The New York Times led me to The Unknown Terrorist, a novel the reviewer mischaracterizes as “a fast-paced, sexually charged whodunit that suggests a far more complex reality.” Well: it might be sexually charged, and a whodunit, and suggest a far more complex reality, but it definitely isn’t fast paced. At least the first hundred—where I stopped—weren’t, and the novel should have started around page 60. Even then very little happens over the next 40 except a lot of interior commentary from the protagonists and annoying exterior commentary from the third-person narrator.

I gather from the tone of paranoia and uncertainty about large, sinister forces that Flanagan’s heroes fear, he is supposed to be recalling Philip K. Dick and his acolytes, including the cyberpunks, but he doesn’t do it as well as them and forgets that they always served up their anti-government sentiment with a strong helping of story that didn’t just intimate Bad Things, but showed how they did happen. Flanagan could too, and there’s a good novel that could have been written from The Unknown Terrorist’s base, and passages of very good writing could be salvaged. Those good passages make the novel more frustrating; Flanagan draws the linkages among money, sex, machines, technology, and economic forces together well, as when he implicitly compares a strip club to a casino. The good passages also have their problems—the amateur sociology behind the strip club scenes could have been much improved by reading Chelsea Girl.

The novel fails because of numerous reasons, including the many vague, portentous comments, as when the Doll sees a cloud: “It kept changing, like the world,” that have no payoff. Yes, we know the world is changing, and globalization means that Australian strippers can sleep with Middle Eastern computer programmer/maybe terrorists, and that governments overreact to terrorism, but that doesn’t mean we have to be hammered over the head with it in metaphors—or in place descriptions. The often clumsy attempts to establish a modern noir setting, where everything is plastic and fake instead of grim and dirty, and nothing is as it seems, fall flat. I keep returning to Dick because he invented and adapted the settings Flanagan wants to use. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has a strong setting that doesn’t detract from the plot—which begins on page one and stops on the last page, and in which philosophical musings are organic the topic.

I hesitate to condemn a book where so many of the technical aspects, like individual sentences, are right, but so many of the big ideas are wrong because most bad or mediocre books go the other way around: good ideas and plots poorly executed in sentences. Some details utterly wrong aside from the strip club, as when the narrator observes that “appliances were all of the best quality” and everything was white and gleaming in Tariq’s apartment. For the last ten or more years, the nicest appliances have been silver and steel colors, although over the last few years some designers have favored black. Mistakes like these stop me from reading and make me question the author’s knowledge concerning what he writes. The Unknown Terrorist is not worth reading, and I shouldn’t have given it 100 pages.

As long as I’m on the subject of Philip K. Dick, in the New Yorker Adam Gopnik published this essay. I don’t agree with all his (re)assessments, which, as others have noticed, he strains for at times, but even when I don’t agree he makes provocative points and packs a lot of ideas into very little space, as with, for example, this:

Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact, Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist—concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum.

If Dick is treated as a romantic, he’s only capital-R Romantic like late Blake, or in the sense of the ironic genre of Romance as begun by Conrad at the start of modernism. I can reconcile him being a bone-dry intellectual humorist and a romantic, but Gopnik treats them as separate ideas. This powerful and interesting essay, however, is worth reading even if I think some of it wrong, and it is worthwhile much like A Farewell to Alms, a book with loads of insightful premises that may not add up to the author’s conclusion. I love anything that makes me really think, even if I conclude that the author is wrong. Gopnik and Gregory Clark both more than accomplish that end.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a novel Elmore Leonard recommends in interviews—he did recently in one with The Wall Street Journal—and he wrote the introduction, explaining that “What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of the rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities.” Not only did he learn, but he surpassed his master: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is not an outright bad book. What I learned from it is that you can show too much through dialog. It accomplished something new in its genre, a feat very few novels—including self-consciously literary ones—do. But it reads like a movie—dialog predominates to such a degree that I could barely track where the characters are, or why they are there, or what they are doing. At the same time, Eddie’s “friends” are so slimy and foolish that I cannot care for them and their fast talking. If anything goes on in their heads besides lust for money, it’s not evident.

