Book Review

  • Waiter Rant, Steve Dublanica

    Waiter Rant, Steve Dublanica

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2008 (2009 paperback re-edition), 302 pages, C$18.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-06-125669-1

    I might as well get something unpleasant out of the way: I hate tipping.  I really, really hate it in the same way my Cartesian mind hates the unwritten rules of social interaction.  Oh, I still do it, sticking to the socially-acceptable “15% plus a bit more” standard, but I’m one of those who would rather pay more on my bill for fully-salaried workers and dispense with the added complication.  I like cold, hard printed numbers.

    But after reading Steve Dublanica’s Waiter Rant, you can be sure that I won’t spend as much time raging against tips.  Part biography of a professional waiter, part anthropological exposé of the job, Waiter Rant tells you about life on the other side of the dining table.  Readers with an interest in fine web writing may recognize the title: After all, “Waiter Rant” was the name of a relatively popular pseudonymous blog.  Now the author, revealed during the hardcover publicity campaign to be Steve Dublanica, has stepped up to the demands of a major book contract.  Fans of the blog may be relieved to learn that the book is no mere reprint of blog notes, but that it arranges many of those incidents in a cohesive narrative.

    It starts about seven years ago, as Dublanica becomes a waiter after professional setbacks.  At the time, it’s a temporary job at a pretty dysfunctional restaurant.  But Dublanica soon ends up working somewhere else as a waiter/manager, and the years pile up… by the time the narrative truly starts in Chapter 4, our narrator has been waiting tables at “The Bistro” for six years, and the pressures are piling up.  Waiter Rant tells us about the last year that Dublanica spent at The Bistro.

    It goes without saying that Waiter Rant is an exposé of the waiter’s job.  The subtleties of the situations, the difficult clients that they encounter on a regular basis, the terrible things that happen even in high-end restaurants, the special holidays, busy shifts, tricks of the trade and ways to land on a waiter’s black-list: Waiter Rant has it all, and it’s told in crisp, hypnotically readable prose.  Dublanica has peered deep in the human condition, seen unspeakable things and he is gifted enough to tell us about it.  Bad patrons beware: Waiter Rant leaves you with no excuses and little justification. (There’s a handy 40-point checklist at the back to tell you how to behave. And so-called “foodies” can be the worst.)

    But what could have been just a book of anecdotes and trade secrets soon becomes something else, as Dublanica’s facade as a professional waiter cracks to reveal a man stuck in his set patterns, a developing writer afraid to take the next steps, a waiter taking refuge in the known certitudes of his once-temporary job.  The external pressures on his job, as tensions at the restaurant escalate to an untenable climax, merely confirm his inner struggle to do more with his life.  It’s during those moments that our smooth and cynical “Jedi Waiter” becomes a well-rounded character: It’s a tricky balance, especially at first, but it develops in a successful narrative structure that does a lot for the book.

    Dublanica’s strengths as a writer are obvious: He has a sharp eye for details, doesn’t embarrass itself with useless details, and often ends chapters on ironic notes.  He’s able to stand in the middle of his anecdotes, yet tell them from a detached perspective, using specific incidents to illustrate larger points of etiquette, sociology or economic theory.  Some of his techniques feel a bit too on-the-nose (such as a “dialogue” that passes off as a lecture on the merits of proper financial management), but they’re usually blips on an otherwise smooth narrative.

    I picked Waiter Rant on not much more than a whim and ended up with one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  I may not like tipping because it’s so wide open to interpretation, social customs and the whim of the moment, but after reading the book, it feels as if I’ve been given the keys to understanding what tipping is about… and why it matters.  Until all of American society comes to realize the advantages of fully-salaried waiters, my 15% “and change” is likely to weigh a bit heavier on the “change” side from now on.  After all, as Dublanica writes, don’t eat out if you can’t afford the tip.

    (One recommendation for savvy readers: pick up the paperback edition, which not only properly credits Dublanica on the cover, but includes an afterword discussing his success after the publication of the hardcover edition.  It makes for a truly satisfying epilogue.)

  • Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger

    Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delta, 1975, 300 pages, C$6.95 tp, ISBN 0-440-55325-3

    I have been curious about this book for years, ever since first seeing the name “Kenneth Anger” and wondering what kind of person went by that name.  As it turns out, this writer/director is probably more famous for this book of vintage celebrity gossip than for any of the films he has made.

    A detour by Wikipedia (the first of many) is useful to establish the context of the book: Raised in well-connected Hollywood circles, Kenneth grew up knowing where all the bodies were buried.  Uncharacteristically for a Hollywood child, he wrote it all down and ended up with a big trashcan of celebrity gossip.  Attempt to get it published in English failed (the first edition of the book, in 1965, was reportedly taken off the market after ten days) whereas a translation had no problems being published in France.  After lengthy delays, Hollywood Babylon was published in English in 1975, and legend has it that it revived interest in all things Hollywoodish.  In 2004, The Guardian attributed him nothing less than the responsibility of jump-starting celebrity tabloids: as they write, he “swung open the gates to a world of gossip in which our media now wallows”.  Impressive!

    But how does the book fare decades later?

    Well, it’s still a great ride through the celebrity scandals that rocked Hollywood between the twenties and the fifties.  Through saucy and hyperactive prose, Anger describes a “tribe” of hedonists, dominators, rapists and murderers.  Starlets rise and fall with monotonous predictability, what happens behind closed doors would scandalize even the most progressive among us and human folly is in never-ending display.  A typical page of Anger prose has UPPERCASE headlines, underlined dialogue for emphasis, a generous sprinkling of “scare quotes” and more names than you can look up in a phone directory.  To say that this remains lively reading is to understate the fun of wallowing in such go-for-broke rumors; while modern tabloids don’t shy away from such things, I wonder how much of it was a real shock to readers back in 1975.

    The other aspect of Hollywood Babylon that still works is the avalanche of pictures that complement the text.  It remains, in that regard, a time machine leading us back to an era of strange old hairstyles, gowns and make-up..  Nearly every page has an illustration of some sort; the full-page or even dual-page spreads are plentiful, but be warned that graphic black-and-white violence is more plentiful than the occasional nudity: Anger seems to think that you can’t have a book about tragic murders and suicides without showing the bodies.

    The real question, of course, remains what -if anything- of this is true. As I was reading Hollywood Babylon, my growing sense of familiarity with the content was answered by taking a look at my treasured Big Book of Scandals and finding out that Anger’s book had been used as a primary source.  Much of what Anger writes about can be corroborated with little effort:  In fact, chances are that you will page through it with a finger on your mouse to go and look up entries on Wikipedia.  There are plenty of fascinating stories in this book, and the truth (properly cited) can be amazing.  On the other hand, much of what the book says remains hearsay both in 1975 and in 2009: In most cases, Anger had the advantage of writing about the safely dead.

