Only enough time for the simplest of sob stories
 |
| Upton Sinclair |
I am not a habitual reader of plays, but I do like to read the dramatic works of my favorite authors, even when they’re not renowned as great playwrights. The Second-Story Man, a one-act play by Upton Sinclair, was published in his 1911 book Plays of Protests, along with The Machine, The Naturewoman, and Prince Hagen. Of these four dramas, The Second-Story Man is by far the briefest, amounting to only about 20 minutes of stage time. Nothing that occurs during that 20 minutes will make you forget that Sinclair is first and foremost a novelist.
The phrase “second-story man” is a slang term for a burglar, as in someone who enters through a second-story window. In this case, the thief is Jim Faraday, “a roughly dressed young fellow with a patch over one eye.” In the midst of a job he encounters the married couple he is in the very process of robbing. When caught in the act, Faraday explains that he has been driven to a life of crime by poverty. The play consists almost entirely of his story, with a little bit of room left at the end for a reaction before the curtain falls. The story that Faraday relates is similar to the labor David versus capitalist Goliath theme that appears in other Sinclair works such as The Jungle, Samuel the Seeker, and Mountain City. In his novels, Sinclair is able to flesh out his stories with graphic detail and intelligent insight, which at times results in a great masterpiece of socially conscious literature. Here, however, the workers’ plight is reduced to only the barest, most simplistic narrative, resulting in a rather generic and forgettable sob story. With a broad brush, Sinclair paints Faraday’s capitalist persecutors as murderous and thieving monsters, then unrealistically asks them to feel remorse. Whatever the reason for the play’s skimpy runtime, it only allows for all but the most cursory and didactic treatment of the complex social issues in question.
Though The Second-Story Man may not have a great deal of literary merit, like all of Sinclair’s work, it does have historical and cultural value for what it tells us about the Socialist movement in America during the early 20th century. One might imagine this play being performed at a workers’ meeting in a rented hall full of folding chairs, sandwiched between the potluck dinner and the party business meeting. The one-act play is an odd format that seems to predestine dramatic works to obscurity. It’s unlikely any high school forensics team will be blowing the dust off this one anytime soon. Unlike many famous novelists (Jack London comes to mind), Sinclair is not a terrible playwright, but drama certainly isn’t his strong suit.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3U0YIEXV70IVT/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Lewis and Clark was a walk in the park by comparison
The Astoria Expedition of 1810 to 1813 established the first permanent (non-Native) American settlement on the Pacific Coast. The expedition was financed by wealthy New Yorker John Jacob Astor, who dreamed of monopolizing the Western fur trade and raking in billions doing business with the Chinese. Astor planned a two-pronged attack on the West Coast, with separate parties traveling by land and sea to rendezvous at the mouth of the Columbia River. Following closely on the heels of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Astoria Expedition was every bit as epic an adventure as that earlier journey. Besides a lot of historical markers on the side of Western highways, however, the story of the Astorian pioneers, while once familiar to the American public, has since faded into relative obscurity compared to the legendary status of Lewis and Clark. With his 2014 book Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire, author Peter Stark aims to resurrect this important story from American history and restore it to the prominence it deserves.
In many ways, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, however arduous, was an example of a trip where almost everything went right. There was only one fatality, from illness. Conflict with the Indians was minimal. They never drifted terribly far off course. The Astoria Expedition, on the other hand, is an example where just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong, for both the sea-faring party and the cross-country trekkers. Internal conflict, an ambiguous chain of command, poor decision-making or a lack thereof, faulty wilderness survival skills, undiplomatic relations with the Native population, the outbreak of the War of 1812, and more all added up to a mission impossible with a high body count. Although Lewis and Clark’s crew suffered from hunger and privation, their troubles pale in comparison to the perils encountered by the Astorians. Stark does a good job of bringing these hardships to vivid reality, but he’s always a little too ready to shift focus back to Astor in his cozy Manhattan brownstone and praise the fur baron’s vision of global domination. Stark strikes a pretty good balance between happenings on the East and West coasts, but I would have preferred a little more of the microhistory of the travelers and their survival tales, and a little less of the relentless affirmation of Astor’s importance as a pioneer of globalization.
