What I’m Reading – Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m Reading: “The Descendants” (Repost)

(Author’s Note: I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I’m reposting this essay about one of my favorite modern novels. Enjoy…!)

Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.

Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.

So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.

What I’m Reading: “Saint Jack” (Repost)

Author’s Note: I’ve be rereading Saint Jack by Paul Theroux this spring. Again. Every time I read it, I feel like my own writing improves. Maybe it’s my imagination.

Anyway, I thought I’d repost this essay about it. Enjoy…!

Novice writers sometimes ask about the difference between “literary” fiction and “commercial” fiction, and so-called learned people often answer something like this: “Commercial fiction is about plot; literary fiction is about character.”

But what any real student of literary fiction knows is that all novels—all good novels, at least—have a plot. That is, they have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some element of that story compels the protagonist (and, thus, the reader) through each phase. A short story without a plot isn’t a short story; it’s a poem. And a novel without a plot is a very long poem, the only real difference being a lack of fixed line-breaks.

No, what people really mean when they talk about literary fiction being “plotless” is that the plot, while discernable, is usually internal in nature. This lies in direct opposition to popular novels. Plots of popular novels are often extrinsic, with threats and goals that are externalized and easy to understand. Plots of literary fiction are intrinsic, private to the hidden thoughts, fears, and desires of the main character. Or, put another way, literary fiction often makes use of a plot that revolves around a symbol—something crucial to the hero for reasons that even they might not understand.

Horror and suspense novels have the most obvious and extrinsic plots: Escape the Monster; Kill the Monster; Get the Girl (or Boy); Live to Tell About It. The degree to which the writer of such fiction can make the internal life of the hero relevant to this plot might define the quality of the work, its “literary merit,” but it is by no mean an essential aspect of the genre itself.

Great horror novelists like Stephen King can blur the line between genre and literary fiction almost to undetectability, as in King’s most famous and widely admired novel, The Shining. While ostensibly a ghost story, King elevates his novel by rendering the psychological make-up of his main character, Jack, in vivid and poignant detail. Early in the book, the reader learns that Jack is a failed writer and recovering alcoholic—conditions that combine to make him uniquely susceptible to the seductions of evil emanating from the villainous hotel. But only later do we learn that Jack is also an adult victim of child abuse, a “key” to his psychic make-up that makes the second half of the novel all the more tragic.

In this way, King confirms what Flannery O’Connor said about fiction: “A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality.” She also said that every novel is, in a sense, a whodunnit, if only the psychological sense. The whodunnit of The Shining is Jack’s abusive, alcoholic father.

Of course, the best literary fiction writers can blur the line, too, from the opposite direction. I’ve written before of my love of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1973. The story of two world-weary young men who conspire to smuggle a kilo of pure heroin from Viet Nam back to the States, the novel could easily be mistaken for a crime thriller. It’s only the way Stone is able to make the heroin a symbol for both of the men, especially the tragic main character, Ray Hicks, that allows him to wind a deeply affecting literary novel around the spine of that frantic and violent tale.

I’ve been thinking about all this plot business recently, even since I read a very fine novel called Saint Jack by Paul Theroux. Most people classify Theroux as a travel writer—his book The Great Railway Bizarre is often cited as a masterpiece of travel literature—but I know him primarily as a fiction writer, one of the best of the past fifty years. I had admired his books Kowloon Tong and Hotel Honolulu, but for some reason I never read Saint Jack, one of his earlier novels, despite my having been intrigued by it since I was in high school, when I saw Peter Bogdanovich’s wry and mysterious movie adaption starring Ben Gazarra. Part of my failure to actually read the book probably had to do with its relative obscurity; I could never find a copy even in my favorite used book stores. But one of the great boons of the digital era is that the back-catalogues of countless writers are now available, and Saint Jack somehow popped up in my Kindle recommendations for a whopping two bucks! Woo-hoo!

And, man, was that two bucks well spent! Saint Jack presents the reader with one of the most colorful and endearing low-life characters in the history of literature. American ex-pat Jack Flowers is a part-time shipping supplier and full-time pimp working the streets of Singapore. Middle-aged and mildly alcoholic, Jack’s seedy character is redeemed, somewhat, by the kindness with which he treats his affable young prostitutes (his “girls”) and also the hypocritical men (the “fellers”) who seek their services. At least, Jack hopes he is redeemed, fancying himself as a man of importance, a protector to the feckless, lustful, and greedy souls haunting the streets of the city. Cooling his heels in a hotel lobby as he waits for a girl to finish her session with a “feller,” Jack often indulges in…

[t]hat momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural—this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?

