What a Long, Strange Loop It's Been

Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Some years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a large book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It sold many, many copies. I have one. I am convinced that few people actually finished it, or even got far into it. It was unquestionably the product of a brilliant mind. But man, reading it was work, lots of little exercises to work through, lots of symbolic logic to learn, but worst, the goal of all that work was unclear. I like a challenging read, so I’m not proud to say I didn’t get far before I put it back on the shelf, where it reposes to this day. The fact is, I just didn’t get it, and I’ll bet not many people did.



I think I will win that bet, because no less an authority than Douglas Hofstadter himself has expressed his disappointment that not many people got it. I quote from Wikipedia: “In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition [of GEB], Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: ‘GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?’”


To remedy this, he says, he wrote I Am a Strange Loop – to make the point that apparently eluded readers of GEB. It was published in 2007. It had been sitting on my to-be-read shelf, in hardcover, since then. It is almost 450 pages long. I read it to the end.


Capsule review: Looks like he’s going to have to write another book.

Its goal is to – well, now there’s the first puzzle. Recall that he says he wants to explore “what is a self,” and there is a lot of talk about self-ness in the book. Also consciousness; also possession of a human soul; also what it is that distinguishes humans from other animals.  But there is next to no explanation of what he means by these concepts, which question (if any) he is trying to answer.  I am very tempted to say that he would say that these questions are all essentially the same thing, which launches us into a muddle right at the outset.   

Which is too bad.  I'm interested in these things, and Hofstadter is really a fine writer and a brilliant man with some interesting things to say, so this volume should have been right in my wheelhouse.   But I can tell you very succinctly why this is not a good book: Hofstadter not only doesn’t get to the point, his thesis is all but invisible. If you handed him the book and asked him to find a paragraph, or even a page or two, clearly describing (1) the question he is trying to resolve (i.e., “what is a self,” “what distinguishes humans from lower animals,” “what is the nature of consciousness” “what do we mean when we talk about having a soul” – am I close on any of those?), and (2) his resolution of it, he might be able to do it. Personally, I never stumbled across it. I can’t tell you how his belief that humans are like what he calls “strange loops” gets him much of anywhere.


Why is this? The cheap answer is “because he had a lazy editor, or maybe an intimidated one,” but the real answer is that Hofstadter just may not have a clear answer to any of these questions.  If he does, it gets lost among the analogies and metaphors and stories and personal anecdotes he loves.  Nothing wrong with those strategies.  But after (actually, before) one employs them, one must articulate the idea the technique is employed to illuminate. The book is so thick with explanatory symbol-filled vignettes that they crowd out a simple, clear statement of his belief respecting these issues (and what he believes those issues to be).


The problem is illustrated right on the cover, which is a stylized representation of “video loop.”  Much of the first part of the book is devoted to a description of images Hofstadter created by pointing a video camera at a teevee that was displaying what the video camera was receiving – that is, displaying itself over and over and over.  Moving the camera distorts the image in interesting ways. You’ve seen the effect if you stand in front of a mirror with another mirror behind you – you see yourself receding into infinity. This is a purely mechanical phenomenon that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness, but Hofstadter goes on and on and on about it, even including a number of useless color plates of his teevee images, as though it tells us something profound about ourselves as human beings. It doesn’t, and if there is a useful analogy to the way humans perceive the world and re-transmit it, I missed it.


Of potentially greater interest might have been his analysis of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) and its undermining of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” (1910-13).  His explanation – which is very lengthy and punctuated with fictional dialogues and analogical fables – isn’t bad, but would it be asking too much for a simple statement, or even a complex or subtle statement, of what these abstract mathematical theories have to do with “I-ness,” or “soul,” or “consciousness,” or “self”?


Let’s return to his central simile. A “strange loop” is a self-referential system (that’s reductive but saying any more would not illuminate this discussion). I have called this Hofstadter’s simile, but I can’t even report that with any confidence – are we “strange loops” in the way that is understood in topology, logic, and mathematical systems, or is he only saying we’re like them in some way that is meaningful to his theory? I went in search of what other people think Hofstadter is trying to say when he says argues that human beings sorta have this characteristic and that it somehow relates to their essential humanity. What I discovered is that no one else knows, either, and those who purport to know sort of skip over what the hell they – and he – think any of this has to do with a unique human nature.


