Farewell, Summer

My favorite author died today. I had sort of forgotten that he held that distinction in my life. I had convinced myself for a while that it was now Michael Chabon, that I had grown beyond the days when Ray Bradbury was #1, but his death brought it all back. There is no author I have read more of. There is no author who has had a deeper impact on my emotions and on my development as a person. And while I've enjoyed everything I've read of his, no book has ever changed me as much as Dandelion Wine. So this will not be an obituary for Ray; this will be a celebration of what I believe to be his greatest work.

Dandelion Wine is the story of a summer, told through the eyes of Douglas Spaulding. Douglas is a boy about to hit adolescence and excited for the season ahead. It starts out as a celebration of the joys of boyhood and life, but as the summer goes on certain things start to fall apart. The trolley that the boys love closes down. Their favorite machine at the arcade breaks. Douglas' best friend moves away. Each individual moment is small, but as they pile on they build up to a breakdown, as Douglas comes to the realization that everything in life ends. And as Douglas works through that he begins the transition from boy to man.

I always thought my love of Dandelion Wine was a little obscure. When you think of Bradbury you think of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, in that order. But it turns out there is a strong following of passionate lovers of this book. It makes sense; I read it and it touched me deeply. Inspired by its tale of youth and life I've traveled to Chicago to see a children's theater adaptation of the story, road-tripped to Waukegan, Illinois to hunt down locations from the book, searched far and wide for the eponymous wine, and I even wrote a mediocre piece for piano and double bass based on an excerpt of the book in a 20^th century music class. Turns out I'm not the only one. I found a tumblr today where people simply post their favorite quotes from the book. Reading through and seeing how many of these favorite quotes were my favorites as well, I was deeply moved by the way a story can affect so many different people. I'm not ashamed to admit that as I scrolled through I cried for about 20 minutes straight.

In my lifetime I've owned probably seven or eight copies of Dandelion Wine. At one point I envisioned myself forming a collection, one copy of every edition ever released. So I hunted through used book stores, always going immediately to the science fiction section (an incorrect classification that greatly frustrated both myself and Mr. Bradbury) with my fingers crossed that I'd have the chance to drop another 2.50 on some yellowed paperback. But they never stayed in my possession long. Whenever I found someone struggling in life, someone caught in the limbo between the joy and the despair, I gave them a copy and told them to read it. And when they tried to give it back, I told them to pass it on to someone else. Almost everyone who has made it through high school owns a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye; everyone should own a copy of Dandelion Wine. Because I honestly believe this book is - to steal a title from one of Bradbury's short story collections – a medicine for melancholy.

I have never found a better description of depression than Douglas' experience near the end of Dandelion Wine. He is running a very high fever, is deathly ill and – in the world before air conditioning – his family is forced to put his bed out on the front lawn to try and cool him and keep him alive. But it is not the fever that is killing him. It is his realization, moving out of childhood and into adolescence, of what life really is. Your friends move away. The toys you love break and the places you love close down. Your grandparents die. Your parents die. You die. Summer does not last, no matter how tight you hold on. Life is hard, and life is sad, and there is nothing you can do about it.

But every part of life is essential. You embrace the good with the bad. The sadness, the pain, it is just like the bitterness of the dandelion wine. But you drink it anyway, because it reminds you of summer, it reminds you of the joy and the power of life:

I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

Douglas is saved by the junkman, Mr. Jonas. who carries around a cart of oddities to trade and sell. He gives Douglas vials of air from exotic locations all over the world, to restore his life. But it is not the magical air that saves Douglas, it is Mr. Jonas' magical words. The wisdom that Douglas is not alone in feeling the crushing weight of the world. He tells him, in my absolute favorite quote from the book:

‎Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

It is this knowledge that heals our protagonist. And it is this knowledge that has healed me, again and again and again. Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. Thank you for telling an adolescent, and for now reminding a man that, yes, it is okay to feel this way. It is okay to be this way. We can't have summer without fall. We can't have life without sadness. Everyone dies. But it still sucks that you had to. I'll be thinking of you this summer as I run and swim and jump and love and laugh and try my damnedest to stay a kid until I'm 91.

Book Review: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Like many who have spent an extended time there I am in love with Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  I would like to consider it my hometown, not that I grew up there; I only spent the best six years of my life there.  It has had its modest place in the national spotlight recently with Bon Iver's success at the Grammys.  But Bon Iver is just one aspect of a thriving artistic community.  There are many other musicians, painters, artists of all kinds and in the woods not too far away, an author: Neil Gaiman.