Unhappy and adrift, Jack’s only ambition is to somehow strike it rich, though he has no plan for doing so. He once dreamed of opening the classiest whore-house in Singapore, a goal that, we learn, was briefly realized in previous years (with tragic consequences). At the point of the novel’s opening, he seems to have stagnated, both financially and spiritually. Then, a stranger enters his life. Leigh, a British accountant hired by Jack’s boss, is of roughly the same age and disposition as Jack, but his life has taken an opposite path. Completely conventional and straightlaced, Leigh nonetheless takes a liking to Jack, even as he finds himself slightly horrified by the details of the man’s street-wise existence. Jack, for his part, sees Leigh as a kindred spirit, a decent “feller,” albeit one who would never hire one of his “girls”. More importantly, Jack is disturbed by Leigh’s disapproval of him, although he struggles to understand why.

Of course, the reader knows why: Leigh is a symbol. He’s a mirror in which Jack sees himself—or, rather, some better version of himself that might have been. In Leigh, all of Jack’s moral failings are revealed.

In this way, his appearance serves as the instigating action of the novel, the beginnings of the plot in which Jack will be forced to explore his own life history. A more generic kind of novel might have proceeded with a burgeoning friendship between the two men, Jack and Leigh, in which the former would find enrichment and even escape from his louche existence. But in Theroux’s capable hands, the story takes an unexpected turn when, barely one-third into the novel, Leigh dies suddenly from a heart attack while drinking in Jack’s favorite “club,” surrounded by boozy British ex-Pats (whom Jack loathes even as he craves their approval).

I previously alluded to O’Connor’s theory that every good novel is a kind of whodunnit, and Saint Jack is a wonderful case in point. It falls to Jack to call Leigh’s wife and tell her of the man’s passing, and also to arrange the funeral, which Theroux renders as predictably absurd and yet surprisingly moving. At this point, the story becomes a huge, Mobius-loop of a flashback in which we learn much about Jack’s past, including the reason he finds himself in Singapore (he’s a fugitive fleeing drug charges in the States) as well as his brief and glorious stint as a whore-house proprietor. Jack pours all his artistic and self-aggrandizing impulses into this joint, an opulent mini-resort which he grandly bestows with the name Dunroamin—a moniker which vaguely evokes an English estate as well as being a homophone for Jack’s yearning for permanence, a true home. (He’s “done roamin’”; get it?). He also pours in all his money, and for a time Dunroamin is successful. But its very success contains the seeds of Dunroamin’s destruction, as it soon attracts the ire of the local Triads, whose henchmen kidnap Jack and tattoo his arms with Chinese curses. Upon his release, Jack finds Dunroamin burned to the ground, his hopes for a better future having gone up with it.

As it turns out, Jack’s days as a house-pimp are not entirely over. He gets a visit from an old acquaintance named Schuck, a CIA spook who once ran a government-subsidized “hotel” with Jack providing R&R to battle-crazed Vietnam soldiers. If the operation of this hotel represented an even deeper moral failing for Jack than his previous ones, Schuck soon tempts Jack all the way into the abyss, hiring him to film a troublesome American general trysting with a prostitute. Whether or not Jack will go through with the plan is the climax of the novel (and one which I will not reveal here).

Saint Jack is a classic novel by one of our most underrated literary writers. Check it out…

What I’m Reading: “The Elementals”

Last year, I wrote a post about a fine non-fiction book called Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction. I enjoyed the book primarily for the way the author, Grady Hendrix, mixes his obvious love of old, pulpy horror novels with an enormous amount of mockery and snark. Basically, he makes fun of the trends that ran through horror fiction back in the day, as well their emphasis on over-the-top gore and hilariously silly plots.

As I read the book, though, I noticed Hendrix mention one writer whom he does not mock: Michael McDowell. Rather, Hendrix uncharacteristically bestows a bit of praise on this particular novelist, which made me curious as to why I had never heard of the dude.

