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Two Quick Thriller Reviews

Under the auspices of research, as investigations into the form of crime thriller, but really only because I love both authors and lately have felt like some light reading...

City Primeval: High Noon In Detroit by Elmore Leonard (#15 of 2010)—Have you ever been two-thirds of the way through a book and then lost it? I thought that's what happened to me with this book. I brought it to my parents' place on that weekend road trip I took with Penny and Myron and then somehow lost it before the return trip to Toronto. And it grated on me. It wasn't as bad as the time I was halfway through Avatar and then received a call from Natalie, that she'd been paged, she had to go to a birth, and I had to speed back home from the theatre to be with the kids. I still haven't seen the rest of Avatar. But it was close—and then, after maybe a week of the book being lost, my mom found it in the bedroom at my parents' house. Whew.

I thought this was a good Elmore Leonard thriller. It's old, dating from 1980. And it isn't like Hombre or 52 Pickup or any of the other old ones people talk about. I think I happened upon it at the used book sales the University of Toronto stages each fall. It's a pretty standard set-up. An unhinged tough—"Evel Knieval with a gun," somebody calls him—tangles with Detroit's homicide squad. There's a fascinating subplot about Albanian blood feuds. And the end stand-off between detective Raymond Cruz and the villain goes down as one of my favourites from the Leonard oeuvre. It was interesting to examine the differences between this and what would come to be known as Leonard's style. There's less emphasis on dialogue here, and in the absence of the usual snappy one-liners it's possible to see that Leonard is a much better prose writer than many consider him to be. For example, chapter 9 is a three-and-a-half page bit that details Ray Cruz's relationship with his ex-wife and woman in general, and within the space of that approx. 1,000 words, Leonard sketches out a portrait of the American male on the verge of the '80s. And in fact, the whole novel can be seen as a morality play on what defines a "good man"—with even emphasis on both the "good" and the "man." Basically, it amounts to Ray Cruz trying to figure out whether he's morally able to shoot the killer, who has a previous history of evading guilty pleas. I won't reveal the ending, but it's a good one. I'd recommend this—a little-known Leonard release that deserves to be better known.

The Mystic Arts Of Erasing All Signs Of Death by Charlie Huston (#16 of 2010)—If Leonard, at the age of 85, is just winding up his career, then Huston is still in the early stages of his. The two writers share some stylistic similarities. Both have a great ear for dialogue, as in the way people actually speak. In fact, Huston's use of dialogue owes something to Leonard. But Huston has a far better hand with character than Leonard. 

Mystic Arts is about Webster Goodhue, who happens into a job on a team of crime scene cleaners and, through that, finds himself stuck between a beautiful girl and a bunch of thugs. This one doesn't have the plotting economy of Huston's pulp masterpiece, The Shotgun Rule, which I think everyone should go out and read if they haven't already. But it still represents an evolution in Huston's technique. His hand with characterization continues to improve. Web's backstory evolves throughout the book. There's an enormous character reveal around page 150, and another about another 70 pages in, and it's only by the end of the story that I felt I grasped Web, which is as it should be. Huston says in the book's acknowledgments that he did more research for this novel than for any other he's done in the past. It paid off—the crime scenes and the tattoo parlour scenes in particular feel authentic. I also liked that Web wasn't particularly tough. He gets beat up maybe three or four times through the book. You like him anyway. There were some major plot holes, such as the fact that Web seems to be an expert crime-scene cleaner after only a day or two on the job. But the rest of the book is so entertaining you forgive Huston for the slip-ups. Another one I'd recommend, but only after you've read The Shotgun Rule.

Pro UFC, Anti Hockey Fight, Hypocrite?

I am in favour of allowing Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Canada, but against fighting in hockey. Does that make me a hypocrite? That's what I've been wondering since this week's Toronto press conference by the UFC, in which the combat organization announced it was opening an office in the city in an effort to pressure the province of Ontario to allow the league to stage events here. Now, some points in the internal debate I've staged over the last few days:

1. Fighting Is Ancillary To Hockey. Those people who say it's an integral part of the game are lying. Hockey is an activity where grown men glide around on ice and attempt to get a small rubber disc into a net. Sometimes these men happen to run into each other and get knocked down. That's fine. So where does beating someone about the face and head come into things? It doesn't. Other sports have banned fighting; in soccer you'd get at least a red card for a punch in the face. In basketball or football you'd risk ejection from the game. Hockey should follow the same path.

