Ann Tyler writes beautifully about families. Her families are always real and believable, made up of quirky, impossible people, suffering from pain and benefitting from love as real families do. She has the gift of putting the right words in their mouths, the right thoughts in their minds. She tells us the parts of their story that we want to know. I've never been disappointed in a Tyler novel, and Digging to America was another winner.
Digging is the story of two children from Korea adopted by middle-class Americans in the late twentieth century. It's the story of two families, the Yazdans and the Donaldsons, who meet at the airport when the babies arrive. Driven by the outgoing Donaldson family they stay in touch and a years-long relationship begins. Every year they have an "arrival party" to celebrate the day when they all met at the Baltimore airport. The novel follows the families as they change, grow, die, argue, fight and love.
Tyler has the knack of being contemporary and timeless at once, blending the interactions of human beings of all kinds, as they exist in families and outside of them, with external social and political issues and events. The Yazdan family are Iranian immigrants and their descendants. Iranian culture and Iranians living in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century becomes one of the themes of the novel, and we are treated to a loving yet realistic (one believes) look into the lives of these new Americans.
Digging to America includes death as well as birth, and has more than a little to say about what it's like to get old in this country. Ann Tyler's voice is gentle yet truthful, she looks on our people and their lives with a loving sense of humor, never failing to penetrate to the core of the human condition.
Don't judge a book by its cover. The edition of Bangkok 8 that I read has a lurid one: orange, black, and hot pink, featuring a blurry image of a scantily-clad dancer in what might be a night club. Reluctant to be seen with my nose in such I placed it on a shelf for some time. I should have known better; the friend who gave it to me has great taste in books, and this was no mistake. Bangkok 8 has everything that makes a great mystery novel.
Set in Thailand, the story starts out at a motorcycle-taxi pace with the murder of a police detective, Pichai, partner of Sonchai Jitpleecheep.This murder is committed immediately after the murder of an American Marine named Bill Bradley. Sonchai tells the story. The murders are gruesome and surreal -- snakes are involved. Pichai and Sonchai were unusually close friends (bound even closer by their vows as "arhat cops" as their penance for having murdered a drug dealer in their younger days) and Sonchai's determination to find the person responsible for Pichai's death and kill him or her is grim and powerful.
As W.R. Greer points out in this review, there isn't anything particularly unique in the idea of a mystery novel wherein a cop avenges the death of his partner. In many ways, Detective Jitpleecheep is nothing more than the hard-boiled detective in the hard-boiled novel -- but what I particularly admire is how John Burdett has used the religion, culture, and environment of this Thai detective to create what was for me a completely unique and refreshing book in this idiom. I haven't been so impressed since reading the novels of Elliott Pattison about his Chinese detective Shan Tao Yun, set chiefly in Tibet. Pattison's work is much different than Burdett's, but they both use the atmosphere of Buddhist culture and philosophy to enhance and deepen their plots.
In the course of the story we get a fair dose of modern Bangkok from the viewpoint of a native. We are introduced to a huge overpopulated city with extreme levels of overpopulation, pollution, and poverty. Corruption is quite literally institutionalized, especially in the police department -- except for our arhat hero and his deceased friend. (Sonchai and Pichai vowed to adhere to strict Buddhist principles of honesty in their police careers. In this way they hoped to avoid at least some of the horrible Karmic retribution that they incurred when they committed murder.) Farangs, foreigners, are a much-exploited resource in this city. Many farangs come to Bangkok for sex, usually purchased from the multitudinous variety of prostitutes that work there. We find that Sonchai's mother is a prostitute, and later in the book her desire to improve her business provides an interesting turn to the plot.
The sex trade is an important part of the mystery, and so is the involvement of a wealthy farang businessman. This man is named Sylvester Warren. He is seen to be highly connected to people in the US government, but at the same time he is a person of some interest to Bangkok-posted agents of the FBI. Sonchai works with some of the FBI people. This relationship provides a Western point of view so that we don't feel too much condescension as the story is, after all, written in American English, for American English readers. It also provides a romantic angle in the person of a female FBI agent who seems to have a little extra-professional interest in Detective Jitpleecheep.
The book is artistically done, skillfully executed, well worth your time. If you love detective fiction, it's a must-read. If you have any interest in the Far East or Buddhism, even more so.
I look forward to reading more of John Burdett's work. A quick search for the author's name with Google brought me to this website, where I am pleased to find that there are two more novels featuring Detective Jitpleecheep. You may perhaps soon read of them in this journal.
An odd coincidence: this is the second novel I've read recently that mentions the Karen people. The other was Saving Fish From Drowning, by Amy Tan. I had never heard of them before (my ignorance is boundless) but now have been introduced to them twice, in unrelated, randomly chosen novels set in Southeast Asia.
I use gmail; I love it. One of its little features, or quirks, is a thing they call "web clips. " Web clips are little teasers about different things on the web, often news articles, new products, practically anything you might find on the Internet, which after all is simply practically everything.