As it turns out, most people haven’t heard of McDowell, even though he was a very respected paperback fiction writer (Stephen King called him one of the best) as well as a successful screenwriter (he wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare before Christmas, as well as a lot of TV shows). I, especially, should have heard of McDowell considering he was, like me, a Southern writer—from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, not far from where I spent my summers in Pass Christian, Mississippi. He was also a writer who tried to blend a literary sensibility with an appreciation of genre narrative, which is an achievement which I admire.

McDowell died in 1999, a latter casualty of the AIDS epidemic in America, just a few years before reliable HIV treatments came into common use. In the years since, his reputation seems to have grown, steadily if slowly, to the point where he is now considered a forgotten master. I was surprised to find an e-book edition of his most famous novel, The Elementals, on my local library’s Overdrive site, and I immediately checked it out and tore into it.

It’s definitely worth the read. Set in Alabama, it tells the story of a two wealthy, intermarried families: the Savages, with matriarch Marian and her adult son, Dauphin; and the McCrays, with matriarch Big Barbara and her adult children, Luker (who has a thirteen-year-old daughter, India) and Leigh (who is married to Dauphin Savage). At the start of the book, Marian has just died and the rest of the blended family is attending her funeral:

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama. The air conditioning in the small sanctuary sometimes covered the noise of traffic at the intersection outside, but occasionally it did not, and the strident honking of an automobile horn would sound above the organ music like a mutilated stop. The space was dim, damply cool, and stank of refrigerated flowers. Two dozen enormous and very expensive arrangements had been set in converging lines behind the altar. A massive blanket of silver roses lay draped across the light-blue casket, and there were petals scattered over the white satin interior. In the coffin was the body of a woman no more than fifty-five. Her features were squarish and set; the lines that ran from the corners of her mouth to her jaw were deep-plowed. Marian Savage had not been overtaken happily.

Even for a funeral, it’s a very dreary and ominous affair. Yet it gets worse when, at one pre-arranged moment, Dauphin rises and stabs a ritual knife into his dead mother’s chest. Yeah, it’s that kind of book. The fact that McDowell can pull it off and still maintain a high-level of physical and emotional realism—not to mention vivid, sharp writing, as in the passage above—is a testament to his mastery.

The book gets even weirder after the funeral, when the family retreats to their ancestral vacation spot, a tiny barrier island called Beldame, taking with them their Black maid, the long-suffering (and very smart) Odessa. We soon learn that there are three houses on Beldame, yet the family occupies only two of them, leaving the third abandoned. (You can probably guess the reason why, but it has something to do with the house’s intermittent habit of…well…eating people.)

As the sand-dunes slowly encroach and bury it, the empty house attracts the curiosity of the young and intrepid India McCray, who ventures inside and sees something impossible yet real. And terrifying.

Of course, The Elementals isn’t just a generic ghost story, nor a generic Southern Gothic novel. The characters are vividly drawn, sympathetic, and believable. Their conversation is fraught with age-old tensions and resentments, yet it’s often very funny in a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way. And the characters of India and Odessa are especially well-realized. Linked by their intelligence and, as McDowell implies, some kind of psychic power reminiscent of The Shining, each comes off as a kind of hero in their battle against the evil hiding (rather obviously) in House #3.

The Elementals is a literary horror novel, meaning that it bridges the gap between genre story-telling and development of realistic characters. The book really comes to life (forgive the pun) in the chapters about India as well as of the adult male characters, Luker and Dauphin, both of whom struggle—in true Southern fashion—with the dark legacy of the past and especially surround their own family. Self-indulgent, smothering matriarchs like the recently deceased Marian are, in particular, a source of psychological revulsion. Indeed, they are central to the main theme of the novel, which I will not spoil here.

There is also a good amount of subtle criticism about the racial divide that existed at the time (and now) in the deep south. Odessa, the Black maid, is the only character who does any real work in the book, busy doing the cooking and cleaning for the affluent Whites, just as she has done (we are told) for thirty years. And, of course, Odessa is not only smarter than most of the family members (except, perhaps, for India) she is the only one who knows what the hell is going on in House #3, using her power of second-sight as well as (it is implied) a familial knowledge of voodoo.

Yes, as many reviewers on Reddit have observed, Odessa is an instance of the Magical Negro Trope, of the sort that genre writers, both Southern and not, have abused for a century. This trope is, of course, a literary stereotype, and like any stereotype it can be harmful if taken too far and left unexamined. But if Odessa is a Magical Negro, she is a very world-weary and snarky example, with both courage and brains. I simply loved her character. Sue me.

