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The story is that Will Eisner was the first person to really try to tell a literary story using both words and pictures. I’m not certain that’s true, but his comic efforts do seem to stand apart from the typical superhero clichés, and also have little in common with the underground Comix of Crumb and the like.
The four loosely connected stories in A Contract with God do read like short stories more than comi
cs. The linking device is an apartment building on Dropsie Avenue, an old style Jewish tenement in New York. It very well may be the location, but I was reminded of prose fiction by Saul Bellow and Isaac Singer as I made my way through the collection. Yet, Eisner’s characterization and writing fall far short of these masters, making his stories seem a pale imitation. In fact, I was reminded quite often of Anzia Yezierska’s work.
The title story is presented first, and though effectively rendered, the ending is a predictable one. Losing everything just when you’ve gained it all back is a worn plot device. The final story involves a group of city people going to stay at the same resort for the summer, and also is full of stock characters that provide little emotional resonance. In fact, one gets the odd feeling that the fifteen-year-old boy who loses his virginity is in some way a character representing Eisner himself.
Quite haunting was the tale of the building’s superintendent, an older man who is somewhat of a sexual deviant. He goes everywhere with his faithful dog, his only true companion in the world. He is tricked by a wily ten-year-old girl into giving her a dime so he can see up her gown, only to have the girl poison his dog and steal all of his money. Though horribly wronged, bystanders of course side with the girl and the superintendent commits suicide because he can’t stand the loss of everything he has. Even a full day later, this story still moves me.
Where Eisner really shines is in his ability to set a mood with his drawing. As the mourning rabbi walks through the rain and breaks his contract with God, such simple images are used to capture his grief. And the presentation of the characters artistically in the final story is well rendered, though it still fails to elevate them from merely a stock status.
Eisner is considered to be the father of the graphic novel, and this collection, his first real attempt, is definitely worth your consideration. In cases like this I wonder if learning about the inventor of groundbreaking effects so long after those effects are commonplace causes us as readers to devalue it in some way, or maybe merely are unable to separate ourselves from what we already know. Definitely something to look for in the future.
I live in one of the bigger state capitals around, and I work downtown near both the Capitol and City Hall. So I have firsthand knowledge of how many people it actually takes to run these governments: not just the elected, but also all the people that assist them and help run the infrastructure. I’d have to conservative say that several thousand people are needed each day just to run the upper echelons of the bureaucracy.
I say this because the new Coalition of Planets is one of the main plot points in Kobayashi Maru by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels. The Coalition is made up of four planets, Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andor, each with pop
ulations upwards of a several billion if not more. The state of Texas needs several thousand in just the top positions; the Coalition of Planets apparently only needs about fourteen. And I could go into about a hundred other reasons why this governmental body makes absolutely no practical sense, like why everyone else has an ambassador but Earth uses its Prime Minister for the same role, but what’s the point?
Politics makes for good stories; if you don’t believe me, turn on a freaking television. For most of the existence of Star Trek, the Federation government has been shown as some sort of monolithic body where everything works right and there is little dissension between members. That’s moronic, but beside the point here. The Coalition consists of four planets, none of whom trust each other, some of which outright hate each other. Political tension at the time of war should be the cornerstone of this post-Enterprise series. Even at such a small stage, the players should be wide-ranging with varying agendas. Maybe it’s impossible to show all of this, but rather than just giving us the viewpoint of two people from Earth, maybe we could have at least some sense of the political consequences Samuels would have on his own planet: we get none in this book.
The plot of the novel works well enough, I suppose. Most of the elements seemed to function to set the stage for next year’s novel by Martin on the Romulan War. And to a large extent this worked for me; though I have been dissatisfied with their work over the last few books, I am interested to see where the story goes from here. However, I hope the writing gets better. The prose is horrible, almost painful to read at times. Here’s an example:
After Archer signed off with Gardner and returned to the bridge, the Starfleet Academy cadets' code for imponderable mysteries kept swirling through his mind.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Mentally translating those time-honored military placeholders into less polite nonmilitary parlance, he thought, What. The. Fuck.
