Blog

Famous for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, Proulx’s carved out a literary niche chronicling the lives of down-and-out communities all across North America—Newfoundland in Shipping, New England in Postcards, and now the Texas Panhandle in Ace. The story is something like the film Local Hero as it might have been told by Flannery O’Connor or T.C. Boyle. (Kirkus Reviews called it a kind of Rake’s Progress, which is too bad because we’d really like to have been the ones to make that reference.) Bob Dollar, a young and ambitious employee of a multinational hog farming corporation called Global Pork Rind, is sent to Texas to find a suitable spot for a new plant, and then buy the nearby land on the cheap. He finds his target in the little town of Woolybucket, but finds strong resistance, and begins to have serious doubts when he learns about the drastic effect giant hog farms have on the land around them. Proulx’s affinity for oddball character names is in full force, and adds to the sense of comic grotesquery: among others, we meet Ribeye Cluke, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek, LaVon Fronk, and the title character, a crusty old windmill repairman named Ace Couch.

It’s difficult not to connect the dots from Robert Crumb to Daniel Clowes. Crumb’s raw, realistic figures, oozing desperate human emotion (unrequited lust, mostly) spawned numer-ous other writer/illustrators like Clowes, Chris Ware, Johnny Ryan, Dave Cooper and Charles Burns that have have expanded comics beyond the green tights and trusty sidekicks that came before. Caricature features nine stories, many from Clowes’ Eightball periodical as well as the melodrama “Eyeliner,” the first comic work to appear in Esquire’s fiction issue. Clowes’s stories are rich with buck-toothed, horn-rimmed, hat-haired eccentrics, each living their lives in quiet and not-so-quiet desperation: a gynecologist/karaoke singer, a 14-year-old trick-or-treater, a traveling carnival caricaturist, all traveling down a road they seem unable or unwilling to change. It’s the journey, not the destination, and these nine by the writer of Ghost World are definitely worth the ride.

Appropriately enough, Sam Fuller’s life sounds like something out of the movies. The director of such great cult noir films as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss penned this autobiography in the months before his death in 1997. Fuller grew up a poor Jewish kid in New York, raised by his strong-willed, widowed mother, and was kicked out of high school for moonlighting as a crime reporter. He never looked back. His newspapering days marked him for life. Third Face is written in a voice that could be a tabloid reporter straight out of central casting: cantankerous and hardboiled, yet passionate in his beliefs and peppered with both no-nonsense profanities and quaint slang like “Holy cow!” His later career as a screenwriter was interrupted by Pearl Harbor, and Fuller the infantryman fought through some of World War Two’s most harrowing moments—D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps—which he’d later draw on for his autobiographical war film The Big Red One. As a postwar director, Fuller was an iconoclast during the height of anti-Red blacklisting, leading his terrific seedy noir Pickup on South Street to be blasted as pro-communist by J. Edgar Hoover and anti-communist by French intellectuals. It was neither; Fuller’s films (or “yarns,” as he insisted on calling them) were too smart to be reducible to anything other than straight humanism. Like him, they were tough and unsentimental, but never cruel. You can open up Third Face to almost any page and find some fascinating anecdote, like the time Fuller set up his brother on a blind date with Marilyn Monroe, or when, during the war he unknowingly took shelter overnight in the boyhood home of his hero, Beethoven. Highly recommended, and a must-read for anyone interested in filmmaking.

Though he’s scored with things like Disclosure and TV’s ER, Michael Crichton inevitably returns to the theme that’s served him so well so often before, Science Run Amok. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the robot gunslingers in Westworld, the virus in Andromeda Strain (We could go on; he certainly did) are joined by the villain of his latest book, Prey: a killer swarm of nanotechnology. Out in the remote Nevada desert, a team of scientists has built a cloud of intelligent microparticles—very small robots, basically—intended as military spyware. But, as always in Crichton’s books, the scientists don’t fully comprehend the complexity of their creation until it’s too late, and soon the cloud escapes, growing larger and smarter by the hour and developing a taste for human flesh. Crichton’s determination to base even the wildest aspects of his thrillers on real science is admirable, but we find it hard to imagine that Prey will find as large an audience as Jurassic Park did—nanobots seem awfully abstruse compared with the in-your-face threat of a T. rex attack. Still, even a weak Crichton book is a smart mix of tense plotting and cutting-edge pop science, equally suitable for the beach and the physics lecture. (Note: To attend, you must buy a copy of Prey at the store.) Ruminator Books, (612) 215-2600, ruminator.com

