Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of The Interrogative Mood: a Novel? (Padgett Powell)

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:01 EST

There was one novel his agent couldn't sell and two manuscripts she wouldn't even show to people. One of these manuscripts was the series of questions, more questions and nothing but questions that became The Interrogative Mood. He'd begun it in reply to a colleague who sent emails composed themselves entirely of questions. Powell says he knew it was "fun", because he would feel "chipper" after working on it, but it didn't occur to him that he could do anything with it.

"One day I realised that I had 142 pages of it – it was long enough to be a book," he says. "While we were trying to sell a book that actually looked like a book I would periodically come across the manuscript and glance at it and say 'You know, I don't know what this is, but it's the best thing I have'."

Eventually his agent sent it to the Paris Review, where an editor called Matt Weiland fell in love with it and published an extract. As soon as Weiland moved back to book publishing at HarperCollins's Ecco imprint, he called back and asked if Powell's agent had sold the rest of the manuscript. "She laughed, said no," Weiland recalls. "I asked to consider it there formally, then hesitated, fearing my new colleagues would think I was insane – this, the very first book I raise?" Luckily his colleagues at Ecco loved it too, and The Interrogative Mood was published to rave reviews in 2009. Like You and I, Powell explains, any large-scale structure in The Interrogative Mood is "left to some sort of sub-conscious accretion".
-INTERVIEW: Padgett Powell: Leaving 'cuddly realism' behind: The American author who came 'back from the grave' with a novel composed entirely of questions, tells Richard Lea how he's written his way out of conventional storytelling (Richard Lea, 18 Jan 2012, The Guardian)

It is probably fitting that the reader’s response to a book (novel?) made up entirely of questions (maybe 2500 of them?) is not to offer answers but, instead, to interrogate it and its author. In the first instance, the title itself includes a question mark after “Novel”, so we ask: “Is the person asking all these questions a fictional character or the author himself?”

I sort of assume it is the author asking. But, is he asking them in order to reveal himself, or would he be interested in a listener’s answers? Can anyone who unleashes such a deluge really be curious about all the responses? Or is this a framework for a fundamentally lonely person to try and generate a conversation?

While I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone has ever actually read the book cover to cover - the interrogation is wearying - it is, nevertheless, a fascinating exercise. If nothing else - as someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time at taps and on barstools discussing innumerable imponderable questions - one would like to grab a beer with the author and quiz him in turn.

Grade: B+

Review of Whalefall: A Novel (Daniel Kraus)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

An imaginative melange of The Great Santini, Pinocchio, and A Monster Calls, this novel is by turns fascinating and annoying. Daniel Kraus’s main inspiration came from a news report about an incident where two kayakers were temporarily sucked into the maw of a humpback whale. He goes deeper - literally - and has his protagonist swallowed whole. During the ensuing struggle to escape, 17-year-old Jay Gardiner confronts his tortured relationship with his father, a legendary diver and sea salt. Everything involving the physiognomy of the whale and the means Jay resorts to in his efforts to get out is spellbinding. Every flashback to his prick of a father - who becomes a kind of spirit guide during the crisis as well - actually drains sympathy from the story.

Jay has ended up in his predicament because, after refusing to go see the estranged father when he was dying of cancer, the boy is diving to try to retrieve the bones left behind in Monterey Bay when his old man killed himself in a dive. Jay believes this will heal his broken relationship with his Mother and sisters and repair his image in the eyes of beach bums who idolized the Dad. For the reader, the suicide is just one more selfish act by a profoundly unpleasant man who was unworthy of this son. We really just don’t care about a reconciliation, even oppose it.

The story is soon to be released as a film and the visuals have the potential to be amazing. But the Jay character has the potential to be so whiny and the father so unlikable that one does not envy the director the job of melding action and emotion, which the book does not quite manage.

Grade: C

Review of 2BR02B (short story) (Kurt Vonnegut)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.

Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

2BR02B is a short story, first published in the January 1962 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction. While the title is an obvious allusion to Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the story it refers to the phone number you dial to reach the Federal Bureau of Termination and schedule your death. The setting is a future where ageing has been, if not defeated, at least vastly extended. The trade off that has been made is to keep the population steady by requiring a death for every birth. Thus, to keep his triplets, Edward Wehling has to find three people willing to die.

There is no literary form more distinctly Anglospheric - and pro-life - than dystopian fiction. Every utopia proceeds from the conceit that human reason should enable us to arrange society perfectly. But, since at least Hume, we of the English-speaking world have rejected such Rationalism and, since at least the Bible, have rejected the delusion of human infallibility and accepted that Man is Fallen.

Vonnegut’s story sits comfortably in a long lineage of warnings that Reason is not a reliable guide to structuring our societies and that we must not trust ourselves to wield certain powers of life and death over each other or we will do terrible things, pretending them reasonable.

Grade: A-

Review of The Unquiet Sleep (William Haggard)

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

Yes, a corruptive drug. And there were other words too, the whole language of the junky and of those who tried to cope with him – jargon about the needle, withdrawal symptoms, stabilized addicts. To Russell the last was the most frightening of all. It meant a normal life except for reliance on a doctor’s weekly prescription. A normal life! Mecron was supposed to be something between a tranquillizer and a pep pill. You took it and went to sleep; you woke to a febrile activity. You woke to addiction.

An unquiet sleep indeed.

William Haggard’s Colonel Russell spy series is best-remembered today-when remembered at all-for its conservatism. At a time when John Le Carre was writing hand-wringing twaddle about how similar the USSR and the West had become, the good Colonel harbored no such doubts. As in the passage above, the enemies he, and the Security Executive he ran, took on were personal as well as political and there was no question about the morality of the cause. The battle here to prevent the sale and distribution of the addictive wonder drug Mecron is driven by the fact that addiction offends his sensibilities.

The other notable thing about these adventures - 24 in all - is that most of the “action” occurs in the corridors of power. As the author said himself, they are political books, befitting for the former civil servant who wrote them. The plot of Unquiet Sleep is largely driven by the attempt to protect a Cabinet member from scandal, as a Cypriot gang tries to blackmail him into obtaining more Mecron after Russell halts its production.

On the other hand, lest we imagine Haggard some kind of troglodyte, the operative who engages in the book’s actual derring do is a former French Resistance fighter with a false foot, Rachel Borrodaile. The Colonel makes no bones about his admiration for her and her capabilities, which allow him to focus more on lunching at the club with fellow bureaucrats.

It’s a peculiar but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the spy genre.

Grade: B+

Review of The Ballad of Mulan (Unknown Unknown)

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:01 EST

“The Ballad of Mulan,” a 330-word poem about a woman posing as a man to enlist in the military in place of her ailing father, is dated sometime between Wei of the Northern dynasties (386-534) and the Tang dynasty (618-907). Scholars and historians have not been able to settle on its origins or settings. Given that no archaeological evidence corroborates Hua Mulan’s existence, her story may well be folklore.[...]

Since her story first graced the big screen in 1926, the folk heroine has, under different interpretations over the course of a century, come to variously emblematize filial piety, patriotism, feminism and, perhaps inadvertently, cultural commodification. Given that Hua Mulan may not be an actual historical figure, faithfulness has seldom been a point of contention in the reworkings of “The Ballad of Mulan” in every form and medium — including literature, music, dance, theater, martial arts and television, as well as film — as expanding on those 330 words necessitates artistic license.
-The live-action ‘Mulan’ is not the first retelling of the legend. Or the second. Or the sixth. (Martin Tsai, 9/04/20, Washington Post)

This is the big surprise facing the reader who comes to the actual Ballad of Mulan from the Disney version: it is incredibly spare. The second is that it is not a martial tale but an anti-war one. The third, and most disturbing, is that, if there was a historical Mulan, she was-in the apt formulation of one essayist- more Hun than Han.

