Was Dave Barry ever funny?

Today’s avalanche of books brings the new (on sale August 5) Dave Barry book. This took me aback, because I had forgotten all about Dave Barry, rather like the grody beer-swilling uncle you once thought was so cool. Then you grew up, and he didn’t. That’s what Dave Barry seems like these days: the annoyance on the bookstore shelf.

Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far) (Berkley Trade Paperback Reprint, $14) features a cover design that illustrates perfectly what I mean: Barry is Photoshopped flashing rabbit ears over the head of President George W. Bush. I’m sure there’s a preschool somewhere where that’s still cutting-edge humor.

And then there’s Barry’s style, which has always relied on juxtaposing the mundane with the absurd and then tossing in some random reference to something that’s adolescent and probably booger-related and hoping against hope that You Get It.

But let’s do this by example, in this entry from June, 2003: “On the literary front, the blockbuster bestseller of the year is the long-awaited fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers. Another best-seller is Sen. Hillary Clinton’s new book, I Can’t Help It If I’m a Saint, in which, with great candor and openness, her ghostwriter reveals the most intimate details of Sen. Clinton’s life, except the parts that might be interesting, which fall within Sen. Clinton’s “Zone of Privacy.”‘

The problems here are about as infinite as Barry’s fascination with lame puberty jokes:

–This is really lazy writing.

–You suspect that Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” could have made short work out of both events. (Or Joel McHale, or The Onion, or the Websites 236.com or Wonkette. Good Lord, there’s more sophisticated, harder-working humor on icanhascheezburger.com)

–And the Daily Show is on basic cable, and the InterWebs are basically free, whereas Barry is expecting you to shell out $14 for a collection of his end-of-year columns, slightly updated. And while $14 for a belly laugh is no bad deal, this book is just a Dave Barry literary garage sale, and jokes about Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton and Dan Rather really have reached their “sell-by” date.

–And even in a literary garage sale — basically, a writer dumping everything he didn’t get published in the big leagues between two covers and calling it an anthology, or “the collected,” or “the uncollected,” or “stuff no magazine, print or online, would sneeze on these days” — there is occasionally a pink flamingo, an item that’s fun and kitschy and makes you proud to haul it off to the car and pose it in front of your coffee table.

Dave Barry may make a comeback, like Abba or “The Golden Girls.”

But this is no pink flamingo.

 

 

 

 

 

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The worst and best reading for the long July 4 weekend

Really, July 4 is up there with Halloween as a reader’s holiday: What else are you going to do? On July 4, you have the best of excuses to lounge on a porch swing with a book: It’s hot and humid and generally sweat-baiting to move around in the oven that is Kentucky, you can’t stand over a hot grill all day, and the fireworks aren’t until 10 p.m. Besides checking out the marathons on basic cable, what else are you going to do?

So: a roundup of what the book haul has yielded this holiday-shortened week.

Worst blurb of the week:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press, $22), a book that could use all the help it can get based on title alone, has this dust jacket gem: “Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the Society’s charming, deeply human members, from pig farmers to phrenologists.”

I love it when people are deeply human, don’t you? It sets them apart from my cats and dog and the bird who attempted to take up permanent residence in our garage last week and is, sadly, No Longer With Us.

And really, had the blurb just given up with letting humans be human, I would let it go. But no, it’s on a roll: “Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds there will change her forever.”

And, in the words of the immortal Randy Travis, forever and ever, amen.

Worst title of the week:

Santa Vs. Satan: The Official Compendium of Imaginary Fights by Jack Kalish (Three Rivers Press, $13.95).

Initially you think: Clever! And then you notice that for every Gandalf vs. Obi-Wan Kenobi, every Han Solo vs. Indiana Jones, you get a “The Constipated vs. the Incontinent” or a “Small Man with Breasts vs. Large Balding Woman” — that is, stuff you wouldn’t read even if you were in a college class where credit was at stake.

Still, props for quote selection, particularly in the Muhammad Ali vs. Bruce Lee dustup, in which Ali’s cool quote No. #1 is: “Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment. I’ll hit him so hard he’ll wonder where October and November went.”

