Fiction, Reviews

‘The City,’ by Dean Koontz

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After you have suffered great losses and known much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless.

One of the many things I love about Dean Koontz is the breadth of his artistic pallet. Your average bestselling writer (and I do the same though I’m not a bestseller) will keep doing the thing that made him famous, over and over. And the public likes it most of the time.

Koontz improvises. He tries stuff. He can write horror or fantasy or mystery. He can be funny, or heartbreaking, or profound, or terrifying. The City, his latest, is mostly a fusion of the lyrical and the tragic.

Jonah Kirk, his narrator and hero, tells us of his childhood in the 1960s, first of all in an apartment house in a poor black neighborhood, his father mostly absent. That’s the downside. The upside is that he’s part of a big, loving, extended family. His grandfather is a legendary jazz pianist, his mother a gifted vocalist. And Jonah himself soon finds he has the makings of a great piano man. He also finds a friend in a neighbor, Mr. Yoshioka, a survivor of the Manzanar internment camp.

Moving with his mother out of the apartment and to his grandparents’ house, he soon meets two neighbor kids – Malcolm Pomerantz, an archetypal geek who is nevertheless a talented saxophonist, and his beautiful sister Alathea. They’re all gifted dreamers, and their dreams are large…

But there’s a destiny hanging over Jonah. He once had a dream of a beautiful woman strangled to death, and the next day he met that woman on the apartment building stairway. That touch of premonition in his life kicks off a series of visions and revelations.

And visions and revelations, the author makes it clear, come at a price.

I loved The City. It was a beautiful story, beautifully written. It broke my heart. I read it with fascination, but could only take it in small chunks, because of the sadness.

Highly recommended. But keep a hanky handy.

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Impressive Presentation Showing Sen. John Walsh’s Plagiarism

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It’s remarkable when someone does the research to demonstrate extensive plagiarism from a public official or someone of high profile, but the NY Times’ presentation of how Senator John Walsh (Democrat-Montana) is elegant. Highlighted sections of this master’s thesis pull up comparison copies of their sources, so you can see how closely worded they are. A bit of explanation, like the following, is one thing: “Though a footnote indicates that this information came from a report on a State Department website, the language appeared in a post by Dean Esmay on his Dean’s World blog nearly verbatim.” Showing comparisons is step up. (via Hunter Baker)

Authors, Fiction

Who Created Batman?

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Today is Batman Day. The Bat-Man, as he was once called, is 75 years old today, and DC Comics wants everyone to celebrate. Ignoring rumors that one-year-old prince George is being groomed to take on the Dark Knight’s mantle (don’t call him Robin), Jim Lee talks about the future of the character with Entertainment Weekly. He mentions strong fan-boy love for Batman ’66 on Blu-ray. I guess the cheese is never too far from Gotham City.

Apparently there’s one part of Batman’s history the publishers have never quite settled: who actually created him? Today they are giving out special edition reprints Detective Comics #27 (1939), in which The Bat-Man first appears. The cover of this issue states it was “illustrated by creator Bob Kane and written by Bill Finger.” The official word from DC Entertainment is that Bill Finger was a great guy who helped write many things, but Bob Kane was the first to imagine the hero.

[Steve] Korté, a 20-year DC Comics veteran, explains the sequence of events that lead to the creation and development of Batman. “After Superman debuted in 1938 and became an instant hit, DC editor Vince Sullivan asked Bob Kane to come up with a superhero, which he did with Batman,” he adds. “During that process, he went to a friend, Bill Finger, who gave him some tips on costume adjustments. For example, Bob initially drew bat wings on Batman. Bill suggested a scalloped cape. After Batman became a hit in May, 1939, Bob brought in more people throughout the year.”

Both men are dead now, but Finger’s granddaughter is rally fans to give Bill the credit she believes he deserves.

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R.I.P. The Rockford Files (James Garner)

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The death of James Garner this weekend has affected me more than is reasonable. I certainly didn’t know the man, and we very likely wouldn’t have gotten along if we’d met. He was a lifelong lefty, and by all accounts a pacifist. His favorite movie of his own was “The Americanization of Emily,” an anti-war film whose message (as I recall it) was that anybody who fought in World War II was a chump.

