Book Worm: Classic remake proves lifeless

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” begins a rather famous novel, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” begins a less-famous but much more current novel, “that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

That, in a nutshell, is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith’s postmodern rendering of the Jane Austen classic. It is not, strictly speaking, a very good book. If we are to speak strictly, however, then we must also admit that a “good book” was probably never the idea.

Like any good mash-up, the beauty (for lack of a better word) of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn’t in its content but in its style. At the same time, this isn’t James Joyce-esque stylistic beauty. This isn’t something you can marvel over for decades. This is, as the title suggests, Pride and Prejudice – plus zombies.

There’s really nothing else to it.

Sure, the New York Times has tried to link the zombie phenomenon in popular culture to the rise of the term “zombie banks” to describe pretty much every American financial institution active today. But the
New York Times is just a little too late.

The revival of the American love affair with zombies predates the worst of the current financial crisis and, if anything, seems to more accurately reflect the credit-driven consumer culture that dominated American life way back when Paul Krugman was just another pessimistic fuddy-duddy.

But back to the book: as I was saying, there’s not much here. Granted, it’s tremendously appealing to the zombie-loving subculture (which is not quite as creepy a group as the re-emerging vampire subculture, mostly because the zombie-lovers seem largely to have surpassed the age of consent and aren’t necessarily a hyper-sexualized group) and holds a fair amount of interest for Jane Austen admirers with a good sense of humor.

For most readers, however, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just a really long joke. If you’re still laughing after 25 pages, you get it. If you’re fed up after 15, there’s probably no point in continuing. If you’re already planning to book opening-night tickets to the Elton John-funded Pride and Predator movie (exactly what it sounds like, by the way), this might help warm you up to (or turn you off from) the idea.

This is not, in short, a book I can recommend on its literary merits alone.

It doesn’t really have any, you see. Or at least I hope you see. If you don’t yet, then this book will probably fit you to a T. That’s the thing: someone who likes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will probably love Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Everybody else will, at varying stages of their reading, lose interest.

To be fair, I wasn’t exactly riveted by the original Pride and Prejudice. I respect Austen, but I’m no admirer. She’s no Raymond Chandler.

But I don’t think my feelings about Austen have anything to do with my feelings about Austen-plus-Grahame-Smith. (Incidentally, this is only the second time I’ve mentioned Grahame-Smith in this review, a fitting tribute to his fairly minor role in the creation of this work.) I don’t, to be honest, really have any feelings about Austen-plus-Grahame-Smith. I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies because I have a job to do. If I didn’t, I would’ve set it down after 100 pages or so and resumed my ongoing epic trek through the complete works of Alan Moore (I may not be totally into zombies, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still a huge nerd).

As reviews go, I suppose this one is rather lackluster. It would’ve been nice to go out with a little more of a bang (this is, by the way, my last column with The Temple News) – but we must, alas, play with the hand that fate has dealt us. And fate has dealt me Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: not a hand I’m likely to win on but not totally worth folding over, either. Mediocrity incarnate – unless you’re just really into zombies.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: On bands, books and unbearable banality

Writers act. Dancers write. Painters occasionally dabble in all of those professions. Despite the apparent affinity between music and literature, the relationship of those two art forms has remained relatively ambiguous over the years.

There are exceptions, to be sure, and there always have been. Many of the 19th century’s great operas and ballets were based on literary works, with composers as diverse as Wagner and Puccini all drawing from novels and stories for inspiration. Indeed, classical music remained closely linked to the written word far into the 20th century, with American classical luminaries like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein penning legendary works about “what to listen for in music.”

But rock musicians – despite the deep similarities between their songwriting and literary authors’ story writing – seem to have steered surprisingly clear of literary success. Sure, there are Bob Dylan’s somewhat uninspiring literary output, Leonard Cohen’s poetry and an upcoming torrent of literary output from Ryan Adams. But really, rock musicians don’t make great authors.

Take Jim Morrison, for instance: a rock legend perhaps more literary than many of his contemporaries or followers. The Doors’ name, after all, packed a double-literary wallop – it was an allusion to the title of an Aldous Huxley book, which was an allusion to a William Blake poem. Moreover, Morrison was a published poet, and his lyrics are avowedly poetic in nature.

