Reviews

  • Lakeview Terrace (2008)

    Lakeview Terrace (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2008) I’m generally not fond of comedies of humiliation, nor of its darker thrillers of exasperation. And this story pushes several of my annoyance buttons: cheap interracial tensions, cartoonish neighbors from hell, obvious dramatic arc and a director with a history for uncomfortable films. So I was surprised to find out that Lakeview Terrace wasn’t quite as grating as I thought: While the well-worn plot holds little surprise as soon as the first five minutes are over (neighborhood tension, escalating all the way to… well, you know), the last act of the film has a few manipulative surprises in store, and Samuel L. Jackson’s antagonist remains as compelling as despicable. It’s too bad that the protagonist is written as a nebbish decent guy: it’s tough to identify with his passivity or his easily-avoidable bad moves. Thriller fans will find a further point of interest in noticing how Jackson’s character, a perfect action protagonist in other contexts, is here portrayed as a man incapable of living in civilized society: now that’s some meta-contextual grist for action cinema critics. As for Lakeview Terrace itself, it’s unnerving, not as surprising as it could have been, but basically a competent thriller if you can make it through an hour of predictable rising tension.

  • Eagle Eye (2008)

    Eagle Eye (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2008) It’s rather telling that a technothriller like this one can slip so easily in the realm of Science Fiction using nothing more than a voice on the phone and some impeccable timing. It’s too bad that the nature of the antagonist will be obvious to even the dullest viewers, or that Eagle Eye never hesitate to indulge into easy clichés, but even those are small problems compared to the film’s inconsistent interest and forward pacing. For every dynamite sequence in the film (such as the escape-by-crane, the naval yard ballet or the Predator Drone chase), the script allows itself a few underwhelming moments that make little sense and rob the film of its impact. There is a lot of interesting material in the film’s justification, where automated systems take it upon themselves to respect a constitution ignored by its human masters, but all of it leads to yet another iteration of the old “sparking computers, last-minute rescues” clichés. It’s a curious grab-bag of contradicting impulses, and it’s perhaps more interesting to discuss than to watch.

  • The Bonfire Of The Vanities (1990)

    The Bonfire Of The Vanities (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2008) This movie was critically lambasted upon release, but if it’s not quite a success, it’s not the disaster that some reviewers have reported. As an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel, it manages to hit most of the high points of the novel, and if Wolfe’s prose can’t be fully adapted to the screen, it finds an appropriate counterpart in Brian de Palma’s swooping direction and ambitious cinematography. The long continuous opening shot is a small marvel of the form, while other sporadic flourishes keep things hopping along. Things aren’t as slick regarding the script, which does an intriguing job re-casting Wolfe’s story into a satiric comedy mold, but falters in the film’s second half with a number of limp scenes that don’t advance the story as efficiently as they should. It’s too bad that the manic quality of the original is only half-finished here. The result isn’t terrible, but it certainly could have been better. The first-generation DVD, regrettably, doesn’t include any supplementary material about the film, which is a shame given that an entire book has been written about the film’s troubled production.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, August 2021) After enjoying TCM’s podcast adaptation/update of Julie Solomon’s The Devil’s Candy, which offers four hours of material on the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, the mandatory next step was to watch the film itself. (Actually, I watched it between the sixth and seventh episode – the best possible timing considering that the seventh episode opens on the first public showing of the film.)  Once again, a rewatch had me protesting that the result wasn’t that bad, even enjoyable. Oh, it’s clear that as a film, The Bonfire of Vanities falls considerably short of its potential. The dark cynical humour is mishandled and neutered by a final speech that shouldn’t be in the film. It’s miscast from top to bottom – Tom Hanks is not bad in the last third of the film when he’s free to play up his comic persona, but he’s really not the right choice for playing a high-powered adulterous stockbroker. Melanie Griffith has never been much of a draw for me, so her casting as an irresistible femme fatale is wasted. Morgan Freeman’s not bad, even when saddled with the film’s most awkward dialogue. Surprisingly, I found Bruce Willis to be the most watchable, but only when he fully plays into the quasi-noir role of the crumpled journalist working hard for his bylines. (This is not, however, the character in the book.)  Visually, the film is far better than its script – The first ten minutes overpromise a film that’s not to be found later on, as a magnificent overhead shot of New York City leads to an astonishing steady-cam shot and then to the memorable image of Tom Hanks dragging his dog off to a sodden walk (and a misguided phone call that triggers everything that follows). Narratively, you have enough to keep viewers invested, but there is often a clash between the original intentions of author Tom Wolfe and the neutered execution that Brian de Palma ends up delivering. Part of it is clearly due to an attempt at mainstream filmmaking – I don’t think that major studios were ready back in 1990 to bet the bank on a highly cynical work, at least not as much as today. You can see the compromises all the way through, even as the atmosphere of a New York City divided along racial and class lines is still quite pertinent as long as you ignore the Bronx caricatures. It’s frequently (but intermittently) funny, at least enough to keep the film from being dull. I strongly suspect that The Bonfire of Vanities’ reputation partially comes from overinflated expectations considering the success of the original book, partially because entertainment pundits were (and are) always looking for a fall-from grace story from Hollywood, and partially because the gap between that the film aimed for and what it achieved is so visible. As someone who routinely watches near-unwatchable cinematic tripe made with only a fraction of The Bonfire of Vanities’ assembled talents, the circa-1990 hyperbolic pans of the film are embarrassing for those taking the potshots: The Bonfire of the Vanities is misguided, disappointing, even a case study in how even the best intentions can go wrong in such a complicated production as a Hollywood film, but there’s more than enough here to make viewers happy – even its problems can be entertaining once you get into them.

