Books Reviews – Page 30 – Auxiliary Memory

The Metaphors of Magic

The concept of magic has been around since the dawn of mankind. Modern people associate the belief in magic with superstition, so the belief in real magic is waning. However, the belief in fantasy magic is growing. People love stories where magic is real. Fictional magic can take many forms because the rules and intent of magic within a story has literary purpose.

I am listening to A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, and beautifully read by Josephine Bailey. It is the first book of a trilogy about four girls in Victorian England that get seduced by the power of magic. One metaphor for magic used in this book is addiction. The girls have hangovers after using magic. They are drawn to magic because of their unhappy lives and magic makes them feel good. They are warned about the dangers of magic, but they become addicted, knowing that magic killed the two girls that are their spiritual guides. In A Great and Terrible Beauty magic is seen as a kind of high, or escape of from the real world.

The metaphor for magic in the Harry Potter books is different. J. K. Rowling treats magic as if it was a science, to be studied in school, with textbooks, journals, and learned societies. Magic has rules and limitations, and mastery of it takes work, skill and talent. This is probably the most popular metaphor for magic. Readers love everyday stories of practical magic.

Older books, especial from medieval times and earlier, see magic as a metaphor for good and evil, directly related to God and Satan, or gods and goddesses. There is white magic and black magic, and human users get their magical power through association. As humans self importance grew, and the power of the gods declined, the nature of magic was moved into hidden aspects of reality. It was the secret knowledge of adepts. Stories like The Lord of the Rings comes out of this heritage.

Nowadays magic doesn’t have to have a philosophical justification. Every writer who creates a new series of books about vampires decides the rules for how they live in their literary creation. Magic is a tool that shapes fictional form, which can go from sexual magic (True Blood) to comedy magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to satire magic (Saturday Night Live) to alternate history science fiction magic (“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang).

The sad thing is sometimes people really do want to believe in magic. They want their fictional fun to be reality. All religions believe in magic of some sorts. Miracles are the metaphor for religious magic. But people also want to believe in concepts like luck, Karma and voodoo too. Thus magic is a metaphor for altering reality. That’s where it gets really dangerous. New Age believers are convinced in the power of mind over matter. That’s an especially dangerous belief.

That’s why you must ask yourself: Do I believe in real magic or just fictional magic? Fictional magic is just a plot device to create fun stories, and sometimes its also used as a moral metaphor, like in A Great and Terrible Beauty. But if you think anything other than the laws of science rule reality then you have something to worry about. And I don’t mean worrying about being delusional, which you probably are. No I mean, you have to worry about knowing the rules of your magic.

For example, if you believe in angels, you have to also believe in devils. If you believe magic can help you then you also have to believe it can hurt you. If you can hex someone, they can hex you. If you believe in ghosts, then you are never alone. It gets creepier and creepier. That’s why I love the magic metaphor in Ted Chiang’s gorgeous story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” where he uses a fantasy time machine to teach the lessons of the Koran. All magic has laws, even if magic might be real. All magic has philosophy, even if its untrue. The best magic is fiction that teaches us lessons about living in the world of reality.

So, whenever you encounter magic ask yourself: What does this magic imply.

JWH – 11/14/10

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is remembered for one book, Little Women (1868) which most people know from at least a dozen film versions, and many women know from reading, and a few of those know from a life-long passion for the entire Jo March chronicles. In her day, Louisa May Alcott’s famous books for girls competed in the bookstores with Mark Twain’s famous books for boys. Alcott has always been a figure standing in the shadows of her much loved autobiographical character, Jo March, and overwhelmed by the success of Little Women. However, Louisa May was not Jo March, and few women in 19th century American had a life as interesting as hers.

I have actually never read any of Louisa May Alcott’s novels, so it’s rather odd that I should choose to read a biography about her, but I kept crossing her tracks in books about other writers in 19th century America so that a few weeks ago when I saw she was featured on the PBS show American Masters I decided to give it a look. The documentary film directed by Nancy Porter is based on the book with the same name, Louisa May Alcott – The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen. The show was so fascinating that I got the audiobook, and after I finished listened to it, bought the hardback edition for reference.

I first encountered Louisa May Alcott biographically several years ago when I wrote a novelette for a historical fiction class, and had my character meet LMA in 1867 Boston. The story was about a young woman who wanted to go see Charles Dickens speak at the Tremont Temple. Researching Boston and Charles Dickens mania was fascinating. Louisa May had seen Dickens in England, so I used facts about her to build details for my character, who was much younger, and eventually gave LMA a walk-on part in the story as thanks. At the time I found LMA so fascinating that I bought a full biography of her, the 1977 Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton, but never got around to reading it. Reading the Reisen biography is great incentive to find time for it one day.

