Pop Culture Porn for Hipsters

Most people know Chuck Klosterman for his essays. And if you don’t know the essays, you should. Because they are awesome. How can you not love someone who can perfectly explain the modern definition of a hipster on the fly, at a book reading, as “You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know." Yesssss.

So, I was very excited to learn that Klosterman has a novel (his first), called Downtown Owl. The premise is pretty basic. It follows three characters in their daily lives in the small, rural town of Owl, North Dakota – or the very epitome of flyover country – over the course of seven months in 1983. There’s Julia, a teacher from Minneapolis who is so bored that she spends every night getting drunk in order to forget that she’s a teacher living in Owl, North Dakota. There’s Mitch, a teenage boy who thinks the best thing going in his life is sleep and imagining a hypothetical fight between the high school’s resident giant vs. the high school’s resident psychopath. And, there’s Horace, a retired widower who lives for his daily trek to the coffee shop where he and a crew of crotchety old men have the same three conversations.

Downtown Owl is very decent and very readable. Klosterman is hilarious and he’s at his fiction writing best when he provides dialogue along with the characters’ internal monologues, creating a script of what he/she said versus what he/she meant. And there are some moving passages featuring Horace and the story of how he lost his wife and the bulk of his retirement savings.

But it’s also apparent this is a first novel, and Klosterman’s penchant for commentary and pop culture references appear throughout the book, with varying degrees of success. Some of the side characters are chiefly described in relation to their musical tastes, including Julia’s love interest, who only listens to the Rolling Stones. In fact, his and Julia’s first conversation is basically an opportunity for Klosterman to reminisce about ‘80s bands, with Julia suggesting a litany of popular records and songs that should be listened to by someone who likes the Rolling Stones. At that point, we lose the fiction and go back to Klosterman’s touch stone of music commentary. This is not to say the exchange isn't entertaining to read - it is. But it doesn't really have any meaningful place in the fictional narrative, doesn't advance the plot and doesn't provide any real insights into the characters.

All things considered, there are enough bright lights in this book to justify the read and show off the author’s talent for fiction writing. Downtown Owl doesn’t quite surpass Klosterman’s insights on why women in their 30s love John Cuscak (note, it’s because they still see him as Lloyd Dobler. Totes true.), but it shows potential.

The New Phonebooks Are Here! The New Phonebooks Are HERE!

OK. It isn’t the new phonebook. But Steve Martin’s excitement in The Jerk mirrors my own with the recent publication of the NYT list of the 10 best books of 2010.

Now, admittedly, the NYT Book Review and I don’t always agree, as anyone who read my assault on The Savage Detectives can see (Hee. That rhymed. I told you I’m giddy over this list!!). But, the Times is right more often than wrong, and the reviewers generally provide good direction. You really just have to read the plot description. If it sounds like a snoozer, it probably is.

Below are the books that made the list, none of which I’ve read because I refuse to purchase hardcovers. (Note to publishers: If you want to send me hardcovers to review on this blog, I’ll gladly accept them. I just don’t want to pay for it.) So, I have reviewed all 10 precog style, and made 10 snap judgments about what I will be checking out in the future.

1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen – From the NYT: “A vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of ‘personal liberties’ assumed new and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures this through the tribulations of a Midwestern family, the ¬Berglunds, whose successes, failures and appetite for self-invention reflect the larger story of millennial America."

This is so on my list. Not only does the description sound amazing, but The Corrections is one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ve been missing Franzen for years, and I can’t wait to tear into this. In paperback, of course.

2. The New Yorker Stories by Anne Beattie – From the NYT: “As these 48 stories published in The New Yorker from 1974 through 2006 demonstrate, Beattie, even as she chronicled and satirized her post-1960s generation, also became its defining voice.”

This is a skip for me. Personally, I don’t care for The New Yorker and its glib smugness. Seinfeld nailed it in the episode featuring the cartoon that made no sense. I’m just not interested in reading a collection of stories with a similar attitude.

3. Room by Emma Donoghue – From the NYT: “Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction: an ebullient child narrator, held captive with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room, through whom we encounter the blurry, often complicated space between closeness and autonomy.”

Hmm. Interesting, no? I’m intrigued, and will probably look into this one.

4. Selected Stories by William Trevor – From the NYT: “Gathering work from Trevor’s previous four collections, this volume shows why his deceptively spare fiction has haunted and moved readers for generations. Set mainly in Ireland and England, Trevor’s tales are eloquent even in their silences, documenting the way the present is consumed by the past, the way ancient patterns shape the future.”

Blech. Definitely a pass. A book that earns praise for “silences,” aka, for what it doesn’t say? That is definitely a clue that what’s actually on the page is boring.

5. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – From the NYT: “Time is the ‘goon squad’ in this virtuosic rock ’n’ roll novel about a cynical record producer and the people who intersect his world. Ranging across some 40 years and inhabiting 13 different characters, each with his own story and perspective, Egan makes these disparate parts cohere into an artful whole, irradiated by a Proustian feel for loss, regret and the ravages of love.”

Despite the fact that I suspect this is another non-linear narrative, I’m intrigued, mostly because of the description of the characters. I also read another awesome review about Goon Squad in The New Republic, which predisposed me to be interested. And now I can look forward to calling a novel “Proustian.”

6. Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans– From the NYT: “Here is the only truly definitive history of classical ballet. Spanning more than four centuries, from the French Renaissance to American and Soviet stages during the cold war, Homans shows how the art has been central to the social and cultural identity of nations.”