  • Alternadad, Neal Pollack

    Alternadad, Neal Pollack

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2007, 290 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-375-42362-8

    I’m now well in the stage of my life where friends are not just married, but actively reproducing. The changes are profound, as the new kids become the focus of their parents’ lives: suddenly, evening movie outing are impossible, and lunchtime discussions become all about showing the latest pictures of their superstar. Some people become hollow husk of their former personalities, having sacrificed every shred of it on the altar of parenthood. Lest you think I am making fun of them, let me set you straight: I’m not mocking them as much as I’m dreading that in a few years, the same thing could happen to me.

    Books like Neal Pollack’s Alternadad may not be the answer to this growing fear, but they certainly put the discussion in context. People who have read Pollack’s previous books will be surprised to learn that his latest is a memoir of his first years as a father. After all, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature was literary hipness given form (from McSweeney, no less), even as Never Mind the Pollacks was a rock-and-roll novel through and through. The leap from this hipster coolness to the more conventional demands of parenthood end up forming the main concern of Alternadad, as Pollack tries to reconcile his hip formerly-single self with the demands of a growing son.

    The narrative begins in Chicago, where alternative-culture-loving Pollack meets the love of his life (although not without behaving badly enough during their first date that he’s got to beg for another one), gets married and learns of her pregnancy. Then it’s off to Philadelphia where Elijah Pollack is born, and where Pollack père gets increasingly concerned about the riskier neighborhoods that he used to find so charming when he was a carefree single.

    So it is that the bulk of the book takes place in Austin, where the Pollack family undergoes its formative years: Elijah starts going to preschool (and becomes a biter) while Neal briefly plays in a punk band, trades a drug habit for another one and gradually gets involved in community work. As Elijah grows up, music starts being a factor in the father-son relationship, as Neal is determined to give his son a solid background in what he considers cool music.

    As a narrative, it’s an engrossing read: Neal is a flawed character, but a solid narrator, and his easy prose is peppered with killer lines and flashes of insight. Part of the appeal of the book, perhaps unfortunately, is that Neal does act in ways that most would consider irresponsible: his drug habits may be recreational, but they’re constant through the book, and his decision to form a punk band and go on a multi-city tour soon after his son’s birth may not be exactly what we’d consider solid middle-ground behavior for a new father. Later on, Elijah gets expelled from preschool for behavioral problem, and Neal writes an on-line article about it that becomes a controversy magnet and an excuse for perfect strangers to criticize his behavior. Remove those elements, however, and Alternadad becomes a fatherhood narrative like many others.

    While I may not share any unsavory habits with Pollack, his narrative does address universal concerns. The transition from bachelor to husband to father is fraught with identity crises, and if Alternadad may be an extreme data point on the “personality change” scale of parenthood, it shows that some people don’t necessarily disappear once their genes have been passed on. Whether this approach is preferable to people who straighten up, become devoted brain-dead parents and carry around a photo album of chocolate-smeared infants is something that everyone will have to decide for themselves, but it’s a comfort of sort to understand that some things don’t change no matter what happens.

