Nameless Dame by Bart Schneider

I’ve just finished my third novel from authors living in the heart of the West County Russian River corridor.  Two months ago it was Pat Nolan’s, “On the Road to Las Cruces.”  Last month it was, “In The Rough” by John McCarty.  Now I’ve finished, “Nameless Dame,” subtitled “Murder on the Russian River”.  It’s always fun, even with “changed names” to protect the innocent, to match up characters, or parts of characters, with actual persons, possibly living.

The author can’t get away with writing just for us locals; we only number a few thousand, and far fewer who can afford $15.95 for a book.  So these tales are legitimate novels, probably selling better in New Jersey than here in Guerneville.  Nonetheless, it’s nice to read about people and places, from Jenner to Forestville, along the River.

The murdered nameless dame is a tweaker who likes her speedballs a little too much.  Most of the book’s characters only admit to recreational marijuana, however the sexual mores along the river are depicted as a wide-open, free sex community, reminiscent of the pre-AIDS 1960’s.

Our heros (!?), an ex-detective and a vacationing P.I. are as milk-toasty as any two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence should be.  These Laurel & Hardy figures must totally confuse the East Coast readers who might be more used to Boston Parker’s P.I. Spenser, or Chicago’s VI Warshawski.

So, as a whodonit, who cares?  The world might be a better place without most of these degenerate deadbeats.  But it’s probably fun for the eastcoasters to get a glimpse at how really weird these Northern Californians truly are: getting drugged up and reciting dead poets writings; never honestly working unless you count prostitution and drug-dealing; spending most of one’s time being stoned.

There was a slightly bit more drug-sobriety with “In The Rough”.  However, being slightly more alert, the author dis’d most of the locals around Monte Rio, the scene of the activity in this novel.  As with “Dame”, the more dramatic & violent scenes are fictional, but the underlying premise holds true, River people hate government men, tax men, permit men.  Basically, every one who isn’t local should go away and stay away.  Women are OK as long as they aren’t in the above classes: government, tax, and permit.  Moms, waitresses, working women, even prostitutes are all a part of the community.

I jumped onto a bang-wagon with this book because it described the rebellion over the Monte Rio wastewater projects of the first decade of this century.  Too much of this history has been overlooked by subsequent “study groups”, and I love to toss across this book to novitiates who haven’t discussed the issue with locals to the degree necessary to understand the local reticence about G-men coming in to tell them how & where to shit.

Pat Nolan’s book is the beginning of something big along the River, a West County publishing company.  River Reader, the local bookstore, is our Russian River’s light house along the Russian River corridor that keeps the artisan’s light burning, providing them a last bastion of vocal outlet for feedback on what they are writing.  . 

I’m so old I remember going to the poetry readings at coffee and wine bars (age 20) along upper Grant Avenue back in the fifties.  Not that I was into poetry at the time, but it impressed the hell out of dates.  I never did make sense out of those guys, but later studied and liked the WW-I poets [Brooke, Owen, Sassoon], they had something serious to moan about.

Eventually [I aged even further] I came to understand and like 20^th century poetry, alas a hundred years too late.  I keep trying to learn the new idioms: haikus and manga.

A Comrade Lost & Found by Jan Wong

Well, talk about giving away the entire plotline in the title, including the ending: Jan Wong is obviously not a suspense writer.  And her titles, like “from Mao to Now” are complete kitsch.  But, hey, it’s just envy on my part that she’s got a marketable niche experience and I’d flaunt it if I had something a mass market craved, not like: early 60’s COBOL programming?, or early 70’s San Francisco dress fashions??, or even early 80’s West Coast Chess Tournaments???. 

What we have here is a tourist guidebook to China from a credible source, at the time it was really needed, 2007, just before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  Jan Wong works all her knowledge and research into the flattest, most boring plotline we’ve had as a Library Discussion book in the past ten years.  Yes, we’ve hit a new low-water mark.

Her experience as a journalist (retired journalists seem to have an inside track on book group selections), but also as a student, and as a Chinese Westerner made her a must-read: for those going to China (in 2007.)  Five years later, however, the bulk of her “currency” has disappated.  The politics have changed, the culture has changed, and things have probably changed physically as well.  What we, as Library readers are left with is an out-of-date guidebook with a bland storyline that inspires no bonding of any sort with the characters.  It’s a boring read.  Her technique is fine, as it should be, Wong being a successful journalist.  But reading this as a memoir!!, well, you can only take so many of, “we went to building 36 on the west side”, “then we ate at building XYZ, which is now called FGH”.

