Red Harvest

RED HARVEST (Dashiell Hammett) - Four Stars

Red Harvest, Hammett's first full-length novel, is not only a shining example of the crime fiction that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s but also a textbook on economical writing.

Hammett launches into the story with aplomb, and relates his tale with a delightful impatience for exposition and great skill for describing people and places with a few short, precise phrases. The story barely pauses to breathe, with plot twists, switchbacks, and misdirections occurring every couple of pages. What starts out as a tale about a murdered newspaper editor quickly becomes a labrynthine puzzle involving bootleggers, corrupt cops, a manipulative femme fatale and an abrasive, wealthy, elderly man who uses his fortune to pull a lot of strings. There's gun fights and car chases and lots of hard drinking. The body count is in the dozens (maybe over a hundred). It's what an action-movie script would look like transferred to fine literary form. Barely 140 pages, Red Harvest has enough action, excitement, and events for a standard 500-page novel. (All five of Hammett's novels—the others being The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man; you might have heard of one or two of them—are of equal brevity, around 140-150 pages.)

The cast of characters is enormous for such a short book, and Hammett has no compunction rotating major character in and out of the plotlines for dozens of pages at a time. Somewhat amusingly, minor characters are tossed into the fray like skeet, showing up at intermittent intervals to reveal an important clue, before just as quickly embarking on their unknown quest for certain death. (One of the most smirk-worthy: a slimy lawyer is introduced to the story on page 114, says his final words on page 118, and is found dead on page 120—Hammett spares no time for dawdling!)

My biggest reservation going into the book was the fear that the 1920s gangster slang would seem trite and cliche by modern standards. Even though this was one of the ORIGINATORS of that very cliche, I was still worried that the language would not have aged well. My fears were unfounded. The story moves at such a break-neck pace, and Hammett's no-name Continental Op narrates the story with such a casual, conversational air that the slang terms seem fresh and new, as if they had never been used before. The book carries itself with a swagger, with a sort of "who gives a fuck what you think?" attitude directed towards the audience. It's here to tell a tale; too bad for you if you don't like it.

So why four-stars and not five? Well, Red Harvest just tells a tale. There's no deep meaning here, nothing to reflect on after you close the cover. The book, for all its dizzying plot-twists, is as shallow as a bowl of soup. But it's a great tale, told very well.

"Then you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again. If you don't do it, I'm going to turn these love letters of yours over to the newspaper buzzards, and I don't mean your Herald crew—the press associations. I got the letters from Dawn. You'll have a lot of fun proving that you didn't hire him to recover them, and that he didn't kill the girl doing it. But the fun you'll have is nothing to the fun people will have reading these letters. They're hot. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother."

Of Love and Other Demons

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS (Gabriel García Márquez) - Three Stars

It is the sign of a good author, I think, when the ending to a story can be so obvious, so telegraphed, such a foregone conclusion and yet still pack a punch. Especially when the punch follows a more-or-less cliché "tragic love story" plot of a story that is only average.

Marquez is a good author, and despite its brevity Of Love and Other Demons makes an impression. It's a breezy read too, despite some serious subject matter, thanks both to its short duration (not quite 150 pages) and to Marquez's use of a "standard" prose style (the dizzying, run-on, magical realism style of One Hundred Years of Solitude is absent). Of Love... is a great story to become familiar with Marquez's florid, weighty use of language, and his fantastical imagination and skill at creating and populating ancient urban environments.

The problem is that Marquez approaches the story as if he's writing a 500+ page epic novel. Of Love... contains probably close to 40 characters, and probably 30 of them are on the fringes of being superfluous. The amount of time Marquez spends going into great detail about many of the characters is disproportionate to the role those characters play in the story. Indeed, the two main characters of the 141-page novella don't even meet each other until the end of page 81!

Of Love... makes some interesting commentary on the nature of disease, love, and religion; indeed, it even implies that those three are much closer to being the same thing than most people might admit. Indeed, by the end of the story one might wonder if Sierva Maria really was possessed, or rabid, or just love-struck mad.

Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget. What did seem inconceivable to him was subjecting one's child to the castigation of exorcism.

"There is not much difference between that and the witchcraft of blacks," he said. "In fact, it is even worse, because blacks only sacrifice roosters to their gods, while the Holy Office is happy to break innocents on the rack or burn them alive in a public spectacle."

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM (David Sedaris) - Three Stars

For the past, oh, I don't know, two or three weeks—from the week before Christmas to the present—I have been largely in a mood that could only be described as "dour." Depressed isn't quite accurate. I've just been overly sick of people (indeed, the world in general) and there was even more "Bah" in my "Humbug" than usual. I needed more wit and funny, so instead of diving into Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men I picked up David Sedaris.

The fact that I come to you today in the same dour mood as has been the norm recently only serves to prove that this book is not likely to cheer you up.

Oh, it was an enjoyable (if throwaway) read. Sedaris's writing style is light and breezy, his wit is sharp, and if he doesn't delve into any grand philosophical territory with any of anecdotes, he at least makes up for it with entertainment value. But Dress... has a consistent (and somewhat unsettling) dark streak to it: a bleakness that I don't remember seeing in his previous stories. They're funny, yes, but it's funny in that "full of knowing and slightly bitter smirks at reality" sort of way. I think only two or three of the twenty-two essays in Dress... actually made me laugh aloud. It just seems to me that in Naked his family was made to seem more silly and eccentric; in Dress... life is portrayed as more tragic. Many of the essays, from the pubescent, basement card game "Full House" to the fascinating-yet-despairing "Put a Lid on It" have very little humor and never really rise out of the darkness that permeates the book.

Again, this isn't to imply they're poorly written or somehow disappointing. I was merely surprised. There are certainly four-star passages of writing in here. But it seemed like Sedaris tried to temper the grimness of some of the essays with slightly more light-hearted ones, and most of those come across as diaphanous and forgettable. There's probably eight-ten essays that are transfixing in their unflinching look towards the dark side, two or three that are really quite funny , and maybe ten more that you won't remember at all once you've finished the book. But if you're looking for a laugh-a-minute read, this isn't it.

Usually when I was forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try and win in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. The person who wanted to win but failed was a loser, while the person who didn't really care was just a weirdo—a title I had learned to live with.