  • Body Of Lies (2008)

    Body Of Lies (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2008) Never mind that this adaptation seems to have dispensed with the rationale for the original novel’s title: Even in a pumped-up, slightly dumbed-down Hollywood version, this story has the heft of a solid contemporary thriller, not unlike Syriana even if it doesn’t satisfies as completely. As a look at current American covert intelligence operations, it’s credible and merciless: the lack of compassion is biting, the rivalries are omnipresent and even the so-called good-guys have their less-admirable qualities. It’s slightly too long for its own good, but director Ridley Scott delivers the goods when comes the time to deliver the showcase sequences: There’s a jeep/helicopter chase early in the film that makes little tactical sense, yet crackles with energy. Throughout, we’re treated with superb cinematography and capable acting: While the spotlights will go to a scruffier-than-ever Leonardo DiCaprio and a rotund Russel Crowe, two of the film’s most remarkable performers, in entirely different registers, are an unflappable Mark Strong as a jordanian spymaster and an irresistible Golshifteh Farahani as an Iranian nurse stuck in the middle of an espionage plot. The best part of the film is how it’s absorbed like a good novel, watching the pieces set up and running in different directions. It’s hardly perfect, but it’s pretty good at what it tries to do, and that’s already not bad.

  • August Rush (2007)

    August Rush (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2008) As sugary-sweet as it is lazily put-together, this unabashedly romantic fable is mistaken in thinking that the simple mechanics of a feel-good film can somehow compensate for contrived plot mechanics. The setup of the story clearly announces what’s in store, as a fleeing relationship between a classical musician and an Irish rocker result in a kid whose existence is wiped clean by a overbearing grandfather. A decade later, all members of this separate family start looking for each other even as the child has become a musical prodigy whose music will be performed in Central Park, but only if he can avoid the clutches of a mysterious ragamuffin impresario. (Hey, I told you it was contrived.) The complications are as artificial as the way the story is resolved, with happenstance and chance glances. I admit that being overly critical of this film is like kicking an adorable puppy, but the alternative is encouraging films that are just as indifferently put together. Despite the film’s interest in music as a transcending, perhaps supernatural force, there’s little of that magic at play in the film. It ends abruptly, almost as if it realizes how ashamed it should be of itself. The DVD contains several deleted scenes that merely prolong the agony.

  • Appaloosa (2008)

    Appaloosa (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2008) This is an old-fashioned western drama with all the usual fixings (trains, horses, six-shooters, saloons, hats, villains, Indians, Mexicans and so on) and little in terms of radical genre re-interpretation. It’s basically a tragic buddy-movie, or what happens when a woman comes in-between them. The dialogue is clipped and folksy, the tough guys remain tough guys, and the bad people get killed. There’s enough here to please both the traditionalists and those who think that westerns are a fertile ground for slash fiction. Alas, there’s a limit to the enjoyment such pictures can create, and Appaloosa remains too well-mannered and too conventional to take chances. Ed Harris’ direction in generally unremarkable, while the short growled lines of dialogue can be hard to understand without subtitles. The two female characters are plot devices, which also goes to the film’s villains and allies: only the two protagonists are really worth considering. In a way, charming throwbacks to classic westerns are nowadays unusual enough to be interesting, but there’s a good reason why they don’t make as many westerns as they used to: the genre’s palette is limited, and it doesn’t take much to touch upon all the essential points if you’re coloring inside the lines.

  • Headwind, John J. Nance

    Headwind, John J. Nance

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 2001, 432 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-13262-4

    One of genre writers’ most essential skills is the ability to cover one’s traces. It may be the difference between acclaimed writers and the hacks. What separates a tired formula from a successful one. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer books always work in roughly the same ways, for instance, but he does it so well that few fans will mind. Parker has perfected the formula for which he’s known, and he’s got the skills to play unobtrusive variations on it. (And when he gets tired of it, he writes something else.)

    John J. Nance’s place in the thriller ecosystem is very specific: He’s the master of the civilian aviation thriller. Not only has he been a lawyer and a commercial pilot before turning to writing, he has also become a media expert in his chosen field, and his fiction has tackled everything from Cessnas to 747s. You may have heard about a few of his novels before: Both Pandora’s Clock and Medusa’s Child have been turned into made-for-TV movies, and some of his books have been acclaimed best-sellers: I’ve kept a particular fondness for Turbulence, for instance.

    But the bag of tricks for a commercial aviation thriller writer can be a small one, and run-of-the-mill efforts such as Headwind can show how formulas can be limited if they’re not handled carefully.