There’s a lesson here.  We see it around us every day, in government, in the workplace, on Wall Street, in the academy, in science:  Brains aren’t enough.  Learnedness isn’t enough.  Opinion leaders, all kinds of leaders, have an obligation to be clear.  Heck,we all have an obligation to be clear with one another.  I don’t care how complex the subject matter is – if you’re writing a nonfiction book for a general audience, especially one that purports to solve a problem or take a position, you have a sacred duty to state your position early and clearly. If you can’t or won’t, you probably haven’t really figured it out for yourself.


With over a thousand pages of closely-printed text sitting on my bookshelf, I don’t know if Douglas Hofstadter is a strange loop. I can say that he is damned near an endless one.

A Novel of Ideas that Might Give You Some if You're Not Careful

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (subtitled “A Work of Fiction”)


This is one of those novels – I seem to read a lot of them – I liked very much but I’m not sure who its ideal audience is. Perhaps one of y’all. Does this sound like something you might enjoy?:

[NO SPOILERS] First, every major character in this novel is Jewish. There is a lot of material here about Judaism of many varieties, and some of the finest scenes are set in “America’s only shtetl,” named here New Walden, where the residents maintain a strictly orthodox way of life. Second, every major character in this novel is a brilliant academic intellectual, and I do mean brilliant, and I do mean academic. Most of the novel is set on campuses, fictional and not, within spitting distance of the Eastern Seaboard. They are not only brilliant, they are the most brilliant in the world in their (sometimes competing) fields. The brilliant characters who are not academic are brilliant religious intellectuals. The plot centers on Cass Seltzer, a lapsed Jew who has written a celebrated book examining The Varieties of Religious Illusion,” and has earned a reputation as “the atheist with a soul.” The plot is difficult to summarize, but I will say only that the drama of the book arises out of the tension between his relationships with several strong (similarly lapsed) women and several strongly religious and charismatic men with whom he studies or otherwise encounters on his path to popular acclaim.

The foregoing description makes the book sound strident, biased against religion, and perhaps even sexist. And perhaps dull. And while Ms. Goldstein’s own thoughts on the existence of God are not hard to discern, I must report that I did not find the book offensive in this respect and hardly polemical at all. In fact, while I used the word “drama” in the last paragraph, the novel is comic in intention and effect. I found myself smiling throughout (and even issuing that rarity, the occasional laugh-out-loud), perhaps because in my own education and life I have encountered similar characters.

And it is not dull.  Even if those characters don't sound familiar to you, you can still get a kick out of this book. The writing is lively, if erudite, and there are some very fine passages the equal of any pure writing I’ve read in quite some time.

The book has two flaws, one bordering on serious, one less so. The more serious flaw is that Cass, the central character, although – yes, a brilliant academic intellectual – is weak, both intentionally (he’s kind of a schnook) and in portrayal (he’s not fully realized, although he appears in almost every scene). Goldstein can write strong, vivid male characters, both attractive and not, so it is curious that Cass is so bland. It put me in mind of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” You needed Mary to tell those stories, but the comic freight was borne by Lou and Murray and Sue Ann and Ted and Rhoda. Not that Mary was not a fine comedienne and sometimes funny in the show – just that her role was frequently to react to the spicier characters around her. That seems to be Cass’s function throughout much of this novel, although he will get off a zinger now and then. Nothing we hear from him in the book prepares us for his final tour-de-force performance.

The lesser flaw is that sometimes Ms. Goldstein forces ideas into the novel through excessive speechifying. I was reminded of another famous female atheist writer, Ayn Rand. The sometimes lengthy speeches are so lucid – on both sides of the existence-of-God question – that they are unlikely ever to have been uttered in the contexts in which they appear.

The novel concludes with an Appendix (as appeared in Cass’s own famous book) setting forth 36 arguments for the existence of God, with commentary, “flaws,” and asides. In reading some of the Amazon reviews of the book, some readers take her to task for misrepresenting these arguments, but they looked pretty neutrally-couched to me. Ah, but Ms. Goldstein is sly – I wrote “the novel concludes,” but it is unclear whether the Appendix is in fact novelistic – something that Cass himself penned in “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” – or only Ms. Goldstein’s helpful summary of the current (and ancient) debate.