Best title of the week:

How Dolly Parton Saved My Life: A Novel of the Jelly Jar Sisterhood by Charlotte Conners (Broadway Books, $12.95).

Isn’t it amazing how many publishers think they’ve got the next Mitford series? But after stealing Ms. Parton’s halo, the book suffers from a thoughtless cover (wigs and beadboard) and a godawful cover blurb that has something to do with “successful, independent women who put their families first” (as opposed, I guess, to all of us abject failures who put our families somewhere below lawn edging and beer swilling), Atlanta, bonding, “personal hurts,” prayer and “sisterly support.”

Do Whut, Now? Odd book of the week:

The World’s Coolest Hotel Rooms by Bill Tikos (Collins/Design, an imprint of HarperCollins, $29.95).

OK, I understand the concept of the coffee table book: random infobits, beautifully illustrated and consumed at reading increments of 5-10 minutes.

Even so, it’s hard to know where this book’s market is: “Fifty of the hippest, sexiest, newest, and most unusual hotel rooms in the most widely traveled destinations around the world.”

So: If you travel extensively and have megbucks, you already know these places. If you don’t, hearing about them is going to make you feel particularly Motel 6: poor, cheap and probably covered in wood laminate and polyester blend of a low thread count.

Unless, of course, it’s Hotel Basico in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, which, the book informs, “exudes industrial chic; the materials are recycled from the region’s oil refineries and factories.” A few pages later, it burbles: “For those who want to take back mementoes of their stay, there’s a Polaroid camera handcuffed to the bed.”

While I can understand the joys of a hotel that thoughtfully anticipates its guests’ need for hand restraints, the place basically looks like a jail with ocean views and bottomless mojitos.

Worth A Second Look:

Larry McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, $24). I am a total fool for the book-lover-memoir genre (such as Paul Collins’ Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books), so this is the book I’m having with my July 4 potato salad.

Except, of course, when I’m reading Pillars of the Earth: entire family crises have wandered past this week while I’ve been following Philip and Aliena and Tom Builder and waiting for that sweet, sweet moment when hissable William gets dispatched. As far as I’m concerned, the medieval English yarn, be it Ken Follett or Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series, is the reason I learned to read in the first place.

OK, so here’s a blog-based book that’s appropriately snarky …

I may have spoken too quickly about the last book from the arch TV site Television Without Pity. A newer try, A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know from Watching Television (Penguin, $14) by Jeff Alexander, a TWOP writer, arrived yesterday.

And yes, it does have the appropriately evil yet literate tone of somebody who has been through college, possibly even the wilds of graduate school, and yet occasionally lets the TV remote wander to the musings of Shanna Moakler and Chris Jericho on VH-1’s “I Love the New Millennium.” If you don’t know who Shanna Moakler and Chris Jericho are, you’re not spending enough time either Web-surfing, watching TV or reading: I can’t help you there. (Well, OK, then: the tabloid-friendly but surprisingly funny beauty queen known for her battles with Paris Hilton, and the WWE wrestler and occasional singer. A working knowledge of pop culture: so valuable.)

It’s not the book you show off with, and yet, on a Kentucky Saturday afternoon in which the humidity and the temperature are waged in a battle to your death, it’s appropriate sofa-slouch reading.

In example, this description of the Fox show “House,” starring the inimitable Hugh Laurie, who is great as the irascible doctor (I think “irascible doctor” is a trademarked description for House), but — trust me on this, as I had a lot of time to kill while housebound with two youngsters — even better as the daffy Prince George on “Blackadder.”  (If you’re reading this, I’m going to trust you have either a Netflix subscription, or a working knowledge of classic BBC comedies, or both. Because while I can take a stab at explaining the appeal of Chris Jericho — which is the quality of being both fully engaged in WWE antics while at the same time viewing them from a sneering distance and wondering, really, how long he has to take these falls before some other line of work will take off – you need to do some of the lifting, or at least watching, yourself.)

