Book Review: The Big Bad, by Phil Beloin, Jr.

The Big Bad, the debut crime novel by Phil Beloin, Jr., is a lean, crude, fun ride. The novel is populated with stoolies, pornographers, redneck hitmen, alcoholics, necrophiliacs, ex pro-hockey drug dealers, ex-cons, and more hitmen. In the deft hands of Mr. Beloin, this motley crew is presented as an almost endearing bunch of screw-ups. They talk tough and act crazy, but they’re also human, with humbling foibles and recognizable tics.

When we first meet The Big Bad’s anti-hero, bar owner Nick Constantine, he’s a quiet alcoholic who just wants to live a semi-secluded, non-productive life above the seedy bar he owns, in a boring mid-sized city, in the middle of Connecticut. He’s a former strong arm for Irv Marquette, a pro hockey player turned full-time drug dealer. Nick’s done some bad stuff to bad people in the past. Now he lives on the payday earned when he turned state’s witness—a move that sent Irv to prison for tax evasion.

While Nick never claims to be a Rhodes Scholar—constantly in a cloud when faced with any big word or concept—he’s smart enough to keep his bar unsuccessful so he can write it off as a tax deduction. It’s a small point that illustrates Beloin’s use of dichotomy; he never misses a chance to turn a cliché on its head—either for a laugh or to add some depth or twists to the proceedings.

The story gets its kick start when Nick wakes from a bender with two beautiful young blondes sleeping in his bed. He can’t remember how they got there. It’s a great hook. Probably one of the most effective classic pulp fiction plot devices. After making sweet love to the closest blonde, it dawns on Nick that these lovely ladies aren’t just wicked hungover, they’re dead. It’s a ballsy move, putting necrophilia in the first chapter of a debut novel. But it’s Beloin’s warning shot to the reading public: “Join me on this funny/wacked journey or close the book now and miss out.”

Irv, now out of prison, gets some dirt on Nick—video footage of the dead girls in his apartment. He blackmails Nick into finding his lovely virginal girlfriend, Pamela, who has run off without a trace. Nick has no choice but to take the assignment. He hasn’t played enforcer in a while, and the fun of the novel is seeing this lug forced to rediscover his dusty wits and survival instincts to outsmart the bad guys, even while smoking three packs a day and drinking beer morning, noon, and night.

Marbled throughout are anachronistic details which call into relief the history of crime fiction, used not as crutches but as motifs, tapping into the reader’s conscious (or subconscious) history of the genre. Poor people live in ghettos and slums. Nick drives a Delta. The source of blackmail evidence is footage on a VHS videotape. It’s all very 1940s, 1970s, or 1990s, depending on the scene.

The characterizations also mix old and new. Nick talks and thinks like a classic tough guy but he’s also misanthropic, homophobic, and sexist. He’s a reflection of contemporary fears and worries; he’s not really searching with a moral compass because he never had one. He may have a code of honor like some honorable Western outlaw, but it’s never articulated.

To any God-fearing normal, he’s the personification of moral turpitude—a one-man melting pot of addiction, hatred, bad moves, quiet rage, and lethal training. We still somehow root for Nick because he has the capacity to recognize the bad in very bad men. He’s part classic detective out of Dashiell Hammett, part James M. Cain everyman making bad choices for the wrong reasons, and homage to the psychotic screwups that pepper Jim Thompson’s grittiest tomes. Yet he can still fall in love and care for his cat.

Many of the characters are sensitive in unexpected ways that transcend boilerplate: Irv’s a stone cold drug dealer, but he’s still insecure about Pam—like an adolescent worried sick over his crush liking him back; Irv’s bodyguard, Michelle, is quick with a semi automatic, but she also had to overcome an abusive father; Eddie, the pornographer Pam has connections to, is an Iraq war vet who can’t get it up.

Nick eventually tracks Pam down at a remote cabin above a picturesque lake. But don’t let the beautiful countryside fool you. It is here that Nick uncovers the truth about Pam and how she has been playing Irv for a fool.

Beloin shines during the inevitable shootouts and double-crosses. He expertly paces his scenes of kinetic violence at the cabin and in the nearby barn and woods, letting adrenaline-fueled momentum and lean description ramp up the tension. The final showdowns feel liberating; they read like a prose version of a violent Sam Peckinpaw film mixed with the diabolical glee of Roger Corman’s ruthless Depression era crime spree flick Bloody Mama.

Don’t miss out on Phil Beloin, Jr.’s wacked, wickedly funny revisionist crime novel The Big Bad, available at Amazon.com. Read my interview with Phil over at Beyond the Margins, where he talks about his interest in crime fiction, how movies and TV influence his writing, and follow links to read some of his stories online.