Ms. Goldstein is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and has written on a variety of philosophical topics, including a popular account of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which, I was surprised to discover, I own, but which, I was not surprised to discover, I have not read). She is married to famed cognitive scientist and brainworks popularizer Steven Pinker. She’s also kinda waifish-hot, which does lead one to wonder whether perhaps she identifies with one of the hot female genius Jewish academic intellectuals in the book (who, I concede, is not a very appealing character).

Here’s where I come out:  You don’t see novels like this much anymore. I drastically reduced my reading of “serious” American fiction about twenty years ago when I wearied of dull, minimalistic writing about unappealing upper-middle-class men and women and their agonizingly uninteresting lives and loves. There are signs that things are changing. Goldstein’s characters are vivid (Cass notably excepted), her prose robust and sometimes challenging (and sometimes arch). The thing crackles with intelligence and curiosity and respect for the reader. That’s plenty good enough for me.

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So You Think You Want to Read A Novel About Vampires, Do You, Dearie?

I had always thought vampires were supposed to be evil, murderous, and scary.

Then, about 35 years ago, they became exquisitely sensitive and romantic and even beautiful in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and were portrayed by the likes of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the movies.  Now, with the Stephanie Meyer Twilight series and inevitable batch of movies, they have become even more exquisitely sensitive and romantic.   And still very beautiful, in a pasty, vacant, heroin-chic kind of way.  While I haven't read any of these books or seen the movies, I get the impression that they can even be protective of honkies, or whatever non-vampires are called, especially cute female ones. 

Well, dearie, I've got news for you.

Real novelistic vampires, and I mean vampires in real, red-meat, hard-core vampire novels, are, in fact, evil, murderous, and scary.  I know this because I have read a novel called Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia, and I novelistically believe every word of it.  Any novel that begins with a guy working late one night in his dreary desk job when his slovenly, loathed boss unexpectedly arrives and before long transforms into a slobbering, furious, hungry werewolf, immediately establishes its credibility with me.  The book's central figure, Owen Pitt, improbably defeats his boss's efforts to kill and eat him, and this act of heroic self-defense comes to the attention of an organization -- the Monster Hunters of the title -- dedicated to suppressing outbreaks of the malign supernatural when they pop up around the world.  They recruit him to join their crusade against supernatural evil, and we're off and running.

Their efforts are not limited to vampires, oh no.  They also battle zombies, several species of demons, werewolves, wraiths, and the list goes on and on.  (There are also some helpful monsters of the elvish variety.)   The battles are violent and bloody -- although some of the bodily fluids involved aren't so much blood as they are goop. 

But here's what you need to know about vampires -- they're not just out for blood and, I guess, chicks these days -- they are planning world domination which involves the end of all other nonvanpiric forms of life (although what they would then feed on remains unclear).   These are bad, bad vampires, and were it not for various organizations like the Monster Hunters, our day of reckoning would have long since arrived. 

The book is great fun.  The Monster Hunters themselves are memorable, there's some romance, the usual friction with federal monster-hunting authorities, and the Monster Hunters organization itself has some deep, dark secrets of its own.  Oh sure, there's massive slaughter, astounding violence, exotic firearms, and serial dismemberment, but the tone is breezy and comedic, owing mainly to the character of first-person narrator Pitt.

One misgiving -- although it moves along briskly, the book is too long.  The mass market paperback version I read is 732 pages and could have easily stood to have lost about 150 of them. 

But if you're looking for a thoroughgoing escapist read -- that is, a read that will tell you absolutely nothing about yourself, the human condition, or the meaning of the universe, then put on your body armor and lay in a good supply of paper towels and Formula 409 and give this one a whirl.

An Old-Fashioned Read -- I Thnk

Some of the most pleasant memories I have and will ever have are of browsing in bookstores. I don’t mind the the big chains, I understand why they exist and why the small independent stores, most of them, are fewer and number and don’t live long when they pop up hopefully in artsy neighborhoods. So I cherish those small ones all the more when I find one.

On our family vacation in Estes Park a couple of years ago I happened on the Macdonald Book Shop on Elkhorn, the village’s main drag. I bought Jayne Anne Phillips’s most recent novel (which I really must get to sometime) and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. I don’t often ask for recommendations, but I wanted to spend more money there and didn’t see how I could go wrong.

