A Library Full of Book Reports

I haven't done this in a while, so I have quite a few to cover:

The Cat Who Came in From the Cold
By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
It’s a brief book, so I’ll keep my review equally concise.

This short tale of the domestication of India’s first housecat culls a lot from Hindu, Buddhist and Sanskrit folklore. It even borrows the tone. The problem is that the legends and myths may be well-known to the people of India, but they are incredibly obscure to the casual American reader. I believe I know a bit more about world religions than the average doofus (I consider myself an educated doofus), and even I got a little lost.

This, however, is the perfect little gift for your Hindu, book-loving friend who also loves housecats. Do you know someone it’s perfect for? Most people, I suspect, don’t.

Naked
By David Sedaris
On the way to West Virginia, Cathy and I listened to the audio version of this book I had already read. Later, David, Michael and I listened to it on the way back from Tennessee.

Here, we have another collection of tasty, goofy stories of Sedaris’ twisted past narrated by the author himself (with some assistance by his Strangers with Candy sister Amy).

I have to admit that Sedaris' fey little elvish voice does take a small bit of getting used to (but I’m friends with David Almeida, so I should be used to this, right?) But Sedaris has excellent comic timing. And his sister’s additions are at first a little jarring, but as soon as we accept the conceit - that and the fact that Amy’s acting talents help mask her brother’s limited vocal range - we are off and rolling.

Sedaris kicks it off with a self-embarrassing exorcism of his past as an obsessive-compulsive little boy with “a multitude of ticks.” It’s a perfect beginning, throwing us right in to the deep end of the pool of his weirdness. He licks light switches, religiously touches lawn ornaments, and maniacally counts his every footstep, dissecting his mental illness for our listening pleasure.

And the quirky stories only get better. (My personal favorite is the tale of young Sedaris’ acting career.)

If you have not yet experienced Mr. Sedaris, you are seriously missing out.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven
By Mitch Albom
An old theme park mechanic dies trying to save a little girl from a malfunctioning ride. And the rest of this brief book is about his meeting five people in the afterlife; people who he has affected or vice-versa. It’s all a very granola-nut crunch, fluffy-ish read, but also very affecting. There are small surprises along the way, and the central mystery is stretched out for all it’s worth. But there also is a lovely hum-dinger of a plot twist that you will not expect. And although the message of how people touch each others’ lives is pretty standard, this airy little book does a nice job of reminding us that our actions are felt much deeper and wider than we can often imagine.

All Families are Psychotic
By Douglas Copeland
I happen to be a great fan of the modern novel. And not just those of Wolfe, Irving, Hoffman, Tyler, and Oates. I especially love those of “my generation”: McInerary, Easton Ellis, Janowitz, Chabon, and yes, Douglas Copeland (he of Generation X fame).

Some wild plots border on the ridiculous; this book proudly crosses that border and holes itself up in a seedy motel in the capital city of Ridiculous.

In All Families are Psychotic, a grossly dysfunctional familial unit travels to central Florida to watch their handicapped daughter launch her career as an astronaut. While they’re here, the entire clan gets caught up in a ring of international theft, smuggling, adultery, murder, and baby-selling. All in a three-day trip.

Did I mention that the plot was far-fetched?

Also, there’s AIDS involved.

I scoffed in disbelief a LOT while reading it!

Copeland succeeds more than he should be able to, given how preposterous the plot is and how incorrect some of his details of central Florida are. (This is land better-traveled by Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard.) But Copeland’s modern reference points have the ability to connect the reader to the story, and his comedy is wry and sharp. Also, the author’s novel may be full of stupid contrivances, but it is also rich with well-drawn characters.

Pick it up for a nice read, but try to keep your suspension of disbelief from stretching to the breaking point.

The Last of the Savages
By Jay McInerary
“The act of friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.”

That’s how this lovely book starts, and by the end, I was thoroughly confused and amazed as to why this isn’t considered a modern classic. I was truly affected by this novel, so much so that I read the book twice straight through. I even got emotional. Both times.

This powerful novel follows Patrick Keane and his 30-year friendship with John, the last in a line of rebellious southern gentlemen surnamed Savage. The plot clearly borrows from Evelyn Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited, but it also creates a story entirely its own.