In any case, the book’s description of Gregory House, M.D.:

” … House decides on a course of treatment by asking himself a series of questions, just like any other doctor. These questions are:

1. How is the patient lying to me?

2. How is the patient’s family lying to me?

3. What do the other doctors think? Because the opposite is probably true.

4. Where’s my Vicodin?

And so lives are saved. See? Being a doctor is easy!”

Of course, this is not all you get. There are elaborate notes on set construction, or why the Huxtables’ living room did not look like the Conners’, TV couples, how TV characters “work,” and of course the great TV path of instruction on the path of child-rearing:

“Arnold Jackson, Alex P. Keaton, and the Soprano kids are cautionary tales of what can happen in the homes of parents who let their kids sharpen their wits on them.

“That’s why kids should be kept away from reruns of Family Ties and Roseanne, and be steered instead toward The Cosby Show. Cliff Huxtable’s kids occasionally ventured the odd retort directed at tehir parents, but everyone in the house was fully aware that goine into a battle of wits with Cliff was like going into a firefight unarmed.”

So, are we clear?

Be this: Cliff Huxtable.

Not this: Roseanne Conner, the “Family Ties” parents of Alex P. and Mallory Keaton, Tony Soprano (although this was the first time anybody ever ventured the critical observation that young Anthony Junior had any wits to sharpen on anybody, ever, and the last time we saw Meadow she couldn’t even parallel park the luxury car Daddy bought her).

 

 

 

 

Is it a stunt book, or racist, or just a bad blog book-of-the-month?

The Definitive Guide to Stuff White People Like: The Unique Taste of Millions (Random House Trade Paperback Original, $14) has been cooling on my desk these last few days while I try to consider whether I have anything of use, or interest, or even moderate tastefulness, to say about it.

And I think I do. I’ve collected stunt books over the years — The Official Preppy Handbook! The Sloane Ranger Handbook! (the British equivalent of preppies) – so I know a humorous deconstruction of an easily slammed lifestyle when I see one.

And I’m becoming more familiar with books launched off blogs, as this one is: Generally they don’t work. That’s because you read blogs for infobits — killing a minute or two of time between surfing to something more substantial, or something at least different: The Internet works as if invented for the Attention Deficit Disordered. And there’s an inevitable rise and fall in blogs: The fashion criticism site gofugyourself.com was on for awhile, particularly concerning all matters J. Lo (about whom it wrote with an evil brilliance), but then it seemed to wander off and lose focus and turn over too many days to “Intern George,” and then there was the resulting book, and the book somehow lost the appeal of the blog, plus you had to lay down real money to buy it. Likewise the Television Without Pity site, which chronicles shows on which its summaries are better than watching the real thing (I direct you to the first-season summaries of VH-1’s “Rock of Love,” particularly the summary of the “meet the parents” episode, which may be the funniest, most risque thing on any site on the Internet, period). The Television Without Pity book didn’t work, either. But then there are sites that you are just a little bit embarrassed to admit that you visit — not icanhascheezburger.com, which is both feline and genius and surely will never disgrace itself with a bad book, but certainly, stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. It’s the kind of site you’re pretty worried will show up in your browsing history and give people the wrong idea that you are not reading it for the irony alone, and in some ways the site is a one-trick pony. Because: How many ways can you slice up Teva-wearing, Prius-driving, conscientious-parenting, TV-limiting, hardwood-craving urban recyclers? Well, just about that many, and then you’re done. Next joke, please: Who’s getting fat at theskinnywebsite.com?

It’s not that you won’t recognize the lifestyle — the symbolic almighty Prius! The people who blog about their Prius and take its picture and give it a name and refer to its as if it is a particularly accomplished family member and then parade it around so much they’re burning more gas than you, Mr. Guilt-Ridden Chevy Suburban. The always-gifted children! Not having a TV exclusively so that you can tell people you don’t have a TV, hence you are superior and lack mind rot! Unless you have a TV and admit only to watching “The Wire” and “Arrested Development” and “The Simpsons.” Hardwood floors! Liberal politics!