At this point, my dreamy recollection from the musty stacks takes a left turn, because one of the books she recommended was one of the very worst books I have ever read, and I warned you about it here. So I was not particularly looking forward to reading the other one she recommended, So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger.

Yet I found myself quickly charmed. Turning the pages to find out what happened next took very little effort. This struck me almost from the outset as a very old fashioned novel in the former sense of the word – a novelty, an unusual tale, something that transports us into a new (that is, novel) world. I won’t be giving anything away to tell you that the novel is narrated by Monte Becket, a man living in Minnesota with his lovely wife and lively adolescent son in the mid-1920s. He wrote one successful novel and found himself unable to finish another one. He encounters an enigmatic stranger, Glendon Hale, who, after initial reticence, becomes friends with the family. Hale, who has skill as a boatmaker, plans to set off to find his first wife he calls Blue, a Mexican woman he left many years earlier, to apologize to her. Becket decides to join him, and the book is about their journey and what happens to them along the way. There are two other major characters, a young buck who is magic with horses and engines – the automobile is still in its preadolescence – and the real-life character Charlie Siringo, a former Pinkerton detective. About the plot I will say no more.

I read this book quickly to its conclusion (285 pages) and when I was done, I thought my, what a fine book. And then I thought: but what was the point? Was there a catharsis? Did the characters change? What explains its unexpected conclusion, and how does it illuminate the darker corners of the human condition? Was it intended to do so, or was I just tricked into reading something that was just a plot, a coupla guys who started out here, to whom stuff happened as they moved along, and ended up there, the end?

No, I don’t think I was duped. I felt enriched, as I do when I feel like I’ve ingested something of value and I think I will remember this book. But I will tell you that it perplexed me, and it perplexes me as I write these lines. This is one of those books that has a study guide in the back with a bunch of questions designed to guide the discussions of book clubs. I looked through them and as I did, I thought yeah, I should have noticed that.

Which makes me think that this is one of those books with hidden riches that are so skillfully hidden that I – who must read quickly and perhaps less reflectively than I should properly to honor the author’s art – would not experience them unless I worked at it. That’s not a criticism. I felt the book’s value as I read it, but I knew just as certainly that I wasn’t going to be able to articulate its lessons. But I feel that those lessons are there.

Perhaps you can experience them. But even if you don’t, it’s a fine read, and I commend it to you.

You Want Laconic? I Got Laconic

Everett Hitch, who is telling our story, has just been hired to keep the peace in the old Western town of Resolution.  In those days, the guard used to sit on a chair somewhat elevated from the saloon floor.  He's the sidekick of the novel's main character, icy legendary gunfighter Virgil Cole, who has not yet put in an appearance, but his presence is still felt.  Everett is  keeping an eye on one desperate-looking character in particular.

     "Hey Lookout," the Weasel said.  "What's your name?"
     "Hitch," I said.  "Everett Hitch."
     He was wearing a dark shirt with vertical stripes, buttoned up tight at the collar.  The buttons were big.
     "Any good with that shotgun?" the Weasel said.
     The room was quiet now, and everyone was watching.  The Weasel liked that.  He lounged back a little in his chair, his bowler hat tipped forward over his forehead.  The gun he carried was a Colt, probably a .44, probably single-action.  He had cut the holster down for a fast draw.  And wore it tied to his thigh.  Probably the local gunny.
     "Don't need to be all that good with a double-barreled eight-gauge," I said.
     "And I bet you ain't," the Weasel said.
     "Wouldn't make much difference to you," I said.
     "Why's that?" the Weasel said.
     "I was to give you both barrels, from here," I said, "blow your head off and part of your upper body."
     He was enjoying this less.
     "Yep, probably kill some folks near you, too," I said.  "With the scatter."
     I cocked both barrels.  The sound of them cocking was very loud in the room.  Virgil Cole always used to say, You gotta kill someone, do it quick.  Don't look like you got pushed into it.  Look like you couldn't wait to do it.  It was as if I could hear his voice as I looked at the men in front of me:  Sometimes you got to kill one person early, to save killing four or five later. 
     I leveled the shotgun straight at the Weasel.

Folks, that is about as chatty and poetic as Robert B. Parker's Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch westerns ever get.  Parker published four before his unexpected death in January:  Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone, and Blue-Eyed Devil.   