    This may not be a profound book, but it does lead one to semi-serious thoughts about the fleeing quality of fame and the meat-grinder that Hollywood can become.  It’s tough to read about then-celebrities whose names are now completely unknown without sparing a thought for those current celebrities whose lives will end up as nothing but a chapter in some future gossip book.  It’s not hard to jump from the black-and-white photos to the desperate lives of those who want to be part of the Hollywood tribe, and the cruel irony when stories that wouldn’t warrant more than three paragraphs in a busy metro newspaper end up splashed on tabloid headlines because then happen to involve rich, famous or at least familiar people.  Hollywood Babylon may have been published thirty years ago and discuss people eight decades removed, but it’s being read by exactly the same readers.

  • Generation of Swine, Hunter S. Thompson

    Generation of Swine, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1988 (2003 reprint), 313 pages, C$21.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-7432-5044-3

    After years of relative silence between 1975 and 1985, Hunter S. Thompson was lured back to regular writing when the San Francisco Examiner offered him a regular column.  Generation of Swine certainly doesn’t try to highlight its lineage, but it’s a collection of 100 columns published between September 1985 and November 1988, in the waning years of the second Reagan administration.  The first few columns confusingly jump all over the chronology, and then settle down to a stricter order.  A lot of it, predictably enough, is centered around Irangate and the 1988 presidential elections: If you were looking for something like Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’88, this is it.

    Thompson fans know, from the many biographies of the writer, that the Examiner columns stemmed from a mixture of greed and convenience, as a constantly-broke Thompson was looking for easy cash while he was back in San Francisco researching a new book at a strip club.  By the mid-eighties, Thompson’s glory days were at least a decade old: The columns in Generation of Swine clearly show a past-his-prime writer convinced that everything he writes is gold.  Despite what must have been heroic editing efforts (Thompson was a famously undisciplined writer even on his best days), the columns often read like disjointed rambling, flitting from one subject to another.

    Occasionally, Thompson shows signs of inspiration: In a few columns, he lets loose an alter-ego named Skinner and gives him a few great lines, but this dramatic device is seldom developed.  Reading his thoughts on Irangate, it’s easy to be struck by the impression that Thompson is seeing this as a replay of Watergate: his certitude that either Reagan or Bush will be destroyed by the events reflect the flavour of the time (especially when Gary Hart is unexpectedly taken out of the presidential race), but they seem a bit misplaced when read later on.

    The best passages are probably those which turn into self-contained short stories.  The book opens in a splendid fashion with “Saturday Night in the City” (about getting tattoos); later on, we get good pieces like “Last Dance in Dumb Town” (swindling in Colorado), “The Beast with Three Backs” (violence and sex in Montréal) and “The Gizzard of Darkness” (a trip to the fortune-teller turns sombre political punditry into something even darker).  Those pieces, un-tethered from reality, have the advantage of allowing Thompson to let loose with his usual world-weary fascination for violence: by the time he describes how Bill Murray and himself beat up punks in Montréal, we’re so deeply in his fantasies that we no longer care.

    The rest of the book, sadly, isn’t like that.  A collection of catch-phrases and repetitive obsessions, Generation of Swine best showcases how badly Thompson had come to believe in his own mystique.  The columns read not like tales of the eighties, but as how someone from the seventies would perceive the eighties.  From the outside, it’s hard to guess how much impact Thompson’s drugs and apathy problems had on the writing of the column (or how much of it was written by other hands), but the overall impression is one of recycling material, of well-worn rants about new names.

    Fortunately, there are the occasional gems in the collection, enough to make us realize how well Thompson would write when he could.  His use of invective may be repetitious, but it’s seldom dull.  Nonetheless, Generation of Swine still ranks pretty low in the Thompson bibliography: Most of the columns were written to fill newsprint and get a weekly pay-check.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing (after all, that’s how most of On the Campaign Trail ‘72 came to be), but it takes a writer of superior skill and interest to go beyond that and deliver something that is worth reading twenty years later.  Thompson wasn’t always able to reach that level by the late eighties.

  • Smoke Screen, Kyle Mills

    Smoke Screen, Kyle Mills

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 2003 (2004 paperback reprint), 387 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-21278-9

    After five conventional thrillers, it’s a welcome change of pace to see Kyle Mills try something new with Smoke Screen.  After repeatedly tackling sweeping threats to the nation, he here dispenses with his established style to tackle an entirely different subject with a brand new storytelling mode and an unlikely hero.

    At first glance, there isn’t much to distinguish Trevor Barnett from countless other men in their early thirties.  Still stuck in a routine of dull low-level office work, weekend parties, attempts to find a girlfriend and prove to his parents that he’s worthy of their name, Barnett nonetheless has a few things going for him:  For one thing, his entire life revolves around cigarettes.  The family fortune was made on tobacco, and a twisted inheritance deal has him locked into tobacco-related jobs until retirement.  In the early days of the twenty-first century, however, that’s not the kind of thing that he cares to share with others.

    His break from routine comes when, in a drunken stupor, he summarizes a complex report to a blunt sentence and accidentally has that summary delivered to the board of directors.  That’s when the CEO of the company he works for develops a liking to our narrator and puts him in charge of ever-more-challenging files.  Before realizing it, Trevor becomes an unwilling spokesperson for the entire industry just as a complex power-play is put in action.  Trevor soon will have enemies he didn’t even imagine it was possible to have.

    One of Mills’ biggest strengths as a writer has always been his conceptual audacity.  Whereas other writers will feature drug-fighting heroes, Mills would rather imagine the massive intentional poisoning a chunk of the drug supply and the reaction of the authorities deal with the fallout.  In other novels, he imagines powerful cults not named Scientology, sends an FBI agent to become a master terrorist and supposes that Hoover’s secret files were still potent and around for the taking.  This kind of risk-taking is also at the heart of Smoke Screen, which takes on a feel halfway between Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking in delivering a low-thrill thriller that still manages to keep readers hooked from beginning to end.

    The tone alone is worth a mention.  Trevor, from the very first few pages, is portrayed as someone for whom the tobacco industry has no secrets.  He’s familiar with arguments for and against what he does, delivering color commentary at his TV as anti-tobacco advocates make their pitch.  He knows that anti-smoking groups are largely financed by tobacco money; he understands how the government doesn’t really want to stop cigarettes tax revenue; he’s able to tie smoking to good old-fashioned American rights.  More than anything, though, he’s tired of the whole debate and when he gets a public platform, honesty is his first policy.

    There’s really only one scene of traditional guns-and-perils suspense in the entire novel, and it comes as a bit of an intrusion.  Most of Smoke Screen’s fun is in following Trevor along as he tries to figure out whose pawn he is, and whether he can actually have an impact in the middle of his carefully scripted reactions.  There’s a bit of romance to spice things up, but there’s also quite a bit of unusual thinking about smoking and what the social response to it should be.  Mills is too smart to favour either stark pro/anti extremes, and his ultimate position is one that’s easy to respect.  One could quibble with some aspects of the plotting (market forces would not allow such a national shortage!), but there’s a speculative aspect to the novel that’s worth suspending disbelief over.