2. Permitting Fighting In Hockey Is Hypocritical. The same parent who will punish his kid for being violent at the playground will stand up and cheer when a fight breaks out on the ice in a playoff game. If violence isn't a permissible form of dispute resolution at the playground then it shouldn't be a permissible form of dispute resolution in professional sport.

3. Fighting Is Not Ancillary To UFC. This sounds obvious but it's an important and crucial difference. Fighting is not a form of dispute resolution for the UFC--it's the whole point of its existence. Whereas in hockey it's basically a form of acting out. As well as poor sportsmanship, particularly in the playoffs—a team starts losing, they get upset, they start throwing down gloves and grabbing collars. Jesus! It's actually kind of maddening when I think about it. We don't allow three-year-olds to conduct themselves this way, and yet it's tacitly accepted within the rules of professional hockey? No! And yet I'm fine with the UFC. In fact, I like it.The Canadian legend, Georges St-Pierre, strikes me as an all-around class act.

4. Punch = Slap Shot. One difference, to me, is that the violence is within the rules of the UFC. A hockey team is permitted to use crisp passes and hard slap shots to beat an opponent, just like a mixed-martial artist is permitted to use quick left jabs and inescapable submission holds. Fighting is OK in a mixed-martial arts contest because that's what the contest is about—there are rules and parameters that dictate the combat, as opposed to the free-for-all that happens on the ice.

THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT: What if the NHL changed its rules to make fighting completely permissible? To an extent that maybe if you won a fight, your team received some benefit—a half point, perhaps, or an extra player on the ice. I would disagree with the rule change, because to me, such a rule change would corrupt my sense of the game. HOWEVER, I would support the NHL's freedom to stage its newly fight-filled games wherever it likes. Fighting in hockey is an issue within the context of the rules of that particular professional sport. Whether to allow UFC bouts in Toronto is a legal issue, and if the UFC wants to stage events here, then I don't think the government should prevent them.

Three Tips For Road Trips With Tiny Kids

By necessity I have become a master of taking toddlers on road trips. As a midwife student Natalie is stuck in Toronto on call 28 days of the month, so when I have to drive to the Windsor/Detroit area, either to conduct research for this novel I'm researching, or just to give the kids some grandparents time, I frequently conduct the road trip as the solo adult accompanying my one-year-old and my three-year-old. At first this rated total and complete fucking breakdown on the stress scale but now that I've done it about a billion times I have basically become Dr. Road Trip. We spent the usual four hours on the 401 yesterday and the experience was 90% pleasant, which is about the best one can hope for. So in advance of the Canadian holiday weekend, a few tips:

1. Remember that a car seat is bondage. Sure they're ergonomic and cost several hundred dollars, but regardless of how comfortable the damn thing is at first, car seats over time can grow into a strange form of water torture. They are strapped into the things, mostly motionless, and they can't get out. Diapers bunch up, legs go to sleep, Granola bars create sticky arms and that can be uncomfortable. Being locked into anything where you don't have the ability to escape grows inherently unpleasant. They're in a terrible fix. So try to distract them. 

2. But don't distract them TOO much. This tip also can be winnowed down to: Ration the distractions. It's a bit like developing a character in a novel -- you don't want to present everything all at once. The all-out nuclear bomb of distraction is the DVD. Turn on Dora the Explorer Season 1, or the latest Pixar masterpiece, and the kids go instant zone-out. But your road trips will be a hell of a lot more fun if you use the DVD player only as a last resort. On yesterday's road trip I got to hour three before I had to deploy it. What did we do the rest of the time? Well, first off, we talked. The best conversations I ever have with my kids happen when we're on the road. They have no other option but to talk with me, and so we catch up on what's going on at Montessori, playground politics, you name it. When the conversation grows stale (maybe 30 minutes in), then change up the interior environment. Open the windows. Crank the music and dance and sing. (Another 15 minutes.) And then start parceling out the distractions. Crayons and notepads will earn you another 15 minutes, for example, particularly if they're brand new. A new form of snack also can earn you a quarter of an hour. And when that gets stale, don't deploy the DVD yet. It will be tempting, but don't do it. Wait. Because...

3. Timing is everything. Maybe I should have put this first because it's the most important. The best time to leave on a road trip is an hour before nap time. The idea is to kill an hour with such conventional time-wasting armament as conversation, games and crayons, and then there will be five minutes of cranky boredom, when you will be most tempted to use the nuclear option (the DVD), and then if you can withstand that, at one point you will notice the back seat's gone quiet, you'll look back and notice: THEY'RE ASLEEP! If you can get them to sleep before you've used the DVD, then your road trip is basically done. They sleep for an hour or two, then once they're awake you pull off the road for a quick sprint (for my three-year-old) and a diaper change (for my one-year-old). And then it's back in the car for an hour with the DVD. At which point, the road trip is over.

