Lost in the 80s Tonight: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Book #13 for 2012: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One is pure pleasure and pure fun. It reads like a YA novel for people who were YAs in the 1980s, very nerdy YAs who were raised on a diet of early video games, Dungeons & Dragons, the geekier movies of the period and 80s rock groups like Rush. Although the action of the book takes place in the 2040s, Ready Player One is steeped in 80s pop culture through and through.

Here’s the premise: Back here in the early 2000s, there lived a computer genius named James Halliday, who along with his business partner Ogden “Og” Morrow founded one of the most successful video game companies of all time: Gregarious Simulation Systems or GSS. (The name is something of a joke, since Halliday is a pure Asperger’s geek, far more comfortable with computers than with human beings.) Not long in our future, GSS will announce its greatest achievement, a stunning virtual reality simulation called OASIS (Ontologically Anthroprocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) that contains a vast universe with thousands of planets. OASIS is so big that it contains other massively multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft and Everquest, as tiny pieces within it. Anyone who can afford the wraparound 3D goggles and haptic gloves (which allow you to manipulate and feel objects within the virtual universe) can enter OASIS and effectively take up residence there. You can even go to school there, because one of its planets is devoted entirely to education. Other planets are devoted to things like shopping for virtual merchandise, but most are devoted totally to fun. Each planet is stunningly detailed, with a vast environment to explore, and many of them contain puzzles, dungeons and infinite opportunities for role-playing. Given that the world economy has continued the downward spiral that it began in 2008, by the 2040s a lot of people would rather spend their lives in the OASIS universe than in the real one, coming out only for biological and economic necessities.

What triggers the book’s plot, though, is the death circa 2040 of OASIS co-founder Halliday. In his lifetime he had amassed a vast fortune somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars and, never having married or fathered children, has no one to leave it to. So in his final will and testament — which he records on 3D video, of course — he announces to the world that he’s set up an immensely complex puzzle quest within OASIS and whoever solves it first will inherit every cent he owns.

You can see, of course, the problems such a quest could cause. A lot of people are going to want Halliday’s fortune and will be willing to do almost anything to get it, including cheating (though there are no real rules, so cheating isn’t really possible), stealing and even killing. But when Halliday’s fortune isn’t discovered within a few years a lot of people decide that it was all a big practical joke and quit looking for it, all except a dedicated (and decidedly nerdy) group of diehards who call themselves “egg hunters” (because the object of Halliday’s quest is what video game players like to call an “easter egg”), a term that rapidly finds itself abbreviated to “gunters.”

The hero of the story is an 18-year-old male gunter named Wade Watts (his late father, also a geek, wanted his son’s name to sound like a superhero’s secret identity) who lives with his malicious aunt and her violent series of boyfriends in the 2040s equivalent of a trailer park — stacks of old, rotting trailers piled like skyscrapers on the outskirts of cities and abandoned as homes for the homeless. To get away from his own relatives, Wade finds an unoccupied trailer hidden away at the bottom of one of these stacks, sets up his virtual reality rig there, and spends his days either going to high school in the virtual world or working on the Hunt, as the search for Halliday’s easter egg is called. Like all gunters, Wade knows that solving the clues that Halliday has left to the location of his treasure will require a voluminous knowledge of 80s trivia, especially regarding the sort of 80s pop culture that Halliday himself was immersed in during his adolescence, which includes movies like War Games and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, arcade games like Joust and Tempest, and text adventures like Zork. (One suspects these things were also youthful obsessions of the book’s author, Ernest Cline.)

And though most of the world has written off the Hunt as a joke, when Wade solves the series of puzzles that leads to the first of the three keys that will literally unlock the treasure, everyone becomes interested again, because a giant scoreboard (like the High Scores board in a video game) appears on virtual reality displays around the planet and the name of Wade’s OASIS avatar is right at the top. (His avatar is named Parsifal, after the knight who found the Holy Grail.)

Ready Player One is a little slow off the ground in its opening pages because there’s a lot of exposition to be gotten out of the way (as should be apparent just from the fraction of it I’ve given in this review), but once Wade finds the first key the book takes off like a combination of 80s trivia contest, open-world computer game and Alfred Hitchcock chase thriller. Everybody wants to know who Wade is and how he found the key — and “everybody” includes Innovative Online Industries or IOI, a vast and malevolent corporation put together for the express purpose of finding Halliday’s easter egg. If IOI finds out who Wade really is — and, of course, they do — they’ll be willing to kill him and everybody he knows in order to beat him to the next key in the set.

Ready Player One isn’t a deep novel, though author Cline includes a touching romance and a nice little moral at the end, but it’s a fast read and a highly entertaining ride — especially if you were around, or even know anybody who was around, in the 1980s.

The Self-Destruction of America: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

Book #12 for 2012: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

No matter what you might guess from its title, Super Sad True Love Story isn’t a novel of teenage romance. It’s not even a YA novel. It’s a dystopian, near-future, catastrophe novel, the wrenching story of America’s final transformation into a crumbling, third-world nation willingly turning itself into a police state in an attempt to clear out the poor, the immigrants, the homeless who have dragged our international credit rating down to the point where we can’t even get a loan from China, which has now become the leading world power. It ends in cataclysm and horror.

But Gary Shteyngart, its author, is a satirist of darkly comic sensibilities, so that’s not how he tells it. Instead, he tells it as the story of a 39-year-old, unmarried Jewish male named Lenny Abramov, who comes across as a somewhat chunkier, balder version of the character Woody Allen has played in so many movies (and who I suspect bears some resemblance to Shteyngart himself). Lenny falls wildly in love with a 19-year-old American teenager of Korean ancestry named Eunice Park that he meets during an extended trip to Italy (a much nicer place to be at this point in future history). He can’t stop thinking of her when he returns to the U.S., where he learns that the country has put itself in the hands of someone referred to only as Defense Secretary Rubinstein, who has stationed troops in the streets of Manhattan and gunboats in the Hudson River. All trappings of the militarized state are accompanied by signs that read “It is forbidden to acknowledge the existence of this checkpoint/vehicle/whatever (‘The Object’). By reading this sign you have denied existence of the object and implied consent,” a policy known to the general public as “imply and deny.” If Shteyngart even makes mention of the U.S. having a president at this point in the near future I missed it, so Rubinstein has apparently effected some kind of military coup.