    But if Smoke Screen has a pleasant depth in term of ideas, it’s first and foremost a terrific read: Trevor is an engaging narrator, and his adventures are worth following even when they don’t involve mastermind terrorists or national conspiracies.  In fact, I have no trouble calling Smoke Screen Mill’s most enjoyable novel yet: an original thriller that delivers a bit more than the compelling reading experience that we expect from genre entertainment.  It’s rare enough to see writers stretch a bit outside their usual marketing boundaries: to see someone succeed at it is even better.

  • The King’s Daughters, Nathalie Mallet

    The King’s Daughters, Nathalie Mallet

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Night Shade, 2009, 299 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-59780-135-5

    Anyone who thinks it’s easier for reviewers to discuss books by friends and good acquaintances is seriously deluding themselves.  Serious reviewers are pathologically unable to say “Great book, buy it” unless they mean it.  They tackle books by acquaintances with even more trepidation than usual: If the book sucks, they either have to say so or shut up.  Given that shutting up a reviewer is about as easy as telling the hot wind not to blow (and I weigh my metaphors carefully here), you can imagine the tremendous psychic toll those situations can take.  Woe is us.

    Where I’m going with this introduction is that I don’t consider myself a trusted impartial source when it comes to Nathalie Mallet’s work.  Like me, she’s a French-Canadian living and working outside Quebec: we first met at a west-coast SF convention and I have, since then, had a few good conversations with her and her husband at other conventions.  I was relieved to find out that I actually enjoyed her debut novel The Princes of the Golden Cage despite my general lack of enthusiasm for fantasy novels.  Similarly, I’m just as happy to report that The King’s Daughters is just as much fun to read, and confirms along the way that Mallet’s in business to write accessible, entertaining fantasy.  (It also avoids some of the deficient copy-editing that plagued the first volume; good job, Night Shade!)

    It picks off where the first volume left off: Our narrator, Prince Amir, is heading north to meet his new fiancé’s family.  Given that she’s one of the titular king’s daughters, that means that Amir is about to enter another palace full of intrigue.  His first moments as a diplomatic envoy representing his country go spectacularly badly (it’s a bit of unconvincing plotting that diplomatic protocols aren’t as developed in Prince Amir’s time: you would expect in a real-world situation that gifts would be cleared with lower-ranked staff –alas this isn’t that kind of world), but pleasing his would-be in-laws soon the least of Amir’s worries: Amir’s delegation has been decimated by brigands, the king is a tyrant, the queen is sick, their daughters are being kidnapped one by one and a local bully has taken an unfortunate interest in our narrator.  Before we know it, we’re back knee-deep in issues of succession, magical enchantments and personal danger for Amir.  A colourful assortment of characters are there to spice up matters, from a pair of sinister foreigners to a flashy libertine who’s obviously not who he seems, without forgetting the usual proto-scientist.  Amir gamely tries to follow along, his known detective skills blooming into flashes of magical abilities.  While the first volume was steeped deep into Arabian mythology, this one makes use of its cold snowy Scandinavian environment, with a very different feel.

    Although the plotting has a conventional quality that sometimes bothered me, The King’s Daughters makes good use of its narrator: Amir has the potential to develop into a full-blown hero, but he’s not there yet and part of his appeal is to see him flail about, get into impossible situations, not figure out the obvious and be flummoxed by the unexpected.  The sudden blooming of his magical abilities is a bit convenient (not to mention a tricky complication when Amir is often portrayed as a champion of rationality), but it does portend good things about his future adventures.

    There’s certainly a lot more planned for Amir: The King’s Daughters ends on a surprising bittersweet note that defies a good chunk of reader expectations while making perfect sense in the context of a continuing series.  This is one of those books where it’s a relief to find the first chapter of the next volume included as a teaser: Amir is changing quickly, and his follow-up adventure Death in the Traveling City promises much.

    In the meantime, The King’s Daughter is the kind of mid-list fantasy novel that plays up a few strengths of the genre (the romance of a castle, the power dynamics of a monarchy, the interplay between rough science and advanced magic) while avoiding some of its usual traps: It doesn’t depend on the events of the previous volumes for context (in fact, it does well at recreating an entirely new setting in less than 300 pages) and manages to take advantage of an unusual mythology without overwhelming readers with context.

    I may not be entirely objective, but as a base reader I’m pretty happy with the result.

  • Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2004 (2005 mass market reprint), 728 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61275-8

    Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are among the most reliable writers in the contemporary thriller genre, and they can be counted upon to deliver the thrills that today’s readers demand.  But even they can have their major books and minors ones.  If their previous effort, Still Life with Crows, was a perfunctory thriller in-between more ambitious instalments, its follow-up Brimstone has all the markings of a major new work.  Or, make that the beginning of a major new cycle.

    For one thing, it goes back to the New York metropolitan area.  After the corn fields of the Midwest, FBI Agent Pendergast is called to investigate a mysterious death on a Long Island estate.  This time, a wealthy man has seemingly burnt to death from the inside, all signs pointing to nothing less than supernatural intervention.  This being a Preston/Child novel, we can guess that it isn’t so; in fact, the key to this mystery will be pretty obvious to a number of tech-savvy readers.  But the fun of those novels is in the ups and down of the investigation, as it keeps traveling to stranger and stranger places.  By the time Brimstone is over, it even indulges itself in very traditional thrills.

    But the other big sign that this is a major Preston/Child novel is in the return of several characters from previous novels.  Here, we don’t just get a featured role for agent Vincent D’Agosta, but secondary roles for journalist Bill Smithback and NYPD Captain Laura Hayward.  It’s a lively cast, but there’s something else at play too: a subplot slowly develops regarding Pendergast’s brother, a criminal mastermind whose plans come to overshadow the investigation that launches the novel.  Sometimes billed as “The first book of the Diogenes Trilogy”, Brimstone launches a new arc in the Pendergast cycle… and we can only guess at the brother-against-brother confrontation that awaits in the next few books.

    In the meantime, there’s plenty of material to enjoy.  The early investigation of the devilish-smelling murder lands them into New York high society, meeting other people who seem to have made deals with the devil earlier in their lives.  But murders are contagious in the Preston/Child universe, and so other victims quickly follow.  After seeing Pendergast work solo in the previous book, it’s good that D’Agosta is back to give him a foil: Preston/Child’s best-known protagonist is a joy to follow, but it often takes a more grounded presence to truly highlight how special he can be.  One of the book’s best moments comes when Pendergast takes on a rich and arrogant businessman on his own yacht: among other things, Brimstone shows how much it takes to really upset the normally-unflappable FBI agent.

    The novel eventually makes its way to Italy, dodging ancient mythology, cutting-edge technology and recent history along the way.  One subplot further sets up the rest of the Diogenes trilogy by portending imminent doom for New York, even as the thrills rely less and less on high technology the longer our protagonists spend in Europe.  The mixture of contemporary suspense and arcane knowledge is a good chunk of what makes a Preston/Child novel truly distinctive, and it’s amazing to see how a lecture on the essence of a Stradivarius violin eventually makes its way back in the plot.  Preston/Child never miss an opportunity to goose up their plotting with whatever classic thriller elements they can stuff in their story, although they can get too ambitious at times: The way they manage to get rid of a world-class assassin smacks of contrivances, especially when they have to skip over elements of their characters’ chronology in order to fool the reader for a few more pages.  It also goes without saying that any thriller that reaches 700 pages can use some editing, but it’s to Preston/Child’s credit that they rarely overstay their welcome.