    The premise of this 2001 thriller, ironically, is more interesting today than it was at the time of its publication: While traveling to Europe, a former American President is indicted by a War Crimes tribunal for ordering an operation that ended up killing hundreds of innocent civilians. Only the efforts of daring airline pilots stop him from being arrested in Greece, but it quickly becomes apparent that he’s up against enemies who seem to have all of Europe’s legal authorities on their side. The president is safe as long as he’s up in the air, but one can’t remain above it all forever…

    The narrow field of civilian aviation thrillers only have a few subgenre-specific tricks up their sleeves: eventful take-offs, terrifying flights and difficult landings. The rest is just variations on a theme, and so it’s amusing to see Nance hit every one of those recipes at some point during the narrative, even when it doesn’t have much of an impact on the overarching plot. The novel starts with a bang as the president is flown out of Greece against the wishes of the departure airport. That’s not a bad introduction, and it serves to highlight the seriousness of the situation. But the other thrill-rides are far less organic to the plot: A character seemingly lives in remote Colorado for no other reason that to present a rough small airplane ride, while a flight to England is spectacularly re-routed to Ireland in an excuse for nap-of-the-earth flying. The novel’s climax is comfortably located on an empty loop as the characters try to fly somewhere, only to find out that then can’t (tee-hee, oops): their return landing is just as difficult as we’d expect in the last fifty pages of any thriller.

    More intriguing is the legal maneuvering necessary to extricate the president from his indictment. The novel may have been partially inspired by the Pinochet arrest, there’s been some real-world discussions of forcible indictments for American executive orders in the years since Headwind was published: the actions of the Bush administration led a few to muse about trying the president and his executive for war crimes. Amusingly, those same discussions rob Headwind of some of its built-in assumption of presidential innocence: Today’s readers would be far more willing to consider the possibility that any president could be indicted for valid reasons.

    Regrettably none of this makes Headwind anything more than a routine milk run in the universe of thrillers, whether they’re based on civilian aviation or not: the plot threads are showing a bit too clearly, and there’s a sense that the novel is gliding in-between the expected plot beats. Nance’s done better before and will almost certainly do better in the future. But his mastery of thriller mechanics isn’t perfect yet, and it’s books like Headwind that show why.

  • Die Trying, Lee Child

    Die Trying, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 1998 (2005 reprint), 434 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-14224-7

    This second novel in my Lee Child Reading Project (“One book per month, every month, until we’re done”) also happens to be Child’s second novel, and the one where his formula gets an extra push in the right direction. It still relies on an abominable coincidence, but one that happens on the first page rather than halfway through the novel like in his previous Killing Floor. Like all of Child’s novel, it also cleverly masquerades the true nature of the plot until midway through, and provides plenty of opportunities for Child the chance to spout credible technical information.

    Child’s early novels seem undermined by coincidences, but Die Trying at least has the decency to put it in the first chapter and go on from there, after a perfunctory comment by the characters about the unlikeliness of it all. It just so happens that Jack Reacher, ex-Milityary Policemen, master of all trades, roving vigilante, series hero, is walking down a downtown Chicago street when a woman he bumps into is kidnapped. Caught between the woman and her abductors, Reacher is told to get in the car along with the woman and not ask any questions.

    Reacher, naturally, is quick to understand that he’d better do what he’s told: There are too many people on the streets of Chicago to risk an immediate confrontation. Later on, though…

    But first, Reacher and his unwilling companion get to make closer acquaintance. She’s a brilliant FBI agent and the daughter to an influential soldier. As Reacher and her are thrown in a van and carried across a good chunk of the country, the reader spends the first half of the novel wondering just what kind of plot is going on here. Why the abduction? Where are they being taken? Scenes presenting the FBI’s frantic search for the kidnapping victim help raise the suspense, to say nothing of a few creepy scenes in which an escape-proof holding cell is built and tested with violent results.

    True to the series’ motif of hiding the true shape of the story with a lengthy prologue, Die Trying doesn’t put its cards on the table until page 150: Reacher’s companion has been kidnapped by a right-wing militia to exert leverage on the US government as they plan on declaring independence for their territory. Reacher is obviously going to spoil their plans, but that’s when the fun of the novel kicks in: Not only is he able to make sense of situations long before anyone else can (he accurately deduces his companion’s identity within minutes thanks to a few simple details), but his abilities border on the superhuman. Die Trying has a few set-pieces demonstrating Reacher’s uncanny time-sense (which he uses to fake out a credulous member of the opposition) and another hard-hitting demonstration of his sniper skills. It’s not entirely believable (some skills erode when not in practice), but Reacher’s entitled to a few super-abilities in his own series, and those sequences allow Child to set up some intricate technical demonstrations.