Here I have a confession: I am probably a barbarian on several of these fronts, so I am predisposed to not guffaw. I live in the suburbs, and I only have hardwood in the kitchen.The rest of the house is thickly carpeted. And not only carpeted, but not even carpeted in a neutral: It’s a rich teal green, and I only wish that none of you have to figure out how to buy paint to coordinate with that. Also: I drive a Pontiac. And in my intensive child-hauling, “can you drive the team?” days I drove a GMC Yukon roughly the size of a city block. I never had my children identified as “gifted,” because, being a bad yuppie, I never quite understood the social distinction of it (and yes, they grew into accomplished students nonethless, because they lived in a house full of books and British comedies on DVD, but I have since sat through innumerable parent gatherings in which the sole criterion for how a school is doing seemed to be how the ”identified gifted and talented” population performs, so I get it, OK? I just think it’s wrong to pre-judge lifetime academic potential in the third grade). Hence I understand that hell — probably a nylon-carpeted hell in a garish primary color – surely awaits me at the end of my cable-watching, gas lawn-mowing days. In the meantime, what’s on Fearnet?

Still, I direct you to infobit #149 in the book: Self-Importance. “Due to an undying need to share their life story with everyone who wil listen, white people have taken to blogging in massive numbers, though it is no surprise that many have simply turned their journals/diaries into blogs where they talk about the latest episode of American Idol, Darfur, their experience at a coffee shop, and their concerns about the future. … What has been less expected is the need for white people to document in blog format any experience that takes more than a week. Pregnancy, vacations to Asia and South America, renovations, child rearing, and car restoration have all become blogs that encourage the rest of the world to take notice of the astute observations and talent of the undiscovered writer.”

And, yes, I am pre-humbled by the irony of making these observations via blog. Still: It’s a blog at a newspaper that believes firmly in diversity and accountability, and I have never abused said blog to rhapsodize about what is, after all, a car.

 

 

It’s back! Your favorite books, listed here …

Dear readers, remember last summer, when we swapped our top 10 favorite books all the livelong summer?

Well, the Top 10 is back!

Send me your top 10 favorite all-time best reads, or your top five, or heck, your top one. We’ll list them on this blog, and many of them also on the Sunday book pages. (And if you’ve got a top 10 LEAST favorite books, well, send them on: I’ll take a look at those, too.)

Our rules are simple:

The names of the books, and their authors.

Your name, your city and state, and a contact telephone number in case I need to clarify some point.

Your e-mail address.

We had an absolute blast with this last year. Participants included everyone from retirees to businesspeople to politicians to students.

And, as your hostess, I will again lead off …

My Top 10 favorite books (not the best books, or the books that made me a better person, or the books I’m most grateful to have read: my favorites). Mine change all the time; yours probably do, too, so those of you who participated last year are invited to submit updated lists this year.

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson. I’ve tried to push this book on pretty much every group I’ve ever spoken to, every student I’ve counseled, every family member I’ve managed to corner near a bookshelf. It’s about the 1900 Galveston hurricane, but it’s a beautifully written reminder of the intersection between journalism and history. Larson’s powers of description have never been better — not even in The Devil and the White City:  Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a murderer, which is also a fine read. And yes, Larson is a master at switching up his narrative threads.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s science fiction, it’s spirituality, but it’s really the book I turn to when I’m sure I’m doing the right thing, to let me know that you can never really be sure. There’s no book that keeps me more humble than this one, no book I’m more grateful to have read. I recommend it to everybody I know. (And sometimes, as was the case with my teenage daughter, they throw it back at me, but you know: I’m persistent.)

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Just a ripping good yarn about what might happen if unknowable aliens hijacked our planet, put a permeable sheath over the whole thing and started pulling strings. Like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, except that Spin stays with you even after the trick is revealed.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Why is it that single defining moments reverberate for us decades later? How can a single action, or a single moment of losing focus, change everything? And how can the proudest among us grit it up enough to simply do the right thing when we should?

