The Bibliothecary

Thursday, Jan 29, 2009 Las Vegas Weekly

Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America

by Jay Parini

Doubleday, 385 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Jay Parini’s latest book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, plots the course of America’s Manifest Literary Destiny. As the title suggests, Parini has chosen a baker’s dozen of seminal American works “that helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country,” from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn toJ ack Kerouac’s On the Road. Each left an indelible imprint on the American character.

In his introduction, Parini argues that this is not a greatest-hits of American literature. There is no Scarlet Letter or Great Gatsby. He also excludes poetry, because, he writes, verse only really affects the “tiny group who actually read poetry.” An exception might be made for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but I think Parini is probably correct: Poetry has yet to change the course of American culture.

Parini, a professor at Middlebury College, is the author of books of criticism (on Theodore Roethke) and biographies (on Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner), as well as several novels and collections of poetry. He’s an academic who consistently writes for a wide readership, a professor for the common reader. His novel about Leo Tolstoy’s final years, The Last Station, is currently being made into a movie.

Each chapter in Promised Land focuses on one book, with each divided into four parts: a thumbnail sketch of the book’s importance; a historical context for the writer and the work; a description of the main body; and a case for the work’s legacy. The books’ cultural and political climates are often as important as their content. In his chapter on William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Parini describes 1856 America, with its states heading toward disunion and its westward expansion coming to define the country’s “Manifest Destiny” credo. “Bradford’s account of the early Pilgrim adventures offered an alternative reality,” a society of “fiercely united and determined men and women” who would create America’s mythic first Thanksgiving. In 1856, the country needed a unifying myth, and Bradford’s fit the bill.

Parini has written a kind of guide to reading these works. Each chapter could serve as an excellent introduction to the books, and indeed, reading Promised Land made me want to read, or re-read, most of these seminal American books. I write “most” because I’m not sure what literary pleasure would be gained by reading Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

A few other odd choices help Parini’s work stand out. There are chapters on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and the little-known immigrant narrative The Promised Land, by Mary Antin. Parini makes strong cases for Antin and Spock, but his allegiance to Carnegie seems more about that work’s influence on Parini’s own life.

Several themes run through Promised Land, and as it progresses, one can see the connections among the books. America’s “outward expansion” is reflected in Plymouth Plantation and The Journals of Lewis and Clark. The “inward exploration” of the American mind is developed in Franklin’s autobiography and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Later books, such as On the Road, encapsulate both inward and outward journeys.

Of course, many of the books deal with democracy, independence and race. These books speak to each other, some making promises and others reminding us to keep them. Parini consistently reminds us that all 13 are nodal books of the American character.

Sometimes these broad, sweeping statements seem too trite for a serious critic of American literature, but Parini backs up his rhetoric with detailed analysis. And, for the scholar itching to point out books that were omitted, the author has included an appendix of 100 more great American works, and a short paragraph about the importance of each.

Still, Promised Land left me a little cold, providing one serious discussion after another, each like a dose of American medicine. Most of these books are works to be studied more than enjoyed, so Parini’s book falls into a pattern, like 13 lectures in a row. Taken individually, each is fascinating and deep. But after the first half-dozen, one needs a little pulp fiction to enliven the palate.

Thursday, Jan 1, 2009  Las Vegas Weekly

The King James of Noir

Cops takes Bruen’s no-nonsense approach to the extreme

Once Were Cops

by Ken Bruen

St Martin's Minotaur. 294 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Ken Bruen has been perfecting his hard-boiled prose for a little over 10 years now. His finely crafted noir novels seem to get sparser, tougher and grimmer with each new one published. And there have been two dozen of these gems in that prolific decade. His latest, Once Were Cops, takes another step along his unique path to tell a crime story in the fewest words possible.

Michael O’Shea is an Irish cop, one of the Gardaí, on loan to the New York City Police Department. However, this is no Irish-bumpkin-let-loose-in-the-Big-City kind of story. Shea, as he styles himself, is a psychopathic killer who leaves a string of bodies in his wake. A few have suspected the killer that lurks inside him, but Shea’s own cleverness, coupled with his fearsome demeanor, has always kept him one step ahead of the authorities.

Noir master Jim Thompson worked this scenario in a couple of his greatest novels, The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, in which small-town sheriffs use their guile to mask dark, murderous hearts. Bruen plows the same terrain, but Thompson’s sherriffs are mere farm boys compared to Shea. His killing fury is buried so deep inside him that, when unleashed, it erupts like a cold storm and he loses consciousness of his actions:

Then there’s the zoning, from the time I was a child, I’d go someplace in my mind, a cold place and it’s like seeing the world through fog or very heavy glass and what I most want is to do damage, biblical damage, it’s beyond rage, more like a controlled fury that oh so carefully watches, then strikes ...

