The Big Eddy Club

by David Rose, 2007
350pp
Read: 05/29/07 - 06/23/07

Nonfiction! Gasp!

Why the hell do I sometimes choose to read as "pleasure reading" books that are tangentially or directly related to my daily concerns? I know that it makes sense, that I'm going to read about those topics that interest me, and this will be informed by my day-to-day life. But reading this book, I sometimes felt that I was compounding my real-world frustrations by reading about real people coping with some of the very same frustrations. Suffice to say, if you're trying to get a job in public defense in Georgia, and are finding that the state would rather not pay for such jobs, you'd really rather not read a book largely about a Georgia court's unwillingness to provide necessary funds for an indigent defendant facing the death penalty.

The book is "about" the Stocking Stranglings, a series of rape/murders down in Columbus, and the eventual legal struggle of Carlton Gary, the man convicted of those crimes. I had a deuce of a time finding this book, as it was filed under "True Crime." Which is an accurate enough label--"True Criminal Procedure" would be more apt--but located it among one of the bookstore's less reputable shelves.

So this book was out of place. Rose is a Vanity Fair writer experienced in covering criminal matters; his wife happens to be Oxford's Criminology reader. His writing style reminds me of Charlie Kaufman's line in Adaptation: "big, sprawling New Yorker crap." Rose has an incessant need to contextualize. In order to tell us about this murder trial, he must tell us about the American criminal justice system, its peculiarities in the South, and a hundred years of race-relations in Columbus, GA. This approach has its advantages; Gary's experience quickly becomes emblematic of larger issues of race and justice. But Rose's structure is a little unnerving, too. Time in this book moves not like an arrow through space, but like an inexpertly-wielded sewing needle. First we are told of Rose's first trip to Columbus, then of Columbus's earliest history, then of the crimes in the late 70s, then of Reconstruction, then the trial, which leads to an account of Gary's life, and then Rose himself enters the picture, and we follow his own investigations. To be fair, I found this least frustrating when I read larger chunks in a stretch.



You begin this book fully expecting it to end with Gary's exoneration. You, the reader, are aware that Rose is writing in 2006, describing a 1984 trial, and you figure that his account will take you through direct appeal, state & federal habeas claims, and then, in the legal-thriller movie-style dramatic ending that really does happen in criminal law, Gary's conviction would be overturned. You become especially certain of this when reading about the trial, with its shaky junk science and judicially-crippled defense team; surely, you think, in the space of twenty years some higher court will have seen the injustice here. And I bet that's what Rose's editor thought. I imagine they had Rose committed to a book five years ago, and were sure of a dramatic, and possibly highly publicized final outcome in the case by now. Instead, Rose takes you up to 2006, and announces that, as of that writing, Gary was awaiting an evidentiary hearing in the Middle District of Georgia. This is of course mildly disappointing, but the next few pages are gripping, actually. Turning from Gary's case, Rose denounces the Rehnquist Court's disengagement from criminal procedure, and laments Herbert Packer's utoptian "Due Process Model of Criminal Justice." And believe you me, whenever a dude named "Rose" starts talking about Herbert Packer, I am riveted.

Finally, Rose includes an epilogue to gloss over that last appeal, and then inform you that you can follow the ongoing legal wranglings of Carlton Gary, wrongfully convicted black man, on his publisher's website. So, in 2007 it seems we have seen the emergence of a new cop-out of an ending: "To be continued...on teh blogz!!!" (Which happens to be how Harry Potter ends, as well as the Michael Bay Transformers movie.)

No one belongs here more than you.

by Miranda July, 2007
201pp
Read: 06/06- 06/08

Miranda July's 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know blew me away. Its honest exploration of how we relate to our fellow man and our belongings; how we strive to reach out to one another; how we want to poop into the butt of someone special, who in turn will poop back into all own butts, which we then will poop back; it all struck some magic balance between quirky inventiveness and heartfelt sincerity, artifice and insight into the human soul.

