True Grit (1968)

It's a surreal joke, with a winding punchline worthy of Mark Twain: When is the South not the South? When it's the Old Southwest! This shifting literary borderland -- populated by mustache-twirling villains, inept but determined (and uncannily lucky) lawmen, saloon brawlers boasting how they could whup Sampson himself, misunderstood hookers with perfectly calibrated hearts of gold, not to mention Johnson Jones Hooper's infamous Captain Simon Suggs and Twain's own celebrated jumping frogs -- is nowhere funnier than where mapped by Charles Portis in his novel True Grit.

Portis hails from Arkansas, a state many would consider decidedly Southern, and his novel makes affectionate, specific use of the setting: main character Mattie Ross takes bold pride in repeatedly reminding others how things are accomplished in her native Yell County, just for starters. Still, several initial reviews of the book took care to point out the "Western" aspects, with Michael Cleary defining Portis as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction" in Twentieth-Century Western Writers.

Location-challenged reviewers aside, the story is relatively high concept, and certainly familiar to readers of pulp westerns: the aforementioned Maddie seeks justice for the murder of her father by one of his hired farmhands, Tom Chaney, who has taken up with a band of outlaws led by the nefarious Lucky Ned Pepper. To apprehend (or kill, whichever) the dastardly Chaney, Mattie treks to Fort Smith for the purpose of hiring a lawman with "true grit," and finds near-enough in the figure of Federal Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Also on Chaney's trail is a Texas Ranger, name of La Boeuf; eventually -- and despite their differing motivations, which range from sheer revenge to simple cash reward -- these three ride out together in search of their quarry.

Though the novel could easily carry different genre labels (satire/humor, coming-of-age) at this later date it's no feat to look back and ascertain how True Grit came to be shelved as a Western rather than, say, a Southern (a decent tag which would fit many books, and that some have tried to make stick, though the adhesive apparently still needs work). The initial marketing of the book is not terribly at fault: the first edition jacket design features a simple illustration of a stern-looking young woman holding in one hand the reins of a horse and in the other the barrel of a rifle. While this iconography telegraphs "Western" for sure, it also merely reflects the essential elements of and suggests a time-frame for the tale resting between those covers. True Grit is Mattie's story, in both plot and tone (she's the first-person narrator, recounting her adventure some sixty years after the fact).

But almost unarguably the main reason: scarcely a year following publication, out from the Hollywood hills loped a popular film starring beloved "cowboy actor" John Wayne as Cogburn, a role which finally earned him an Academy Award. But John Wayne alone did not brand True Grit as a Western; the 1969 film takes many liberties with the novel, beginning, importantly, with the setting: the scrubby, mountainous landscape of Ouray County, Colorado, stands in for the Ozarks, and thus does the movie unavoidably "look" like a traditional Horse Opera. (Additionally, the screen version moves Cogburn to front and center, correspondingly muting Mattie's acerbic attitude and commentary -- an undeniable charm of the novel.) Interestingly, Vincent Canby, in his mainly positive review of the film for the July 4, 1969 edition of the New York Times, had this to say: "I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte)."

Though contemporary full reviews of the novel are now scarce, Canby's comments seem to be at odds with those short blurbs and slug lines which do remain accessible, either printed on the front endpapers of the paperback editions or elsewhere. In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Rhodes called the book a "skillfully constructed ... comic tour de force," echoing the sentiments publisher Overlook reprints on their current edition, which also features an afterward by another Southern novelist, Donna Tartt -- who proclaims the book a "masterpiece" even as she notes how well it captures "the Wild West of the 1870s."

It is as though the film, despite its bold differences from the source material, has supplanted within what Carl Jung would pinpoint as our Collective Cultural Consciousness the true character of the novel. In that sense, at least, Mr. Canby has had his way -- despite the fact that Portis' novel sold millions of copies well into the 1970s and for a short while was taught in schools, when most people think of True Grit they are thinking of the film and not the novel, thus bringing to mind stereotypical Western iconography. Meaning: horses, shootouts, lawlessness, and of course John Wayne. (Doesn't help that the latest [2004] edition of the True Grit paperback features silhouetted saguaro cacti -- which grow only in the Sonoran Desert. Does everybody around here need a map?) Of course, American pop culture sensibilities are finer attuned to cinema than to the written word, at present. It could even be argued that many people, in remembering moments from their favorite books, are actually remembering details from the better (or at least most persistently referenced and shown) movies made from them. Motion pictures like To Kill a Mockingbird, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Maltese Falcon, and The Lord of the Rings have all come to be considered as powerful complements, if not outright equals, to their literary sources. (There are even cases -- Love Story, Jaws, even Dracula comes to mind -- where the film treatment might be preferred over the books.)

Assisting this perception, True Grit, despite its initial popularity, remained out-of-print for nearly twenty years. In an essay for Salon, Allen Barra writes: "True Grit's going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature." Which is a fair point. By the mid-1970s, the Western had fallen out of favor; the dime novels and pulps and Saturday serials which had popularized the genre were long gone, Westerns rarely produced in Hollywood anymore, even the long-running TV series Gunsmoke reached the end of its run. And, in favor or not, "Western" is an easier tag to apply than "Southern." Particularly when only remaindered and hand-me-down copies of the novel were available, and the film version had free reign to establish itself in the cultural memory.

Not to put too much blame on the author, but another factor in this slightly askew labeling might well be the sparse, pigeon-hole proof output of Portis himself. His career as a novelist spans from the 1966 publication of Norwood to the 1991 appearance of Gringos; counting also the 2012 essay collection Escape Velocity, Portis has produced only six slender tomes over a five decade period. With topics ranging from ridiculous secret societies to bus-driving cuckolds to UFO hunters lost in Mexico, his novels have only one thing in common: a distinct comic sensibility. Given a one-line description of each, one might reasonably assume all five are the products of different individuals -- particularly since we readers are accustomed to authors tackling recurrent story structures, subjects, themes.