It's summer.  It's hot.  You want a quick, effortless read that still entertains you.  You're not all that fond of commas.  You might like a little killing in your books.  But you thought you had outgrown westerns.  Or you never liked them.  Or you never read one but thought you wouldn't like one if you did. 

Fair enough.  But if you don't mind a little gunplay, give one of these a try.  Probably best to start with the first in the series, Appaloosa (which was made into a movie you didn't see with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen), as the subsequent volumes refer to some of the history established there.  Like Elmore Leonard novels, there's a certain sameness to the writing and the characters and the stories, but all three are classic.  And a pleasant break from the awful prose in much of today's "literary" fiction, and almost all pop fiction.  If you'd prefer more familiar territory, you might try Parker's first western, Gunman's Rhapsody, which retells the story of the Earps, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons in Tombstone.

There's also a fair dose of humor in the books.  For my money, the humor works much better in the westerns than it does in Parker's Spenser novels for which he is best known.  In the Spenser series, the joking seems arch and smartypants.  Here it flows more naturally from the cadences and habits of the characters' speech and the situations in which they find themselves.  But don't mistake me:  These books are not primarily yukfests.

So have a look.  Short chapters.  Short sentences.  Short lifespans.

And after awhile you will find yourself talking like Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch.  Yep.

I Know Lots of People Dying Isn't A Good Time, but Read It Anyway

The Death and Life of Bobby Z by Don Winslow

Sometimes, when you're at loose ends, looking for something to do, the thought arrives that you must, before another instant passes, sit down with a book featuring a sociopath who just happens to have superb Gulf War infantry training and really, really poor impulse control, who has murdered a biker in prison  with an edge-sharpened license plate (in his defense, the biker was probably going to try to kill him eventually), who is given the opportunity to escape the death that unquestionably awaits him in the cell block by agreeing to pose as a guy he looks a lot like, a (deceased while in custody) SoCal surf and drug-dealer legend, for the purpose of being traded to a sadistic Mexican drug lord for an undercover US drug guy that the overlord has found out.  When you have a craving for some readage like that, really, nothing else will do.  Gotta have it.

You're in luck!  The Cool Hot Center can report that The Death and Life of Bobby Z fits your bill to a T.  And lest you think I may have strayed from my policy of not disclosing material plot points, let me assure you that you learn all of the foregoing within the first few pages.

I was enthusiastic about Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine  back a week or so ago, and Bobby Z is an equally bracing read.  Now, I am assuming that our readers here are aware we're talking about books where there is a lot of crime.  And I'm not talking about securities fraud or cybersquatting.  This is a book where everyone -- the US agent, lots of bikers, an army of Mexican drug guys, and the former right-hand-man of Bobby Z, all want the frequently-jailed narrator (real name, Tim Kearney) dead.  They do not succeed -- we know this because this book is in the first person -- and it's not just because he runs away successfully.

Tim spends a lot of time thinking about his life as a failure.  (He told the judge his problem wasn't breaking and entering -- it was breaking and exiting.)  Although, like Frankie Machine, he is highly competent at the things he needs to do to stay alive.  And in the middle of all the suspense and violence, you find passages like this:

"They had a lifeguard at the public pool in Desert Hot springs, he remembers.  They called her Big Blue because she wore a bright blue one-piece bathing suit.  No one ever actually saw her swim -- the popular theory was that if anyone started drowning Big Blue would just jump in and raise the water level so that the drowning person would just sort of wash up on the edge of the pool.  No one ever volunteered to test the theory, though, so Tim's memory of Big Blue was her sitting up in that big chair reading Mademoiselle magazine while chewing on beef jerky."

One more cool thing:  This book in its paperback version is 259 pages, and has 79 chapters.  There are numerous chapters that are 1 and 2 pages long.  You got some adult ADHD issues, this is the book for you.

Finally:  The first couple dozen chapters or so of this book take place in one of my favorite places in the entire galaxy, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park just over the mountains from San Diego.  I've hauled my bride, her grandchildren, and numerous unsuspecting friends over there to experience the desolate beauty of  this Death Valley Lite (and a cool little underground museum).  When I lived in Poway and needed to unclog the synapses I'd go by myself -- cup of coffee in Santa Ysabel, breakfast in the old mining town of Julian, then downgrade all the way to the desert.  And now, here it is, starring in this book. 