    It all amounts to another highly satisfying reading experience for Child fans: the action moves at a steady pace, the prose is never less than compulsively readable, and it all wraps up in a gigantic explosion for those who deserve it. Written in a slightly different fashion by a less-capable author, the Jack Reacher series would feel like bargain-basement men’s adventure series. But Child is a capable professional, and so his series steadily hits its target with unnerving accuracy. Now, if only Child could get out of the habit of using coincidences as plot drivers…

  • Enter the Babylon System, Rodrigo Bascuñán & Christian Pearce

    Enter the Babylon System, Rodrigo Bascuñán & Christian Pearce

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vintage Canada, 2007, 360 pages, C$22.00 tpb, ISBN 978-0-679-31389-2

    The link between guns and modern hip-hop is as obvious as the genre’s music videos, but serious explorations of the subject aren’t quite as common. While the subject is good for alarmist sound-bite news reports, a serious exploration of the subject would require journalists with some understanding of hip-hop culture and the capability to analyze both the statistics and the human elements of the situation.

    Fortunately, that’s exactly what we get from Rodrigo Bascuñán and Christian Pearce’s Enter the Babylon System, a book-length exploration of the link between urban culture and firearms. “Unpacking gun culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cents”, as the subtitle suggests. Both authors are co-owners of Pound, “Canada’s largest hip-hop and urban culture magazine”, which speaks well of their interest and affection for the culture put under the microscope. But if you were expecting the kind of mealy-mouthed excuse that so often seems to come from groups under fire, think again: Both authors are quick to admit that there is a problem in hip-hop’s fascination for guns. The opening pages of the book make it clear that gun culture has a price measured in lives, as innocent bystanders and not-so-innocent criminals are both caught in the crossfire. The authors aren’t interested in denying the link between guns and hip-hop: They’re keen, however, on exploring the roots of that fascination, and its consequences.

    After a vastly entertaining introduction that hints at the decidedly entertaining style in which the book is written (mixing statistics, news reports, hip-hop lyrics, artist interviews and well-penned editorializing), the book spends its “first chamber” discussing “the trade of the tools”: The weapons so often rhapsodized about. Readers who can’t tell the difference between a Glock and an AK-47 will be well-armed after reading a chapter that takes a hard look at weapon manufacturers, their products and their self-serving rhetoric. Latter meaty chapters discuss the gun distribution circuits (a process that involves a surprisingly low number of known crooked dealers), the way guns are depicted in popular culture outside hip-hop and the myriad of ways guns are used, from crime to suicide to military operations.

    It’s a lively, entertaining, enraging book. Definitely written from a Canadian perspective, Enter the Babylon System doesn’t even attempt to excuse facilitators of gun violence. It’s difficult to come away from the book, for instance, without feeling that the NRA, regardless of it’s members’ purest intentions, is a borderline psychotic association that has taken a pro-violence mandate that goes far, far beyond protecting gun owners’ rights. The United States are quite naturally blamed for the influx of illegal gun in Canada, but one of the book’s surprises is an exploration of Canada’s home-grown gun makers.

    Unfortunately, the book sometimes steps upon its own qualities. Utterly knowledgeable about hip-hop culture, the authors often assume the same understanding from their readers. And, as entertaining as the author’s style can be to read, some transitions and linking passages can feel forced and deliberately opaque, dampening the reading experience.

    But even with those minor issues, Enter the Babylon System is a brilliant piece of engaged investigative journalism. It weaves together an impressive amount of material into a compelling storyline, one that goes beyond easy summaries to truly delve into the roots of gun culture. It’s compelling reading about a distasteful subject, and it’s a shame that the book was only published north of the frontier rather than down south where it could do some greater good.

  • Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams

    Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Night Shade, 2008, 265 pages, US$24.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-59780-125-6

    It’s not entirely true that Walter Jon Williams has been away from Science Fiction for a long time; it just feels that way. In the years since Aristoi (1992), Williams has written a space-opera trilogy, several well-received short stories, a mainstream catastrophe novel, a Star Wars novel, a yet-unfinished urban fantasy series and has been involved in writing alternate reality games. But from a certain viewpoint, Implied Spaces looks like William’s first standalone far-future pure-SF novel in sixteen years, and it’s somewhat of a return to form for him.

