The Unrequited, by Mark Goldblatt


The taste of the cheeseburger lingered in my mouth. Not the ketchup or the onion or even the “world famous” curly fries of the Elizabethtown Diner, just the red meat. I’d asked for it well done; it came rare—but I never send food back. It’s bad form, as far as I’m concerned. Fate delivered a rare cheeseburger, so I downed it. Now, as the car was coasting, and as my foot was dangling, I was glad for the taste of rare meat in my mouth. It tasted of open spaces and grazing herds.

I should mention at the outset that author Mark Goldblatt is a Facebook friend of mine. However, I can honestly say that I didn’t receive a free review copy of The Unrequited. So make your own judgment as to whether or not this enthusiastic review is impartial.

Calvin Hooker, the narrator of the story, is a reporter for a supermarket tabloid headquartered in New York City. He’s not proud of the work, but he does it as well as he can, not agonizing over what the editors and headline writers do with it afterwards. He hasn’t been in a relationship for a year and a half, and sometimes gets weepy thinking about his ex-girlfriend’s cats, to which he just lost visitation rights.

In other words, Hooker is not an alpha male. Certainly a beta, maybe a gamma. A central clue to the meaning of this book is that pretty much all the guys here are betas. The one actually forceful man in the story (aside from one who’s just crazy) is the character Hooker is sent up to Elizabethtown, NY to interview. Daniel Lockett has just completed a prison term for rape and the accidental murder of a baby. The great irony is that Daniel actually emasculated himself with an improvised knife while incarcerated. Continue reading The Unrequited, by Mark Goldblatt

Neglecting the Ministry of the Word

Al Mohler writes:

Indeed, in many churches there is very little reading of the Bible in worship, and sermons are marked by attention to the congregation’s concerns, not by an adequate attention to the biblical text. The exposition of the Bible has given way to the concerns, real or perceived, of the listeners. The authority of the Bible is swallowed up in the imposed authority of congregational concerns.

(via Jared C. Wilson)

Journaling

Read many good reasons for keeping a journal in this post by Ivan Mesa. One reason is to help us remember God’s blessings. Mesa writes, “D. A. Carson is right: ‘Believers who spend no time reviewing and pondering in their minds what God has done, whether they are alone and reading their Bibles or joining with other believers in corporate adoration, should not be surprised if they rarely sense that God is near.'” (via Challies)

"Osteenian"

Today I got an e-mail from super-author Andrew Klavan, directing me to this column on his blog, in which he gives me a nice plug.

Novelist Lars Walker — a friend of this blog and an insightful reviewer of some of my own novels — makes a trenchant comment in the Elizabeth Smart post below. I know it’s trenchant because I was about to make basically the same comment but Lars beat me to it! In the comment, he makes a delightfully concise reference to “the Osteenian view that suffering is always a sign of God’s displeasure.” This, of course, refers to popular preacher Joel Osteen, who has been promoting his new book at the Blaze and other places. He basically preaches that God wants wonderful things for your life and you only have to open yourself to God’s will in order to receive those blessings.

He was particularly pleased, he said, by my use of the adjective “Osteenian,” meaning theological ideas in line with Joel Osteen’s preaching. He seems to think I may have coined it, though I find it hard to believe nobody’s used it before.

In any case, this counts as a good day.

Gay Talese on Writing "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"

Frank SinatraGay Talese didn’t want to write about so public a figure as Frank Sinatra when his editors at Esquire assigned it to him, but he took it on with creative persistence and produced a masterful profile. Elon Green talked to him about it for Nieman Storyboard, so we now have the feature story with writerly annotations throughout.

Greens says at one point every story he has ever heard about Sinatra appears to have come from Talese’s profile, which is enormously detailed. Here’s an appealing bit:

I had seen something of this Sicilian side of Sinatra last summer at Jilly’s saloon in New York, which was the only other time I’d gotten a close view of him prior to this night in this California club…. That night dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra’s, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly’s saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect…. Continue reading Gay Talese on Writing "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"

I, bully

News item: This story from CBS Dallas-Fort Worth seems to have surprised a lot of people. But I suspect there were a lot of us for whom it was no surprise at all. The story has to do with a study done at the University of Texas, Arlington which indicates that anti-bullying programs in schools don’t seem to do any good, and indeed may do harm.