    By this moment in their career, though, Preston/Child both know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.  Brimstone may not be lean nor overly mean, but it is a well-oiled thrill machine with an abundance of chrome.  It probably works a bit better as an introductory volume to a trilogy than it does as a self-contained murder thriller, but it’s a reliable test of their skills that it does both in a relatively successful fashion. After all, there’s little doubt that most readers who pick up Brimstone will race over to the next volume.

  • Hunter S. Thompson, Simon Cowan

    Hunter S. Thompson, Simon Cowan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    The Lyons Press, 2009, 252 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-59921-357-6

    Four years after Thompson’s suicide, the market for his biographies is booming.  Other than William McKean’s dispassionate, meticulous and mesmerizing Outlaw Journalist, there has been a small but steady stream of personal recollections of the man by friends.  Simon Cowan’s Hunter S. Thompson is entering a crowded market, and one of the questions that arises isn’t just whether it accurately portrays Thompson, but if it manages to say something new about him.

    Cowan has a privileged perspective in that he grew up near Thompson’s Woody Creek (one of the first chapters has him describing, as a high-school student, one of his first meetings with Thompson), eventually became a caretaker on Thompson’s ranch -imagine having Thompson as a landlord!- and ended up a journalist with solid publication credits.  This gives him both the anecdotes to write a personal recollection of what it was like to live alongside Thompson, and the writing skills to deliver an overall evaluation of Thompson’s work.

    The result is a surprisingly good piece of work that few Thompson fans may have expected.  It does more than go beyond the legend.  Cowan was close enough to Thompson to see him at his best and worst: The revelations in the book will do much to confirm a few suspicions.

    If you have only one chapter to read, make it “Guns, Lawyers and Money”: This is where we learn much about Thompson’s history of legal trouble (including a few DUI incidents that, to the best of my recollections, were not often mentioned in other Thompson biographies), his constant need for attorneys (and tangled relationship with them), the fact that hasn’t a very good shot despite his fondness for weapons, and does its best to answer the question of why Thompson was always broke despite -especially in later years- a fairly comfortable stream of royalties.  Part of the answer, unsurprisingly enough, is drugs: Cowan loosely estimates that Thompson’s lifetime drug tab to be around two million dollars (not all of which came out of his pocket, mind you), which puts to rest one my own long-standing questions about Thompson’s lifestyle.  Add to that Thompson’s lavish and impulsive spending habits and you do end up with someone who, financially speaking, spent his entire life on the edge.

    Cowan is not necessarily any kinder when it comes to the mystique of Thompson-as-a-writer, especially during his least productive years: Cowan was around when Thompson wrote the San Francisco Examiner columns collected in Generation of Swine, and his description of the process clearly highlights the importance that his editors and assistants had in re-shaping Thompson’s prose into something workable.  Cowan isn’t particularly sympathetic to the moments where Thompson drank or snorted himself in a stupor: One particularly affecting passage describes the scene when a high-ranking Gary Hart staffer, seeking advice in the wake of the scandal that destroyed Hart’s 1988 presidential bid, discovers a “nearly catatonic” Thompson unable to do anything but “open his eyes, roll his head around and utter noises” [P.201].

    Even for those who have read nearly everything else by or about Thompson, Cowan’s book offers an unflinching series of anecdotes and fits them into the known legend.  Cowan tells the real story behind The Curse of Lono, describes some of Thompson’s celebrity encounters, recalls with a cringe his participation in a failed intervention to get Thompson to lay off drugs, and eventually acknowledges the role of Thompson’s abuse of his female companions in driving a wedge between himself and his subject.

    But best of all, the book is narrated with a strong sense of what makes anecdotes work, and Cowan has enough distance from his subject to be able to ties those anecdotes in an even-handed portrait of his subject.  Hunter S. Thompson is a breezy, fair and often-amusing look at a fascinating subject.  It complements such works as The Kitchen Readings and Outlaw Journalist without contradicting or repeating them, and ranks among the finest books written so far by Thompson acquaintances.  Few may have expected this book, but most will agree that it’s now an essential part of any Thompson retrospective.

  • Gaudeamus, John Barnes

    Gaudeamus, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2004, 320 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30329-9 jul30

    I rarely get close enough to authors for them to give me reading tips about their own novels, but a chance encounter with John Barnes at 2006’s L.A.Con IV had him telling me that I would either love or hate Gaudeamus.

    Never mind that it took me three years to follow up on his suggestion: I can definitely see what he meant by polarized reactions.  Gaudeamus is anything but a conventional genre SF novel: It’s meta-fiction, tall tale, genre parody and RudyRuckeresque weirdness all at once.  It makes little and complete sense, takes risks that would doom less outrageous SF novels and manages –almost despite all ongoing expectations– to fulfill its own ambitions.

    A conventional plot summary would probably start by an acknowledgement that the novel’s narrator is one “John Barnes” and that most of the novel is made out of three long conversations with a friend of his.  The friend in question, Travis Bismark, is an industrial spy whose latest case gets weirder by the minute, and it’s Travis’ story that Barnes tells, at a remove.  Technically, Gaudeamus doesn’t have to be a Science Fiction novel: you can dismiss it by saying that it’s all taking place in Travis’s head and the rest is just a tall, tall tale.  How tall?  Tall enough that coincidences and long-lost friends all fit perfectly… and that’s not even considering the science-fiction elements.

    Because whenever it comes to SF elements, Barnes uses the freewheeling spirit of his story to pull out all the stops.  Gaudeamus (“Let us rejoice” in Latin, and not a regionally-accented bastardization of “Goddamn mouse” as I was hoping for) ends up being a code word for all sorts of neat classic SF devices all thrown willy-nilly in the plot.  Not to spoil anything, but: Telepathy, teleportation, time-travel or aliens?  All Gaudeamus!  (Also; a web comic)

    To fit all of this, plus mainstream observations on the daily life of one SF writer named “John Barnes” (the first few pages are all about how to begin a story), Gaudeamus moves at a pretty fast pace, especially when Travis’ initial investigation quickly evolves out of anything we can feel comfortable with.  My most serious complaint about the novel, in fact, is that a fascinating techno-thriller could have been written out of Travis doing industrial espionage and stumbling into a high-tech mystery.  Still, that Gaudeamus then pick up at light-speed toward ever-stranger vistas isn’t really a problem, so file this under “Ideas another writer may want to use some day.”