Now Gaiman is not an actual Eau Claire resident, nor is he a native son.  He is a Brit who has taken up a second residence about half an hour from the city in a secret location, presumably to find peace and quiet.  I give you all this background not to try and claim his works as the product of my city but to explain how I came across this book.  Because the local cultural magazine, Volume One, does consider him part of the local culture and strives to keep us all informed of his activities.  Makes sense.  When a renowned author chooses to live in your part of the world that's exciting, even if his goal is to escape civilization.  So he comes up every few issues.

My best friend from college knows I love and miss Eau Claire, and he knows I love the essays the online editor writes in each issue so, being a great friend, he clips them out and sends them to me.  Well, a recent essay used Gaiman's Neverwhere to explain a point about the local cultural scene and my friend had a copy so he sent it along in the mail.  Like I said, great guy, and thanks to him I had a new book to read.

Neverwhere is about a secret underworld made of lost and forgotten bits of London from across the ages.  Our protagonist, Richard Mayhew, is your typical mild-mannered nobody who accidentally finds himself in London Below.  While trying to find his way home and get his life back to normal he becomes wrapped up in a major plot and ends up having to summon his courage and believe in himself to save the world.  If it sounds like a cliched action fantasy story that's because it is, but that doesn't make it a bad book outright.

I was skeptical going into this book for many reasons, the first of which was the predictability of fantasy stories.  I had never read anything by Gaiman before but I saw the movie Stardust - based on one of his books - and thought it was just completely terrible.  My friend who lent me the book has very similar tastes to me and recommends a lot of great stuff, but he also enjoys a lot of things that are, shall we say, less than great so the recommendation is not a guarantee.  And really I'm just not a fantasy guy.  There are a few devices in fantasy writing that just rub me the wrong way:
1) When authors describe someone performing an action, usually at the beginning of a story, without letting you know who the person is.  "The man walked down a dark alleyway, blood dripping from his hand..."  The idea of it is to draw in your interest but I think it's a very weak way of creating suspense.
2) When characters in a fantasy world explain things matter-of-factly as if they are obvious and then offer no explanation.  The newcomer asks how something works and the native of the fantasy world gives a one sentence explanation, always ending with "of course."  This is fine, because that which is fantastic to us is commonplace to them.  But I never understood why after this the explainer neither notices or cares that the other person is still visibly confused.

In Neverwhere, Gaiman is guilty of every fantasy cliche that bugs me.  And yet I found myself enjoying myself.  My skepticism was wrong; I liked the book.  There's a joy and a passion in the writing that is contagious.  Gaiman clearly loves his characters, and loves his city and loves playing with language.  Altogether it just makes for a fun read.

One of the reviews on the back of the book refers to it as a modern Alice in Wonderland.  This is a comparison that's made a lot but it's fitting here.  It's not like Alice in Wonderland in the way that so many have lazily taken old stories and made them "creepy."  You won't find specific characters or events that are analogues to, say, the white rabbit or caterpillar, though at one point Gaiman describing a character as "smiling like a cheshire cat."  What you will find is a completely original story written in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland.  There is a naive and innocent protagonist with a dull life who stumbles into adventure and finds he was a lot happier being bored.  There is a slew of creative characters and locations, and I really do mean creative.  I was delighted each time to see what we would be presented with next, and the new arrivals rarely disappointed.  But the feature of the book that most emulated Lewis Carroll was the experimentation and manipulation of the English language.  The only word I can find to accurately describe Gaiman's prose is exuberant.  Even though his story copies other fantasy stories, his language takes common fantasy phrases (i.e. "once upon a time") and turns them on their heads.  He seems to be making jokes with himself and sassing the audience half the time and it's really endearing.  You can tell he's having fun and as a result you start to have fun.  It's the strongest quality of the book.

I'm glad I gave Neil Gaiman a chance even though I hate his movies.  Because any adaptation of his work is doomed to fail; it can never capture what makes his work great.  The strength of his literature is not in what he writes but in the way he writes it.

Book Review: Crumbtown by Joe Connelly

This ended up being a good palate cleanser after two really heavy books.  Something short and light-hearted and comical.  Another find on the library stacks, this one jumped at me but had its warning signs, too.  On the book jacket there were a ton of positive reviews for the author's first book, and none for this one.  Highly suspicious.  So let's jump right in and see what I thought about it.