Yet, Morrison’s poetry does not stand up in the same way the Doors’ music has. In fact, Morrison’s poetry is almost unreadable today (once, in a fit of high-school pretension, I composed a semi-epic poem that echoed – and perhaps even surpassed – Morrison’s style; that should give you a fair idea of his poetry’s quality). Minus the music, Morrison sounds like a hack. “This is the end / my only friend / the end” doesn’t, after all, look half as impressive as it sounds with the rest of the Doors’ powerful musicality behind it.

No, musicians don’t make great writers (and it’s somewhat unfair of me to single Morrison out; he’s not the only legendary rock star to pen some atrocious text) any more than writers make great musicians, but that hasn’t stopped some level of cross-fertilization from taking place between the two art forms.
Where rock musicians and songwriters seem at home is in paying homage to their favorite authors, through song. Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” for instance, permanently wed the classic rock and epic fantasy subcultures with its distinct Lord of the Rings overtones.

The literary references don’t stop with Plant, Page and Co., however. The Police make a surprising number of literary references in its music, with the Lolita shout-out in “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” perhaps being the most obvious (You know: “Like the old man in / That book by Nabokov”).

More surprising? Freddie Mercury from Queen was totally into canonical English poetry, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, in particular. Less surprising? Despite his own failures as an author, Bob Dylan perhaps perfected the art of the rock musical literary allusion. In more recent years, the Beastie Boys may have recorded the finest of all on Paul’s Boutique, with the immortal proclamation in “Shadrach” that it has “got more stories than J.D.’s got Salinger.”

Nor do lyrics provide rock musicians with the only opportunity for literary allusion, as the Doors’ name demonstrates. Contemporary groups like the Airborne Toxic Event (Don DeLillo’s White Noise) and the Straylight Run (William Gibson’s Neuromancer) demonstrate an emerging affinity for allusions to highbrow, early-1980s science fiction, a bandwagon that soon will lead to “Grotto of the Dancing Dear,” a 1980 Hugo and Nebula Award-winning short story by Clifford D. Simak, getting significant airtime on WXPN.

Allusive band names and song lyrics, however, are only so much musical name-dropping. If the rock scene really wants to establish its literary chops, it’s going to have to do quite a bit better than Ray Davies’s Waterloo Sunset story collection. More than half a century after Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, rock music should have a lot more to show for itself than Led Zeppelin II’s permanent enshrinement as the album of choice for Dungeons and Dragons tournaments worldwide.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: Spy novels make a comeback

They’re everywhere, it seems, endlessly clogging the “new release” shelves at every Barnes & Noble in the land (and, if his taste in psuedo-serious film scripts is any indication of his literary preferences, all George Clooney’s shelves, as well). From John Buchan to W.E.B. Griffin, from Orson Wells to Daniel Craig, we just can’t get enough spies.

But spy stories, in case you were unaware, aren’t very old. Pretentious purists will refer you to James Fenimore Cooper. But for all intents and purposes, the spy story as we know it today didn’t appear until the early 20th century. With the exception of a few classics, it didn’t really hit its stride until World War I.

That a literary genre has managed to capture our imaginations in just less than a century is a testament either to the power of its writing or to the absolute insanity of that century’s politics. Given my familiarity with the literary merits of most spy stories, I’m inclined to go with the latter.

Our new century hardly seems to have ushered in a new era of simplicity in global politics, and the spy story is perhaps as current in the post-9/11 world as it was at the height of the Cold War. Confronted with an international political scene that seems beyond the reckoning of even our most advanced minds, we readers of spy fiction need the comfort of knowing that someone is able to figure it all out — if it’s even possible.

This need is perhaps all the more pressing in the uncertainty of the 21st century, as we find ourselves immersed in a war on terror. We’ve long since given up on the James Bonds of espionage — but knowing we had a George Smiley or two on our side would go a long way toward buoying hope in a world that appears to be increasingly hopeless.

