Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:01 EST

Apocalypse Now: Amid fire and torment, a man and his son endure the end of the world as we know it.: a review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Ron Charles, Washington Post)

Concurrent with keeping his son alive is the more metaphysical challenge of sustaining his son's innate goodness while forcing him to witness the corruption of all moral behavior. "Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks in moments of confusion and shock. His father insists they are. "This is what good guys do," he tells him. "They keep trying. They dont give up." Why, then, his son asks, won't he help the stragglers they run across instead of running from them or shooting at them? "We should go to him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. . . . I'd give that little boy half of my food." How to explain the necessity of abandoning others to certain death (or worse, in one particularly terrifying scene) while maintaining that they're "the good guys," the ones "carrying the fire"?

Under these singularly bleak conditions, the boy's nature -- his impulse to help, his anxiety about stealing others' food -- is, of course, naive. But even when fighting for their lives, his father knows that it's a naivet� inspired by the boy's goodness that makes their fight worthwhile, that allows him to resist the age-old temptation "to curse God and die."

The encounter that illumines the final moments of the novel will infuriate McCarthy die-hards who relish his existential bleakness, but the scene confirms earlier allusions that suggest the roots of this end-of-the-world story reach far past the nuclear age to the apocalypse of Christian faith. The book's climax -- an immaculate conception of Pilgrim's Progress and "Mad Max" -- is a startling shift for McCarthy, but a tender answer to a desperate prayer.

The book allows for a number of readings--though all of them Christian. A fable of the love between Father and Son can't help but be read as a Christian allegory, especially when the boy is referred to as a tabernacle and proclaims: "I am the one."

But I was struck throughout by the obvious way in which the author was challenging existentialism. This is the sort of book the mature Camus would have written to rebut his younger self. In particular, Mr. McCarthy makes the direct argument that the man's love for the boy justifies existence and the selflessness of this love is made apparent by the man's sacrifice. Meanwhile, despite a situation of literal lawlessness, the two characters are continuously bothered by whether their actions conform to objective standards of good. The boy is even more insistent on this point than the man, functioning as a prick to his conscience. In a world where existence has been boiled down to little more than the individual and utter freedom seemingly reigns--the ideal condition for the Existential anti-ethos--our heroes reject individualism and freedom, choosing love and the Law instead.

The unrecognized money shot of the book though may come when the man is remembering a special night on the beach with his wife and recalls that: "he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different." The suggestion is that this moment of beauty and love justifies Creation. Perhaps too the love of the man and the boy does, no matter the circumstances under which it occurs. Or, maybe the story alone does. Were you God, wouldn't the capacity of man for such love justify your Work to you? Despite all the awfulness and evil we're likewise capable of?

Grade: A+

Review of The Devil's Star [Marekors] (Jo Nesbo)

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:01 EST

Scandinavian crime fiction is smokin' hot, and with good reason. Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik thrillers are exceptionally good. Henning Mankell's Wallender books have spawned both a very good Swedish tv series and the BBC/PBS version with Kenneth Branagh. Even Martin Beck came back years after his written adventures had ended for a high quality Swedish tv run. Helene Tursten's Inspector Irene Huss is in the midst of a successful written and tv run. Other popular series include Ake Edwardson's Inspector Winter and Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer. It's a deep vein we're suddenly mining.

Jo Nesbo may be the most ambitious writer of the lot. His Norwegian detective, Harry Hole, is an alcoholic, much further gone than Matthew Scudder ever was. In Devil's Star he's pursuing a serial killer Thomas Harris would be proud of. He's trying to hold together a personal relationship. He's haunted by his childhood and by the recent murder of a colleague. His arch rival on the murder squad is part of a clandestine vigilante organization within the Norwegian government. And so on and so forth....

Indeed, half the fun in the novel is just seeing if the author can keep all the plates spinning without them all crashing down around him. It does mean though that the book is very elaborately structured and the flow sometimes suffers as he checks in on his various plotlines. That said, Hole is a compelling hero and the mystery keeps you guessing. I'll be looking for the rest as they're translated.

Grade: B+

Review of Closely Watched Trains (Ostre sledovan� vlaky) (Bohumil Hrabal)

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:01 EST

Milos Hrama is a 22 year old Czech railroad apprentice in the closing days of WWII. His country is still occupied and Nazi trains continue to roll through the station, but he and his countrymen have more or less accommodated themselves to the situation. Sure, his Grandfather did try facing down the tanks when they first invaded, attempting to drive them back via hypnosis, but they promptly drove over and killed him. Milos himself has recently attempted suicide, but mostly because his failure to lose his virginity has convinced him that he's impotent.