Guilty of all the alleged sins I defended in The Prisoner of Convention, The Friends of Eddie Coyle would probably make Myers self-immolate. If he thinks Leonard’s heroes are amoral verging on immoral, then the ones in Higgins’ books are simply animals. The Friends of Eddie Coyle also shows that at some level Myers is right: I could not care about Coyle or his friends in part because all of them are so bad, and not only bad but vain and petty. Richard III and Othello at least had contrasts with the villains even if they fell for the villains’ schemes, but Coyle doesn’t even have that. Eddie, Jackie Brown, Dillon, and the rest of them are unredeemed by any glimmer of humanity’s positive traits. Leonard’s have some honor or dignity, even that of a thief. Few if any of Leonard’s protagonists, for example, kill without provocation, and he raises more moral questions through his work than Myers seems to realize.

As with the work some nineteenth-century authors, The Friends of Eddie Coyle appears significant more for its influence than for itself. If you’ve read Elmore Leonard you’ve read Coyle but better; if you’ve seen Homicide: Life on the Streets or any of the innumerable gritty cop shows on T.V. or in theaters you’ve heard his characters’ voices. They are influenced by film, and, as one says, “It’s like you’re in a movie, and the other guy’s in the movie with you, but he knows you’re both in a movie, and what comes next. And you don’t. I get the feeling, all the time, he’s playing me” (emphasis in the original) (85). Maybe some of Higgins’ other books are better—Elmore Leonard improved with age—so he might too. But I’m not going to find out.

After reading some judicious Orwell quotes selected by Kate of Kate’s Book Blog posted a while ago, I decided to buy the Everyman’s Library edition of his Essays—all 1363 pages, excluding end notes. What a delight: many speak with the economy of a journalist, the depth of a great philosopher and the practicality of an executive, and their topics range over a host of ideas, many of which are as relevant today as they were 60 years ago. In Defense of the Novel is particularly timely; Orwell writes about the problems of book reviewing: many books are not necessarily bad but fail to rouse the love or even curiosity of the critic: “[…] the chances are that eleven out of twelve books will fail to rouse in him the faintest spark of interest.” But professional critics have to review them, judge them, and establish some kind of scale. If Shakespeare is a 10 and Orwell a 7, very few books looks good in comparison. But if one starts comparing only modern books to each other, they start to look better, and one finds something redeeming in bad books, and then one starts raving about the indifferent books, and, as Orwell writes, “There is no way out of it when you have once committed the initial sin of pretending that a bad book is a good one. But you cannot review novels for a living without committing that sin.” Maybe—but I think he leaves some nuance out of his description.

I don’t review novels for living, but I still know of what he writes and understand the problems inherent in judging books. Orwell is also too harsh or cynical because he neglects to realize that most reviewers are not trying to pretend that a bad book is a good book, but rather that most—well, many—books contribute something. Otherwise they would never have reached print at a major house. They would find no readers, with or without the critic’s help. So they must fulfill some need, particularly because anyone who buys a book chooses it out of a sea of literally millions of other books in English alone. I, for example, didn’t love Martin Amis’s latest novel, House of Meetings, but I still wrote about it because I realized that it is a good book in its area, even if it was a book that did not move me greatly.

Not all of In Defense of the Novel applies to me—I am paid nothing to write about books and so can write about whichever ones I please in whatever way I please. But I consequently avoid many bad, mediocre, or uninteresting books because most of the ones I choose are recommended some way: through bloggers, or reviewers, or essays, or the like. They have survived the rigorous pruning by agents, editors, and often fellow bloggers like me, who have no particular affiliation and seldom receive recognition, let alone money, for our efforts. Most of the books I’ve been reading lately have said something useful, even if I do not have enough passion to spare for all of them, and it’s worth trying to describe what useful thing they say. Passion is a curious and individual thing, and even if a book doesn’t move a reviewer, it might move someone reading the review, and many books published deserve at least that fair hearing. Orwell is still, as usual, more right than he is wrong, and in reading his essays I find myself much changed—just the effect I hope for when I crack a fresh spine.