Enter Olen Steinhauer, author of The Tourist and one of the first true post-9/11 spy novelists. The Tourist isn’t his first novel — he’s already a two-time Edgar Award nominee — but it is his first to really hint at the shape of spy stories to come, to begin the first reinvention of the spy since John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold revolutionized the genre in 1963.

The tourist is Milo Weaver, you see, and Milo is just as confused as any of us. That confusion is key: he’s not jaded, really, and he’s not disenchanted with the West. Milo Weaver, like the rest of us, just doesn’t really have any idea what’s going on anymore.

The book begins on Sept. 11, 2001, but the attacks on New York and Washington have little direct impact on its action. Sept. 11 also happens to be the day Milo got shot, the day he met his wife and the day he thought he’d been finished as the book’s eponymous “tourist.”

Exactly what a tourist is never becomes entirely clear (nor does anything else in this book, to be fair), but a general picture can be imagined. Somewhere between 007 and a hired thug, a tourist does whatever the CIA needs him to do and doesn’t let anyone know about it. From a strictly technical point of view, a tourist doesn’t actually even exist.

But Milo does exist, as do his wife, his step-daughter, his house in Brooklyn, N.Y., and his ungainly gut and his frustrated boss. For most of the book, Milo must negotiate the unsteady ground between his old role and his new one, maintaining what, in the end, proves to be an unsustainable balance.

As far as plot goes, The Tourist is as unoriginal as most spy stories: a man who appears to know too much (although in truth, knows next to nothing) is on the run, uncertain of whom he can trust.

  Of course, the best spy stories don’t rely on original plotting. Instead, they exploit the uncertain ground of espionage to comment on the modern condition, like that of Le Carré’s and of Graham Greene before him.

Had he written The Tourist, Graham Greene would’ve called it “an entertainment,” a label he affixed to a number of his early forays into the spy genre. Like Greene’s entertainments and Le Carré’s earliest work, The Tourist is a flawed work that fails to achieve the literary standing both authors’ later spy stories would.

But a spy story need not be The Quiet American or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to be worth reading. The Tourist isn’t, and it’s certainly still worth any discerning reader’s time. Indeed, the most discerning reader will certainly keep an eye out for Steinhauer’s future work, hopeful that this talented young writer will once again take the spy story to great, new heights.

Peter Chomko can be contacted at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: ‘Beer and Loathing’ on spring break

Remember Encyclopedia Brown? The annoyingly clever boy-detective who protected the good children of Idaville from the nefarious schemes of Wilford Wiggins? 

Well, imagine this: Encyclopedia’s much older now. He’s headed to Panama City, Fla., for spring break in a Jeep Cherokee loaded with eight cases of Natty Light and an undisclosed quantity of marijuana. However drunk, however high he gets, he’s just as annoyingly clever as always. Only, instead of solving mysteries, he’s trying to get laid – and to do so in just 80 pages.

Interested? If so, then move Keith Strausbaugh’s Beer and Loathing in Panama City: A Bloodthirsty Spring Break Exodus to the top of your to-read list. Of course, if a liquored- and doped-up Encyclopedia Brown doesn’t hold any real appeal to you, this may not be the book for you. In fact, even if that image does hold tremendous appeal, this still might not be the right book for you.

“Appreciating a natural setting,” Strausbaugh writes in one of the later chapters, “makes me feel like I should donate my d–k to an obscure charity and join a hand-holding glee club.”

With a remarkably small number of exceptions, the book maintains this tone of sarcastic nihilism and near-solipsistic self-confidence throughout. In trying to summon the rage of a Richard Wright and the stylistic prowess of a Hunter S. Thompson, Strausbaugh winds up sounding more like a congressman from Connecticut, feigning rage at AIG executives between iced coffees – utterly unconvincing but cathartically familiar at the same time.

Beer and Loathing is the book all the smart kids think they could write about their spring break shenanigans, and Strausbaugh is a twisted sort of Everyman, an overly-pretentious narrator you can’t help hating because he sounds like your own most ambitiously cynical blog entries. Granted, there’s some pithiness floating about in this sea of pettiness – “What happens in Panama City, stays in Panasonic SD cards” – but Strausbaugh’s writing mostly amounts to the ultimate elevation of style over substance.

