Prospero's Cell, The Thin Man, The Virtu, Blankets
I had one of those trips to the library where I go in to fetch the one thing I had on hold and stagger out a while later carrying a big stack of books. So this is only part of them.


Prospero's Cell (Lawrence Durrell): It is always slightly chancy to pick up a book because you saw someone on the bus reading it and the few lines you read over their shoulder seemed interesting. This time it worked out well, though. It's not something I would have chosen myself -- no action, not much humor, no plot, and at times I'm afraid it verges on the poetic -- but it somehow works. It's a memoir of the time the author spent on Corfu in 1937, written as diary entries interrupted with extended digressions. And the thing is, it was written four years after that, with the author trapped in Egypt by WWII (and some of his friends dead and gone). So the guy already loves Corfu, and now he's looking back on it from the sucky spot he's in now, and no wonder it's this dreamy recollection of days gone by, with little stories about the places and the people. Given all that, I can't begrudge him a little poetry.


The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett): This is a reread, but it holds up pretty well. I think it's Hammett's softest book -- there are a lot of messed-up people here, and the amount of drinking the protagonists do is astounding, but it's not nearly as brutal as the other stuff I've read by him. Really, the grimmest part of the book is Nick's drinking, and that causes no problems whatsoever in the actual text. It's just that he's clearly drinking to keep something buried, and, man, that's not gonna keep it down forever. This is probably also the closest book of his to anything Raymond Chandler wrote, but just being set in New York rather than California is enough to show you who's who, not to mention the absence of Chandler's elaborate similes.


The Virtu (Sarah Monette): This is the sequel to Mélusine, which I griped about extensively earlier. I don't know what I would have done if I had written Mélusine and was trying to figure out how to make a sequel happen, but it seems like what Monette decided was to basically take what she needed from the last book, adjust some of the characters to make them fit the new book, and go from there*. I am pleased to see that The Virtue has none of the plot problems I griped about with the previous book, but unfortunately it has its own set of character issues.

Basically, the problem with the characters in this book is that none of them have been to summer camp. If they'd gone to camp, they would be familiar with the camp romance phenomenon -- day one you meet, day two you're holding hands, day seven you've been passionately in love forever, day fourteen you're parting tearfully and your world is ending, day eighteen you've been home for three days and are wondering if anything good's on tv. In other words, the magic word is propinquity, but a relationship that flares up that quickly isn't any more likely to be "real" than a relationship with a random person off the street.

Once they're no longer teenagers people tend to work out that a meet cute and momentary charm aren't enough to build a real relationship on, but not so for the characters in this book. Which leads into the other issue, the characters of the two protagonists. Monette's set up something interesting here: one character is a selfish, manipulative jerk who everyone sees as charming and beautiful, and the other is a completely unassertive milquetoast who everyone sees as a cloddish thug. So from the outside you have a hero-and-sidekick model but the reality is much more complicated. The problem with this setup is that 'everyone' doesn't include the reader! Because the text is written from the interior view of the two characters, it's obvious to the reader from the beginning that the one guy is a jerk and the other guy is sensitive. When we got to some bits in the text that suggested that outsiders had a different perspective I was totally startled.

And the related problem here is I got tired pretty quickly of the jerky guy. The characters claim he is charming and witty and so on, but we don't really see it -- we seem him being smarmy and manipulative and freaking out due to his various past traumas (of which he has a zillion). But since he is apparently clever and charming, the other characters put up with and excuse his antics, even as he gets them into deeper and deeper shit. The ending of the book has an arc like you'd expect with this kind of character: he finally does something really selfish and short-sighted, doesn't like the consequences, and has to set out to fix it. I'm not sure if the author meant this to be ironic or a literal rendition of some kind of hero's journey thing or what -- because the actual way the character sets out about fixing things up and behaving afterwards shows he's still totally as manipulative and jerky as ever. Yeah, for a while he's doing the manipulation "for a good cause" but it's clear that this is basically coincidental, and he hasn't learned any lessons like, oh, say, DON'T BE A SELFISH JERK.

He's got all these past traumas, as do various other characters, but what none of them seem to know (and again, I can't tell if the author knows this and is just taking her sweet time letting any of the characters realize, or if she's really that clueless) is that your past abuse never justifies you being a fuck-up now. It may, if you're making an honest effort to stop being a fuck-up, be good reason for people to bear with you while you work on changing. But if you're an asshole and you're not trying to change, I don't care what your past is like -- to hell with you.

The characters made an itsy-bitsy change for the better at the end of book one, and another itsy-bitsy change at the end of book two, but if Monette thinks I am going to stick around for seven books to see them finally behave acceptably, she is mistaken.

*I am certainly willing to accept that I just misread the first book and all the characters are drawn exactly the same in this one, but it seems more likely to me that this isn't the case.


Blankets (Craig Thompson): Another graphic novel! Soon I will know all about what you kids of today are reading, with your mangas and your outstanding spider-person and your ranma two-thirds. Anyway, this is the longest short story I have ever read. I guess this is the same principle as how the best movie adaptations are supposedly done off short stories, not novels -- the pacing of a movie is different enough that you're better off with the little bit of plot you get in a short story so that you have time to fit in all the "movie stuff". Similarly this is fundamentally two brief storylines, one about the guy growing up with his brother, and one about the guy and his first girlfriend. But these are exploded out with all these, well, pictures.

When he's talking about how he and his brother pretended their bed was a pirate ship, we get multiple pages with the bed drawn as a pirate ship, and when he and his girlfriend are sleeping together they fall out of bed dropping towards hell (there is also a lot about his strongly-fundamentalist upbringing) and then angels swoop down and carry them up into swirling bliss. And what the hell, we get pages of that too. This seems in some sense extravagantly wasteful, but I guess this is in fact the whole appeal of graphic novels, the parts like this that really make it its own medium and not just text with some illustrations to go along. I hate to say that I didn't expect to like the book but was won over by its charm and honesty* because that is such a cliche, but it would be inaccurate to say anything else.

*Although you have to wonder, of course. I don't think I could bring myself to put this kind of thing down on paper if it were true, and if I did manage, I don't know how I'd resist the temptation to change things up to make the story better. But I guess it feels honest, and that's what's important -- like they say, once you can fake sincerity you got it made.


Next up: more books I stumbled across randomly at the library or saw in the Christian Science reading room or something.