My Mother used to say,

“Shea lives in another room.”

A room covered in ice and fierceness.

There are two overlapping narratives in Once Were Cops: Shea’s first-person voice alternating with a third-person point of view of his NYC Police partner, Kurt Browski. Later in the novel, the POV shifts to a former cop-turned-investigative reporter, Joe Mulloy, on the trail of a brutal serial killer who is preying upon young women in New York. Browski is nicknamed Kebar because of his weapon of choice, the short, lethal K-bar pipe he uses to tame his suspects. In any other book, Kebar would be the bad cop.

Bruen, in all his novels, likes to take the conventions of noir and crime one step further. The reader expects the punch. But Bruen whacks the reader senseless with a pipe, or more usually an Irish hurley stick, to the temple. Blood flows. What just hit me? Did he really just do that to a character?

More than once, while reading a Bruen novel, I’ve wondered what dark dreams must haunt him, his characters wracked with a Dantean pain. Then I realize it’s his masterful prose, the lyrical Celtic expression wrapped around the iron bar of hardboiled American idiom. Beating a guy with a hurley stick, Shea thinks that, “to hear that whoosh of the bat, it was like the darkest music.” Or when he runs into Jack Taylor, the Irish PI from another of Bruen’s series, drinking in a bar, Shea comments:

I saw a photo of Beckett in a mag once and fuck, more lines on his face than the ordnance map of the country.

Taylor’s face would have given him a close run.

The lines were imbedded, like with a very sharp knife.

And the ones around his eyes, you just knew laughter certainly hadn’t been responsible.

Bruen’s no-nonsense prose style is a good fit for Shea. Once Were Cops seems to operate on a whole new stylistic level for contemporary crime thrillers. Looking at the pages of the novel, I almost felt it was a novel in verse, with only 20-25 lines per page, spaced out so that there’s more white space than text. This isn’t prose. The novel is an exercise in the poetics of noir, each line aphoristically phrased to pack the sharpest, most damaging, biblically damaging, punch. Bruen is like the King James of noir, and an Irish one at that, weaving his spell of dark music, his pale rider coming out of the whirlwind to bring down the hammer of kingdom come.

Notes on Democracy: a New Edition

by H.L. Mencken

Afterword by Anthony Lewis

Introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Dissident Books, 206 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Swimming Against the Sea of Morons

Over the last couple years, I’ve become so dissatisfied with the American political system that I’ve almost stopped participating. Politicians who speak in nothing but a coded language, pundits who do nothing but speak in a code of their own and journalists who feed the obfuscating fire. Is it any wonder that so many people have turned to comedy programs, like the Daily Show, SNL and late-night talk shows, for their political news? Comedy has a way of cutting through the bullshit. 

So how refreshing it was to read Dissident Books’ reissue of H.L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, first published in 1926. Mencken was a world famous journalist and iconoclast of the highest order, so politically incorrect that it is highly unlikely he would survive in what passes for news-reportage today. 

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers provides some biographical and critical background for Mencken in an introduction that borders on hagiography. But I forgave the saint-like treatment when Rodgers provided this Mencken quotation: 

If I have accomplished anything in this world it is this: that I have made life measurably more bearable for the civilized minority in America. The individuals of this minority are often surrounded by dark, dense seas of morons and so they tend to become hopeless. I have reason to believe that my books and other writings have given a little comfort to many such persons and even inspired some of them to revolt. I am glad of the comfort but the revolt doesn’t interest me. 

The elitist in me feels a pang of Menckenian kinship, as I daily swim against that tide of morons. 

Mob rule was feared by many of the politicians who founded America and the role of the common man was heatedly debated for the first few decades of the Early American Empire. This is not surprising when you consider they watched the French Revolution, modeled after and inspired by the American one, succumb to riot and rampant bloodshed. America never went down this path. Our politicians, at least, have been relatively safe from violent overthrow. 

However, Mencken saw American Democracy in the same stark turns, as a conflict between the elite, educated citizens and the shrill, blunt mob. Watching the political parties ratchet up the class war terminology for the last few months has done nothing to dispel this view. Mencken watched successive administrations play the fear card to pursue their agenda, especially with The Great War. Make the people afraid and they’ll follow you anywhere. 

Mencken’s fear of demagoguery has become an even greater problem today because of the power of mass media. Political operatives have learned how to manipulate a system, to control certain small pockets of voters, just enough of them to supply victories at the polls. Mob rule is now so deftly manipulated that the mob doesn’t know they’re being led and the watchdogs, the journalists, don’t know they are playing a role in manipulating them.

