The reading lately has been eclectic: a family member gave me The Rejection Collection, an excellent and hilarious book of frequently contrarian cartoons. I picked up Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising from the library, where it was swiftly returned when I finished it; the style is straight from a poorly written technical manual on human emotion and idiocy in war, but a post on some of the interesting aspects of it 20 years after its first publication will be forthcoming. I can only hope that admitting reading it won’t kill my credibility.

Then there were two melancholy and elegiac Big Fiction works from Britain: The Sea and Atonement, neither of which need much introduction given their fame, prizes and praise.

Finally, I also checked out George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context after reading about it in The New Yorker. The essay itself certainly doesn’t have any context: aside from decrying the depravations of pop culture and lamenting some form of old order, I’m not sure what it was about. If the world doesn’t make sense anymore—a point I’m not about to take sides on—that’s no reason to imitate one’s view of the world in writing.

Oh, and television is bad—very, very bad. That much was evident. What’s good? That wasn’t so evident, but I guess we need context to find it. Perhaps context is good. It might be. It’s hard to tell from this essay. Getting it from the library was also a wise choice.

I’m going on a trip shortly and will probably start Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey after. Reading it is supposed to be an odyssey in and of itself. I hope it’s a worthwhile one.

Good existentialism isn’t dead, even if it is dressed in unusual clothing like The Player, Michael Tolkin’s story about an amoral Hollywood executive more intrigued by puzzling, anonymous postcards than about why he murdered a screenwriter who he thought authored them.

The protagonist, Griffin Mill, is oddly sympathetic; we can sympathize both Griffin and with the many well-meaning but foolish writers he turns down. The writers are far from heroes, because they scorn the Hollywood machine even as they’re determined to break into it by toadying up to people like Griffin. There’s more than a hint of envy in the desire for the glamour and power of the Big Time, regardless of whether that Big Time is Hollywood, sports, CEOs, or even writers and academics.

I normally don’t like seeing a movie before reading the book it’s based on, but The Player, like Out of Sight, is fabulous in both. The ending of The Player the movie was even more astonishing than the book’s, because both stories are all about someone fighting the Hollywood story machine, yet the movie and book manage to both accommodate and defy the Hollywood story.

You can see the some of the tensions by listening to this worthwhile Bookworm interview, in which Tolkin discusses the many maladies faced by the wealthy and successful as well as the eternal question of the soul.

In the interview Tolkin doesn’t give away The Return of the Player, but reading at least The Player and ideally both makes sense if for no other reason than because the abstract concepts discussed won’t make as much sense without the concrete mooring of the art itself.

You can get away with reading only one—the two books are sequels only nominally. The Return of the Player references events in The Player, but they’re not any more important than background in most standalone books. The Return of the Player is also concerned with very different things than its predecessor; while The Player still plays in the Hollywood and conventional world, The Return of the Player is much more philosophical and metaphysical, to the point where it is concerned with ideas and issues far above and beyond Hollywood. The movie business is just a symptom of a greater decay and malaise, and The Return of the Player is a macro view of the world compared to The Player’s micro view. And yes, a post on The Return of the Player itself is en route.

In The Player, the individual is becoming conscious of himself. As is so often the case, the person with no conscience and little consciousness slowly awakens, maybe just enough to perceive himself—but will this lead to a greater unfolding? Sometimes it seems very unlikely, as in Martin Amis’s Money. In these novels something, some trial, comes along to knock the character out of his emotional stupor. Rising through the sludge takes time, and so does trying out fresh feelings. Griffin’s trial is the mysterious shadow who is uncomfortable because he points out what Griffin is, and he isn’t much.

The writing itself is understated in the way I would imagine a screenplay to be, and I sprinted through the last quarter, wanting to see what would happen; the conclusion was abrupt and somewhat puzzling, and it highlights the undercurrent of the freewill/fate debate that is an undercurrent throughout. Once Griffin commits the act that starts things, how much control does he have over the way they will end? It sounds like description of current American foreign policy problems, and it also applies to murder stories. Or, as Gandalf says, “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

Griffin is hardly among the wise, and the results of his actions are most unusual. If he is a modern Raskolnikov, then the world of Griffin is indeed a very fallen place. And a funny one, too, but also a sad one (The Return of the Player looks at society in a larger sense). Funny and sad: they are different angles of looking at the same thing, but Griffin is too obtuse to really see either. His inner vision is restricted two areas: money and power, although they might also be different ways of looking at the same thing.

The most fascinating part about Griffin is how much I came to like him in spite of his mortal sins; at times I found myself nodding along with him before remembering what he is and what he’s doing. I suppose that’s part of the point: I do relate to the Hollywood moneyman and mogul, whose job it is to be the slime that greases the wheels of the dream industry. But what does that say about me, the reader? It is an unsettling thought, and one that need not arise if one just rips through the story, which is fun in its own right. The reader can be like Griffin and just go along for the ride. But then you live your life without realizing the shadow that follows you, because you don’t have a rejected writer to remind you of it.

You only have the writer whose book you choose to pick up.

For a really funny book, try Straight Man, which, like its literary predecessor Lucky Jim, takes place in academia. Lucky Jim is better than Girl, 20, another Kingsley Amis novel—Lucky Jim has many of its strengths and none of its flaws. Straight Man builds on Lucky Jim and the other campus novels that preceded it; the good news about life, whether academically or elsewhere, is that it provides plenty of absurdity for writers.

