Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery

Brian Francis Slattery’s debut novel, Spaceman Blues, begins with the disappearance of Manuel Gonzalez, the boyfriend of Wendell Apogee. Wendell isn’t willing to accept that Manuel is actually dead, and knowing that he has contacts with a whole assortment of random people sends him off to find his whereabouts. Of course, it’s not that easy, and long the way he encounters an underground civilization, alien assassins, and weird offshoot of the Catholic Church.

Slattery spreads the narrative over a fairly diverse cast, and the connections between the characters never seem too strained. Every sentence is packed with information, and the author’s style involves an absence of verbs that contributes to this. Oddly enough, the affectation works pretty well, and though there are times during the narrative when the reader is quite lost as to what is happening, by the resolution everything makes perfect sense.

There are a lot of mythological parallels in the novel. For one, Wendell’s descent into the underground civilization in order to return with his lost love comes straight from Orpheus, but the progression of the story never goes beyond this and one wonders of the parallel was unintentional. The alien assassins are called the Four Horsemen, which fits well with the apocalyptic tone of the Catholic sect. Though the narrative ends before any apocalypse can come to be or be averted, this allusion to the Bible actually works quite well.

That lack of conclusion is likely to turn off many readers, but as Slattery accepts some of the genre conventions of science fiction, he also maintains a more literary sensibility that allows him to end the narrative without playing out every note. Not in the sense that there will be a sequel, but that when Wendell’s arc is finished, the novel concludes; the novel’s about Wendell, not the world facing alien invaders. The aforementioned stylistic devices Slattery uses also can be distracting, especially at the novel’s opening when one may feel as though they just can’t ‘get into’ the narrative.

In all, I found Spaceman Blues to be fairly enjoyable, especially because unlike so much of genre fiction, this was constructed as an exploration of characters rather than a focus on plot. With a new novel about the US after a complete economic collapse that leads to chaos, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Slattery’s name mentioned in the future among such genre-defying authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

Dennis Lehane's Coronado

After seeing his name appear time and time again as one of the best mystery writers, I finally sat down with Dennis Lehane’s collection Coronado. I expected to like it, seeing as I enjoyed the movie Mystic River that is based on one of his novels, and like any collection some of the stories worked better than others. But what I was enamored with is the eponymous play and the story it was based on.

Earlier this year when studying Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, I learned that the play had its origin with a short story he had written several years earlier. Though I didn’t have much time to really ponder the connection, I did read the story and it is something I would like to get back to one day. In ‘Until Gwen,’ Lehane tells the story of a young man who has just been released from prison. He is picked up by his criminal father, one of the most reprehensible and psychopathic characters I’ve ever encountered, who is interested to find where his son hid a large diamond that they stole. Told in second person, the story is paced quite well and is a fascinating study of a young man who has been betrayed by the father who has twisted his life.

‘Coronado’ is the story translated into a two-act play. It begins in a bar with the father and son having a very similar discussion as they do at the start of the story. Yet in the bar are two other couples, seemingly disconnected: one involves a middle aged woman who is meeting her psychiatrist for a drink, the other a young woman and man who plot to kill the woman’s husband so they can be together. As the play progresses, we realize slowly that each of these couples’ stories relate much more closely than we were lead to believe at the start, and rather than occurring somewhat simultaneously, the occur spread out over a great length of time, albeit in the same bar.

I suppose what I find so delightful about this play is the way he truly changes the way the narrative works to suit the different medium. Too often I have seen plays directly translated to television, or novels like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men that are nearly direct adaptations of the prose. It just ever seems to work that well, though I guess Steinbeck did okay. But different mediums require a different method of storytelling; Lehane captures the essence of his very good story, yet translates and expands it to work well on a stage.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a play likely to be performed here anytime soon. After reading the script, I would like to see how a director and stage designer would approach the first act, how the different tables in the bar would be arranged. However, these concerns not applicable to a review of the material here.

The other four stories mostly work, especially the opening novella ‘Running Out of Dog.’ The only one to come up short in the Kafkaesque ‘ICU,’ that seems more an exercise in imitating the Austrian than a successful attempt at a story. But that shouldn’t top you from reading this collection if you are interested in dipping a toe into Lehane’s work. I’ll likely be picking up one of his novels in the near future.