    In fact, there’s a refreshing looseness in the story that Barnes allows himself with the tall tale conceit.  In its attempt to go against the grain of genre SF, Gaudeamus manages to become a rather charming novel in which the usual tropes are displayed differently, and with constant winks to the seasoned readers.  I’m not sure that I would like to see a steady stream of such self-referential novels, but once in a while isn’t a bad thing.  I’m also pleased and impressed at the way the entire story comes together at the end, even when it seems, at times, that the whole thing will crumble on its own rich mixture of elements.  (For all remaining complains for plot holes, see “Tall tales, telling of”)

    Gaudeamus also fits pretty well in Barnes’ bibliography as a genre SF writer: Elements of the conclusion seem to echo a little bit of Barnes’ Jak Jinnaka series, while we get a sly wink about his two collaborations with Buzz Aldrin.  That it laughs, in-text, at overly picky SF readers is an extra bonus.  In fact, I regret that the narrator never makes to the SF convention he spends a few moments complaining about: it would have been fun to see such an event from the point of view of narrator-Barnes.

    In short, Gaudeamus is weird, unique, intentionally off-putting and yet completely successful.  It’s a successful gamble, and the kind of novel that ought to appeal to SF readers who don’t mind a bit of genre-bending.  I’d go as far as saying that it’s one of Barnes’ strongest efforts in ways that directly relate to the rest of his bibliography to date.  In fact, looking at his list of publications to bolster this argument, I’m struck at how Barnes fits the model of a mid-list genre SF author while, at the same time, writing a long and relatively successful series of books that struck back at genre conventions.  But we’re running out of space, and so this observation will have to be postponed to another review…  In the meantime, frankly, I’ll read anything the man will write.

  • In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

    In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2008, 244 pages, C$26.50 hc, ISBN 978-1-59420-145-5

    “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”

    There.  In seven words, that’s a summary of Michael Pollan’s wisdom.  Helpfully, the cover of the book even sports those words.  If you’re not yet satisfied, you can always read Pollan’s New York Times article “Unhappy Meals” in which he laid out most of his book’s central message.

    Otherwise, well, what can I say?  It’s tough to review great books.  Once I have urged you to go and get the book, everything else is an anticlimax.

    Oh, OK, a few more contextual details may be useful: For instance, you really should read Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma before tackling In Defense of Food.  While both can be read independently, Polaln’s previous book provides a theoretical framework over which his latest book elaborates.  In fact, Pollan is up-front about the fact that reader reaction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma led him to write In Defense of Food: After spending four hundred pages explaining all about the unsustainable and unhealthy process through which our food comes from, Pollan found himself deluged with questions about what to do about it.  In Defense of Food is an answer: not a rigid system, but a set of ideas and guidelines meant to help us navigate through supermarkets booby-trapped with false nutritional claims and processed variants of mostly-corn.

    The first few chapters of In Defense of Food tackle the industry of nutrition.  With brief historical overviews of how Americans have been seduced over and over again by dubious claims about what they should be eating, Pollan comes to the conclusion that trying to add explicitly-nutritive ingredients to synthetic food is a losing proposition.  Humans, he reasonably reminds us, have co-evolved with their natural food sources for thousands of years: The interaction between human nutritive systems and natural food means that it’s difficult to isolate the building blocks of what food does to the body.  A reductionist approach (add this much fat, that many carbohydrates, a little bit of protein…) is actually harming us: it’s better to stick as closely to naturally-grown whole food as possible.

    That’s not exactly a new or revolutionary message, although Pollan’s catch-phrases are memorable: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” is one of the best.  But as a reminder of what we should strive to do in-between the convenience of food-court lunches, it’s an entertaining and convincing discourse.

    Along the way, though, we learn a bit more about government intervention in the mechanics of the food pyramid (both the one that hangs on walls, and the real one that favours certain industries over others in bringing you sustenance) and reflect on the meaning of a healthy food culture.  Passing nutrition manias such as the “Atkins Diet” (which seems to have disappeared from the mainstream as quickly as it entered it) are symptoms of a bigger problem, which is to say the appalling lack of knowledge that most (North-)Americans have about how and what to eat.

    If nothing else, In Defense of Food will make you feel a lot better about how much you know about food.  In the last section of the book, Pollan suggests ways to best shop at the supermarket: Avoid food with unpronounceable ingredients, avoid food that make health claims, go to a farmer’s market whenever possible, cook, eat slowly, plant a garden… the trouble with a lot of those recommendations are that they’re very familiar: It’s what your mom told you, and most of it can be deduced from “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”  Culinary wisdom is simple:  it’s sticking to it despite inconvenience that’s hard.
    There’s also the suspicion that In Defense of Food will mostly be read like people who intend well and already do most of what it recommends: At a time where market forces are what really changes supermarkets (and in turn, what’s easily available to us), the real issue here will be to get people who aren’t concerned about their diet to start paying attention.

    So: “Read Pollan.  Eat better food.  Discuss issues.”

  • Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson

    Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2000 (2006 paperback reprint), 756 pages, C$21.00, ISBN 978-0-684-87316-9

    This second volume of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters takes us to Thompson’s most memorable years: 1968-1976, spanning not only the eight years of the Nixon/Ford administration, but most of Thompson’s best-know work.  Gonzo journalism was born in 1970 with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written not too long after, eventually published in the middle of the 1972 presidential campaign that Thompson was covering for Rolling Stones and eventually ended in Fear and Loathing ’72: On the Campaign Trail.  Add to that the continuing echo of Hell’s Angels (1966), his candidacy for Aspen’s Sheriff position, Thompson’s increasing fame and the crystallization of his reputation as a hard-living journalist and you end up with a fascinating eight years.

    What editor Douglas Brinkley has done with this second volume of letters is similar to the work accomplished on the first volume of Thompson letters (The Proud Highway), with a few differences.  For one thing, there are quite a bit more contextual notes to explain passing allusions, which reflects Thompson’s gradual accession to national affairs.  The other difference is that the book reprints a number of letters sent to Thompson, including a number of dark and angry missives from Oscar Acosta, the “Chicano Lawyer” often mentioned in Thompson’s seventies work that was so famously parodied in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It’s easy to see the rough nature of their friendship, and even easier to see how it breaks down to mutual hostility.  Other notables whose letters are included are Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, Katharine Graham, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter.  There are also, unusually, snippets of Thompson prose that don’t seem to have been reprinted anywhere else –including fragments about his influential experience in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, where he got caught in riots and beaten up by policemen.

    Many of the notes and caveats about The Proud Highway also apply here: This is the closest we’ll ever get to a Thompson autobiography, especially as it details on a quasi-weekly basis what Thompson is working on.  (Alas, reading the book as it details numerous projects that Thompson never finished is enough to make one wonder about What Could Have Been –am I the only one who thinks “Guts Balls” could have been a splendid Palahniuk-like story?)  It’s a very, very long book, and the low density of content will make it of interest to dedicated Thompson fans.  There are minor revelations here and there, but rest assured that those have already been cherry-picked by the recent wave of posthumous Thompson biographies.  A few photos, some never seen before, are inserted between each year’s worth of letters.