You might wonder why I’m pontificating about politics in what is supposed to be a book review. Mencken made me do it. Every page of his Notes was a refreshing shot to my political brain. I felt as if I had finally found someone willing to lay bare the bones of our democratic system. I can’t help but read his book and think about our own time. Comfort indeed in a world of morons. 

The Evil That Men Do

by Dave White

Three Rivers Press, 287 pp

Savage Night

by Allan Guthrie

Harcourt, 311 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Bloody Katanas and Battered Private Eyes

Dave White is a New Jersey writer of PI novels set in Jersey and Allan Guthrie is a Scottish writer of violent crime novels set in Scotland. You’d think they’d have little in common (except their boyish good looks). However, their two new books, White’s The Evil That Men Do and Guthrie’s Savage Night, both subscribe to a noir view of family and violence that is unforgiving and unrelenting. And very readable.

White’s novel is the second in his Jackson Donne private eye series, set in New Brunswick and the surrounding Jersey area. The first novel, When One Man Dies, introduced Donne as a burnt out former cop, trying to get his life back together, but haunted by his past connections to both the crooks and police. He’s the quintessential noir hero who can never catch a break. Tragedy follows mishap follows bad luck follows a fight for his own survival. We’ve been down this road before, but White balances nicely our expectations of the genre and his own contemporary take on the proceedings.

White’s PI is an isolated outsider, helping those also on the fringes of society. His jobs usually start out for a paycheck, but end up finished out of sheer compulsion. As resistance meets him at every turn, Donne just goes on. Like the noir hero he is, Donne battles the fates aligned against him because to stop would be to admit defeat. Unlike his namesake, he IS an island and still every death affects him.

So far so noir. Nothing new here. But while in classic noir and hard-boiled stories, the private detective reaches out into society and finds corruption that ultimately eats away at his own self, White’s PI delves into his own family, retreating from a society that has already rejected him. And what he finds isn’t solace or peace. What he finds is explosive hate and violent love, in those around him and in himself.

The Evil That Men Do also differs from the classic Raymond Chandler world in another respect: action. Like may contemporary crime writers, film has had as much influence on their work as other novels have (often more so). Sometimes Jackson Donne reminded me more of John McClain, the hero cop of the “Die Hard” movies, than he did of any traditional PI in a fedora. And that’s a good thing. The action in this novel crackles. Donne gets beaten up so often that you’d think he’d break, but he still manages to claw his way to his feet and throw one more punch. However, White handles his plot so well that it doesn’t seem hackneyed or clichéd. Not only is Donne compelled to go on, so is the reader.

Guthrie’s Savage Night could never be called hackneyed. But there is plenty of hacking involved. The book opens with Fraser Savage and his girlfriend returning from a night of drinking to find a headless corpse in Fraser’s apartment. What follows is a tale of two families who will stop at nothing as they pursue their respective vengeances. This is the Hatfields and the McCoys with katanas. For Guthrie the blood of family is not just a metaphor. These families, the Savages and the Parks, share blood because it gets splattered all over themselves.

The novel takes place over only six hours in Edinburgh, but Guthrie flashes back and forth in time, revealing only just enough to compel the reader forward in suspense. I think this is the best thing that Guthrie has written to date. Savage Night works on all cylinders. I know these characters better than I’ve known any of the ones in his previous novels, Kiss Her Goodbye, Two-Way Split and Hard Man. In the last one, Hard Man, although I enjoyed it, I thought that the violence had begun to take over the plot, leaving me with characters just doing things, not characters living. But the Parks and the Savages seem like real brothers and sisters and fathers and wives and husbands. Not that I’d want to meet any of them in person. But I love reading about their lives.

Like White, Guthrie explores a noir sensibility of Family. The ever tightening bonds of union, whether genetic or by marriage, that normally threaten to crush, must here remain close so the family can stop from being crushed by others. The family that kills together stays together. Or at least stays in as many pieces as possible. The twisted dysfunction of these families works to help them stay together. Guthrie always writes with a deft ironic touch. But this one is his best.

Years ago I discovered Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood, a penny dreadful from the Victorian age, the first full-length vampire novel in English (I've never discovered whether there were any vampire novels in other languages that predate it). My discovery was a three volume Arno Press edition, a facsimile of the original 1847 edition with a plethora of illustrations throughout the text. The tiny print layed out in double columns on each page seemed daunting at first, but what the hell, I was game. Somewhere around volume 2, I just couldn't bear it any longer. The text was just illegible in places and the print-size was giving me a headache. Reading Varney in this way became a chore. Later I discovered the novel online and was able to finish it, but I still missed the pleasure of the book form, still the best way to read any long text.