When he does manage to get his freak on it gives him the confidence to strike a blow against the Germans, but the sabotage plot goes awry and he's killed too. His last thought, as he cradles a German soldier he's just killed: "You should have sat at home on your arse..."

Yeah, I know, we're supposed to recognize what a waste it was. But I admired him for joining in the family tradition of crazy resistance. He died a man. at war, rather than a eunuch in his bath tub with his wrists slit. Doesn't seem all that tragic in the final analysis.

Grade: B

Review of The Draining Lake : A Reykjavik Thriller (Arnaldur Indridason)

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:01 EST

If you've not been reading Arnaldur Indridason's great Inspector Erlendur series, it's worth starting with the first, Jar City, and reading in order. While the mysteries stand alone, the author has revealed the torments of his morose hero only gradually. Indeed, if you've not been following along, this review will reveal a few details you might prefer not to hear yet.

As always, the murder being investigated draws Erlendur and his team back into some aspect of Iceland's recent, though often intentionally forgotten, past. In this case, the draining lake of the title, Lake Kleifarvatn, has revealed a thirty year old skeleton with a Soviet radio transmitter weighting it down. Indridason uses this plot as a vehicle for a deliciously savage attack on the old Communist Bloc and the young socialist nitwits from the West who bought into its lies.

Meanwhile, Erlendur's daughter, Eva Lind, has gone missing again, but his son, Sidri, shows up. He casts some new light on both Erlendur's obsession with the brother he lost in a snowstorm as a boy--an apparently not uncommon occurrence in Iceland--and on Eva Lind's self-destructive behavior. It should have been obvious, but Sidri points out that Eva has basically made herself another one of the missing in order that her father will seek her too.

While the narrative style makes it apparent who the killer was fairly early on, the politics of the mystery and the deepening of the main characters may make this the best book in the series.

Grade: A+

Review of Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life (Michael Greenberg)

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:01 EST

Seize the Pen: In his essays on the writing life, Michael Greenberg emerges as figure out of Bellow (Adam Kirsch, September 22, 2009, Tablet)

[G]reenberg is engaged with the very subjects that made the first generation of American Jewish writers so elementally vigorous. That is why this slender book makes such a strong impression: it is as though Bellow or Alfred Kazin were transported to post-millennial New York, bringing their toughness and romanticism to bear on our softer and more familiar world. Greenberg himself hints at this quality of his writing in a typically self-deprecatory piece about his early struggles to publish a novel. In the early 1980s, Greenberg writes, he sent his manuscript to the influential editor Ted Solotaroff, who returned it with a note: ?This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction.? Greenberg was devastated, of course; but years later, when he read Solotaroff?s memoir Truth Comes in Blows, he realized that his novel must have struck all too close to home. ?With its complicated, immigrant-minded fathers and their sons,? Greenberg now sees, ?my novel must have seemed old hat to him, a story of Jewish marginality that, in America at least, was pass�.?

In a certain sense, the style of Jewish marginality that Greenberg writes about Beg, Borrow, Steal does seem pass�, or at least to belong to the past, if only for socioeconomic reasons. We are accustomed to reading about Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and their struggling intellectual sons in the 1930s. Follow that lineage down to the present, and the great-grandson who becomes a writer is likely to have an MFA from Iowa and a tenured teaching job; if he writes about Jewishness, it will be in a nostalgic, quasi-magical-realist style.

In Beg, Borrow, Steal, however, the familiar timeline of assimilation and upward mobility has been discarded. Instead of his grandfather, we find Greenberg himself working as a peddler (the time appears to be the early 1970s), selling knockoff cosmetics on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Greenberg befriends a Chilean food-vendor named Lucho, who teaches him the tricks of the trade?above all, which security guard to bribe to avoid being rousted. But this gesture of friendship, like most such gestures in Greenberg?s world, turns out to have been a con. The day before Easter, when Greenberg has done great business and is carrying a lot of cash, Lucho doesn?t show up to work; instead, three teenagers come and rob him, presumably on his friend?s instructions.

The moral is one Bellow would have approved: the life of the mind is okay for idealists, but real life is dog-eat-dog.

If you were putting together a short list of our best regular essayists, we'd at least include the following: Andrew Ferguson, Joseph Epstein, Peter Augustine Lawler, PJ O'Rourke, and Mark Steyn. These are the guys who you don't just read every week--or seemingly every day in Mr. Steyn's case--but whose essay collections you keep on the bedside table so you can dip into them over and over again.