Some time ago, I think early in September, one of these little clips sent me to The Agency Delta, by Blake Schwendiman, a book available online in pdf format for free. If you'd like to read The Agency Delta, visit Ms. Schwendiman's website.
I have a weakness for thrillers, mysteries, and to some extent, science-fiction. The Agency Delta is all three. It's a pretty well-done tour deforce set a few decades into the future, involving an incredibly rich leader of a giant high-tech corporation, his amazing yet unlikely discovery of a very peculiar phenomenon on the Internet, his evil competitors, and his very good friend, a man named Ramesh, who is unusually ethical.
It's a good read, very entertaining, and I am grateful to the author for making her work available for free. I'm not sure what the business model is going to be for writers in the future, but I think she may be onto something. New writers with novel-length works have a tough time getting published on paper these days. With the availability of inexpensive (even free) web hosting and software it is not a major feat for such an author to publish her work herself. How to publicize it and how to make a living are two very good questions, but Schwendiman has made a very good start.
Amy Tan's characters are always drawn with exquisite skill. Tan's people and their stories are believable and genuine -- even when they are completely fantastic.
Saving Fish From Drowning does not lack fantasy: Its narrator, Bibi Chen, is dead. The story of her friends' trip to Burma, their kidnapping by Karen villagers, the chaotic search for them, are told from her perspective -- that of a ghost, the unquiet spirit of the woman who was to have been their tour guide who accompanies her friends on their trip as she was meant to in life. This omniscient observer makes for a unique sort of first-person/third-person narrative.
I don't mean to make it sound as if this construct were unwieldy or in the least bit intrusive. On the contrary, it is artfully done, entertaining, and comes off as the most natural thing in the world. Of course, Tan has delved into the invention of characters from the afterlife before.
The story of Bibi's friends unlucky adventure in Burma allows us to see these privileged Americans against the backdrop of one of the most benighted countries on the planet where they might actually find themselves. Tan has done a good job of illustrating Burma's plight. She does not sugar-coat the misery of Burma's citizens nor the heavy-handed totalitarian military dictators that rule them. As contemporary commentary this novel is excellent, but this does not detract from its literary excellence or simple entertainment value.
372 pages. Bantam Books, October 1969. On the cover of this timeworn paperback on loan from a friend (thanks, Doc!) is a blurb from a NY Times Review. It says "The best book on the hippies."
I'm not sure that this book is "on the hippies," but it certainly is "on" the Merry Pranksters, a loosely knit group of LSD aficionados centered around Ken Kesey in the 1960s.
Tom Wolfe's portrayal of the life and times of the Pranksters is poetic and appropriate. He uses some far-out prose tricks and insterted poetry to create the psychedelic atmosphere necessary to tell the tale of this subcultural bubble.
Kesey and his crowd were most assuredly heavy users of many drugs. Wolfe's recounting of the heroic consumption of speed in many forms amongst Pranksters and near-Pranksters is awe-inspiring in itself. Add to this the frequent, intense LSD trips, the constant consumption of cannabis, and the other psychedelic hors d'ouevres at this years-long party and one has a testimony to the durability of the human body in the face of diverse chemical assaults.
Wolfe quotes Kesey on page 4 from a letter to Larry McMurtry. Wolfe's description of the letters:
"...wild and ironic, written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade...written in the third person..."
From the letters:
"...this young...happily-married-three-lovely-children father was a fear-crazed dope fiend in flight to avoid prosecution...
"...Once possessor of a phenomenal bank account...it was all his poor wife could do to scrape together eight dollars...
"What...brought [him] to so low a state in so short a time?...
"Dope!"
The book chronicles the many "Acid Tests," and long road trips in "Furthur," the Pranksters' bus. It's hard to really distill what happened on all these occasions -- it's hard to actually understand even while reading it -- this was some pioneering into alternative reality mixed with dropping out. Indeed, Kesey and the Pranksters disdained (and were disdained by) elements of the contemporary subculture that you might think they'd have been friendly with. But Kesey's country ways and directness were unacceptable to the elite among the Beats, and as he told the Vietnam Day Committee's rally: "you're playing their game."
Some time points: 1962: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 1964: Sometimes A Great Notion April 1965:Kesey arrested for possession of marijuana January 1966: The flight to Mexico to avoid prosecution October 1966: Kesey sneaks back into the US, but is caught by the FBI near San Francisco.
What Kesey said about whether he would be writing any more: "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph." (p. 8)
Some of the Merry Pranksters: Mountain Girl Hassler Paul Foster Neal Cassady Ken Babbs Black Maria Doris Delay George Walker Freewheeling Frank
On the Prankster lifestyle -- life "on the bus":
"...suddenly it hits me that for the Pranksters this is permanent. This is the way they live... sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with rotten looks... they have films and tapes of their duels with service-station managers...trying to keep their concrete bathrooms and empty Dispensa-towels safe from the Day-glo crazies..." (p. 16)
Day-glo was a fond toy of the Pranksters, its use is frequently mentioned.