I'd really hoped, then, that Miranda July's fiction would perform a similarly virtuosic feat. This seems to be the goal of many young, contemporary writers today, and I'd figured July was up to the task. I'm trying hard not to lose esteem for her. It may simply be that fiction is not her forte. She comes from a performance art background, after all, and while standing before a roomful of strangers and speaking about sex & emotions, etc. nakedly and without artifice takes a lot of courage, and is laudable in that context, it makes for some uninteresting writing. July's prose is too plain, and she is frequently concerned with improbable emotional quandaries, or the details of sexual mechanics. This wide disconnect between plain, simple words and charged, intense subject matter can be moving when mediated by flesh-and-blood human beings like actors, or July in her capacity as a performance artist. But July's straightforward, unadulterated accounts of female orgasms and dysfunctional lesbian trysts only manage to occasionally raise an eyebrow, or amused smirk. My tone is harsh, I know, when really what I mean to say is that the book is entertaining, and a light, easy read. Usually this is high praise; I'd just had higher literary aspirations on behalf of Miranda July.


I should point out that this is in fact a book of "stories." Which, I almost never read short fiction. I sometimes feel bad about this; I am almost never as happy with short stories as I am with novels, and yet I know that novels are hardly objectively "better" than short fiction. I seem to have some deep-rooted prejudice against short-fiction. I approach everything I read with an implicit set of expectations which can only be met by a novel. And thus I wind up reading short fiction only rarely. This vexes me: I know that shorter pieces actually better lend themselves to well-crafted writing, and yet I constantly eschew them in favor of their bulkier brethren. Interestingly, for a while I mostly read novels in the 500 - 800 page range. During that time, my literary expectations likewise reflected what I tended to read: I was interested in fiction of sprawling scope, and often enormous casts. This changed for mostly practical considerations: after I got to law school, I was tired of spending months on the same piece of pleasure reading. Seeking higher turnover, I turned to shorter novels, and now that's what I prefer. I doubt that I'll ever do the same for short stories, though.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon, 2007
411pp
Read: 05/01 - 06/02

I read a bit about this book when it first came out, and it seems that to discuss it, one must begin by discussing the historical quirks on which the book is premised. Briefly, then: back in 1941, there was a proposal by Harold Ickes (U.S. Secretary of the Interior; you know him from "Annie") to make a homeland for Jewish refugees in Alaska. Upon first reading this fact, it took great forbearance to not work it into every conversation of the next few days. (At dinner that night, I had to restrain myself from ham-handedly insinuating it into the conversation thus: "You say you're from Oregon? Did you know...")

So, Chabon spins an alternate history from this weird historical footnote, and filters this through a noir detective lens. Apparently this is toward Chabon's literary goal, first expounded in his introduction to that McSweeney's Thrilling Tales thing a couple of years back, of reestablishing the legitimacy of genre fiction. This may or may not be a laudable goal, but Yiddish Policemen's Union does not serve it all that well. While Chabon writes pitch-perfect detective prose, giddily describing every damned object of any significance with an overwrought simile, and the book has the arc & pace of a detective novel--short chapters, often broken in the middle of a conversation--I'm not sure that the author is entirely willing to play by the full set of established genre conventions. I blame postmodernism, but then, I see postmodernism in my morning bowl of cereal. Much as he'd love people to read detective novels, Chabon didn't seem all that interested in writing a novel where our downtrodden protagonist chases dames, puts together clues, and solves a murder.

Granted, a corpse is dutifully introduced on the first page, and the question of "whodunnit?" ostensibly provides direction right up to the book's very end (is this a legitimate detective genre convention? I felt cheated out of even a shred of denouement), but the progress is frequently interrupted with explorations of Chabon's Great Jewish North. Even the plain question of "who killed the jew in room 208?" leads, not to well-established motives of sex, money, or Los Angeles real estate speculation, but to geopolitics and messianic Zionism. This final revelation didn't sit too well with me: the Jewish detective story leads to a shady Zionist cabal? I'm pretty sure Ahmadinejad could have called that from page one.


I enjoy publicly reading books w/ snappy jackets. This one often got comments & inquiries from strangers and acquaintances. It does a fair job of capturing, without blatantly illustrating, the book's subject: the graphic artist blends hebraic and "detective" images into the Tlingit style, in a color scheme that really "pops." While it's understandable that the cover would mention "Kavalier & Clay" for commercial reasons, I was a little irked to see that unwieldy name checked even on the *spine* of the book. When my fingers peruse my books' spines on their shelves, am I really going to care else the author's written?

Incidentally, if there's anyone who should've read Kavalier & Clay, it's me. I tend to read contemporary fiction; the Dave Eggers Seal of Approval (for better or worse) goes a pretty long way with me; and I'm all about comic books. When the book came out, though, I pretty quickly got tired of the people telling me "you should read this..." Before long, the book was passé, and (for better or worse) I was reluctant to pick it up, what with new books coming out all the time.