Which brings us back to Mr. Cleary's assertion that Portis is "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction." In the final accounting, given his disparate if slight oeuvre, Portis can no more be counted among the writers of "western fiction" than can be Mark Twain, whom Mr. Canby thinks Portis is clumsily aping. At least Donna Tartt doesn't entirely miss the mark -- the final pages of True Grit do specifically satirize "Wild West" exaggerations, as Rooster is remembered as having become an actor in a travelling circus, cashing in on his rough-n-tumble lawman-of-the-frontier persona. He rode with Quantrill! the handbills for the Cole Younger/Frank James show say, He rode for Parker! -- a brief but snarky reference to the showmanship and commercialized myth-making which still colors popular American perceptions, far contrary to reality, of what the West was like in the last couple decades of the 19th Century. Looks like we all need maps, if not well-researched guidebooks.

Perhaps the grand irony here is, Portis was trying to disassemble the Western, not contribute to the canon. Though it would seem he's been largely misunderstood, given the prevailing comic sensibility of the novel, Portis probably still would argue his joke landed correctly -- squarely on the heads of his audience. Having scribed Mattie's own inflexible worldviews, Portis shows he understands both the folly and the comfort of unchanging perception. And if anyone appreciates the humor of a grapefruit being labeled as an orange, it would surely be Charles Portis.   

Inherent Vice (2009)

In all the commotion typically attending the appearance of a new title by Thomas Pynchon -- considered by many to be the poster boy for Postmodern Literature -- it is often forgotten that he began his career as a bestselling popular novelist. Mass market paperbacks of his first two books, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, had sold a combined three million copies prior to the 1973 publication of Gravity's Rainbow -- a novel for which, shortly after launch, Viking boasted orders of over seven hundred copies per hour. But during the seventeen-year silence leading into Vineland, Pynchon got racked into the category of "literary" (not to mention "difficult") rather than "popular" and while his next three novels made a great deal of additional noise over the publishing landscape, such prior sales numbers proved elusive.

The savvy Pynchon is apparently unwilling to fade into "literary cult author" status -- how else to explain this curious cross-breeding of a Maltese Falcon with a Pink Panther at a time when crime fiction is at a hip zenith? Inherent Vice is exactly what the dust jacket makes it looks like -- streamlined noir, gilded at the edges with a mellow, psychedelic glow. It is 1970 in the LA surf community of Gordita Beach. The Lakers are in the playoffs. The Manson Family is going to trial. And gumshoe (or, as he refers to himself, "gumsandal") Larry "Doc" Sportello is one evening visited by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey, transmitting bad vibes about her current dalliance, billionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann -- who soon disappears, possibly murdered, leaving Sportello as the chief suspect, at least in the eyes of Sportello's perpetual shadow, LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsen.

Sportello (think Phillip Marlowe by way of the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger) spends the rest of the novel trying to clear his name, or to at least keep from being ensnared by Bigfoot. Or something to that effect. Other ingredients include but are not necessarily limited to: a federally-thwarted plan to build domed houses for the poor and homeless; smugglers from Vietnam trafficking in counterfeit bills printed with Nixon's face; a multitude of wigged-out hippies and surfers, some capable of astral travel; an early version of the Internet which interests Doc only so much as it might help him score weed; a set of peculiar neckties, hand-painted with likenesses of nude women (one of whom is Shasta Fey); a cabal of sex-crazed dentists; and a mysterious schooner called the Golden Fang, whose shadowy operators just might be tied to everyone and everything involved.

Like fellow literary lion Cormac McCarthy, who some years back and with great commercial success began shedding a dense, idiomatic, description-centered prose style for leaner, plot-oriented narration, Pynchon here nixes his notoriously recursive and tangential approach(es) to storytelling. The omniscient intrusions and historical flashbacks which extend, deepen, and often contort his previous works are no longer in evidence -- vanished, apparently, into the ever-present smog surrounding Gordita, Pynchon's stand-in location for the Manhattan Beach of his own younger days (where he reportedly wrote a great deal of Gravity's Rainbow). One can almost imagine the author blissfully banging away at his typewriter, serving only the basic needs of his tale, freewheeling as it is -- Vice is nothing short of a classic potboiler (emphasis being on the pot.) It is also a bittersweet portrait of the American culture teetering between the joys of Sgt. Pepper and the grisly angst of Dark Side of the Moon -- and as some have pointed out, the particolored details are likely the closest the World of Letters will get to autobiographical reveals from the famously reclusive Mr. Pynchon.

For all its narrative brevity, speed, and hilarity -- and this might well be Pynchon's funniest book, which is no small statement -- there is a devious undertow at work. Pynchon sends up his own obsessions, elements from previous novels, and the expectations of a devoted readership, but retains his signature moral outrage against imbalances of power. Gravity's Rainbow underlines the weird moralities and opportunities "civilized" countries abuse during wartime -- whatever atrocities can be gotten away with under cover of larger violence; Inherent Vice takes the scarier tack of what can happen in the Homeland when citizens remain willfully unaware of what is happening under the auspices of keeping their streets safe: neighborhood watches suddenly comprised of neo-Nazi wannabe badasses, sub-contracted private firms looking to get into the paramilitary business, all sanctioned by local law enforcement by way of federal monies. It's not hard to imagine how Pynchon feels about Halliburton or the agents of Blackwater.