Now I’m not recommending the book, but Wong successively avoided one of the pitfalls of this sort of book, using too many foreign words and expressions.  My guess would be that she tosses in one expression every three pages.  That’s under a hundred for the book.  There’s never any need for foreign expressions, at all.  We’re not trying to learn Mandarin phonetically; and like Chinese food, we’ll have forgotten all the expressions by five o’clock tonight.  I guess the authors that do this sort of thing, think they’re boosting their credibility, and maybe they are.  Maybe those Absolut swilling, New York book club critics use a score card that gives points for foreign words.  In our case, the currency of the book in 2007 outweighed the blandness of the writing, so the critics were right, in 2007.  The Sonoma County Library, however, put a stinker on the list by ignoring the necessity for timeliness with travel books.

Maybe this is my season for recommending systemic changes, so I’m going to suggest we try compiling a ratings scorecard for future library book of the month club selections.  I suggest that when we give our comments, we each give the book a number, from 1 to 10:

1 – rotten, one of the three worst books I’ve read this past year

3 – a boring book that I couldn’t get into, wouldn’t recommend

6 – not a great book, but I did read it and might recommend it to friends

10 – one of the best books I’ve read this past year.

I would give “Comrade” a three.

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore

The latest and in my opinion, best satyrical comedy of Christopher Moore {The Stupidest Angel 2004}, also {Bite Me 2010} [San Francisco is being stalked by a huge shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay Area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre]

Yes, Moore has raised the bar to a level higher than his past works as can be clearly seen by the cover art at the left, discretely downplaying his model’s sumptuous hind-quarters and instead focussing on the Eiffel Tower, 1889, and the fascinating visage of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec {circa Eiffel Tower}.

With this book, we have a serious novel, almost a murder mystery, and one that at times spans the ages, trying to pin a dastardly crime on the devious mastermind, Colorman.  Colorman has seduced artists through the ages, but finally, here at the peak of French cultural, political, and artistic prominence, the confluence of brilliant impressionist artists may be able to solve the greatest artistic mystery of the ages; defeating Colorman; and recapturing true blue.

Some might argue that Christopher Moore has penned a legitimate art history book chronicalling the critically important last two decades of the nineteenth century.  Unfortunately, there will always be those that stick their noses up at all the boisterous boozing and wanton whore-mongering, with no Christian consideration for those artistically influenced by opium and alcohol addiction, with their later-life health issues of syphyllis, gout, and liver & kidney failure.  Fortunately, most died young, both Christians and artists.

It one way, this is a series of loosely connected vignettes, focussed on specific impressionist paintings.  You know those jokes in The New Yorker, where the readership is supposed to fill in the joke tag-lines.?  In Moore’s case here, the picture is the painting; the lines are already stated as a simple description of the picture.  Moore’s filler is the back story to how we got to the tag line.  It’s an interesting exercise.  Maybe in another way, it’s like Dave Barry’s recent book, “Lunatics,” where he and Alan Zweibel toss the plotline back and forth to challenge each other in getting to more and more outrageous situations.

Reminds me of Hugh Laurie

There was “take-away” art history from the book.  This book wasn’t intended as a film script outline [a fun book – but a stupid film].  By being serially disconnected, you can jump in and out of this book at will, and randomly, which to me means it’s lightweight and entertaining.

Moore is actually a Californian, I think.  Well, anyway, he’s as irreverant as only Dr. House can be.

Calico Joe by John Grisham

Pigeon holes are made for pigeons.  John Grisham is trying to get away from his type-casting as a legal thriller author.  This book is not going to free him from his pigeon hole.

“Calico Joe” is a cute book.  Thankfully it is short.  I never was able to “suspend my disbelief.”  John Grisham is a good author; he does a great job portraying people in his legal mileau.  Sports is not his thing.  The plotline was irritating and almost childishly contrived.  The research work to add in names, dates, and statistics was superficial and seemed wedged in every so often separate from the story.  Even the supposed time-frame, 1973, forty years ago feels contrived to appeal to a male 45-65 year-old market segment.  I was left with the feeling that had the release date been six months earlier or later, this could just as easily been a football book.

