Category: books

Object 1: Jason Reynolds’ Look Both Ways

Here’s something I haven’t seen many of: middle-grade short story collections.

JReyLBW

My copy is the first edition hardback. I think I bought it from Amazon to be delivered the day of its release, so it doesn’t have the book award thingamy on it. It has a beautiful cover, so I like that my copy is unblemished.

I finished reading it in about three sittings. There are ten stories, all set on the same afternoon just as school is letting out. Each story is about a different kid or set of kids and their walk home. I love Jason’s writing — he has a gorgeous prose voice — or for that matter, speaking voice — let’s just say that a Jason Reynolds reading is a fabulous experience. Plus, also, too, he’s written some of my very favorite children’s books. This one is a very good book. (My favorite of his books is As Brave As You, btw.)

I’m holding on to it — it’s a first edition. Jason teaches at my alma mater, otherwise I might never have read his work. But as it happens, I do know these books, and I am the richer for it.

Craft Reflection: A Scene From Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling

I swore I was done with these when I finished my MFA

Part 4, Chapter 1, pp. 249-266

Cuckoo's Calling

I generally prefer fantasy and science fiction when I read for pleasure. Mystery is a genre that I have never gravitated towards, though I watch enough of it on television.

So it should come as no surprise that when I make one of my exceedingly rare forays into reading a detective novel, the writer would be someone who has gained much of their renown for their work in my “home” genre. Robert Galbraith is the lightly-worn pseudonym of JK Rowling, in case you are one of the three or four people on the planet whom I assume must exist who hadn’t come across this bit of information yet.

It occurs to me, having just finished this bit of the first Cormoran Strike novel, that scene work is one of the most fundamental aspects of the detective novel. How else, then, should a detective gather information than via interviews with the various people who knew the victim? One can google, I suppose, and Cormoran Strike and his temp assistant Robin Endicott both spend quite a bit of time doing web searches and reading articles for information, but ultimately, the best source of information in research is a primary source. Thus the need to do what is called “legwork”.

I could spend some time talking about the significance of that term in relation to the particular character of Strike, but that would be a different craft reflection.

The scene between Strike and Guy Somé excited me, because I enjoyed watching these two characters — strangers, very different on many levels — discover someone they could respect and appreciate over the course of an interview around a very difficult topic: the death of Somé’s friend and muse, supermodel Lula Landry, which Strike is investigating.

Throughout the scene, as this is just past midway through the book, other players in the story are discussed, and Somé offers sharp observations about each. We don’t know how many of these insights Strike finds novel, because he doesn’t want to influence a subject: Strike has shown throughout the course of the book that he is a gifted and disciplined detective. He keeps his opinions to himself, while working to bring out the viewpoints and knowledge of the people he interacts with professionally in as pure a form as he can.

There are three people in this scene: Somé and Strike, plus Trudie, Somé’s recently-hired and much put-upon assistant. As an aside, I suspect that part of Trudie’s purpose in this scene is to remind us of Robin Endicott, though Robin is never mentioned. Another aspect of Trudie’s purpose is to reveal some aspects of Somé’s character.

The subtext in this scene fairly sings, as both of the major players in it thrive on reading subtext. At least one attribute that defines Somé as a brilliant entrepreneur is his ability to read people. He’s also abrupt and sharp in his unvarnished takes on those around him, and those takes are without fail poignant and pithy. He is also cagey in how he uses those insights. He is familiar with Strike, basically through certain aspects of Strike’s background. Somé has dressed Strike’s father, aging but still a-list rock star Jonny Rokeby. Strike avoids the limelight, it’s not his world, and he and his father barely know each other.

As overtly as Strike is working to understand who Somé is, and what he adds to the overall contextual world of the dead woman he is investigating, Somé is working just as hard to figure out the person across the desk from him, because that is what Somé does. Somé keeps subtly probing Strike, trying to gain clues as to who he is and what his motivations might be. Part of the tension in the scene early on is Strike working to keep from being the subject of Somé’s own desultory investigation.

The turning point in their relationship comes with this exchange:

“…How come,” said Somé, swerving suddenly off the conversational track, “Jonny Rokeby’s Son’s working as a private dick?”

“Because that’s his job,” said Strike, “Go on about the Bristows.”

Somé did not appear to resent being bossed around; if anything, he seemed to relish it, possibly because it was such an unusual experience. (p. 258)

Somé’s general tone does not change. He seems to use frankness as a kind of offensive weapon, and the edge in his conversational style does not, at first go away. In fact, one of the first things that shows that Somé’s attitude has changed is a brief fit of pique. But then two pages later in the scene he lets his birth name slip, and before the end of the scene, he cries openly in front of Strike over the death of Lula, whom he considered family.

I love the understatement of that moment: the simple bluntness of Strike’s reminder of the business they were conducting, his demonstration of his professionalism struck a chord with Somé, and earned his respect. This was perhaps the third or fourth foray into Strike’s personal business, each time rebuffed similarly. But the nature of Somé’s character is to reason out whatever response he gets and to contextualize it; Somé is, as stated previously, a detective of sorts himself: a paragon of street wisdom.

The best part of the scene comes at the very end.

As Somé led Strike back down the spiral stairs and along the white-walled corridor, some of his swagger returned to him. By the time they shook hands in the cool tiled lobby, no trace of the distress remained on show.