Straight Man finds academics fighting for budget and prestige like dogs over a scrap of meat, while the more reasonable narrator stumbles, perhaps intentionally into ludicrous situations—such as threatening while on camera to strangle a goose, which he calls a duck—in part because of his environment. It’s a long book that never its pacing or jokes; I’m thinking about Straight Man in the context of an e-mail I sent about why I prefer novels to short stories. By the time I get into a short story it’s already over, and I’m forced to learn a new set of names and circumstances and assorted other trivia that too often feels too much like trivia. The kinds of longitudinal narrative arcs (and jokes) that make the best novels what they are interest me, and short stories by their nature cannot encompass them. One could certainly argue the opposite, and I’m not about to quibble with taste, but I understand mine well enough to know what I like.

And I like Straight Man because it takes us through Hank Devereaux’s world. That means repeated references to William of Occam’s Razor, the ultimate fate of the duck, and the way his students, peers, and superiors inadvertently conspire against him. Or he conspires against all of them, depending on one’s perspective (“Orshee,” who adds “or she” to any sentence referring to a person of indeterminate gender with a singular male pronoun, would no doubt consider Hank a nemesis). That’s not to say I always demand brontosaurus novels, as I also like some that are closer to nibbles—Tom Perrotta writes short, for instance—as well as really long ones, such as Neal Stephenson’s awesome, 1,000 page opus: Cryptonomicon.

Bear in mind that I like novellas too: Heart of Darkness, if that counts, and Byatt’s Angels & Insects—which, like Possession, takes place in the Victorian era. But both are long enough to engage me and last long enough that I can get my bearings in the story’s world.

Once I’m fully in a novel, I don’t want it to end; my real issue with short stories might be that either a) I don’t have enough time to decide a short story is excellent before it’s over or b) even if I do decide it’s excellent, I know how quickly it will end. Short stories are vehicles for the pure power of language, while most novels have more plot to unfold. As the title of this blog shows, stories—their content—is what I most care about. Obviously form can never be fully separated from content and vice-versa, but if you put them on a continuum, I want more of the story. And that usually means novels.

Straight Man has both, and it is Richard Russo’s best novel, followed just behind by Empire Falls. Short stories, though, don’t, and though I read them when I had to for school, I never really wanted to. So now I read chiefly for pleasure, and few books offer as much as Straight Man.

Why is Elmore Leonard so damn good when he’s at his best? His best excuses his worst in the same way hitting a three at the buzzer in game seven excuses a season of bad rebounding and missed lay-ups. His middling caper novels are better than the best of most writers; the best Leonard is seeing the master work because you don’t see him work unless you’re paying attention to all those deft cuts and all that masterful dialog. You have to slow down if you’re going to consciously notice how good he is, because you’re reading so fast that you’re not even reading—you’re living, and when you look up and see it’s two hours later and you still have to get up for work in the morning, you’re let down because work isn’t going to be nearly as good as what you’ve just been reading.

He’s so good that reading generalized criticism raises my hackles. One disappointing part of Reading Like a Writer came with the put-down that Leonard, though highly skilled as a writer, is basically formulaic. He’s not, and the rest of Reading Like a Writer lets me chalk up the disagreement to differing taste, but accepting Prose’s judgment on other books doesn’t come as swiftly after she hits Leonard.

Still, even I have a hierarchy within the Leonard canon. I didn’t love The Hot Kid: Leonard’s milieu is in the contemporary caper world; his early westerns don’t hold up well. Some reviewers, including the one of the NYTBR, called The Hot Kid his best, but I disagree. He’s said that it takes about a million published words, and if his westerns trained him for his later work, I’m glad they were published.

It’s tough to get a feel for Leonard without reading an entire book. He doesn’t deliver big ideas into poetic aphorisms. His genius is between and among the lines, and it’s often not until I’m done with a book that I realize how good it is—not just in terms of the “plot,” which is the only way people can defend garbage like The Da Vinci Code, but in terms of the writing and especially the dialog. This comes from Out of Sight, although stripped of the preceding pages it doesn’t come as such a surprise:

He said, “It doesn’t have to, it’s something that happens. It’s like seeing a person you never saw before—you could be passing on the street—and you look at each other . . .”
Karen was nodding. “You make eye contact without meaning to.”
“And for a few moments,” Foley said, “there’s a kind of recognition. You look at each other and you know something.”
“That no one else knows,” Karen said. “You see it in their eyes.”
“And the next moment the person’s gone,” Foley said, “and it’s too late to do anything about it, but you remember it because it was right there and you let it go, and you think, What if I had stopped and said something. It might only happen a few times in your life.”

Yeah, we know what you mean. The exchange is so good because of how implausible it is, and yet its perfection in the story’s context. They’re telling us what Charles Foster Kane did fifty years ago—he once saw a girl in a white dress on a passing ferry, and yet still often thinks of her, even after acquiring all the wealth and power the world had to offer. Leonard’s characters don’t have anything but their experience and wits, but they feel the same feelings, the same longings, that don’t know the boundaries of class or time.

In the story you get the impression that Foley and Karen Sisco are overcoming themselves to have that exchange, each tentatively probing to see if the other is going to shut down, and in a flawed book it would’ve been forced. But the passage fits so naturally, and it’s so understated, that you’re already jumping ahead to what happens next. But Leonard doesn’t overplay his hand—he seldom does—and the description doesn’t fail. Problem is that it might be too late for Foley, this thing that happens only a few times in his life, but you’re not quite sure: with Leonard it could go either way.

One unusual note about Out of Sight: it’s almost as good a movie as a book, and experiencing both back to back is worthwhile.

The best of Leonard’s best is Get Shorty, and if you haven’t read it already, get it. The only danger in starting with it is the possibility of disappointment when you read the rest, but it’s worth the risk.

He is, after all, both popular in the sense of making the bestseller lists, and respected by reviewers and critics. It’s a rare feat these days, with the stereotypical effete, elite fiction dominating among the literati while garbage thrillers occupy the New York Times bestseller lists, to have both—and be worthy of them.