Against the backdrop of Fear as powered by the atrocities of the Manson Family, fear against the hippies and their Freak Power movement destroying society, Bigfoot constantly attempts to recruit Doc as an informer to aid in various shake-down schemes -- a path Doc dreads Coy Harlingen, the subject of one of his missing persons cases, has already stumbled down. Harlingen was a semi-famous session musician and saxophonist for a surf-rock band called the Boards (now apparently taken over by zombies). Coy's wife, the aptly named Hope, does not believe her husband overdosed on heroin, the official story, but that his death was faked and he is now a federal operative. Whatever the circumstances which led to Coy being taken from her, she doesn't care; she just wants her family back together. As things will turn, repairing this damage will become Doc's primary concern. When, that is, he's sober and straight enough to focus on the mosaic of clues.

Inherent Vice (a term from maritime law, applied to annul potential shipping damages -- i.e. eggs break in transit, reason being: they're eggs) is saturated with images of "the axes of space, now taken away into commotion and ruin." While this initially seems like yet another route into entropy (one of Pynchon's favorite concerns, going back to his eponymously-titled 1958 short story), in Vice that idea is taken a quantum step further. Natives of the coast wander their old neighborhoods, confused by the sudden construction craters where their houses used to be. But the old order isn't being supplanted by the expected chaos: coming to replace the old standalone businesses owned by locals are clean corporate franchises, lined up in strip malls. Pynchon pinpoints a moment in our culture when the detritus inevitably left behind by commercial efforts of change and progress started being packaged and sold: the experience of nostalgia as commodity. Doc, driving past a supermarket-sized record store, takes note of the customers visible just inside the sweeping glass front, each secluded in a soundproof booth; music -- the community glue of that era and an important motif in this novel -- is suddenly an individual rather than a collective experience. The Powers That Be have already begun to divide and conquer, using the easy wedges of simple market forces, supply and demand -- no greater conspiracy seeking control and subservience of a citizenship, such as those that have previously dominated Pynchon's novels, is necessary. If billionaire Mickey Wolfmann has no say in his own development projects, what chance do the rest of us (capable of being bought off with a chili dog, as one character points out in the novel's closing moments) have? Doc himself, no bumbling hippie innocent as might initially appear, eventually drifts into his own, essentially inevitable fog, only mirroring, if not actually following, the leads of those who have hired him or crossed his path.

In Gordita Beach, there's no screaming coming across the sky -- just the sound of the surf, the quiet, relentless surf, eating away at the edge of the continent. Pynchon's apocalypses have become less sweeping, more focused, smarter, meaner, personal. There's an old saying, essentially this: As goes the State of California, so goes the Nation. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's candy-coated warning: the Golden State and all the dreams it stands for, long-understood to be just one good earthquake away from slipping into the Pacific, is soon to be as lost to the rest of us as the mythical continent of Lemuria -- a set of final coordinates for that Golden Fang, perhaps.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Tie-Dyed Noir" September 28 2009

Heat (1995)

Career detective Hanna (Al Pacino) is hot on the trail of career criminal McCauley (Robert De Niro), who is busy assembling a team for that proverbial Last Big Job. But then an extravagantly botched armed car robbery leaves three security officers dead and a stooge named Waingro on the lam, running not only from the cops but from a revenge-seeking McCauley himself. Waingro enlists a money-laundering banker, burned on a previous job, to take McCauley out of play. Meanwhile, Hanna's marriage disintegrates (stop me if you've heard this before, he's a cop obsessed with being a cop) even as McCauley falls for a bookstore clerk/graphic artist; gee-willikers, maybe they can escape together, to the Good Life... Michael Mann's thriller seems to have been built around two standout sequences: a ridiculously complicated midday shoot-out in downtown LA, and a hushed, tense conversation between McCauley and Hanna in a coffee shop. The rest is bloated static (including, critically, the final showdown on an airport runway). An all-star cast is generally wasted on zest-less characters, Dennis Haysbert in particular. Overrated, disposable exercise in by-the-numbers con-man fiction.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Doctors around London are being picked off one by one, the modes of death bizarre (rabid bats, grisly exsanguinations, a deadly head-crushing vice disguised as a frog mask, hungry locusts -- to name but four). Inspector Trout, assigned to the case, cannot help but think the same psychopath is behind them all. He's ridiculed for it throughout his department, but his hunch is correct -- all the expired doctors had a single case in common: they operated on the victim of a long-ago car crash, Victoria Phibes (B-queen Caroline Munro) who died during surgery. Trout's theory that her husband, Anton Phibes, is seeking revenge on the attending surgeons is marred by one simple fact: Phibes died in the accident, long before his wife got to the operating table.

Or did he? Vincent Price turns in one of his more outlandish performances (and all without moving his lips) as a demented cross between a mad scientist and a serial killer. In the years since his disfiguring accident, Phibes has been plotting his revenge, which follows (for no good reason, other than it provides for interesting murders) the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Trout gets hip to this after Phibes drops one of his pendant glyphs, used in the ritualistic killings, and has it interpreted by a Jewish scholar. Between strikes, Phibes hides in his creepy mansion, belting out show tunes on his pipe organ while his lovely but silent assistant Vulnavia looks on. Kind of a precursor to Seven (1995) when you think about it. Stunning psychedelic set dressing as well as a healthy dose of intentional humor (mainly involving the bumbling detectives) on the part of director Robert Fuest have made this a deserved camp classic.

Mr. Sebastian & the Negro Magician (2007)

It's an old storyteller's saw, of course (and rarely, these days, sharp enough to cut a woman in half): ye olde Deal with the Devil. Doctor Faustus, well-known metaphysician and seminal mad scientist, leads the way, providing motivations extant in a legion of fictional satanic pacts ranging from "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to Angel Heart (1987). It's always about getting drunk with some kind of power, influence, maybe a little immortality thrown in for good measure -- a lesser evil of the heart begetting a greater evil in the soul. And it never turns out very damned well.