In fact, I loved the whole book, which feels a bit like a mash-up of Tennessee Williams and Stephen King. Check it out. It deserves some attention. Better late than never.

Today I Learned a Word: “Precariat”

I’ve been reading an excellent non-fiction book by Paul Fischer called The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. It’s very similar to another great book I read recently (and subsequently wrote a post about), Don’t Stop: Why We Still Love Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” in that both books document the history of struggling artists—film directors, in the former, and rock stars, in the latter—who hit the Big Time. Inevitably, they each also tell the story of a bohemian sub-culture of the 1970s, when people lived hand-to-mouth in the canyons of Southern California, occupying cheap, hardscrabble houses and doing menial jobs while they developed their artistic skills. They also did a lot of drugs (mostly cocaine, booze, and marijuana) while having lots of sex with multiple partners. Fischer’s book, in particular, tells the great story of aspiring actress Margo Kidder, whose rented, A-frame house was frequented by young film makers, actors, musicians, and other arty-types, all attracted by Kidder’s good-natured wit, excellent cooking, and general hospitality. And by her beauty, of course. As Fischer relates, Kidder once joked that if she had bothered to write a memoir of that halcyon time, she would’ve entitled it I Fucked Everybody.

Such artistic, bohemian scenes are as old as…well, 19^th Century Paris, when the term “bohemianism” came into use. Apparently, it first referred to the Romani people of Paris, who lived a nomadic existence doing odd-jobs and performing various services (most legal, some not) for local people. In French, they were called bohémiens, because they were thought (mistakenly) to have migrated to France from the Kingdom of Bohemia. Bohemian soon came to describe anyone who, by choice, lived an unconventional life on the edges of society, doing as they pleased. Often, these were artists (painters, writers, musicians) who refused to pursue a normal career, but it also included the moneyed, free-spirited offspring of rich people, who went “slumming” with those same artists.

As I was reading the Wikipedia page on bohemianism, I discovered that such bohemian subcultures are often examples of a precariat. Precariat (I learned) is a mashup of precarious and proletariat, the latter being Karl Marx’s term for the working class. (“Proles” as they are called in George Orwell’s 1984.) People in a precariat are usually just as poor but also lack even the job security of the traditional industrial class, going from low-paying job to low-paying job, with no guarantee of when they’ll land their next position (or be able to pay the rent).

The term (I also learned) is particularly apt today, being often used to describe our modern world of Uber drivers, digital freelancers, and other non-traditional workers. As I read about all this, I thought of a book I posted about some years ago called Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! by Chris Carlston. Written at the dawn of the so-called gig economy, Carlston describes how, rather than dreading the precariousness of modern capitalism, some people have embraced it. By working temporary gigs, such people—whom Carlson calls Nowtopians—have managed to preserve the time and freedom to pursue their true passions like art, or education, or community service, or whatever. He writes:

What we see in the Nowtopian movement is not a fight for workers emancipation within the capitalist division of labor…. Instead we see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifurcated life that is imposed in the precarious marketplace. They seek emancipation from being merely workers. To a growing minority of people, the endless treadmill of consumerism and overwork is something they are working to escape. Thus, for many people time is more important than money. Access to goods has been the major incentive for compliance with the dictatorship of the economy. But in pockets here and there, the allure of hollow material wealth, and with it the discipline imposed by economic life, is breaking down.

Looking back on these words now, they seem a bit naïve. The longings of a utopian dream. They hardly seem describe our current gig economy, which, instead of new bohemian class, seems little more than a last-ditch means of survival for those who can not find good, decent-paying jobs (with benefits). As wealth and power become more concentrated in the hands of a few (usually male) oligarchs, fewer people have the freedom to do anything, no less pursue art. They’re too busy working, looking for jobs, looking for housing, or generally getting by.

In fact, rather than a utopia, our precariat seems more like the dystopia of which William Gibson foretold in his early, cyberpunk novels. Worlds in which most people on earth are underemployed, rootless, and in constant danger, while a tiny middle-class manages everything for an even tinier upper-class. The heroes of such novels are usually young, smart people who resist in the only way they can—by entering an underworld of artists, hackers, thieves, and gangsters who make their living off the rich.