Does he wind up sounding like a groundbreaking Gonzo journalist? Well, yes, he certainly does sound like one from Beer and Loathing’s clearly allusive title to its stream-of-consciousness comma splices. What’s lacking is the sense that this superficial similarity matters, that Beer and Loathing is any more than a freshman composition instructor’s last-chance paean to the literary idol of his drink- and drug-filled undergraduate days. What’s lacking is the sense that we, Strausbaugh’s readers, couldn’t have done just as well ourselves.

So how did I come into possession of a copy of Beer and Loathing in Panama City? The answer is rather illuminating, as it sheds some light on both the book’s quality and the larger systems that produced it.

Long ago, editors like Max Perkins steered great authors like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe through the writing process, making sure that their products were truly worthy of publication. Over time, as printing got cheaper and good editors got more expensive, this approach began to fall by the wayside. Any book that seemed likely to capture an “audience” could be printed quickly and abandoned even faster if its promise didn’t pan out.

Online self-publishing takes this niche-writing to the extreme, allowing writers to directly target near-microscopic audiences without the large expenses incurred in traditional self-publishing.

Thanks to Web sites like Lulu and BookSurge (which publishes on-demand copies of Beer and Loathing), the best and worst of literature are both more available than ever before.

From sub-genre-specific treatises such as Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle to universally-accessible works like Office Slave: Books I and II to the extremely long-titled How to Get ANY MAN to Do ANYTHING You Want! How to Find the Ones You REALLY Want. How to GET Them. How to Get Them to Buy You Stuff!!, the magical world of online self-publishing means that just about anyone can read or write just about anything at just about any time.

Granted, not every self-publisher is a Tom Paine-in-waiting. For every Common Sense, you’ve got, say, 80,000 Beer and Loathings.

OK, so the Paine comparison may have been a little unfair. At the same time, however, the people who do seem to be reading these books also seem to be liking them: the Office Slave books averaged a 3.5 out of 5 star rating at BookSurge (with eight ratings total), while Beer and Loathing comes in at an alarming 4.5 stars (with seven ratings).

So, exactly what is the point of all this? I’m not sure. Online self-publishing could be (as its proponents claim) the next big thing or just another manifestation of an old tradition known for catering to extremists, unappreciated masters and utterly-forgettable amateurs. Again, I’m not sure – but after reading Beer and Loathing, I’m inclined to go with the latter.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: Read any good drinks lately?

A good book, like a good meal, is a multisensory experience. For instance, one cannot devour Thomas Mann with the eyes alone, but should take him with a good dose of Richard Strauss. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, pairs best with the likes of John Cage, Dashiell Hammett with Gershwin.

Music, however, can only set the mood at best – more than sound is necessary to truly bring a book alive. Of course, good writing helps, and one might almost call it a prerequisite, but even the tawdriest of prose can jump off the page with the help of the right drink.

As a literary critic, I take chances with my reading material. I have to if I want to fill this column on a semi-regular basis. Great literature doesn’t just pop up in bookstores every two weeks or so. Now and then, I get hold of a book so bad that it’s simply stunning (Jock Young’s Epsilon Zeta comes to mind. It read like a 12-year-old’s wet dream), but that is rare enough.

Much more typical is the case of Brian Hayes’ Group Theory in the Bedroom, a deceptively titled book of essays about complicated math. After muddling my way through the first of these, I asked a friend majoring in math and economics to skim a chapter or two, worried that Hayes’ writing would be accessible only to those for whom advanced math was an everyday activity. I was wrong; even he had no idea what was going on.

Disheartened, I turned to drink. Drunk, I turned back to Hayes’ essays – and got them.

I won’t say that I could replicate his math. I won’t even say that I attempted to puzzle out his equations. What I got were the bigger ideas he was trying to communicate, the actual intention behind what had previously seemed only opaque exercises in mathematical esoterica. And I couldn’t have done so without Gordon’s gin.

But that’s a rather gauche and unprofessional story. The average readers need not imbibe themselves into literary comprehension, always having the option of simply setting a book down – for good, if need be.

