The first book of Gregory Wolfe’s new literary imprint, Slant, is almost out. It’s satire by Erin McGraw, called, Better Food for a Better World
McGraw says that the part of her that loves Charles Dickens took pleasure in inventing outsized characters behaving in outrageous ways. “Once you’ve created an over-the-top world, you’ve got a fat contortionist and anything else you want.”
The publisher also has a much longer interview with McGraw.
Stephen Hunter continues to delight with his bestselling thrillers, centered on veteran Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger and members of his family. It would be an exaggeration to say there’s no formula at work here – but the formula is in the characters, not the plots. Hunter loves to surprise his readers with fresh situations. He’s put Bob Lee into NASCAR races, samurai sword fights, and terrorism scares. In The Third Bullet he uses the thriller format to examine the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, something that was hinted at, but not developed, in the first BLS novel, Point of Impact.
The first neat trick here is that Hunter inserts himself into the story. Not in the Clive Cussler manner, portraying himself as a suave and admirable deus ex machina who shows up to get his hero out of a tough situation, but in a real writer’s way. Hunter paints himself, under a pseudonym, as a semi-comic hack with a drinking problem – he’s recognizable through his career arc and book titles. His character plays an initializing role at the start of the book, and then exits. Which is precisely the way to handle it.
As a result of the writer’s experience, old Bob Lee Swagger is enticed out of retirement by a woman who asks him to examine a new theory about the Kennedy assassination. And Bob Lee agrees, for reasons he keeps to himself until the end. On the way there are murders and close calls, and a dangerous trip to Moscow. Bob Lee comes up against a criminal mastermind to beat all criminal masterminds, and there’s a dramatic – and revelatory – final showdown.
I can’t say much about the theory author Hunter proposes here. It’s not entirely clear how seriously we’re meant to take it – this is fiction, after all. To me it seemed, at least, to raise interesting possibilities.
I’ve never been a Kennedy conspiracy aficionado. I know a man who is, and I’ve never argued it with him, because a) I haven’t studied it closely, and b) this guy is a veteran sniper himself, someone who looks at the problem from a shooter’s point of view.
Which is precisely what The Third Bullet does.
Recommended. Minor cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.
If anything area in our contemporary culture can be called post-Christian, it’s literature. Where has the novel of belief gone?
In The Paris Review, Ray Bradbury expounds:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again.
…
[M]ainstream [fiction] hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.
…
Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned.
You’ll forgive me, won’t you, if I don’t post anything tonight (except this)? I went home early from work today on account of sickness, and I’m interested to see what all this unpleasantness will develop into. I appreciate it, and thank you for patronizing Brandywine Books.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen this short film already. Paperman is a black-and-white, almost silent production done by Disney animators using only traditional (non-computer) animation techniques. Everybody loves it, and with good reason.
I have to admit that, being me, I had a mixed reaction at first. Then I realized I was wrong. I want to explain why, because it has to do with the nature of Story.
(Spoilers below. Do not read until you’ve watched the film through.)
My initial, self-oriented response was to say, “Life isn’t like that. The Universe does not step in to make your dreams come true.”
Then I saw that I’d missed the point. The point is that when the Universe took a hand in this couple’s story, it was only after the young man had done everything he could from his own end. He’d made his boss mad, and may have sacrificed his job, for the girl. It’s a little like the merchant in Jesus’ parable, who sold all he had in order to purchase the Pearl of Great Price.
If you’re writing a story, you can permit a Deus Ex Machina (I’ve written about this before), but only after you’ve let the character suffer and fail a whole lot. If the audience feels he’s tried his best, and not gotten the reward he deserves, then you can bring the Cosmic Hand in to set things right at the end. If you handle it carefully.
That’s a narrative principle only, by the way. It’s not theological, or only partly theological. Christianity does not teach that you gain God’s acceptance through trying your hardest, followed by God’s pleased intervention to finish the job for you. In Christianity it’s all grace from first to last.
Still, from the experiential point of view, the two things are hard to tell apart. The moment of grace is when the merchant falls in love with the Pearl, when the young man falls in love with the girl. All their efforts afterward are not actually their own accomplishments but entirely the work of God’s grace within, doing business as Love.
It’s a mystery.
Everything is.
Here’s a remarkable short animation from Zealous Creative.