Daniel Wallace, with the fantastic Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, subverts the Genre of Devilish Dealings by removing the aforementioned motivations. Our hero isn't a wrong-minded egomaniac looking for the secrets of the universe, but a mere boy, Henry Walker, lodged at a painful crossroads. It is the grainy depths of the Great Depression, his mother recently dead, his father fallen from Wall Street mogul to destitute hotel janitor, and his beloved, angelic sister Hannah has decided she loves a stray dog (which she names Joan Crawford) more than him.

Henry stumbles from grace via a chance meeting with "Mr. Sebastian" (if that is his real name), a peculiar pasty-skinned gentleman who offers to teach Henry some nifty magic tricks, most of them to do with a deck of ordinary cards -- but Henry must vow to never reveal the source of his artistry, which turns out to be shockingly powerful, if not borderline sinister: along with the preternatural sleight-of-hand technique comes powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and conjuring. Henry can just as easily make a full-course meal appear from thin air as he can commune with the newly dead. By the pricking of their thumbs and the mingling of their blood, Henry's fate entwines with the murky wishes of Mr. Sebastian -- who then vanishes into the aether, with Hannah in tow. Henry will spend the rest of his life searching for her, in one way or another.

This tragic story is told in a series of secondhand flashbacks by Henry's former fellow sideshow performers, who knew him at the end of his career as a hysterically inept magician barely managing, thanks only to the color of his skin, to find work. Like a giddy mash-up of The Canterbury Tales and Carnivale, we meet Rudy, the "Strongest Man in the World" (who actually is far from it), Jenny the Ossified Girl (who, as a woman passively rejected by Henry, is best able to tell the doomed tale of his One True Love), JJ the Barker (who seems to confuse his own childhood memories -- specifically his feelings about his father -- with those of Henry), and Jeremiah Mosgrove, the proprietor of Mosgrove's Chinese Circus (which is in no way Chinese), as well as a few other figures who emerge from Henry's past, both real and imagined. Each of these characters is privy only to a particular part of Henry's life story, parts which eventually connect even as they contradict each other. Depending on who is doing the telling, Henry is depicted by turns as a miracle worker, a broken-down con artist, a heartsick lover, or a lost soul in perpetual mourning over his departed family, still seeking revenge against the man who took it all away from him. Or all of the above.

The stunning centerpiece of the novel concerns Henry's love for his stage assistant, the willowy, troubled Marianne La Fleur, a creature ever fluttering on the border between Life and Death. Henry conceives a magic show -- part trickery, part séance -- around an eerie aspect of their relationship that has his audiences gasping simultaneously in admiration and utter horror. Henry ultimately defines himself by his losses; his signature card trick involves the Three of Hearts: one heart each for his departed mother, his vanished sister, and his unattainable Marianne. And being the performer, knowing the foul secrets of his magic disallows Henry the gifts of wonder and hope and laughter he is able to bestow upon his audiences. Believing in nothing, he is shrouded in his own lies and illusions.

It won't be until he encounters a trio of hoodlum hecklers that Henry at last remembers magic isn't about the trick, believing isn't always about the truth, and that his illusions don't have to be as real as he's made them. The Devil, as it turns out, really isn't in the details -- those small, beautiful, ordinary moments of our lives. It's the fact that we take such moments for granted that is a true evil. "Only love can take us to the darkest places," a character eventually remarks, underlining the double-edged, tragic-comic nature both of this story and of the approach Wallace takes in telling it.

Following three works of, essentially, shorter fiction, with Mr. Sebastian Wallace inherits the storied mantle in American Letters previously shouldered by Ray Bradbury, master of simultaneously sentimental and wicked observation -- a delicate and bittersweet trick indeed, one capable of revealing the innermost chambers of the human heart. (This book, in fact, makes a fitting companion to Bradbury’s equally wonderstruck carnival tale Something Wicked This Way Comes.) We might allow magicians to trick us, but it's love that will ultimately make fools of us all.

Meanwhile, the sideshow parade only seems familiar to the Wallace canon -- circus freaks peopled the Big Fish movie, but the citizenry of the novel was more mythical in nature; this is an illusion/allusion that Wallace, perhaps, fully intended -- here using freaks and misfits to mis-remember, mis-tell, and just plain mistake the true story of Henry Walker, and carry it into the realm of lofty folklore, reminding us how ordinary lives fit into the larger pattern of human history. The tale, as such, flows like an unexpectedly long string of particolored handkerchiefs from the pocket of a skilled and charming prestidigitator, one who always keeps a knowing eyebrow lifted towards his audience, luring them with a recognizable trick, only to unleash an unexpected but heartbreakingly appropriate flourish at the end -- a tale that is transcendently amusing in its variety, startling in its unregulated humor, bewitching in its final originality. This is, simply enough, one of the best, most captivating books of the year. And it's impossible not to wonder what tricks Daniel Wallace yet has hidden up his sleeve.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Bigger Fish Swim in Wallace's Latest," Aug 19 2007

The Host [Gwoemul] (2006)

Following a formaldehyde dump into the Han River, a dinosaur-creature emerges from the depths, hungry for man-flesh. Was it activated by the toxic waste, or created by it? Does it matter? This vintage monster-movie formula is an excellent mix of comedy and dysfunctional family pathos as, after snacking on several full-size humans, the monster drags young schoolgirl Hyun-seo underwater, presumably as a treat for later. Trapped in the creature's lair, deep in the, uh, bowels of the city sewer system, Hyun-seo finds a cellphone and manages to alert her waste-case father, Gang-du, to the fact that she's alive and could need a little rescue -- though naturally the signal breaks up, the phone goes dead, just before she can reveal her location. Another hurdle: any contact with the creature means you're the carrier of a deadly, contagious virus -- and Gang-du got up-close and personal with the beast during its initial riverbank rampage. Agents in hazmat uniforms track him down, isolate him, instigate a series of torturous tests ... while Hyun-seo, awaiting rescue from her sewer hidey-hole, can't escape the snapping jaws of the hungry beast forever ... Perfect drive-in fodder. The formula satisfies and never strains beneath its own weight, or takes itself too seriously, even when offering pointed social commentary (the formaldehyde dumping and Agent Orange allusions are well grounded in actual events) -- just enough originality and genuine jump-scares to keep the proceedings fresh. Compare this to the wretched Godzilla (1998) for a good lesson in the right and wrong ways to make a latter-day Creature Feature.