Book Review: Try To Remember, by Iris Gomez

Try to Remember by Iris Gomez is transporting. In many ways reading Gomez’ debut novel is like sitting across from a thoughtful storyteller who painstakingly and lovingly recreates the story of Gabriela, an intelligent, sensitive Colombian teenager growing up in Miami in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Gabi’s story is about many things: a teen girl coming of age and discovering herself during the American women’s liberation movement; an immigrant family living in fear of deportation; a young woman torn between loyalty to the family who depends on her to help manage the household and her need to escape her crazy parents and live the life she wants; and a daughter and sister who struggles to comprehend her increasingly unstable father, spending hours typing his progressively nonsensical letters (more like manifestos) to companies and the government.

Iris Gomez, a lawyer with expertise in immigration rights, was born in Cartagena, Colombia. She has also published books of poetry. Elements of her experience are expertly woven into the fabric of the novel, which presents Gabi’s episodic story arc, covering about three or four years of her life, with honest and compelling language and pacing that never flags. Lyrical yet straightforward, Gomez inserts compelling details that spring Gabi’s story to life.

You feel the claustrophobia of Gabi’s family’s small house. The constant Miami heat, especially during the torpid summer months. The harrowing hurricane that hits Miami and almost carries away her father and their house. Gabi’s high school experience getting into trouble from teachers for speaking Spanish in class. Gabi’s first experiences with boys and the men who whistle at her whenever she walks through her neighborhood.

One of the central storylines the novel expertly showcases is the steady decline of Gabi’s father, who descends from loving, hardworking family man to an unemployable hothead who lives in a haze of confusion and at times is overcome with an uncontrollable, lashing rage. Gabi, her mother Evi, and her two younger brothers never know what will set him off—it could be a chaste kiss between husband and wife on TV or the sight of a male friend driving Gabi home from school.

Even as his behavior turns violent, Evi keeps blinders in place and believes Roberto will be himself again someday and that his temporary condition is exhaustion born of a life of hard work supporting the family. Instead of taking him to a doctor, Evi feeds him a daily regimen of downers to keep him docile. It’s a Band-Aid to an obviously wider and deeper problem.

The genius of Try to Remember is how Iris Gomez tells Gabi’s story in honest, clear language with moments of lyrical transcendence with sympathy for her characters without a false note. This is not an easy accomplishment. The point of view is close first, which pulls us quickly into the Gabi’s thoughts and experiences. The novel could have been bogged down with flashbacks and constant remembrances of the way things used to be.

Gabriela does harbor memories, but these fleeting, necessary snapshots expose a time when her father was normal, doting, and employable. There is no secret from the past that haunts the present. At once bittersweet and hopeful, the story of Gabi’s day-to-day life, her struggles and accomplishments, is told with a minimum of melodrama and the novel is stronger for it.

First Book Review: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

No, I haven't read it. But Publisher's Weekly just came out with their starred review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom, which won't be out until the last day of August. The Corrections has built up such a reputation by fans of Franzen's fiction that it seems almost impossible that another Franzen novel will live up expectations, but, as PW says: ..."the first question facing Franzen’s feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor’s shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way." 

Still, another novel about a family...hasn't he already covered this ground? It's like seeing movie remade by the same director originally released only ten years earlier. But, as PW goes on to say, "Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family’s facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at—incredibly—genuine hope."

Sounds good, I'll give you that. And Liz is interested in reading it as well. Way interested. So this all to say that a copy of Freedom will be gracing our shelves by the end of the summer.

There is a lot of anticipation in the publishing/book seller world for this book. UK trade magazine The Bookseller says Freedom is the "one to watch" this September. "This is probably the most eagerly awaited literary novel this autumn." UK's The Guardian says, "Bookshops pin hopes on Jonathan Franzen's return with Freedom."

Book Review: The Awful Possibilities, by Christian TeBordo

Planning a vacation this year? Want to go to someplace unique? Try the locales featured in the stories from Christian TeBordo’s new collection, The Awful Possibilities, out now from Featherproof Books. TeBordo’s stories are populated by characters that are often not what they initially seem, sometimes even to themselves. And the familiar locations of apartment buildings, lonely snow-covered highways, congested intersections, graveyards, and motel rooms (oh, fear the motel rooms) may not be the kind you’re used to.

Throughout The Awful Possibilities, TeBordo plays with subtle time and point of view shifts that bring out a surprising depth to what could be, at first glance, sensationalistic or exploitative themes. Some of his stories exist amid a landscape where even the smallest action has a reaction. Where tables are turned, where prisoners become keepers, where memories are real, imagined, or continuously reconditioned into new realities.

In “Moldering,” a man thinks and speaks like he’s living in the 1940s. His wife tells him to go out and get a new wallet, as his old one is moldering away in his pocket. The man heads out into the night, sure in his quest to look for his friend, the wallet maker. By the time he finds his friend, it’s clear that the wallet maker is no maker of leather items and is instead a drug dealer who lives in contemporary America. They are not actually friends, but acquaintances who knew each other back in high school. The man eventually gets his wallet, and a matching handbag for his wife. But how and why I’ll leave for the discerning reading to discover.