The concept of the book at least in terms of plot is brilliant.  A serial criminal spends multiple stints in prison, the last of which is for a Robin Hood-style bank robbery where he throws cash to people on the street.  But he lives in a town so desolate and run-down that television studios have made it a habit of filming their crime shows there ("It looks more like New York than New York does, they say").  This leads to the prison creating a program where prisoners can receive early parole if they take on jobs on movie sets as crime consultants.  Our main character, Don, becomes a consultant for a show romanticizing his own crime spree.

I misjudged the direction of the book at first.  I thought it was going to be a story of redemption slowly played out through the making of the show.  As it turned out, it was actually a comedy of errors.  Within an hour Don goes back to his thieving ways and unleashes a string of chaotic events - including an attempt at robbing the scene of the reenactment of his bank robbery, which for some inexplicable reason is using real money. 

In a lot of ways this was a good thing.  The story plays out like a modern day Ulysses (which I haven't read and therefore will make no deeper comparisons).  It's fascinating to see how one day in one town can change so many lives irreparably.  At least it would be fascinating if the whole situation weren't so contrived and impossible.

The style of the book is very punk rock.  Things move quickly.  People make rash decisions.  The chapters fly by in a blur of noise and music.  More noise than music.  You'll find it almost a chore to keep track of which characters are which, not just because there are so many of them in such a rapid succession.  The real reason is because there is so little discerning them.  Everyone's a drunk or a junkie with a regrettable past, and it tends to be that the only thing that separates characters are their afflictions.  It's not until the final act (the story is divided into acts, like Shakespeare I guess?) that you start to get a feel for any of the individual character's souls.  There are some beautiful moments then, but for the most point the train has already come off the tracks and you're left wondering why Connelly didn't build them up when he still had the reader on his side.

This even extends to the main character, who should at least be a little more defined.  His first day out of prison, his first hour out of prison, he's immediately into trouble.  He's required by law to keep in touch with his parole officer by phone and always answer when she calls.  But when he can't figure out how to answer his cell phone (it's 2003 and he's been in prison for 15 years) he panics, runs out of his hotel room and then goes on a crime spree.  Now I understand the idea that criminal behavior can be a disease that one never recovers from; I'm sympathetic to that.  But after 260 pages I still have absolutely no idea what caused Don to make every possible mistake a person can make.

If I had to go back through and count how many times someone was bit by a car in this book, I don't think I could.  Same thing with people getting shot.  And people falling in love.  There is a woman in the book, Rita.  She is the muse of the man writing the TV show that sets everything into motion.  She is also the muse of every criminal in the story.  And just about everyone who meets here.  Yet we know absolutely nothing about her as a person except that she's beautiful, has a Russian accent and is constantly bored/annoyed.  Nothing to inspire the reader to love her.  I got the feeling that Connelly based her on someone he knows in life, someone he felt deeply in love with.  And in the way that a man falls for a woman suddenly and inexplicably, he thought by just writing about her it would make perfect sense to the reader the way it makes perfect sense to him.  That or he just writes very one-dimensional female characters.

Reading this far you would think I found nothing positive about this book, but I did.  There was a lot of good happening too.  There is one fascinating character who is such an obsessive method actor that when asked to play the role of a criminal he becomes a criminal.  There's a beautiful moment where a man is reading his list of demands to police and it quickly morphs from a humorous list of things the police could never provide (I want Ted Williams to play baseball again) to a heartbreaking list of things the police could never provide (I want my mother to understand me).  There is a man who even as he lies dying from being shot by his wife still tries everything in his power to make her happy.

These moments are powerful but are few and far between.  The rest of the book plays out too quickly with too little substance.  In a lot of ways it's paced like a TV show.  Being a book about a TV show, that could possibly be seen as an interesting commentary.  I just felt like my time would have been better spent actually watching TV.

Book Review: The Shining by Stephen King

I am not a reader of horror.  In fact, I've never read a horror story before this (except Goosebumps and works of a similar vein as a kid).  It's sort of strange that I ended up reading this book.  But I was at the library a few weeks back, completely directionless as to what I should read next.  So I started walking through the stacks and in the K section The Shining caught my eye.