Future of the Newspaper Comic Strip

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that the future of the newspaper comic strip is in doubt. Newspaper circulation has been on the decline for some time, while the primary advertisers in newspapers, department stores and car dealerships, aren’t exactly having banner years. Last year I did a bit of research and wrote a paper about succeeding as an independent creator of comics by distributing them online: the chances of making enough to live even sparsely aren’t good.

Yesterday’s New York Times had an interesting article in the business section about the effects of declining newspaper sales on comic distributors and creators. Universal Feature Syndicate, whose comics include ‘Peanuts’ and ‘Dilbert’, has recently released all its archives online for free. Apparently some revenue is drawn from advertising on the site, but it primarily is intended to introduce comics to a new audience.

So the distribution plan for the future includes mobile devices like the iPhone. Though I believe there are some drawbacks to this, most notably the reduced screen size that might cause readers to view panel separately rather than as a whole, this has potential. Yet the ability to raise revenue with such a project is not addressed in the article. In addition, though I am skeptical of the influence of the Kindle, especially as I have never seen one in real life, it wouldn’t be hard to envision that newspapers making the transition to such a platform might include comics as part of their offerings.

Learning more and more about the rhetoric of digital media has driven home the fact that few readers on the web are willing to pay for access to content (that is non-pornographic, I guess). A couple of years ago the Times was forced to scratch their Times Select program that restricted access to columns by staff columnists and other content. Slate found itself unable to survive with a subscription model, and now gives away all its content for free. While signing up to receive a comic like ‘Pearls Before Swine’ on your cell phone would probably be free and carry an advertisement with it, could that possibly generate enough revenue to keep the syndicate model viable?

My research showed that the only way for independent creators to earn money from their sites was to give away the content and then sell products like t-shirts and postcards. (There has been some success with donation drives as well.) So it would seem that a lot of merchandise would need to bring in the revenue that the syndicate needs. This isn’t impossible, especially when you can market comics geared to wards younger readers into shirts and bumper stickers that could be sold at places like Hot Topic. Yet one might ask if it is this easy then why aren’t syndicates doing this now.’

I would submit that the syndicate model is flawed. For one thing, they insist on owning the property, and though creators are usually compensated fairly, their lack of ownership is a real sticking point for many of them. Relinquishing some of the control might be in their best interests. The need for new comics with a greater appeal to younger audiences is an immediate concern. No one I know gets a kick out of Dagwood making giant sandwiches. Perhaps by cutting deals with independent creators to distribute their content while letting them retain ownership would be a shrewd move for both parties.

All this said, it is hard to envision now how the comic strip business model will survive the change from the print medium into the digital one. Yet giving away the content for free has helped quite a bit. Since we haven’t gotten the paper regularly for several years, I have only been introduced to new comics like ‘Frazz’ and ‘Sheldon’ through the blogs of friends and later feeds of my own. The topic has captured my fascination and charting the progress of the changing distribution designs will be something I keep a close watch on.

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

Though I didn’t feel that Benjamin Black’s first novel Christine Falls worked as well as most people did, he was successful in capturing a certain noir atmosphere of 1950s Ireland that intrigued me enough to follow up with The Silver Swan. Black, of course, is the literary alter ego of John Banville, widely regarded as one of the best current writers in the English language; shamefully, this is something I can’t vouch for as I’ve never read anything published under his own name.

The Silver Swan picks up tow years after the conclusion of Christine Falls, and medical examiner Quirke is approached by an old university classmate, whom he hardly remembers. Over coffee and tea, the former schoolmate tells Quirke that his wife has been discovered as a suicide, drowned in Dublin Bay. He implores the pathologist to see that she isn't subjected to a forensic dissection, as the law requires. Quirke agrees, but no sooner does the body pass into his custody than he notices a needle mark on the arm and begins to slice his way to the truth, which is that the woman didn't drown. As Quirke unravels her deceptive past, the trail leads to a fashionable beauty salon called the Silver Swan that the dead woman once ran, to a sinister Englishman and to an intricate web of deceit and blackmail in which the doctor's own daughter, distant and bitter, appears to be heavily involved. Best of all, everything builds to a credible and strangely satisfying conclusion.