    If Aristoi was ten year ahead of its time, Implied Spaces often feels like a mix CD of the coolest bit of contemporary SF. It first looks like epic fantasy, but is eventually revealed to be far-future pure Science Fiction, with an immortal adventurer slumming in artificial worlds with a powerful sword and an even-more-powerful cat to his side. Before the story is through, we’ll deal with a renegade AI, zombies, grandiose space battles, and oodles of other stuff in a relatively short 265 pages. S.M. Stirling, in his back-cover blurb, calls it a “Sword & Singularity” novel, and it’s a better description than most.

    What’s certain is that Williams is having fun: the entire novel is written with a carefree eye toward fancy set-pieces and high-tech twists blending together the entire catalog of modern SF tricks and gadgets. It’s a fast read, and one that gets more than a few smiles along the way.

    It’s also a great deal less conventional than you’d expect. Thanks to the novel’s post-human artificial environments, the structure of the story seems to oscillate between set pieces in exotic locales, followed by quiet chats in relaxing rooms where the novel’s stakes are raised and explained. Once the pattern becomes clear, it almost starts being amusing as the story’s Big Ideas become nothing more than exposition sequences forming the connecting tissue between otherwise-unrelated fantasy sequences. One wonders if the novel could be adapted for the theater with a few minor tweaks.

    But peer closely at the novel’s architecture, and something else emerges: the awful suspicion that we’re in the hands of an author deliberately aiming at fan-favorite targets. AI using a cat proxy? Check. Pirates, ninjas and zombies? Check. Antagonist/Protagonist? Check. “Using a star as a flamethrower” [P.183]? It was awesome in E.E. Doc Smith’s time, and it’s just as awesome today.

    It’s terribly unfair to suggest that Implied Spaces is a made-to-order romp that uses the familiar elements, or “power chords”, of contemporary SF in a deliberate and calculated fashion. But up to a certain point, Williams’ last spate of novels may have conditioned readers to think of it in that fashion: Since 1999’s The Rift, Williams has been trying to reinvent his career in different fashions, with media tie-ins and a military SF trilogy cold-bloodedly similar to many best-selling such series. Assuming the worst, which is to say an author deliberately returning to the heart of genre SF by writing a novel playing with the last decade’s buzzwords, it’s still not a bad thing: Implied Results is an interesting and entertaining novel, and it seems to have garnered Williams some of his most sustained genre attention in years.

    SF writers have always written to market, and there’s nothing wrong with that —except when the rivets show. Frankly, it’s good to have Williams back in the genre-SF pool, competently speaking the language and riffing off the sense-of-wonder expectations of his readership, earning a place alongside the current heavy hitters of the genre. It may or may not be from the heart, but it’s certainly worth the price of a hardcover book.

  • The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

    The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1987, 690 pages, C$6.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-27597-6

    I’m not sure what makes a middle-brow classic, but I think that The Bonfire of the Vanities qualifies on most counts. Let’s see: it was widely-reviewed, sold really well, was adapted in a big-budget Hollywood movie (which tanked spectacularly, forever earning another place in history) and has earned 155 amazon reviews so far, which it pretty darn good for a book published ten years before the whole Internet thing took off. Better yet: Tom Wolfe is still writing and commanding attention today, lending further heft to the importance of his first novel.

    The assignment, should we choose to admit it, is to read 1987’s The Bonfire of Vanities and see how well it holds up today. Once the novel has moved from contemporary headlines to historical context, does it retain the energy of the period, or does it fade away in irrelevance?

    The Bonfire of the Vanities certainly feels like it couldn’t exist anywhere but in mid-eighties New York. A pre-Guliani New York riddled with crime and racial tension, home to the poorest and the richest, playground of the self-styled “Masters of the Universe” ruling over Wall Street and, by extension, the rest of the world. Sherman McCoy is one of those men to whom everything is owed: He can make multi-million commissions by moving around billions of dollars in government bonds, eking out massive profits from razor-thin percentage fractions. He lives in a multi-million-dollars apartment that he can barely affords, owns the requisite Mercedes and has a just-as-requisite affair with another married woman. But a late-night tryst turns sour as he makes a wrong turn in the Bronx and his car ends up hitting a young black man. Outraged media reports quickly lead to an investigation and a very public trial of Sherman’s entire life. In the process, we get to study New York society in action, as Sherman becomes the focus of the media, is thrown to the wolves by his former acquaintances, tries to salvage his honor and loses everything along the way. Right, wrong, fair or unfair become distant considerations in the face of a hefty look at that society at that time.