But Lenny, a second generation Russian immigrant, doesn’t have time to be worried about any of this. He worries mostly about three things: The first is his credit rating. In Rubinstein’s America your credit rating is of such paramount important that it’s automatically announced by street signs as you walk past them. God forbid you should be mistaken for a Low Net Worth Individual (LNWI, or what we used to call “poor person”). Fortunately Lenny’s credit rating is high enough to keep him out of the LNWI class, if not quite high enough to qualify him as an HNWI (High Net Worth Individual).

The second thing Lenny worries about (and once again he bears a striking resemblance to Woody Allen here) is death. He’s so afraid of growing old and dying that he’s taken a high-ranking job with a company called Post-Human Services that offers rejuvenation services and potential immortality using the latest nanotechnological cell-reconstruction techniques. These techniques are so expensive that they only market them to HNWIs, so ironically Lenny can’t afford his own product. However, his boss and long-time mentor Joshie can. Despite being thirty years Lenny’s senior, Joshie is youthful, vital and passes for Lennie’s younger brother. Eventually he will also become Lennie’s romantic rival.

The third thing Lenny worries about is Eunice Park, the Korean-American teenager he met in Italy, a second generation immigrant herself and essentially an LNWI with an uncertain future. Eunice has just broken up with her boyfriend in Italy and, when she moves back to the states, Lenny convinces her to move into his small Manhattan apartment with him. Although Eunice recognizes that Lenny is a bit age inappropriate for her, not to mention bald, overweight and fairly unattractive (she calls him “nerd-face”), she also discovers that she feels a certain affection for him, perhaps as a father substitute (her own father is cold and violent) or perhaps just because she needs someone who, unlike her boyfriend in Italy, loves her more than she loves him.

Super Sad True Love Story is told as a kind of epistolary novel, a mosaic of entries in Lenny’s diary and the text messages exchanged by Eunice, her family and her friends over an email/chat system known as GlobalTeens. In the first two-thirds of the book, the sheer denseness of the (often comic) detail that Shteyngart accretes from these fragments of text to describe Lenny’s life and the state of the world around him frequently threatened — I have to be honest here — to overwhelm my ever-tenuous attention span. But in the last third of the novel the true horror of the situation that Lenny and the narrow world around him (which consists mostly of Manhattan, Queens and Long Island) are in begins to sink in and the novel stops being biting satire and becomes something deeper, more resonant, something almost terrifying and, yes, super sad.

Much of what happens in Super Sad True Love Story is frantic almost to the point of chaos, but Shteyngart ends it on a reflective note that could almost be described as elegiac (look it up if you have to) in a way that makes a touching sense of the romance between Lenny and Eunice in the context of the self-destruction of America. This denouement provides the kind of emotional summing up of the novel’s events that the reader desperately needs after the comic/frightening intensity of much of what precedes it. It wasn’t until then that I realized that, yes, I really did quite like this book.

Taking It to the Streets: Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

Book #11 for 2012: Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

I have never read a complete novel by William Gibson. I suspect many people will react to that statement with a simple “So what?”, but a small subset will wonder why I would dare make such an admission in public. Have I no shame?

Gibson, when he arrived as a science fiction writer in the early 1980s, brought to the field a fusion of the traditional science fiction that he’d read when quite young and the beat generation prose of writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs that he had learned to love in his adolescence. In his 30s, Gibson became part of a small group of writers who developed a form of science fiction known as cyberpunk (Gibson himself coined the term “cyberspace”) and in so doing actually succeeded in making science fiction hip. The main point of cyberpunk was to remove modern electronic technology from the hands of geeks and office workers and take it, as the Doobie Brothers once said, to the streets. If the future was going to be about computers in all their possible forms, what forms would they take when they reached the fringier elements of society?

Why I’ve never been able to read an entire Gibson novel has never been quite clear to me. I actually made it halfway through his first one, Neuromancer, when it came out in the mid-80s and then simply didn’t pick it up again. I’ve started a couple of others with pretty much the same results. Yet I still want to read Gibson because I think the man is highly articulate, in touch with some important elements of the technological zeitgeist, and has some interesting things to say. So when I heard there was a collection of Gibson’s essays on the market, I knew I had to read it.

The problem is that Gibson isn’t really an essayist per se. He’s a fiction writer who gets asked by certain publications (often Wired) to write essays or who just writes random pieces of nonfiction to fill spaces where brief bursts of nonfiction are needed, like the introductions to books or as filler pieces in special issues of Time. Distrust That Particular Flavor is a collection of these random pieces and it’s about as mixed a bag of nonfiction writing as one could assemble without leaving the print medium altogether. I suspect if Gibson had ever written copy for the back of cereal box packages it would have been included in this collection, but fortunately he never has.

Some of the pieces collected in Distrust That Particular Flavor are brilliant, and it probably won’t shock anyone if I say that these tend to be the ones that I agree the most with. Gibson is often at his sharpest when writing about the contemporary world as though it were an environment out of a science fiction story. Gibson realizes, as many science fiction writers do, that most science fiction really isn’t about the future. It’s about aspects of the present that the majority of people simply haven’t noticed yet. Much of Gibson’s sf flows out of contemporary Japanese culture and he writes about Japan quite a bit in this book, maybe a little too much, but Gibson sees Japan as the cutting edge of modern pop culture and on that point I suspect he’s right. (Just as pop culture in the latter half of the 20th Century tended to flow out of Southern California and into the rest of the U.S., pop culture in the 21st Century tends to flow out of Japan and into the rest of the world.)