Two things make this novel superior to its predecessor: the highly developed character of Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe, and the relatively limited scope of the conspiracy that is uncovered. In an interview at The Elegant Variation, Black claims his agent thinks he’s in love with Phoebe, and her focus as a central character whose perspective informs much of the story would bear this out. I would be unsurprised if she were more dominant in the next novel in the series than her father.

The conspiracy in Christine Falls involving both Quirke’s adopted father and father in law, not to mention the larger Catholic church in both New England and Ireland, stretched the credibility of the mystery. With a relatively smaller scale of mystery in this novel, one enjoys it because it seems so much less grandiose. In fact, I often was reminded of the plot in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as I read along; consequential, but not earth shattering.

I mused a couple of months ago about the choice of a pen name for these noir mysteries, concluding that it was fun for Banville and that was reason enough to explain it. But after reading Jim Ruland’s very good interview at TEV, it almost seems like Black/Banville are not as interchangeable as all that. In fact, one isn’t exactly sure who the interviewee is. I’ll be excited to read more about Quirke sometime in the future, but for now perhaps I should actually pick up my copy of Banville’s The Sea.

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize, passed away on Wednesday. He revolutionized the way stage dialogue is used, something obvious when the terms ‘Pinteresque’ and ‘the Pinter Pause’ come up time and time again as one studies contemporary drama. His work influenced not only later playwrights like David Mamet and Sam Shepard, but also the way a young man in Austin, Texas, would feel about the power of drama.

Though in many of Pinter’s scenes, there is little of consequence transmitted verbally, labeling such pieces as uncommunicative completely misses the point. Pinter is far from wanting to say that language is incapable of establishing true communication between human beings, but merely draws our attention to the fact that human beings rarely make use of language for that purpose, as least so far as spoken communication is concerned. People tend to act not so much logically as emotionally through language, and the tone of voice, the emotional color of the words is often far more significant than their exact definitional meanings. For example, the verbal outburst of one persona against another is basically an act of aggression, an assault by verbal blows in which the violence of the emotion behind the words is far more important than their content. What matters most in oral communication through words is more what people are doing to each other through it rather than the conceptual content of what they are saying.

Thus in drama, dialogue is ultimately a form of action. And Pinter found a way to insert the silence into his poetry. The silences in his plays are written into the text, are a part of the dialogue, and are wielded against other characters. If a line of Shakespeare’s verse is like an atom, full of infinite energy if we can just find a way to split it open, then perhaps the same can be said for the silence in Pinter’s plays. They derive their power for suggesting possible answers to questions that the audience thinks could be said, then subverting that expectation with a spoken line that seems less than meaningful. The power in these exchanges derives from the silence, not from what is spoken.

I’ve written several papers about Pinter, but have been most influenced by an essay concerning radio drama by Mamet. His claim is that one could get just as much out of Shakespeare listening to a radio broadcast as one could receive at a staged version because all the power is packed into the language. Yet I imagine that Pinter’s plays could be just as well observed the same way. The power isn’t in the staging at all. It’s the silences that not only we hear, but the characters hear as well. As a person who has written a bit of drama and likely will return to that again, this aspect of Pinter’s style literally changed the way I approach my own work as well as they way I critique the work of others.

Harold Pinter was a revolutionary playwright, taking the Absurdist nature of Samuel Beckett and placing it amongst lovers or a family. His best work is probably The Homecoming, but I’ve found one can’t really go wrong with him. I urge any of you to make an effort to see one of his plays and to find Peter Hall’s BBC version of The Homecoming. Pinter will truly be missed.

Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Up until now I’d only read short works by Harvey Pekar, a form that is suited to his style though lacks the ability to do any real in depth character work. In The Quitter, he pairs with artist Dean Haspiel to create a moving and effective coming of age story. In a sense the book works more like a novel, even though it is nonfiction, for the arc of the story is in a very real sense the origin story of Pekar’s American Splendor persona.