Coffee House Press has certainly been double-dosed on caffeine—or something—in the past year. One of our favorite local publishing houses just seems to go from strength to strength. Norah Labiner’s Miniatures got widespread acclaim (and even got thrown up on by the office cat, a special distinction we won’t go into here) and the world seems poised to go nuts over Laurie Foos’ Bingo Under the Crucifix. The latter, together with Ellen Cooney’s The White Palazzo seem to suggest that someone over at Coffee House found the box of hand-buzzers, squirting flowers, and rubber chickens. These books are subtle and hilarious, without being cynical or cruel. Cooney’s novel takes her young heroine on a wild ride from the altar, where she abandons her betrothed, to the backroads of Massachusetts, where she eventually hooks up with a psychic who has been hired to find her. Think of it as a goofball, 21st-century update of Thelma & Louise and an inversion of The Graduate. Is the nation on the verge of a New Sense of Humor? We think it may be one of the few benefits that accrue from single-party rule, and we plan to laugh hard and long, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Amazon Books, (612) 821-9630, amazonbookstorecoop.com

Once, when my daughter Sophie was about two years old, I dragged her to a big, noisy birthday party at Circus Pizza, where she had been on only one previous occasion. That, too, was for a big, noisy birthday party about a year and a half before. When we arrived at the second party, Sophie looked up at me intently as a far-distant look spread across her face. “I remember this place,” she said. “I ate cereal here.” And believe it or not, she was right. I had fed her baby rice cereal when she was five months old at that very same Circus Pizza a year and a half earlier.

The nature of time, memory, and experience intrigues me a lot. I’m right in the throes of a fascinating book—Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives. I bought it primarily because I loved the title and the cover, but it turns out to be a lively read, and it reminds me immediately of two things. First, the uncanny feeling I had about my daughter Lillie the minute she was born, when I squeezed her warm, wet arm, and I felt the physical presence of my beloved Aunt Lala (Alice) all around me. Since the first minute she could speak and name things, Lillie has repeatedly chosen the name Alice for everything in sight. Second, this book has sparked my recollection of a singular experience with the potential of my own previous incarnations.

It was back in the last days of December 1999 when I drove with my sister Laurie down a dark, quiet street in an ordinary St. Paul neighborhood. In my wallet was a wad of cash. I needed $60 for the hour-long psychic consultation my sister had talked me into scheduling.

Sitting down with a clairvoyant had been Laurie’s idea, but since she was an out-of-towner in from New York for the holidays, the business of tracking down referrals, sifting through them, and choosing the most promising seer had been left to me. Now here we were, ten minutes late, skeptical of course, but having a good time doing something novel and indulgent and sisterly.

My appointment was first, and it began, just as you’d imagine, with a greeting from the very assertive and overly affectionate house cat. The woman standing in the shadows behind the cat was large and rather stern. She led me into a stark room off the front hall where we sat across from each other on the only two chairs in sight, separated by a small table. The first thing she did was scold me for being late. “The spirit,” she told me, “arrives on time.”

It got better from there, for she quickly began to rattle off some interesting observations about my daughter Sophie. First of all, she spoke of Sophie’s unusual and profound affinity for animals. “She’s going to be devastated when she figures out where meat comes from,” the psychic told me. “She’s been a vegetarian since birth,” I replied, struck by the memory of a child who refused to walk down the meat aisle in the grocery store and wept inconsolably after learning, at age four, that the Chicken in a Biscuit cracker she’d eaten at a neighbor’s wasn’t purely plant based.

Eventually, the conversation turned toward the distant past. I learned, much to my unabashed delight, that prior to this lifetime I’d been a prominent Russian ballerina. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather have been. It was like drawing the trump card on past lives.

The psychic said I was very talented and a raving beauty. Everyone loved me—when they weren’t fleeing from my dramatic temper. My one true flaw, I was told, was a tendency to be tyrannical (when I was not being lavishly generous and witty and adoring).

In this lifetime, I was born on the other side of the tracks, and was simply not the kind of kid who got to do things like take ballet lessons. In fact, I somehow developed an aversion to dancing, a dreadful self-consciousness around it, what you might even call a rhythm and music impairment. (I did study the violin, briefly, until my sister tore me from it permanently by stomping on my instrument. But we’re both over that.)

Now, pondering my supposed past life as a ballerina makes me want to go buy a pair of toe shoes and tear up the floor. I think it’s a tad too late for me to become the next Billy Elliot, though. But that’s okay. There are other avenues. Do I really have to be ashamed to consider, with relish, the idea of ballroom dancing lessons? I think not. After all, you only live once. Er, I mean, life is short. So we have to make the most of it.