In “Rules and Regulations,” a father describes his list of rules for successful child rearing, which include restraining as a form of discipline and avoiding losing control. The final rule he tells us about is Do not let the child discipline you. From here the story shifts fifteen or twenty years later, as his two now grown children, a boy and a girl, recipients of said rules, have their own rules for disciplining their now invalid father. The boy is the disciplinarian, and the girl writes in her diary the new rules. But is she really a sister, and are there really two children, or just one who wishes he had a sister?

In what is arguably the centerpiece of this collection, the “Champion of Forgetting,” a girl is kidnapped by a band of rogue kidney thieves and forced to witness, study, and eventually participate in the practice of kidney stealing. Her kidnappers condition her to forget even her own name. As told from this girl’s close point of view, sometimes she’s “me” and sometimes “this girl.” The narrative stutters forward, then slinks back, and it’s up to the reader to put together the compartmentalized memory of this girl into a story. It turns into the horror landscape of a traumatized young mind exposed to, and forever altered by, her keepers. Eventually left on her own in a motel room, she knows only how to continue to be a nameless kidney thief.

Many of the stories peel back moments when characters are in extremis: arguments that, to an outsider, might appear random but to the participants are intense, baroque, personal. "SS Attacks!" deals with a misunderstood school shooting. In “Oh, Little So-and-So,” a man tries to help a little girl who appears to be lost, randomly trying to direct traffic in the middle of an intersection. She leads him to a cemetery, where he ends up helping dig a grave, possibly his own. Not all the stories traffic in extreme themes. "Took and Lost" and "I Can Only Hope That He Still Believes In Redemption," both deal with an item stolen from a man on the street, each with an entirely different outcome.

Each story is bookended with a post card that depicts a seemingly normal American scene—a shopping mall, a trailer park, a motel room, a ‘50s burlesque review. The scenes have been altered to include oil slick skulls and black drippings that could represent, in a more colorful world, blood. These are effective interpretations of TeBordo’s stories—life seen from those moments that play out below the surface of normal or classic America, barely containing primal emotions. Maybe TeBordo is simply reinterpreting America, albeit a different and often uncomfortable one. But then who’s to say what’s normal in comparison?

TeBordo chooses situations that, if you experienced them in your own life, you might question the very stuff of reality. These stories stay with you, gnaw away at your memory and beg to be reread. Some end in such a way that left me wanting a bit more resolution. But this may be TeBordo’s way of tweaking the form to give the feeling that each story continues on when you’re done reading, with or without you. And the way to continue with these stories is to reread them.

Book Review: Severance Package, by Duane Swierczynski

With Severance Package, Duane Swierczynski, author of The Blonde, The Wheelman, and Marvel Comics' X-Men series Cable, has written a furiously-paced crime thriller. Severance Package concerns seven employees of a financial services company called to a Saturday morning meeting in a downtown Philadelphia high rise. Like much about this novel, no character is exactly what he or she first seems. No plot point is presented without complication.

The story shifts into warp speed early on when the boss, David, calls the Saturday meeting to order by informing his underlings that the floor they are on has been secured so nobody can enter or exit without triggering nasty poisonous gas. Their company, actually a front for a covert government agency, is getting shut down. And instead of laying people off, this company's downsizing severance package includes death. All employees are instructed to either drink a cup of poisoned champagne or take a bullet to the head. Without giving much more of the plot away, I can tell you that only one employee goes for the champagne, thinking it's some kind of twisted corporate trust game. When one of the underlings shoots the boss, all hell breaks loose.

As far as characters, there's Molly, the boss's mousy assistant. Jamie, the word nerd who writes press releases. Ethan, ex-military, ex-special forces. Nichole, a spreadsheet workhorse who turns out to be pretty handy with a gun. And so on. The characters are just above stock, but it's not really character development you come to Severance Package looking for. It's action. And this book's got it.

Over the next 263 pages each employee scrambles around the building's 36th floor trying not to die. The timeline of the novel only arcs a couple hours, if that. It's a testament to Swierczynski's pacing that he keeps all his balls in the air expertly, even introducing a hapless security guard who would rather not have to play hero. All the while a pair of men in Edinburgh work a bank of surveillance cameras, keeping check on the unfolding action. It's visceral storytelling that has roots in the cross-cutting style of suspense movies and the dramatic, stylish pull of left-to-right comic book frames. It makes sense then that the pages of the book are peppered with black and white illustrations by Dennis Calero.


It's a body count story, and these are by nature not heavy on the character development. From Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians to Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, there's an inherent drama in finding out who dies next and how. But it's low-calorie, binge-and-purge fiction, with the thrill coming during the reading, not afterwards.

So that means it's all about the ride. And this novel offers a doozy, full of plot twists, double crosses, daring escapes, and frenetic moments where characters you thought were dead come back into play. Taken at this level, the ride is entertainingly fast and well-drawn, and at times almost believable. I recommend reading the book quickly. If you put it down for too long, the plot holes begin to burn away at the left side of your brain.

Violent and fast, giddy and gory, there's a lot to like about Severance Package. Take a ride.