    A few things do evolve, though: Thompson’s worries about money never completely disappear, but Fear and Loathing in America takes place after his move to Woody Creek and the relative peace of mind that a stable home base provided to him.  At the same time, though, Thompson’s prose style finally solidifies in the aggressive gonzo style that he would keep until his death in 2005: the strong-willed but polite southern gentleman of his formative years has ceded place to an obsessive writer whose invectives become legendary.  It’s also worth nothing that, perhaps due to the increased panoply of communication devices available to Thompson as the seventies go on, the bulk of the book takes place before 1975, and the lengthy “here’s what I’ve done lately” letter updates are increasingly replaced by letters regarding specific issues.

    It all neatly sets up the much-awaited third tome of the series: The Mutineer has been promised for years by the Thompson Estate, and was pushed back from October 2009 to June 2010 as I was reading this second volume of letters.  Who knows what awaits in Thompson’s correspondence between 1977 and 2005?  We’ll find out in a year or so… assuming the book isn’t pushed back even further until then.

  • How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate, “Honest” Ed Mirvish

    How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate, “Honest” Ed Mirvish

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Key Porter, 1993, 220 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 1-55013-506-6

    If you have never been to Toronto landmark store “Honest Ed”, don’t miss a chance the next time you’re in the area: It’s worth a trip to the Bloor/Bathurst intersection only for a visit.  (It’s a lot more interesting than another trip to the Eaton Centre!)  Once you get past the flashy facade that sports 23,000 light bulbs (go at dusk for maximal impact), there’s the store itself: four floors of merchandise organized in a crazy organically-grown fashion, where stairs, basement, an overpass and crooked floors all work together with the bombastic signage, showbiz relics and deeply discounted prices to produce a multi-layered experience quite unlike anything else in the world.  Even once you think you’ve seen it all, you will end up confronting the cuckoo clock… and you will remember that moment forever.  (Usually with an “OH MY GOSH WHAT IS THAT?”)  Such an accumulation of effects can only exist because the store has existed for decades, constantly adding more details and reflecting the passions of its owner, Ed Mirvish.

    Honest Ed continues to thrive today years after Mirvish’s death in part due to the impression that his personality has left on the store.  Fortunately for everyone, it’s possible to re-live the Mirvish experience thanks to his autobiography, How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate.  Growing up poor in Toronto in a family of American immigrants, our narrator learns his first business lessons from the family store, before going from one venture to another and eventually founding his own store.  His discovery of the discount merchandising model isn’t obvious, but once perfected the formula becomes hard to resist.  Past the autobiography of his early years, the book’s second quarter section becomes a succession of anecdotes about doing business as “Honest Ed”.  His flair for flashy gimmicks (such as a 72-hours dance marathon for which Mirvish gladly paid store closing fines) becomes a rich source of stories for the book.

    The third quarter details Mirvish’s increasingly diverse activities beyond his store, most notably buying two theatres (one in Toronto, the Royal Alexandra, the other one on London, the Old Vic), expanding their scope in a line of restaurants to feed their King Street theatre patrons, and building a third theatre (the Princess of Wales) in Toronto.  Mirvish approaches those ventures with no preconceived notions, and apparently upended much conventional wisdom along the way.  The last quarter of the book is a series of “121 lessons I never learned in school” that riff on anecdotes about the store, the theatres, the restaurants or the rest of Mirvish’s life.

    As you may expect from such an eccentric character, the book itself is a joy to read with well-written anecdotes, fast pacing, a triumphant attitude and deliciously accessible prose.  Paul King (A Toronto Star reporter who passed away in 2008) is credited in the acknowledgements as having provided “invaluable help in penning and polishing this story”, and a good chunk of the book’s appeal is surely his.  Mirvish himself is a curious mixture of self-humility (“I was the only adult raised by my wife and our son.”) and cocky self-confidence: like the best of books in the “business inspiration” category, his autobiography leaves readers with the sense that nothing is impossible.  There’s an authenticity in Mirvish’s voice, however, that impossible to fake: I ended up reading How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate the same week that I read Donald Trump’s Think Like a Billionaire and the contrast between Mirvish’s likable persona and Trump’s all-bombast all-self-promotion all-greatest shtick couldn’t have been more enlightening.

    The only exception to the book’s overall geniality and accessibility comes in the odd little moments where Mirvish goes off on rants about government, taxes and regulations.  It’s to be expected, of course: Mirvish’s often-successful fights against city hall are part of Toronto lore, and it’s hard for any entrepreneur to be all that well-favoured toward government taxation or oversight.  But his small-c conservative rhetoric is shockingly naive and may put off a few left-leaning readers.

    Otherwise, it’s a great book that has the merit of having been written just at the right time to herald Mirvish’s greatest successes.  The Old Vic theatre was sold to a theatre trust in 1998 and while the end of some of his early King Street restaurants is acknowledged in the book, all had closed down by 2000.  Mirvish himself passed away in 2007 to much local mourning, but his legacy continues: Honest Ed is still open and busy, while his theatres are still in business in the middle of a revitalized Entertainment District that Mirvish jump-started by purchasing the Royal Alexandra.

    How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate is currently available on amazon.ca, but with a shipping estimate of one to two months.  It may be better to schedule yourself on a trip to Honest Ed to pick up copies of the book there.  You can’t miss it: excluding the kids’ books, it’s pretty much the only book on sale in the entire building.

    (And if you do go to Honest Ed, turn to your left upon exiting the store and walk down a few meters down Markham Street.  Not only will you see a bit of the “Mirvish Village” local artistic enclave, but you will also find yourself at the front door of The Beguiling, perhaps Canada’s finest comics and graphic novel bookstore.  When I’m in Toronto, I visit Honest Ed’s for the atmosphere… but it’s at The Beguiling that I spend serious cash.)

    [August 2009: There’s no Business Like Show Business… but I Wouldn’t Quit My Day Job is Mirvish’s second book (also ghost-written by Paul King), and it focuses strictly on theatre anecdotes.  Good, funny stories with nary a political point in sight… but it works better if you know a lot about 1960-1990 theatre legends.  ]

  • The American Zone, L. Neil Smith

    The American Zone, L. Neil Smith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 350 pages, C$38.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87369-7

    Complaining that L. Neil Smith uses his novels to indulge in libertarian propaganda is a bit like commenting upon the kinkiness, depravity and foul language in Chuck Palahniuk’s work: While true, it’s not exactly a new or enlightening observation.  Smith has long been a writer of explicitly-libertarian fiction, and if the result can be unreadable or silly, he can occasionally manage entertaining novels whenever he soft-pedals the rhetoric.

    Perhaps his best novel to date remains The Probability Broach (1980), an action/adventure tale in which private eye William “Win” Bear discovered a gateway to another dimension where libertarian ideals had triumphed.  My fond memories suggest that the book managed an ideal balance between robust ideology and non-partisan entertainment: It was obviously a libertarian novel, but one that didn’t actively work to annoy whoever wasn’t in complete agreement with core libertarian principles.