A lot of the pieces in this book suffer from being divorced from the contexts in which they were originally published. An introduction that Gibson wrote for a book of photographs of Tokyo, for instance, would be a lot more interesting if it had been accompanied by even one of the photographs it discusses. And discussions of things like Japanese crime films will probably only be of interest to a small but no doubt passionate cult of readers. (Since Gibson has always been something of a cult writer anyway, I suppose that won’t represent a problem to much of the book’s readership.)

Where Gibson really endeared himself to me, though, was in a short piece on Steely Dan’s album Two Against Nature, written for…well, I’m sure it says somewhere in here who he wrote it for, but I’m too lazy to go find it. It’s clear from this fragment (it’s too short to call an essay and Gibson himself admits that it’s not a review) that Gibson feels about Steely Dan almost exactly the same way that I do, which is to say that they exist outside anything that contemporary music ordinarily offers and are seriously warped in a way that people listening to them don’t always seem to recognize but that precisely matches the way that a few of us listening to them are warped. I’m willing to make another attempt to read Gibson’s fiction just because he claims to have “always maintained that Steely Dan’s music was, has been, and remains among the most genuinely subversive oeuvres in late-twentieth-century pop.” Yes, it is, and if Gibson can do anything as genuinely subversive in fiction at as high a level as Walter Becker and Donald Fagen do it in music, then I owe it to him, and to myself, to read it.

Only Skin Deep: Uglies, Pretties, Specials & Extras by Scott Westerfeld

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Book #7 for 2012: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Book #8 for 2012: Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
Book #9 for 2012: Specials by Scott Westerfeld
Book #10 for 2012: Extras by Scott Westerfeld

There was an article in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, which you can read here. about the current trend toward dystopian science fiction novels for YA — young adult — readers. The most prominent example of the trend, especially at the moment, is Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the film version of which just had one of the most successful opening weekends in movie history. (Actually, it’s the first of a trilogy, so there are at least two more films coming, more likely three given the current trend to break the last book of a YA series into two films as a way of giving the cash cow an additional udder to milk).

I read the entire Hunger Games trilogy about the time the final volume came out in the summer of 2010. (Those of you dying to read my review can find it here.) It’s an immensely readable series of books and I gobbled it up in about a week, as have apparently about a billion or so teens (and possibly as many adults) around the world. I enjoyed it so much that I began looking around to see what sorts of things other YA writers have done with dystopian themes and somehow alighted on Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. Let’s just say my results were mixed.

Here’s a quick sketch of what the Uglies books are about: The first volume, simply titled Uglies, takes place two or three centuries in the future, after our society has pretty much strip mined and clear cut the planet to the breaking point and then gone defunct. (Ironically, the strip mining and clear cutting aren’t why our current society — known in the future as “rusties,” because we left so much abandoned metal behind — no longer exists. What we actually did wrong was to inadvertently engineer a bacterium that eats reserves of petroleum and, whoops, there goes our continuing dependence on the internal combustion engine.) To rectify the mistakes of the past, society has rebuilt itself as a loose network of relatively small cities separated by deliberately preserved wilderness and our energy needs seem to be largely supplied by solar power. Transportation not involving walking is mostly handled by magnetic levitation, which allows not only for cool hovercraft and high-speed maglev trains but airborne surfboards that kids can use the same way skateboards are used today, except even more recklessly. It’s not reckless hovering that puts the dys in this particular topia, though: It’s cosmetic surgery. People have become obsessed with looking physically perfect. Radical surgical procedures have been developed that can make almost anyone flawlessly beautiful at the age of 16, after which they may become older (or, in the book’s futuristic slang, “crumbly”), but still remain kind of hot.

The heroine of the first three books (which are structured as a trilogy with a more or less continuous plot) is Tally Youngblood, a 15-year-old going on 16 who is waiting eagerly to go under the knife and achieve perfection. Right now she’s an Ugly, which means she looks about as hideously flawed as you or I do (or more like you or I did at age 15, when we were probably cuter than we are now). At 16 she will be allowed to become a Pretty and move off to New Pretty Town, where all the newly minted Pretties hang out and do airheaded things. (One of the things that our society apparently didn’t do wrong was to ruin the economy, because most people in this future society don’t seem to need to work for a living if they don’t want to. Machines do everything that needs doing. Sounds like utopia to me.)

Alas, Tally makes friends with someone from a bad crowd — and in a dystopian novel “bad crowd” usually means “group of rebels who discover that things aren’t as nice as they seem.” What isn’t so nice in Tally’s world, it turns out, is that the prettifying surgery tends to be accompanied by some unpublicized brain surgery, where people are made almost literally airheaded by having little holes punched into strategic locations in their forebrains, to keep them docile and less likely to do the stupid sorts of things their ancestors did. Through a convoluted series of events, Tally is blackmailed by the secret police (scary-looking Pretties, as oxymoronic as that may sound, known as Special Circumstances, or just Specials) to infiltrate the rebels, who live in a secret location called “the smoke,” where she is to broadcast their location and betray them. Naturally, Tally turns out to like the rebels but accidentally betrays them anyway, allowing for tons of action in the second half of the book.

As silly as I make all this sound, Uglies is actually quite readable and more than a little fun. As semi-mindless entertainment goes, it’s worth a read, by which I mean a read by human beings over the age of 15. (Human beings 15 and under probably don’t need the encouragement.) Unfortunately, Westerfeld didn’t stop with one book, and I found that the continuing adventures of Tally Youngblood grew continuingly more tedious as the trilogy went on. (Tally herself, who seems to go through a dire but logically justified personality change with each volume, also becomes continuingly more obnoxious.) By the climax of the third book, which completes the initial plot arc, I was ready to quit. But the fourth book of the “trilogy,” appropriately entitled Extras, offered a brand new heroine and a brand new premise, so I decided to stick it out.