To sum up: Timing is everything, parcel out the distractions and remember a car seat is a horrible thing to be in for three-plus hours. Remember that, and your holiday weekend road trip will be a breeze. Your friend, Dr. Road Trip.

A Few Words About Robert Munsch

My first reaction was just plain wow. As this news story notes, Robert Munsch spent most of his career struggling with addiction to cocaine and alcohol? Dude, wow.

My second reaction was, huh, doesn't that explain the erratic quality of Munsch's output? The 64-year-old author has written some remarkable children's stories. Mud Puddle is horror and suspense for three-year-olds and even after I've read it approximately a thousand times I still marvel at the a propos nature of the mud puddle's end. Oh, and every single word of The Paper-Bag Princess? Brilliant. And how great is it that he's able to shoehorn into a storybook a satire of municipal politics with Jonathan Cleaned Up, Then He Heard A Sound. Nearly as great is the fashion industry satire, Stephanie's Ponytail, which offers a succinct portrait of the mechanics of trends. Other favourites in my household: The Fire Station, Show and Tell and Angela's Airplane. All of them are remarkable stories that offer observations about the human condition. At it's best, Munsch's work is literature. Pure and simple.

But there is bad Munsch. There is terrible Munsch. I mean, have you read Murmel Murmel Murmel? It doesn't make sense. Like not even remotely. I would make a joke about the dude who wrote that book being on serious drugs, except that would be in bad taste, because the dude who wrote that book was on serious drugs. And same with the other book Munsch wrote the same year, The Boy In The Drawer. In fact, Munsch's career has been marked with unpredictable quality.

My third thought was, hey, Shulgan, why are you so surprised? Isn't it obvious that children's performers are doing way more drugs than most of us? And I'm not even talking about Steven Page. I mean, have you seen a concert by Sharon, Lois and Bram? And Raffi? Some of his antics can only be explained by BC's finest, or even more powerful drugs. That song, You Brush Your Teeth? That could only have been written by a complete stoner. I mean, come on:

And finally, my fourth thought. Being a successful children's entertainer is, I imagine, akin to living in the world's weirdest prison. As a society we have such an instinct to compartmentalize kids in this box of innocence and sweetness and light—to compartmentalize kids, as well as anything associated with kids. Thus, we hold parents to a different standard of behavior than we do the general public. Same with children's entertainers, such as Robert Munsch.

In a way, I wrote a book about this tendency. I mean, Superdad explores my own instinct to rail against it—it's about the way I rebelled against the father/parent stereotype. We're so apt to insulate children from the nastier things that happen in the supposedly adult world. I wonder about that instinct as I'm simultaneously guilty of it. I have vowed to avoid protecting my kids unless it's absolutely necessary. I drop the occasional f-bomb around them, for example, and I don't think it's a big deal. And yet, for all my supposedly progressive parenting style, I'm as disturbed as anyone by the image that opens this blog post. Cocaine and Robert Munsch books do not belong together. There is just something so wrong about anything like cocaine being associated with this manic, male Scheherazade. 

I wish I didn't think it was wrong. I wish the stereotype didn't exist. Can't we avoid passing judgment on the poor guy? He wrote some amazing books. Plus a few that royally sucked. Let him have his addictions. And yet, at the same time, I recognize an ambivalence in myself about all this. Maybe we should hold things associated with kids to a higher standard. Having some influence on a kid's life is a big responsibility. But geez, it's tiresome sometimes.