I’ve been doing some work lately that’s forced me to become at least casually reacquainted with pop music, a reunion that distresses me as if I were being dosed with booze after a happy stretch of sobriety. For the past three or four years, I have sheltered myself from developments in music, and have enjoyed the isolation. Before, I was a self-confessed record geek, the kind of emotionally arrested, obsessive collector lampooned in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. In my early 20s, I allocated 90 percent of my post-rent budget to record-store binges, leaving just enough ready cash for one Totino’s Party Pizza and a Diet Shasta per day.

But as I approached 30, and my wife and I started talking kids, I became concerned for my future. I had a nightmarish vision of a father-son chat from my vinyl-hoarding tomorrow: “Son, I need you to be a man about this and sleep on the couch so I can move the jazz section to your room.” But before I could enroll in a twelve-step program, the addiction loosened its grip without coaxing. To my occasional sorrow, my diehard rock-and-roll ideals began to quietly erode. I was slightly disturbed to discover that my non-conformist instincts, my passion for records, fanzines, and nightclubs ebbed in my late 20s, at about the same age most regular folks, by which I guess I mean the non-non-conformists, lose touch with youth culture. My response to this loss of faith was to become a pop ostrich, avoiding exposure to new music as much as possible. Music couldn’t suck, I reasoned, if I sealed myself in a vacuum.

Just a few years ago, dissecting the music scene and tirelessly surfeiting my lust for records was so self-defining that I couldn’t imagine my interest fading. But along the way, band profiles and record reviews began to interest me about as much as the copy on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Soon I started to bog down in the middle of 100-word concert previews (“Oh God, when will this end, and what are they talking about?”). I reduced my record-store visits from three or four times a week to once or twice a season. Hearing a good song on the radio became an unexpected day-brightener, rather than a call to action; for the first time, I felt approval of a record didn’t morally obligate me to own it. I started leaving the (eternal, infernal) gaps in my collection unfilled, tuned in NPR, and dropped out.

For most people, the golden age of music conveniently climaxed when they were about 18. Having danced and moped and cruised and groped to (depending on their generation) Benny Goodman, the Beatles, Boston, or Public Enemy, they find it especially difficult to tolerate what they regard as the vastly inferior effluvium being spoon-fed to kids today. I’d like to think my neglect of new music is not driven by this kind of cranky nostalgia. I’d like to think my tastes weren’t so rigidly formed in my youth that I couldn’t see the merit in the cream of today’s crop. If I immersed myself in it, I could judge the newfangled on its own terms. I figure the aesthetic quality of pop music is fairly constant, that there is always at least a small percentage of great stuff being made. Sure, particular genres and even particular musical values wax and wane. But for the kids—the abstract, mythical kids—I suspect the music has the same transcendent, liberating, intoxicating wallop it has always had. Ever the populist optimist, I cling to the idea that if the “kids” think it’s great, then it possibly is great.

At least that seems like a reasonable theory, but one I haven’t tested too rigorously as of late. And that’s why, when I learn, for example, that Nelly and Nelly Furtado are two different people, or that the Hives are helping resuscitate garage rock, my curiosity is tempered with fear. It makes me want to hear their music, and I don’t want to hear their music. If curiosity gets the best of me, and I blow my next paycheck at the record store, I might find the music uninspiring, perplexing, boring, trite, rehashed, juvenile. It’s too risky. The chasm between youth culture and my own increasingly bourgeois world-view could suddenly yawn in front of me. I could start to feel old, cranky, and sentimental, like a white-flannel-trouser-wearing beachcomber, when all I want is to be the eternal pop fan on an indefinite leave of absence.

And so the irony (you’ve undoubtedly heard how much my generation loves irony) is that in the midst of trying to dodge a buzz-band-induced buzzkill, the opportunity has arisen to earn a little cash by writing about pop music. And I guess there’s some rule about “journalistic integrity” that requires the critic to actually listen to the music before evaluating it. So I’m hearing new music again, and it doesn’t seem worse than when I left it a few years ago, but my relationship with it, once so intimate, now feels long-distance.

A few weeks ago, I heard the new Missy Elliot single, “Work It,” as I pulled into my garage, and I waited in the car until it finished. I love it, but I feel I’m enjoying it out of context. I want to hear it in a club, or at a party, or with a carload full of stoned friends. But I can’t stand clubs anymore, and parties start too late, and it’s dangerous to drive stoned. Still, I bought the twelve-inch. On some level, I’m back.