Oh, and Essays? Brilliant. It and Graham Green’s The End of the Affair have made my reading life. I can go through a lot of less than perfect books to find two like these.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a good novel—good even without the modifier “crime,” in front of “novel” though not quite as good as some think. Like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it’s slightly too long and goes mushy two-thirds through (how again did Landsmen end up in a training camp for religious terrorists in the middle of Tlingit country in Alaska? And is it bad that I give nothing away by saying so?), but I forgive because I like Landsman. I forgive because Chabon never stops playing with words, with dialog, with ideas, even while his characters make improbably erudite references or use literary terms—”‘You need me to hold your hand,’ she says. ‘In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.’ ‘Only in the metaphorical sense,’ he says.” Detectives refer to tautologies and adverbs, and very occasionally professorese slips into the cursing and backbiting I normally think of as the detective’s domain. The rare one-liners that misfire are still more than compensated for by the ones that work: “She leaves the door open and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. This is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.”

Chabon sometimes stays lowbrow, classic detective, but also goes much higher than Chandler, whose shadow stays on the page even when I read in direct sunlight, and who also sometimes left one confused (who killed who and why?). The Chandleresque metaphors appear—”[…] its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General […]” Then again, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more political than Chandler, and it criticizes the fanaticism of our time by mixing some religious conspiracy elements into a detective novel, making a pastiche of genres that disoriented at times and, towards the end, made me roll my eyes as events reached an unlikely confluence. Chandler never went that route, but then again Chandler arrived in a time blessedly before The Da Vinci Code.

Chandler is not just on my mind, and Chabon mentioned him, though not explicitly the anxiety of influence detective writers feel regarding master, when Chabon visited Seattle recently. During his initial comments Chabon delivered like a standup comic or TV show host, with a speech pattern unlike the professorial tone many if not most authors adopt, and what his characters sometimes hit by accident. He wore a pink shirt and was well-coifed in an unruly, Bohemian sort of way, the young intellectual king who has conquered a small territory in the land of literature, yet turned into something closer to a cantor or rabbi in reading his own work. He spoke slowly compared to most authors. Hearing him roll with his languid sentences made them gorgeous, or sound more so than they already are, and the crowd, myself included, loved his elocution, “The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms” on page eight, causing even more laughs than his opening routine.

At the reading I also I realized what’s so odd about book readings: they’re often not really about the book so much as the apparatus around the book, or the way the book was formulated, or what kind of computer the writer used. The same is true of weaker interviews, which is one reason I liked so many of the pieces from Conversations with Robertson Davies, a book I mentioned, perhaps not coincidentally, regarding John Banville’s visit for Christine Falls.

This time, the questions directly about writing habits and where Chabon got his idea were mostly preempted—the former in the Author’s Note of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where we learn it was composed on Macs using Nisus Writer Express and DevonThink Pro (I like DevonThink Pro, but prefer Mellel for obscure word processors), and the latter when he described finding a travel guidebook of Yiddish phrases published in the 1950s. World War II demolished any communities where such a guidebook would be of any use, and so he began to imagine an alternate universe where a Yiddish-speaking community might have grown. The ultimate result he signed at the end of the night, impressed with the number of stickies festooning the long edge. “A future graduate student’s compulsion,” I said before the line moved. During his talk Chabon did have one great bit about writing, instead of what he had written, which was paraphrased advice from a former teacher: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog.