Recent Books + Renovations

Cripes, why is it that every time I finish one mammoth project I turn around and take on another? Can't I just kind of relax for awhile? But no. When I try to relax I just end up feeling rootless in the usual lukewarm bath of existential angst. Big projects provide purpose to life. Hence, since the memoir is done -- we get the Advance Reading Copies this week -- I turn around and start an enormous renovation on the house. With just one wall left to tear down we've been living in dustland for about a week. But first, I should catch up on posting book reviews.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (#13 of 2010) — I'm going to reserve providing a full accounting of my thoughts on this book because I'd like to write about it a little later on. This is the second or third time I've read it and I enjoyed it more than I thought it would. Yep, another notch in my ongoing quest to discover parenting role models in literature. Atticus Finch is up there with the unnamed protagonist in The Road as one of the Great Fathers of the Modern Novel. So far as parenting methods go you could do a lot worse than following the maxim, WWAFD -- What would Atticus Finch Do? There are so many remarkable scenes in the book. My favourites: 1. Chapter 10, when anti-violence Atticus reveals himself to be the county's best marksman. 2. Chapter 15, when Scout unwittingly resolves the standoff outside the courthouse. And 3., the many chapters of the trial of Tom Robinson. Which brings up one point. For all of Finch's fathering skills I do wonder about his adeptness as a lawyer. At one point in the midst of the trial before the biased jury, Tom's employer, Link Deas, rises in the audience gallery and, unbidden, shouts out about the way Tom's worked for him for eight years and never caused "a speck of trouble." So why didn't Atticus put Link on the stand as a character witness? Another quibble is the moralizing that happens from Atticus and other adult characters in the aftermath of the verdict. It gets tedious, and I don't think the novel needs it because the reader gets the sense anyway from the story itself. But perhaps this is my 2010 self nitpicking about a novel written for a milieu of a half-century before. The moralizing is the only dated aspect of a book that stands as one of my favourite novels.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel (#14 of 2010) — In this review in the most recent New York Times Book Review, Dexter Filkins criticizes the Sebastian Junger new release about Afghanistan, War, for not providing enough detail about individual characters. "None of the men of the platoon come to life for very long," he writes. "... 'War' lacks the emotional power it might have had if its characters had been described in more depth." I felt the same about David Finkel's similar book about American troops in surge-era Iraq, which traces a U.S. Army infantry battalion through their 15-month deployment. The most in-depth treatment of any of the battalion's characters goes to the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who begins the mission almost ebullient with confidence at American ability to change things in Iraq and comes away disenchanted and discouraged. But as commander, Kauzlarich sees little of the on-the-ground action, and the book would have benefited from an equally in-depth portrayal of a grunt's perspective. In the absence of the identifiable grunt, lots of patrol firefights and lots of roadside bomb explosions dissolve into so much war porn. Still, I'd recommend this book -- aside from The Hurt Locker it's the best at conveying the soul-killing horror that comes with serving as a soldier in the fight against the insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Finally, some recent pics of what our house has become:

 

I've been doing the demo, and we have contractors doing the drywalling and framing. The wall Natalie's standing beside in the below pic no longer exists. Also note her somewhat shellshocked expression, which is symptomatic of what I've also been feeling, now that this long-planned reno has begun. It's overwhelming!

 

And here's me in mid-demo. It is remarkable how much dust gets generated when you tear down a 110-year old wall. You stick the sawzall into the plaster and out comes a solid jet of dust. Which proceeds to get into every single room in the house no matter how well you drop-cloth the joint.  

The ski-goggles help keep the dust out of the eyes. Grrrr!

 

And finally, a view of the framing for what will be the main floor's only interior wall.

Generation X's Mid-Life Crisis

A.O. Scott wrote a fascinating essay in yesterday's New York Times about Generation X and aging. He writes, "How can a generation whose cultural trademark is a refusal to grow up have a midlife crisis?" Many of the essay's themes tie in with things I discuss in the memoir I'll be releasing in October, Superdad. Here's the link. It's great reading.

The G20 And Trinity Bellwoods Park

Earlier this year, I joined the Trinity Bellwoods Community Association. The group had long been dormant, but there was a clear need for a neighbourhood representative that didn't just safeguard the needs of the park, and so when Megan Hall and her partner Mike Varey organized the first meeting, I attended. I love my neighbourhood and want to participate in its future. The day of the TBCA's second meeting, news broke that the park was to be the designated speech area for G20 demonstrations when the international gathering is held in Toronto on June 26 and 27.

Pressure from the community and such politicians as Olivia Chow, Joe Pantalone and Adam Vaughan helped to move the designated speech area to Queen's Park. But as of last night's meeting of the Trinity Bellwoods Community Association, the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress were sticking with their plans to stage a rally in Trinity Bellwoods that various estimates suggest will target a minimum of 5,000 people. The below letter is my response. Will anything happen? Who knows? 

May 7, 2010

To: Ken Georgetti <president@clc-ctc.ca> and Sid Ryan <sryan@ofl.ca>,

Dear Mr. Georgetti and Mr. Ryan,

I am writing this letter to ask you to consider reversing the parade route for the June 26 labour parade that goes from Queen's Park to Trinity Bellwoods Park.

