Reads Like a Screen Play: Unholy Night

I enjoyed Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter and assumed his latest, Unholy Night, would be just as clever and original.  It isn't.  SG-S has rewritten the story of the three magi, turning them into criminals who happen to escape from jail after stripping the clothes off the three priests who come to console them the night before their scheduled execution.  Balthazar takes the lead, also known as the Ghost of Antioch, whose career began as a pickpocket, moved on to grave robber, and then to just out and out highwayman.  Gaspar and Melchior are interchangeable side kicks, notwithstanding one's prowess as a sword fighter.

And of course all the other New Testament folk make their appearances:  Herod, Pontius Pilate, Augustus Caesar, as well as JMJ on their flight to Egypt.  That escape is the most Indiana Jones of all:  not only do legions of Roman soldiers pop up continuously and relentlessly but the last "real" remaining magus whom Caesar sends to Herod raises the dead from their catacombs to attack the fleeing holy family.

If an author is going to fictionalize history or myth, do it big -- make the President a vampire.  As much as SG-S writes to make the story visual and fast paced, it is droll and predictable.  Nothing I would recommend.

Strained Relations, Strained Ending

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything by Lisa Scottoline before but I quickly read Come Home, her latest, this weekend. I love it when the library only gives me two weeks to read three books … what a motivator. 

When I got to the acknowledgments in the back of the book, the author explained that her theme was the ties of motherhood and mothering, even when the children are not biologically your own. The mother in this story is Jill, a part time pediatrician, who has one natural thirteen year old daughter and who is about to enter into her third marriage. (Her first husband and Megan’s father died; her second husband, William, was the father of two daughters who abruptly re-enter Jill’s life after William himself dies.) So much for serial marriages, broken homes and step children in crises in America.

The step daughters are now young women, still hostile about William and Jill’s divorce. The younger suspects her father was murdered and shows up on Jill’s doorstep, drunk and needy asking for help to find the killer. (Yes, I’ve fallen off my bucket list for 2012 and am back to mysteries … well, so is the book club this month too.) Jill’s fiancee, Sam, has no use for these unexpected family ties, and the story focuses on the angles, tensions and demands of adult versus dependent child “love.”

The story is best when everyone is angry and acting out. Jill is multi-tasking as fast as she can: trying to save an infant’s life at work, discover her second husband’s hidden life of crime, fending off phony FBI agents, ignoring each daughter in turn, depending on which “pot” is boiling. Her being frazzled and unfocused on what is most important makes her an unsympathetic character.

Scottoline then tidies up the ending with her alienated fiancee returning as a new age metro sexual welcoming a doubling of the family; her renegade daughter whom she reported missing to the police in at least three states was conveniently in a government protected safe house; her angriest stepdaughter finds love with a real FBI agent who was entrapping her father; and her biological daughter ends up like Pollyanna pushing her would be boyfriend into the school swimming pool after her photo-shops a nude picture of her across the Internet. Way too contrived. Yes, Scottoline can pull on your heartstrings and give you so many traits in her heroine that one or more might resonate with a female reader, but it is overloaded, too contemporary, and manipulating.

Catch my Drift

My younger son was appalled, appalled when he saw my latest library book on the dining room table:  Drift by Rachel Maddow.  He said he couldn't believe I was reading something by her.  Just to show you the generational problem I have, I told him I never heard of her before and that my review would be predictably tepid.  So I am assuming her television show is the typical glaringly liberal diatribe of all major network political commentators, so I was surprised to find several statements and positions in her book that I agreed with.

First of all, a discussion about the lack of declarations of war arises more often in our house than probably most others without a family member serving in Congress.  Maddow has researched Presidents and their advisers going back to LBJ through Barry to track the sure but steady transfer of war-making powers from the legislative branch to the executive.  This is no "conspiracy" piece of work ... it is simply a knitted together timeline of several major and minor decisions that have resulted in the public's disconnect from all things military, thus making "war" based on the expediency and expanded options of one person and not a deliberate body.

And now the specific arguments and observations Maddox makes that mark her as more of a strict constitutionalists than a hippie flower child:

"The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter.  Their great advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war.  With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it -- uncomfortably -- every second we were at war.  But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us -- of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happening -- war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state.  It never stops."

Not Up to a Full Semester of Flannery O'Connor

The blog list for 2012 just recorded my need to read A Good Man is Hard to Find. The book that came with that short story in it from the library was 1,220 onion skin pages of all Flannery's writings, including her personal letters. If this was an elective, I might have slogged through it all; but let's call it the equivalent of a pass/fail course. I read as much as I wanted and now the library won't renew it, so I'll call it a day, month, whatever.

Starting with A Good Man is Hard to Find. Obviously, I can't judge a book by its title. Shades of the 2011 Lust List lingers, making the good man I am looking for about 180 degrees opposite O'Connor's. Her said referenced male is a killing criminal ... not a hint of sexual attraction about him. He is sympathetic only to the extent that the reader intensely dislikes the woman he kills. She is a insistent busy body, hyper-controlling her her family, calling all the shots, including indirectly those that kill them all.

And this is the theme that I cull from the other stories I read from this collection, many of which I really did like: The Life You Save Maybe Your Own; A Temple of the Holy Ghost; The Artificial Nigger; Good Country People; The Displaced Person; I can't list them all. And what did I learn about Flannery? She is cruel. She loves depicting her Southern fellow citizens with all their glaring faults. She is 100% honest, to the detriment of not showing much understanding or forgiveness. Here are all the flaws, nasty ambitions, self-centeredness, racial biases of "unenlightened" Southerners. Yes, she writes powerfully, and even lyrically. But unlike Colum McCann, who can write about characteristics weaknesses, even sins, without a mean bone in his body, Flannery is petty. She wants to settle scores and distributes just desserts, retributions.

Do I like her style and themes? Actually no. Maybe I am overreacting since I have had friends, fellow Slackers, tell me I write like her. God forbid I am that vengeful.