Against the Day (2006)

James Thurber once said, "There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." There is also a middle ground, a Twilight Zone between these two qualities: contre-jour, "against daylight," a photographic term for backlighting, that moment when the glare and the glow meet, and the outer edges of foreground subjects begin to disappear into the light beyond them.

It is in exactly just such an area that Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day takes place. As though assembled from those split seconds occurring between the flash of the bulb and the chemical alchemy of the silver nitrate that will eventually form a frozen image, Pynchon delivers a sprawling photomosaic of the World That Was in the decades prior to WWI -- itself heralded by a mysterious, supernatural "heavenwide blast of light" in the wastes of Siberia on June 30th, 1908 -- over a century distant from the present time, yet perhaps an event that still illuminates, if not irradiates, this familiar world.

The novel begins in pure innocence as the Chums of Chance (five young, bickering zeppelin pilots who, along with their literate dog Pugnax, happen to be the heroes of a series of adolescent adventure novels) descend upon the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. But it isn't long before the narrative focuses instead on a temporary passenger assigned to the Chums, the hapless Lew Basnight, a proto-noir private detective who has committed an unspeakable crime unknown to himself but that nevertheless has alienated him from society ... before switching to the power schemes of railroad tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, a kind of cross between John D. Rockefeller and Snidely Whiplash ... then on to photographer and amateur chemist Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally, as they cross the American heartland, into Colorado where they fall in with anarchist dynamiter Webb Traverse ... Wait! What happened to those Chums?

They'll be back in a few hundred pages. Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon without a little sleight of hand, a few red herrings wiggling upstream. After all, the Chums exist in a kind of fictional universe, parallel to the universe where the rest of the characters exist ... just as that universe, in turn, is parallel to our own, a place of suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map -- as if, to be brought to any shelter, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined.

The yarn of Against the Day is spun mainly from the lifelines of the Traverse family, beginning with kooky anarchist/domestic terrorist Webb and continuing to his four children -- sons Reef, Frank, and Kit, and daughter Lake -- who scatter to the respective winds following their father's murder at the hands of a hired gun, Deuce Kindred. Reef tries marriage but is more at home as a swindler and dynamite handler, like his old man -- shifty employ that keeps him tuned to the underground, just in case he should ever find the will to act upon his weak desire for revenge against Deuce. It is Frank, meanwhile, disappearing into the desert landscape and eventually becoming a cog in the Mexican Revolution, who learns that blood spilled in retribution will not necessarily equal redemption. Kit tries to break family ties by attending engineering school in Europe -- but his scholarship comes by way of Scarsdale Vibe, the man who likely paid to have Webb killed for blowing up his railroad lines. It is Lake who binds herself most closely to a sense of disastrous familial legacy and fate, by marrying Deuce -- knowing full well his role in her father's death. (The Traverse family tree, incidentally, ultimately branches all the way into Vineland.)

While the Traverse children are the tesseract cornerstone of the novel, their numerous associates receive if not equal then certainly quality time. Along with Basnight, the Rideouts, the Vibes, and the Chums, there is Professor Vanderjuice, a kind of mad scientist, studying the aether and delving into time travel; Yashmeen Halfcourt, a gorgeous "polymorphous prodigy" and schoolmate of Kit who is capable of warping space through sheer mathematical computation; the Zombini family, traveling magicians who create doppelgangers of their stage volunteers by using mirrors made of the refracting calcite Iceland Spar; an enclave of pseudo-spiritualists known as T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys); and Cyprian Latewood, a fop who seems to have been teleported in from an Evelyn Waugh novel, most likely The Loved One. It's a cavalcade often bordering on being a parade of names, only a few of which will morph into full characters. Pynchon favors characteristics over characterizations; it is his forte, and the subjects in Against the Day are every bit as lifelike and as valid as Prince Florizel and company in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, or for that matter the legion of wacky servicemen in Heller's Catch-22. By abdicating any deep psychological qualities not relevant to the matters as hand, Pynchon frees himself to render a world that refracts through his characters.

And it is an eerie, doomed world, indeed. Though the principals never articulate it, they clearly feel the boom being lowered, as the century turns and the War approaches, as from a dark cloud bristling with lightning. Pynchon treks into the metaphorical sci-fi terrain most frequented by Ray Bradbury, and retrofits history in the same fashion that Area 51 scientists supposedly reverse-engineer crashed UFO parts into our own, less advanced aircraft. Characters meet shadows of themselves: Trespassers, they are called -- ghosts from the future who have come to warn, or perhaps mourning time travelers who want to revisit what is to be lost; it is never made sure. Meanwhile, among comical Star Trek and Doctor Who allusions, a military search is underway to locate the fabled land of Shambhala, to secure a backup paradise before the greater world is lost. And finally a device is invented that extrapolates information from photographs, allowing views into either the past or the future, moments beyond the shutter click -- suggesting that all of history is only some kind of false memory, anyway. A trick of the light.