The Portable Dorothy Parker. Because, like my collection of books by and about the Mitford sisters, I couldn’t live without it, and I’m finally old enough to admit it.

Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz. Because Fran Lebowitz could be Dorothy Parker’s daughter.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. We like to pretend that everything is inevitable. We like a narrative. We like to pretend that history turned out that way because it was supposed to. We are so wrong, and Taleb takes great delight in showing why.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. What if humanity vanished tomorrow? What would the world be like? Would the earth “recover” from us? One fun footnote: The thing that’s most likely to get your house, and, indeed, all manmade structures: the moisture. Go thank your roofer right now.

Middlemarch by George Eliot (or Bleak House by Charles Dickens: same general idea). Why readers don’t root for the characters of Eliot and Dickens the same way they pull for everybody in Jane Austen just befuddles me.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Writing about the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth sent me back into this book, and not because I’m looking forward to seeing the movie version (Liam Neeson as the Great Emancipator, indeed). Goodwin has a gift, both in writing and speaking about this time in history, of seeming as if she was on the spot. It’s hypnotizing — and if you can, as a reader, lose track of time’s passage as you’re reading, you’ve found yourself a wonderful book.

 

 

 

 

Sell it to me: Or why I love Red Bull but not Susan Powter

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker, opines that we’re not only what we buy. That would be obvious: We all aspire to live in a Pottery Barn catalogue and have our kitchens arranged by Martha Stewart. Sometimes we want cute shoes and cell phones that will enable us to be marketed to even as we drive distracted. Sometimes we buy stuff, not because we like it, but because it’s outside the image we think others have of us. We buy to appear to be on the edge of our comfort zone.

Which brings me to Buying In and its nifty discussion of the stealth marketing campaign that gave us the world’s best beverage, even better than Tab (go ahead and yuk it up, younguns, but Tab is an iconic drink, and I care not that it tastes like it could peel paint off farm fencing): Red Bull.

The book notes that Red Bull’s initial marketing ploy was a murky, seemingly stealth ad campaign — none of those nice old ladies handing out cuplets of free brew at the Wal-Mart. Red Bull wasn’t a soda, not a bottled water. It fell firmly in the new category of ”energy drink,” and there wasn’t really a brand pattern for marketing an energy drink — at least not beyond the idea that it’s 3 p.m. and you have to at least feign alertness until 6 p.m. and even if you don’t know what’s in taurine, how bad could it be? Hence Red Bull established itself as both a stoked beverage for participants in extreme sports, a pick-me-up for office drones and a bar drink for college students. And nobody paid too much attention to dispelling all those urban legends about whether taurine came out of a naughty bit of the bull or was an aprodisiac or whether in some countries Red Bull could only be dispensed in pharmacies: “Some pointed to the drink’s caffeine content, and one theory was that Red Bull with liquor acts like a poor man’s speedball.”

And therein is the genius of stealth marketing: If somebody is watching you read that, you’re pretending to be absolutely appalled. But if you’re by yourself, you may be thinking, where is the vodka? That’s why Red Bull is a hugely successful drink, marketed by giants in the marketing world, even if they be Austrian giants, and I will buried with a sugar-free can of it by my side. No use waiting in line at the Convenience Store of the Afterlife.

Recently, I did an article in which we did a taste test of the various energy drinks, none of which has really taken off like Red Bull. (Although I did get a call from a marketer for an urban energy drink called Pit Bull, which was being targeted to your deeply urban convenience stores, and I am sorry to say that they never sent along a can, because I surely would have tried it.) And the truth is, Red Bull tastes like something you chipped off the interior of your dirty dishwasher, but it’s a taste that you can get used to and even come to crave. And still: When you’ve got a three-hour drive, NPR ain’t getting the job done. You need three Red Bulls, ice-cold, and a bag of Cheetos.