Of what use, then, is this column? The answer depends on how seriously you’re willing to take what might seem like an astonishingly pretentious suggestion: that you begin pairing your literature and your liquor – treat a fine book like a fine meal, and select an accompanying drink accordingly. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you wait to start reading until you’re already three sheets to the wind. I’m merely advocating the responsible co-selection of reading and drinking material.

A crisp mojito might bring added life to Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (a good tempranillo will pair better with Death in the Afternoon, a cheap sangria with The Sun Also Rises). Bourbon adds flavor to William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and all the best tragedians of the postbellum South. You can’t beat a cream sherry when reading Dickens, while Stevenson’s sea stories go down easy with rum. The great Irish modernists remain a question all their own – does Joyce pair better with a stout or an Irish whiskey? (Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, I can state from personal experience, is the sort of romp that works well with the former.) And I simply won’t go into the bizarre and eldritch concoctions Hunter S. Thompson’s best work calls for.

There’s no exact science to this, of course, and nobody’s going to fault you for mixing Sartre with Schlitz anymore than they’d criticize your combining Shakespeare with Schoenberg. Snobs, of course, may scoff at your taste, but they’d mock that merlot whatever you were reading. The point isn’t to impress anybody – the point’s to enjoy yourself and to add a new dimension to your favorite literature while you’re at it.

But really – Schlitz?

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: Books you can’t afford not to read

Under normal circumstances, at least half the point of book reviews is that they’re timely. Once a book’s been out for a couple years, you can usually assume that it will already have flourished or failed on its own merits.

However, under particularly abnormal circumstances – and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that we’re living through anything but particularly abnormal circumstances right now – it seems that a departure from conventional wisdom can be easily justified.

For one thing, new books are expensive, and you can hardly be expected to go out and drop $28 for a hot-off-the-presses hardcover in the current economic climate. On top of that, recession jokes are the humor du jour, and I could hardly pass up my crack at them.

More important than that is given the state of our national economy, there are certain books that you simply can’t afford not to read. That three of those books happen to be a collective 150-plus years old is no argument, in my mind, against their importance. If anything, their longevity is a testament to that importance.

The fact of the matter is, after all, that recessions are nothing new. Our country has been through this territory before and so have plenty of others. We’ve strayed so far into this territory that such great numbers may be cause for alarm – but not necessarily for surprise.

Nor should it be cause for disregarding advice from the past – specifically, advice from economist John Maynard Keynes, universally-acclaimed as the smartest man in the universe (except by those who happen to declaim him as the most dangerously idiotic man in the universe). Regardless of which side of the Keynesian debate you fall on, there’s a lot to be said for familiarizing yourself with his theories.

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes interpreted economic variations as being products of “aggregate demand” (sound familiar?) and argued for activist government intervention, particularly in times of crisis (again, sound familiar?), in order to promote demand.

Although Keynes’ book was initially published in 1936, his influence continues to be felt in contemporary economics and politics. In fact, a contemporary Keynesian took home last year’s Nobel Prize in economics – Paul Krugman, a regular New York Times contributor and the author of 1999’s The Return of Depression Economics.

A decade ago, Krugman theorized that a world economic structure largely dominated by supply-side economics lacked long-term viability and would soon lead to prolonged, painful economic collapses. His conservative critics laughed, cited Alan Greenspan and continued to tout the greatness of mortgage-backed securities. Guess what? Krugman was right, and with last year’s release of The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, he’s likely to be one of the few people to benefit from this recession.

Of course, no matter if you read Keynes or Krugman, John Boehner probably won’t read either – and as a result, we may be in this for the long haul. That’s why I’ve got a third recommendation for your reading list: Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson’s classic Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps.

First published during the Nazi bombardment of England during World War II, the book advised the British of the little things they could do to make everything go a bit further. In response to popular demand, Penguin Group has chosen to reissue the book in (you guessed it) a budget edition, suggesting that you can keep a steady supply of eggs and meat on hand, even in the worst of times.