Though several members of the Astorian land and sea parties kept diaries of the journey, there seems to be a lot less information available on this expedition than that of Lewis and Clark. Stark is forced to skip over periods of time or to resort to filling in blank spots with speculation. All historians do this to some extent, but one wishes there were a greater pool of primary source material from which to draw. Documentation was one of the primary missions of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, as it had specific scientific, geographic, and diplomatic mandates to fulfill. The Astoria Expedition, on the other hand, was largely a commercial venture, and its members were primarily focused not on exploration or diplomacy but simply on the getting there. In terms of an adventure story, the Astoria trip may be the grittier and more treacherous quest, but it lacks some of the epic grandeur and Enlightenment spirit of its predecessor.
Stark’s book is an illuminating reinvestigation and compelling retelling of this important episode in America history. It’s also just a great wilderness adventure story. Anyone interested in Western expansion or the early exploration of the American continent will certainly find it an enjoyable read.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2HSGK26JLHGLV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
From dinner guest to sacrificial lamb
Cousin Pons, originally published in 1847, is one of Honoré de Balzac’s last novels. Within his body of work known as the Comédie Humaine, Cousins Pons is the second half of a two-novel miniseries known as Poor Relations (Les Parents pauvres), the first book being Cousin Bette. Although the two books are thematically linked, they feature different characters and are not sequentially related. Cousin Pons is often hailed as one of Balzac’s greatest works. It’s definitely a skillfully crafted novel of great literary quality, but among the author’s prolific output of books I would not count it among my personal favorites.
Sylvain Pons is a musician who makes his living conducting an orchestra in a Paris theatre. He has two great passions in life, the first of which is gluttony. With a gourmand’s appreciation for fine food, he refuses to eat at home, instead making regular weekly rounds as a perpetual dinner guest in the homes of distant relations, however tenuously connected their bloodlines may be. When Pons inadvertently offends one of these relations, he becomes persona non grata among all branches of the family. His wealthier relations will no longer tolerate the freeloading visits of this poor relation.
But how poor is Cousin Pons, really?—a question that brings us to his second love: collecting paintings, knickknacks, and objets d’art. Pons has the ability to recognize masterpieces of great value and acquire them for bargain prices. When rumor of the market value of his collection gets out, everyone sets about trying to rob Pons of his priceless possessions, not by burglary but through legal maneuvering. Pons has only one true friend, Wilhelm Schmucke, a fellow musician. Together the two struggle against the rapacious vultures attempting to abscond with Pons’s fortune.
The novel has a very comical beginning, but it becomes darker and more depressing as a host of despicable characters set about preying upon these two friends. It eventually becomes a catalog of all the various means of fraud, corruption, and legal loopholes by which a dying man can be robbed of his legacy. One has to admire the intricate web of deceit Balzac spins between an ensemble cast of swindlers all angling to serve their personal interests, but at the same time it grows very tedious. Balzac loves to write in legalese. He truly revels in any opportunity to work contract law, estate law, or finance law into a story. He catalogs the exchange of each and every franc as if he were providing blow-by-blow commentary on a round of The Game of Life. While Balzac may be a genius at creating memorable characters, smart dialogue, and vivid scenes of great emotional power, you really need to ask yourself whether you want to wade through a novel that’s primarily about the myriad ways a will can be circumvented.
Amid this dreary subject matter, the one shining light is the unbreakable bond of friendship between Pons and Schmucke, who share a modern Damon and Pythias relationship that rises above all material concerns. The platonic love between these two eccentric bachelors is the saving grace that imbues what could have been a mean-spirited melodrama with an inspirational sense of humanity. As previously stated, this isn’t one of my favorite Balzac books, but it’s still a notable literary achievement with powerful moral lessons to impart.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3K7DMT4LXRBPE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
The good, the bad, and the offensive
The Pulp Fiction Megapack, published in 2013 by Wildside Press, is an ebook collection of short stories and novellas gleaned from the pages of vintage pulp magazines like Mystery Tales, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, and Action Novels. The original publication dates of the 25 selections in the book range from 1919 to 1947. I consider myself a casual pulp fiction enthusiast and have enjoyed several of Wildside’s megapacks, including The Adventure Megapack, The Mummy Megapack, and The Time Travel Megapacks 1, 2, and 3. Editor John Gregory Betancourt explains that the two criteria uniting the stories in this volume are their bizarre, sensationalist titles and their lack of political correctness. The former requirement has definitely been met by titles like “Death Mates for the Lust-Lost,” “When Super Apes Plot,” and “Satan Drives the Bus.”
