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.

The Various Lives of Keats & Chapman

by Flann O'Brien, 1940-1966
166pp

At some point I crossed a line from "reader interested in Flann O'Brien" (having started as "guy who read a mention of The Third Policeman in a Grant Morrison comic") to "Flann O'Brien completist." This despite the fact that I've not yet read At Swim-Two-Birds. This book, though, is pretty much limited to the O'Brien completist in your family.

Every jacket-flap bio of Flann O'Brien I've ever read, after invoking the name of Joyce, makes mention of his Irish Times column, "The Cruiskeen Lawn." I'd imagine most of O'Brien's popularity during his lifetime, in his native country, derives from that column. God knows his books weren't met with much publishing success during his life. This book collects writings from "Cruiskeen Lawn," mostly his "Keats & Chapman" stories, but also "The Brother," a one-man play posthumously adapted from others of O'Brien's "Cruiskeen Lawn" features.

I found the "Keats and Chapman" material to be a lot of fun. O'Brien employs a very simple, unlikely premise: the poet Keats, and the translator Chapman are for some reason imagined as a comic pair (Chapman is the straight man) perpetually seeking new employment or easy wealth. In a small handful of paragraphs--most of the stories are about a page--O'Brien quickly crafts an elaborate set-up for a dreadful (if often very erudite) pun. Basically, it's the last round of the BBC's "My Word." Seeing as I actually chuckle at the punchline, "Dismissus? Leave my wife out of this!", this became my bathroom reading of choice.

As for "The Brother," it's best to keep in mind the original intented audience: Irish Times readers. A lot of the humor here plays to Irishmen's sense of Irishness. I feel like my own thorough efforts at contextualizing Ulysses give me a better-than-average insight into day-to-day Irish culture, but "The Brother" seems to be an especially rarefied exercise in local flavor & dialect. It's pretty much the kind of humor I equate with the late Lewis Grizzard. At one point, O'Brien draws on his readers' familiarity with a local advertising slogan of the times. Suffice to say, this is not what you'd expect if you just finished (& loved) The Third Policeman.


This was a Bargain Book, found on a table by the front door of a Barnes & Noble for the price of $4.95. Initially I found it depressing that a book collecting material never before published in America, by one of the Great Irish Authors of the Twentieth Century, had within a couple of years of publication found its way to this dead-end of book retail, but having read the book, it makes sense. From where I stand, it's a steal at five bucks, to be sure, but the only way of moving it off the shelves seems to be deep discounting.

The Lunatic at Large

The Lunatic at Large
by J. Storer Clouston, 1899
205pp
Read: 3/30 - 04/06

This is a Late Victorian comic novel, which if you don't know, is what happens when a dapper gent is mistaken for a cad. I sometimes conceive syllabi in my mind--or at least whole Roman numeraled sections of syllabi--for high school or undergrad lit classes. Reading this book, I had the idea that assigning it would be a fun reward for a class of teenage boys who'd just slogged through Austen. Actually, a comedy depends on its context, and I probably received 90% of my understanding of the Victorian mores at play here through a high school reading of Pride & Prejudice.

The plot is as follows: a man with no recollection of his past finds himself as a patient at Clankwood Asylum, "home of the best-bred lunatics in England." Employing subterfuge and charm, he affects a daring escape. Again with the subterfuge & charm, he ingratiates himself to one Baron Rudolf von Bliztenberg. Lives lavishly at the Baron's expense, then alienates him. Returns to London, where he rediscovers his own true identity.

Now re-read the above paragraph, being careful to insert "hilarity ensues," after every sentence.

The premise is a funny one, the situations are humorous, and the dialogue is occasionally rather witty & Wildean. (The intro speaks of Clouston as being a kind of link between Wilde & Wodehouse in the English Comic Tradition. I think it'd be fair to say the dialogue owes a debt to Wilde, whereas the social lampooning anticipates Wodehouse.(NOTE: I have never read any Wodehouse whatsoever, though I am thoroughly acquainted with the proper pronunciation of his name.)) I don't have much to say beyond that: it's a funny book. It's not much else, although it may be the origin of the word "bonkers." If you find it amusing when people impersonate English priests & German nobles--particularly when hilarity proceeds to ensue--you'll enjoy this book.

A book's chapter lengths can be one of its greatest strengths. There's that quality "readability" that has nothing to do whatsoever with "literary merit." This is a highly readable book, largely because the chapters are so perfectly apportioned. Some of my favorite authors write in dense, enormous chapters. This is a book of short chapters, quickly read. Not that I hold "readable" books as superior to "good" books (many people do, often out of ignorance), but there are plenty of times when what I want is a readable book, not necessarily a good one.