Pynchon's first five novels -- from the paranoid quiltwork of V. to the giddy, melancholy divisionism of Mason & Dixon -- are all stories of wrong-minded, impossible, disrupted quests. Against the Day breaks this tradition, and Pynchon, late in his career, boldly sets off in a new direction -- a move that seems to have disoriented some critics. Ironically, it is his esteemed Gravity's Rainbow that is often described as a plotless, unstructured beast. That novel actually has a definite though deliberately incomplete structure -- the book even ends in mid-sentence to point this out. Here at last, Pynchon has turned in the novel he has been accused of for thirty-five years: there is no plot device outside the simple passage of time.

As such, the novel runs like, well, like clockwork. Exactly like clockwork, actually -- gears clicking, cogs a-spin, cuckoos and all, chiming at intervals dictated by a kernel mechanism just out of sight. Though some might say the trouble with clocks is that they measure something you're never going to get to the end of, the pacing is ingenious: the multiple storylines alternate for exact amounts of time -- just long enough to introduce some new tantalizing thread, or provide symbolic echo for one of the other episodes. Like Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, I suspect it would be possible to read the stories separate from each other, that Against the Day -- like the split beams of light that comprise the novel's controlling metaphor -- would come apart just as easily as Pynchon has put it together.Though there may be no tangible plot, don't be fooled -- this by no means signals a dearth of story. In fact, Pynchon throws away more story elements than most novelists employ in a full career. Through 1,085 pages of slapstick encounters, thwarted intentions, and sinister conspiracies both explicit and alluded to, he still only skims the surface of the world he's imagining. This is no shaggy dog narrative -- the narrative is the shaggy dog, a tail-wagging catalog of visions of the unexpected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world.

Long discussed as our one living writer capable of inheriting the literary mantle of Melville, Pynchon is actually shooting for the throne of Cervantes, here. And with this much story afoot, this many characters, this much mischief, Pynchon exhibits an astonishing restraint. Absent are the massive, brain-crushing narrative monologues, the characteristically arcane and cryptic ramblings; his tangents are now controlled, precise. What once took entire passages is now often done in a few words -- a remarkable, heartbreaking economy, redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. This is lightning that strikes right out of the bottle.

Yes, Pynchon still has his fastball, after demonstrating a deceptive curveball (Vineland) and wicked slider (Mason & Dixon). His style is again historically (not to mention hysterically) affected -- this time it's chiefly an era-appropriate turn-of-the-20th-Century idiom; think Arthur Conan Doyle on mescal. (I'm quick to imagine a hypothetical audio book, read by a smirking Orson Welles.) What's too often forgotten in the discussions of Pynchon's word games and conceptual puzzles is that the man can flat-out write. In his dreamlike prose, all described action takes on the thrust of greater import, of movement toward revelation. Descriptions of social conditions, mathematical theories, even just passing landscapes turn into roaring visual sweeps, the royal thunder of genius coming over the mountain -- a sound not heard since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow. The resulting reading experience is both luxurious and unsettling, very like a moment of post-lunch midday drowsing that results in vibrant, unlooked for flashes from the deepest parts of the brain.

Against the Day is, ultimately, that kind of book, demanding to be read on its own time, for a reader to pay attention, to actually read, a simple thing we sometimes forget to do in an age when books are too often expected to behave like television shows and merely distract us. Distraction is, after all, the last thing Pynchon is after. How else to explain the fierce moment he brings the proceedings to a halt, some 150 pages in, to describe a terrible tragedy in a city that must be Manhattan -- Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes ... but with only dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have found refuge in time?

Using history both real and imagined, Pynchon creates a world that floats off the page, into our own, and beyond. People see the world differently -- which must necessarily mean, according to the logic of Against the Day, there are different worlds to see. Parallel universes have long been Pynchon’s main concern -- on landscapes divided between the Haves and the Have Nots, he ever takes the side of those forgotten by history: the Passed Over, the Preterites, the Thanatoids. And now, the Trespassers, lost somewhere between a real doomed world and a paradise that probably never existed, not even in memory. Where does the truth lie? Was there a moment, now unreachable, where things took a terrible turn, and the world split, leaving us in the Bad one, while the Good one goes on spinning right next to us, but always out of reach?

Well, to paraphrase one of Against the Day's many characters, the "truth" is never as important as what lessons you might learn from the events themselves, however distorted they may appear to be. But ultimately Pynchon leaves us to our own devices, we Constant Readers, lost, ourselves -- for in the end, we are the Trespassers into the world of Against the Day. And the fractured reality we see within is only a reflection of our own.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, May 13 2007

The Illustrated Man (1969)

Rod Steiger chews his own tattooed scenery as "Carl," a wandering sideshow freak cursed with body art capable of weird telepathic tricks, soothsaying, show tunes, the works. The three tales originally penned by Ray Bradbury depicted are: "The Veldt" (two children imagine a world where lions eat their parents); "The Long Rain" (astronauts seek shelter on a rain-soaked Venus); and "The Last Night of the World" (The End is Nigh, but everybody sticks to their workaday routines). The source anthology contains thirteen more stories, nearly all of which would have been better suited to cinematic drama, starting with the flight of fancy provided by "The Rocket," all the way to the spacewreck nightmare of "Kaleidoscope." Uninspired production is reminiscent of an unsold television pilot. Absolutely no help: Steiger carves ham with a bizarre hick accent and grumpy, alienating demeanor. Better to have let the tattoos do the talking. The original promotional tagline was "Don't stare at the illustrated man." Good advice.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Kowalski (Barry Newman), a cop-turned-race-car-driver, is tasked to deliver a white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco. It's Friday night, he has until Monday -- all kinds of time -- but then he goes and makes a bet with his speed dealer, he can do the deed in half the time. Translation: It's On. Kowalski, fueled by uppers and insomnia, zooms his supercharged vehicle through gauntlet after gauntlet of cops, still to be dogged by other drivers, roadside bandits, roadblocks, &c. The chase eventually leaves the road, enters the blistering sands of the Sonora Desert, Kowalski egged on by a blind, perhaps psychic disc jockey, Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a Greek chorus of gospel R&B records and cryptic rants. And what's that mysterious black sedan reappearing around every corner, no matter how hard Kowalski jams the pedal to the metal? Quintessential grindhouse fare. Sublime desert cinematography. Insanely gratuitous nudity. And no hot rod dies harder on the silver screen (except for the Barricuda in the Phantasm movies -- that's a heartbreaker).