And I didn’t entirely regret it. By the time the events of the fourth volume roll around, about three years have passed since the end of volume three and, this being a dystopian thriller, you can guess that major changes have taken place in society since volume one began. In the society of volume four (which seems to take place mostly in and around an unnamed city in Japan), the idea of becoming Pretty at age 16 has been abandoned and people have started doing their own thing. Some still become Pretty, some stay Ugly, some just become weird. In other words, it’s a kind of free-for-all society and it’s entertaining to read about for a few chapters. The heroine is a teenage girl named Asa Fuse, who’s a “kicker,” someone who generates news stories with her own hovercam and broadcasts them via whatever future equivalent of the Interwebs is currently in use. She falls in with, yes, a bad crowd and together they stumble on a strange plot to build mass drivers — basically, magnetic guns the size of mountains — that can fire immense bullets into the air with the kinetic potential to destroy cities, which appears to be what they’re going to be used for.

Asa’s own city runs on a “reputation economy” (a cute concept), where everyone has a ranking based on how many people know about them and talk about them, and when Asa “kicks” the mass driver story to the news feeds she becomes famous, which in the reputation economy also makes her rich. Needless to say, things turn out to be more complicated than they appear at first, and the second half of Extras involves Asa and her friends discovering what’s really going on and either stopping it or supporting it, depending on whether it turns out to be good or bad. (You won’t be surprised to hear that, at various points in the novel, they do both.)

Westerfeld is a competent writer and has the sort of lean, muscular, somewhat superficial style one would expect of a YA science fiction writer. He also has that magical ability that makes you just curious enough to know what’s going to happen that you keep turning the pages. But that’s not really what you want to know, is it? What you really want to know is: Are the Uglies books as good as the Hunger Games books?

Of course not. This series was actually published shortly before the Suzanne Collins novels, but nobody has leaped at the chance to make a blockbuster movie series out of it yet, have they? So clearly Westerfeld lacks the Collins touch. But why exactly aren’t the Uglies books as good as The Hunger Games volumes? I mean, the plots are similar. A teenage girl gets caught up fighting the authorities in a nasty, totalitarian future society and finds courage and self-confidence through the act of defiance. It’s a highly kickable premise, as Asa would say. What exactly does Westerfeld do wrong?

Maybe the real question is: What does Collins do right? Two things come to mind. The first is that Collins has a more compelling premise — a group of people trying to kill one another on a reality TV show. Note that I didn’t say it was an original premise. Much has been made of the resemblance of The Hunger Games to the Japanese film Battle Royale, but Stephen King used the same basic plot two decades earlier in his Richard Bachman novel The Running Man, which was made into a movie in the 80s with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and science fiction writer Robert Sheckley used it way back in 1958 in his short story “The Prize of Peril.” (Reality TV has been around for a long time.) But regardless of how overused the plot may be, Collins pulls it off as well as anybody ever has (with the possible exception of the makers of Battle Royale, which I’ve never seen) and makes it engrossing in that “I think I’ll stop sleeping and eating for a few days in order to finish reading this” way. (Unfortunately she uses essentially the same plot in all three books of the trilogy, with a major variation in the third, which gets a little wearisome, but Westerfeld goes out of his way to make the plots of each of his books completely different, and that turns out to be even more wearisome. So maybe Collins was onto something.)

The other thing Collins does right is to create a fully three-dimensional protagonist in Katniss Everdeen. Though the world of The Hunger Games is a bit sketchy — Exactly what sort of disaster befell the human race, anyway? Does she ever explain? — Katniss is so sympathetic and believably heroic that you don’t really care. Tally Youngblood, on the other hand, seems rather interesting at the beginning of the Uglies books, but by volume two I was already hoping that Westerfeld would just push her off the top of a hovercraft and get it over with. (Actually, I think he does this at one point, but Tally’s society has devised magnetic bracelets that make falling a lot less dangerous than it used to be in ours. So much for killing off our heroine.)

By the way, if there’s any moral to be gleaned so far from my survey of YA dystopias, it’s that the dystopias themselves are purely plot devices. Brave New World and 1984 were genuine warnings about the excesses of human behavior, but despite Westerfeld’s sloganeering against strip mining, clear cutting, genetic engineering, obsession with beauty, et al, the dystopias in both The Hunger Games trilogy and the Uglies series exist mainly just to be mean to people. After all, every thriller needs a good villain. These days, in the world of YA fiction, dystopias are it.

A Night Not to Remember: S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep

Book #6 for 2012: Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson

For a relatively rare condition, anterograde amnesia — the chronic kind, not the occasional kind that results from popping an Ambien at bedtime or drinking too much 80-proof tequila — has inspired a remarkable body of fiction. This is the type of amnesia where you can’t form new long-term memories, where what happens in short-term memory stays in short-term memory and after that it might as well never have happened at all. I think the recent spate of stories about the condition began with Christopher Nolan’s remarkably clever 2000 film Memento, where Guy Pearce tattooed his memories on his chest in a Quixotic attempt to find the murderer of his wife. That movie was rapidly followed by Ellen DeGeneres’s memory-impaired clown fish in Finding Nemo and Drew Barrymore’s infinitely refreshable girlfriend in the Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates (which was so bad I barely saw enough of it to give it time to get past my own short-term memory). But there have been other attempts at turning the syndrome into fiction — for instance, the eminently forgettable 1994 Dana Carvey movie Clean Slate, about a man who woke up each morning having completely forgotten the previous day. (At least I assume it was forgettable, because I honestly can’t remember whether I saw it.) And the late science fiction writer Philip José Farmer beat everyone to the punch and probably produced the most ambitious variation of all with his 1973 novella “Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind,” in which an entire town woke up every morning unable to remember what they’d done the previous day.

With all of those variations, you’d think anterograde amnesia and its many fictional variants would have been completely played out by now as a premise for fiction. Think again. S.J. Watson’s pop thriller Before I Go To Sleep is about a woman who, yes, wakes up every morning unable to remember what happened the previous day. In fact, she pretty much can’t remember anything that’s happened since shortly after she graduated from college, even though she’s now well into middle age. All she knows — and finds out again every day — is that she wakes up next to a man who has to explain to her that he’s her husband Ben, that she had an accident that left her in a state where she loses her memory when she falls asleep (so unusual a form of anterograde amnesia that even doctors seem to go a bit dull-witted when they try to explain it) and that maybe one day she’ll remember him well enough to want to have sex with him again. (Given that they never have more than a few hours’ acquaintance, you can see the problem here.) And she also has a doctor who’s both treating and researching her case, who for some reason doesn’t want the husband to know anything about him. He recommends that she attempt to create a kind of pseudo-memory by keeping a daily journal, sort of a more detailed version of Guy Pearce’s chest tattoos. This journal constitutes the majority of the novel.