I had never read anything by King before, besides a nonfiction essay in an English class once.  But that essay was fantastic.  After years of failed lectures from teahers it was the only thing that ever convinced me that passive voice is something to be avoided.  But I had never felt a need to pick up any of his novels.  I've always had a negative stereotype of both the horror and mystery genres.  I guess I associate them with dime-a-dozen pulp novels.  I know it's a totally unfair characterization so I figured I'd take a chance to challenge it by picking up something by the king of horror.  I was also curious about if a horror novel could actually scare me.  I'm a very visual person so I imagined it would be hard to get me frightened over something I can't see.  But the movie of The Shining is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen, so I figured it stood a chance.

I was amazed right away, though I know I shouldn't have been, by the quality of the writing.  Horror is by no means a lesser genre.  In terms of literature there is a lot of good being done here.  The descriptions and characterizations are very clear and astute.  For the most part, at least in the beginning, it feels like very real people with real concerns.  The first half of the story, the better half of the story,  is actually a lot more about a struggling family and a father's battle with alcoholism than any paranormal activity.  It's about a man who has made mistakes and is trying once more to piece his family together.  He gets a job as the winter caretaker of a hotel up in the mountains because it's the only job he can get after the mistakes he's made but also because it will allow him and his wife and kid more time together .

Things start to go wrong as the evil forces at the hotel begin to affect him negatively, and as the snow comes and the family is fully isolated it all goes from bad to worse.  The horror starts.  I was actually dissapointed with how this transformation comes about.  King does a good job of taking his time building into the paranormal stuff, but in the beginning there is a really good tension where we don't yet know how much of this is real.  Are there really ghosts at the hotel or are isolation and personal demons causing hallucinations?  I was excited about this question and then dissapointed to see how early King answered it for us.  I would have preferred more mystery and more time in limbo.

I had a tendency while reading to compare the book to the movie.  I know this a mistake, but I'm a novice reviewer and I'm doing this as a hobby so who cares?  It's inevitable.  It actually made the read more fun.  There were things I preferred about King's version, such as the aforementioned depth of character.  But Kubrick's version is signifcantly more frightening, and not just because you can actually see what's happening.  I didn't feel like this book was much of a horror story at all; it's more of a psychological game.  All of the frightening moments are based on the feeling you get leaving a basement that you don't feel comfortable in.  You know something is behind you but you're not going to look back, you're just going to walk a little faster.  Walk, don't run, because if you let it know you're aware of it it will pounce.  You rush out of there and then turn to find it was never there but you KNOW it had to be.  This happens multiple times in the story, and even though it's relatable it seems like a weak way to try and scare the reader.

I am fascinated by isolation.  I was very drawn to the idea of the hotel as a place far away from the world.  This isolation is what draws Jack and his family in - a reprieve from his mistakes and from anxiety and alcohol and all the pressures of everyday life.  But it eventually becomes what does them in.  Isolation is no longer an advantage when you realize the hotel is not a place, it is a character, and its intentions are not pure.

Overall I enjoyed the book, I would recommend it, but there is a major weakness in the fact that King does not (or at least did not at the time) know how to write children.  He sets up Danny as being incredily intelligent for his age, and the parents take pride in never talking down to him, but his thought process is way above that of a child his age.  And then King tries to make him more childlike by cutely misspelling or misunderstanding words (i.e. Presidential Sweet) and it just comes off as a failed attempt.  I'll give you an excerpt as an example.  The first three paragraphs are actually third-person narration, but they're describing Danny's wandering thoughts, and then the quote at the end is him interjecting:

     But it wasn't really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on.  Here in the Overlook all times were one.  There was an endless night in August of 1945, with laughter and drinks and a chosen shining few going up and coming down in the elevator, drinking champagne and popping party favors in each other's faces.  It was a not-yet-light morning in June some twenty years later and the organization hitters endlessly pumped shotgun shells into the torn and bleeding bodies of three men who went through their agony endlessly.  In a room on the second floor a woman lolled in her tub and waited for visitors.
     In the Overlook all things had a sort of life.  It was as if the whole place had been wound up with a silver key.  The clock was running.  The clock was running.
    He was that key, Danny thought sadly.  Tony had warned him and he just let things go on.
    "I'm just five!"