I wish he had been able to talk more about the religious aspects of the novel and how he employs chess as a metaphor. Religion played an enormous role, to a much greater extent than his earlier big novels, and Landsman goes from the specifics of him as a Jew to the general problems of being a Jew to back to the specific again, making him the microcosm of the larger issues. The novel also discusses his family, or lack thereof, and how the Jews have been forced into being peripatetic, contributing to the feeling of being lost that is so prevalent in many detective novels but seldom as well-supported as it is here. Landsman is lost because of his absent family, while the Jews are lost because they cannot find a home. For Landsman, as if it’s not enough being left by a woman (a standard detective fiction trope) and being an alcoholic and being cynical (as we’re too often explicitly reminded), he also has to contend with being kicked out of Sitka with the rest of the temporary residents. The people don’t belong there, and Landsman is the detective, so he doesn’t belong either, and he’s trying to find a home through solving his case, just like John Wayne was trying in some sense to belong through his adventures in his Westerns, like The Searchers. Being Jewish makes for unusual references, though, as when “The daily sight of [Bina, Landsman’s ex-wife] is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”

Not all the religious references are Jewish: “Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma.” We’re dealing with Jewish intellectual detectives, evidently, but this is a bit much, as with some of the intellectual matter I talked about above. Chabon also has Landsman speaking for the people when “Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels […]” He feels hollow, and so do the people; they feel frustrated, and so does he: “[Landsman] tries [to drive the game he found at the murder scene] from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.” I like the use of chess and color to describe Landsman’s existential frustration, and the reversal of white and black as traditional symbols of good and bad. Reverses like that occur throughout the book, as does commentary on politics, which only become more explicit as it goes on and work at many levels. Landsman could be describing an individual, a state (especially Israel), or humanity here: “Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss.”

The Elegant Variation beats me to the punch again with reporting on Chabon in L.A. Mark Sarvas wrote:

Chabon cited the influence of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald … determined that he needed an “unobtrusive conveying of information” about this alternate society, which could be handled via a detective … He “felt strongly that I wanted to keep the sentences short,” which he acknowledged is contrary to his more normal style.

Unobtrusive? In one scene, one supposedly blue-collar character remarks to another about the adverb used in the preceding sentence of dialog, and there is no way of “unobtrusively” mentioning an enema. I liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s style, but it is not unobtrusive. Perhaps unobtrusive compared to The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, but not at all compared to Elmore Leonard, or to the writers who seem to have one eye towards the screen.

In addition, The Guardian writes about Chabon and even mentions novels here.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a good novel—good even without the modifier “crime,” in front of “novel” though not quite as good as some think. Like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it’s slightly too long and goes mushy two-thirds through (how again did Landsmen end up in a training camp for religious terrorists in the middle of Tlingit country in Alaska? And is it bad that I give nothing away by saying so?), but I forgive because I like Landsman. I forgive because Chabon never stops playing with words, with dialog, with ideas, even while his characters make improbably erudite references or use literary terms—”‘You need me to hold your hand,’ she says. ‘In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.’ ‘Only in the metaphorical sense,’ he says.” Detectives refer to tautologies and adverbs, and very occasionally professorese slips into the cursing and backbiting I normally think of as the detective’s domain. The rare one-liners that misfire are still more than compensated for by the ones that work: “She leaves the door open and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. This is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.”

Chabon sometimes stays lowbrow, classic detective, but also goes much higher than Chandler, whose shadow stays on the page even when I read in direct sunlight, and who also sometimes left one confused (who killed who and why?). The Chandleresque metaphors appear—”[…] its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General […]” Then again, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more political than Chandler, and it criticizes the fanaticism of our time by mixing some religious conspiracy elements into a detective novel, making a pastiche of genres that disoriented at times and, towards the end, made me roll my eyes as events reached an unlikely confluence. Chandler never went that route, but then again Chandler arrived in a time blessedly before The Da Vinci Code.

Chandler is not just on my mind, and Chabon mentioned him, though not explicitly the anxiety of influence detective writers feel regarding master, when Chabon visited Seattle recently. During his initial comments Chabon delivered like a standup comic or TV show host, with a speech pattern unlike the professorial tone many if not most authors adopt, and what his characters sometimes hit by accident. He wore a pink shirt and was well-coifed in an unruly, Bohemian sort of way, the young intellectual king who has conquered a small territory in the land of literature, yet turned into something closer to a cantor or rabbi in reading his own work. He spoke slowly compared to most authors. Hearing him roll with his languid sentences made them gorgeous, or sound more so than they already are, and the crowd, myself included, loved his elocution, “The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms” on page eight, causing even more laughs than his opening routine.