And the thought of Cheetos brings me to the new Susan Powter book. Truly, I had no idea that Susan Powter — you’ll remember her from her “Stop the Insanity!” craze, which posited that to lose weight you need to exercise a lot and eat better — was still around and scoring book deals. But she is: The Politics of Stupid is her new book, and really, it’s time to freshen the message. Or get a message. Or not pose in a catsuit. I am a sucker for two categories of trash literature: true crime books and diet books, but you have to understand in writing such books that you’ve got to get a least a nugget of sense in there. Otherwise you’re just recycling, or posing, or going directly to the remainder bin.

Consider this sentence, and wonder with me if Powter ever met an editor: “Something I hear over and over again, and it’s something that never ceases to amaze me, because if you are overfat, you are bulky already. Fat is wide. Fat is what’s dripping over your jeans. Fat is waddy (Truman’s note: And in Kentucky, Waddy and possibly also Peytona.) Fat is what’s hanging from your body not lean muscle mass, and if it is lean muscle mass hanging from your belly, even I suggest you run to your local emergency room and get checked out.”

I have no idea what this means. But it makes me want a Red Bull. After all, it’s 3 p.m. somewhere.

 

The best color of walls to read by?

I’ll be reading this weekend, of course — Gene Hackman (yes, THAT Gene Hackman, he of “The French Connection”) and Daniel Lenihan are coming to Lexington later in June to promote their book, Escape From Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War. So far, I can tell you: It starts with a lengthy description of the smell of blood. So there will be blood — and also gut-spilling death, bullying and some of the worst prison conditions ever. I’m up to the initial escape, which reminds me how very much I hate the idea of being in any kind of tunnel, anywhere, anytime.

But I’m also painting my 17-year-old daughter’s room while she’s far, far away. It’s now a color called “swimming pool,” which is the sort of blue-green that seems to smell like a hot chlorinated day from even down the hall.  I can surely understand why she wanted to get away from the bubble-gum pink walls that were there when we moved in — complete with a hand-painted, glitter-studded castle that consumed an entire wall. But why not emo black? That you can accessorize with.

(By the way, I did an article a while back about Beth Harper, aka The Lone Rearranger. One of Beth’s decorating rules is: No white ceilings. Initially, I was skeptical about this idea. But having had the chance to skip the white ceilings on several occasions now, I am here to testify: No only do the walls seems to flow together better, it’s infinitely easier to paint if you’re not constantly trying to avoid the wall color-ceiling paint overlap. Aesthetics is always best when it facilitates laziness.)

Don’t laugh — or laugh if you must — but I’m starting to believe that there are environments that encourage reading. Our living room never felt so comfortable to sustained bookishness until it got a coat of that Sherwin-Williams Irish Cream; I liked that color — beige in some lights, yellow in others — so much that I painted my bedroom as well, gleefully slinging paint over the, ahem, sponge-painting job that had bedeviled me for five years. (Remind me: Why did otherwise sane people think that sponge-painting was a good idea and indicative of fine style? Because when you look at it every day for years, it looks like nothing so much as the detritus on your dishes before you wash them. Done badly, sponge painting looks like a mudhole.)

When my kids were younger and I lived with a set of car keys in my hand at all times, there was a flute teacher who had a living and dining room that was a lovely, soothing color of peach. To this day, I associate blissful half-hours spent with Portrait of a Lady with the cool darkness of those rooms. Henry James to me means a nice subdued orange. I suspect that Edith Wharton, who was a decorator as well as a novelist, has some ideas on the subject; I’ll look them up.

So what color did I end up with? A clear bright blue called Sausalito. It’s not the vivid purple or electric orange or stop-sign red my daughter wanted, and I suspect there will be friction when I dismantle her 43-can Red Bull “art object”: We differ on the beauty of this. She calls it a monument to consumption, and I call it an invitation to rodent infestation.

 Still, check back with me in a few weeks: I’ll let you know whether she’s settled down with Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News — items on the summer reading list for her English class – or whether Sausalito Blue is the kind of color that makes her remember just how much she has missed text-messaging and cable surfing. Also, constructing ”art” from energy drink cans. 

I hope for the former, suspect the latter. This is how the teen years work.

