Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon (Sceptre)
…And, of course, sometimes there’s just a giddying joy to be had watching a strange world being constructed. Especially if it’s done with this light a touch.
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Seconds - Bryan Lee O'Malley (SelfMadeHero)
Forever destined to be introduced as a ‘much-anticipated follow up’, Seconds jettisons a lot of Scott Pilgrim's tics, including some of the playful ways it meddled with the comics form and gleeful breaking of the fourth wall.
But this is one of the places where those tendencies seep back in. Seconds is narrated in third-person, by captions which hang in the air above Katie’s head. And throughout, Katie directly addresses - and, in this case, contradics - the way her story is being narrated.
As the captions use free indirect speech - staying just outside of Katie’s head, but heavily dosed with her perspective - they read like a live commentary playing out in Katie’s head.
When she contradicts these monologues, then, Seconds softly establishes and then reminds you how indecisive she is as a character, which (without spoiling anything) turns out to be sort of the point of the book. But on the surface, it’s just a great running joke.
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Phoenix Fiction)
This is just some great, tight thriller writing.
Those last two sentences invite you to play detective, pick back through the scene for the other four lies. They set expectations which Flynn spends the next few hundred pages alternately reinforcing and confounding. But…
As a rule, I tend to pick out passages that are representative of the book as a whole. That isn’t the case here. To me, Gone Girl isn’t a great, tight thriller, though it may be presented as one. At its most effective, Gone Girl a horror story.
That horror is rooted in very mundane, universal fears. Fears about working in a collapsing industry, which in Gone Girl appears to be just about all of them. About being a bad person, deep down, and having to lie to ourselves and others. About how we appear when those lies fail or are overwhelmed by someone else’s.
Most of all, it’s a horror about the fragile unpredictability of love. The book sells Nick and Amy’s relationship without ever really lingering on its happy origins. Instead, the focus is on the couple a decade down the line, as each of those fears is methodically applied to show how they can cause love to dissipate, or to warp into something ugly and harmful.
WEIRD FOREIGN DRINKS PARTY – Grant Howitt (Look Robot)
Grant Howitt’s Look Robot is nominally about games, I think, but it’s one of those blogs that I will happily follow on pretty much any digression.
This particular post takes a stroll into a kind of mutant Lifestyle section, outlining – without really recommending – the titular parties, where everyone brings untested beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and puts them to the test.
I’ve never been one for dressing up, or doing prep or, y'know, activity of any kind. So as theme parties go, this is pretty much exactly my speed.
Howitt elevates it beyond that with prose which is honourable enough to pretend, with an entirely straight face, that this really could be a Lifestyle section and that people in Sunday-afternoon living rooms across the country could right now be nodding sagely into their broadsheets at the idea of a soy/vodka shot.
Which is just a very funny idea, even before you get to phrases like ‘like having the sea come in your mouth’.
The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson (Picador)
The Psychopath Test is a series of loosely grouped non-fiction stories which reads like a thriller. So it feels strange to be picking out this section of the book, which doesn’t fit that mould at all.
As a passage, it’s no testament to Ronson’s remarkable ability to seek out the strangest situations and individuals. But it does hint at the other thing I love about his writing – the way it takes you along with him as he encounters each new perspective on the topic.
It’s utterly convincing when, for example, Bob Hare tells you psychopaths are practically a second species hiding among us like Cylons. Then you turn to the next chapter, and encounter a completely contradictory perspective, and are won over by that one too. They all kind of plaster over one another, giving The Psychopath Test the texture of a palimpsest.
For me, it’s a reminder of how easy it is to become a third-hand expert on a subject after reading/watching/listening to. And of course, before too long Ronson is reminded of that too – in this case, by a well-argued point from documentary maker Adam Curtis. Once again, you’re totally convinced.
And once again, Ronson moves on quickly enough to give your brain mild whiplash, letting this question mark haunt the rest of the book. It’s a ballsy move for a non-fiction writer, to say the least.
Batman #663 - Grant Morrison, John Van Fleet (DC Comics)
I’ve said that one of the reasons for this blog is to earmark things I can steal at a later date. This isn’t that, exactly.
With the exception of the odd nice turn of phrase (“shuffling selves like croupier cards”), the prose here is overwrought nearly to the point of ugliness. I’m posting this for the elegance of its ideas.
The core concept of Morrison’s run is incorporating Batman’s entire history, making space for it all. The Joker is the axis on which much of this spins. His ever-shifting persona, it’s implied, is the reason that Batman stories have jumped back and forth between camp ‘n’ colourful and grim 'n’ gritty for the past 75 years.
(Which, now I come to think about it, casts Batman himself as a reactive element, defined almost entirely by what his nemesis is doing.)
These two paragraphs contain almost all of the ideas about the Joker (and super-crime in general) that pepper Morrison’s work on Batman, all the way back to Arkham Asylum and forward to the end of his run five years later.
It joins all the dots, but not neatly, not the way Batman would: that repeated “Maybe”, slightly contradictory sentences sat adjacent to one another. This kind of pattern spotting, organising chaos into useful narratives, and the question of whether it’s healthy behaviour, is a theme we’ll come back later in Morrison’s run.
The 200 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far (#3, Kanye West - Runaway) – Jeremy D. Larson (Pitchfork)
I’ve been really enjoying my very particular way of reading Pitchfork’s 2010-2014 tracks list (listening to this Spotify playlist, working my way from #1 down, reading each entry in time with the song it’s about).
There’s some great writing in there (I suspect this won’t be the last passage I share) and this piece in particular absolutely nails its subject. In the space of a paragraph, Larson moves from being purely descriptive, in a way that’s ensures you’ll be able to hear that note in your head, and into a larger reading of the song and its context in Kanye’s career.
That’s enough to be envious of. But the bloated magnificence of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is my own personal white whale as a blogger, and seeing someone pin it down this effortlessly turns me a shade of green previously only seen in emoticons.
Multiversity #1 - Grant Morrison, Ivan Reis (DC Comics)
(A portrait of the blogger as a young man.)
…What’s that was I just saying about Grant Morrison really getting his fans?
Coming in the middle of my great Morrison-at-DC readathon, most of Multiversity #1 felt like a muddled retread of his Greatest Hits. But the opening was smart and “live dissection” is, I suspect, a phrase I’ll be using at any opportunity in future.