Is it a good novel? Well, I can say several good things about it. I read it in a little over two days, which given my current case of anterograde attention span is pretty damned good. It’s hard to put down. And this kind of novel, where nothing is as it seems because it starts out with the protagonist not knowing a damned thing about how anything seems, not only has infinite possibilities for plot twists but for plot twists on the plot twists and Watson doesn’t stint on the unexpected narrative switchbacks. (It also has the built-in advantage of allowing the author to indulge, quite legitimately, in the tritest form of plot exposition imaginable: having characters explain the obvious to someone who, by all rights, should already know it).

But Watson’s characters keep vacillating between, shall we say, two-dimensional and two-and-a-half-dimensional. Sometimes I kinda believed that they were real people and sometimes I was all too conscious that they were just plot devices. And his dialog often has the stiff sound of obligatory exposition because, well, that’s exactly what much of it is. Still, I found that anterograde amnesia still has a remarkably powerful effect as a plot device and the premise alone held my attention through the entire book, right up to the last page, even when the plot itself didn’t (though to give the author credit his twisty plot pulled a lot of weight on its own). So, yes, I enjoyed the book and recommend it as quick-read-on-a-long-plane-flight material.

Toward the ending, though, it began to degenerate into a Mary Higgins Clark-style woman-in-peril thriller. (Does anyone still remember Mary Higgins Clark? Is she still writing? Is she still alive?) I’m sure there’s plenty of other similar suspense fiction on the market but probably not with anywhere near this effective a gimmick, which in the end is what makes it, well, kinda memorable. In a forgettable sort of way.

Ceaselessly Into the Past: Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere

Book #5 for 2012: I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

When I came to the back matter at the end of I’d Know You Anywhere, I found myself surprised in several different ways. It turns out that Laura Lippman, the book’s author, is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and author of quite a few previous novels, many of them based, however loosely, on true crimes. This is not only the biography of a rather ordinary-sounding mystery novelist, but — and I’m sure this betrays some deep prejudice of mine — someone who is a bit of a hack mystery novelist, someone who dashes off clichéd suspense fiction in the flat, lifeless prose so typical of the bestselling novels one finds on the paperback bookshelf in the supermarket, next to magazines showcasing the scandalous lives of reality TV show stars. So let’s just say that I’m glad this back matter was precisely that: back matter. If it had been front matter and had come before the novel itself, I doubt that I’d ever have bothered to read what followed.

Because I would have been completely wrong about Lippman. She isn’t a hack; she isn’t even really a mystery writer, at least not in this particular novel (though she takes a humorous jab at such hack “true crime” writers by casting one as a minor character in one of the book’s later chapters). Lippman’s tone is literary without being self conscious about it, the kind of prose that I love because it holds my attention without ever making me feel as though my attention is either being taken advantage of or flattered for its superlative taste. Lippman writes with intelligence that never spills over into pretentiousness. And while I can’t say that I’d Know You Anywhere is likely to be the best novel that I’ll read this year, it’s certainly the best I’ve read so far and I’d happily read any of the other dozen or so Lippman novels that are listed in that back matter.

I’d Know You Anywhere is about a crime (one that Lippman says afterwards is based on a real crime though just in minor ways) but the novel doesn’t so much focus on the crime itself as on the people involved in the crime and how, despite the crime’s inevitable effects on their lives, they never manage to be anything remotely like the people you’d expect them to be. The specific story being told is about a 15-year-old girl who is kidnapped and held prisoner for 39 days by a young man who is afraid she has witnessed him murdering another teenage girl. The specific reason for that particular murder is left vague — deliberately, I think — but the young man has no intention of also murdering the girl he kidnaps. In fact, he seems to like her. He simply keeps her with him, driving around Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia (through many of the areas where I lived before I moved to California, so the book’s locales are hauntingly familiar to me). And then he lets her go.

Though it is not a mystery novel, it does have a mystery: Why does he let this girl get away and not the other girls he’s killed? (There turn out to be several other victims.) I can tell you this without it being spoilerish because it’s part of the novel’s set up, not its resolution. The story is told long after the fact, largely from the viewpoint of the 40-ish woman that the 15-year-old kidnap victim has grown up to be, after she’s contacted by her kidnapper shortly before he’s to be executed; having exhausted all his legal appeals, he wants a last chance to talk to her. He won’t say why, but he insists on the opportunity to see her and the woman eventually gives in.

It’s to Lippman’s credit that this isn’t a conventional suspense novel; she dwells very little on the possibility of any physical threat to the woman or her family, which now includes a rebellious daughter, a doting son, a loving husband and a large dog. Rather, she concentrates on the psychological aspects of the story: How was the now-adult 15-year-old changed by her kidnapping? Why did she stay with her kidnapper for 39 days when she had ample opportunity to escape? What was her complicity, if any, in the murder of his final victim, who was killed two days before the kidnapper released her?

I’d Know You Anywhere is a novel that is extraordinary precisely it seems not to be extraordinary. In fact I suspect that it’s representative of what Lippman has been writing during the more than two decades that she’s been a novelist. What surprises me is that she’s been turning out fine prose like this so quietly in a genre — the crime novel — that I’ve generally kept my eye on, if only with mild interest, and that I wasn’t even aware of her. I strongly recommend I’d Know You Anywhere if you like crime fiction and have grown tired of the clichés of the genre. I doubt that I’ll wait very long before seeing if Lippman’s other books are as good as this one.