In my visits there, though, I never saw any pitched battles between a three-time loser accompanied by a six year-old boy and a phalanx of crazed Mexican drug czar minions.  So I was glad to see that someone had filled in this gap in my understanding of the area.

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I promise I'll soon review something that chicks might enjoy.

A Pulpy, Corny Classic

A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins

In 1986 when I lived in Chicago I took a short story writing course with Asa Baber through Northwestern's night school.  Baber was an author (Tranquility Base, Land of a Million Elephants) and wrote the "Men" column for Playboy for many years.  Around fifteen students, and every last mother one of them a miserable writer, including yours truly, to judge from my aggregate published output to date of nothing.  (We pretend writers all thank Jah for Blogger.)  One night one of the smarmy young pretend writers in the class was making a dismissive reference to Harold Robbins, comparing him unfavorably to -- I don't remember, some writerly ideal like Mailer or Updike or the like, accompanied by the nodding agreement of the class.   I had never read a Harold Robbins novel, but I spoke up, probably rather more sharply than I should have, to note that Harold Robbins actually finished writing books, wrote books that attracted the attention of real editors, and were read by millions of real readers, many of whom may not have had the elevated tastes of these kids (who probably hadn't read Updike or Mailer since college), but who were not being fooled into reading something they didn't enjoy.  That shut 'em up.

In the intervening two-and-a-half decades, I still hadn't read a Harold Robbins novel.  I don't know how I came across A Stone for Danny Fisher, but I think I read somewhere that as Robbins's first novel (published in 1951), it had about it some of the grit and drive that may have dissipated somewhat in his later potboilers (The Betsy, Heat of Passion, The Carpetbaggers).  I am very glad I picked it up.

The cover tells some of the story:  A hot mid-twentieth-century chick with one of those hot mid-twentieth-century hot-chick hairdos and really hot mid-twentieth-century hot-chick foundational undergarments, a fleabag room, and boxing.  What's not to like?

The book has all these things, but quite a bit more.  It is about a boy growing into manhood in Brooklyn during the Depression.  He suffers from economic deprivation, limited prospects, and the curse of anti-Semitism.   He overcomes them to a point, but the logic of the life he has chosen soon drives him to become a very different kind of person.  He struggles with the demands of his new life, which is in sharp contrast to the joy he takes in the woman he loves.  

If you're thinking about picking this up, let me be clear about a couple of things.  First, this is a story you've heard before.  As you read, you will find yourself predicting what happens next, and you will frequently be correct.  To adopt the boxing metaphor, Robbins telegraphs his punches.

Second, this is not sophisticated writing.  It is sometimes childishly simple.  Lots of adverbs.  (Most good writers profess to hate adverbs (I almost said "unanimously" hate adverbs.))  I'm flipping through the book right now, let's see  .  .  .  you'll find sentences like: "Slowly the beating of her heart quieted."  "Her hand reached up wonderingly and touched her hair."  "The dark rolled around me in gentle swirling clouds."

But -- and this must have been what I was sensing in 1986 -- there is something to hold your attention on every page.  Something that keeps you moving through the dialogue and exposition.   These simple and sometimes corny words tell the reader what is happening.   They don't tell you how smart the author is, they don't trick you with pointless plot devices, they just set forth the dramatic facts of the life of a young man the reader comes soon to care about.  It's a story.  Robbins doesn't apologize for it or dress it up.  He just flat tells it.

Folks, that's writing.

Two Summer Reads: A Vulgar Masterpiece and a Slick SoCal Crime Thriller

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston

We all learned in school that when we read a novel we must suspend disbelief.  Sometimes, to enjoy a work of art, we have to suspend disapproval.  In this case, we have to suspend our disapproval of people who punctuate almost every utterance with one or more obscenities.   Can you do it?  If you can, and you have a ken for crime novels -- there's a little mystery here, but it's mostly a crime novel -- pick up this number.

The voice is that of Web, a wiseass slacker, but turns out Web wasn't always a guy who cleans up what's left of one after one passes over (or, frequently, in this novel, is unnaturally killed).  He used to teach school; his father is a famous writer.  Too much more than this I don't want to reveal, except to say that (1) the death-scene cleanup business is fiercely competitive, (2) his best friend, roommate, and sometime employer is a tattoo artist, and (3) things get immeasurably worse for him when he tries to accommodate a hot chick whose father has committed suicide.  Seriously, who among us can't identify?