Of course, the best part is that all this reading comes out to less than 800 pages. Tell that to your conservative friends as they try to slog their way through The Wealth of Nations, clocking in at a hefty 1,200 or so. The upshot, of course, is that you’ll have more time to futilely mail out all those résumés – and plenty to read while waiting in the unemployment line.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: In Tokyo, adrift

The most efficient way to learn Japanese, it seemed,” begins Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée, “would be to teach French.”

It is an interesting proposition with which to begin a novel: not quite counter-intuitive, but just enough to draw you in – and keep you – so for the next 150 pages of this brief but stimulating book.

Tokyo Fiancée is either a love story about language or a language story about love. It is a story that takes place in the French and Japanese languages as much as it does in Tokyo and the surrounding environs. In fact, it is perhaps more set on the landscape of those languages than on the physical landscape of Japan on which Nothomb’s characters live and love.

Like much of Nothomb’s work, Tokyo Fiancée is somewhat autobiographical (for those familiar with her work, the events related in Tokyo Fiancée take place at much the same time as those described in Fear and Trembling). Born in Japan to Belgian diplomats, Nothomb spent significant time in other parts of the world before returning to Japan. It is at this point in her life that the story of Tokyo Fiancée begins.

A foreign language tutor for well-to-do Japanese students, Amélie finds herself suddenly swept into an affair with Rinri, one of her students and the eminently-likeable male protagonist of the novel. As their relationship progresses, Amélie reflects on the sort of things one might expect in a Belgian-Japanese love story: cultural differences, parental disapproval and her love for all (or most) things Japanese.
These conventional reflections, however, make up only a small part of Tokyo Fiancée’s meaning and import. Of far greater interest to the discerning reader will be Amélie’s oh-so-French ruminations on the nature of love.

“Love is such a very French élan,” she muses at one point. “That there are some who view it as a national invention. While I would not go that far, I do acknowledge that there is a genius for love in the language.”

It is this French “genius for love” that simultaneously makes and breaks Tokyo Fiancée. The French language plays such a tremendous role in the novel that one cannot avoid the feeling that something rather vital has been lost in translation. This is not to say Alison Anderson, the book’s translator, bungled the job. It is simply an admittance that, as Nothomb herself writes, “the worst accidents in life are accidents of language.”

That Tokyo Fiancée underwent incredible changes in its translation (the original French title was Ni d’Ève, ni d’Adam – roughly, Neither of Eve, Nor of Adam) is just as undeniable as it was unavoidable, for in no two languages can any story be told the same way. The English version is different, no doubt ­– but that is a far cry from saying that it is not worth the time and effort of reading.

If you are able to read French, then read Ni d’Ève, ni d’Adam – you’ll be far more likely to experience the story as Nothomb must have intended it and probably even more likely to catch the subtleties that are inevitably lost in translation. If you are unable to read French but are even the least bit interested in love, language or Japan, a quick read through Tokyo Fiancée can only further stimulate that interest.

In one of her reflections on the nature of love, Amélie states emphatically, “no dish is sublime unless it contains a touch of vinegar.” Tokyo Fiancée is no exception: a sublime yet extremely readable and enjoyable novel, for all its flaws.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: A tall ‘upstate’ tale for the 21st century

Some places, it seems, just make better stories.

The London of Oliver Twist, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula comes to mind, as does the Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer and Easy Rawlins. Yet no poorer in literary pedigree—although perhaps a bit less likely to spring immediately to mind—is upstate New York, home to Ichabod Crane, Leatherstocking and now Truly Plaice, the massive narrator and heroine of Tiffany Baker’s The Little Giant of Aberdeen County.

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County features a decade-spanning storyline of a scale on par with its gigantic protagonist. Think Forrest Gump meets a Dove commercial gone awry, with a touch of both The X-Files and Brokeback Mountain added for good measure. On the most basic level, though, is the story of Truly’s struggle for acceptance as someone different in a small town where most folks are all the same.

“I was a lot of things,” Truly reminisces early in the book. “Bigger than most boys. Stronger, too. But that didn’t matter if you were a girl. All anybody ever saw about me, I thought, were the parts that were missing.”