Does this mean that we, as modern Americans, are headed for a world in which the precariat is, essentially, everyone? I think so, yeah. After all, isn’t that the fantasy of every oligarch—to rule over a vast sea of unpaid serfs with no autonomy to control their own lives? A limitless, self-perpetuating underclass, with no agency to defend themselves from the predatory impulses of the ultra-rich, impulses are, ultimately, sadistic in nature.

I hope not. We’ll see.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “They Walked Like Men”

Despite a youth in which I read literally hundreds of sci-fi novels, I somehow missed the works of Clifford D. Simak. I would blame the fact that Simak wrote his best books long before I was born, in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but I managed to read other giants from that period like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. No, I think I missed Simak simply because, well, he wasn’t as popular as those guys. In fact, he became known as one of the founders of Pastoral Science Fiction, a sub-genre in which the stories are set in rural or other off-beat settings. (Sounds sexy, huh?)

So, you can imagine my surprise when I read Simaks 1964 novel They Walked Like Men. I stumbled upon the book on my local library’s web site. It was a modern copy (see the excellent 1979 cover below by Jan Esteves), and I figured that if my librarians like it enough to buy an e-book copy, it must be worth a shot. So, I checked it out. And I loved it. It’s one of the strangest, edgiest sci-fi novels I read in a long time. Imagine an alien invasion narrative, set in the early 1960s, in which the major plot point is…real estate.

Sounds funky, right? The protagonist, Parker, is a hard-drinking, noirish newspaper man who stumbles upon a plot by mysterious strangers to buy all the real estate in town. Naturally, the strangers turn out to be aliens whose actual shape is something like a bowling ball, but who can simulate almost any form—kind of like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with equally gruesome results. Parker makes it his mission to get to the bottom of the murderous aliens’ plan, whose true motive turns out to be even stranger than I suspected.

Honestly, I can’t believe no one has adapted this book into a movie. It reads like The Maltese Falcon meets Twin Peaks meets The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I could someone like Jordan Peele coming in and making this into a really cool, eldritch thriller.

In the meantime, we have the book! Check it out…

Here is the cover from the latest printing, which I also really like…

What I’m Reading – “Dont Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours”

I finally moved out of my parents’ house when I was twenty-two, when I embarked on a cross-country move to Tucson, Arizona. I had enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the university there, and I arrived knowing not a single, living soul. Once I found a place to live and acquired a U-of-A ID card, I spent my evenings going to the small, student gym in the basement of the football stadium, where I and a few other lonely souls (all dudes) worked out until the lights went off.

I vividly remember my first night at that gym. There were radio speakers in the ceiling tuned to the local F.M. rock station. That night, as it happened to be running an hour-long special devoted entirely to one rock album: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The show included a few tracks off the album along with interviews with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie. (For some reason, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were left out.)

By this time, Rumours had already achieved legendary status of the sort afforded very few pop-music albums. (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the only other.) Today, many years after that first night in Tucson, the album’s popularity and reputation has not diminished. If anything, it has increased. It’s gone from being a recognized artistic masterpiece to a timeless cultural colossus. As each new generation of music fans and musicians have discovered Rumours, an entire legendarium has been constructed around it.

Entire books have been devoted to the months-long, tortuous period in 1977 when the album was recorded. Two of the band’s members, John and Christine McVie, were in the midst of an ugly divorce. Two other members, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were in the midst of an ugly breakup. And the remaining member, drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood, was on the verge of breaking up with his famous wife, Jenny Boyd. The five members alternated between screaming obscenities at each other and slipping into effortless, soulful harmonies, all while drinking heavily and vacuuming titanic amounts of cocaine up their collective nose.

At one point late in the process, the album’s producer, Ken Caillat, was horrified to discover that the master recording tapes were literally flaking-out. They had been re-run through the mixing machines so many times that the metal-oxide strip was coming loose from the plastic, threatening to lose all the work he and the band had done. A technician from the manufacturer was flown in to manually transfer the recording onto a new tape before disaster struck.

In short, the fact that Rumours was made at all seems like something of a miracle.

What I’m Reading: “Mona Lisa Overdrive”

The great sci-fi writer Clifford D. Simak was known for writing novels and short stories with off-beat main characters. Often, his protagonists were cynical, working-class stiffs (often with a drinking problem) who stuck to their own, private, moral code, often at great cost to themselves. One of Simak’s editors once groused that all of his stories were about “losers.”