As for political incorrectness, I was prepared for the usual racial stereotypes and misogyny one finds in early 20th-century American popular fiction. There isn’t much of the former, thankfully, but in the latter category I got way more than I bargained for. Some of these stories go far beyond mere male chauvinism. The absolute rock bottom is Russell Gray’s “Fiances for the Devil’s Daughter.” Though it delivers a clever variation on the familiar “The Most Dangerous Game” plot scenario, this story is basically a piece of torture porn, with scenes of violence against women that would be at home in one of Eli Roth’s Hostel films. Though by far the worst, it isn’t the only offender in this area. Some of the stories make you feel sick just thinking some creepy dude from your grandparents’ generation must have been turned on by this stuff.
Most of the stories do not inspire discomfort or embarrassment, but many make you regret wasting your time reading them. Catchy titles don’t always translate into great storytelling. Several of the stories follow the typical formula of a Scooby-Doo mystery. The inhabitants of a secluded manor are threatened by a supernatural phenomenon that turns out to be a thief in disguise, when it really would have made a better story if the monsters turned out to be real. Another oft-repeated set-up is that of the car breaking down in the woods. The driver has to walk for miles through swamp or forest before arriving at a secluded old house where he discovers the nefarious plans of a murderous psycho or mad scientist. These aren’t all bad, one of the best being “Black Pool for Hell Maidens” by Hal K. Wells, in which a villainous biologist turns men into crayfish.
There is some wheat to be found among the chaff, particularly towards the end of the volume. “The Ray of Madness” by Captain S. P. Meek is a good proto-CSI-style scientific detective story. “The Terrible Tentacles of L-472” is a mystery-in-space science fiction tale featuring the Space Patrol, a sort of precursor to Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets. David R. Sparks’s novel “The Ape-Men of Xlotli,” the longest entry in the book, is a pretty good knockoff of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s lost world novels. To cap things off, Hugh B. Cave, one of the few names I recognized in the table of contents, delivers a solid horror story with “The Corpse on the Grating.”
I’m a fan of Wildside Press, and I’m thankful for their efforts to revive pulp fiction, but this is the worst of their Megapacks that I’ve read. For the most part, the quality of the stories is not that good, and though I’m not a reader who’s easily offended, a few of these stories left even me feeling uncomfortable. Pulp fiction fans would do better to select one of the many other Megapacks from Wildside’s extensive catalog.
The Kindle file has a lot of typographical errors; not enough to hinder understanding, but enough to annoy. One of the shortest stories was pasted twice, so it appears duplicated in its entirety. The copy I downloaded even had the wrong cover image. Wildside publishes good stuff, but they should pay more attention to quality control.
Stories in this collection
(Some novella-length works have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)
Blood for the Vampire Dead by Robert Leslie Bellem
Mistress of Snarling Death by Paul Chadwick
Fiances for the Devil’s Daughter by Russell Gray
The Shrieking Pool by G. T. Fleming-Roberts
Death Mates for the Lust-Lost by Hugh J. Gallagher
The Dogs of Purgatory by Hugh Pendexter
When Manhattan Sank by George S. Brooks
Bride of the Ape by Harold Ward
Blood-Bait for Hungry Mermaids by John Wallace
Ship of the Golden Ghoul by Lazar Levi
Black Pool for Hell Maidens by Hal K. Wells
Death Flight by Robert Wallace
The Scalpel of Doom by Ray Cummings
Satan Drives the Bus by Wyatt Blassingame
Servant of the Beast by L. Patrick Greene
The Dead Book by Howard Hersey
When Super-Apes Plot by Anthony Wilder
The Yellow Curse by Lars Anderson
The Brain of Many Bodies by E. A. Grosser
Tong Torture by Emil C. Tepperman
The Ray of Madness by Captain S. P. Meek
The Terrible Tentacles of L-472 by Sewell Peaslee Wright
The Ape-Men of Xlotli by David R. Sparks
The Floating Island of Madness by Jason Kirby
The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B. Cave
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R14QF2Y6C4X5CW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Into the lost world of Quetzalcoatl
The Ape-Men of Xlotli, a novel by David R. Sparks, was first published in the December 1930 issue of the pulp fiction magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science. I came across it in The Pulp Fiction Megapack, a collection of vintage weird adventure stories from Wildside Press. The concept and plot of this lost-world sci-fi tale appear to be heavily influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel The People That Time Forgot, and to a lesser extent by Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. However, it somehow manages to be more entertaining than either of those more intelligent books by not taking itself too seriously and opting for macho action and pulpy thrills over scientific veracity.