I like that I’m slowly discovering who Louisa May was, it mirrors the academic world that has slowly rediscovered her and her many forgotten works of fiction, one of which, A Long Fatal Love Chase finally found book publication over a hundred years after it was written and made the New York Times bestseller list.

Louisa May has endeared herself well enough with me, even without reading her fiction, that she’s joined a small group of authors that I return to again and again to study their biographies. They are in order of biographical discovery: Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald and now LMA. I don’t know why, but these American writers fascinate me.

Louisa May grew up with those 19th century hippies, the Transcendentalists, and she even lived on an early commune, had a crush on Henry David Thoreau, wrote lurid pulp fiction to pay the bills for her family, worked as a nurse during the civil war, took opium for her many pains, maybe experimented with hash and other drugs, was an abolitionist, early feminist, grew up a vegetarian, loved to run for exercise, and knew a lot of famous people of her day. She was tall and sharp tongued, and never wanted to lose her freedom to marriage, and she loved to compete against boys and men.

Harriet Reisen makes an interesting case for Alcott’s fame in her day being equal to the mania for Harry Potter books today. I’m sure that’s a stretch, but Reisen also talks about how she’s met many women that read Little Women because their mothers read it to them, and their mothers got it from their mothers, and in some cases, she could trace these family readings back to LMA’s day. Certainly Harry Potter has yet to inspire a dozen film versions spanning almost a century of cinema history. And that’s not counting the various anime versions, plays or operatic version.

Even though I’ve yet to read Little Women, I have seen three film versions, and after reading the Reisen bio can easily see how Alcott adapted her reality to fiction. I do plan to read Little Women someday, but I think I want to read around it first. I have a copy of A Long Fatal Love Chase, and Audible.com has A Modern Mephistopheles. Audible.com also has ten unabridged versions of Little Women, which I think beats out their number of different versions of Pride and Prejudice. Amazon offers Behind A Mask, a collection of her pulp fiction stories. I think I’d like to get to know LMA more before reading her famous novel so I can really see how and why she created Jo March.

Finally, I also admired Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women for its day to day view of American life in the 19th century. I like to glean small details, like one women telling another where to find the lady’s WC, or the difference between crossing the Atlantic on a sailing ship and a steamship, or tidbits about the popular magazines of the day and what they paid for stories. Like I’ve explained, this book is fun to read even without being a fan of Louisa May Alcott.

JWH – 10/11/10

Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – 1907-1948

If there was ever a big fish in a little pond, it is Robert A. Heinlein. Science fiction is a very small pond, and despite all its success at the movies and television, written science fiction remains a tiny ghetto in the world of fiction. Robert A. Heinlein is a towering figure in the tempest-in-a-teapot world of fandom, but outside that small subculture Heinlein is little known.

William H. Patterson, Jr. has written the first half of a massive authorized biography of Heinlein called Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – Volume 1 – Learning Curve – 1907-1948. The biographical narrative goes through page 473, while appendices and notes continue through page 594, and the index ends on page 622. This is a well researched biography, and as I read it, I felt I learned as much about American life from 1907-1948 as I did about Heinlein. Patterson studied the politics and social norms of the time to put Heinlein in context, and that greatly enriches the story.

Now here’s the problem. Patterson wants to make Heinlein more influential than I think he was, not an uncommon trait of biographers. However, Heinlein had some very devoted fans, who after his death have become even more fanatical about the importance of Heinlein’s work. This reminds me of Jesus and his followers after his death. Most of what is attributed to the historical Jesus was actually invented by his followers. This kind of remaking the real man into a miracle worker may be happening to Heinlein.

I’ve been following Patterson’s work on Heinlein for over a decade, first on alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup and then with his Heinlein Journal. Virginia Heinlein selected Patterson and gave him access to Heinlein’s papers. Robert and Ginny Heinlein had burned a lot of his papers after he left his second wife, but evidently there were plenty left, because this is a very detailed biography on Heinlein’s early life. I can’t wait for the second volume.

