Triburbia, by Karl Taro Greenfeld

This novel was written before The Subprimes. 

This is the rare book that I didn't finish. I got maybe 50 pages in, and just lost interest. Maybe it develops into something and I may have missed that, but so far I'm reading the problems of people wealthier than I have ever been even near to. Perhaps this is simple envy, but they just don't seem like actual problems to me.

The Subprimes, by Karl Taro Greenfeld

New York Times review.



It's dystopian near-future fiction. America has become almost completely de-regulated, practically everything privatized. There's an enormous population of unemployed homeless, the "Subprimes" of the title, who wander the country, working as temporary labor--especially at fracking sites--and squatting in foreclosed, uninhabited housing developments. The environment has deteriorated quite a bit from the way it is now: summer has become a long, hellish season with temperatures routinely climbing into the 130s. A major character is a kind of Bernie Madoff who may be rehabilitated by a televangelist who characterizes him as a victim of progressives who wish to stymie the "job-creators." One of the skillful things that Greenfeld has done is to make this world very, very close to the one we are in. Many current cultural references are made: it's not that far in the future.


Unfortunately, I didn't much like the ending. It seemed contrived, a sort of deus ex machina thing that says, "I didn't know what to do with this plot so I did this." To me, anyway. The book was still worth reading for its dire predictions and the caution that it should raise.

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler

Haven't read anything by Anne Tyler in years. I'm looking forward to this.

And it was not a disappointment. The story of the Whitshank family, with special focus on Abby Whitshank and her son Daniel--though we feel very well acquainted with all other family members by the book's end, both the current and past members--is, in a way, nothing special, and at the same time it is devastatingly extraordinary, particular, and fascinating.

New York Times review.

The Hermit's Story, by Rick Bass

A collection of short stories.

These are gems, really. Some are set in Montana, of course. Others, such as "Eating," are set elsewhere.

An essay about "The Hermit's Story," (just that one short story, which provides the title for this collection).

A review of the collection in the Chicago Tribune.

The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt

New York Times review

This is a very good novel about the life and times of a New York City police detective. Sgt. Billy Graves runs the Night Watch, and the Night Watch runs him.

The Big Seven, by Jim Harrison

...People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to toalk to a shrink.... it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

...One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying "Keats 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies." Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn't into serial marriages...

...what could you do about a fourteen-year-old boy who would commit cold-blooded murder? The paper failed to mention whether he was a Boy Scout or a junior member of the NRA. There were no clues other than the implicit one that he was a member of a culture dying of dry rot...

Back in the fifth grade each student had received a packet of Audubon cards resembling baseball cards but with photos of birds rather than players, and they were let out into the woods to match them to what they saw. An oriole was a prize sighting. Some boys cheated and sat around in the woods smoking cigarettes. He told his dad about this and his dad had said, "Once a cheat, always a cheat." He had pondered what this meant and came up with not much because he had noticed that cheaters seemed to do well at everything and being one might well prepare you for a career in business.

Another rough, drunken Sundersen novel by Jim Harrison. This one is a sequel to the one I just read, Great Leader. In it, Sundersen acquires a hunting cabin with a nearby family of backwoods people who are vodka-swilling armed maniacs, to be generous. A merry series of events ensue.

Damon Runyon, by Jimmy Breslin

Damon Runyon was a journalist, poet, author, and playwright. He wrote of the Roaring Twenties, and brought Broadway and New York City and its characters of that era to life. Jimmy Breslin, a colorful and popular journalist and writer of the later twentieth century writes the life of his predecessor.

Runyon grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, and was apparently drinking like an alcoholic and smoking like a chimney before he was a teenager. His drinking became so bad that eventually he quit, and in later life wrote of his appreciation for AA, although his own sobriety predated the birth of that program by about 20 years.

In writing about Runyon's career, Breslin talks of graft and corruption in a very casual manner. His attitude seems to be that this stuff is everywhere, and pretty much always has been, and that we shouldn't be surprised by it. His own analysis of history would be one of theft and greed.

An interesting bit from the middle of the book (pp185-186) describes "[New York City's] drug panic of 1919." This was also the time when influenza was killing thousands all over the world, including in that city. Louis Harris, "a doctor who was chief of the city's Bureau of Preventable Diseases...found that groups of doctors and nurses were shoving aone another to enter houses where the sick inside had cash..." Harris said " 'The socialization of the medical and nursing professions to place them under government control should no longer be deferred."  Harris's opinion was not too welcome. " 'When he went to medical school, he failed stethoscope,' Esdail (Doc) Cohen of the New York World said."

"...on April 8, 1919, the first federal drug agents in the nation raided six physicians and four druggists who were prescribing opium, cocaine and heroin to people purportedly in need of hop as medicine. That weekend...two thousand addicts walked into Bellevue Hospital...and begged for help. By Monday, the hospital opened a drug treatment center, alarming doctors, who saw it as another attempt to establish socialized medicine..."

From page 187:

"...the state planned to open a long-term treatment center at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village... 'These people should get treatment all right,' a Bellevue doctor announced. 'They should get treated to jail.' "
"Dr. Royal Copeland, the New York City health commissioner, reported, 'Over 95 percent of all drug addicts have shown, by their acts, a non-appreciation of the service, and have repeatedly attempted to be discharged before the end of their treatment. It is, therefore, recommended that the Department of Health discontinue any sort of drug treatment program.' "

Runyon observed this through the point of view of Arnold Rothstein, a gangster. "[Rothstein] decided to provide an orderly distribution of drugs by a professional criminal, himself. He told Frank Costello, 'There can't be much wrong with them. Nobody cares.' "

From page 188:

"Rothstein was the nation's first major underworld distributor of drugs. The first federal drug agent in New York, Max Roder, always said the biggest name he had on his list as a dealer was Arnold Rothstein. 'Every time you mentioned his name in the office, five people on his payroll went to the phone to call him up.' "

Runyon's life was colorful, to say the least. He saw the first half of the twentieth century in all its iniquity and glory, and wrote about sports, gangsters, and his beloved Broadway.