Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #163

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #162

Clerihew from a Dark Place

JAMES ELLROY

In My Dark Places
The author traces
That broken boy,
James Ellroy.

A Caricature

A Nudge

It may sound unlikely, but I rather enjoy confused customers. I don't mean those who can not find the bathrooms, or think they are receiving messages from imaginary third parties to our conversation, or even to those unaccustomed to book shopping in an actual store -- a growing population of the young -- rather, I refer to sound, healthy readers who come to the bookstore not this time to browse or to fetch their next book, but from an uncharacteristic desperation. These customers may have just unexpectedly finished a book at the bust-stop, having mistimed the pages they had left when they left the house that morning. I've done that. They may have lost a book, or left a book behind them and realized this fact too late or too far from home. I've done that as well. Then again, they need not be without a book, to require another. Perhaps what they've been reading no longer suits them, or the hour's commute, or they may have just begun with a book and found attention wandering, the style bad, or the content unpleasant. They may have been forced, finally, to abandon all hope of ever finishing Moby Dick. For whatever reason then, these customers are either book-less, badly matched, or bored, and having come into the bookstore in hopes of better days, they find themselves either overwhelmed or just blinking. They stand stock still in the middle of the sales-floor and just look helplessly 'round, waiting to be told what to read next. Their confusion is temporary, most often needing just a title or two to shake off the mood, but somehow, this once, unable to do so unassisted. Perfectly capable of seeing to themselves most times, for whatever reason, they are lost between books.

I do sympathize.

To help such customers in the usual way is impossible. The known will not do; for that they might better have been left alone. Neither will bestsellers or familiarity of genre answer. What's needed is something unlike, unusual, unexpected. It takes a bit of diagnosis, but if what ails is not to be cured in the routine way, I find a slight shock the best way to jar loose an unexpected enthusiasm. Nothing outlandish. I don't recommend James Ellroy to a Romance reader, or suggest Angela Thirkell to someone stymied by Céline. More a prodding than a push, what's required is a book, or kind of book, like enough to interest but unlikely to have been considered.

Whatever I'm meant to be reading just now -- and there is plenty that I should -- I find I simply can not concentrate enough to read fiction. Novel after novel, for good reasons and bad, has lately been by me let drop, so that the pile of unread fiction by my bed grows too high, the books already in my bag, too heavy to carry on. Story suddenly bores me. My mind refuses narrative. Characters wander off. Nothing pleases, nothing works. Favorite authors, favorite books, provide no sense of relief. It is just a mood, I understand, but when it is on me, all that will do is -- history. Now that may be an odd fact, but it is a fact of my reading. When I can not otherwise read, I can always read history. Familiar history or periods, places and or persons unknown, there is in history, for me, is a refuge.

Nothing relevantly topical or themed, you understand, nothing politically challenging or intended to do anything but tell. I don't so much want to learn, or to be lectured as to watch a parade. The instinct is passive, it calls for pageantry and people watching, whole lives, rounded already, "with a sleep." When fiction fails me, or I fail it, I think this may be why; I have no room left in my head for the allusive, the indefinite, the suggestive. I do not wish to work, worry or wonder. I want only to be told, and told the whole; beginning, middle and end. Popular history -- meaning written as literature rather than polemic or for purposes of academic promotion -- provides, even more than biography, the assurance of resolution. Many lives will pass in history, one need not know them all so well as to have more than a passing sympathy. I do not need a friend, I need a crowd, anonymity, events.

Lately, the mood to disappear being on me as my vacation approaches, I root out yet another little volume of Green's History of the English People. With relief, I find the Stuarts following the Tudors. just as they should, to be undone in turn by the Puritans, just as they so richly deserved. For me, this is perfect relaxation. I did not think to read again any of this long story. My hand just found this little book, Volume VIII, for me, and I am content. Why had I not thought of this before?

And yet, I never do. Instead, history waits patiently for just this mood.

And now I want nothing else. Having come to Cromwell, I want more. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, by Sir Charles Firth, finds me too. Published in a little Oxford Classic, it is the right size to match the Green. I own it, but have never read the book before. And Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, catches my eye. She's quite good. I've read Jardine before, but this one came into the store unnoticed by me last August.

It seems, I have a topic.

History may not work for the next lost soul. Might be anthropology. Might be genetics. Might be Buddhist meditation. Might be... anything. Anything, so long as it isn't whatever it was I had, or lost, or ought.

And what's less likely, I ask you, than warty old Oliver and Co. tonight? Perhaps the landing of the Orange? Ah, possibilities again.