Heinlein always seemed such a secretive person that I was expecting little about his actual life and more about his fiction. Instead, Patterson’s biography is mostly about Heinlein, and surprising little about his writing. Patterson talks about Heinlein struggling to write, but mainly in relation to Heinlein needing a paycheck. The book ends just as Heinlein is starting to become more financially secure, so his story is almost one of struggling for over forty years to become a overnight success. Heinlein overcame economic hardship and a lifetime of poor health to succeed and fail at many ventures before becoming a science fiction superstar.

Any Heinlein fan should love this book. However, I think Patterson wants Heinlein to be far more important than he is. If you look closely to Patterson’s sentences, especially in his introduction, but throughout the book, he adds a strong Heinlein bias. Patterson obviously feels Heinlein is significant outside of science fiction and I have to question that. Patterson says on page 15 of his Introduction,

And even among this select group of writers-cum-culture-figures, Heinlein is unique. He galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction, and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this. When you read books about the 20th century you just don’t see Heinlein mentioned, mainly because they seldom mention science fiction. And the parenthetical statement crediting think tanks to science fiction, is bizarre itself. And frankly, Heinlein’s impact on the counter culture, libertarian and commercial space movement has got to be extremely minimal. The logic is almost equal to: powerful leaders drink whiskey, thus the twentieth century was galvanized by whiskey.

Heinlein was a substitute father figure to me growing up. I love many of his books, enough to read and reread them. I’ve read most of what he wrote at least twice. Yet, I give him very little credit as to influencing me. Heinlein was a major influence on science fiction, and strangely enough Patterson’s doesn’t show that in his biography.

Now I assume Patterson did this on purpose, knowing that so many other books have already been written about the history of science fiction, and no book has been written on the history of Heinlein the man. Heinlein, and his hardcore fans always wanted to separate his fiction from the man, claiming readers shouldn’t extrapolate ideas about Heinlein from his stories. I think this new biography will be the Rosetta Stone for decoding Heinlein inside his fiction.

Alexei Panshin’s legacy appears to be totally despised by the Heinlein fanatics because he offended the master with the first book on Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension, back in 1968. I think its still the best quick overview of Heinlein’s fiction from 1939-1966, but that Panshin book continues to enrage the Heinlein disciples. They see it as trashing Heinlein, even though I thought it was a young man’s love letter to his hero. Panshin’s later book, The World Beyond the Hill, does explain Heinlein’s influence during the golden age of science fiction, covering the same period of Patterson’s biography. Both of these books won Hugos, although Panshin got a Hugo for fan writing while he serialized Heinlein in Dimension in fanzines.

Like I said, if you want to know Heinlein the man, read Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, but if you want to know about Heinlein’s influence on SF, read Heinlein in Dimension and The World Beyond the Hill. Now I expect this will change. Because the authorized biography has finally come out, and especially after the second volume appears, I expect a new writer to put all the sources together and write a new story by story survey of Heinlein’s fiction. And if that writer is well read in science fiction, I think he or she will be the one to explain Heinlein’s influence on the genre. Oddly enough, I wonder if that could be Alexei Panshin? Boy, wouldn’t that piss off the hardcore Heinlein followers.

After you finish reading the Patterson biography, go over to The Critics Lounge and read some of Panshin’s later essays, especially “When the Quest Ended.” Which biographer do you prefer, Patterson, the authorized explorer of Heinlein, or Panshin, the shunned fan?

Heinlein’s real legacy is his impact on the little world of written science fiction. When I was growing up in the 1960s most science fiction fans considered Heinlein the top dog of the field, but today you can ask young people reading science fiction what writers they love and often Heinlein doesn’t even get listed. But that’s deceptive, because those young people often pick writers that were influenced by Heinlein. Those writers are the true disciples and children of Heinlein.

As much as Patterson would like to think that Heinlein greatly influenced the counter culture, libertarianism and commercial space companies, I just don’t think he did. Those are separate worlds and some of their members might have read and loved Heinlein’s books, but they had their own shapers and makers.

William Patterson’s biography of Robert A. Heinlein is a must read for anyone who loves Heinlein’s fiction. We finally get to know the Wizard behind the Oz Heinlein created. After finishing the biography I wanted to start with Heinlein’s first story and read them all again, till his last, and examine his writing in light of the new biography.

JWH – 9/6/10

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Why are YA novels so appealing right now? I know many people in their fifties reading young adult novels like the Harry Potter series and The Hunger Games trilogy. And these non-YA readers just gush about the great storytelling they are finding in their kids’ books. I recently listened to The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which includes The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) and was amazed by how much I enjoyed them. I was just blown away by Suzanne Collins’ narrative skills and plotting. Nothing was conventional. The story was completely fresh.