Book Review: Chinese Takeout, by Arthur Nersesian

The novel Chinese Takeout by New York-based poet, playwright, lit mag editor, and novelist Arthur Nersesian, concerns a lower Manhattan artist in his early thirties, Orloff Trenchant (great name). His friends call him Or. And sometimes either/or. Or had a level of success early in his career after he produced a series of paintings depicting his real-life experience of his getting pushed onto train tracks (what Or refers to as the subway accident). Eight years after his first solo gallery show, Or is living a squalid life, sometimes in run-down apartments, sometimes out of his van. He pays for his supplies by selling used books on the streets of Manhattan while struggling to complete his latest work—a series of paintings of swimmers navigating the East River.


As the novel unfolds we are introduced to Or’s various downtown artist friends, lovers, and critics. There is Bethsheba, an Australian artist with which Or pals around and occasionally sleeps with. Klein Ritter, “a shrunken, deviously mild-mannered man and the most venomous art critic on the scene.” Cali, a matronly gallery owner who got Or his first solo show. And June, Or’s artist girlfriend. By the end of Chapter 2, Or’s jealousy overtakes him when he finds some sketches June drew depicting sexual acts that Or is sure he was not a part of. In a fit, he destroys a couple of her finished works, ceremoniously breaking off their relationship.

In any other novel, this rash, extreme act would connote the beginning of a downward spiral. But Nersesian avoids cliché by having this be just another blip on Or’s radar of life. The chapters are fairly short, averaging ten pages, and the prose is brisk and the dialogue true, funny, and plentiful. Flashbacks are kept to a minimum, with the story told mostly in the present.

Or avoids living in his van by moving into an older artist’s loft space while the artist, Shade, is out of town. He meets Rita, a beautiful young punk who works for a needle exchange program, handing out new needles to street addicts with names like Meaningless Mike and Crackpipe Bob. He is instantly smitten, falling for this girl he knows almost nothing about, and turning her into his muse.

Nersesian adds discussions of real artists like de Kooning and Rothko, as well as art critic Robert Hughes, lending an authenticity to the story. He shows us how hard it is for Or to continue living in a city that has priced out poor artists and writers. The locations feel authentic to Or’s life: he meets up with fellow artists and writers at the KGB Bar. Shade’s loft space is in the Jarmulovsky Bank building, on the corner of Canal and Orchard Streets. Though published in 2003, Nersesian has set his story pre-9/11, specifically during the 2000 presidential election. This lends the novel a fabled feel of a time and place that was inexorably changed within the year.

Or is not just a character in a story who happens to be an artist. When he’s not buying and selling used books, he’s drawing, painting, or sculpting with palpable passion, frustration, failure, and success. Nersesian appears to know what he’s talking about, and highlights the day-to-day details of what it takes to be a working artist in New York. He describes artists' financial struggles, the types of art supplies needed for a certain project, and the thought processes that spin through the mind of a painter.

The Chinese takeout of the title is a sculpture job that Or is offered, to create a headstone in the shape of a Chinese food takeout carton. Or accepts the work because he needs the money. But he also wants to learn more about working with stone. Or is a specific type of artist, and there are probably many like him in the New York art scene—broke, struggling, but also trying to become better at his craft in hopes that one day recognition will come.

The tone of Chinese Takeout is handled deftly, with sly, comic touches, and dialogue that is generally honest and real. You learn a lot about Nersesian’s characters by the way they talk and interact. When Or falls hard for Rita, he learns that not only has she quit her job with the needle exchange, she’s an addict herself. The theme of addiction is marbled throughout Chinese Takeout: not only drug addiction, but also fame addition, poverty addiction, and love addiction. This is heavy stuff, but it never becomes overwhelming or suffocating. I felt more like I was being shown a new, unfamiliar world by an author who wanted me to understand it without judgment, while also warning me about its pitfalls.

In many ways Or is lucky, as a character and as an artist. But he is still a character in a novel, and as such experiences a story arc. And whether you buy the end of the novel depends on whether you can appreciate Or foremost as this specific character. I enjoyed reading about Or’s experiences and ultimately I found the ending of the novel and of Or’s story arc a satisfying conclusion.

I admit it took me a while to get into the writing. I was put off by the many adverbs in the character tags. Often Nersesian hits you over the head with them, using phrases like, “he replied nervously”, “I asked delicately”, “I replied earnestly”, and “he instantly retorted.” This is an important point, because as a writer I try to avoid redundancy or hyperbole. But a strange thing happened on my way to the finish line: I warmed up to this style and believe it added a level of warmth and sympathy to Or, and made his occasional rash, rude behavior come across more human than douche baggy.

If you want an adult read that will take you to a place and time in Manhattan you might not otherwise get to see (and if you do, take care out there), I recommend Chinese Takeout. If you read it, let me know what you think. And if you’ve read other books by Mr. Nersesian, tell me which of his books I should pick up next.