The book is a baseball fairytale with good triumphing over evil, but with no moral at the end.  Calico Joe is 100% good: Warren Tracy has evil in him.  The narrator relates the tale of each man and their eventual meeting as batter and pitcher on a baseball diamond.  Evil wins that day,but both men are destroyed as a result of their encounter … .. until Tracy’s son comes along thirty years later and heals both men, who wind up smiling and shaking hands. 

Most sports writers deal with real events, sometimes embellished through a writer’s license to heigthen drama and comedy, romance and sports passion.  As a reader, it’s passion that I look for in sports stories, even the fictional ones.  “The Legend of Bagger Vance” comes to mind as an ideal golf story.  Set in time far back enough that portrayals of the famous names doesn’t irritate anyone and the fictional lead characters were believable, all magic being incorporated into a fictionally acceptable “Bagger.” 

With more than a century of baseball history to use as a backdrop for a novel, why create a new Babe Ruth or Ted Williams.  Of course my answer to that question is money: for film rights.  All the real famous players have either been “done” many times, and/or doing them again would mean sharing control and profits with others.  “Calico Joe” is 100% Grisham’s.  This slim book reads just like a film script.  When this movie is made, there will be no grandson, nor other heirs to squabble over the memory of their father.

I can think of no other reason for writing this book other than milking another, distinctly different demographic for the movie.  I didn’t learn anything from this book.  I didn’t develop any sympathy for any of the characters, good or evil.  I couldn’t help but dislike Warren Tracy because he was portrayed as an evil, mean bully.  There was no “take-away” from having read this book.  It was like the cliché about hours after eating Chinese food; done, but with an empty feeling.  I should have waited for the movie.

Ran Away by Barbara Hambly

“This particular author is a master craftsman at weaving interesting historical tidbits into a murder mystery story.”  Wait a minute; I wrote that a year ago about Jason Goodwin, when he was covering the Ottoman Empire, circa 1836, through the eyes of Yashim, the Eunuch, a private detective.  Now we have January {Jannisary?} as a “detective” {long before detectives}, who is a black man from New Orleans, again, circa 1836.

O.K., I’m well-aware that sometimes authors write under pseudonames in order to attract a different audience.  In this case, January has a very female heterosexual wife-type partner, and we should remember that Yashim was a eunuch.!

But the more relevant, yet still salaciously interesting, book comparison, is to our April 2012 library book, “Cane River”.  The heart of each story is the decades just before the American Civil War.  Both books are told through the eyes of an African-American.  Truly, the protagonists of both books represent the epitome of the merger of African and American.  And yet, no two people could be more different, nor come at their world view more differently. 

The Cane River women are a family of slave women, made concubines/wives by lecherous French white men, through the length of the nineteenth century. These women also have tenacles reaching to New Orleans, but the great world beyond is unknown to them. 

January’s ease at moving about in a world of slavery, is probably a story-book fiction that bears no close inspection.  However, it may be the sort of fiction that provides hope for those caught up in an ugly world.  He is a doctor, learned, and a professional musician, living in Paris as the story opens.  A bon vivant and man-about-town, but with humble origins, as is Yashim, so as not to be a member of the 1%.

Just like Yashim, who flowed in and out of the harem with surprising ease, January, likewise spends an inordinate amount of time around a bevy of concubines, more than most happily married men. 

So, anyway; I love this author’s work, be he/she Goodwin/Hambly.  As I pen this note,  I haven’t progressed beyond the first half of “Ran Away”, thus January is still in Paris.  The last half of the book, I am assured, will take place in New Orleans.  The Paris scenes, streets, and buildings are poetically captured.  The Ottoman knowledge is reminiscent of Goodwin.(?).  The theme is classic Yashim – a harem girl has been abducted {by a bad Arab} and is now in a nunery; January will save her.

A week later and I have now finished the second half of the Hambly book, “Ran Away.”  The action has moved to New Orleans and Doctor January is using forensic techniques to solve a murder case, which will exonerate his Ottoman friend from Paris, who is being unjustly accused, mostly because of racial and religious bias.  The plight of enslaved Africans is explored in side issues to the central plotline.  Dr. January is running an underground escape route as well as solving murders.