I won’t tell you about the plot, because it sounded bizarrely unappealing when I first heard it. But my friend Linda insisted that I get over that. I’m glad I took her advice. Just get a copy of the first book, The Hunger Games and give it a try. Don’t spoil it by reading reviews. Let me just say one lady I recommended The Hunger Games to has since read all three books and has already started rereading them. If you liked The Giver by Lois Lowry or Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the odds you should read The Hunger Games.

I caught this YA trilogy at the perfect time, finishing the first two the night before the third was released on August 24th, which I got from Audible that morning when I woke up. I’m not sure I would have loved them so intensely if I had to read them a year apart, like I’m doing with the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, another story that I highly recommend, also featuring a teenage girl as the hero of the story.

My all-time favorite novels are the Heinlein juveniles, twelve science fiction books written in the late 1940s and 1950s by Robert A. Heinlein. I read those books when I was a teenager, and the only books that come close to their excitement since then have been YA novels. Is that a failure to grow up?

Oh, I’ve read hundreds of adult novels that I greatly admire, but they lack the emotional excitement of YA novels. That’s one clue. Adult novels are great for intellectual reasons, but YA novels are fun for their emotions. YA novels are like roller coasters – thrill rides, and even when they deal with ideas, they are sense of wonder thrilling. Maybe us oldsters just want to feel young again.

YA novels defy genre classifications – they are all shelved together and not segregated by topics. For instance The Hunger Games is science fiction, but it’s read and loved by all kinds of readers, including those who would never choose to call themselves fans of science fiction. Stranger still, this trilogy has flown completely under the radar of most hard core science fiction readers.

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire should have been Hugo winners, but they didn’t even make it to the nominee level. Why? I’ve read the 2010 nominees and I think Catching Fire stands up equal to any of those books. Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer also features a teenage girl protagonist and is a YA novel too, but Sawyer is a big name in the SF genre, and Suzanne Collins is not. Julian Comstock is also about tyrannical government that occupies the former United States like The Hunger Games, and its author, but Robert Charles Wilson has already won a Hugo and is well known to SF readers.

In other words, YA novels seem to be a world unto themselves. According to Wikipedia, young-adult fiction is intended for 14 to 21 year olds. I’m not the only one wondering about why us old folks are reading kids’ books, the New York Times ran “The Kids’ Books Are All Right” recently asking the same questions. I agree completely with:

“A lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot,” Grossman said. “I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives.”

Over at Ground Zero they asked what has sparked a YA golden age? They point out that sales of adult novels are in decline while YA sales are growing. They also give more first person accounts of adults reading more YA novels than their young adult children. Did the Harry Potter books get us all hooked on reading kids’ books?

Over at the American Library Association they have their YALSA lists of Best Books for Young Adults broken down by long lists and top ten lists going back to 1996. The Hunger Games was on their Top 10 Best Books for 2009, picked from 86 books from the longer list. The Hunger Games was the only book I recognized, so maybe I have a treasure trove of great books to mine. I didn’t recognize any of the 2010 top 10, and only one each from the 2007 and 2008 lists. (I did read that one 2007 book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and it was impressive.)

YA lit is a vast area of literature that I’m mostly unfamiliar. I need to change that and go exploring. It will give me something to do in my old age, and maybe even help rejuvenate my old mind. Maybe YA books are appealing to us OA (Old Adults) because we’re weary of this old world and crave a younger one.

JWH – 9/1/10

Thalia Novels of Larry McMurtry

Thalia, Texas is a fictional town, the setting for five novels by Larry McMurtry:

The Last Picture Show (1966)
Texasville (1987)
Duane’s Depressed (1999)
When the Light Goes (2007)
Rhino Ranch (2009)

I read all five of these books in the last six weeks, and the threads that weave them together are Thalia and Duane Moore, so it’s essentially the story of one man and his small town over fifty years since he graduated high school. (My guess in 1952.)

I first read The Last Picture Show after seeing the movie when it came out in 1971 and this led me to be a life-long Larry McMurtry fan, but not a consistent one. I read a handful of his early books during 1971-1975, then after seeing the Lonesome Dove mini-series on TV read most of McMurtry western novels in the late 80s and early 90s, then in the early double-ought’s, I read the Berrybender books, and final this summer I came back and caught up with the Thalia novels.

The Thalia novels are my favorites because I find so much that resonates with my own life.

