Fran: L is NOT for Lee, L is for Lelord

I tried.  I read almost 30 pages of Ashton Lee's The Reading Circle.  In Ashton's defense, maybe the first book was better.  Maybe I needed to care about these characters before I began this one.  In my defense, perhaps the publisher/cover designer should have more prominently displayed the fact that it was a second book in a series.  Probably a flaw that this I found the second book's openings so bland that I could not be bothered to finish it or seek out the first book.

Instead, at the same time, perhaps in uncanny premonition of its dullitude, I picked up Francois Lelond's Hector and the Search for Happiness.  I vaguely remembered it had been made into a movie with Simon Pegg (whose films have amused me).  If I had remembered that while at the library, if I had had access to the web and its reviews, I might have also passed on the book.

Hector is a psychiatrist from a nameless city somewhere in the Western world who decides to travel the world and look for the secret of what makes people happy.  The book is a series of small vignettes told in broad generalizations; the idea is that this is a children's style book for adults.  The characters are flat and generic--deliberately so, to make us feel that they are universal.  The situations reveal Hector as privileged, white, wealthy enough, shallowly male.  Women are primarily paid attention to for their beauty; Hector is constantly remarking on it and how he's had more than his share of attractive women.  His guilt over being complicit in the Asian sex trade is patronizing and shallow--I must actually love her to have slept with her; I will wind up my world tour by using my business connections to take her from this life of selling her body for money.  His Western admiration for the mystic wisdom of an ancient Chinese monk continues to stick in my craw as I relive the book in this review.  The list of "revelations" are fine for what they are but seem quite like thinly veiled psychological claptrap.

My search for happiness reached fulfillment with the eventual end of this book.  I do not need to read the sequel of Hector and the Search for Love.

(I may continue to read "L" authors in the search for something good.)

Ed: C is for Cleese

So… Anyway… I read the John Cleese book.

He's a funny man. No, really. He's still funny. It's a funny book.

Unfortunately, it's not an entirely funny book, and there are sizable chunks of the first half that are more or less of the form:

I remember I couldn't have been more than six or twelve when an entirely ordinary thing happened at the end of the school day. Much later, I told my therapist about it, and I still remember how the feelings came back to me, just as they had when I was nine, a feeling of overpowering ordinariness. Indeed, writing this, I can remember it now, even though things are very different, and different people annoy me in different ways. But at the time, it was like it was at the time. And so was my father, who was like that.

Except that he'll throw some bizarre oddity in the next paragraph to make Fran ask what I was sniggerin' at. So that's all right.

The second half of the book covers his career in comedy up through the formation of the Pythons—well, it was clearly intended to stop with the formation of the Pythons, but he clearly wound up writing another chapter after that, which included enough discussion of the Python working methods that it took away from the structure of the thing, although of course I didn't mind—as I age, I find I am becoming more interested in reading about them and their work than watching episodes of the Flying Circus for the n=kth time. The evolution of individual sketches, or even of ideas of what works in a sketch, from his Cambridge Circus days through writing for David Frost and the two Ronnies, to sketches I know by heart.

Speaking of which, the bookshop sketch on Contractual Obligation was written for At Last the 1948 Show and has been done various times with various people; Wikipedia claims that Bob Hope performed it at one point, tho' I have not confirmed that fact.

It occurred to me, as I was reading the book, that many of my favorite Python bits, in particular many of the great Cleese bits, are essentially extended world's worsts. If you aren't familiar with world's worst, it's a one-liner improv game where the emcee throws out a prompt of the world's worst something, and the players come up with examples. Whether they started from that germ or not, there are sketches about the world's worst game show, the world's worst mountaineer, the world's worst Hungarian phrasebook, the world's worst food shop, the world's worst arts interviewer, the world's worst pet shop, etc, etc. The thing that makes them great, though, is the other guy in the sketch, who responds to the world's worst bookshop customer in some insane and hilarious way. That's the funny stuff.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: K is for Kaufmann

Nicholas Kaufmann, Dying is My Business, was entertaining.

In the vein of authors like Jim Butcher, Kaufmann has mixed an urban (New York City) punk mafia-style set-up (our hero, Trent, is a henchman, a "collector" for a boss named Underwood) with vampire/werewolf/dragon/gargoyle magic world fiction.  The main character is interesting from the start since he cannot die--he is killed and then revives--and his lack of memory/context makes him ideal as a stand-in for us when we need things explained to us.  In this respect, it is very noir--this seamy crime underbelly that exists to the world that most of us never see ALSO has a seamy magic underbelly. There are well-fleshed out magical companions that become part of a team foiling the evil mages trying to harness destructive magic and un-make NYC (humanity and the world, etc. etc.).  It is an excellent thriller, with ripping, fast-paced action and well-written set pieces.  It wraps up at the end (for our satisfaction) but leaves open space for his sequel, Die and Stay Dead; I enjoyed the writing and plotting enough that I will actively seek this out.

(One very minor and very personal complaint--when the oracle reveals the cryptic location that our heroes need to find a piece of the puzzle before the bad guys do, I immediately knew where it was.  But specialized medievalist knowledge shouldn't ruin this plot point for most of you.  And for those of you who immediately know, the secret is worked out by Trent and his companions about 5 pages later so it isn't like we wander around the elephant in the room for very long.)

Fran: N is for Notaro

I recently finished Laurie Notaro's book, there's a (slight) chance i might be going to hell. Subtitled "a novel of sewer pipes, pageant queens, and big trouble", it's a comic novel in the vein of Jane Smiley's Moo (which I have read and enjoyed) and Jill Conner Browne's Sweet Potato Queens books (which I have only glanced at but have often picked up and set down in that maybe kind of way).  Very chick-lit in a Christopher Moore way.

The main character, Maye, follows her husband from Phoenix to his new job at a small liberal arts college in Washington state.  There she looks for friendship of fun friends to cure her loneliness.  But the tight-knit town, with its various demographic groups (old-time seniors who've lived in the tiny town forever, hippie new agers, college faculty), doesn't seem to have a space for her.  Hence the desire to run for Sewer Pipe Queen, in a desperate attempt to bust into the small-town scene.  The secrets of the town, stemming from arsons years before that destroyed the pipe plant, come out in the process and change the nature of the town (and Maye), such that they can have a place for each other.

While others loved this book, I was charmed only enough to keep reading.  The scenes are over-the-top scenarios constructed to be outrageous.  There are many flat characters, used for comic scenarios but without depth; Notaro wants us to believe in Maye's depth (and the depth of the former Sewer Pipe Queen, Ruby) but she constantly brings us into situations that are funny but not transformative/revelatory.  The writing often forces us to find it funny: "Crawford Lake Road was not paved, and not only was it a bumpy dirt road, it was full of potholes that looked more like spots where meteors had bounced off the face of the earth the way a basketball inevitably rebounds off the head of the fat girl in freshman gym class."

I could see picking up another but I suspect that I would be thinking of the annoying bits more than the bits I enjoyed.  I might pick up a non-fiction from her journalism days--I suspect that the writing would be more subtle and better shaped.