Recent reading:

Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine

Philip K. Dick, Voices From The Street

Back in university, I was the scruffy bearded guy who was always reading a Stephen King or Philip Dick paperback under the table in a seminar supposedly devoted to John Milton, or Jane Austen, or the fine art of bibliography. I still read a lot of genre fiction, vastly preferring it to whatever the Walrus or CBC Radio is currently pimping as the future of Serious! Contemporary! Literature! Elmore Leonard is a far better writer than Timothy Taylor, and Diana Wynne-Jones, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Connie Willis all make the turgid "realistic" prose of authors like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Gilbert pale in comparison to their own.

Don Winslow is the author of a few Carl Hiaasen-meets-Elmore Leonard style comic mysteries (eg., The Trail to Buddha's Mirror; The Death and Life of Bobby Z) and two terrific hardboiled crime novels: California Fire and Life and The Power of the Dog. But his latest, The Winter of Frankie Machine, is a turkey, full of glib Hollywood chatter and coincidences that keep the soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture plot creaking along. There's also a gratuitous, casual misogyny to several of the book's key scenes, a slick, Michael Zen-style "arousing eroticism" that abruptly slides into sexual violence. The (male) audience gets to feel aroused at the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold alternately exploring her partner's labial folds and the cocaine lines on the glass tabletop in front of the senator's son, and then properly chastised for that arousal, as the hooker ends up dead in a ditch, with rocks in her mouth. Of course the senator's son dunnit, and a short, three- or four- paragraph chapter lets us in on the breaking news that the guys in power are criminals, too. Pushed by Random House or Hollywood this isn't news, but embarrassing, shock-jock talk pumped up as "cultural analysis." California Fire and Life and Power of the Dog largely refrained from editorializing; their plots were their points, not pulpits for the presentation of ideas rendered banal through pop-cultural overuse.

Dick's Voices was written in 1952, and, I suppose, one of the realist novels returned to him by his agent Scott Meredith, who preferred that he spend his creative energies churning out SF potboilers like The Crack in Space and Vulcan's Hammer. Dick got his revenge by bending science fiction to his own purposes; novels like Radio Free Albemuth or Time Out Of Joint read like Raymond Carver or Richard Yates rewritten by...well, by Philip Kindred Dick. Voices was unpublished up until a year or two ago. It's deeply dystopic, the story of a TV salesman who rebels against his menial job and family life, only to discover that the universe has no intention of shifting to acomodate his unique, "artistic" subjectivity. None of Voices' characters are content, and the book's great strength is its dispassionate depiction of their flaws, shortcomings and more-than-casual racism, juxtaposed against Dick's fine-grained depiction of the operation of a small business; of a "literary magazine"; of the responsibility of caring for a child and making a life with someone you're not sure if you really love. I saw many aspects of myself in this fine novel, and I recommend it to you.
- posted by cjb @ 8:35 PM