Indeed he is just five.  So how is he coming up with this very complex, very adult, very metaphorical thought process?  I think this example shows a lot of the inconsistency in this early writing of King.  There are unbalances like this throughout a book.  A lot of quality ideas executed poorly.  It's not surprising to me that Stanley Kubrick took the shell of this story and led it in a more complete direction, even rejecting a script written by King.  I'm sure King felt writing this book the way I feel with these attempts at reviews; I know exactly what I want to say but not quite how to organize and present it.  This book serves as an interesting stepping stone on the path to him eventually becoming a great writer.  Or at least someone people say is a great writer.  I wouldn't know.  I've only ever read one horror story.

Book Review: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Hartsad

I never know how to choose books to read.  I don't read literary publications or really know where to get recommendations from.  I'm also an obsessive spendthrift, so I only get books from the library or borrowed from friends.  That's where I found this book, in the New Fiction section at the front of the library.  I was drawn in by the beautiful cover (classic mistake) and the fascinating title.

Buzz Aldrin, what happened to you in all the confusion?  What a perfect title.  It gives you just enough to pique your interest while revealing nothing about the story.  Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon.  Famous runner-up.  What happened to you in all the confusion?  What happens to someone who does something amazing, world-changing, and is simply seen as the second person to do it?

So I grabbed the book and was even more excited as I read the jacket.  Turns out it was written by a highly acclaimed Norwegian author who had finally been translated into English.  Yep, this was the book to read.

So the book is not really about space travel at all.  It's about a man about to turn 30, Mattias who lives a simple life in a coastal city in Norway.  He enjoys working hard and being a cog in the machine (as he puts it).  All he wants to do is live a good life and go unnoticed, which is why he idolizes Buzz Aldrin, the little celebrated second man who was actually a better pilot and scientist than Neil Armstrong.  Mattias has two best friends, a girlfriend and a job in a garden and could never want anything more.  But everything falls apart and he finds himself in a mental health facility in the Faroe Islands.

I won't give you any more of the plot because I hate spoilers but also because it's not important.  The quality of this book comes in its structure and flow.  It's very postmodern in the way events are presented.  Pages and pages are devoted to exact details of everyday life, routines, late-night conversations and long drives.  Then life-changing events occur - getting fired, deaths of characters - that receive no more than a paragraph.  I don't think this is done just to be subversive.  This is a book about mental health, and the slow battle for recovery.  It puts us in the head of Mattias and not just because it's written in the first person.  But Mattias is depressed and it's written like the narrator is depressed.  Days drift on and on, the whole book seems to be described through a haze.  Harstad employs a few tricks to do this.  The whole book is divided into short sections, each no longer than two pages.  Some describe the smallest details and give them the heaviest weight.  Other times Mattias will be talking about something mundane and then slip in an observation profound sadness and wisdom.  It's always raining or sunless.  All of this works together to make the book move in a calming, directionless phase with sudden manic bursts of plot.

This style is not unique to Harstad, it's quite prevalent in literature these days, but this is one of the few books I've read where I felt it served the plot and strengthened the characters instead of just looking and sounding cool.  It also made it personally good to read because I could pick it up for a few minutes at a time, read a section, and then go on to something else.  Yes this makes me a lazy reader.  I'm sorry.

There are a lot of pop culture references in this book.  Deep ones and obscure ones.  I noticed this when I read a passage, recognized it and had to spend about ten minutes reflecting on where I knew from.  It was the note that Kurtz sends home 2/3rds of the way through Apocalypse Now, something I would have never caught if it hadn't watched the movie a week before.  This took me aback.  I understand the purpose of all the references, to plant Mattias firmly in my fragmented, connected generation, but references this specific it just made me wonder what else was missing.

Mattias is still lovable.  His role as a happy also-ran, a devotee of Buzz Aldrin, is something I think we all can relate to.  I'm a baseball fan, a Brewers fan, and my favorite player is Craig Counsell, someone who you would never confuse for a superstar.  But I can appreciate the virtue of just being a reliable good person who happily does what is asked of him and doesn't ask for anything more.  When Mattias has this idea of himself and of life shaken so fundamentally, you feel his pain.  You want him to get better.

Ultimately this is a story about healing.  About the peaceful monotony of slowly getting better, day to day.  Most of us don't have an experience as dramatic as losing everything you love and waking up bloodied in the rain in the middle of a street on the Faroe Islands.  But we all know how it feels to have your life shaken and the daunting journey of just living through it, just making it to the next day.  Harstad describes this more realistically than any other book I've experienced.