    The American Zone may be a direct sequel to The Probability Broach, but the years in-between the two books haven’t improved or softened Smith’s tendencies to discuss libertarianism in the middle, the side, the top and the bottom of his fiction.  It features Win Bear a few years after the events of his previous adventure, now solidly established in his new community.  Not that everything is utopian in Bear’s new world: The opening of the dimensional gates has created a new type of immigration, and not everyone can cope well with the freedoms of the “Gallatin Universe”: The titular American Zone is a Colorado urban ghetto where refugees from Bear’s United States tend to congregate when they can’t cope with the rest of the world.

    Keep in mind that there are plenty of differences between Bear’s new and old worlds.  In the Gallatin Universe, the “North American Confederacy” is loosely presided over by an ape (uplifting being common, there are also a few dolphin characters), all levels of government are ineffectual by design and (this being an American libertarian utopia) there are guns, big guns, and beautiful guns everywhere for everyone.

    But whereas The Probability Broach was a fun romp for all, with concepts that you didn’t necessarily had to buy into in order to enjoy the rest of the tale, The American Zone is a lot more shrill and dismissive of alternate viewpoints.  If you think that putting guns in the hands of everyone may not be a perfect idea, then you’re fit to be laughed at and dismissed.  One of the lasting impressions left by The American Zone is how angry Smith seems to be at whoever disagrees with him.  Grudges about Geraldo Riviera, Ralph Nader, the Clintons, Nixon all lead to so-called amusing passages in which analogues of those characters are ridiculed –which seems particularly curious in the case of the Clintons, since they only came to prominence years after the narrator left their universe.  (Not to mention the improbability of finding such characters in a parallel reality in which, say, Denver doesn’t exist.)  Even Canadians are targeted twice in similes, first as the narrator eats breakfast and feels “as contented as a Canadian” [P.64] and then later as a villain acts “complacent as a Canadian”. [P.136]

    (This would be an ideal place in which to re-establish that as a French-Canadian working for the government, I consider Libertarianism to be a philosophy by aliens, for aliens.  Our world, simply put, doesn’t work like that, and no amount of folksy narration of a utopia whose rules have been stacked in favour of libertarianism can convince me otherwise.)

    If you do manage to put ideology aside to look at the actual narrative workings of The American Zone, well, there isn’t much to gnaw upon.  The best SF ideas are carried over from the previous book, although there’s a little bit of interest in the description of how parallel universes travel is disrupting the way the citizen of the Confederacy live.  A novel on this topic would have been interesting, but The American Zone is really more interested in letting a feisty grandma explain why she should have energy handguns in her personal arsenal.

    That’s not necessarily awful (despite my political objections to Smith’s novel, it’s not exactly difficult or unpleasant to read), but it leads nowhere, and that’s where The American Zone falters: Despite a gorgeous Martiniere cover, it feels hollow the moment you’re not already a libertarian.  It preaches to the choir, leaving the rest of the SF congregation looking bored.

  • The Talbot Odyssey, Nelson DeMille

    The Talbot Odyssey, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 1984 (2006 mass-market re-issue), 543 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-446-35858-3

    A generation after the end of the Cold War, the past already feels like an alternate universe: With the advantage of hindsight, we now understand how weak the Communist forces were, even at the height of the great transatlantic eyeball-staring contest.  It’s strange, after seeing the way Russia imploded after the end of the USSR, to read about all-powerful Soviet forces and the valiant attempts by US secret forces to keep them in their places.

    Nonetheless, that’s what we get with The Talbot Odyssey, a deeply paranoid throwback to the Cold War that survives even today in bookstores because it was an early novel by someone whose reputation continues to sell books.  At the exception of his brand-new The Gate House, this novel marks the end of my effort to read the entire main-line DeMille back-catalogue.  I’m not sure I would have bothered otherwise: Reading about the binary certitudes of the Cold War may be a comfort for those who think today’s world is shaded in too much gray, but it seems increasingly irrelevant.

    Still, the Cold War isn’t too much of a bad time to get back to.  After all, the stakes were high and simple: the survival of western civilization against an enemy seemingly determined to enslave America –and presumably provide free single-payer health-care whether Americans wanted it or not.  1984 was one of the last good years of the Cold War: Gorbachev would ascend in 1985, and after 1986’s Chernobyl, the myth of Soviet technological superiority would ring increasingly hollow.  It’s also noteworthy that the closest we ever came to nuclear war was not in 1962, but 1983: Read up on Stanislav Petrov and Able Archer 83 to learn more.

    So it’s no surprise if The Talbot Odyssey ends up being a muscular tale of espionage set in mid-eighties New York and Long Island, filled with brutal Soviet operatives, able American heroes, quite a few traitors, and a drawn-out ticking-bomb climax.  It involves the weight of decades of clandestine operations reaching out to the 1940s, tangled family loyalties, multiple identities, high-technology threats and a little bit of romance.  The backbone of the tale is about the unmasking of a deep mole in the US intelligence community and the hero is a policeman whose traits echo most of DeMille’s latter protagonists, but the only thing you really need to know is that it’s a superb late-period Cold War thriller, one that fully uses most of the plot mechanics of the genre and seldom hesitates to liquidate its own characters.  One of the book’s standout sequences is a drawn-out torture scene in which a fairly sympathetic character comes face-to-face with a double-agent: it’s a terrifying sequence, and it ends on a spectacular note.

    The cast of characters is large and not always clearly distinguishable and the book’s opening third meanders quite a bit in an effort to establish everyone’s complex lineage and relationships.  No surprise, then, if The Talbot Odyssey feels like a meaty saga rather than light entertainment: This is one book that’s perfect for long flight or other uninterrupted reading moments.  It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to say that it’s a great book for its time, but there’s really no other way to explain that a novel like this couldn’t be written today: The overdone ruthlessness of the Soviets would be a tough sell now, and we know from our own history that the threat that weighs on every characters’ shoulders has not come to pass.  Quite a bit of the novel plays upon genre espionage conventions, and so we get almost every trick in the thriller source-book except for hidden twins –perfect for a mid-eighties marketplace in which nearly every single suspense novel dealt with Communist spies, but not so much today when a “historical” novel would have to stick closer to accepted facts.

    Nonetheless, it’s a heck of a read and another good entry in the DeMille oeuvre.  By now, it has acquired a comfortable patina of quasi-alternate reality, and can be enjoyed not as a possible story, but as a fine example of once-possible genre fiction.  It almost makes one nostalgic for that kind of fiction, when America-the-virtuous was a credible proposition, and there were implacable enemies up to Western Civilization’s standards.

  • The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger

    The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor, 2003 (2006 movie tie-in mass-market re-issue), 432 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-307-27555-8

    By now, nearly everyone even remotely interested in this kind of story has seen the 2006 movie adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, featuring an icy Meryl Streep as the implacable editor Miranda Priestly and Anne Hathaway as her much-abused assistant.  This may actually work to the novel’s benefit, given how newer readers will have no trouble imagining Streep’s iceberg-blonde terror enunciating each one of her zingers.  (Speaking as a guy, there are also worse things than picturing Anne Hathaway as the narrator of a 400+ page book.)