“I like losers,” Simak replied.

I just read this quote the other day, and I immediately thought of William Gibson’s books—specifically, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I first read MLO back in the early 1990s, just a few years after its publication, and I thought it was great. I never really thought of reading it again, but for some reason—perhaps because I’ve been a bit down, of late—I recently checked-out the book and re-read it. And I’m really glad I did. One of the foundational works of the cyberpunk sub-genre (along with Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and other books), it still holds up, both as a work of speculative fiction as well as just a damned good, vividly imagined, human story.

A lot of people heap praise on Gibson’s novel—and on the Cyberpunk genre in general—because of their ideas, the thematic questions they ask about how humanity can relate in an age of overwhelming, dehumanizing technology. And what are the brutalizing effects of the ever-increasing disparity between the high-tech haves and the lower-tech have nots? Et cetera et cetera.

Myself, I like Gibson’s characters. Often, they are losers, of the sort Simak wrote about. Little people eking-out an existence on the fringes of society. MLO is no exception. The last of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer and Count Zero, it’s set on a near-ish future Earth where mega-corporations, trillionaires, and criminal cartels have replaced all governments, and most of humanity muddles along in a rat-race of late-stage capitalism. The plot is a complicated skein of four interlocking narratives, each centered on a different character: Mona, a teenaged prostitute; Kumiko, the tween-aged daughter of a Yakuza boss; Angie, a beautiful young star of virtual reality films (“simstims”); and Slick Henry, an artist who sculpts robots and suffers from government-inflicted memory loss. I find it interesting that, of these four characters, two are children (Mona is sixteen), one is addicted to drugs, and one is brain-damaged. Additionally, two of them (Mona and Slick Henry) are poor, while the other two “rich” characters (Angie and Kumiko) are virtual prisoners of their wealth and position, separated from any real friendships or human connection.

Most notably, none of them have real families. Mona is an orphan; Kumiko’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and her father is an aloof cypher.

In short, all of Gibson’s view-point characters are underdogs, one way or another. The closest he has ever come to a real, kick-ass hero is in one of his best supporting characters, Molly Millions, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary who figures so prominently throughout the Sprawl trilogy (not to mention Gibson’s landmark short-story “Johnny Mneumonic”, which first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1981; yeah, I read it fresh off the newsstand). And even Molly is more of an anti-hero, selling her services to the highest bidder, yet always displaying a basic, inner decency and compassion.

It is Molly, in fact, who becomes the physical catalyst that eventually brings the four narrative threads of the plot together in the MLO’s final chapters. I don’t want to spoil it completely, but the story involves a plot to kidnap Angie (the simstim star, whom Mona strongly resembles; hint, hint) and prevent her from reuniting with her boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, whose body lies comatose in Slick Henry’s art studio while his mind is busy in cyberspace. Kumiko, too, finds herself caught up in this plot, if only tangentially.

Having just re-read the book for the first time in thirty-odd years, I find myself liking it even more now than I did back then. I am awestruck by how deft Gibson’s prose is (he is surely one of America’s most underrated writers), as well as how quickly the story sucks the reader in. Almost every pop-novel out there these days is written from multiple, shifting points-of-view, but very, very few manage to draw their individual characters so vividly, or keep the reader as invested in the plight of each.

And, yeah, Gibson’s ideas are really, really cool. My favorite revelation in the book is when Slick Henry’s friend, Gentry, figures out that the L.F., the device attached to Bobby’s skull, is really an aleph, referencing the 1945 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. (If you read enough cyberpunk novels—or urban fantasy novels, for that matter—you’re going to run into Borges eventually.)

To sum up, Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of my favorite novels, sci-fi or otherwise. Check it out…

Today I Learned a Word: “Precovery”

As part of the work for the Read a Classic Novel…Together channel, I’ve been reading a very old classic indeed, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (almost always abbreviated to just Tristram Shandy). Published by Laurence Sterne in 1767, it’s a very funny, sly book—kind of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but in the 18^th Century—and I found myself imagining George Washington reading it (and laughing his ass off) while holed up in some winter bunker during the dark days of the American Revolutionary War.

