MacDonald - The Green Ripper

The Green Ripper, John D MacDonald, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1979.

Some books from earlier eras age very well, every bit as readable as when they were written, some even find a more appreciative audience many years after the first publication. But while looking through a few books in the Travis McGee series, I became worried that this highly regarded series would seem dated. I looked for one of the more recent books, one that was also mentioned in places as one of the best. I picked up this one, not sure if it met the second criteria, but it met the first.
I suspect it was more of a sensation when first published. It is, for better or worse, very much in the style of much 70's adventure fiction. The characters talk a great deal, they follow leads and uncover a few facts which lead them somewhere else. In this case a female character is introduced as McGee's latest girlfriend, and of course we read how awesome she is, McGee wants to marry her. Then very quickly she is killed off. McGee wants revenge. She was, it is obvious, killed off by a cult. In the seventies cults probably seemed even more mysterious and weird than they do now. Today they are a familiar menace, then they were a new menace. Anyway, McGee spends most of the book following leads, discovering that government agents are also after this cult, and not much else.
Finally McGee decides to join the cult as a way of finding out who killed his girlfriend and then killing them. Luckily for McGee, the group he joins are not regular cult members, they are part of some special cult militia getting military training. Either the author did not know about cult brainwashing techniques, or he ignored them. Just their possibility makes joining a cult to get information a very stupid idea. But the hero is lucky, this section of the cult is a military section.
McGee is told he cannot leave, but is allowed to wander around the base/ compound and ask any questions he pleases and have them fully answered. They even give him a woman to - well I am not sure what she is supposed to be doing, watch him perhaps, but her author-purpose is to supply sex scenes and give plot information. The absurdity builds until the action finale.
This novel is silly really, and I hope not an example of the Travis McGee greatness which so many write about, because this book certainly isn't.

Tosches - Cut Numbers

Cut Numbers. Nick Tosches. Back Bay Books (Little, Brown, and Co.) 2001.
Tosches tells a parallel story of two characters. Both are hard men living on the fringes of crime. They know the big hitters in the crime world, but live and work in the margins. One is Louis, a shylock, handing out loans and collecting payments every week. The other is Joe Brusher, a killer. Their two stories run separately, and involve some of the same supporting players, but they never meet.

Each man is approaching middle-age, feeling the years of effort, and the lack of success. Both welcome a chance to make their fortunes. Louis especially can barely make a living, fights with his girlfriend, and feels the effects of a gangster mid-life crisis.

The novel is rich in colorful, realistic characters, gritty dialogue, and believable detail on the life of low - level crooks. Joe makes a good menacing figure, and we do get some of his point of view. But it is Louie who is the main character. We spend more time with him, get most of the story through his eyes. He is not always a likable character, but Tosches makes him a sympathetic one.

Ellis - The Informers

The Informers. Brett Easton Ellis. Vintage. 1994.
Ellis's 'The Informers' is actually a collection of short stories, one per chapter; but he purposefully writes them all in the first person and rarely or never gives the narrator a name, so the stories blend together in an esoteric, impressionistic, crazy way. College kids talking of a dead friend, the unhappy wife of a movie mogul, a serial killer, and so on. The chapter-stories move one to the other like a prose form of an old-school punk rock performance.

Nersesian - Chinese Takeout

Chinese Takeout Arthur Nersesian, Perennial, 2003.
Orloff Trenchant is a painter living in his van, hustling paintings to art dealers, selling books at a sidewalk stand, and failing at his relationships with women.
Orloff basically has three relationships as the book progresses. The first ends quickly, the second occupies most of the book, and the third seems like a backup that is there when needed. The dialogue often sounds unnatural, and the plotting is a little shakey; Orloff's paranoia and foolish decisions seem meant as humorous and as drama at the same time, but end up being neither.
Where the book succeeds is in it's depiction of setting. The knowledge of the Chinatown area, its history, its streets and places, is colorful and thorough and always engaging. Also the small things are done well: the street of book vendors, the scene where Orloff takes down street signs and substitutes ads about himself, and so on. These portions of the book make it a good read.

Ellis - Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis, Vintage, 1985.
It begins as an odd little book, then draws you in and becomes fascinating, and finally a bit disturbing. At first the style may be a little off-putting, but very quickly the reader is drawn in. Ellis has a great ear for dialogue, and for choosing detail, sparse but effective, to build a scene.
The book features many parties, but Ellis makes each seem different. The action is varied within the repeated framework of parties and dinners and clubs.
There is a fairly large group of main characters, but Ellis handles them well, and the reader is never lost thinking 'who is that again?'
The only problem is the author's unnecessary need to 'top himself' late in the book; the characters have shown so much hedonism throughout, that Ellis goes over the top in the final chapters to create a climax. He needn't have bothered, to have maintained the status quo of the earlier chapters would have suited the novel and the ending much better.

Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was most famous for his novel Slaughterhouse Five, the story of a man, circa post-WWII, traveling at random through time, re-living the events of his own life, including his death, multiple times. The hero knows he is time-traveling as he repeats the events of his life, but he can do nothing to change events, or choose when or where in his life he will travel, or stop his time traveling. Eventually he accepts his fate, adopting the philosophy of fatalism, and in doing so he acquires peace.

Recurring themes throughout Vonnegut's work are determinism, iconoclasm, humanism, and fatalism, revealing much about the author's own attitudes to the world, and to life and death. He was also a great literary experimenter. Vonnegut's plots are disjointed, and many of his characters are more thematic devices than characters. He also used metafiction, using sections of a novel to write about the novel, sometimes appearing as himself in the narrative. For example, in Breakfast of Champions, one of his bestsellers, we get the great humorous exchange:
"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.
This novel is also a sort of all-star novel, featuring many cameos by characters from several other of Vonnegut's works, including, for example, the frequently appearing Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful though prolific sf writer.

Charles Bukowski

So many sites about or including Charles Bukowski. He was a post-beat, beat generation writer. For ten years he worked in the Post Office, then quit to write - primarily poetry. Referred to at times as the Poet of Skid Row, he lived close enough - just below or just above - the poverty line to know what he was talking about. He wrote poetry, short stories that are often prose poems (as are many of his poems) and novels that belong in the category called fictive biography. www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/bukowski The Beat Page gives a good intro to Bukowski's work. It is a relatively old site dedicated to Beat writers. There are links to other beat-related sites, bios of beat authors, and a list of top ten beat books.