I read Andrew Klavan’s laudatory post today, along with our friend S. T. Karnick’s more equivocal one. Klavan sees Garner’s Maverick and Rockford characters as laudable examples of American individualism, lost today in a flood of cop shows. Karnick finds the anti-heroism of those same characters a sign of cultural decline.

For me, although I like Maverick, The Rockford Files is a personal touchstone. I consider it the best network detective show ever produced in America. Over a six year run the characters remained lively (often very funny), the acting excellent, and the scripts only slipped a little at the end.

I read a critique once that described the Jim Rockford character as “pusillanimous.” I don’t agree. What he was, in my view, was a believable good guy. Unlike the standard American TV hero, he had no illusions of invincibility (you could sometimes detect the limp that came from Garner’s real life bad knees). Like any sensible man in the real world, he didn’t fight if he could talk his way out, and he’d run away if he had a chance. Because fights with other guys are rarely a good idea. But when he had no choice, or when a principle, or a friend or client, was threatened, Jim stood up and gave as good as he got.

The relationships made the show work. Jim’s father (the great Noah Beery, Jr.) loved him dearly and worried about him, and Jim clearly reciprocated. Nevertheless they nagged and teased each other all the time, and did not hesitate to trick each other out of a free meal or a tank of gas. Jim’s old prison buddy Angel (Stuart Margolin) was a brilliant addition – a man with no redeeming qualities whatever, but Jim remained loyal to him. We never knew why, but we loved him for his grace. His lawyer, the lovely Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett) admitted she was in love with him, but had accepted the fact that the guy couldn’t be domesticated. And Sgt. Dennis Becker of the LAPD (Joe Santos) put up with a lot of flack from the department in order to maintain a sometimes stormy friendship with the low-rent PI. It was an ensemble effort, and a thing of beauty (by the way, I pulled all those actors’ names out of my memory without consulting Wikipedia, which will give you an idea how many times I’ve watched the credits).

The rusty trailer on the beach at Malibu. The copper-brown Pontiac Firebird. The wide-lapelled 1970s sport coats. The gun in the cookie jar. The answering machine. It all felt, if not like home, like a friend’s home to which we were welcome once a week. It meant a lot to me. Still does. I watch it every Sunday on the MeTV broadcast channel.

Jim Rockford made me want to be a better man. And it didn’t seem impossible to do it his way.

I’m not sure I want to live in an America without James Garner in it. We take ourselves too seriously already.

Authors, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Publishing

Alton Brown, Media Mogul

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At least twice on my current list of regrets is that I have not learn enough from Alton Brown. The man is the mad scientist of culinary delight. Grade school kids should have classes based on Good Eats. Here’s a recent morning interview he did that briefly mentions his many media products.

Bookselling, Publishing

The Changing World of Publishing

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Philip Yancey writes about this many years of experience in publishing.

I had an enlightening experience with e-books in 2013. In April I finished the book The Question That Never Goes Away, based on my visits to three places of great tragedy. My traditional publisher wanted at least nine months lead time to publish it, the typical schedule for a new book, yet new tragedies such as the Boston Marathon bombings, tornadoes, and school shootings were occurring almost weekly, the very situations my book addressed. So I signed on for an Amazon-exclusive program to publish an e-book for 90 days before the hard copy book came out. Leaning on my friends for email lists, I managed to sell about 3,000 copies. On September 11 and Thanksgiving weekend I offered free downloads and 40,000 people downloaded the book! The moral of the story, as many have learned: things can quickly go viral on the Internet but it’s a tough place to generate income.

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‘There Are No Jobs in Academia.’

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Ryan Anderson is a grad student in anthropology (not the clothing store). “I realized how bad things were when I was about half way through my PhD program—and it didn’t help that the global economy was literally crashing right when I started. You know, the whole ‘Great Recession’ thing. After one year, I nearly dropped out. Looking back, maybe that would have been the better decision. But, for some reason, I kept going…in part because of a vague hope that things would somehow ‘work out.’ I too pinned my hopes on that imagined employer.”