Going to Hell in Florida: Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

Book #4 for 2012: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

I’m not quite sure how to describe Swamplandia! (The exclamation point, as with Oklahoma!, is part of the title.) It’s a book about the Florida Everglades. (I guess these are the Everglades. I can’t recall if Russell ever uses that term in the book, but it’s set in Florida, there are lots of swamps and an excessive number of alligators, which sounds pretty Everglade-y to me.) It’s about the strange rural yet sophisticated cultures that grow up along the kind of byways through which tourists pass on their way to more respectable resort areas with money in their pockets to spend and kids in their pockets to spent it on. It’s about ghosts. It’s about hell. It’s about rape. It’s about an ending that would seem absurdly coincidental if the book weren’t quite so well written and hadn’t descended so far into a miasma of hallucinogenic surrealism by the time it gets there.

What it’s mostly about, though, is family.

The family it’s about comes from Ohio, but pretends to be a tribe of Florida Indians in order to run a kind of mom-and-pop amusement park called Swamplandia! on an island buried so deep in the swamps that it requires a 40-minute ferry ride to get there. The main attraction at the amusement park — perhaps “circus” actually would be a better term than “amusement park” and would tie this novel in more neatly with The Night Circus, which I read a week or so ago — involves the mother of the family, a former beauty queen in her 30s, diving into a water-filled ditch infested with alligators and emerging safely on the other side. (The alligators, which the family refers to affectionately as “Seths,” are about as dangerous as parakeets.) Swamplandia! does well as a tourist attraction without making anybody rich. And then everything goes, figuratively and quite possibly literally, to hell.

Twin disasters occur almost simultaneously. The mother dies of a particularly virulent strain of cancer, leaving behind her husband, son, two daughters and senile father, then a rival amusement park called World of Darkness opens not too far away and instantly siphons off the tourist trade. The theme of World of Darkness is, yes, hell. All of the rides and most of the snack foods are based on the premise of hot and eternal damnation. And with serious amusement park money behind it, hell proves to be a more a popular destination point than Swamplandia!’s alligator pit, so attractive that as Swamplandia!’s economic fortunes disintegrate, the son jumps ship — or, in this case, island — to go to work there. The father disappears (he has a second job, now desperately necessary to support the family, and begins to focus on it full time) and the daughters spend most of their time keeping house in what remains of their tiny Swamplandia! community, mostly just being teenage girls together.

Now here comes the big twist and I’m going to give it away because it’s not one of those neck popping twists that one might expect from the final 10 seconds of a serialized TV show but just a kind of unexpected place where the story goes: The older of the two daughters falls in love with a ghost. At least she claims that he’s a ghost. And when the hulk of an old dredging barge left over from the Great Depression turns up in an isolated place in the swamp, she claims that this was the location of his death.

To describe the plot from this point on would take too much typing and you probably don’t want me to give that much away. Suffice it to say that the sister with the crush on the ghost decides to marry him (death apparently being no obstacle), the younger sister tries to stop her but loses track of her and employs the services of a local birdman (someone who rids communities of annoying buzzards by chasing them into other communities where he can hire himself out to get rid of them all over again), the brother goes to work at World of Darkness where he inadvertently becomes a local hero, and the resulting set of individual journeys go from the bizarre to the literally hellish. In fact, much of the younger sister’s portion of the story is about a descent into what may really be hell. (The Everglades certainly seem like a good place for it.)

It’s difficult to say if Swamplandia! qualifies as a comedy, a horror novel, a family saga, a soap opera or just a fairly fast read. The characters are less quirky than the environment that they inhabit (which was something of a relief, given the quirkiness of the environment they inhabit) and the family, though they go through some travails that should qualify as nearly Shakespearean in their tragic nature, actually turn out to be surprisingly competent at negotiating the bizarre turmoil of their lives. Which shows, I guess, that being trained to wrestle alligators at a young age is pretty good preparation for just about any bad thing that can happen to you.

From the Wrong End of the Telescope: Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending

Book #3 for 2012: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Some books need a good night’s sleep before I can even begin to write about them. Some books probably need even more, but I don’t have the time for that and at some point I’d start forgetting crucial details. (Who’m I kidding? With most books I start forgetting crucial details before I’ve even finished reading.)

The Sense of an Ending (named for a famous book on literary theory by the late English critic Frank Kermode) not only needed a good night’s sleep before I wrote about it but it really needs me to go over it again with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, looking for clues that will tell me that what I think happened at the end really happened. Despite its short length (I put it at 42,000 words, which is just north of novella territory), Barnes manages to pull off not one but two surprise twists in the book’s final pages, the first of which is sad and a little wrenching, the second of which takes your breath away. At least I think it did; Barnes refuses to spell out the second twist in specific detail, though he makes it clear that it’s there. But I suspect that if I go back and review certain key moments — particularly a long-forgotten drunken letter and the general timeline of certain events in the story — I’d have it down cold. There are other books to be read, though, and I may put this off for a while. I may put it off forever.

In case I’m making The Sense of an Ending sound like one of those twisty crime thrillers that slither their way into your local cinema multiplex every other week or so, it’s not. It’s the self-narrated story of a British male born probably around the same time as Barnes (1946) looking back on his life from the present, with particular emphasis on a group of friends he had met in school and on his first serious girfriend, who he ended up sharing (serially, not simultaneously) with the most brilliant of those friends, one who would probably have gone on to become one of the greatest philosopher-historians of his generation if he hadn’t suddenly, unexpectedly committed suicide while still a young man.

The suicide is the book’s central mystery, but this is not a mystery novel and the suicide goes largely forgotten for decades, until the narrator discovers that his late friend’s diary, which apparently holds clues to the reasons for his self-demise, has until recently still existed, right up until the former girlfriend decided to burn it. Much of the latter part of the book is about the narrator’s attempt to find out what the diary said and even, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, to effect a rapprochement with the old girlfriend, something that isn’t likely to happen.

