Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson - Hunter S. Thompson

I finished this book the same day a woman pepper sprayed people at a Wal-Mart to get at an X-box during a Black Friday sale. Thompson would have been at home in this madness. He also would have recognized the incident a few weeks at Berkeley when a campus cop causally pepper sprayed a line of student protesters.

This collection stretches from the beginning days at Rolling Stone all the way to a few months before his death - a piece about the Bush re-election victory in 2004, and Thompson's opinion that he would rather have voted for Nixon, his arch-nemesis, than Bush (perhaps the harshest indictment of the presidency of George W Bush ever given)
The cliche would be to say that we need a voice like Thompson now, but it could never happen. You can draw connections between Thompson's style and bloggers (personal, argumentative, opinionated, vitriolic) but Thompson put himself in the story by going to the centre of action (instead of sitting back and commenting on what's happening) and he wrote long, rambling pieces that required heavy editing and don't fit nicely onto the screen of an i-pad.

In-between the pieces are letters between Thompson and Jann Wenner, some of which hint at what might have been. One of the great lost books is Thompson's lost Vietnam novel. Some of the dispatches are collected here, with Thompson bunkered down in a hotel as the Viet Cong approach, collecting ammunition and trying to teach two other journalists how to to use a walkie talkie system for when the walls are breached. Vietnam was pure gonzo, and it takes a madman like Thompson to make sense of the madness.

The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

A few pages in and a main character throws a Rolando Barthes book, A Lover's Discourse. So it's going to be one of those kind of books, is it?  Three characters, in university in the early 80's, fall in love, talk about religion, literary criticism, yeast cultures and truth.  Mitchell (Young Tom Waits as he is referenced) is searching for meaning in religion. Leonard, manic depressive, is searching for truth in science. Madeline is the girl they both fall in love with, who doesn't quite get the new literary criticism and prefers Victorian novels.

She picks Leonard. Mitchell goes off to see the world, and after a negative experience at Mother Theresa's hospital in Calcutta, he comes back to the U.S. to find that Madeline has married Leonard.  Leonard, however, is a manic depressive who can't get his meds right, and as the story unfolds, Madeline was more in love with the idea of being in love with Leonard than actually being in love with him. She could blame Barthes, or she could blame all the Austen she read.

There is some wit in this realistic prose, but the novel feels like an experiment - can an old fashioned love story be written for these modern (or near-modern) times? Nobody seemed to ask why this should be a topic to explore, but the author puts together a readable novel, even if it's hard to find an emotional connection to these characters.  There's something for everyone - you can read it as a straight ahead romance novel, or you can hold it under the light of your weary, post-post-post-modern microscope and dissect it.

One aspect was particularly distracting - the author seems to be paying homage to David Foster Wallace in the character of Leonard. He's smart, large, wears a bandanna and chews tobacco, majoring in philosophy. DFW was a depressive and not a manic depressive, and Leonard isn't a writer, but the similarities are too close to be coincidentally. Eugenides has denied this, which makes it even more distracting - surely an editor or a first reader must have pointed this out, even if it wasn't intentional.

Boomerang: Travels In The New Third World - Michael Lewis

If the end does come, it won't be zombies - it will be bankers. They brought us to the edge of ruin in 2008 and no doubt will lead us there again. Lewis starts in Iceland, where the fishermen came off the boats and into banking, and in 30 years bankrupted the country. In Greece he spends time in a monastery run by an order of monks that turned a land deal into a series of business deals that brought down the economy. It didn't help that no one in Greece pays taxes, and public sector employees make boat loads of money.  In Germany he tries to find out why the Germans kept pumping money into failing EU economies but instead comes away with insight about the German relationship to excrement. Last stop is California, where a state out of money still manages to be one the largest economies in the world.  Lewis is an excellent writer with a talent for getting out of the way and letting his characters tell the story.