This is Volume 5 of McSweeney's "Collins Library," a series of handsome clothbound editions of books that have been too long out of my print. This book was last published in the US in 1926. That this book would so fall out of publication surprises me, not because of the book's merits so much as because the book was once pretty popular: it was made into a silent film on three separate occasions. No copies of any of those films is known to survive today. It's as though some force were actively trying to suppress knowledge of the book. I have to wonder whether later editions would have been published had copies of the movie survived. There's an alternate universe where the film stock did not decay, the book stayed in publication, and Chevy Chase starred in a 1980 remake.

Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar
by Italo Calvino, 1983
126pp
Read: 3/27 - 3/30

I'll start with the "Index":

You'll notice that it's more of a table of contents or schemata. The book is arranged by three's: its three sections, "Mr. Palomar's Vacation," "Mr. Palomar in the City," and "The Silences of Mr. Palomar," are each divided into three subsections, each of which consists of three scenes. So, twenty-seven parts.

But observe the coordinate system on the left. Those numbers, Calvino explains, correspond to different modes of perception or experience (he's a little unclear here, and I think that the translation probably does his ideas some disservice). Roughly, 1 = Observation (particularly of aggregations), 2 = Anthropology (as well as semiotics, apparently), and 3 = Meditation. Roughly, I suppose he's trying to establish a hierarchy: one's relation to objects --> one's relation to society --> one's relation to the universal. So, for example: 1.3.3, "Mr Palomar's Vacation: Mr. Palomar Looks at the Sky: The contemplation of the stars" is two parts "meditation" to one part "observation." Or that's how it ought to work.

So the book works less like a novel than a series of essays. Mr. Palomar observes the things around him (hence the observatory reference), and he reflects on these things. In reading it, I experienced a fair deal of synchronicity, despite the unlikely objects of Mr. Palomar's observations: I read his meditation on "The loves of tortoises" just before seeing a picture of copulating turtles; "The infinite lawn" likewise resembled a friend's comments about his own lawn, and "The order squamata" reminded me of a museum exhibit I'm planning on taking a certain three year-old to.

Strangely, for a book that's so much about the interaction between ego and the outer world, we don't really get to know Mr. Palomar. Though we constantly hear his observations and meditations, the traditional avenues of characterization (interactions with other characters, seeing him make decisions) are largely closed to him. Consequently Palomar feels a bit like Mr. Magoo, a comic character whose interior life we can only intuit.


The covers of the Harcourt Brace editions of Italo Calvino all sport these rather straightforward illustrations of the book in question, all by one Shelton Walsmith. It's always kind of fun to see how he manages to capture a piece of experimental fiction in ten square inches.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1975
255pp

In theory, this should have been a very difficult book to put down. It provides almost no stopping points. This book is a thick stew of run-on sentences, eschewing paragraph and sentence breaks almost entirely. In its 255 pages, the book probably has around twenty periods. This has the effect of making it seem like a much longer book than it otherwise appear.

I first picked up this book back in November. Then the new Pynchon book came out, for which I would've dropped my own mother. After finishing Pynchon, I wasn't particularly interested in getting back to this book. After a few more reads, I picked this back up in early February. I don't think it was a week before I had selected another book to distract me from this one. By the time I had finished this book, I'd also read Hunger, The King, About Alice, and "Alcestis" & "Heracleidae" on the side.

Despite my distractions, I loved this book. Garcia Marquez tells the story of a tropical dictator's life through a series of flashbacks, and a stream of consciousness that runs from consciousness to consciousness. The book is at times narrated by the General himself, sometimes by someone speaking to him, sometimes by someone speaking about him. The narration of one event creates tangents, along which the narration runs to the details of some other event--never pausing to begin a new sentence--all the while shifting among its narrators. Reading this feels like you've dropped something slippery, which you catch, only to lose your grip on and catch in a different place, where it slips away again...

There is a rhythm by which the book regularly wraps up the anecdote at hand and returns to some regularly recurring image. Every twenty pages or so we hear the General described in more or less the same terms: his elephant-like feet, his denim uniform, his hands like claws, his herniated testicle. Likewise the General's various routines are repeated periodically, like the rosary.

Amongst the established order of recurring elements, we read the story of the General's impossibly long reign, though not always narrated chronologically. He betrays a friend, he introduces an enemy among his inner circle, he pursues a beauty queen, she eludes him, his mother died, the church will not make her a saint, the church is expelled, he falls for a former nun, she marries him and gives birth to an heir, they are killed, he creates a new branch of government to hunt & torture the conspirators who killed them, he exacts revenge on the man he installed in this ministry of vengeance. He's in power for over a hundred years, during which time he is alternately portrayed as being of limitless power & cunning, a man who commands every aspect of his realm, and powerless figurehead, whose government beneath him constantly seeks to placate him and convince him he still holds real power.


I often read in my tub, during which I can never keep my hands totally dry, and consequently the edges of pages of my books lose their crispness. This book, however, was sitting on the floor when streams of water from some misdirected jacuzzi jets shot out of the tub and soaked it through. Thus it is wavy, and waterlogged, and full of character.