Being Harper Lee

I don't know Harper Lee, and I don't pretend to. I know some people who do know her -- but this is like saying "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." So when Charles Shields contacted me last fall about the biography he was putting together, I spoke to him more out of my own curiosity than anything else. What could I know that could possibly be of interest? He was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel, calling me.

And there are arguments to be made that Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee is composed primarily of barrel scrapings: Shields did not have access to Lee herself, and many of her closest compatriots were loyally mum. Still, like any mulligan stew, the success lies in how you combine the elements you do have on hand. Given that this particular stew is one for which people have been hungering for some time, the question becomes: How much flavor can something have when there's no main ingredient?

The book concentrates on the obvious eras: Lee's childhood and college years; her early period in Manhattan during the writing and revising of To Kill a Mockingbird; the time spent with Capote researching In Cold Blood in Kansas; the release of her book and then the film version; and finally an essentially speculative section, only fifty pages or so, devoted to the time since 1965. To flesh out what little is known, Shields uses heaping helpings from previously published biographies of Truman Capote, Gregory Peck, and Horton Foote. He's collected a multitude of interviews with and articles about people who surrounded Lee at one time (it seems he dug up every article ever published that even mentions Lee's name, quite a feat of research). Though of questionable value, there's also an abundance of first-hand accounts from people who claim to be former classmates, childhood friends, and other varieties of distant acquaintance. 

Even with his careful reliance upon this bounty of sources, Shields misses crucial inconsistencies and downright contradictions that prove the fallibility of such varied subjectivity: in describing A.C. Lee, the man whom so many believe is the template for Atticus Finch, neighbors recall him being "detached... not particularly friendly" and further say "the image of facing down the crowd of rough necks has never rung true to me." But a page later, without comment, come two hearty, if slightly at-odds, accounts of A.C. facing down a group of Klansmen. Shields also leads himself into some early, unwarranted speculation about the personality of Lee's mother; by the time he offhandedly admits, late in the book, such views come from mistaken (or intentionally mistaken) accounts, the damage is done -- he has perpetuated the error. 

It is reasonable to assume that a reader wishing to better understand the author of To Kill a Mockingbird would appreciate a detailed description of small town life in Monroeville during the 1930s and the prototype personalities and events that would eventually find their way into Lee and Capote's stories (the Jewish store owner who knowingly sold bedsheets to Klan members; the snuff-addicted baker of fruitcakes; the Monroe County court case that became the basis for Tom Robinson's trial). The book is therefore flush with ornamental, atmospheric, secondary detail. While impressive and engrossing, it ultimately becomes testament to the Invisible Center: Shields at one point spends six lines of text describing the functions of an Underwood typewriter. 

He makes the same miscalculation later on, describing the Clutter investigation and initially making the most of newly unearthed materials from the Capote Papers at the New York Public Library -- but buries the effort by piling on information (a four-page room-by-room description of the Clutter home, mainly devoid of any firsthand accounting) that can be more effectively gleaned from the pages of In Cold Blood itself.
 
The book is most effective when Shields stands back and lets Lee speak for herself. Good use -- revealing Shields' reverence for his subject -- is made of excerpts from the University of Alabama publications Crimson White and Rammer Jammer; Lee wrote for both during her time there. Even better are the snippets from interviews conducted during press junkets following both the 1960 publication of Mockingbird and the release of the film version a handful of years later. All of the excerpts showcase Lee's warm personality, not to mention wicked wit. (An authorized collection of these first-hand materials, framed only by editorial, contextual narration, would make a great read -- though such a beast seems unlikely to appear any time soon.)

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On a chilly November evening in 2005, I entered the Capri Theatre in Montgomery and settled in to watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of Capote. Even in understanding that the film was a speculative, compressed take on the investigation of the Clutter murders that led into the writing of In Cold Blood, I was taken out of the experience each time Catherine Keener appeared onscreen as "Harper Lee." I knew by the report of a mutual friend that Ms. Lee had indeed already seen the film and, though she reportedly thought Hoffman did a fair enough job, was largely dismissive of its many inaccuracies.

I could not keep from wondering how uncommonly weird it must be to live a complete life, quite like anyone else, but for a moment or two, decades prior, when you had a hand in something extraordinary and which left a profound legacy. And for someone to then make a movie about that legacy, that singular moment from your life, without your input or consent. A movie that then hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people see. I tried to think about how I might feel if someone in Hollywood made a film about something that happened in my life during, say, my college years (our intramural water polo team, while not heroic on the order of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, did, in fact, rock). Would they get the details right? What would it be like to look into the 30-foot face of my onscreen avatar and think, Some of this is right ... but the rest is all wrong?

About a month later, I was contacted by Charles Shields. His research had led him to an old essay I wrote for the Mobile Register Sunday book review page, describing how I tackled the popular Alabama parlor-game of half-baked speculation regarding whether or not Truman Capote had actually written To Kill a Mockingbird by reading Mockingbird and In Cold Blood back-to-back and, observing the different styles and tones, concluding that a kindergartner could figure out the truth of it. I was rewarded for this exercise by a phone call from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. You can surmise that it was, indeed, Harper Lee -- Truman Capote having been dead since 1984. Not to mention, our mutual friend Wayne Greenhaw confirmed the call, chuckling, "She doesn't make a lot of those." For a while, I included short account of this interaction as a "postscript" to my essay, but finally excised it since, frankly, it's more fun to tell in person, with added jokes and detail and whatnot; that Shields could use the Way Back Machine to access it anyway is a reminder that the Internets never forget.