So, I have to confess to some considerable chagrin when the publicist for Mr. Greenberg's column collection sent us a set of materials suggesting that he is one of the great essayists in America. I'd honestly never heard of him. The Google search quickly rendered the reason why: he splits the Freelance column in the Times Literary Supplement, appearing every other issue. Not exactly the most widely read pages around--a problem that kept Mr. Epstein out of the limelight for too long, when he write primarily for The American Scholar.

But I read a few of the pieces he has online and the reviews for his memoir about his daughter's schizophrenia--Hurry Down, Sunshine--are uniformly glowing, so we asked for a copy of this book. Taken in short doses, the essays do not disappoint.

Mr. Greenberg is a terrific writer and he's especially good at packing a punch into the final lines of each essay (a la Mr. Ferguson). Where the other guys listed are mostly political writers though, Mr. Epstein's columns, at least those collected here, probe his own personal life and those of the people around him. His honesty about himself, and about them, is downright discomfiting. Indeed, the title piece is about his high school friend and former landlord, Eric, who has been working on a novel for years and showing him updated versions which Mr. Greenberg commented on favorably mostly to avoid having his rent raised. The author included Eric in the recent memoir and revealed not just that he was lying in his assessment of the novel but that he personally never thought it would be finished. Since his own book was published. Mr. Greenberg had been avoiding his old "friend," realizing what he'd done, but a mutual friend tells him that Eric feels like he has been "stabbed." The closing lines of the essay read:

Eric had once commented on how closely I listened to him. Enough to steal a piece of his soul.

That's an honest enough self-assessment, but it is the author's apparent habit to latch onto characters he meets in real-life in order to make them grist for his essays, which makes this promo piece from YouTube seem appalling: Are they all really just circus acts and freaks and he the ringmaster? That is how he treats them all too often. He comes across as a kind of Joseph Mitchell but without much empathy.

And that leads into the other curious aspect of the book. There's a revealing scene in William Styron's Sophie's Choice, where Nathan is talking to Stingo and says:

[H]istorically and ethnically, Jews will be coming into their own in a cultural way in this postwar wave. It's in the cards, that's all. There's one novel already that's set the pace. ... it's the work of a young writer of absolutely unquestionable brilliance."

"What's the name of it?" I asked. I think my voice had a sulky note when I added, "And who's the brilliant writer?"

"It's called Dangling Man," he replied, "and it's by Saul Bellow."

Just as Mr. Styron's book and his doppleganger, Stingo, seemed to be trying to borrow Jewishness because it was the in thing, so too does Mr. Greenberg, as Adam Kirsch says, seem stuck in the 1950s, trying to imitate Saul Bellow, or trying to recreate him in the here and now.

Writing in Harper's, Vivian Gornick offered a pretty devastating critique of Bellow and Roth:

As the social reality of Jewish outsiderness waned, the rage at the heart of Jewish-American writing began to lose its natural source of energy. This turn of events delivered an unexpected piece of information about the entire enterprise. The work was inextricably bound up not so much with being kept out as with the sickness of feeling kept out. [...]

In the nineteenth century, Jewish mockery was described by a critic of Yiddish literature as ?the sick despair of [those for whom life is] a permanent witticism.? It could never get beyond the limited force of its own excoriating humor. That force held everyone and everything up to superior ridicule, but it could not penetrate its own self-deceptions; hence, it could not deepen psychologically. If you accept this observation as a given?and I do?you cannot help wondering how much of Ur-Bellow and Roth will prove to have transcended its moment of cultural glory. Somehow it?s hard to imagine yesterday?s savaging brilliance transforming into tomorrow?s wisdom.

Well, it is tomorrow now and if we can sort of accept that Bellow and Roth--who at least grew up when Jews were alienated from the prevailing culture--weren't capable of moving on, we do have to wonder why someone like Mr. Greenberg can't.

Norman Podhoretz has been fretting lately about why Jews are so overwhelmingly liberal. He has arrived at the conclusion that liberalism has actually replaced Judaism itself as their faith and that Jewishness for many is just a matter of ethnicity these days, not anything to do with religion:

[I]n virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define "a good Jew," reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.

Obviously a politics that is unconsidered, just a "racial" birthright, is not a thing of much worth. And it sits so uneasily beside the sort of Bellowian mockery that Mr. Greenberg employs that it creates considerable psychic dissonance. Maybe liberal mockery can't help but be mean-spirited, rather than jokingly insightful?

For all the honesty about the deeds and words in his own life, Mr. Greenberg doesn't really penetrate to the motivations and attitudes that underlie them. And that leaves a huge void.