 

 

 

William Gibson and the art of the cyberlife

 

Ask anybody who’s read William Gibson to describe him, and the perceptions pile up: Supercool literary prophet of cyberspace, new technology, murky conspiracy. His last book, Pattern Recognition, was full of cool surfaces, ruminations on the seductiveness of advertising, and the unease of living in the wake of 9/11.

And then you get a book like Spook Country, the paperback release of which is now sending Gibson to stops around the country, including an appearance in Lexington on June 13. Spook Country has the technology, of course — Gibson’s take on “locative art,” a sort of combo between virtual video reality and People magazine, makes you wonder if celebrity’s next horizon may be some sort of virtual-reality rendering that takes you inside the birthing chamber of the Jolie-Pitt clan, or along for a late-night careen with Britney — but it also assembles an unruly, oddly endearing cast of characters who would not be out of place in a Carl Hiaasen novel. Spook Country is what might happen if John le Carre decided to write a book with Jimmy Buffett after perusing the collected output of Wired magazine: rollicking tech-driven spycraft. A friend of Gibson’s told him that the book is his most comic novel. He’s right.

The driving force in all this is a character simply called “the old man,” described by Gibson as “a disgruntled old-school U.S. intelligence guy. He’s just not happy.” Also, Gibson notes, he’s probably crazy. He’s masterminding an operation to contaminate a fortune that’s probably being funneled from the United States into something godawful. He doesn’t want the money. He just wants to make sure it gets a touch of the old glow-in-the-dark before it wanders off to whatever nefarious purpose he’s pretty sure it will wind up servicing. The genius of Spook Country lies in its ability to convince you that this is not such a bad thing.

Also along for Spook Country is a broke has-been rock star who think she’s a journalist, but is really getting played by a stratospherically rich spy hobbyist; a dim but hateful spy who enslaves a drug-addled translator; and a young Cuban-Chinese tough who’s caught up in something that seems like the spy version of “the force” in “Star Wars.” (Cynics have noted that the wannabe journalist doesn’t write a single word over the course of the book. In her defense, it must be noted that the note-taking, interviews, writing and fact-checking process is often exactly as enthralling as changing a cat litter box 247 times in a row: It gets done, but do you really need to hear about how many quarts of Lysol are sacrificed in the process?)

It’s Milgrim, the druggy translator who’s hijacked into providing translation services for the dull side, who really steals the book. And, as Gibson notes, Milgrim is a character who simply wandered in. He was writing a chapter in which Brown, the humorless kidnapper, sets a bug in the apartment of Cuban-Chinese spy Tito. The action had to be observed by some nameless, faceless character: “By the time I’d written the chapter I had Milgrim. … He very quickly assumed his own peculiar dimensions in spite of me. That’s what I most enjoy about writing fiction, when that happens. … He sort of forced himself on me.”

Milgrim is, incidentally, not named after landmark psychology researcher Stanley Milgram, who showed the world how quickly people will wander into barbarous behavior when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Milgrim is, Gibson says, a common name in Virginia, where he grew up. As a character, Milgrim is a cypher, and yet the kind of endearing cipher who becomes attached to a crackpot religion book he finds in the pocket of a coat he stole and prefers a Toyota Corolla for purposes of crouching unseen.

There’s a lot of attention in Spook Country to how you might contaminate hundred-dollar bills — defined by Gibson as “the international currency of bad sh-t.” But there’s also speculation on what how the next frontier in art may be: self-guided tours of sites in which are erected digital “images” of, say, River Phoenix dying outside the Viper Room. There’s a magnetic levitating bed. There are pretentious hotels, big money and a rather detailed description of the distinctions between private planes. Should you ever happen unexpectedly upon a few ten million dollar piles, you’ll want to know these things.

Spook Country

: It’s the United States, and parts of Canada, but it’s also a broader territory. It’s where Jay Gatsby and Daisy may have wound up if they wandered into a starstruck Internet era: The boundaries aren’t clear, and you’re not really sure where anybody’s loyalties lie. Still, there’s plenty of money, and everybody’s charging around using the latest technology to be committed to something, and they’re all pretty sure they’re right.