All this leads to plenty of disagreement about the various iterations of the ballad, which we can maybe avoid by going to the source. Here’s one translation for your perusal: The Ballad of Mulan (Asia for Educators l Columbia University, From The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry, by Han H. Frankel)

Grade: A

Review of The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:01 EST

We finally made it to Disneyland last week and got to experience some of the rides that differ from Disney World. As we were leaving the park we decided to hop on one with a short wait and opted for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which turned out to be pretty demented. It occurred to me that I had probably never read the original book, only Disney story books when I was a kid, based on their film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Long out of copyright, it’s easy enough to find a version of the text on-line or an audio version (see below)

It’s a curious text, a children’s book that’s not necessarily for children. It is no surprise that Disney latched on to Toad, whose mania for going ever faster leads him to buying, and eventually stealing, cars to race around the country in, with predictably disastrous results.

The car stood in the middle of the yard, quite unattended, the stable-helps and other hangers-on being all at their dinner. Toad walked slowly round it, inspecting, criticising, musing deeply. “I wonder,” he said to himself presently, “I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?” Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul. As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

While these scenes are comical in their own right, Toad ends up in prison, with his magnificent abandoned home overrun by the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. This gets pretty dark and his friends are forced into stern measures to reform him before a battle to retake Toad Hall.

There are also quite beautiful musings about the pleasures of home and of nature. There’s even a famous chapter that is downright mystical: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was sometimes edited out of versions specifically geared towards kids.

All in all, it is a real pleasure to read and richly deserves its status as a classic.

Grade: A+

Review of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Keefe)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:01 EST

Gerry Adams has questioned why a “show trial” that forensically examined his alleged role as an IRA leader ever made it to court after the case dramatically collapsed at the last minute. The former Sinn Fein president said he had been subjected to “smears and false accusations” during the two-week trial into his alleged responsibility for three bomb attacks on the British mainland. The case was halted on the last day of proceedings at the High Court in London after a trio of victims withdrew their claim over concerns that they would have to foot Adams’s six-figure legal bill.
-ARTICLE: Gerry Adams: Collapsed ‘show trial’ should have never made it to court: The former Sinn Fein president said he had been subjected to ‘smears and false accusations’ during a damages case that examined his alleged role as an IRA leader (Mario Ledwith, March 20 2026, Times uk)

It is pure coincidence that I read this book–at The Daughter’s recommendation–just as the above trial collapsed. But that outcome is made even more maddening by the dispositive evidence Mr. Keefe lays out, demonstrating that Adams was the leader not just of the political organization Sinn Féin but the terrorist IRA. Nor is it just a matter of him denying responsibility for the mass killings he oversaw, but that he is distancing himself from the damage that perpetrating those murders did to his followers, as chronicled here.

The author is one of our great investigative essayists and the reigning king of The New Yorker. Here he expands on a piece originally written for that magazine:

Jean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just off the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen with the food.

Four men and four women burst in; some wore balaclavas, others had covered their faces with nylon stockings that ghoulishly distorted their features. One brandished a gun. “Put your coat on,” they told Jean. She trembled violently as they tried to pull her out of the apartment. “Help me!” she shrieked.

“I can remember trying to grab my mother,” her son Michael told me recently. He was eleven at the time. “We were all crying. My mother was crying.” Billy and Jim, six-year-old twins, threw their arms around Jean’s legs and wailed. The intruders tried to calm the children by saying that they would bring their mother back: they just needed to talk to her, and she would be gone for only “a few hours.” Archie, who, at sixteen, was the oldest child at home, asked if he could accompany his mother, and the members of the gang agreed. Jean McConville put on a tweed overcoat and a head scarf as the younger children were herded into one of the bedrooms. The intruders called the children by name. A couple of the men were not wearing masks, and Michael realized, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers—they were his neighbors.