Book Review: Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, by Marc Blatte

I acquired a review copy of Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed for the very purpose of reviewing it for the Unreliable Narrator. It’s not a book I would generally buy. Meaning, I don’t read police procedurals, which this is. Sort of. And I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up based on the sleeve, which touts Marc Blatte’s first novel as “…the first truly wonderful hip-hop noir mystery” with comparisons to Tom Wolfe and Carl Hiaasen.


Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed is a fast-paced who-done-it that barely slows to consider its shortcomings (more on that later). It’s a mostly believable tale of a cop, Black Sallie Blue Eyes, out to find the murderer of a night club bouncer. The story unfolds by introducing a group of initially disparate characters, many accounting for multiple points of view. The effect of multiple narrators is distracting at first, but eventually Blatte falls into a rhythm that at least stopped me from asking, “Why all the different points of view?” It’s a choice, and the author went for it. It gives the reader the benefit of getting into the heads of the major players in the story. But the down side is that the inner life and motivations of Black Sallie Blue Eyes, alternately called Sal and Sallie throughout, become watered down. I would have liked to see much more from Sallie’s point of view. Blatte’s author bio says that he’s currently writing another mystery featuring Sallie. I’ll be curious how he handles the point of view thing in the next one.

Anyway, so where does the hip-hop come in? Chapter 1 is told not from Sallie’s point of view, but that of Biz, a rising-star rap producer and cousin to a scumbag gangsta named Scholar. Scholar insists that his star cousin produce a demo for his rap group, Proof Positive. Biz relents when Scholar amazingly comes up with 15K, the high price Biz quoted his crazy cousin thinking he’d never actually scratch the cash together. Where did he raise all that cash? Biz’s favor for his cousin (he’s rightfully scared shitless of Scholar) sets off a series of events that turn up the body count. Word. Chapter 1 did not grab me by the short hairs and scream, “Read the rest of this book!” The point of view shifts between Biz and Scholar. It’s Biz’s chapter, if we want to nit-pick (and, oh god, do I), although Biz only shows up two or three more times in the book.

Next we are introduced to Sallie (“one of New York’s most decorated cops”) and his crew as they investigate a murder in the parking lot next to the Manhattan club all the rappers and high-rollers love, the Kiki Club. The dead body belongs to Pashko, a former Serbian gun runner, come to America to escape the drama and share an apartment with his cousin, Vooko. Turns out Vooko was with Pashko when he was shot, barely escaping a hit and run that left him in the hospital but with a clear memory of who killed his cousin.

The chapters are short, which lends to the quick read. The choice of shifting points of view, while initially off-putting, ultimately adds breadth to the storytelling. Both Sallie and Vooko are looking for Pashko’s killer. The lens of the story widens as we discover that a few altercations occurred at the Kiki Club, one involving Scholar and his crew, and another with rich white boy Kal Kessler, and his sister, Leah, the spoiled spawn of ultra-rich New York developer, Sheldon Kessler. I suppose this is where the Tom Wolfe comparison comes in, with the depiction of the haves and the wanna haves. Vooko and Scholar both come from nothing and want the lifestyle on display in the Hamptons, only a car-drive away. If murder is a way out, than so be it.

I’m not the target audience for this book. I don’t read a lot of police procedurals or watch CSI and Law & Order. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good plot-driven read. Or can’t spot unbelievable characters or situations. Scenes of Sallie’s detective work seem the most plausible and are among the most interesting to read. Vooko’s character is flawed but comes across as curious but mindful. He has his own dangerous agenda, but in his chapters we are shown his struggle to forget the atrocities he witnessed in his home country and his determination to find his cousin’s killer and right his world. The book’s title is his mantra: Humpty Dumpty didn’t just fall. Murder doesn’t just happen. Mr. Dumpty was, ultimately, pushed.

Sections that work best include a scene where Blatte takes us out of the city and drives to the Hamptons with Vooko in his search for justice. His longing for a mansion and a garage full of classic cars is well conveyed, his dream making him come across as a hopeful innocent. We know Vooko will probably never achieve that kind of life, but it’s his determination for what he sees as the American way that makes him endearing.

When Sallie visits the drugged-up Kal in his renovated Tribeca loft (one of his father’s projects), Sallie stares out the window, down into the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. He feels nausea remembering that day and how he lost friends in the attacks. This sort of emotion in the context of a murder mystery seemed like a convenient trigger for a jaded character to get more angry and depressed. But it’s later, when Sallie comes back to Kal’s place for a deadly face off, that the area out the window evokes tears and a true reflection of evil. It’s a heartfelt moment, welcomingly downplayed, that echoes more realistically the earlier scene’s sentiments. These moments explain more about what drives Sallie than any other passages in the book.