The particular brilliance of this fine novel is in the razor-sharp, and frequently hilarious dialogue.  Doubtful that too many readers of this blog hang out with guys like Web, but we all know smartmouths who can hardly express themselves other than in ironic asides.  It rings true.

And despite the gruesome subject matter, the text is not utterly drenched in blood.  (See the next novel for that.)  In fact, this is a real novel.  The protagonist grows and changes, and we like it, because we care about him. 

If you think you can get past the violence of the language (and violence to the language) and you have a natural affinity for the genre, this is one you should check out.

Continuity complaint:  At one point, Web points out a constellation to the toxic hot chick.  The constellation he points out is Corvus, the Crow, which is a rather obscure constellation and somewhat low in the sky when it appears, and I am doubtful that anyone could see it, much less identify it to someone who didn't know the night sky, from a moving car in the light-drenched Los Angeles night.

(P.S.:  I have seen news accounts that Mystic Arts is going to be made into an HBO series.)

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The Winter of Frankie Machine, by Don Winslow

I lived in the San Diego area so I'm a sucker for the novels of T. Jefferson Parker (who, thankfully, is one of our more wonderful crime fiction writers).  Don  Winslow paddles out into the same surf.  This one is a peach. 

One of my book-review rules is not to give away any of the plot -- at least not any of the plot that doesn't appear in the first few pages.  This baby doesn't really get rolling until some ways into it, but you know, you just know, something is about to pop.  When the cover of the book displays a sinking boat and the name "Frankie Machine," and your main character Frank Macchiano is a pillar of the Pacific Beach recreational fishing community and a meticulous businessman, the pleasant rhythms of his daily routine are unlikely to continue.  And when it starts to pop, it doesn't stop popping until the final page. 

A lot of that popping comes from .38 caliber instruments. 

This book reminded me just a little of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, featuring a hero -- such as he is -- who never seems to be at a loss for the right thing to do.  Oh, he runs into a spot of trouble here and there, but Frank always seems to have an appropriately violent solution.  

Let's put it this way:  When I was reading this, I thought DeNiro should play this guy in a movie, and whaddya know?

One more thing:  This novel moves easily through the Cosa Nostra underworld of Southern California.  Almost every major character is recognizable as a thinly-disguised real-life thug to those who have done much reading in Mafia history.  You will find Jimmy "the Weasel" Frattianno, Frank "Bomp" Bompensiero, Jack Dragna, Allen Dorfman, Allen Glick, Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein, and several others, all committing crimes looking very much like the crimes of their real-life doppelgangers.

Lotsa killing of bad men.  Highly satisfying.  Could not put it down.

Looking for a Good Mystery? Avoid This One

Wild Indigo, by Sandi Ault

If you are looking for a mystery/thriller with a Native American slant and even an intriguing dose of mysticism, run, don't walk, away from this volume and pick up something by Peter Bowen or Kirk Mitchell. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books I have put aside without finishing, and this is one of them.

I can even pinpoint the exact moment when I came to this unhappy conclusion (no spoiler): The heroine, Jamaica Wild, explains that the reason she does not have blinds on the windows of her home is because she wants to be able to see the surrounding mountains through them.

Ms. Wild's lack of awareness that blinds may be opened to view objects through their accompanying windows will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this far. Ms. Wild is dumb as a stump. And not entertainingly so. She never says anything interesting, unexpected, witty, or suggestive that she is capable of solving the mystery. She is weirdly forgetful and unable to interpret some pretty obvious circumstances.

Indeed, the entire pueblo is a pretty dull place  None of the other characters, with the possible exception of Momma Anna, who tends to speak in sentences of no more than five words, ever says anything that suggests you'd like to be seated next to him or her at dinner.

But a mystery with a stiff central character (even one who is in every scene, and is telling the story) can be redeemed by good writing. Alas. The writing is writing-class poor. The book seems not to have had an editor's care. From page 5: "I looked through the shattered windshield, the scene beyond it in fragments like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the green of the forest land rising to the blue and purple shoulders of the Rocky Mountains, the high peaks watching like guardians over the normally peaceful, ancient village of Tanoah Pueblo." Multiply this cliched, redundant, unlikely, dull, and plot-stopping level of irrelevant detail by several hundred pages, and you can put away the Ambien.

Don't get me started on the wolf.