“Lose some weight,” he told Strike, as a parting shot, “and I’ll send you something XXL.”

As the warehouse door swung closed behind Strike, he heard Somé call to the tomato-haired girl at the desk: “I know what you’re thinking, Trudie. You’re imagining him taking you roughly from behind, aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Big rough soldier boy,” and Trudie’s squeal of shocked laughter.

In zingers aimed at both Strike and his assistant, he shows his respect for each of them. We learn that whatever tension there is between Somé and Trudie, they understand and appreciate each other. A couple of other moments that we might have misread earlier in the scene are more properly illuminated by this exchange. We also see that, while Somé can’t really help himself from taking a jab at Strike, there’s respect and even generosity towards him mixed in. I both imagine Strike smiling to himself as he walks away (never stated in the book) and Rowling herself smiling as she completed this beautifully constructed scene.

Books I Like #9

At Home in the Heart of Appalachia by John O’Brien

Anchor Books New York 2001

Appalachia

Here’s a wonderful book-length personal essay that resonates with me on a number of levels. Although O’Brien never names it, it’s clear to me that he suffers with ADHD: all the hallmarks are there, and he frankly discusses some of those markers.

He writes about his home in West Virginia, about many different aspects of life there, with an astute eye and a gift for clear, beautiful prose. Ultimately, It’s a perfect marriage of person and environment, exploring how much of West Virginia is a part of who he is, and drawing the parallels back between his own life and how that is reflected in different aspects of what this place is.

It’s a beautiful book that I just happened to pick up at a Barnes and Noble once, but it has stuck with me. I point to it as an influence in my journey from an exclusively genre reader to someone who likes various sorts of nonfiction: history, biography, memoir, essay, and journalism.

Books I Like #8

A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

Orbit Books 2009

A Madness of Angels

By 10 a. m., Chapel Street Market already smelt of cheese, fish, Chinese fast food and McDonald’s. It was a market defined by contrast. At the Angel end of the street, punk rock music pounded out from the stall selling pirate DVDs; from the French food stall, more than half a van with a rumbling engine at its back, there sounded a recording of a man singing a nasal dirge about love, and Paris when it rained; at the cannabis stall (for no other name could do justice to the array of pipes, T-shirts, posters, burners, and facial expressions that defined it, everything on display but the weed itself), Bob Marley declared himself deeply in love to the passing hooded youngsters from the estate down at King’s Cross. Outside the chippy, where the man with inch-wide holes in his ears served up cod to the security guards from the local shopping mall, a gaggle of schoolgirls from the local secondary bopped badly in high-heeled shoes to a beat through their headphones of shuung- shuung-shuung-shuung and shouted nicknames at their passing school friends in high voices that didn’t slow down for the eardrum. Fishmongers chatted with the purveyors of suspicious rotting fruit, sellers of ripped-off designer gear gossiped with the man who sold nothing but size-seven shoes, while all around shoppers drifted from the tinned shelves of Iceland to the rich smell of the bakery, wedged in between the TV shop and the tattooists parlour.

Somewhere, I don’t know where, I found out about this British publisher’s daughter who got her first novel published when she was 14, named Catherine Webb. I may have looked up the author of this book, Kate Griffin, because I had been joking with a friend about how she was my cousin, and found Catherine Webb behind the pseudonym. She wrote that novel, Mirror Dreams over summer break from school. Her father read it, then advised her to find an agent, which she did.

The next year its sequel, Mirror Wakes was published, and she has continued to publish prolifically since. At the time I picked AMOF up, she had published 11 novels at the age of 25. She currently publishes under the name Claire North, and has published several wonderful books under that name.

The four books in the Matthew Swift series all inhabit the fringes of a magical London, dark and full of panoramic, almost hallucinatory imagery like the passage above. The story begins with Swift resurrecting out of thin air in the flat he had lived in before his demise two years earlier, sharing his newly-reconstituted body with what he calls “angels”: actual living beings brought to life in the telephone lines of London from the unfinished ends of telephone conversations, on a mission to find the person who murdered him.

The problem I see with the series is that over time, they begin to seem like copies of themselves, as Griffin (Webb) follows Swift on endless walkabouts through London, always with these long hallucinatory passages that never lose their immediacy. I suspect Webb just got tired of walking through London enough to create these descriptions: I certainly never got tired of reading about them.

The tone is noir and almost post-apocalyptic (in the way that we are all living in a nearly post-apocalyptic world these days) and the magic of these books is original and dark.

 

Books I Like #7

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Little, Brown and Company, New York, Boston, London 1994, 1995

Nelson

More of a history than a memoir, Long Walk to Freedom is the man’s detailed account of his extraordinary life. He seems to have lived every sort of life a man could live within the span of the twentieth century. Born an indigenous Xhosa, he was taken from his tribe at the age of ten and educated as a tribal prince. Then he moved to Johannesburg and lived in Soweto township. He was a laborer during the day and walked into Johannesburg in the evenings to go to law school. He was the leader of the ANC, a revolutionary, a prisoner for over two and a half decades and a beloved head of state.

Here is the story of a man who was a pedestrian for pretty much his whole life, hence the title, and a monumental human being.

If only David O. Lean were still alive.