Few parks are as crowded as Trinity Bellwoods on summer weekends. The park is used by people in the neighbourhood as well as people outside the neighbourhood as a kind of communal backyard. I spend a lot of time in the park with my three-year-old son and my one-year-old daughter. As we walk along the park paths we pass soccer players and dog walkers, baseball outfielders and picnickers. There's a remarkable energy around Trinity Bellwoods in the summer, a come-one-come-all vibe that is the reason it's such a successful and much-loved urban park.

Many in our community wish the park could accommodate the OFL/CLC rally. We recognize the importance of freedom of expression and the right to protest, but the park is an inappropriate venue for the event of the proposed scale in the context of the G20 Summit meeting. When news broke several weeks back that the park was to be the designated speech area for G20 demonstrations, many in the area were dismayed, including myself. I worried about the trees, the park grounds and the safety of the many young children who would otherwise be in the park that weekend. For this reason I was relieved to hear that an outcry from the community had helped to move the designated speech area for the G20 meetings from Trinity Bellwoods Park to Queen's Park.

Your June 26 rally remains a cause for concern, however. Many in the community fear that your peaceful march will be infiltrated by a more international element who view G20-type events as an opportunity to engage in pitched battles with police. The OFL's representative at the recent TBCA meeting said 300 labour-related marshals would be on hand to control crowds throughout the parade. That seems an appropriate number if your march draws 5,000 people (at one marshal per approx. 17 people). But what if your rally becomes something the whole of the G20 protest movement rallies around? Then it seems feasible far greater numbers could attend. If the rally gets out of control, the response from police could put many children and other residents in the community at risk.

If you feel that you must use Trinity Bellwoods Park because of the requirements of your parade route, perhaps it makes sense to flip things around. Make Trinity Bellwoods the convening point and Queen's Park the terminus and venue for the concluding rally. There seems to be much less potential for losing control at the beginning of the parade, rather than at the end. This way, your marchers could gather for the start of the parade in Trinity Bellwoods, proceed east along Queen Street, turn up at University and then staging the concluding rally in Queen's Park—where, presumably, there already will be media and audio-visual equipment set up, since Queen's Park will be the G20's designated speech area.

Flipping your parade route seems like a compromise that could help allay everyone's concerns. Please consider this option.

Thanks for listening,

Chris Shulgan

Update: Sid Ryan Announced the march route will be changed so that it begins and ends in Queen's Park, completely avoiding Trinity Bellwoods.

Lisey's Story by Stephen King

(#12 of 2010) Well, my reading has slowed down this month, mostly because I've been working a lot lately—the edits on my own book have been keeping me pretty busy. And I'm a little behind in my posting. I've been procrastinating about posting this book because I don't have anything really brilliant to say about it. As I recall, it made a pretty big splash when it was first released in 2006. It was billed as a landmark novel in a new, more literary phase of King's career. That made me excited to read it. I love reading King. At the worst, when picking up a King book you're guaranteed a page-turner that keeps your interest (Cell, say, which I thought OK as a diversion). And at best, you're transported to a new world that connects and disturbs and stays in your thoughts long after you've finished reading it ('Salem's Lot, The Stand and, more recently, Duma Key).

And yet, Lisey's Story turned out to be the least absorbing King book I have ever read. Most King books grip you from the first little bit -- the first page, the first paragraph, hell, often the first word. But I had to get to page 133 to feel like this book wasn't work. I kept wondering when King would get going on the plot. The other problematic thing is the way King uses this juvenile, overly cutesy-piesie marriage speak throughout the book. This is jargon almost as elaborate as Anthony Burgess's invented slang in A Clockwork Orange. But this stuff doesn't work. For example, Lisey says "smuck" instead of "fuck", and she refers to her big "sissa" as "Manda-Bunny." And much is made of the acronym "SOWISA", which means, Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate. All this jargon isn't interesting. It's merely off-putting.

Toward the end the book does become absorbing. The joke of the title is that it isn't really Lisey's Story -- the captivating bits are all Scott, and the gradual unveiling of his disturbing, troubled youth. What is so frustrating about this book is that at times King does seem to be working on a level he has rarely approximated. There are sections in the middle where he is moving between a half-dozen different settings, and somehow the way King does it, the movements between worlds and eras are smooth and completely natural.

It is saying something about King's career that this is the first book of his that I would have preferred not to read. It won't keep me from getting to Under the Dome. Not even the most reliable batter can hit a home run on his every at-bat.