Soooooo....2012 was a shitty year for books... for me. I do believe that I am getting old and it is just so hard to get any serious reading done. I get a little done up in Michigan but for the rest of the year I try and read before I go to bed and that dog is no longer hunting. I read the Post Dispatch every morning (I like to wrap fish in it later), I try and read the Wall Street Journal everyday so I can their reasoned, non agendaized, fair and balanced editorial content (not) and that fucking New Yorker tends to arrive on most weeks and along with what didnt get read earlier from the Journal that day seems to leave me very little time for books. Which makes me sad.
I love books. I am prideful of my predigious reading. I am arrogant and unlikable about it and dismissive of people who don’t read fiction. I am a bibliophole asshole. Which is bad, but it is worse now. This was my first year for a Kindle. I read “The Hunger Games”, Grishams newest (than it was “The Litigator”, a great book called “The Gun” and the early chapters of an upcoming book by our own David Kowert. But the Kindle does not satisfy. The Kindle feels to me like I imagine Methadon feels to a Heroin addict. It fills a need but it does not satisfy the beast like riding the horse and holding a nice hard back novel in your hands with a dusk jacket and brief author biography. So i have been buying books again and not reading them because...truth to be told.... I can no longer stay awake. On the shelf as ladies in waiting I am already dealing with a formidable stack of:
Neil Young: “Waging Heavy Peace”
Will Self: “Umbrella”
Jonathan Tropper: “One Last Thing Before I go”
Richard Russo: “Elsewhere”
David Foster Wallace: “Both Fless and Not”
David Byrne: “How Music Works”
And I despair for the future. I gave up on several books this year including Michael Chabon’s well reviewed “Telegraph Avenue” and this fills me with self loathing (and I don’t need more of that).
Which brings me to Tom Wolfe’s new book. Wolfe seems like an ass. His foppish pictures dressed as a white haired dandy make me kind of queasy and the length of his books barks of a self indulgence that we have not seen on display since Clinton’s second term but damn. The man can write. This book fits in nicely with his last three, “Binfire of the Vanities”, “A Man In Full” and “I am Charlotte Simmons”. They are all slices of time and place but honestly the characters never change but they are still fun to read.
His characters are not caricatures, so much as they are caricatures of caricatures. Every predictable, bigotted, small minded, over generalization about a type of person is drilled down on relentlessly and satisfyingly mercilessly. Wolfe has a strong eye for our desire as a country to classify, seperate, sterotype and move on. His characters never surprise, they never shock, they never show much more than a glimmer of self knowledge but they all move their their environments like mindless sharks, reverting to type and devouring and destroying in their way.
The subject this time is Miami and South Beach and from an outsiders perspective he hits it pitch perfect. A city of immigrants profoundly uncomfortable with itself with every group feeling threatened and victimized now matter how dominant and in control they are. The stage is set with a Cuban water patrol cop who rescues a guy trying to get a foot on dry land so he can legally emigrate from Cuba. The recue is heroic and brave and makes him a goat in his community and he becomes immediately ostracized and through most of the novel continues to spin down as fate keeps zeroing in on him again and again. He loses his beautiful Cuban girlfriend to a sex therapist, social climbing doctor. We get introduced to the Editor of the Miami Herald and Miami Art scene which might or might not have just been mightily swindeled by a Russian oligarch.
What amazes me is how easy it is to read and how fun it is to read. Lots of heavy handed social commentary but but his narratives and his dialogue keep you turning the page and it just makes for a good read. Especially in the snow. So I thank Wolfe for giving me this. I read a 700 page gook like it was a John Grisham 320 pager and in the end was much more satisfied because unlike Grisham, Wolfe knows how to end a story. So I recommend this book, and this author, though I think if I met him in a bar I would want to punch him. read it and get lost for a while.
7 ½ Slingers on the Diner Review 10 Scale.
I love books. I am prideful of my predigious reading. I am arrogant and unlikable about it and dismissive of people who don’t read fiction. I am a bibliophole asshole. Which is bad, but it is worse now. This was my first year for a Kindle. I read “The Hunger Games”, Grishams newest (than it was “The Litigator”, a great book called “The Gun” and the early chapters of an upcoming book by our own David Kowert. But the Kindle does not satisfy. The Kindle feels to me like I imagine Methadon feels to a Heroin addict. It fills a need but it does not satisfy the beast like riding the horse and holding a nice hard back novel in your hands with a dusk jacket and brief author biography. So i have been buying books again and not reading them because...truth to be told.... I can no longer stay awake. On the shelf as ladies in waiting I am already dealing with a formidable stack of:
Neil Young: “Waging Heavy Peace”
Will Self: “Umbrella”
Jonathan Tropper: “One Last Thing Before I go”
Richard Russo: “Elsewhere”
David Foster Wallace: “Both Fless and Not”
David Byrne: “How Music Works”
And I despair for the future. I gave up on several books this year including Michael Chabon’s well reviewed “Telegraph Avenue” and this fills me with self loathing (and I don’t need more of that).
Which brings me to Tom Wolfe’s new book. Wolfe seems like an ass. His foppish pictures dressed as a white haired dandy make me kind of queasy and the length of his books barks of a self indulgence that we have not seen on display since Clinton’s second term but damn. The man can write. This book fits in nicely with his last three, “Binfire of the Vanities”, “A Man In Full” and “I am Charlotte Simmons”. They are all slices of time and place but honestly the characters never change but they are still fun to read.His characters are not caricatures, so much as they are caricatures of caricatures. Every predictable, bigotted, small minded, over generalization about a type of person is drilled down on relentlessly and satisfyingly mercilessly. Wolfe has a strong eye for our desire as a country to classify, seperate, sterotype and move on. His characters never surprise, they never shock, they never show much more than a glimmer of self knowledge but they all move their their environments like mindless sharks, reverting to type and devouring and destroying in their way.
The subject this time is Miami and South Beach and from an outsiders perspective he hits it pitch perfect. A city of immigrants profoundly uncomfortable with itself with every group feeling threatened and victimized now matter how dominant and in control they are. The stage is set with a Cuban water patrol cop who rescues a guy trying to get a foot on dry land so he can legally emigrate from Cuba. The recue is heroic and brave and makes him a goat in his community and he becomes immediately ostracized and through most of the novel continues to spin down as fate keeps zeroing in on him again and again. He loses his beautiful Cuban girlfriend to a sex therapist, social climbing doctor. We get introduced to the Editor of the Miami Herald and Miami Art scene which might or might not have just been mightily swindeled by a Russian oligarch.
What amazes me is how easy it is to read and how fun it is to read. Lots of heavy handed social commentary but but his narratives and his dialogue keep you turning the page and it just makes for a good read. Especially in the snow. So I thank Wolfe for giving me this. I read a 700 page gook like it was a John Grisham 320 pager and in the end was much more satisfied because unlike Grisham, Wolfe knows how to end a story. So I recommend this book, and this author, though I think if I met him in a bar I would want to punch him. read it and get lost for a while.
7 ½ Slingers on the Diner Review 10 Scale.
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