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More Than Zero Book Reviews

I've been on vacation for the past week and a half, with another couple of days left, and one of the things I've neglected is blog postings, including blog postings chronicling what I've been reading lately. I'm currently participating in the National Post's Afterword Reading Society, going over Alissa York's Fauna, which I'm enjoying thus far. And here are the books I've finished over the last little bit.

The Switch by Elmore Leonard (#17 of 2010)—I found this paperback at the annual used book sale St. Mary's Church of Windsor puts on during Willistead Park's Art in the Park weekend. It's another early-ish Leonard book, written in 1978, and it's a version of the kidnapping-gone-wrong trope that fuels such other minor classics as Ruthless People. Although it loses coherence in the final third, it begins with a couple of chapters that portray the gritty, unpleasant reality of what it's like to be a well-to-do wife married to an alcoholic husband. It's pretty grim, and is particularly interesting considering the inverse it represents to the alienated masculinity chronicled in the last Leonard novel I read, City Primeval. 

Fatherhood by Bill Cosby (#18 of 2010)—Another book I found at the St. Mary's sale. I expected a heart-warming account of child-rearing from the paternal protagonist of The Cosby Show, who had five kids in real life. Instead I found a shockingly bitter tirade about how terrible it is to be a dad. Shockingly bitter. Speaking of experts on child-rearing, he says, "These childless experts fail to understand that, for the last nine million years, ever since the first child crawled out of the slime (where his mother had told him not to play), children have had just one guiding philosophy and it is greed: Mine! Mine! Mine! Of course these small people like to share. The way Hitler shared Czechoslovakia." Honestly, this book is one unending litany of complaints about kids. I kept waiting for the Coz to turn it around, to say, yeah, that's the bad stuff, and now here's the good stuff—but no. He never turns it around. It's just the bad stuff. This book has no redeeming value. Oh wait, maybe there's one—as a historical document? It's a fascinating portrait from the dawn of the era when society had just begun to expect fathers to participate in the lives of their children. Perhaps Cosby was one of the first fathers to do it. And here he is, in this book, reporting to all the other fathers out there, that participating in the life of a child: Sucks.

Cherry Electra by Matt Duggan (#19 of 2010)—My editor at Key Porter also edited this book. She gave it to me during one of my trips to her office. I'm glad she did. Lots of people have compared it to Dead Babies set in Ontario, on a Muskoka cottage weekend. The twist here sees the narrator recounting the novel's events from a jail cell, because police have charged him with murder. The book did a great job conveying the chaos that happens well into a serious drunk. The protagonist is sympathetic and yet completely off the rails on cocaine and whatever booze he can get his hands on. It's decadent, it's hilarious, it's completely amoral, and that combination works together to make it a rollicking fun summer read—just the thing that's appropriate on a dock during your own Muskoka cottage weekend.  

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (#20 of 2010)—Wow, I forgot how good this book was. You can dismiss it as just another coming-of-age novel, maybe Catcher In The Rye set in L.A., but it feels so much more current. The famous first line alludes to the narrator's inability to create real emotional connections. Did it resonate when it was first published, in 1985, because society was confronting the effects of technology, of the vapid cable TV universe created by MTV and its compatriots? Was that the point things began to feel soul-less and insubstantial? And does the novel feel so current today because we're mired in a similar age, when society hasn't yet figured out how to make real emotional connections in the face of the vapidity of Facebook and Twitter? This just might end up being my favourite book of the year, because it so perfectly captures the current situation.

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (#21 of 2010)—Probably I shouldn't say much about this book because I'm slated to discuss it in Culture Club, this cross-artform discussion group I'm in with Jason Anderson, Kate Carraway, Micah Toub and Shelley White. But hell. It just feels less substantial than it's already slender volume, in exactly the opposite way from the manner that Less Than Zero felt more substantial. So Clay and the rest turn out to be soul-less adults. Huh, that's surprising. At least the character development is handled expertly. But the book doesn't resonate. It's a well-told and well-written pulp storyline, diverting in its way, but not all that captivating because there aren't any sympathetic characters with whom readers might identify. It feels like a money grab. The best thing about it? The jacket blurbs reminded me I should pick up Lunar Park.