Kirby, an aviator from Kansas, is training pilots in the Mexican Air Force when his plane unexpectedly goes down in a remote wilderness. Fleeing from bandits, he enters a canyon into which his pursuers decline to follow. Following this canyon to its opposite end, he finds the entrance to a tunnel that leads to a forgotten underground land of strange geological wonders and bizarre flora and fauna. He also finds beautiful women—lots of them—who appear to live without male companionship, and are more than happy to see him. These women are threatened by a neighboring tribe of hideous ape-men, atavistic relics preserved from mankind’s evolutionary past. After coming to the ladies’ rescue, Kirby learns that this new friends are citizens of a lost civilization, complete with a social hierarchy, religion, and government—a government that Kirby discovers is just ripe for a coup d’état.
The ape-men are the worshippers of Xlotli, the rabbit god, while the homo sapien women pray to Quetzalcoatl, the great feathered serpent god. In keeping with the Mexican setting, Sparks gives everything a vaguely Aztec feel, though he’s not at all concerned with anthropological accuracy. He likely chose Mexico as his setting because it has an ancient history of human sacrifice, which is always a good element to throw into a pulp fiction adventure. Like the aforementioned Burroughs novel, this is basically just a fantasy land designed to put damsels in distress so the spunky American tough guy can come to their rescue with fists flying and pistols blazing.
Not surprisingly, a book entitled The Ape-Men of Xlotli is no literary masterpiece, but if you’re into this sort of vintage adventure fiction you’re likely to find this brief novel entertaining. It can be predictable and formulaic at times, but there are fun moments of suspense and action as well. You never know what you’re going to get when you dig into those old fiction magazines, but this entry fares better than most.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2KAGDNRKO8LU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Splendid isolation
Against Nature, or Against the Grain (neither English title seems to be more commonly used than the other), a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, was originally published in 1884 under the French title of À rebours. This eccentric work of literature is an intimate portrait of the life, home, and habits of Jean des Esseintes, who is essentially the only character in the book. He is the descendant of robust aristocratic ancestors who distinguished themselves in battle and business. Generations of wealthy indulgence and idleness, however, have reduced the once powerful blood line to an anemic trickle. The last remaining vessel of this noble gene pool, Jean des Esseintes is an effete, effeminate aesthete resigned to a life of self-indulgence and decadent dissipation. Decadence, as portrayed in this book, does not take the form of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (though unnamed “perverse pleasures” are briefly alluded to). Rather, des Esseintes’s personal decadence revolves around art, literature, and furnishings. Exhausted and disgusted by society, he holes up in a house in the country which he molds into a rich cultural man-cave designed to indulge his five senses. Though occasionally des Esseintes ventures forth from his fortress, mostly the book is a catalog of everything he eats, drinks, reads, and collects.