Ah, yes. Another Kellerman. Another Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis story, and absolutely fine from start to finish.
In this novel we learn about the split between Alex and Robin, which I discovered in a later novel with scant explanation. This is the penalty I pay for being a scattered and disorganized Kellerman fan.
The mystery of the "murder book" in the title, a scrapbook of ghoulish crime-scene photos sent anonymously to Delaware, takes us into Milo's past, uncovers a great deal of dirt in the LAPD at high levels (this is fiction, remember), and includes enough psychology to keep Dr. Delaware involved.
Alex and Milo in this story solve an old cold case from Milo's first months as a detective. It involves a young girl who disappears, and involves rich and powerful people in the Los Angeles area. Because of this, inquiries into the crime have been squelched in the past. But murder, as the bard said, will out, and people touched by the evil in this crime and the people around it eventually cause it to come to the attention of our two sleuths.
This was a great and entertaining read that lessened the discomfort provided by Delta Airlines in bringing me across the continent last month.
I've been neglecting this project for a while -- perhaps Summer can take the blame. I finished reading Libra quite a while ago, keep meaning to write a little about it, but something always stops me.
Today, I determined to get started on this as I have other books in the pipe and before you know it I'll be seriously behind. In order to get into the mood and steal some ideas I looked the book up on Amazon.com and found some capsule reviews. The interesting observation about Libra that I gleaned from these reviews was that the book may be -- at least in part -- a study of how a novel can portray reality, or history, and at the same time be a work of fiction. One of the reviewers more or less posed the question: Why should we allow a novelist to tell us what really went on?
The essence of real mystery during my life is certainly embodied in the events of 22 November 1963. I was a bit shy of twelve years old then: not a little child but not yet quite an adolescent, either. It was very strange for me to experience the muffled drumbeats of mourning, the funeral parade for that fallen President that seemed to travel from coast to coast.
My parents were (and are) Republicans and did not like Kennedy, but they were as I recall shocked by the assassination. Little did we know that it was to be the first in an ugly string including the President's brother and Dr. Martin Luther King.
In 1963 I don't think I was at all aware of the Bay of Pigs operation. I do remember the Cuban missle crisis. Having been brought up with air-raid drills in school, and bomb shelters sporting that funny nuclear hazard symbol (it always looks like a reel of recording tape to me) my peers and I were well aware that our country's enemies had threatened to destroy us. But my understanding of all that went on in that time was very limited -- starved for information and begotten in the mind of a child.
A few years ago I read another novelistic interpretation of the Kennedy assassination in American Tabloid, by James Ellroy. Ellroy painted a picture of ruthless criinals, international spies, and politicians coming together in what was (in that story) the inevitable death of the President.
While De Lillo's characters are seldom admirable, they are not unsympathetic. His Oswald is disturbingly attractive; Jack Ruby a down-at-heel businessman in bad health, recruited to do the dirty work for the real Bad Guys.
Oswald's astrological sign was Libra, at least according to one of those reviewers I mentioned earlier. I'm no astrologer, but I do know that Libra has something to do with balance. How that works in this story is beyond me, but it's an interesting thought. Oswald as portrayed in Libra is anything but balanced. The book is a tragedy, presenting irresistible forces that move hapless characters to perform acts that they are seemingly powerless to avoid.
In Libra we follow Oswald through much of his short life. His mother is a study in dysfunction, an overbearing yet under-protective force in the young man's life. We follow him in to the Marine corps and then to the Soviet Union where he sought refuge from Capitalism and a country that rejected him as an outcast and a freak. He marries, becomes somewhat disillusioned with the People's Paradise, and returns home to the USA.
Meanwhile we are treated to an interwoven narrative about the other players in this tragedy.
"Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room ... the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fifteenth year of his labor ..."
Branch is researching and writing the definitive CIA analysis of the Kennedy assassination, a book that will never be read. His depressive, soundless labor makes a loom on which this story can be woven.
"American kitchens... where a man named Walter Everett, Jr., was sitting, thinking ... He was thinking about secrets."
Everett, known as Win, lives in sundrenched suburban silence with his very compliant wife Mary Frances, and his daughter. Everett is a somewhat psychologically damaged retired CIA agent. Together with other disenchanted warriors cheated of the assassination of Castro, he is lead toward the unspeakable -- but the hint grows stronger and stronger as the story progresses. These shady characters are awkward and frequently seem very stupid in their actions, but nonetheless move history forward to the demise of the President, and Oswald.
Libra is a quiet, thoughtful book about a violent obscenity. De Lillo is a student of America; he strives to capture our sanitized world, the calm surface of our culture under which pulses limitless mayhem unleashed on anyone or anything that goes against its stubborn will. His language is elegant, spare, polished to brilliance -- he wastes no words. Libra is not comforting, but it is fascinating, and not to be missed.
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