 

William Gibson, author of Spook Country:

–On his previous books: “I don’t re-read my previous work unless for some reason I absolutely have to. … If I were a 12-year-old reading Neuromancer, my first novel, I’m sure I would get 20 pages into it and decide that the mystery is, where are all the cell phones? Or, why has the Soviet Union returned?

–On why it’s impossible to predict the future with “futuristic” novels: “Novels with imaginary futures are never about the future in any way. They’re always about the day in which they were written.”

–On his next book: “I always allow myself the luxury of having no idea what it might be until I have the blank screen in front of me.”

–What has Gibson recently read? He’s taken with two very different books: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “my absolute favorite of the past year or so,” and Halting State, by Charles Stross, which he calls “an amazing piece of science fiction.” Gibson says he only wants to read “science fiction that couldn’t have been written 10 years ago.”

–Does anything bother him about the Internet? Not really: “I’m more concerned with various corporate and governmental efforts to bring it under control than I am with what people are actually doing with it. … It’s an emergent technology, and social change is almost exclusively driven by emergent technologies. … either directly or indirectly. It’s emerging, and it’s changing what we do, and we change before we have a chance to decide whether to change.”

 

IF YOU GO:

William Gibson will discuss and sign Spook Country on June 13 at 7 p.m. at Lexington’s Joseph-Beth Booksellers.

Big fun for summer readers: the original Time magazine reviews …

of its 100 favorite books of the 20th century: http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

I wandered there because while trying to figure out what I wanted to talk to William Gibson about in a phone interview on Wednesday, my wind wandered to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which for some reason I developed an urge to re-read this very afternoon while trying to figure out Gibson’s bio, which the publicist said included a stint in Lexington but apparently only goes as far as Virginia. Anyway, having just finished Gibson’s Spook Country, I seemed to have been primed for the Lessing novel appearing like a shimmering oasis of even more Complicated Literature to re-read ASAP, leading me to Google — the great refuge of those having a trying afternoon at work — and finally to Time’s 1962 review of Lessing’s book, which includes this gem:

“She succeeds in creating a remarkable heroine (possibly her alter ego) who somehow manages believably to combine the qualities of Kitty Foyle, Arthur Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Got all those cultural touchstone references down, folks? Go ahead, look them up: We’ll wait. Today I guess we’d pony up Bridget Jones, James Frey and Oprah for an equally awkward mental picture, one that’s pretty much guaranteed to send you running away from your keyboard and refusing to even visit amazon.com for an entire week. In future, when I have a need to keep a straight face and slightly puzzled expression, I will revisit that sentence: Kitty Foyle! Arthur Koestler!

And if you liked that review, try the original review of The Great Gatsby, which reads like somebody’s gin-encrusted night terror.

 

 

Cherise the niece by J.K. Benton: subversive kids’ lit for adults, and more

You sort of expect Charles Addams-esque humor from the creator of the Its Happy Bunny series. And, in Cherise the niece by J.K. Benton (Plume Original, $!0), you get it.

Cherise is a Wednesday Addams clone of an orphan who spends the book dispatching her many aunts:

Auntie Rose loved her garden

Though Cherise despised it.

But together, one Wednesday

They both fertilized it.

The accompany line drawing is of little Cherise wielding a shovel with which to dig an environmentally-appropiate final resting place for the latest of her aunts to meet a gruesome end.

Yes, it’s probably not worth $10, but it’s a fun if minor giggle on a Friday afternoon in which it seems the best-seller list is dominated by true-life tales from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints: Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall with Lisa Pulitzer and When Men Became Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear and the Women Who Fought Back by Stephen Singular, which has a publication date of June 3.

Grim stuff all, although I have to give credit to Elissa Wall’s book, which I’m now reading: If Wall had any hand in the actual writing of this book, she has a future beyond the tell-all. Still, if I were picking up a nonfiction religious tragedy right now, I’d rather read Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.