The first person to speak publicly about involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville was a former I.R.A. terrorist named Dolours Price. In 2010, Price revealed in a series of interviews that she had been a member of a secret I.R.A. unit called the Unknowns, which conducted clandestine paramilitary work, including disappearances. Price did not participate in the raid on the McConville house, but she drove Jean McConville across the border into the Republic of Ireland, where she was executed. McConville, Price claimed, had been acting as an informer for the British Army, providing intelligence about I.R.A. activity in Divis Flats. The order to disappear her came from the Officer Commanding of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional I.R.A.—the man who held ultimate authority over the Unknowns. According to Price, the Officer Commanding was Gerry Adams.
-ESSAY: Where the Bodies Are Buried: Gerry Adams has long denied being a member of the I.R.A. But his former compatriots claim that he authorized murder. (Patrick Radden Keefe, March 9, 2015, The New Yorker)

He weaves together the McConville murder; a biography of Dolours Price and her sister; the story behind those interviews; Adams’s own life story; and various other strands to render a fascinating, if not comprehensive, look at The Troubles. If the eventual outcome of the IRA’s campaign of violence seems arguably triumphant this account is soaked in tragedy.

I have to admit to being conflicted. One can not believe in self-determination, as I do, and then deny that the Irish are entitled to it. But I am an Anglophile, recall many of these terror attacks and had an ancestor killed centuries ago while occupying the island, so it is not easy to sympathize with the cause. And that ambivalence certainly influences a personal feeling that there is justice in the regrets that Delours and her compatriots express a nd, likewise, outrage that Adams refuses to man up and accept responsibility for his actions. But it seems unlikely that anyone could come away from the book without feeling similarly.

Grade: A-

Review of Come Back Dead (Terence Faherty)

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:01 EST

Ross Macdonald built something else entirely. There is still an investigation, but the detective does not move from bead to bead, encountering scenes in the moment. Instead, he pulls a thread and unravels a tapestry of lies.

The case begins, but it is not the beginning. The real crime is buried in the past: a switched identity, an abandoned child, a family tragedy long suppressed. Yet the past has been covered up. This is the tapestry. As Lew Archer pulls on its threads, the accumulated damage from one generation to the next becomes visible.

Chandler, the poet who worked behind a desk as an oil executive, brings to mind T.S. Eliot, another poet who worked a day job at Lloyd’s Bank and wrote The Wasteland between drafting financial memos. Yet it is Macdonald who embodies the truth of Eliot’s famous dictum: the past is always present. In our beginning is our end.

This is what makes Macdonald a quiet author. His scenes accumulate meaning. A conversation may appear trivial until it is placed beside another. A casual remark about a missing daughter, a half-forgotten marriage, a name that doesn’t quite fit: details that mean nothing until, pages later, they mean everything. There are no standalone beads.
-Searching for a Unified Theory of Chandler versus Macdonald: The Necklace and the Tapestry (Frank Ladd, 2/20/26, CrimeReads)

While Terence Faherty’s hero, Scott Elliott, has more of the external qualities of Philip Marlowe, this fine mystery ultimately finds its way into Ross MacDonald territory. Scotty is a former actor who now works for a Hollywood security firm. He’s married with kids, unlike Marlowe or Archer, but his romantic nature is reflected most in his love of how the movies and movie-making used to be.

In this installment in the short series he is brought in to protect a director modelled on Orson Welles, who is trying to restore his original cut of a film that is obviously a riff on The Magnificent Ambersons. Someone is sabotaging that attempted restoration and the director - a wunderkind turned flop - is having difficulty raising money. So when an Indiana businessman - whose family company parallels the subject of the movie - offers funding for the production the reshoots move to his company’s town. (Scotty just happens to be an Indianan himself.)

Here the novel shifts as we are introduced to a family haunted by the ghost of hero killed in WWII, a sexy widow, a stern matriarch, Klansmen, a disfigured war veteran, and more. And Scotty begins unravelling the tapestry.

Scotty is a likable lead and ditching the family lets him function as a lone hero for the most part. There’s just the right amount of misdirection, but leavened with enough clues that the resolution feels earned. All in all a fine gloss on the classic private eye story.

Grade: B+