A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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| Carter Beats the Devil | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay | The Kindly Ones |
We interrupt this stodgy old book log to bring you the following bit of breaking news: I passed the February 2003 California Bar Exam. Thank you, that is all. As you were. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold (2001), 480 pp (hb).
Carter Beats the Devil is a sort of fictional biography of Charles Carter, a stage musician performing during the waning days of stage magic's Golden Age, the teens and twenties of the last century. This is Gold's debut novel, and as such, it's an nice achievement. There's some interesting story material on display here. The narrative ultimately rambles somewhat as it winds its way to its conclusion, but it's mostly a pleasant and entertaining ride, if not a "gee golly" spectacular one.
The book starts up with a peek at some formative events in the life of young Charles, oldest son of a wealthy San Francisco couple. From there, it skips to Charles's early career, performing as an undercard act with a travelling vaudeville show. He gets his bump to headliner status upon the downfall of the malicious Mysterioso, the magician previously occupying the spot. As a bonus, there's a cameo appearance by Harry Houdini, who plays a part in said downfall and Charles's advancement. The bulk of the tale then takes place following the death of President Harding, which event is connected to Carter by virtue of the fact that Harding appeared as a "volunteer" in the third act of Carter's show (a dramatic contest with the Devil that gives the book its name) and then expired in his hotel room a couple hours later.
It's a fun look at an interesting period and an interesting world. The characters are pleasant if not memorable (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention another cameo, by Philo T. Farnsworth, seeking to peddle his new invention of television, as he was my great-great uncle--my paternal grandmother's maiden name was Farnsworth). Not a bad way to spend a few hours.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon (2000), 632 pp (tpb).
This won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a couple years back, a prize that was well deserved, because this is a really good book. As I observed in my comments about Summerland, Chabon is a very fine writer. Some writers--the prose stylists, we'll call them--are a pleasure to read mostly because they do such neat things with words. What they're actually writing about is secondary, and indeed, often seems obscure or not that interesting. Other writers--we'll call them the "ripping good yarn spinners"--are fun because they write such a breathlessly exciting tale, or make such meaty observations about a given topic, that their pedestrian, plain vanilla prose is kind of beside the point. Then there's the really, really good writers, who seem to combine both abilities in a single package (and no doubt a few more qualities as well; I acknowledge that these are probably somewhat artificial distinctions that I'm making, and I don't mean for them to be either authoritative or exhaustive). In Kavalier and Clay, Chabon has spun a vital, compelling tale, and wrapped it up in a delicious structure of sentences and paragraphs that run and flow and leave you wanting more. Here's a wee sample, describing the beginning of Superman, in the early days of comic books' ascendancy:
Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superman was born in the pages of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this miraculous parturition, the form finally began to emerge from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves. Comic books were Kid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.
Kavalier and Clay is, of course, nominally about comic books. Well, strike the nominally, because the comic books really are more than just a conveniently chosen plot device. This is a book about two men who come together to create comic book series at a time when comics were first getting hold of the imaginations of American youth, but in a broader context, it's about the upheavals of World War II, and coming to America from a wounded land to create a new life, and about two guys with talent and can-do spirit creating the American Dream for themselves. And it's about the sacrifices and hurts that attend all of those things. Here's the delightful description of the aftermath of said two young men's first business pitch:
"Sammy." Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy's wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. "This is good."
"Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can do it."
Joe let go of Sammy's hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy's bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol's office, the sly and harried bulk of Anapol himself, the talk of sales figures and competition and cashing in big, all this had conformed so closely to Joe's movie-derived notions of life in America that if an airplane were now to land on Twenty-fifth Street and disgorge a dozen bathing-suit-clad Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin's display of bold entrepeneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8degree C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.
Josef Kavalier is the eldest son of a well-to-do family in Prague, and as the Nazi threat continues to expand and strengthen, his family scrapes up all the money it can muster in order to buy him a way to America, where his father's sister lives in New York. After a mishap or two, he makes it there, where he meets up with his cousin Sammuel Klayman (Clay). Sammy can draw a bit, but his real strength is his ideas. Fortunately, Joe has had some formal training, and is quite a good artist. Sammy wants to make it big; Joe wants enough money to buy his family's way to America. They strike out to see if they can make it happen.
This is fine, substantial stuff. Really not to be missed.
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The Kindly Ones (Sandman IX), Neil Gaiman (1996), 320 pp (gn).
The penultimate compilation in the Sandman series, and also, as it happens, the longest. I'm never quite sure how to approach spoilers when I write up an entry for inclusion here, and it's a particular concern in this case since, well, stuff happens in The Kindly Ones. So I'm just going to note, for those who care about such things, that spoilers are likely in the following discussion, and consider it fair warning.
Although one more volume follows this one in the series, The Kindly Ones is in a sense The End. It includes appearances--some just cameos, some much more substantial--from quite a lot of the characters that have wandered through the pages of the earlier volumes. It also relies heavily for its narrative momentum on events that occurred earlier in the series. The details are convoluted, so I won't reconstruct the whole knotty plot, but somewhat in brief: Morpheus earlier allowed Loki to escape his binding; Loki (with Puck) runs a scam that involves kidnapping the child Daniel (a character the roots of whose history also extend back into the earlier volumes); Daniel's mother becomes convinced that Morpheus is behind the kidnapping, and invokes the Erinyes, the Furies of Greek Myth (and the Kindly Ones of the title), who it turns out may only pursue those who have shed the blood of kin; as it happens, Morpheus has just, as an act of mercy, slain the immortal head of his son Orpheus, so the Furies begin to destroy the dreamworld; Dream takes the hand of his sister, and dies. But wait! The king is dead, long live the king...a new king of dreams is born, since the Endless are archetypes, and dreams can never die (What?! I said there would be spoilers...).
This is a complicated, plot-heavy volume. I quite dislike the artistic style in which the majority of it is composed, but it's an interesting, weighty bit of storytelling. Much worth reading, but only after reading the volumes that have preceded it.
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