From Darkness to Light

This week I finished the second pair of stories in Full Dark, No Stars.  Both were very good, although the first, "Fair Extension," a classic make-a-deal-with-the-devil story (with a side of The Book of Job), was lighter than the second.  In fact, it was the lightest of the four, being almost comical.  King used Bangor for his setting, and I enjoyed recognizing the landmarks he described.  I didn't like the main character, though, and that lessened the pleasure for me.  Dave Streeter was far too willing to accept the happy consequences of his deal with "Elvid," that left him cured of his fatal cancer while his so-called best friend lost everything he treasured.  In the end, Dave was not punished for his bad acts, though I believe he should have been.

The last story, "A Good Marriage," was inspired by the revelations some years ago that the BTK killer in Wichita, KS had murdered women for many years while his family and friends suspected nothing.  This was the most suspenseful of the lot, and very compelling, but was as morally ambiguous as the rest. In each of the four stories, the protagonist gets away with murder, which leaves me wondering what King meant for us to learn about the stranger who dwells within.  Should we condemn or approve the character's success? If we approve, are we revealing our own inner darkness?

After Stephen King, I decided a dose of reality was in order, so I took up a book I started reading many years ago but didn't finish, another of Tracy Kidder's books about ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people. Among Schoolchildren chronicles a year in the life of Christine Zajac, an elementary school teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1986.  We learn about her fifth-grade classroom, her pupils and some of the staff at Kelly School, one of the many public schools trying to educate students in the face of some very difficult challenges. 

In the book, Kidder paints a detailed portrait of Mrs. Zajac, as a teacher and a person, so that we get to know her and care about her as we go through the school year with her and her students.  We also get to know and care about some of her students, one in particular, Clarence, known to all the teachers as a "difficult" child.  We watch while Christine deploys her full arsenal of teaching tactics to get around Clarence's many behavioral, social and learning challenges with the hope of finding a way to help him.

Tracy Kidder is a skilled writer who always manages to get me deeply engaged in the lives of the people he profiles. I'm about half way through the book now, which means it's half way through the school year, and I'm looking forward with hope (and fear) to what lies ahead for the children.  Already it seems some of them won't make it, despite Mrs. Zajac's considerable talent and dedication.  Reading this book reinforces my appreciation of how incredibly difficult a job teaching is.  Among Schoolchildren should be required reading for those pundits on cable TV who sneer at teachers and for the politicians who write laws that make teachers' lives more difficult than they already are.

In my next post, I'll let you know what happens to Mrs. Zajac's class.  She's still alive, apparently--though she is now a retired principal--and still living in Holyoke.  In fact, in 2009 she was the Grand Marshal for the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade.  Read about it here: MassLive.

From Bloated to Bare Bones

I finally finished Six Suspects (after fast-forwarding through much of it).  I must say it's one of the worst books I've ever read.  I was slogging through the second half, intent upon reaching the end where I would at last discover who killed the politician's son, learning along the way that every one of the six suspects had gone to the party with the intent of killing the man.  So which one did it? When I finally found out (way past what I thought was the ending of the book), I felt cheated and not a little bit angry.

It turns out the actual culprit wasn't even one of the six suspects, but someone else entirely, someone not only the one you'd least suspect, but someone not even mentioned as being involved!  This unexpected killer comes in at the last minute to solve the riddle and end the book, much as the deus ex machina would arrive at the last minute to end a classical play.

When I finished the book I was left to wonder why this novel was published. Is it an example of some avant-garde trend that involves completely throwing out all the rules of good story writing? Or is it simply a marketing move?  The author of the book that became a very popular movie (Slum Dog Millionaire) writes a second book that must be exploited for its marketability before people find out how bad it is? 

When I read Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times, I was wondering where she was finding the fun in this book.  She does say that the Tribal (one of the six suspects) is Swarup's "most lovable creation" (June 24, 2009), and I agree with her on that. In fact, I was very upset when the author killed him off before the end of the book for no apparent reason. But that was just one more reason to hate this book. 

After that 470-page mistake, I thought I'd try an author I know to be a good storyteller: Stephen King. I chose his latest collection of long stories, Full Dark, No Stars.  There are four stories in it, all sharing a theme: the darkness that dwells within one's soul.  The first two were very good, both about ordinary people who find themselves capable of murder.  Neither has supernatural elements, a good thing, I think.  I've found over the years of reading Stephen King that his best stories are often those that don't include the supernatural in any overt way.

The best part is that when I read the stories, I get so involved I forget where I am.  In fact, a couple of times this past week I've almost missed my stop.  After more than a week of enduring Mr. Swarup and his bloated narrative, it's great to get back to an author who knows how to write a story.

See you next post.