Occasionally, though, Blatte makes some astoundingly odd choices. Some of the action scenes are written in a bloodless, distancing style. For example, toward the end, one of the characters is racing through Manhattan streets. The scene ends in a fiery car wreck. Instead of a satisfying description of the crash, we get this: “The collision was fast and furious; a case in point that drugs and driving don’t mix. The outcome was predictable. How could a prissy little BMW sports car plow into ten tons of steel loaded with five tons of garbage and remain intact? The answer: it couldn’t, and neither could its driver.” What really happened? Give us real-world detail. Like, what happens when this particular BMW ‘plows’ into this particular truck? The collision was ‘fast and furious’, the outcome ‘predictable’ – this doesn’t tell us much, and shows us even less.

Another misstep is to include a scene at the very end, where Scholar explains his dastardly actions, articulating his ideas in language that had until now eluded him. If Scholar was indeed some kind of scholar, as this scene implies, we need to see it throughout the book. His interior monologue, shown in chapters from his POV, never hinted at this type of self-awareness. Also, as a reader I didn’t need or want such a concise, pat explanation for his character’s motivation. It’s like the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho, where a new character is introduced in the final ten minutes to give a long-winded explanation about Norman Bate’s motivation. It’s a matter of balancing, and Blatte hasn’t quite worked out what degree of importance to give certain details.

Overall though, Blatte introduces an interesting bunch of characters and situations. He has a decent ear for dialogue, and basically gets out of his own way to let the Vookos, Scholars, and Kals of his New York duke it out. So if you want a quick read, a fast ride, a book that doesn’t take itself too seriously, check out Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, out now from Schaffner Press.

Book Review: This Book Will Save Your Life, by A.M. Homes

In This Book Will Save Your Life, 911 returns a call, leaving a message on the main character’s voicemail. Can this happen? Does it matter? That’s the kind of book this is. Acts of god abound, yet somehow, and I’m still trying to figure this out, Homes makes it seem like it can. And makes you wish it happened to you.

Richard is divorced, retired early, fit, living a comfortable, secluded life in the hills above Los Angeles. Every morning he walks the treadmill in his living room while he checks the latest numbers from Wall Street, shifting his money around. He’s rich, and this is all he wants out of life. He has a woman who cleans his house and assists him. He has a nutritionist who brings him a week’s worth of healthy meals so he doesn’t have to leave his house. And he doesn’t, for weeks at a time.

This Book Will Save Your Life introduces the consistent sameness of Richard, spins him around as if readying for a piñata slaughter, and pitches him off in unforeseen directions. Random acts begin with a sinkhole in Richard’s lovely green yard. Then he experiences a pain, forcing him to dial 911 for help, and this introduces a series of events that takes him out of his house and beyond his comfort level.

Very quickly Richard meets an expansive cast of characters, each changing his life and opening up a horizon of possibility. There’s Cynthia, a woman he befriends after he finds her crying in the produce section. She’s miserable in her life as wife and mother. There’s Anhil, a Donut Depot proprietor who, Richard discovers, cherishes making quality donuts, driving fancy cars he can never afford, and spouts malapropisms like, “Make my words.” And Tad Ford, the movie star up the street who, when a horse gets stuck in the sinkhole, orders up a chopper, flies over with a harness, and lifts the horse to safety. This random but powerful act shines a strange spotlight onto Richard that follows him for the rest of the story.

He gets advice from doctors and friends. It’s the literary version of the Jim Carrey movie, Yes Man. Richard, instead of just letting his money make money, starts saying yes. Yes, he will go on a retreat to meditate. Yes, he’ll let Anhil drive his Mercedes. Yes, he’ll move to Malibu for the summer while his house gets worked on (sinkholes really screw up your land when you live on an L.A. hillside). He starts to want to change people’s lives, like people have affected his.

If all this sounds like a sappy, sentimental Lifetime movie (if they made movies for men), it’s not. A.M. Homes, author of the scabrous The End of Alice and the execrable Music For Torching (sorry, but I couldn’t get past page 30), lightens her touch and opens her window upon L.A., giving me one of the most enjoyable reads in a long time. I didn’t want the book to end. When does that happen? Seldom. The last time for me was with The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and before that, maybe going all the way back to The Corrections. I grew to enjoy not just all the characters, minor and major, but their travails.

The book is a happy amalgam of concurrent events. Homes follows Richard as he drives around Los Angeles, visiting Anhil at the Donut Depot, watching the till as Anhil drives in his car. After moving to Malibu, Richard does things like adopt a beach dog, befriend his crusty old neighbor who turns out to be a brilliant, famous writer (hey, why not?), shield Cynthia from her increasingly cruel husband while she starts her new autonomous life, and prepare for the visit of Ben, his long estranged son driving West to work as a summer intern at a talent agency. Thinking of his son sets off memories of his marriage, his wife, his parents, how he was never there for Ben. He wants to change, to make amends, to do nice things for people like buy them new cars or pay for hip replacements.