Huysmans was a disciple of the author Emile Zola, leader of the literary school of naturalism. Though this book was Huysmans’s declaration of independence from that school, venturing off into symbolist territory, the influence of his former master can still be felt. The book is loaded with beautiful descriptive passages written in the naturalist mode. When taken alone, any page in the book is a vivid linguistic treat (at least that’s true of the English translation by John Howard), but together it all adds up to a rather dull and lifeless mess. The book is more a character study than a novel. Like the opening passages of some epic drama, the setting has been richly and intricately described; it’s just waiting for a plot. Instead, Huysmans merely uses the character of des Esseintes to express his own tastes. For example, there are at least four grueling chapters about books—ancient Latin literature, later Christian literature, modern French literature, some praise for Edgar Allen Poe—that you almost need a PhD to get through. If one wants to write literary criticism, then write it. Don’t dress it up as fiction and call it a novel. Authors like Zola, Victor Hugo, or Balzac would occasionally insert an essay into a novel, as an expository interlude, but Against Nature feels like a jumble of essays unsuccessfully masquerading as a novel.
Huysmans seems to be making two points here (and I’ll admit I may be grasping at straws): First, through centuries of wealthy indulgence and slothful entitlement the nobility have long lost any former claim to greatness they may once have had. Second, the culture itself—from literature to the Catholic Church—has likewise decayed to a despicable shell of its former self. Huysmans makes these points adequately in the first and last chapters. The rest is just a series of illustrative examples that beat the dead horse. The book has the feeling of a protomodernist manifesto in which Huysmans advocates striking out in a new cultural direction and rejecting past glories, except of course for those choice few past glories that the author himself deems worthy.
This book does have its fans, but to me it came across as a boring, failed experiment. Huysmans’s prose, however, does exhibit the makings of a great naturalist writer, so I’ll probably seek out more of his novels, perhaps earlier works more in keeping with Zola’s aesthetic. Hopefully one of them has a plot.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2FQRZ3R8XWPM5/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Corruption and cover-up
Maigret and the Calame Report, published in 1954, is the 74th adventure of Inspector Jules Maigret, superintendant of Paris’s Police Judiciaire and star of the extensive detective series by Belgian author Georges Simenon. It was originally published under the French title of Maigret chez le ministre and can also be found under the name Maigret and the Minister. Simenon wrote the book during his decade-long stay in the United States.
A tragedy has occurred that has all of Paris upset. A building housing an orphanage has collapsed, killing 128 children. It is brought to light that, prior to the disaster, an engineer named Calame had written a report warning of just such an occurrence, but that report was suppressed and all known copies are missing. One late night, Maigret is called to the apartment of Auguste Point, the Minister of Public Works. Point informs Maigret that recently a man named Piquemal had delivered to him a newly discovered copy of the Calame report. However, 24 hours later, the report went missing, apparently stolen. Point realizes that if anyone were to find out that he had the report in his possession, he would be accused of hiding or destroying the document in order to protect those officials responsible for the disaster. He asks Maigret to find the thief, recover the document, and clear his name. Though reluctant to get involved in political matters, Maigret sympathizes with the minister and agrees to help him.
This intriguing setup makes for a very exciting mystery. Once hooked by the first chapter of this novel, I couldn’t put it down. Like all of Maigret’s cases, this one is brisk and brief, and I read the whole thing in a single day. Though Maigret novels are often unconventional entries in the mystery genre, this one follows a pretty standard detective novel format: description of the crime in Chapter 1, enumeration of the suspects in Chapter 2, interrogation of the suspects in Chapter 3, then a few chapters of gumshoeing until the big reveal in Chapter 8 and the epilogue in Chapter 9. The contents of these chapters, however, is anything but conventional or predictable. The book is enjoyable on three levels: First, you’ve got the detective work; next, you gain insight into Maigret’s personal character and his relationship with his wife; and lastly, there’s the added dimension of a political thriller. The fact that the crime involves members of the higher levels of government elevates the importance and urgency of the case. Maigret definitely feels the pressure, and spends much of the novel worried that he’s in way over his head. He knows his career is at stake. If Point goes down, he goes down.
This is one of the better Maigret books I’ve read, though not entirely typical of the series. I tend to say that with almost every Maigret book I review, however, so perhaps there really is no typical Maigret mystery. The author’s boundless inventiveness delivers a unique experience with each book. It’s a wonder that Simenon was able to crank out so many novels, and even more amazing that they are consistently of such high quality. Maigret and the Calame Report is a top-notch thriller and a totally engaging read.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2BLNPPWMXDX9U/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