The bottom line, he says, is this isn’t the 1960s and there are no jobs in academia. He points to data showing about 36,000 new PhDs for every 3,000 new positions created. Is this education making 33,000 better people or just dragging them and their families down? (via Anthony Bradley)

Fiction, Reviews

The Cole Sage novels, by Micheal Maxwell

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A few days back I reviewed Micheal Maxwell’s novel Diamonds and Cole, which I liked very much. I liked it so much that I went on to purchase the next three books in the series, Cellar Full of Cole, Helix of Cole, and Cole Dust, and read them all at speed. Though I have quibbles, I recommend the series highly.

First, the quibbles. The titles, as you can see from the previous paragraph, are a little silly.

Secondly, there are weaknesses in plotting. Occasionally our hero Cole Sage makes an improbable deductive leaap (always correctly, of course). And the stories tend to be episodic, a sin to which I too am prone in my own books.

And there are word problems. Author Maxwell is prone to homophone confusions, like “waste” for “waist.” At one point he describes Cole’s granddaughter’s hair, well established as dark and curly, as “flaxen.” Maybe he doesn’t know what flaxen means. Who sees flax these days?

But I easily forgive these minor sins, and I think you will too. Cole Sage is a fresh kind of mystery hero. He’s essentially optimistic, and he enjoys making life better for the people he meets. No cynical, hard-boiled attitude here. Cole likes life, and he likes people.

In the second book, Cellar Full of Cole, we find our newspaper reporter hero, newly relocated from Chicago to San Francisco, facing off against a serial killer who targets little girls. His investigation is motivated in part by his fears for his own granddaughter, who he never knew existed until the previous year.

In Helix of Cole he is singled out by an old ‘60s radical, on the basis of a news story he wrote decades ago. This radical has a nuclear device, and a god delusion, and he won’t let anybody but Cole near him.

Finally, Cole Dust is an entire narrative departure. Cole learns a relative he barely knew has died, leaving him a house in Oklahoma. In that house he finds the journal of his grandfather, a man he barely remembers. Spending a month in residence, he gets the chance to get to know a remarkable, courageous, deeply flawed man with a dramatic, tragic story. He also gets acquainted with the inhabitants of a nice little town, portrayed more sympathetically than such people would be portrayed in most mysteries.

Another book by Maxwell, a flawed but interesting non –Cole novella called Three Nails, provides some insight into the author. It would appear he’s a Christian of some sort. Probably more liberal than I am, but emphatically Christian, even evangelical. Which means he’s doing what so many of us talk about but rarely do – writing novels that aren’t evangelistic tracts, but straight stories in which Christianity is implicit rather than preached. For which I laud him.

There must have been some rough language, but I don’t recall much. There are a couple homosexual recurring characters, one of whom is what you’d call “flamboyant.” But there’s no preaching on the subject, pro or con.

All in all, I endorse the Cole Sage novels highly, though your mileage may vary. E-book only, and not expensive.

Religion

Bullies on Mars Hill

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The stories out of Seattle regarding Mars Hill Church are one of the reasons this past year has been one of my hardest. I hate this news. Many stories are coming forward through many venues.

This co-founder of the church, who left in 2007, says:

It has been written, spoke of and declared, that in order for a church to be “On Mission” that sometimes people need to be “Run over by the bus” and a large pile of bodies is a good thing. I know where this kind of thinking came from because I believed it to be true and was in full agreement. While it is true that those who desire to lead people astray (the bible calls them wolves) need to be dealt with, I believe we went way too far and responded with anger and self-righteousness’ in throwing people under the bus. I ask your forgiveness for my part in promoting and approving this kind of behavior, it was godless!

Run over by the bus? Is that a line from the Inquisition?

A long article with many stories of spiritual abuse appeared this week on Crosscut.com. It describes Driscoll’s inflammatory language, the congregation’s habit of shunning disgraced members, and narcissism from many leaders. Witnesses claim the church encourages misogyny and sermons are “relevant” at all costs.

Stacey Solie writes, “Driscoll also started to preach more about male privilege and sexual entitlement. This had a damaging impact on many marriages, said Rob Thain Smith, who, with Merle, was acting as an informal marriage counselor to many young couples.

‘He created enormous abuse of wives,’ Smith said. ‘He helped young men objectify women, by his over-emphasis of sexualization of women and subservience.'” Continue reading Bullies on Mars Hill →