Grade: B

Review of When in Greece : A John Putnam Thatcher Mystery (Martha Henissart)

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:01 EST

It's a strange thing, but when you frequent book sales and thrift stores as much as I do, there are some authors who are so popular that you're likely to see their books in bunches at every stop. And you get to the point where you automatically skim past them, either because you know you've read them all or you have no desire to do so now. Since I peruse the mystery titles in particular and since there are so many "cozies" by female authors, I'm afraid I'd made "Emma Lathen" one of the authors I didn't pay any attention. Until the other day that is, when the local Salvation Army store had almost an entire shelf of them out curiosity got the best of me. Good thing too...

Mary J. Latis and Martha Hennissart met as graduate students at Harvard and paired up to write over 20 John Putnam Thatcher "mysteries," under the Emma Lathen pen name, between 1961 and 1997, when Ms Latsis died. Ms Hennissart was a corporate lawyer, but their detective hero owed more to Ms Latsis's career as an economist (including stints with the CIA and UN). Thatcher is the Executive Vice President of Sloan Guaranty Trust and they use his business dealings and Wall Street intrigues as the backdrop for his adventures.

As luck would have it, I chose to read "When in Greece" first, and it was something of a departure for the authors. Ms Latsis was of Greek decent and was so disturbed by the Colonels Coup there in 1967 that they set aside the installment they'd been working on and churned out one with a Greek setting in just six weeks.

Ken Nicholls, a junior executive at the bank, is in Greece working out the details of a deal when the coup occurs. For obscure reasons, he's suspected of some involvement with Greek radicals and ends up going on the run. An amusingly pompous senior bank officer, Everett Gabler, is sent to straighten things out but he is kidnapped in turn. Enter Thatcher...

The authors keep the tone light and the action moving. They use the milieu to criticize the military plotters, but aren't overly polemical and they portray Greece as such a nest of plot and counter-plot that the coup almost seems sensible by the end.

Fortunately, I've got a whole pile of Thatcher adventures to work my way through now and know better than to ignore the Emma Lathen titles in the future.

Grade: A-

Review of When in Greece : A John Putnam Thatcher Mystery (Mary Latsis)

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:01 EST

Grade: A-

Review of In the Heat (Ian Vasquez)

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:01 EST

Miles Young--"former world-ranked contender in two divisions, former North American Boxing Federation middleweight champion, the best prize-fighter Belize has ever produced"--has just lost what is likely the final fight of his solid but unspectacular career. Now he faces the prospect of a retirement he can't afford, with no other marketable skills, and a young daughter he's raising on his own. The promoter of the last bout doesn't have the money he's owed, but does have a proposition. Isabelle Gilmore, a local businesswoman, needs someone to track down her teenage daughter, who's run off with the son of a powerful former Belizean cop and $10,000 in cash:

"[E]xplain to me now why I'm the man for the job?"

Isabelle said, "Three reasons. First, because you're Miles Young, national sports star. Like I said, Belize is a small place. Word gets around that you're looking for Joel Tablada, he might just show his face. Like, why is the boxer Miles Young looking for me? Second, because you're Miles Young, a boxer, and Joel is a personal trainer at the new gym out on Northern Highway. A boxer seeking the services of a personal trainer? That's reasonable to assume, nothing strange about that. Third, because you're Miles Young, and let's be honest, your name commands a certain respect on the streets."

Miles is reluctant but when the promoter offers him a fight with a former superstar champ, Hakeem Wahed, who is making a comeback, the job suddenly looks more attractive.

Boxers and ex-boxers have always been a staple of film noir--Body and Soul; The Killers; The Set-Up; 99 River Street; On the Waterfront; Fat City; The Harder They Fall; even Pulp Fiction--and hard-boiled private eye novels--like Robert Parker's Spenser series and Robert Randisi's Miles Jacoby books. The loneliness and brutality of the ring and the likelihood that a few too many blows to the head have impaired their judgment makes them naturals for the genre. So Ian Vasquez's choice of heroes is a nod to the classics. And the missing youths, cache of money, crooked cops, and brutal hoods are all familiar. But the exotic setting and Miles's single fatherhood are quite distinctive. The threat of violence always looms, but when bad things happen to Miles they're almost comic, including a genuinely funny incident where he gets a bad haircut. All in all, while Mr. Vasquez pays homage to his forebears he also manages to keep things fresh and Miles is an engaging, if stubborn and sometimes slow-witted, character. The wrap-up is a tad pat, as it seems Miles will escape further trouble despite actions that most have upset some real hard guys, but we like him well enough not to mind his good fortune and if the loose ends set up a subsequent adventure all the better. For now, it's a fine debut novel for Ian Vasquez.

Grade: A