Six Suspects: Wait for the Movie

This week, I did end up reading a mystery, but it didn't work out as well as I'd planned. I thought it would be fun to read a mystery from a different culture, so I settled on a novel written by the man who wrote Slum Dog Millionaire, Vikas Swarup.  The movie made from Swarup's book was very popular, and his second novel, Six Suspects, got some good reviews and sounded like it would be interesting. (Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it a "Bollywood version of the board game Clue.")  But alas, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep reading.  The only reason I'm hanging in there is to find out whodunit.

The story takes place in India, and throughout the book, the author emphasizes the corruption pervasive at all levels of Indian society.  He must be exaggerating, I tell myself.  No society could be that blatantly corrupt.  And, after all, it's supposed to be "a rollocking good read," according to the London Times.  But when every character will do anything to gain an advantage for himself, I not only lose interest in the story, I lose interest in India.

Is this the response the author is aiming for with this book?  I'm not sure.  Maybe he expects us to know what the truth is and laugh at his exaggerations.  But if we don't know the truth, well . . . how can we tell what's exaggerated?

Another aspect of the book that leaves me wondering what the author is trying to accomplish is the writing style.  Sometimes Swarup has very nice descriptions that allow me to visualize the landscape of India and its people.  But other times he is trying too hard to be clever, it seems, especially with dialogue that often comes out sounding a bit wooden.  Do people in India really talk that way? I could excuse the unnatural sounding speech if there were a translator, but no, Mr. Swarup is writing in English for British readers.

One of the six suspects is an American from Texas.  He is particularly annoying.  Not only is his supposed naivete completely implausible, his speech is a hodge-podge of cliches, country-bumpkin witticisms and well-phrased, educated sounding observations. The last is especially distracting, since these are the moments when the writer seems to be speaking in his own voice rather than the character's.  Is he deliberately doing that to destroy the reader's involvement in the character's story? I find that hard to believe and I'm left to wonder if he's trying to do something different or if he's just a bad writer.

So what's Vikas Swarup's goal?  I can only guess that he's writing a farce.  Here's the definition, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica eb.com:

farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.

Six Suspects does contain all the features of a farce, including stereotyped characters, so that must be what Swarup is after.  But if so, he fails to deliver a successful farce, in my view. 

For example, he spends six chapters of the book with first-person accounts of each of the six suspects in the murder.  (Oh, yes, did you forget this is a murder mystery?  I did too.)  Such narratives are not helpful to the plot, since the information we get could be gotten more efficiently by other means.  Moreover, first-person narration is for developing characters.  We don't need to hear what's in the head of a type.  Since he doesn't have an inner life, who cares what he thinks?  He's only there to fill a role, so we only need to see him doing it, not know why he's doing it. 

Even if Swarup wanted to give us more substantial types, he fails to do so since his characters reveal nothing illuminating in their narratives.  They remain true to form; there are no nuances, no surprises, no hidden depths.

The problem with Swarup's attempt at farce is that farce really works better in drama (as the definition indicates)--it's a visual, three-dimensional form of entertainment. On the page it pretty much falls flat.  Was Slum Dog Millionaire also farce?  I don't know, but I won't be reading it to find out.  I do plan to watch the movie, however.  And perhaps that's what Swarup was truly trying to accomplish with this book--to write a novel that would be made into a movie.

I plan to finish Six Suspects, but I'll be fast forwarding through most of it, I think.  And if I were you, I'd wait for the movie.

Our Shaky Future

Well, I finished A Crack in the Edge of the World, and it was most satisfying! We finally got to the detailed examination of the San Francisco earthquake, complete with stories from those who experienced it.  I never knew how terrifying it was until I read about the streets moving like gigantic waves toward the shocked onlookers, or the buildings falling down all around them.  I saw such wave action on a much smaller scale in 1980 in San Jose and I can imagine that people were stunned by what they saw.

Something else I didn't know was how much help the people of San Francisco got after the earthquake from around the country and the world.  Apparently, there was a huge outpouring of sympathy and cash for the devastated city. But that made me wonder if other towns and cities equally devastated but less populous also received assistance.  That's something rarely talked about with respect to that day: all up and down the fault line, communities were hurt and in some cases destroyed by the earthquake that had far reaching effects--from as far north as Oregon to as far south as Anaheim and as far east as Winnemucca.

Toward the end of the book, the author goes on to discuss other earthquake prone areas of the world, including Alaska, with its quake in 1964, and the giant caldera in Yellowstone National Park.  He's worried about all of these places, including San Francisco, since the Loma Prieta quake did not happen on the San Andreas fault, which means the pressure has been building there since 1906.

A Crack in the Edge of the World was a fun book to read!  I recommend it highly.

But what to read next?  Maybe a mystery would be a nice palate-cleanser before tackling a meatier work.  I'll see what I have in the cupboard.  Meet me back here later for a full account.