The climactic pair of twists, the second of which almost completely reverses the first, are devastating to the narrator, who is forced to see almost his entire life in a different way, one that suggests that he is not the mediocrity that he has made himself out to be for much of the book but something a little bit worse, a person who has managed to ignore the negative effects he has had on the world and the people around him. His final grasp of the truth is not so much devastating as sad, emphasizing just how empty his life and failed relationships have been up to that moment. It is the story of a life told from the wrong end of the telescope, the end from which everything starts to look very small. By the end of the book it looks very small indeed.

None of which is to say that The Sense of an Ending is a depressing or unrelievedly bleak book. Just the opposite, in fact. Barnes is a master of that mordant, acidly funny style of British humor that is so sharp and incisive that it masks the fact that just below the book’s surface is something with the bite of a shark, something that would be difficult for the reader to face if the writer hadn’t combined the cleverness and timing of a stand-up comedian with the sharply honed meat knife of a literary Jack the Ripper.

The Circus of Dreams: Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus

Book #2 for 2012: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

What is it about magicians that continues to fascinate not only on stage but in books and movies? The great age of theatrical magic would seem to have passed by now, having taken place roughly at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th (the period during which this novel is set) and yet there seems to be a slow but steady stream of books, movies and stage acts that appeal to a kind of ex post facto nostalgia for an era that took place before most of us were even born. There were those dueling magician movies a few years ago, The Illusionist and The Prestige. There is the enduring appeal of traditional magicians like David Copperfield and the more physically oriented showmanship of men like David Blaine, who seem determined to carry on in the aggressively athletic tradition of Harry Houdini. And there is this book.

The conceit of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is that, while ordinary magicians use deftly executed trickery to produce the illusion of the supernatural, the magicians of the Night Circus (the actual circus, not the book) use the supernatural to produce the illusion of deftly executed trickery. The circus of the title is, in fact, made up of nothing but magic acts or traditional circus acts abetted by magic, each performed by a practitioner of genuine magic and each act allotted its own tent in an expanding geometric arrangement that proliferates like a slowly constructed chessboard (a description that turns out to be more than just metaphor). And these are extraordinary magic acts. The Night Circus, so-called because it only opens at dark and closes at dawn, is to an ordinary circus what a world-class restaurant is to a Denny’s, each act a superbly prepared meal enhanced by the sheer wonder of its artistic and stylistic presentation. The Night Circus (also known as Le Cirque des Rêves or Circus of Dreams) is a nightly work of art, one that steals away silently during the day after staying for a week or two in one spot and then appears unpredictably in some other location, followed by a band of fans so dedicated that they make Deadheads seem lacking in enthusiasm.

Appropriate to the subject matter, The Night Circus is more a novel of mood and illusion than it is of plot. In fact, one of its illusions is that it actually has a plot. Yes, there are pairs of lovers who could have come straight out of Shakespeare, and a pair of ancient enemies, one of them named Hector Bowen,  once a stage magician himself (who, speaking of Shakespeare, used the nom de plume of Prospero the Enchanter), and the other simply known as the man in the grey suit. There is a long-standing wager between these two men that for some reason reminded me of the wager between God and Satan in that most literary of Biblical texts, the Book of Job, though this is more because that’s who the two men reminded me of; the nature of the wager is more like a series of bets on a chess tournament, a tournament that seems to have been going on for so long that its origins are lost in the mists of time. What gives the book its poignancy is that they are wagering on the lives of real human beings who are raised from childhood to be unwitting competitors and never given a choice as to whether they want to grow up to become part of what amounts to a battle to the death.

That sounds like an awful lot of plot for a book that I suggested had only the illusion of one, but Morgenstern never really explains the backstory here in any particular detail. Instead, she leaves a great many of the details for the reader’s imagination to fill out and whether you consider that to be a strength of the book or a weakness is a matter of taste. (I may need time to decide.) The real star of the book, though, rather than any of its characters (who tend to be more sketched than fully drawn) or the story, is the circus itself, which is described in loving and often thrilling detail. The book is a grand and elegant banquet of magic that will probably make a spectacular movie if filmed (and though I haven’t checked to see if any film versions are in the works, I can’t imagine one isn’t already being prepared for production). It is Morgenstern’s loving portrait of this elaborate arena of magic, spectacle and splendidly old-fashioned style that makes the book worth reading, and in the relatively brief time it takes to read, it goes down like a rich confection filled with flavors you may never have tasted before. If they leave you feeling slightly unsatisfied in the end — and for me they did — it’s only because you wish you’d had more of them before the meal was over.

Three Books I Didn’t Finish (and One I Did): Reamde, Dragon Tattoo, Bag of Bones & State of Wonder

Book #1 for 2012: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

This is going to be a long post. That’s not because I have a lot to say about the book in question but because I first want to talk about why it’s the first book I’ve read (or at least the first book I’ve finished) since I wrote about Stephen King’s 11/22/63 last November.

2011 was my year of reading long books. In the spring I plowed through the first five volumes of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, something I’d grown convinced I would never do in the remainder of my lifetime, and I found time to read Robopocalypse between books four and five. (It wasn’t worth it. Robopocalypse was a snooze, a brief precis for an upcoming Stephen Spielberg film that has no other excuse for existing in book form.) After the approximately 1,100 Nook pages of Martin’s A Dance with Dragons I felt pretty much prepared for anything and polished off the 1,000-plus  pages of King’s Under the Dome in nine or ten days. I galloped through Jonathan Franzen’s compulsively readable Freedom in about a week, but that was only 500 pages, which by that time seemed trivial.

And then I got cocky. When I blithely attempted to read the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde I hit a brick wall. Stephenson is a writer that I admire and enjoy, roughly in that order. His books are bursting at the seams with inventive, slightly twisted, yet oddly believable ideas and when he chooses to he can write high velocity action that never leaves the reader feeling that his/her time would have been better spent curling up with something more intellectually edifying. Even when Stephenson writes an action scene he is intellectually edifying. I’ve carried on about this before, but the opening two chapters of Stephenson’s Snow Crash are the most amazing balancing act of characterization, sociopolitical speculation and sheer edge-of-your-seat suspense that I’ve ever read. I had heard that Reamde was more of a conventional terrorism thriller than Stephenson usually deals in, but I hardly found that off-putting. I love thrillers and I love Stephenson. What combination could be more appealing?