The student videos used in many campaigns show examples of bullying and how to intervene. But Jeong says they may actually teach students different bullying techniques — and even educate about new ways to bully through social media and texting.

This is what happens in a post-Wisdom world, where experts have replaced sages, grandmothers, and the Scriptures. Experts believe that children are basically good, and desire to learn how to avoid bullying. Those of us who are familiar with actual children know that the true situation is different. You can’t divide kids up into “bullies” and “victims.” The categories are fluid. Every kid has it in him to bully, by the same kind of instinct which causes chickens to single out a member of the flock who’s been wounded, and peck it to death.

I’ve spoken of being bullied here before. I was bullied a lot, both at home and at school. There were few safe places in my world.

But I was also a bully, now and then, when fate chose to make me the alpha dog in some tiny situation. I never even thought about it. It came naturally. Today I’m hotly ashamed of those incidents, but at the time it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

We won’t make progress until we recognize human nature for what it is. And we won’t do that until we start reading the Bible seriously again.

The Severance Kill, by Tim Stevens


I reviewed a previous novel by Tim Stevens, Ratcatcher, a while back. I liked it, but thought it went a little over the top, demanding the kind of suspension of disbelief that’s better suited to action movies. Severance Kill dials the improbabilities back a little while remaining a fast, tense, wall-to-wall action story.
Martin Calvary works for a top-secret English intelligence organization called the Chapel (and yes, I’m sure the names are significant). The Chapel specializes in assassinations, deniable by the government. Martin joined up after a military stint in Bosnia, where he spared someone’s life with horrific consequences. For a time he was content to kill the bad guys good and dead.
But recently he’s grown weary of the exercise. Perhaps they deserve to lose their lives, but does he have the right to take them?
So he quits. Only his boss has incriminating evidence on him. He wants one more job out of him. There’s an English traitor, a defector to the old Soviet Union. It’s been decided he has to die. If Martin will just do this one, he can walk away free.
Martin doesn’t trust his handler, but he goes to Prague to do the job. Before long he’s tangling with Russian spies, Czech mobsters, and a group of naïve young activists. Martin gets attacked repeatedly, captured, and tortured, gradually figuring out he’s been lied to, and setting a trap of his own.
Severance Kill is not for the squeamish. There’s lots of violence – the scenes of Martin’s torture are particularly intense. As in Ratcatcher, one wonders how the hero can continue functioning physically, but it’s less of a stretch this time out. The plot doesn’t bear close analysis, but taken as an action romp the book works very well indeed. The characters are especially good. Recommended for those who like this sort of thing (I do). Cautions for the aforementioned violence, some sex, and language.

The Unburied Dead, by Douglas Lindsey

I finished this book before I left for Minot, but a review of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay didn’t fit my schedule at the time. As a result my memories of details are a little faded. But I’ll give you my general reactions, which remain vivid.

G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that there are two meanings of the word “good.” If a man could shoot his grandmother with a rifle at 500 yards, he would call him a good shot, but he wouldn’t necessarily call him a good man.

In the same way, The Unburied Dead is an excellent book in terms of technical achievement. It provides a grim and gritty picture of police life in Glasgow, where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton gets involved in a hunt for a serial killer. Thomas is a relatively honest cop, in an indifferently honest department where the police aren’t above “stitching up” a suspect if they know he’s guilty. But some cops have gone over that fuzzy line, and it only serves to muddy the investigational waters. Thomas himself is contemplating a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, the mother of his daughters, but he can’t resist a dalliance with his sexy boss.

In short, this book is extremely short on sympathetic characters. The violence is horrifying, the language filthy. The Unburied Dead was a masterful piece of contemporary noir, which I was delighted to be done with when I finished it.