Since he covered about the entire time he worked for the federal government in American Splendor, Pekar begins this tale during his boyhood and takes us through to his hiring at the infamous job shown in his previous work. His parents were Polish immigrants who came to Cleveland in the 1920s, buying a small corner grocery and struggling to make ends meet. Harvey was born in America, and the culture divide between he and his parents is a constant source of problems. Harvey doesn’t get along with most of the kids in his mostly black neighborhood, frequently fighting. Yet his mother, a Communist sympathizer, tells him that blacks and Jews needed to get along to succeed, an interesting fact that makes his later intellectual development fairly interesting.

Harvey was a perfectionist who, if he considered his own efforts even slightly flawed, simply quit rather than let himself finish in second place. Haspiel presents Harvey's dilemmas in powerful split-screen shots, rendering Pekar's world in shades of black and grey. Unable to pass a math class, Pekar drops it. Not given a fair shake to play on the football team, he leaves that behind as well. He forgoes college because of his fear of math, then when attending later drops out when he gets a C on a geography test. Rather than buckling down and tackling his opposition, Pekar instead quits, carrying the shame of being less than a success with him forever. Anyone familiar with the angry tone in some of his earlier work can see where his personality really develops here.

But eventually Harvey discovers jazz, creating relationships with other fans and eventually writing reviews for magazines. He then becomes enamored with the comics of R. Crumb, and started writing his own, which of course continues to this day. In a sense, Harvey has found something he enjoys enough not to give up on. Hard work though it may be, it seems to have been tolerable because he was doing it as something he liked rather than trying to make a buck.

There is an emotional resonance in the book with which I identify greatly. Harvey felt like he was a smart but misunderstood young man who never was able to impress those who could have helped him out. In my eyes, he never had someone really encourage him and help him believe in himself. Haven’t we all felt that we could be more than we are now if someone had just given us a little boost when we were young?

The conclusion feels as though The Quitter will likely be Pekar’s last autobiographical work, but one wonders that if he was able to leave his childhood untapped for so long, couldn’t there be more than he is holding in reserve? I certainly hope so. His work has been instrumental in beginning to break comics away from the superhero dominance that has stifled the medium for so long.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

Always a big fan of time travel/alternate universe stories, I was bound to pick up Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine at some point. Believing it would be a lighthearted look at time travel, I was a bit surprised by how far my expectations were off, and how disappointing the book was.

Matt is a lab assistant at MIT in the near future who accidentally creates a time machine when building some sort of graviton spectrometer. Finding that the machine jumps forward and only forward in time in progressively longer interims, Matt decides to hop aboard himself and check it out. Feeling threatened at future stops, he continues to fling himself forward ever farther in time. Eventually, about 200 years after the story begins, he winds up in a sort of post-apocalyptic theocracy where he meets Martha, the obligatory eventual love interest. As they jumps take him father and farther ahead in time, the different earths he explores are fairly boring. For what is a short novel, it would have been nicer to get more a sense of these worlds before leaping to the next.

The theocracy I described takes place after the second coming of Jesus, and there are religious themes throughout the book. Unfortunately, the religious angle isn’t played up enough for my tastes, and the evolution of Martha’s character is fairly unbelievable when one considers that she has grown up in a sheltered world full of old time religion.

Haldeman relies on the standard third person narration here, but with the entire novel being told from Matt’s perspective, I wonder why he didn’t go the first person route. I think the humor would have worked better, and it just might have made things more exciting to experience them through his eyes rather than just being told through the narration. Perhaps this is just an inherent bias with me; I tend to prefer first person narration above all others.

Matt really wants to return home, so the basic quest is the search for a time machine that allows one to travel back in time. He keeps jumping to the future in order to find someone who can help him build one of it doesn’t exist already, and when he finally does discover a way back no real explanation besides ‘you don’t have the worldview to begin to understand the math’ is given. I’m not some big tech head who has to know how everything works, but why write a book about time travel and go light on the mechanics?

All in all, The Accidental Time Machine is a fair book that was more entertaining than not. I suppose my disappointment mainly stems from my wish that this would be a sort of comedic version of David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, probably the best time travel book I've read. However, it was nice to read a little more of one of the most respected SF writers. I may have to go with a more traditional military SF novel by him sometime next year.