My mistake. Reamde may be crammed with action — almost too much for its own good, if truth be told — but it has all the excitement of watching a chess game played by mail. The premise is clever. A computer virus called Reamde — a corruption of the familiar computer filename Readme, so named because the virus creates a file of that name on your hard drive that holds all your vital information prisoner in an encrypted format with an unbreakable key — is propagating across the Internet. If Reamde snares your valuable data you must pay a ransom in the form of virtual merchandise within a massively multiplayer online game similar to World of Warcraft, where the virtual value of the virtual merchandise can be converted to real-world coin by Chinese hackers who will then pass you the key to your data. (This isn’t that farfetched given the bizarre crossover economies that actually exist within such games.) But Stephenson fills the novel with too many characters and they feel boringly interchangeable. Despite the author giving them distinct if perfunctory characteristics that can be used to distinguish them, I kept having to remind myself who every character was each time they returned to the novel’s viewpoint stage (and I never came up with a convincing reason to care about any of them). I managed to read more than 400 pages of the novel’s 900 pages and that’s 400 pages of reading that it looks like I’ll never get back.

Then I decided to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I can’t tell you whether it was a good book or a bad book because I never got far enough to decide. I came up against the same problem I always run into when attempting to read a book in translation, the disheartening sensation that I wasn’t really hearing the author’s voice. One of the joys of reading for me is the sense of having a direct mind-to-mind connection with another person, which consists not only of sharing their thoughts in as direct a manner as our physically separated brains allow but of hearing in my mind the very words with which they choose to express those thoughts. Word choice tells you a lot about another person (and I say this with some trepidation, knowing that you will immediately start paying much closer attention to my own word choice than you might have otherwise). Reading the words chosen by a competent or more than competent author can be as electrifying as watching a beautiful sunset (or, to stick more precisely with the analogy, it’s like looking at a beautifully composed photograph of a beautiful sunset).

With works in translation, though, the connection is lost, or at least it takes place only indirectly, with words being relayed through an intermediary much like in that old game where one person whispers a message to another person who whispers it to another person until, at the other end of the line, it comes out thoroughly garbled. I’m sure that Stieg Larsson’s translators are the best Swedish-to-English translators available and yet on page 37 of the Nook edition I came across this sentence:

“Instead of giving Salander the boot, he summoned her for a meeting in which he tried to figure out what made the difficult girl tick.”

Give her “the boot”?  Figure out what made her “tick”? Those are cliches from a bad 1940s movie. When’s the last time somebody under the age of 80 used the phrase “give her the boot”? This isn’t just bad writing; it’s lazy writing and I blame the translator for it. Of course, I don’t know Swedish so maybe the original phrase as written by Larsson actually involved placing a piece of footwear on Salander’s posterior, in which case it was Larsson who was the bad writer. (Somehow that doesn’t make it any better.) Someday maybe I’ll go back and read the book again to see if it manages to be a powerful piece of suspense fiction despite the encumberment of its trite narrative style, but by then I’ll have seen the movie and probably won’t care. Fortunately I only wasted about 50 pages on this one.

Finally I picked up Stephen King’s Bag of Bones because there was an upcoming miniseries version. I love King and am continually impressed by the amount of intelligent writing, vivid characterization and richly imagined detail that he is willing to invest in what are, after all, fairly disposable thrillers. And I liked Bag of Bones, at least as far as I got into it. (This was between 200 and 300 Nook pages, I believe.) But I’m beginning to realize that the last couple of months of the year (it was late November or early December by the time I started it) are not a good time for reading. I was exhausted by my marathon sprint through earlier King novels and the Martin quintology (pentology?) and there are far too many distractions at holiday time. I also found myself caught up in playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a game I had waited all year for. (I’ve played every game in this series since it began in 1994 and Bethesda Softworks never fails to deliver a richly immersive, immensely time-consuming experience.) So eventually I lost all momentum on the King book and by now I’m sure I’ve forgotten the character names and most of what the book was about.

But a new year always renews my excitement in reading, if only because dozens of publications and Web sites post their Best Books of the Year list and in them I see one book after another that I’m instantly convinced will be the best thing I’ve ever read. I picked the book at hand, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, entirely at random, having no idea what it was about or what Patchett had written before.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

And, indeed, it’s an excellent piece of writing, with an ingenious story, believable characters and a graceful style so filled with rich observations that a reader could linger over a paragraph for hours extracting its wealth of precisely and wittily described detail. (Given how tired I was of spending weeks and months over books, this wasn’t entirely a good thing.)

I have two negative observations about the book. The first — and it’s the weaker of the two — is that though the plot was intricate and ingenious I never found it compelling, though I suspect the fact that I’m looking for “compelling” here at all is merely a sign of my increasing jadedness as a reader and a human being, a symptom of advancing age and a faltering attention span. I want a book in which the stakes for the main character are so emotionally heightened that turning a page becomes almost an act of desperate need (though I dislike it when such books degenerate into overripe melodrama). The second problem is that I found the main character, Dr. Marina Singh, something of a boring cipher, which made it difficult for me to become involved in her story. This may well have been a deliberate choice on the author’s part, but it wasn’t one that sat well with me as a reader. The story is about Dr. Singh’s journey to the jungles of Brazil to find a research scientist working on a miracle drug being financed by the pharmaceutical firm for which Singh works, and it isn’t until that scientist, Dr. Annick Swenson, who had been Singh’s teacher at Johns Hopkins, enters the story that the book comes to life. Swenson is a dynamic, excitingly imagined character, and she develops unexpected depths as the story proceeds, evolving from the ogre that she has always been in Singh’s mind into a fully rounded, fascinating human being.

But, alas, she is only a tiny part of what the book is about. The story is really about Singh finding herself and finding something even more important that I’m not going into here because I really didn’t find it as interesting as the author seemed to think it was. Looking back at it now I think there was symbolic value in the discovery, but I can’t work up the energy to suss out exactly what it was.