The alien and familiar world of Kerouac

This is the third book by Kerouac I have read, and without fail, they all have an unusual raw emotional gravity about them. This book is short burst of linguistic invention--supposedly written in only three days, and it reads as such. It weighs in at a little over 100 pages, but is full of love, disgust, drunkenness, excitment, and the peculiar next-day regret hangover. It does not match either On the Road or The Town and the City in terms of overall narrative power, but is a strangely compelling book after you adjust to Kerouac's fevered prose style. The Subterraneans is sometimes difficult to read--Kerouac can go for pages without paragraph or punctuation--but does become more manageable as the book nears conclusion.

There is some weakness in the portrayal of the supporting characters, and the novel is much more interested in painting vivid word-pictures that give the reader a sort of strobe-light impression of events than it is in any kind of serious character study. But if you are a Keraouc fan, you know what you are getting into here. And while I did find myself on the fence about whether I actually enjoyed the book as I worked through it, the ending was strong enough to pull over into the plus column. As a final note, it is humorous to take a look at the Kerouac reviews on Amazon and notice how the reviewers tend to take on Kerouac's writing style to a degree as they review his books--an amusing feature which I am afraid that I have succumbed to as well.

Lesser Known Dostoevsky

Who knew how many minor works Fyodor Dostoevsky has produced? I recently finished The Village of Stepanchikovo, also sometimes translated as The Friend of the Family. This is a short attempt at a comic novel that meets with middling success. The plot revolves around a rural household in thrall to a domineering pseudo-intellectual named Foma Fomich. Foma, though basically just a hanger-on, manipulates the entire family, including the uncle that is supposed to be in charge, into revering and bowing down to him. The plot turns on the arrival of a newphew to the estate who challenges Foma's supremacy.

Stepanchikovo is not a difficult read and I thought it was enjoyable, though not something that would be considered a classic. Dostoevsky is still finding his footing here, and though the novel is occasionally funny, it did not keep me in stitches by any means. Only for the dedicated Dostoevsky completist.

I review another bad novel

In this case, Darkfall by Dean Koontz. I had no idea what this book was about when I started it, and declined to read the synopsis so I could have the "joy" of nosing the plot out for myself. Well, I'll spoil it for you: it's about a voodoo practitioner that opens the gates of hell a bit and lets out some weird stuff that terrorizes the family of a policeman that is trying to catch said voodoo practitioner for his connection to some murders. Now, this sounds like exactly that kind of thing that I might get some guilty pleasure out of, but as is so often the case, Koontz is such a bad writer and inept at characterization and dialogue that I couldn't squeeze any enjoyment whatsoever out of the experience. The characterization of the bad guy in is awesomely stupid. That Koontz remains a bestselling author through decades of poor quality work is astounding.

Early Dostoevsky

Netochka Nezvanova translated means something along the lines of "nameless nobody". So you have some idea how cheerful this novel is--though what else would you really expect from Dostoevsky? Calling it a novel is not really correct either--it was supposed to be the beginning of a novel, but Dostoevsky never returned to it after being rudely interupted by his imprisonment in Siberia for political activism.

I won't really get into it, since it is just a fraction of a work. I'm glad it's been preserved, but I don't think anyone rates it among Dostoevsky's great achievements. Not a bad read, though somewhat melodramatic. Not really worth digging into, though, unless you are a Dostoevsky scholar, or have some kind of pathological need to to read all of an author's works.

World War Z

I have fretted long and hard about what my choice for book club would be, when that time finally came. I wanted both to pick a piece of literature that would be surprising and that most others in the club would not have considered reading, but I also wanted it to be good. After all, I have spent the last few months reading the likes of The Kite Runner and Water for Elephants. If I can put up with that kind of sissy-pants literature (I am of course, joking. Partially.) then I wanted to make others endure something they would not normally consider. So I cast around for a while, and eventually landed on this little book. The deal was sealed when, in a strange coincidence, the day I started to read this book, the author turned out to be reading in town. So I went to hear him, and decided this book was fate. He signed my copy and added "survive book club".

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a hell of a fun book. Though not without moments of humor, it takes itself completely seriously. It is laid out as other "oral histories" are, with short, "man on the street" style interviews, as well as interviews with those that experienced certain unique aspects of the war. Humans have, at least for now, vanquished the zombie threat, though there are still zombies out there and no one knows if the plague might start again. Through the eyes of the participants we see the earliest outbreaks, the chaos of the Great Panic, fighting the hordes to a stalemate, the tide slowly turn, and finally the re-emergence of humanity. WWZ is full of intimate detail, some touching or inspiring; some brutal, remorseful, or bittersweet. There is a fair share of blood and guts--this is a horror novel, after all--but many of the snapshots are unexpectedly poignant.

Really though, the zombies in the story are only a stand in, a way to pique the interest of readers. It could be any kind of worldwide emergency, particularly disease, such as Avian Flu. The bulk of the story is showing lack of government planning and bureaucratic missteps. And it's impossible not to read and think of the inadquate disaster response to Katrina in the U.S., and other large scale catastrophes around the world. Also on this wavelength, there are some fairly clear allusions to modern political figures and to the war in Iraq. However, the novel is truly global in scope, and we spend time in a variety of countries besides the U.S. I was especially intrigued at the way the zombie war boosted the prestige of eastern nations, and helped to tip the balance of geopolitical power toward China and India, much like a major worldwide disaster might really do.

Criticisms I expect to have to deal with at book club: there are 40 or 50 different "voices" or characters in this book, most of them only getting a few pages to speak. As such, some voices will obviously be stronger than others. Also, we do not build up large amounts of attachment to a single character over the course of the book. I think Brooks did a great deal of research on what type of weapons the military might use to combat a zombie plague, and he spends quite a few pages detailing various sorts of tactics and specific weapons that could be used. To some degree, I lost interest in this topic. I felt that since he did the research, he felt like he had to use some of it, but honestly, I wasn't too in to learning about exactly how weapons systems work. Less would have been more. As someone who works in politics, as does most of my book club, some of the interviews with political figures were a little heavy handed.

One particular section I wanted to praise was the writing about zombies in the water. This was a very effective image for me and will have me thinking twice next time I'm swimming in a body of water after dark. And, of course, as with any story about zombies, during certain moments you have to ask yourself who the real monsters are. The zombies, grotesque as they are, have no choice in their actions. It is the humans that stab each other in the back and become their own worst enemies, willing to do anything to fellow survivors in order to gain their own advantage. Even in the last pages, as some survivors talk about the way the crisis brought people together, I had to wonder if they were already starting to gloss over the worst moments with familiar cliches. Do these sorts of crisis bring people together, or is that only the story we tell ourselves when it's all over, when we've done what we must to survive?

WWZ is a fast and interesting read. Obviously I think highly enough of it that I chose it to make my coworkers read. If you happen to be an interp coach reading this, you might seriously think about getting a copy; I think some very cool pieces could be cut from it, and I guarantee you'll be the only school in your area doing them.