It’s those missing parts (“lovely clothes, and proper manners and tidy hair”) that Truly’s sister, Aberdeen beauty queen Serena Jane, has in spades. And it’s those parts that drive the sisters apart after their parents’ death, a schism reconciled only after Serena Jane’s mysterious disappearance following the birth of her first child, Bobby.

Bobby’s birth and upbringing are the catalysts that drive The Little Giant toward its climax, as the good-hearted Truly struggles with Bobby’s sinister father, town doctor Robert Morgan, for the young boy’s soul. It is a struggle that exacts a deadly toll on both sides and reveals the book for what it truly is: a surprisingly rollicking meditation on the nature of life and death in the tradition of America’s greatest tall tales.

Through it all, the town of Aberdeen remains a dominant presence in the book, a character as much as it is a geographic locale. In that way—and in others—Baker seems to channel the same spirit that invigorated another, recent upstate New York novel: Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton, a runaway critical success last winter. Baker’s Little Giant seems poised to meet a similar fate, already receiving a number of strong reviews from critics nationwide.

In creating the larger-than-life character of Truly, Baker presented herself with a challenge few debut novelists would be able to meet. Writing a “realistic” novel is hard for even the most experienced of authors; doing so through the voice of a patently unrealistic character seems nigh impossible.

Somehow, however, Baker manages to do just that: to create lovable-but-flawed characters who really feel real, despite the tall-tale nature of the events that surround them.

Like the best of all folk stories, this one has its morals and lessons, the discovery of which is as much of a reward as any reader could need. For those seeking non-stop action or a rocket-paced plot, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County would not be the best choice. For those interested in getting to know the work of a promising writer and storyteller at the beginning of her career, however, it certainly would.

And for those to whom an unlikely tall tale featuring a rag-tag band of small-town misfits just sounds like fun—well, you won’t be disappointed.

“Me, I’ve never been a big reader,” Truly explains. “I figure that if a secret has an answer, it’ll out on its own if it’s meant to.”

Let us all hope that Baker’s talents are one of those secrets—for they are surely too great not to be shared among us all.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: ‘Tinkers’ astounds but doesn’t fulfill

Reviewing a book that’s truly great is no trouble at all, and it’s an even simpler matter to write up one that’s absolutely terrible. The books that fall somewhere in between, those that aren’t quite ready for the canon but are by no means awful—it’s those that often prove difficult.

Keep the name of Paul Harding in mind; file it away on some mental bookshelf to be dusted off in 10 or 20 years, and you’ll have a great writer on your hands. Right now, however, all you’ll have is Tinkers—a rather unsteady prose-poem masquerading as a novel, an exercise in poetic description of the highest order bogged down in a plot half-stolen from Nicholas Sparks.

Tinkers isn’t a bad novel by any means. It’s fabulously written, occasionally moving and can be read in a single (albeit long) sitting, leaving the reader feeling almost as if they’ve read something great—but only almost. What Tinkers is, in short, is a promising debut novel that reads like a promising debut novel. It is no more than that but also no less.

Plot, in this case, is almost irrelevant. Of what importance is “plot” to writing that verges on expressionist poetry? The plot of Tinkers is the stage from which Harding’s prose can astound the reader, the canvas on which he can paint the word-pictures that are far more moving than the rather mundane plot devices he employs.

But a plot, unfortunately, Tinkers does have. George Washington Crosby is dying. As life slowly ebbs away, he begins to hallucinate—with increasing clarity, for those of you who might get bogged down in the first few pages’ near-unintelligibility. George’s life story mingles with that of his father, Howard Crosby, and for a few pages inexplicably with that of Howard’s father. Narration, style and point of view shift continuously, as the stories converge and diverge repeatedly, before eventually (and predictably) meeting once and for all in the book’s final pages.

It is not much of a plot, no, but it is enough of a skeleton upon which Harding can hang his beautiful words, his masterful descriptions, his page-long sentences:

“Wind swept over the plains,” Harding wries, being brief. “We never saw the caribou or the revolution. We were a burning fuse. We barely caught a glimpse of the darkening world below us before we burned away to nothing.”

It is prose, and good prose, but just barely. Break it into stanzas, fiddle with the alignment and you’re left with what would probably be one of the more touching entries in an anthology of contemporary poetry.