The story is told by Shandy himself, a very smart but self-absorbed and neurotic man (again, a lot like Larry David) who tells his life story in wry, sardonic, and occasionally schizophrenic prose. At one point in his rambling narrative, he mentions the “seven planets” in the heavens, which surprised me. Sure, I knew that even the ancient Romans knew about the inner planets, as well as Jupiter and Saturn. But the fact that the unfathomably distant Uranus was known in the 18^th Century struck me as remarkable.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Uranus was not discovered until 1781, over a decade after Sterne wrote his novel (but still much earlier than I thought). Which means that there is no way that either Sterne, the writer, nor Shandy, the character, could have known about the actual seventh planet.

So, what, exactly, is Shandy alluding to in the “seven planets” bit? It seems that he was referring to the astrological planets in their classical (and very unscientific) sense, i.e., the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This context makes sense, in retrospect, because Shandy is obsessed with astrology and its supposed effect on a person’s character. (Yes, he’s a bit of a kook.)

By the time I sorted all this out, however, it was too late; I was already deep down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole. I looked up the history of the outermost planet (not to be confused with the dwarf planets like Pluto and Ceres), Neptune. Neptune was discovered by French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier in 1846. Not only was it the first planet to be discovered entirely by telescope, it was also the first one whose existence was surmised before it was actually observed. That is, Verrier and fellow astronomer John Couch Adams had noticed irregularities in Uranus’s orbit, which, they suspected, might be caused by a seventh, hitherto unseen planet. They then deduced the probable location of this hypothetical planet and hunted it down.

And that’s not all! I also learned that Neptune was actually discovered before it was discovered. As historians found later, Neptune was seen at least three times before, by Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jérôme Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830. Each of these men recorded seeing something in that spot, but none of them realized it was a planet and not just a weird “fixed” star.

Apparently, this sort of thing happens with some frequency in the world of science, to the point that it actually has a name: precovery. In a precovery, someone finds all the information they might need to make a real (and potentially career-making) discovery, but they never put the pieces together. (Or, at least, they never publish a paper about it.)

I think there might be a profound lesson here about the difference between data and knowledge, observation and understanding.

It’s also a lesson about publishing what you’ve got, ASAP. Before some other doofus steals your thunder.

What I’m Reading: “The Future Was Now”

In the summer of 1982, I was a very unhappy boy. Being a nerd in an upper-class high school full of preppies and jocks, I didn’t fit in very well. I hated most of my classes. I had a few good, close friends (including some jocks), but that was it. As one would expect, I spent a lot of time in my room reading sci-fi novels and typing short stories on the typewriter my mother had bought me.

The only thing that kept me sane was movies. Fortunately, 1982 turned out to be the most incredible time in cinematic history to be a nerd. A string of classics came out that summer including Blade Runner, The Thing, The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Max Max II), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and (the 800-pound gorilla) E.T. Even at the time, I was cognizant that this bumper crop of cool films, all coming out within a few weeks of each other, was a very unusual, almost magical development. I spent many hours on the bus with my friends going to and from the local cineplex, where we watched many of these films over and over.

For forty years, I labored under the delusion that this rapid series of classics was just a lucky coincidence. But while reading Chris Nashawaty’s fine nonfiction book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, I learned otherwise. A good historian will reveal that any event, no matter how seemingly incredible or unlikely, actually emerges logically from previous events. That is, the seeds were planted years or even decades before. And in 1982, main seed was a little film called Star Wars. As Nashawaty explains:

There’s an unwritten rule for reporters and trendwatchers who cover Hollywood that if you want to know why a movie—or a particular group of movies—was made, all you need to do is look back and see what was a hit at the box office five years earlier since that’s the typical gestation period for studio executives to spot a trend, develop and green-light an imitator, push it into production, and usher it into theaters. And the summer of 1982 would prove no exception, coming exactly five years after Star Wars. What seemed underreported, however, was how this new wave of sci-fi titles had been conceived and carried out. It is a wave that we’re still feeling the aftereffects of, for better and worse, today.

Great Mystery Novels: “The Rose Rent”

As I’ve stated before, one mark of a truly fine mystery novel—for me at least—is if I feel the need to go back and reread it. This isn’t just a matter of me waiting long enough to forget whodunnit (a period of time that grows shorter the older I get), it’s also an indication that something about the novel stuck with me, and made me want to revisit its imagined world.

