The Leaning Tower

Egads!  The semester starts next week and I am looking at a tower of books sitting next to my computer waiting to be reviewed.  So, think of this as a Tower Reduction Measure.

1. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is one of those Fad Books which reminds one that every now and then along comes a Fad Book which is actually worth reading.  Sadly, a good Fad Book will inevitably spawn a set of copycats and propel Flynn into iconic status which means a steady stream of Flynn novels not worth reading rising to the top of the bestseller charts.   Gone Girl is a clever book (which is undoubtedly why that font of Great Book Recommendations, Mallory, recommended it).  But, cleverness in a story is not the sort of thing which is easily reproduced.  Maybe Flynn will surprise me; maybe this isn’t a one-hit wonder situation.  But I am deeply afraid this is one of those Dan Brown situations in which a Fad Book generates a cottage industry.  (It is worth noting, however, that The Da Vinci Code was a terrible book, while Gone Girl is good, so perhaps the comparison is not fair.)    But, the sequel problem aside: Gone Girl is worth reading if you like novels with mysteries in them or if you just appreciate a cleverly constructed story.  Also, by the way, I think this may be a noir novel, but to be certain, I’d have to get a definition of Noir, and well,  you know how that goes.  It would fit right into the Library of America Crime Novels series, though,

They are already in the process of making a Gone Girl movie, by the way, a fact which I know solely because the actor playing the lead in the Gone Girl movie was just announced to be the next Batman.  Nick (from Gone Girl) and Batman (from, well, Batman) have absolutely nothing in common, so either the actor in question is one superlative actor or at least one of these roles will be a disaster.   Hollywood is a curious place.

2. Speaking of Hollywood, P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle is a collection of stories, half of which are about Mr. Mulliner's relatives in Hollywood.  (The other half are about, surprisingly enough, the folks from Blandings Castle.)  [Then there is a Bobbie Wickham story thrown in which makes the fact that I have divided the book into halves a bit problematic.]  As with all Wodehouse, the stories are fantastic and funny.  Much insight into Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time (terribly unsuccessful as a script-writer, by the way.  Interesting to note that the ability to write witty dialogue in a book and to do the same in a screenplay are very different skills.)  In one passage, Wodehouse gives a rather nice explanation for why so much of the product from Hollywood is horrid.  You can blame it on the Nodders.  As Mr Mulliner explains:

Putting it as briefly as possible, a Nodder is something like a Yes-man, only lower in the social scale. A Yes-Man’s duty is to attend conferences and say “Yes.” A Nodder’s, as the name implies, is to nod. The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes. He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man—or Vice-Yesser, as he sometimes is called—and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed, do the Nodders begin to function. They nod.

That explains much.  Very much.  There are clearly too many nodders in Hollywood.

3. There are too many nodders in the publishing world too.  Take Douglas Adams.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a masterpiece.  No doubt about it.  The sequels are also good—some brilliant moments throughout.  But, Adams also wrote a pair of books about Dirk Gently, and these needed someone, somewhere to say, “You know Douglas, you are funny, to be sure, and the plotlessness of the Hitchhiker series is part of the point, but if you want to set out to write an amusing mystery story with a Holistic Detective, you really need, you know, a plot that, you know, coheres, or else the book will in the end be a totally pointless exercise with a few jokes thrown in.”  Nobody said that to Douglas Adams.  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency isn’t too bad.  There is some nice play on the two Big Coleridge poems which is a bit amusing.  (I first read these books decades ago, before I knew a thing about Coleridge—the book is definitely better if you know about Coleridge.)  And being Douglas Adams, there are sentences throughout which are very funny.  But, as a mystery, it’s pretty bad.  Too many moving parts, each one of which is designed because the part provides a joke, but all those parts jumbled up and thrown into a big pot do not make a palatable dish.

4. The sequel to the first Dirk Gently book is a horrific mess.  To be honest, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul has many clever verbal pyrotechnics here and there and some genuinely funny scenes.  But the plot is a total train wreck.  The book has one feature, the presence of Thor and Odin in the story, which induced a rather surprising realization.

In my life, I have read a fair number of books about the Norse Gods.  First, there are the Marvel comic books.  Thor is a rather interesting character in the Marvel Universe, and the rest of the pantheon is fun.  Then there is this Douglas Adams book.  Wagner has an entire opera series all about the Norse Gods.  Thor, Odin and Loki also show up in The Sandman series.  And then Gaiman brings back the Norse gods in American Gods, which come to think of it has an eerie and curious similarity to the basic idea behind The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.   That’s a lot of reading about Norse gods.  Yet, I cannot think of a single time I have ever read a book about the actual Norse gods—all these pop culture stories, and a Wagnerian opera, but never anything original.  Then when I stopped to think about it, other than the source book for Wagner’s opera, I have no idea what source books there are.  Clearly, my education about Norse deities is seriously lacking.  I should probably fix that. 

5.  Hopefully fixing that failing in my literary education will be less painful than fixing my failure of appreciation of short stories.  Ambrose Bierce wrote stories about the Civil War.  They all seem designed to end with an ironic twist, which is supposed to leave the reader gasping with shock, but once you see the trick and expect the ironic ending, the stories devolve into the utterly predictable.

Ah, the stack of books is much shorter now.  Life is good.