Why would he think something and then think the explanation. It’s not as though third-person limited perspective is something hard to master, yet it seems beyond the authors at times. In fact, the novel reads as though it is a slightly polished rough draft. I can’t imagine that this book got much editorial oversight, something that is becoming hard to ignore as at least half of the fiction line is overseen by an seemingly incompetent editor.
Apparently the passage quoted above is the first use of the word ‘fuck’ in a ST book. You know, if I were in some of these insane situations, I'd curse a hell of a lot more than they do. It was a laugh line, but Data’s ‘Shit!’ in Generations might have been the only believable part of that movie.
Martin & Mangels also have the annoying habit of name-dropping other authors and editors into the narrative for no reason. It’s distracting and causes me to lose my suspension of disbelief. And at one point the Vulcans provide a ship with some advanced parts to help it go faster. One of those parts: the flux capacitor. Give me a fucking break.
At least the characterization of Archer was done well. It’s hard to believe anyone would act that way, but it was how the captain was played in all of seasons three and four. I didn't buy it then, nor do I now, but at least it's consistent.
Kobayashi Maru is a mediocre Star Trek novel, but it’s not unreadable. You know, I started to write merely an unfavorable review and it turned into an evisceration. Let’s just hope the Romulan War book is somewhat better, though it's hard to imagine how it couldn't be.
Following the recent advice of my good friend Allyn Gibson, there is going to be a lot more content here in the coming months. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I burn through a lot of books. Rather than making a list at the end of each month with a couple of sentences on each, I am now trying to write a a few hundred words when I finish one. If current trends hold up, that should equal four to five posts a week, a number that will be supplemented with posts on other things as well.
That said, I like the round-up every month, so I likely will provide a quick list with links to the commentary. Anyway, in September I finished 18 books and graphic novels:
Check back for frequent updates throughout the month.
What I find so interesting about George Saunders is that while everyone seems to love his fiction, no one wants to sit down and read a bunch of it in a row. For instance, I only managed to make it through his latest collection of short fiction on my fourth attempt. The idea of delivery in such an instance makes me wonder why it so neglected in literary criticism; perhaps the flagging sales of short story collections can be attributed to this notion that reader
s don’t want to read eleven in a row.
His third collection of short fiction, In Persuasion Nation, is typical of the satire on our media-obsessed, consumer-driven culture. And though his work seems to be a bit absurdist, maybe a little too unusual for the average reader, it seems to work because even in some of the oddest stories he manages to hit an emotional core that is the envy of more traditional authors.
The stories in this collection seemed to work best when they were more traditional. For example, ‘The Red Bow’ presents the grief of a father and community over the mauling death of a little girl. Another story deals with the gambling impulse that leads a blue-collar worker to squander his opportunities to provide a Christmas for his family. Though the narrative voice is obviously Saunders with the slight nod towards absurdity, the realistic settings give the work a resonance that the more outlandish situations seem to lack.
The more absurdist the stories get the more a reader can rely on a biting satire of consumer culture. In ‘Jon,’ orphans are sold to a marketing group that uses them to test new products. Unfortunately, the story fails to move as the title character never really connects with the reader. In the title story, bands of advertising characters fight each other for dominance, the lesson being that all of life exists to promote some product or service and defying such a fact is impossible. ‘Comm Comm’ managed to evoke a sense of the Saunders at work in Civilwarland in Bad Decline (a book I enjoyed greatly), something none of the other stories managed to do.
In Persuasion Nation is an interesting collection and worth a look if you enjoy his essays in The New Yorker or are a fan of satire. But it is best approached intermittently; reading the stories consecutively will burn you out in a hurry.