    But beyond a modest crime story anchoring a rich study of characters in distress, The Bonfire of the Vanities is written with self-conscious verve. Passages are written in quasi stream-of-consciousness style, allow us inside the confused minds of the characters. Sherman is quickly exposed as an insecure man barely holding on to his social position. His latter passage through the New York prison system is as harrowing a sequence as anything written in a suspense novel. As flawed as he is, Sherman almost looks like a hero compared to the venal and petty characters that surround him.

    The novel is filled with terrific set-pieces, lucid explanations of the way things really work, from the stockbroking room to the justice system or the complexities of upper-society New York. Tom Wolfe may be a media-friendly self-promoter, but there’s a real interest in his prose, even when it becomes flashy and self-indulgent to the detriment of storytelling. It succeeds where other writers would fail miserably, and remains interesting even when it loses its way.

    So, yes, The Bonfire of the Vanities is still worth a read even today. It’s a terrific throwback to another era, and a novel that manages to combine ambitious literary goals with a clear and intriguing storyline. The set-pieces are terrific, and the prose is unique. Ah, if all mainstream fiction was just as good, I may never need to read genre fiction again…

    [October 2008: Amusingly, I ended up reading The Bonfire of the Vanities at the beginning of the Credit Crisis of 2008, a time where Wall Street finance salesmen ended up in the news again. Strikingly, a good number of the articles and news reports discussing the crisis (nearly 2000 as I trawl news.google.com in mid-October) referred to the brokers as “Masters of the Universe”, the expression coined by Wolfe in the novel. Now if that’s not a proof of an enduring classic, I’m not sure what is…]

  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Riverhead, 2007, 340 pages, C$15.50 tpb, ISBN 978-1-59448-329-5

    During the summer of 2008, the drums of the genre-SF critics starting passing along shocking news: for the second year in a row, the Pulitzer prize for fiction had been given to a geek-friendly book. A year after Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it was Junot Diaz’s turn to walk away with the prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a mainstream novel about a genre-obsessed nerd. After earning raves from the mainstream press, the novel then proceeded to win over SF reviewers, who got a copy from the general fiction stacks and Declared It Good.

    There are plenty of reasons to be so enthusiastic: Diaz’s first novel is an enthralling mix of multi-generational family history, immigrant experience, macho storytelling and geek references. It’s got a little bit of magical realism in-between tales of the Dominican diaspora and American geek name-dropping.

    At a distance, the story is simple, as narrator Yunior tells the story of the titular life of Oscar Wao, a former roommate whose life was shaped both by a terminal case of geekness and a family curse dating back to 1940s Dominican Republic. The story moves both forward and backwards in time, following Oscar in one direction as his life begins in 1974, and up generations as the tale discusses Oscar’s Mother’s childhood and then deeper in time to Oscar’s Grandfather’s life immediately after World War 2. Three shadows always loom over the narrative: Oscar’s own shortcomings (especially in the romance department), the terrible legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and the even more unnerving menace of the fukú curse placed over Oscar’s family. As the title suggests, the story may not have an entirely happy ending.

    But don’t get the impression that this a dour novel, because The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shines brightest when the narrator’s confidently sarcastic voice goes riffing on the beauty of Dominican women, the absurdities of life under Trujillo or Oscar’s burgeoning nerdiness. Yunior, we’re supposed to understand, is the type of pure Dominican male who hits the gym thrice weekly, knows the hippest clubs and leaves a trail of conquered women. (If the novel will have a weakness for some readers, it’s that it’s written in a very masculine voice.) Yet when comes the time to tell the story of Oscar , nothing short of SF&F references will allow Yunior (who refers to himself as a Watcher) to do justice to the tale. So one gets to read passages such as…

    Beli, who’d been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam’s cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! [P.94]

    If nothing else, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao features the strongest narrator voice you’re likely to read this year, a near-perfect blend of literary ambitions and genre references. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel quite like this, nor one that exemplifies some of the best aspects of (North-)American culture blending like this one. It’s both a terrific mainstream novel and an even more fulfilling geek-friendly novel. A full understanding of the novel is probably impossible outside comic-friendly hip Dominican readers, but don’t let that dissuade you from giving this novel a read. It’s got much to teach to anyone who thinks the values of mainstream literature are incompatible with genre readers.