So, it’s perhaps not surprising that I find myself rereading many of Edith Pargeter’s (writing as Ellis Peters) Brother Cadfael novels. Currently, I’m on The Rose Rent, which is about as fine an episode in the series as any. It has all the components of a truly great mystery novel—namely, a compelling and complicated sleuth; an entrancing and alien setting; original and interesting secondary characters; and a multi-layered plot.

And a voice. Of course, a great narrative voice. Take the opening paragraph of the novel:

By reason of the prolonged cold, which lingered far into April, and had scarcely mellowed when the month of May began, everything came laggard and reluctant that spring of 1142. The birds kept close about the roofs, finding warmer places to roost. The bees slept late, depleted their stores, and had to be fed, but neither was there any early burst of blossom for them to make fruitful. In the gardens there was no point in planting seed that would rot or be eaten in soil too chilly to engender life.

I love the elegance and almost romantic feel to this passage, which is characteristic of all Pargeter’s writing. You feel like you’re in competent hands, which is crucial considering that you’ve been transported to England in the Twelfth Century. (Specifically, to Shrewsbury, the town where Cadfael lives as the resident herbalist of the local Benedictine monastery.) I love the sense of desolation in this opening. We can almost feel the lingering winter, which has gone on too long and threatens the well-being of the town, including the ordinary folk, the monks, and even the nobles. It also suggests the coming tragedy of the murder around which the story will be revolve—that of a young, love-stricken monk who is killed trying to protect the woman with whom he has become infatuated.

Yes, it’s a desolate opening. But with Pargeter, you never really feel hopeless. Sure, it’s the Dark Ages, but her stories are populated with good, strong, shrewd people who always find a way to make the best of things. Take this paragraph, which comes a bit later and introduces Brother Cadfael himself:

Brother Cadfael, preoccupied with his own narrower concerns, continued to survey the vegetable patch outside the wall of his herb-garden, digging an experimental toe into soil grown darker and kinder after a mild morning shower. “By rights,” he said thoughtfully, “carrots should have been in more than a month ago, and the first radishes will be fibrous and shrunken as old leather, but we might get something with more juices in it from now on. Lucky the fruit-blossom held back until the bees began to wake up, but even so it will be a thin crop this year. Everything’s four weeks behind, but the seasons have a way of catching up, somehow. Wareham, you were saying? What of Wareham?”

He is speaking, of course, to his best friend, Hugh Berenger, the Sheriff of Shrewsbury. Berenger is a much younger man, but like Cadfael he is world-weary, experienced, and tough. Indeed, many of the best novels in the series depict bad guys who underestimate Berenger, with his mild demeanor and slight build, as weak. He is, in fact, an intelligent man and a cunning fighter. Berenger has just brought news of the most recent battle of the on-going English civil war (the Anarchy) which serves as the backdrop for all the novels. Berenger, we know, has befriended Cadfael in part because they have both been soldiers—in Cadfael’s case, a veteran of the First Crusade, which caused him to live in the Middle East for many years, where he lived with a Muslim widow and fathered a child with her.

A great part of the appeal of these novels is this tension between two sides of Cadfael’s character. He is the very opposite of an oblate—a person who has come into the monastery as a child. Rather, Cadfael has converted later in life, after have seen many terrible and wondrous things and had many worldly experiences. As such, he brings a shrewd, wise perspective to his role as a monk, healer, and protector of the innocent—a shrewdness that is matched by the “hatchet-faced” Abbot Rudolfus, who often conspires with Cadfael to bend the rules in favor of a remorseful miscreant or helpless person.

And, of course, there is just Pargeter’s unerring talent for winning, memorable description. For instance, take this passage, in which a self-serving (and possibly villainous) young character, Vivian, is introduced.

[Vivian] was a very personable young man indeed, tall and athletic, with corn-yellow hair that curled becomingly, and dancing pebble-brown eyes in which a full light found surprising golden glints. He was invariably elegant in his gear and wear, and knew very well how pleasant a picture he made in most women’s eyes. And if he had made no headway yet with the Widow Perle, neither had anyone else, and there was still hope.

The woman on whom Vivian has set his sights is Judith Perle, a young widow who has leased her old house to the monastery for the meager “rent” of a single rose per year, plucked from the bush that grows outside the doorway. Judith is, of course, very rich woman, and must of the plot revolves around a murder who is intent of separating her from that wealth—even if this means killing her in the process.

The Rose Rent is a great mystery novel. Check it out…