    But The Devil Wears Prada was a book well before it was a film, and going back to the source provides, as usual, a deeper and more immersive experience.

    The bare bones of the story remain the same: In New York, a studious young woman looking for a writer’s job is almost accidentally hired as a personal assistant for the editor-in-chief of the top fashion magazine on the planet.  She knows the job will be hell, but reasons that she’ll be able to name her reward after a year on the job.  But little does she suspect that the job will change her more quickly than she expects…

    Basically a boss-from-hell story, The Devil Wears Prada clearly suggests real-life kinship with Vogue magazine, and much effort has been spent elsewhere explaining the similarities between Priestley and Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anne Wintour.  That kind of what-real-what-isn’t inner-baseball, however, will be better left to true enthusiasts of the New York fashion scene: For the rest of us, it’s a look at an alien culture that can spend as much time worrying about fashion accessories as others worry about their mortgage.  Meanwhile, our narrator is stuck answering to every whim of her boss, no matter how insufficiently detailed they may be.

    There’s some irony in that even though The Devil Wears Prada can be classified under the fluffy chick-lit banner (featuring a romantic plot involving a young woman deluged under the more superficial aspects of contemporary life), it quickly finds itself a spot alongside The Nanny Diaries as an indictment of the New York upper set.  Although focused on fashion, the story does feature a modest amount of class-warfare goodness in showing how the rich are not necessarily any saner than the rest of us.

    Fans of adaptations mechanics will find much to like in comparing both versions of the story: The novel, of course, has the advantage of detail as our narrator explains the inner working of a modern fashion magazine, and the political wars in-between the covers.  On the other hand, the movie cleverly balances the impact of both lead characters and provides both depth and sympathy to the boss-from-hell: Two of the film’s best scenes show the consequences of Priestley’s behaviour and how she recognizes herself in the young protagonist of the story.  Those may be obvious screenwriting-101 fixes, but those details add a lot to the overall dynamics between the characters and tone done the petulance of the book’s narration.  The film is perhaps a bit better at showing how close to the dark side our protagonists finds herself after a few months on the job, which makes things a bit more interesting than the boiling-kettle drama in reading the book and wondering when Miss-perfect narrator will finally crack under the pressure.  (When she does, however, it’s a thing of beauty.)

    Given the singular nature of the New York publishing scene and the even stranger character of the fashion scene, it’s a relief to find out that the prose style of the novel is accessible and even compelling.  The episodic nature of our narrator’s plight is a series of one absurd incident after another, and it’s not such a big issue if the plot emerges only late in the story.  Some of the dramatic arc is contrived and depends on a narrator who’s essentially oblivious to what’s going on around her, but it’s fair to point out that the novel is less about the plot than an accumulation of wacky incidents in the world of fashion.

    For an escapist novel aimed at wannabe fashionistas, it’s a minor amazement that The Devil Wears Prada keeps having an impact even six years after its release.  Not only did the film do good business (and led Streep to yet another Oscar nomination), but it’s an open question whether the upcoming documentary The September Issue, which features Vogue and Anne Wintor front-and-center, would have existed in its current form without the increased attention given to Wintour after The Devil Wears Prada.  Not bad for “just a chick-lit novel”…

  • Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, American’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad, Jeffrey T. Richelson

    Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, American’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad, Jeffrey T. Richelson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Norton, 2009, 318 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-393-06515-2

    Considering the anti-terrorist rhetoric of the past decade, it’s easy to be paranoid about America’s ability to counter nuclear terrorism.  After all, the Bush administration managed to convince peace-loving Americans to invade a nation without a viable WMD program in part because, in the oft-quoted words of then-NSA Condoleeza Rice “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”  In the years since 9/11, “dirty bombs” and “suitcase nukes” have entered the vernacular, along with a low-grade paranoia that any high-school student with a working knowledge of E=MC2 could be a sleeper agent.

    Fortunately, there are watchdogs out there.  We don’t often hear about them because reassurances rarely sell newspapers, but elements of the US government do exist to react whenever there’s a nuclear threat against the nation.  In Defusing Armageddon, Jeffrey T. Richardson tackles the history and achievements of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), an organization of experts whose mandate it is to answer whenever someone rings the nuclear alarm.

    The first surprise of the book is the context that made the creation of NEST so necessary.  After a preface that acknowledges an impressive bibliography of fictional work mentioning nuclear crisis scenario (from Thunderball to The Peacemaker, with mentions of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, Broken Arrow and Michael Connelly’s The Overlook), Defusing Armageddon tackles the real post-WW2 history of nuclear incidents in North America, and the result can be just as hair-raising as the fiction: The history of the organization so far includes missions of nuclear extortion threat evaluation, as well as radioactive material detection and containment.  If the White House receives a letter saying “answer our demands or say bye-bye Boston”, NEST’s number is at the top of the list of people to contact.

    This happens more often than you’d think.  The book’s appendix provides a list of 103 nuclear extortion threats between 1970 and 1993, and the first few chapters detail quite a number of them.  From high-school students to disgruntled employees, NEST has helped identify and apprehend quite a few would-be nuclear terrorists.  Richelson’s descriptions of attempted extortion plots are alternately depressing and hilarious, their lack of consequences being no match by the thought that there would be so many attempts at it…  For those with an interest in techno-thrillers, this chunk of the book is a real highlight.

    The next big moment of Defusing Armageddon comes in Chapter 3, which studies NEST’s response when a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite, Cosmos 954, re-entered the atmosphere and disintegrated over northern Canada in 1978.  The following search effort (“Operation Morning Light”) made sure that no significant nuclear debris presented any lingering threat, and the mechanics of the operation are fascinating in their own right.

    After those first few chapters, Defusing Armageddon becomes less gripping as it studies the fallout of the fall of the Soviet empire (and unsecured depots of nuclear material), the new challenges of a post-9/11 security environment and the organisational changes that replaced NEST’s initial “Search” acronym to “Support”.  The narrative of fascinating details in the first third of the book gives way to a more conventional organizational biography, although occasional discussions of technological capabilities will reward those looking for background information.  Readers of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s similarly-themed One Point Safe will find both confirmation and explanations about such events as the botched “Mirage Gold” training incident and the remarkably successful “Sapphire” nuclear evacuation operation.

    Unlike the Cockbuns, however, Richelson is a scholar more than a storyteller, and the less glamorous sections of Defusing Armageddon illustrate that while the book is impeccably well-researched (over 50 of the book’s 300 pages are notes and sources), it’s not always as interesting to read as it should be: The writing style is dense, and Richelson’s access to many of NEST’s current and former employees hasn’t always translated in an accessible narrative on the page.

    Nonetheless, Defusing Armageddon is a fascinating book.  Generally non-partisan and non-paranoid despite its catchy title, it’s a lucid explanation of real anti-terrorism efforts with a significant pedigree of effectiveness.  It’s engrossing reading for national security buffs, and it’s even sure appeal to those who think it’s been a long time since Tom Clancy’s last novel.