The original story in this unintentional series, The Last Picture Show, was “lovingly dedicated to my home town,” by McMurtry, who was born in Archer City, Texas. I assume that’s the model for Thalia. Thalia, from Greek mythology, was the Muse of comedy, and one of the three Graces. Some people do see these stories as essentially comic, but any comedy is vastly overshadowed by loneliness, sexual frustration, sadness, restless boredom, depression and death.

I’d like to think The Last Picture Show is autobiographical, the kind of a novel that a young writer would write to describe how they grew up. It’s about two high school best friends, Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore set in the early 1950s, during the Korean War. It was made into a beautiful film by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971, starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd. The Last Picture Show is Sonny Crawford’s story, but Duane and Sonny share a tragic love for the fickle Jacy Farrow. The odd thing about this novel is how the women are much stronger then the Texas men.

For some reason, starting with Texasville, the story shifted to Duane, and Sonny was marginalized as a character. Because Texasville was also made into a film in 1990, again by Bogdanovich, I wonder if McMurtry wrote it for the Duane because Jeff Bridges was then a much bigger star. All the books after The Last Picture Show focus on Duane Moore, and it’s Jeff Bridges who I picture in my mind as Duane for all five books.

Over the five books, two of which were made into films, I got to love many characters, and in the course of the series they all die. Most of the deaths, like death in life, were surprises, and some were gut wrenching to me as the reader.

The peak of the whole series is Duane’s Depressed, when Duane is 62. Like The Last Picture Show, I hope Duane’s Depressed has more of McMurtry in it because its emotions are more real.

The last two novels, When the Light Goes and Rhino Ranch, are slight, and follow many drifting years for Duane. They are more intentionally comic, if not farcical. The chapters become shorter and shorter until they are tiny scenes in Duane’s life, but they cover Duane’s late sixties and early seventies, a time of little activity in a man’s life, although those books should have been longer and more philosophical.

One thing I found amazing is how much America changes in these books. We start out in Thalia, around 1951, the year I was born. There are no cell phones, no computers, no Internet, no computer games, etc. They do have television, but most people seem to ignore it. Sonny and Duane play football for a school that seldom sees any wins, and they both dream of scoring with Jacy, their high school beauty queen. Both have jobs, and Sonny has a mentor, Sam the Lion, plus Sonny has an affair with the high school coach’s wife. But nothing I can say about the story conveys the full cast of vivid characters and all of their lonely lives. You have to immerse yourself in the novel for that. I’ve talk to many people who found it depressing, but I found the story uplifting.

Texasville jumps ahead in Duane’s life to his forties, after he’s married Karla, has four kids and a couple grandchildren. He’s twelve million dollars in debt during a bust cycle of oil prices. Jacy Farrow comes home at the same time Duane and Karla are having marriage problems, but Jacy steals Karla, his kids, his grandchildren, and even his dog from Duane. Duane fails to communicate with his family even though he loves them. Texasville is a riot of crazy characters, and Duane’s four children are every parent’s complete set of parenthood nightmares.

Texasville is about Duane’s failure to communicate with women. His wife and several girlfriends read him like a book, knowing his every move, emotion and desire, but he is clueless, indecisive and the only words he can find for each women are the exact words that piss them off.

Evidently Duane never catches up with the women because in Duane’s Depressed, when he’s 62, walks away from his family. Literally. He parks his pickup, hides the keys, and walks away from a house with a wife, a cook, four children and nine grandchildren. Duane is not educated enough to know who Thoreau was, or to know about Walden’s Pond, but he goes off to live in a small cabin. Some people do point out he’s choosing to live a Thoreau like existence and he eventually finds a copy of the book, but he only reads a few lines about living deliberately. Which he does.

Duane’s Depressed is about finding peace living alone, and Duane goes to a psychologist. This is my favorite of the five books. I’ll turn 59 in a few months, and that feels very close to 62. McMurtry was just a little bit older than that when he wrote the novel, so I consider it my tour guide for my sixties. Even though I write about almost anything I want in my blog there are topics I’m afraid to talk about. Some of those topics are ones that Honor Carmichael gets Duane to discover.

I wished Larry McMurtry had written other books for this series. I’d like at least one more book, if not two, from Sonny Crawford’s point of view. Jacy deserves a book too, and I think Karla deserves three. Ruth Popper definitely deserves a book. And Jenny Marlow too. And Lois Farrow.

JWH – 8/9/10