Zone One - Colson Whitehead

When the end comes, it won't be the smartest or the bravest or the best among us who will survive. It will be the ones that make the hard choices, the ones that have that built-in survival skill  - those one will survive. In Zone One, Mark Spitz (everyone has a new name at the end of the world) is an average guy from Long Island who managed to live this long into the zombie apocalypse. He's joined the re-formed military and is a sweeper, assigned to clean out the office towers and Chinese restaurants of Zone One.  Everything is run from Buffalo and the outlook is grim for humanity, even with sponsorship opportunities for warlords who have managed to secure beer distribution routes and athletic shoe warehouses. Everyone is damaged from the trauma, and for Mark Spitz it manifests itself in a almost reckless disregard for his own life.

Too literary to use the word zombie, the author calls them skels (short for skeletons). The plague has divided them into two groups - ones that try to eat your brains and ones trapped in a pre-life daze that causes them to sit at desks or or stand at a hot dog cart. The prose sings, even if at times it's laid on a bit too thick. A believable look at the zombie apocalypse, the novel reminds you what it means to be human.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman

This is what Klosterman does best - non-fiction ruminations on pop culture. His desire to write fiction is understandable, but he has yet to achieve the level of skill and engagement he does with this collection. The best piece is on a Guns'N'Roses tribute band that has more energy and passion for the music than the original band ever did, but all of the pieces are good. He nails how reality TV has changed the way we behave in real life, and makes a convincing argument that Trisha Yearwood is more important than Lucinda Williams.  He's searching to understand how pop culture (and really, at this point, is there any other kind?) affects us.

The Visible Man - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with an invisible man story is that it's been done.  There was the original story, a slew of movies, a few Twilight Zone episodes and all of those daydreams everyone has had.  So, what to do if you want to tell an invisible man story?  (Let's ignore the answer "don't tell one" for one) You look for a new way to tell it. The first thing you do is get rid of the invisible part - there's no such thing as invisible, and science will back you up. So, make him visible, in the sense that if you knew what you were looking for you could see him. Add a suit and and a cream and an obsessive type with social skills so poor that he can only understand other humans by observing them for lengths at a time.

But a straight ahead narrative won't do, and neither will a journal type story. Instead, change the focus to a series of conversations between a therapist and the invisible man. But you can't do like that - you need to have it a collection of notes and emails that could be used to create a book, add a letter from the therapist to the editor, and there, now you have something.

What you have is a story that's made more entertaining by the diversions and asides and the observations about culture and people, but lacks a narrative force in the main story.  The structure gets in the way of the first section (an email exchange - literary history question - what was the first novel to use letters as a narrative device? And what was the first novel to use emails? Those authors have some answering to do) but gets out of the way for the remainder, and the book is better off for it.

Killing Yourself to Live - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with Chuck Klosterman, or at least Chuck Klosterman's writing, is that he knows that he's a writer, and he knows that you know that he's a writer. You have certain expectations, even if you don't know who Chuck Klosterman is, because as someone who would read a book about rock star deaths, you have a set of certain expectations about what a book like that would be about and what kind of person would write that kind of book. And Chuck Klosterman knows this, and he knows that you this. And he knows that you know that he knows this.

We could call it the Eggers effect, or perhaps the DFW effect. It's a bit maddening, really, this level of self-consciousness. We could blame reality TV as well, and maybe The Gary Shandling Show, for breaking the 4th wall and never putting it back together again.

This book is about a music writer doing a 20-day tour to all of rock's famous death spots - the Chelsea Hotel, a field in Iowa, Mississippi, and Seattle.  If you care about rock deaths (and why wouldn't you if you are reading this book) then you know about these places. You will probably also chuckle at the author calling the rental car Tauntan and get all of his other references. 

Instead of giving us the expected writer-on-the-scene reporting, the book takes a left turn and the author ruminates about three major relationships in his life.  Most of the novel is spent on these three women , rehashing the past, worrying about the future.  It's all fine and good, but it stalls the forward motion of the book.

But, the author knows this. He mentions that the main thesis of the book is underdeveloped and the cutesy sub-title shows his hand - we're not getting the full story, either about his relationships with these three women or about the rock star deaths. Not sure where to go, he ends with a phone conversation between him and a female friend who implores him not to write a book about women he used to be in love with it.  She cites the faults in such a novel (all of which are in the book that you just read). And that's the ending you're given, which is probably the ending you were expecting, if you are the type of person who would read a book like this.