Happily Zittaw Press has published a new complete edition of Varney, edited by Curt Herr.  And Zittaw has a podcast about it here. I wrote this review for the Phila Inq back in December, but in their change of book review editors (and by the looks of their new review policies), it never ran and it is unlikely it will at this point. So here it is.

Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood
Zittaw Press

By James Malcolm Rymer

Edited with an introduction by Curt Herr

Zittaw Press, 828 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Before Dracula, there was another Victorian gentleman vampire, preying upon the rosy-cheeked young women of England. James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood was published in serial installments in 1845, more than half a century before Bram Stoker wrote his most famous vampire novel. There had been fictional vampires before Rymer’s, most notably John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in his short story, “The Vampyre,” modeled on Polidori’s sometime traveling companion, the poet Lord Byron. While both Dracula and Ruthven have been acknowledged as major influences on the development of the vampire in literature, film and other popular culture manifestations, Rymer’s Sir Frances Varney has been underappreciated by scholars and virtually unknown to the reading public.

Zittaw Press, a small company devoted to republishing neglected gothic classics in affordable paperback editions, has just released a new edition of Varney the Vampire. At over 800 pages, with an introduction and several appendices (the book weighs 4 pounds), this is the definitive version of Rymer’s book. Varney was originally published as a “penny dreadful,” a fictional serial printed on cheap paper in weekly installments with subjects that ranged from the prurient to the grotesque. With murder, mayhem and sensationalism galore, the penny dreadfuls were one of the forerunners of our popular literature.

The penny dreadful Varney ran to 237 chapters (over 700 pages in the Zittaw edition) and was so successful that original copies are extraordinarily rare. According to one scholar, Varney was “read literally into dust.” Two previous editions have been mere photocopies of the penny dreadful edition, which was barely edited itself. Double columned with typographical errors and faded text, some words are printed upside down and occasionally sentences are even incomplete.

"A Romance of Exciting Interest" Front Wrapper from 1853 editionYears ago, I had tried to read one of these previous editions and could barely decipher the tiny, cramped print. So Zittaw’s clean text is a welcome improvement. Although it is a pity that they only reprint a few of the illustrations. Each penny dreadful installment had lavish pictures and ornamental letters. But to include them all would have ballooned this volume to gargantuan size. My fantasy text of Varney would include the clean text as done by Zittaw, but also reproductions of all the illustrations within the text as they originally appeared. This could only be achieved in a multivolume edition or even a facsimile series of the 237 parts of the original penny dreadful (and the price for such a version would limit it to collectors). Wishful thinking indeed.

 

To call it a novel is a bit of a misnomer, as well, for these kinds of serials do not adhere to the trim, inherently concise ways of the novel. Dreadfuls were written so quickly and by diverse hands (it is suspected that Rymer, although the primary author, was not the only author of Varney) that it was impossible to keep out inconsistencies of plot or characterization. In Varney, the time period of the story shifts and even names sometimes change. But this kind of small chaos in form is perfectly apt for the story. As the vampire wreaks havoc on women, families and the class system of staid, refined Victorian society, the tumult of the plot bleeds into the very structure of the book with storylines careening into all sorts of unknown territories. Varney takes on various disguises. He is nearly destroyed more than once, but always revivified by the power of moonlight (and fresh blood). Rymer pulls out all the gothic conventions and his vampire revels in their gruesome glory.

The book, as a whole, is picaresque in nature, containing several storylines that the new editor, Curt Herr, helpfully breaks down into “sagas” in a table of contents. Varney walks among the living as a refined aristocrat and over the course of the book begins to regret his “malignant destiny,” finding no solace in his power. He is not the static evil incarnate that Stoker later imagined in his Dracula. Varney has a richly detailed history (not all of it consistent) that helps flesh out his character. Nor is he quite like the manifestations of more recent vampires (Lestat and Buffy's friends and foes), although he does undergo something akin to a modern existential crisis. He is tormented by his bestial condition. Unlike the passionately romantic scenes of Dracula in which the vampire passionately bites his victims’ necks, or lets them feed from his own bosom, Varney is violently erotic, attacking his prey with a wolf-like fury, tearing into their flesh with his enormous fangs.

Varney is an immensely enjoyable novel, packed with action and doomed romance. Rymer’s prose is furious and lurid. For the uninitiated reader, the prose style may take a little getting used to. The short, choppy sentences, ripe with clichéd imagery, seemed silly at first, but after a few pages, I was sucked into Rymer’s penny dreadful realm and found myself racing along its pages, the pace quick and suspenseful. Varney the Vampire is a feast.