At the reading I also I realized what’s so odd about book readings: they’re often not really about the book so much as the apparatus around the book, or the way the book was formulated, or what kind of computer the writer used. The same is true of weaker interviews, which is one reason I liked so many of the pieces from Conversations with Robertson Davies, a book I mentioned, perhaps not coincidentally, regarding John Banville’s visit for Christine Falls.

This time, the questions directly about writing habits and where Chabon got his idea were mostly preempted—the former in the Author’s Note of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where we learn it was composed on Macs using Nisus Writer Express and DevonThink Pro (I like DevonThink Pro, but prefer Mellel for obscure word processors), and the latter when he described finding a travel guidebook of Yiddish phrases published in the 1950s. World War II demolished any communities where such a guidebook would be of any use, and so he began to imagine an alternate universe where a Yiddish-speaking community might have grown. The ultimate result he signed at the end of the night, impressed with the number of stickies festooning the long edge. “A future graduate student’s compulsion,” I said before the line moved. During his talk Chabon did have one great bit about writing, instead of what he had written, which was paraphrased advice from a former teacher: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog.

I wish he had been able to talk more about the religious aspects of the novel and how he employs chess as a metaphor. Religion played an enormous role, to a much greater extent than his earlier big novels, and Landsman goes from the specifics of him as a Jew to the general problems of being a Jew to back to the specific again, making him the microcosm of the larger issues. The novel also discusses his family, or lack thereof, and how the Jews have been forced into being peripatetic, contributing to the feeling of being lost that is so prevalent in many detective novels but seldom as well-supported as it is here. Landsman is lost because of his absent family, while the Jews are lost because they cannot find a home. For Landsman, as if it’s not enough being left by a woman (a standard detective fiction trope) and being an alcoholic and being cynical (as we’re too often explicitly reminded), he also has to contend with being kicked out of Sitka with the rest of the temporary residents. The people don’t belong there, and Landsman is the detective, so he doesn’t belong either, and he’s trying to find a home through solving his case, just like John Wayne was trying in some sense to belong through his adventures in his Westerns, like The Searchers. Being Jewish makes for unusual references, though, as when “The daily sight of [Bina, Landsman’s ex-wife] is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”

Not all the religious references are Jewish: “Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma.” We’re dealing with Jewish intellectual detectives, evidently, but this is a bit much, as with some of the intellectual matter I talked about above. Chabon also has Landsman speaking for the people when “Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels […]” He feels hollow, and so do the people; they feel frustrated, and so does he: “[Landsman] tries [to drive the game he found at the murder scene] from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.” I like the use of chess and color to describe Landsman’s existential frustration, and the reversal of white and black as traditional symbols of good and bad. Reverses like that occur throughout the book, as does commentary on politics, which only become more explicit as it goes on and work at many levels. Landsman could be describing an individual, a state (especially Israel), or humanity here: “Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss.”

The Elegant Variation beats me to the punch again with reporting on Chabon in L.A. Mark Sarvas wrote:

Chabon cited the influence of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald … determined that he needed an “unobtrusive conveying of information” about this alternate society, which could be handled via a detective … He “felt strongly that I wanted to keep the sentences short,” which he acknowledged is contrary to his more normal style.

Unobtrusive? In one scene, one supposedly blue-collar character remarks to another about the adverb used in the preceding sentence of dialog, and there is no way of “unobtrusively” mentioning an enema. I liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s style, but it is not unobtrusive. Perhaps unobtrusive compared to The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, but not at all compared to Elmore Leonard, or to the writers who seem to have one eye towards the screen.

In addition, The Guardian writes about Chabon and even mentions novels here.