The Crane Operator's Break

Yesterday I was walking around the University of Toronto's Robarts Library when I caught a sense of motion by one of the windows. Another glance and I saw this enormous red metal superstructure swinging past the other side of the glass. It formed an interesting contrast to the sedate atmosphere inside the ninth floor library stacks. And it was exactly the same level as the ninth floor. And close! The tip of the crane closed to within three metres of the windows, which seems extremely close when you're nine floors up.

The crane boom rotated on a plane exactly parallel to the ninth floor. With such an unusual frame of reference it was possible to see the way the wind swayed the crane and the boom. The thing rocked even when it wasn't doing anything. At one point the operator came out of his cab for a break. Shirtless in the heat, alternating sips from his coffee mug with drags of his cigarette, he leaned on the railing above the city and watched life happening below. At one point he looked over at Robarts. I waved to him, but maybe he didn't see me. Soon he wandered back into his cab. He was still working when I left the library at 7 p.m. Interesting job.

 

 

Bob Probert And Male Culture

Just before dawn a few years back, a Windsor friend of mine woke up and heard noise in his house. He checked the bed next to him. His wife was asleep. Was it his sister, who also lived in the house? Just to be sure, he padded out in his bare feet to the living room, where he found a stranger sitting on the couch. The stranger was enormous, and when my friend cleared the sleep from his eyes, he recognized the guy. It was Bob Probert. It was the NHL’s most feared enforcer.

This story has become legendary among my circle of friends because it’s so surreal. Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night and going into your living room to find Bob Probert sitting on your couch? It turned out that Probert had been drinking in the same Windsor bar as my buddy’s sister. The two of them struck up a conversation. All this, the sister explained to my friend when she came out of the bathroom, shortly after the initial scary encounter. My buddy didn’t have to ask what they were doing. Open beer bottles were on the coffee table, and certainly somewhere was a little baggy of coke. Or maybe not so little.

The same friend emailed me yesterday to tell me about Bob Probert’s death from an apparent heart attack on a boat in Lake St. Clair. I didn’t know Probert, not personally, but his home is a few blocks away from my parents’ in the Windsor suburb of Lakeshore. His was one of the names that always came up in conversation during my early, violence-obsessed adolescent years. In its way, my native Essex County was proud of Probert, same as it was proud of other, troubled hockey enforcers who hailed from its water-gilt borders, including Tie Domi and Darren McCarty.

Everybody bewails how sad Probert’s story is—the alcoholism, the cocaine addiction, the legal trouble. Here’s the Globe and Mail:

Probert was one of the toughest fighters in NHL history, but he battled demons – drugs and alcohol – for many of the 16 years and 935 games he played in the league. He had a rare talent for someone known primarily as a fighter; when he was at his best, he also had the skill level of a top-six forward. Most of those close to Probert lamented that fact, that he had so much ability, and except for a handful of years, wasn’t able to harness it the way they thought he could.

And Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press:

Coming up in the 1980s, Bob Probert was the sort of warrior they now model video game characters after. Relentless. Brutal. Single-minded. Unafraid of blood. He was an enforcer, a goon, a guy whose main purpose was to make sure nobody messed with his team’s stars. Someone touched Steve Yzerman? Bob Probert touched back hard. Someone ran the goalie? Probert ran him harder.

What I think needs to be underscored here is that Bob Probert’s problems went hand in hand with his gifts—as well as his sport. As an enforcer for the Blackhawks and Red Wings, Probert stood up for his friends. He had his friends’ back. He was the sort of guy you could count on. Implicit in all these observations—all of which have been made, I’ll wager, during the sort of informal eulogies bound to happen in the wake of Probert’s death—was that Bob Probert was a man.

He was the epitome of a certain kind of man. The fights and the substance abuse went hand in hand in the male culture in which Probert excelled. Within that sphere Bob Probert was a legend. I feel the allure of that sphere. My own problems are evidence of that. But I also think this masculine sphere is growing ever more insulated from the greater culture. Ever more opposed to the greater culture. And few people illustrate that more than Bob Probert—a legend in one world, an absolute fuck-up in another.

Contemporary society doesn’t applaud guys who solve problems with fisticuffs. Today, violence is a form of surrender. That's pretty easy to get. What is harder for many guys to process is the vacuousness of the partying-to-excess spirit that also gets wrapped up in male identity. Certainly, Probert had a hard time processing that. Perhaps the drugs and the drinking didn't directly cause the toughman's death yesterday. But the fact that he died at the age of 45, in front of his kids, creates a powerful cautionary symbol, one that attests to the emptiness of the man's man existence.