Since Star Trek novelists have been spewing out fanwank for years (pun intended), they might like to take a look at Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck to see how it is done correctly. Rosa gathered together all the references to Scrooge’s history in Carl Barks’s work, and I mean all of them, and found a way to use every bit in a twelve issue series taking the reader from Scrooge’s humble beginnings in Scotland as a shoeshine boy to his state of reclusion in Duckburg that immediately predates the Barks comics. It is very intelligently done, and quite enjoyable for even the adult who has a fond memory of the cartoon and of old Disney comics.
For me they all sat on a spinning rack down on the first floor of the library my mother worked in for a while, and since they were Disney my grandmother never put up too much of an objection to me bringing home a stack. Thus began my love of comics. But that of course, is another story.
Rosa did some other historical stories with Scrooge, both before and after his previous volume was published, and these tales are compiled in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion. Scrooge’s relationship with Glittering Goldie is much more established in two very good stories, giving chronologically later events in Barks’s work more resonance. And Scrooge meets Teddy Roosevelt again, as the first president to leave the country while in office teams up with the richest duck in the world to foil a revolution in Panama.
But there are misfires as well. Magica de Spell goes back in time to steal Scrooge’s lucky #1 dime before he gets it, only to realize that if he doesn’t get it himself then it won’t be the dime she wants. Yawn. Scrooge also apparently made a trip to sell cattle in Java only to witness the eruption of Krakatoa, in a story that was about eight pages too long.
A more slightly mixed tale is that of Scrooge and Buffalo Bill Cody’s gang team up to chase down the Dalton Boys. The whole thing is pretty contrived, which Rosa is known for though he overindulged this time, but t had all the beats of a quality DuckTales comic, especially with the integration of a famous historical character that took me by surprise.
A nice collection, though nowhere near the quality of Rosa’s first. That said, if you sample and enjoy the original, the Companion is probably worth checking out.
How rare is a truly unreliable narrator? I hadn’t really considered the question before reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works last month, though now I wonder why I never thought of it before. The author almost always informs the reader through the perspective of another character how he/she should read a particular narrative. The easiest example is when a dog is the narrator and mistakes a car for a mechanical horse or something.
That’s why Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances is such an interesting first novel, especially considering this is not the sort of material usually mined by a young female debut novelist. Dr. Leo Liebenstein opens the narrative with, ‘Last December a woman entered my apartment that looked exactly like my wife.’ From this point forward we follow Leo as he searches for answers to who this impostor is, and how to reconcile all the strange events that seem to be occurring all around him.
Galchen provides Leo with a dispassionate take on the whole adventure, oftentimes separated from any empathy towards others. While his wife is bereft at his inability to accept that she is who she says she is, he maintains a distance that keeps his narration reliably unreliable, yet her dialogue allows the reader to achieve the empathy he is lacking. This difficult combination is skillfully done, and is the only reason I would recommend that one pick up the novel.
The narrative probably could have been cut a bit; at times I was kind of bored with the pace. The book also contains a character named Tzvi Gal-Chen, a fellow with the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and a sort of lynchpin for analyzing the novel. Rivka Galchen’s father was named Tzvi, and was a meteorologist as well, yet there exists no such body as the Royal Academy of Meteorology. (At least not as depicted.) But rather than tickle me with the blur between fiction/nonfiction like David Benioff’s recent novel did, it annoyed me. I am unable to divine why such a choice was made, and therefore it glares at me as a mistake by the author.
And while I feel Atmospheric Disturbances had some miscues, I truly enjoyed the legitimate unreliable narration that is so rare. It is worth looking into, if only for the devices and not the story.
cs. The linking device is an apartment building on Dropsie Avenue, an old style Jewish tenement in New York. It very well may be the location, but I was reminded of prose fiction by Saul Bellow and Isaac Singer as I made my way through the collection. Yet, Eisner’s characterization and writing fall far short of these masters, making his stories seem a pale imitation. In fact, I was reminded quite often of Anzia Yezierska’s work.