Patrick longs for the pedigree and history John has. John fights his Memphis upper-crust upbringing by running a gambling racket to fund his production of poor black musicians. Patrick slaves to escape from his middle-class beginnings into the upper echelons of respectable Wall Street society. John hopes to free himself and others from the stifling classicm of his past. Patrick subjugates his own longings for acceptability. John marries a black woman and starts on a world tour of excessive sex, drugs and rock and roll.

That these two are friends who come to trust and depend on each other so intimately is the power than binds this tale. Through the Kennedy assassination, 60s race riots, war protests, hippie movement, drug-binged 70s, and me-ist 80s, these two best friends alternately challenges and accepts each other. What’s most compelling is how, over 30-plus years, these two people change, despite and because of each other.

By the emotional end of this novel, my sturdy objectivity was completely gone, and I was actually choking up. I am giving this paperback copy to Sarah French and starting a search for a permanent hardcover version for myself.

You’ll probably have trouble finding this book, too, but it’s definitely worth the hunt.

The Snow Garden
By Christopher Rice
Young Rice is the progeny of vampire-slash-witch-slash-everythinggoth chronicler Anne Rice. While I am impressed he is not treading the same mucky, overblown ground his mother turns into 4000-page books, I am still not a fan.

There is an excellent premise here, though. A professor’s wife dies of a car accident while he’s sleeping with one of his students. There are some nice curves, also. The wife’s car crashes into the same river a young girl drowned in when the professor was a student. And the professor was somehow involved in that incident fifteen years earlier. And did I mention that the professor may have poisoned his wife’s well-used stash of alcohol? And did I mention the professor’s lover also nips from that same cache of poisoned Chivas? Also, did I mention the student lover was a boy?

All this is good and exciting, ripe with possibilities, except that instead of choosing a mature way to telling the story, Rice decides to make this half teen soap opera. All of the sudden it’s loaded with ennui and bad dialogue and gay rights and immature people we don’t ever really end up caring about. It’s like early Brett Easton Ellis decided to write for Beverly Hills 90210. Or worse, Saved by the Bell.

Let ‘em all drink the poisoned scotch for all I cared.

The Poet & the Murderer
By Simon Worrall
This is yet another book about Mark Hofmann, the geeky master forger who in the early 80s set about to bring down the Mormon Church. He was doing a passable job embarrassing the church hierarchy with undetectable forgeries, while also creating and selling letters and “lost works” by some other of America’s great historical figures. Hofmann’s work as a criminal was amazing, beyond reproach. No, his problem was that his debt got the best of him, and he desperately started planting pipe bombs, killing two people, to try to escape getting caught. But he accidentally detonated one of the pipe bombs on himself, and some very smart people got very suspicious.

Thus was caught probably the greatest forger the world has ever known.

It’s all fascinating and impressive stuff, and journalist Simon Worrall deftly bookmarks the whole story around Hofmann’s drafting of a lost Emily Dickenson poem. So many people wanted to believe this “new work” was real, and Hofmann’s forgeries and back-stories were so outstanding, that people would not let it die. Over and over, this poem was sold and resold, even by the venerable auction house Sotheby’s, who had a very good idea they were peddling a forgery in 2002, almost 20 years after Hofmann got caught.

There are two essential problems with Worrall’s book. One is that two other books, Salamander and The Mormon Forgery Murders, have been written about Hofmann. (Salamander is actually the best of all three). There is only little new to tell, even with Worrall’s framing the story around Dickenson’s “poem” and Sotheby’s deception.

This leads us to the second problem. Instead, Worrall spends most of the middle of the book filth-mouthing and maligning the Mormon Church and its history. Truthfully, it is a strange, dark history, but one has to wonder if Worrall himself has the same goal as Hofmann does to bring down the religious institution. So much ugly rhetoric, so much bile and vicious vitriol is flung that one starts to doubt the author’s journalistic integrity.

It’s a book supposedly based on history; if a reader (and especially one like me, who knows much about Mormon history) senses such a strong bias on the part of the author, the whole thing begins to smack of forgery.