What this country needs, in my opinion, is more cheerful tough guys. Probably in real life, certainly in literature. Much fine work has been done in the realm of the grim and tragic hard-boiled mystery, but there’s no actual law that says a detective who can handle himself in a fight has to be an emotional wreck. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser was a happy exception (for a while, anyway), and Bob Burton’s (with L. J. Martin) bounty hunter hero Brad Benedict is another. Quiet Ops is the first novel I’ve read from this team (Bob Burton is a real life bounty hunter), but I want to read more.
Brad Benedict is a man with a good life, and he enjoys it. He makes a nice income as a high-end skip tracer, enough to have a comfortable life, a nice office, a couple of expensive cars, and a succession of beautiful girlfriends. With the help of his regular associates Cocoa and T-Rex, and the lovely Monique who runs his east coast office in Florida, he goes after rapper Jo Jo Bling, who has drugged and kidnapped the twin daughters of Florida billionaire Grenwald Stanton. The girls are restored to their family, and their father (not to Brad’s surprise) balks at paying the fee, but before Brad can begin applying pressure (something he knows how to do, even with billionaires), Stanton himself is kidnapped, and Brad and company go to work again – though Brad still finds time to romance a pretty female cop.
There’s a sunny quality to this book that surprised and pleased me. Brad doesn’t waste our time bellyaching about past traumas and existential guilt. He’s also an actual nice guy – capable of making a genuine gesture of grace to a former enemy at one point. (His giant associate Cocoa, by the way, is described without irony or sarcasm as a church-going Congregationalist who doesn’t stand for foul language. Brad notes that he himself doesn’t swear much, which is generally true.)
There are weaknesses in the book. The spelling and grammar sometimes could use correction, and I thought the plot was unnecessarily complicated. But I came away from Quiet Ops feeling good. That’s pretty rare in my reading.
Cautions for language (there’s some rough language in spite of what I said above), violence (not over the top) and adult themes (but nothing explicit). Recommended.
I was going to celebrate a pretty good day by posting some kind of YouTube video associated with Vikings. I don’t know what. Just something. But YouTube doesn’t seem to be functioning tonight. So I chose the painting above, The Ravager by John Charles Dollman (ca. 1909). Because it’s cold and snowing up here, and it seemed appropriate. Even with the stupid winged helmets.
But it’s still a good day, never mind the weather. Or the wings. Did a reading of one of my theological translations for the Georg Sverdrup Society at the seminary this morning. That went well.
Also signed the contract for my book translation with Saga Publishers International. That means a direct connection between the wealth of Norway and my personal bank account. Also the tremendous respect that being a certified professional scholarly translator brings. And the groupies, of course.
Not coincidentally, I sent the completed first draft of the translation to Saga.
I even got a good parking place at the grocery store – one of those where I could pull forward into the next slot and so leave without backing up.
I should have asked some random woman on a date. But there are limits to a good day.
I got to thinking about freedom today. Specifically, about why it is that the Left hates freedom.
Oh, I know Leftists will say they don’t hate freedom. They love freedom, from their own point of view. Don’t they support freedom of sexual expression, and freedom from traditional social norms, and freedom to do whatever you want (unless you want to do something traditionally socially normative, of course)?
But in my view that’s not freedom, that’s distraction. That’s a three-year-old’s idea of freedom. When the Founding Fathers created our country – and even when European radicals first tried to establish communes and revolutionary governments in the 19th Century – the last thing they had in mind was the freedom to have sex with whatever gender, number, and species you like, or to run around naked in a public park shouting dirty words.
They wanted freedom to talk about important things. To hold a conviction and express it without fear of government reprisal. To do your best to make yourself wealthy (in America, at least) without a lot of busybodies telling you “You’re not permitted to do that.”
When it comes to things like that, wherever the Left rules, freedom gets reduced. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press – those must be subordinated to “sensitivity.” If you express the wrong ideas, it’s “bullying” and “hate speech,” and you have to be gotten out of the way. For the sake of the children, you understand.
That brings me to the second part of the meditation. Here’s why the Left actually hates and fears freedom.
It’s because their entire program is built on a falsehood, a lie about human nature. Ever since Rousseau they have believed that people are basically good. That if you just fine-tune the laws to provide the right environment, their virtue will blossom naturally.
This, of course, does not happen. It never happens. Because people are not in fact good.
The only way to avoid facing that truth is to clamp down on the people so tightly that they can’t actually express their true nature.
So freedom has to go. And it always does.