Weaved throughout the narrative are seemingly unrelated random events. Posters are stapled to telephone poles. Have you seen this? they ask. Photographers stand across the Pacific Coast Highway from his Malibu house. Patches of tar seep into the basement of Anhil’s Donut Depot. Fires flare unexplained in garbage cans up and down Richard’s street. A saber-toothed cat has been spotted in the city. While driving on a freeway, Richard decodes an SOS flashed by the break lights of the car ahead of him. He thinks someone is locked in the trunk and forces the car off the road. Turns out, there was a woman locked in the trunk. He saves the day and becomes one of those civic saviors (think Tom Cruise saving a woman from drowning) who piques the public’s collective interest. Thankfully, Homes doesn’t have Richard go on the Today Show to talk about it.


The randomness of events could be cloying and tricky in another story, but here it is the story, serving the overarching purpose of the character. Homes hints to deeper meanings, webbed together just out of sight. Unlike, say, Joe Meno’s Boy Detective Fails, where random unnatural events begin (buildings disappearing) only to peter out for no reason. For This Book Will Save Your Life, it’s another part of Richard’s journey of growth. It’s not to be taken too seriously, and is played for gentle laughs. Richard takes it in stride, and so should the reader.

There’s repetition in action, in everything being so random, but the constant change of locations, short scenes, action interspersed with true dialogue, and a revolving door of minor characters to interact with Richard keep the pace snappy and the mind wanting to know what happens next. Homes doesn’t let things settle, or the characters to get too analytical.

If I have one complaint it’s that the timeline gets a little blurred toward the end. It’s supposed to take place over a summer. We see the beginning of the summer. And then, before we know it, Ben is headed back east to start his senior year in high school. A little jolting. Maybe I didn’t read close enough to pick up the marks of time passing. I’m picky about segues and timelines. Hold my hand just a touch more without being obvious, don’t let me flounder in timeless fictive waters, keep me grounded.

How do you wrap up such a story, so many characters? I like a congealing at the end. Save vagueness and lyricism for short stories. If I’ve committed to read a 372 page novel, I better come away with some knowledge of how the characters finished. Or didn’t finish. And I get it here, even though the swift ending barely avoids a disaster movie/act of god crutch. Richard’s initial pain and sinkhole were merely narrative devices to drive him out of the house. Nothing is really explained fully, and nothing needs to be. It’s all metaphors, physical manifestations of upheaval, the turmoil in Richard’s life. And even though he ends up floating in the ocean, pieces of his Malibu rental around him, the smoke from wildfires clearing out in the morning sun, he is, finally, not alone.

Book Review: Memorial, by Bruce Wagner

If I were a character in a Bruce Wagner novel, I would have been born and raised in Los Angeles. My mother, Marjorie, would have married twice—divorced once and widowed once—passing her old age year in relative comfort in tony Beverlywood. My sister, Joan, an also-ran architect, jealous of other architects of her generation, would be flipping out because she’s almost 40 and hasn’t achieved all she wants from her career or from men. My father, Ray, would have left this cuddly family unit when I was only a couple years old. And then there’s me, Chester, a forty-something location scout and relative loser, always seeking, never finding. If the above were so, then you could call my life Memorial.


We are introduced to this Los Angeles family as things begin to fall apart or come together, depending on your point of view. Chester gets taken in as the butt end of a reality show gotcha moment, caught on tape, getting physically banged up in the process. For the remainder of the book he pops pills to fight the pain and hires a pit bull lawyer who promises Chester he’ll wring the production company for all they’re worth. Joan sleeps with most of the men in her life, including the man her company is wooing to land a contract to design and build a memorial for his brother lost in the Asian Tsunami of 2004.

Meanwhile Marjorie gets scammed by a troop of ingenious grifters as they wring her for all she’s worth with a bogus state lottery shadow program called the Blind Sisters. Gullible and lonely (her kids only call when they’re looking for a handout) she willingly gives these very nice people who want to lavish her with secret lottery winnings all the information about her bank accounts and money up front in order to secure her place among the other secret winners. That’s just the beginning of poor Marj’s problems. Her devastating fall from grace is a cruel wonder to read.

While Marjorie is raked over the coals, her ex husband, whom she hasn’t seen since he left decades before, has gone through the trauma of having his City of Industry apartment mistaken for that of a drug dealer and invaded by police. In the process, his dog is shot. After the ordeal there are lots of apologies by all involved, his dog gets the best care, makes it through, and Ray ends up with a tasty settlement from the city.

So, lots of opportunity for a rather depressing story. But Wagner takes us into the cranium of these characters so absolutely that we don’t just witness their innocence (for the mother and father) and humor and pathos (for the kids) but we feel it absolutely. Wagner is masterful at spinning pages of internal strife and dialogue into gold blocks of black humor and endless pop culture references. Actually, he goes beyond references to show how actual behavior and thought patterns are predicated on the cultural environment.