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Meanwhile, there is no disputing the mystique surrounding the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't think you can pin it down easily by attributing it to a "literary mystery" regarding her singular output and long silence. After all, go tell it to Emily Bronte. I don't think the ongoing fascination has, at its core, anything much to do with Lee's personal choices -- that is just a symptom. The fascination, truly, is deeper -- having much less to do with Lee herself than is comfortable to admit.

We live in a culture that equates success not only with cash flow but with notoriety, where the media feeds on personalities who are famous for being famous -- a phenomenon so common, it's become an accepted joke. Lee is someone who bucks all expectations, who has achieved unqualified success in her chosen field of endeavor, and who has subsequently chosen the joy and satisfaction of simply having done Good Work. There is no evidence of a drive to better what, perhaps, could not be bettered. Not even the apparent need to ride the self-satisfying gravy train of celebrity that could certainly accompany Being Harper Lee -- at any moment, she could pick up the phone and start making the talk show and lecture circuits. But there's really no need. The literary and popular stature of To Kill a Mockingbird is above and beyond any aid she could give at this point.

And I'm banking that Harper Lee knows it. So she has chosen for herself the dignity of a quiet, normal life. Being the woman who wrote a book that defines a watershed moment in American culture and has touched and inspired millions -- millions -- of human beings around the planet, she chooses, courageously, to let her Good Work speak for itself.

For many of us, that choice -- the conundrous decision to not behave like a famous person when in fact it is always within her ability, at any moment, to do so -- is baffling. The unfortunate thing is that it should not be. We should all just aspire to have a little value in our lives, to do a spot of Good Work, find pleasure in it, and move on.

Atticus himself would ask of us little more than that.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, July 23 2006

The Sword & the Sorcerer (1982)

If you watched Excalibur (1981) and The Beastmaster (1982) back to back, then went to bed and had a nightmare, the nightmare would sync with The Sword and the Sorcerer. Titus Cromwell (B-movie prince Richard Lynch, employing his finest Brooklyn accent) raises the demon Xusia to help him conquer all the lands and get all the ladies. It more or less works, excepting a couple of escaped heirs belonging to one of the newly-decapitated kings (ye olde proverbial twins, sister Alana + brother Mikah). Years later, Mikah and Alana stir up rebellion against Cromwell, who somehow still hasn't quite gotten his act together, maybe because he double-crossed Xusia before all the land deeds were signed? A dude named Talon, clad in furs and sporting a manly man's half-shave (achieved with his triple-bladed sword, methinks) arrives with band of ruffians in tow; he strikes a deal to help the royal twins, so long as he can bed down Alana when the job is done. She agrees. Hunh. Anyway, there's requisite banner-swinging across dining halls, uninspired swordplay, and finally a sewer-rat attack. Talon's humongous triblade weapon seems to have no interesting legend behind it (two of the blades are spring-loaded and require no aim to hit their targets... they also magically reload); perhaps designed for a line of action figures that never materialized. Not quite as bad as the Ator movies, but close. A sequel (promised at the end of the credits) never materialized, thank god.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Vincent Price is a dude under siege by vampires. By day he seeks out their underground lairs, all the better to stake them to death. By night the shambling undead batter at the ramparts of his boarded-up home, seeking revenge: Prior to the viral apocalypse that turned 99.9% of the population into bloodsuckers, Price was a scientist working on a cure for the once-rare condition; now his blood contains the key to reversal. If only the vampires don't get him first... The first attempt at bringing Richard Matheson's seminal I Am Legend to the silver screen certainly inspired George Romero, but moments of chilly atmosphere are fleeting as the film drags on and on and on. And on. Matheson originally submitted this story to Hammer Studios, who passed because their films were being so thoroughly stomped by British censors at the time; the property then passed to an associate producer, who got the film made in Italy -- making this, in essence, the very first Italian zombie movie.

Equinox (1967/1970)

Four college kids are summoned to a remote cabin belonging to a nutty old professor (science fiction author Fritz Leiber, moonlighting between books) who, turns out, had his hands on a 1000-year-old demonology tome/early draft of the D&D Monster Manual and was practicing a little black magic in the name of science. Whoopsie. Also included with admission: a scaly, prehistoric boogeyman; disappearing castle; giant, cabin-crushing land octopus; possessed park ranger; vanishing corpses; creepy, cackling, cave-dwelling geezer; portal to evil dimension; devil-worshiping monks; doppelgangers; angry green homunculus; flying skull-faced devil (Asmodeus himself). Be sure to make your saving throw vs. insanity, or risk being stunned for 2-4 rounds.

Quintessential amateur low-budget horror schlock, ripe with stop-motion creatures and the worst ADR dubbing you'll see/hear this side of Toho Studios. Originally a student film (credit: Dennis Muren and Mark Thomas McGee) cobbled together on a $7K budget, later purchased by filmmaker Jack Woods who assumed director's credit after editing in footage of his own, meant to expand the story (and create a role for himself) but resulting mainly in goofy continuity errors. Both versions are silly fun; the shorter 1967 cut makes marginally more sense. Featuring a pre-WKRP in Cincinnati Frank Bonner, young but already heading into Herb Tarlek mode. Ed Begley Jr. served as assistant cameraman for the 1970 pickup shots. Sam Raimi lifted the basic plot elements for Evil Dead (1981).