  • War, Inc. (2008)

    War, Inc. (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2008) Sharing political outlooks with the film’s writers doesn’t necessarily imply that I’m more favorably predisposed to forgive the film’s increasingly annoying missteps. A mess of good intentions and weak satire, War Inc illustrated how difficult reality has become to parody: The idea of a wholly-outsourced war sponsored by big businesses isn’t that funny or outlandish, and the film flops from weak smiles to even weaker laughs. Worse is the idea to turn the film in some kind of redemptive experience for a paid assassin: it never totally works, and stops the film dead whenever time had to be spent developing this particular storyline. For a comedy, War, Inc remains curiously dull, as if the jokes were all taking place on an entirely different plane of humor, sometime intersecting with ours. The direction can’t patch to holes in this low-budget production, and the script (co-written by Mark Leyner, of all people!) clearly has no clue what to prioritize and what to leave behind. Some of the earliest laughs even come at the expense of the pictures, as it presents a fantasy version of “Iqualuit, Nunavut” that has nothing to do with the real place. The film isn’t a complete disaster thanks to good but misused actors such as John Cusak and the always-cute Marisa Tomei, but it’s a great deal less impressive than it could have been. Even the film’s leftist politics are more annoying than anything else: anti-capitalism and anti-war targets are so easy that it takes some effort to miss those targets. I may be on the picture’s political side, but is it too much to ask that the film be, at least, smart?

  • The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman

    The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2007, 275 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-441-01616-7

    Joe Haldeman may be an acknowledged master of Science Fiction, but his work has been quite uneven over the past decade an a half. This, of course, is a polite way of saying that he’s capable of the worst (Forever Free), the dull (Forever Peace), the competent (Camouflage) and the intriguing (The Coming) without warning. One never quite knows what to expect from a Haldeman novel, largely because he rarely attempts sequels or series, but also because his track record so far spans the entire range of critical opinions.

    So to say that The Accidental Time Machine is a surprise isn’t entirely surprising. The title is accurate, given how it describes the adventures of a young disaffected MIT student stuck with a sophisticated custom-made lab device that surprisingly ends up sending itself forward in time. As Matt Fuller discovers, this machines works according to precise rules: Every time he activates it, the machine sends itself in the future for a duration twelve times that of the last jump. From micro-second jumps, Matt activates the machine to jumps days, weeks, months and then years in the future. Then things get interesting.

    The most obvious attraction of The Accidental Time Machine is the time travel element itself. As Matt jumps from era to era, the world changes, slightly at first, then more radically as the jumps span decades and centuries. Many readers loved it when the protagonists of Haldeman’s The Forever War came back home from decade-long missions only to find utterly transformed societies, and this novel occasionally offers the same kind of conceptual kick. Matt goes through theocracies, post-scarcity economies and strange far-future adventures, and the result is a satisfying grab-bag of speculations, none of them radically new, but all intriguing to some degree or another.

    But the real star of the book, for once, aren’t the ideas as much as the characters experiencing it. Matt is our anchor through the novel: recently single, generally apathetic, troubled by job problems, Matt is the ideal character to send through progressively farther futures. He’s both smart enough and isolated enough to look forward to the next jump. He learns much during his trip, including how to woo a comely young woman he accidentally picks up during his jumps. The conclusion, which would have been a nightmare from certain perspectives, ends up being a true charmer in great part because our characters are so happy through it all.

    It’s no accident if “charm” ends up being The Accidental Time Machine‘s single most distinctive trait. It’s a short book in an age of bloated monstrosities, and it flows without a hitch. Haldeman’s prose is classic stripped-down elegance, and there’s no reason to stop reading. This is partly a throwback to an earlier kind of SF, but not necessarily a less-successful piece of work. Even with a subject so familiar as time travel, Haldeman finds a few clever wrinkles and wisely doesn’t neglect his characters. While The Accidental Time Machine may not create the kind of gob-smacked admiration as more ambitious contemporary works of SF, it’s got most other contenders beaten down in sheer likability. This is mid-list SF as it should be: Accessible, interesting, short and warm. Readers who have been let down by some of Haldeman’s latest few books ought to be pleased by this one.