trails next to the train tracks above the Milwaukee River and behind the Open Pantry, the gritty locales of Black Hole brought back very visceral memories for me, and Burns exactly translates to the page what Neko Case calls "That Teenage Feeling" of crushes and first kisses.