That said, contemporary poetry, good or bad, isn’t quite the stuff great novels are made of. You can write a good novel without much of a plot, and you can write a good novel without fantastically developed characters, and you can write a good novel without the florid verbiage employed so artfully by Harding. Until you’ve got a firm grasp on at least two of those factors, however, literary greatness will be a long time coming.

I would hardly advise Harding to abandon the novel form. He may one day write the grand, Faulknerian story that Tinkers aspires to be. That he has not yet done so is no cause for shame—and that he has proven able to toss off nearly 200 pages of beautiful language in trying is most certainly reason for hope.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Book Worm: A trip through history

I live around the corner from Henry George’s house – he’s the economist whose ideas inspired the creation of Monopoly – and just a few short blocks from Joseph Bonaparte’s – the elder brother of the Emperor Napoleon and a deposed king in his own right.

Every day, on my way home from school, I linger just a bit in front of the PSFS Building – the first skyscraper in the “International Style” to be erected in the United States – and Ricketts’ Circus – the site of the first complete circus performance held on American soil.

Whenever I visit my friend’s house on Bainbridge Street, I walk past the homes of jazz singer Billie Holiday and William Whipper, a lumber baron and founder of the American Moral Reform Society. I buy my produce at the Ninth Street Curb Market – one of several to emerge in response to food shortages of the World War I era – a trip that often takes me past the grade school attended by Joe Venuti, the “Father of Jazz Violin.”

No one will deny that Philadelphia possesses a rich and varied history, and thanks to the efforts of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, nobody can deny it possesses a lot more of it than you’d ever guess.

Without the iconic, blue Pennsylvania State historical markers erected by the PHMC, who but the most inquisitive of history buffs would realize the nation’s first Girl Scout cookies were sold at 1401 Arch St. or that Mother’s Day was founded by Philadelphian Anna Jarvis? Were it not for the commission’s diligent efforts at preservation, who would there be to keep alive the public memory of Lehigh Avenue’s sporting heritage, or W.C. Fields’ tenure as a Strawbridge’s employee?

The PHMC’s markers have always fascinated me, and I approach the knowledge they impart with a reverence most would reserve only for the most sacred of religious texts. The moment a blue plaque catches my eye, I cannot but stop to scan its text and in doing so enrich my understanding of the character of whatever place I find myself in.

Nor are these plaques, of course, limited solely to the streets and parks of Philadelphia. In fact, my earliest memory of a Pennsylvania State historical marker is one that commemorates the two years great songwriter Stephen Foster – he of “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” (itself commemorated by two PHMC markers) – spent living in my grandmother’s hometown of Towanda, Pa.

In fact, it amazes me that these blue markers have not become the object of countless college-student pilgrimages, that cars packed with reckless, young undergrads do not stream forth from Philadelphia to stand in awe of the marker for Bristol, an early river port, the first Bucks County Seat and the site of an astounding three markers officially listed as “missing” by the PHMC (unless, of course, a more surreptitious stream is actually to blame for the previous disappearances).

Philadelphia alone houses around 230 markers. Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties boost that number to upwards of 480, and the addition of Berks, Lancaster, Lehigh and Northampton counties yields approximately 730 officially-recognized sites, with Pennsylvania as a whole containing more than 2,000.

Planning a themed pilgrimage – or simply a tour – of officially-recognized sites has never been easier, thanks to the “Stories from PA History” (complete with a list of markers corresponding to each story’s theme) provided by ExplorePAHistory.com, a joint venture of the PHMC and several other state and nonprofit organizations. From William Penn and the Underground Railroad to jazz and baseball, these prepared lists are more than adequate for planning your first pilgrimage.

More advanced planners, however, might instead opt to use the search function provided on the PHMC’s Web site. I did and managed to plot out the George Washington themed tour you’ll find in this column’s sidebar.

As for me, I’ll continue slowing down every time I walk past Edgar Allen Poe’s house on Spring Garden Street, or Siegmund Lubin’s on North 15th Street, and nod my hellos to George every time I run to Superfresh.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

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