Pale Black

I've all but given up on mystery novels. Television does them so well, so much more economically, and frankly with greater depth; characters have faces and move, murders are resolved in a hour and a half, and the consequences of violence seem more real, the blood is red, the regret registers. Now and again though, I grow wistful and take a thriller home, remembering how I thrilled to every page of Sherlock Holmes, what a revelation it was to read my first Raymond Chandler or pick up Killer on the Road on the recommendation of a friend. True crime anthologies and the regular stories of the rich gone wrong in Vanity Fair Magazine tend nowadays to do for me, when it comes to written crime, but then the weekend looms and I think I might just want a fast, mean read.

There was a time when I would gather up four or five paperback mysteries and spend the whole of a weekend, specially a long weekend, ripping through thrillers, one after another. I read all of Conan Doyle when I was boy in a kind of frenzy, ignoring my school work, my chores, the television, my friends. For two or three weeks I could think of nothing else, regretted sleep, lived only for a new story from Doctor Watson. I still think that that was the best way, and absolutely the right time, at eleven or twelve, to read Holmes. I've reread some favorites in just the past year or so, and was amazed to find the stories funny as well as thrilling. I remembered all of Sherlock Holmes as being deadly earnest. I read nearly everything the same way when I was young; liking one novel or story, I would then need to read everything, end to end, that I could find by that author. Mysteries and thrillers lend themselves well to this kind of reading, but I did it with almost every author I read on my own, when I was young. I read Jerzy Kosinski with just such obsessive devotion one summer in high school. Even as a younger adult, I still kept the habit of reading mysteries, when I still read them at all, as a more occasional indulgence but one necessitating more than one or two books, and long, happily otherwise empty hours alone, without distraction. I read both volumes of the Library of America's noir anthologies just this way, but those were my last murderous, crowded, long weekends.

Noir, as a catch-all, would have to be the easiest way to categorize my preferred style of thriller. Chandler and Hammett and Cain, down to Jim Thompson, Ellroy and Jake Arnott, that last a gay Brit who might be said to have taken all that stylishly butch posturing to one of its two natural conclusions, overtly homo gangsters, the other postmodern road being Ellroy's, ending in vicious, semi-pornographic self parody. What I enjoyed in all the best of the form was the action; guns, gangsters and plots gone wrong, the cynical romanticism; of tough guys who read poetry, quote Homer, and lose their hearts in the gutter, and the insistent, twisted aestheticism, from which all the genre's practitioners seem to have derived both their dark philosophy of life and their now sometimes quaint pleasure in inventive and funny aphorism. Noir, at it's best, can be beautiful, bub.

I recently took home the new Denis Johnson novella, Nobody Move, just hoping for a quick fix of the remembered Adrenalin. It's on our bestseller list. Johnson won the National Book Award just last year for his Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke, which, I admit, I could not read, though because of its setting and subject, not because of any fault I found in the writing. I've read Johnson before, at least the better part of two earlier novels and all of his story collection, Jesus' Son. His new book is a well reviewed little noir, originally published serially in Playboy Magazine. I read it in a night, but it did not really satisfy.

What was best in Johnson's earlier stories -- the sense of comic instability, the marginality of the characters as junkies and petty thieves taken very much for granted, though obviously and accurately detailed, the Holy Idiot business played with tongue firmly pressed into cheek -- in a later novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic, went all flabby and maundering. It seems it is all but impossible to write about the business of drugs without ascribing their sale and use to either an almost supernatural evil, or lapsing, as Johnson seemed to, into a hazy, good natured mysticism. It's as if only cops and potheads ever write junky fiction. Johnson, of course, is not of the cop school.

And that may explain why his new short novel seemed more workmanlike but less satisfying even than the two earlier novels I'd never quite finished. Denis Johnson, like many a contemporary writer, is drawn to criminality, but does quite believe in crime. In his new book, crime happens. His leads are both quickly and amusingly sketched; the guy a singer of competitive barbershop and a degenerate gambler, the gal a blackmailing femme fatale, and the plot that brings them together is satisfyingly arbitrary. The writing is competent and even clever. I was reminded though of a quote from Agatha Christie:

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

And that seems to have been the problem. Denis Johnson's noir seems idly done, invented, like a story told in a bar, to pass an amusing hour or two, as it did well enough for me, but without the angry necessity one feels from the best practitioners of the form. In short, I don't think Denis Johnson was serious. He needn't be, if what he'd written had been parody, but it's not. Instead it is something like the outline of, or a screenplay based upon, a better book than he wrote. There's no black heart in his little book, no sense of either the disappointed crusade or the survival of love's devastation. Those old boys may have been drunk or punchy when they wrote the sometimes truly ugly stories they did, and their plots could be a hot mess, but they were sincerely unhappy. Johnson isn't. He seems too good natured, perhaps too fundamentally cheerful, or if not that, then perhaps even -- dare I suggest such a thing -- happy? for this kind of thing. His cynicism seems borrowed, like a pinched fedora. I can't help but think he wanted to write a Jim Thompson novel, and ended up writing the pitch for an ersatz Elmore Leonard screenplay.