Bruce Wagner has been writing about Hollywood and Los Angelinos denizens since the early nineties (and earlier?) when he published his first novel, Force Majeure, about an aspiring screenwriter who drives a limo for a living, a character who will do anything to get his stuff on screen and be a player in Hollywood. Wagner writes about the inner workings of his L.A. characters like no writer since possibly Nathaniel West—splayed and flayed in real-time, they swagger, discourse, screw, ingest drugs, screw over, and ultimately expect their due. And it should be said, the karma they put out comes back to them in grand ways. Generally, lots of humiliating situations ensue. I couldn’t get through Force Majeure. It was unrelentingly depressing and misanthropic. It also lacked what his later novels (including his cellular trilogy, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Still Holding, and I’m Losing You) abundantly enjoyed: a wicked, fun, spot-on sense of humor. The blacker the better.


Chester and Joan fight off their respective demons by fucking, doping, and spewing some of the foulest, racist, darkest humor I’ve probably ever read in a mainstream book. There are some images I wish I hadn’t come across. Yet everything mixed together—the bathos of Marjorie as a total victim; the tender, dopey father making gestures to reconnect to his original family; Joan discovering a strength and positive ferocity while becoming her mother’s only benefactor and protector; vapid, flailing Chester digging deep to finally overcome his fears and head off to India to search for an inner peace he’s canny enough to know he’ll never get in Los Angeles—all this crazy shit reduces like a surprisingly succulent stew from the disparate parts of a dozen stale Hollywood pitch meetings.

Death comes a calling, and India as country and symbol spins its web, as a real or fantasy destination for many of the characters. It’s this symbol of peace and healing that swirls out of the memorials for everyone lost in recent tragedies, both American and world-wide. It’s like Wagner has created this sour and sweet salve to rub on America’s collective, exhausted wounds.

Wagner’s prose is thick, and I’m always surprised at his savvy turns of phrase. While his characters, mostly Joan and Chester, spew long pages of venom and uncanny (sometimes unrealistic) insight into almost every corner of their psyche, there’s nothing boring about Memorial, and everything about it will stick with you. This novel was published in 2006, and it’s so timely that if you read it in another couple years, the pop references would seem stale, although they magically still hold up in February 2009. And his themes of human loss, family struggle and tragedy, of the haves and wish-I-hads, of endings and beginnings, never really go out of style.

Book Review: The Sound of Our Town, by Brett Milano

Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of Boston rock & roll summed up between two covers. Brett Milano, a man who’s been on the scene for decades, writes with you-are-there fanboy urgency about many of the Boston bands that passed through The Rat, The Channel, Cantone’s, The Middle East, TT the Bear’s Place, and other Boston clubs and bars. He covers various touchstone rock eras: r & b 50s, groovy 60s, laid back 70s, snotty, anything goes late 70s, new wave early 80s, hardcore mid-80s, major label feeding frenzy early 90s. Through it all he presents every band as just wanting to play in a wicked decent band and have people see them play live.


Rock has been vital to Boston and its neighboring burgs since the G-Cleffs harmonized on Roxbury street corners. The book is a good primer in early local legends and also-rans like Gene Maltais, the Remains, and the Lost, while covering the obvious success stories of Boston, J. Geils, The Cars, and Aerosmith. The book doles out nuggets of context (social, political, gender) so readers who weren’t around to see it first-hand can understand why homegrown bands ached to play either sock hops or the most scuzzy, beer-soaked Boston stages. Milano obviously loves these bands. All of them. He even writes with a fond humor and bewilderment about probably the most loathed, obscene, and dangerous of all punk performers, GG Allin.

I guess I wanted to pick up this book because I was never part of any music scene. I went to school in Worcester for a couple years, but I spent much of college and post-college years in Connecticut and on Cape Cod. So it was essential reading to discover how punk music influenced the Boston bands of the late 70s. How post-punk, hardcore, new wave, and alternative/college bands fought their way onto Boston college radio, into underground record stores and clubs like The Rat, and finally onto mainstream radio behemoth WBCN.

I came of musical age in the 80s, so this book covers vital history, including how Mission of Burma and The Pixies came to make some of the most influential rock music ever. There are plenty of anecdotes about bands that signed with major labels with varying degrees of success. Or burned out in a couple of years but were no less influential or singular. Regional heroes like The Lyres, Real Kids, Nervous Eaters, Dinosaur Jr., Dumptruck, Big Dipper, Classic Ruins, and on and on.

Maybe you saw some of these bands live. I wish I could say I did, at the time. I made up for lost time in the early ‘90s when I moved back to the area. I caught The Lyres at TT’s and Sebadoh at Avalon. Saw Morphine play Central Square’s World Fair in ’97, was shocked to find Peter Wolf standing behind me at some random TT’s show, caught Juliana Hatfield and John Doe sitting at TT’s bar, and I’m pretty sure that was Rivers Cuomo talking to some guys at my table back when TT’s had booths and Mr. Cuomo was attending Harvard. I’m happy to say I caught Mission of Burma opening for The Pixies in late 2004. Not in Boston, but down the street here in Lowell, at the Tsongas Arena.

If you’ll pardon me, I have to get back to some essential listening: my vinyl copy of Let’s Breed! Part two of the Throbbing Lobster saga, featuring Boston legends Dumptruck, The Outlets, Christmas, Blackjacks, Scruffy the Cat, and so much more...