Meh. Most likely a pass for me. Seeing ballet performed is one thing, but reading about it? And considering that no one really goes to the ballet anymore (well, not in America anyway), can we really say it’s “central” to the identity of nations?

7. Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff – From the NYT: “With her signature blend of wit, intelligence and superb prose, Schiff strips away 2,000 years of prejudices and propaganda in her elegant reimagining of the Egyptian queen who, even in her own day, was mythologized and misrepresented.”

Hell yes! Great subject, and if the writing is even half as good as the Times suggests, this book could be totally amazing.

8. The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukjerjee – From the NYT: “Mukherjee’s magisterial ‘biography’ of the most dreaded of modern afflictions. He excavates the deep history of the ‘war’ on cancer, weaving haunting tales of his own clinical experience with sharp sketches of the sometimes heroic, sometimes misguided scientists who have preceded him in the fight.”

An awful lot of “quotes” peppered in this write up, which gives me pause… is it a "biography" or not? Are we or are we not at “war” with cancer? I’ll wait on this one. At first blush, I’m inclined to pass, but then again, I adored Atul Gawande’s Complications, so more research may be needed.

9. Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim – From the NYT: “The theater’s pre-eminent living songwriter offers a master class in how to write a musical, covering some of the greatest shows, from ‘West Side Story’  to ‘Sweeney Todd.’ Sondheim’s analysis of his and others’ lyrics is insightful and candid, and his anecdotes are telling and often very funny."

No thank you, despite the clever title. This sounds like 300 pages of liner notes. Self indulgent at best, snoozefest at worst. I can tell you now that this book would just piss me off.

10. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson – From the NYT: "Wilkerson, a former national correspondent for The Times, has written a masterly and engrossing account of the Great Migration, in which six million African-Americans abandoned the South between 1915 and 1970. The book centers on the journeys of three black migrants, each representing a different decade and a different destination."

This sounds pretty decent. I’m not as excited about it as the Cleopatra book, but this could have some very interesting components to it. I’ll probably read, but not immediately.

Let the Great World Spin, or my Screed Against Non-Linear Narrative

On the back jacket of Let the Great World Spin, it says “a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day.” Even my beloved Dave Eggers says “There’s so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”

Call me underwhelmed.

Here’s the basic plot. A tightrope walker strings a high wire between the top floors of the World Trade Center and walks across, enthralling the entire city. Also happening that day, a support group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam meet at a Park Avenue penthouse. Some hookers from the Bronx get arrested. A monk abandons his order to finally sleep with a woman he’s fallen in love with, only to die later that day in a car accident. And of course, all these stories are interrelated – one of the hookers is with the monk at the time of the crash. One of the support group moms ends up adopting her children. Another mom is married to the judge who hears the tightrope walker’s case.

But Joycean? Just because events are told out of order and from different points of view doesn’t make you Joyce. It makes you a mimic.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the post-modern version of the non-linear narrative. I really liked Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is one of my favorite books of all time. I even like non-linear narrative in film, ably pioneered by Quentin Tarrantino in Pulp Fiction and perfected by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia. But, note to authors out there everywhere…THESE BOOKS AND FILMS ARE DECADES OLD. IT’S PLAYED OUT NOW.

If everyone is telling stories in the non-linear fashion, it’s not fresh, innovative or pioneering. It’s boring and predictable. Tarrantino walked away from the style about a decade ago after the Jackie Brown disaster. In fact, the only filmmaker still clinging to the style is Christopher Nolan, but at least he put his spin on Memento by telling the story backward to create the non-linear feel without the story actually taking on non-linear form. That’s inventive. Just rehashing a style without adding a creative take on the genre is not.

The Savage Detectives, or a Month I’ll Never Get Back

After reading The Savage Detectives, I felt the way I did after watching Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Which is to say I was asking myself: “What the hell was that??”

Like Nick and Norah, The Savage Detectives involves a tedious scavenger hunt that ultimately is supposed to lead to deeper lessons about the human condition. Nick and Norah cruise through the boroughs of NYC in a oh-so-ironic Yugo looking for “Where’s Fluffy,” a terribly named band that communicates about upcoming gigs through brain teasers to ensure that only the most clever indie rock riddlers find them. The Savage Detectives is about a group of boho Mexicans who call themselves the Visceral Realists searching for a 1920s avant guard poet named Cesarea Tinajero.

Nick and Norah is basically a movie strung together to justify a soundtrack. After hours of roaming around on a series of pointless adventures, Nick and Norah decide to forego Fluffy and make out in their parent’s basement. And, apparently, we’re supposed to be interested because we like the song they exit with. Likewise, The Savage Detectives is just a series of self-indulgent narratives designed to show how “revolutionary” the Visceral Realists are. And we’re supposed to care because it’s not like Octavio Paz….or something. It’s a so-called poetry movement consisting of people that never write, never publish and have no philosophy. And there’s no reason to find Cesarea, either, since she only published one piece 50 years earlier in a friend’s homemade zine, and even that doesn’t contain a single word – it’s a stick figure drawing.

So, what’s the point?

As near as I can figure, it’s all elaborate masturbation committed by and for the benefit of the author, Roberto Bolano. Bolano himself started some bullshit poetry group in Mexico that was too clever for its own good, and the story is basically a rehash of partly autobiographical adventures that don’t advance a plot or create a reason for caring. There are endless pages written by a pedantic teenager explaining the different varieties of poetic meter. There are women in the book that serially sleep with the different members of the group and confuse that with sexual liberation. And there are the cliched art house fags that discuss the differences between butch, femme, queer and homo as terms to best describe them.

Despite the NY Times gushing with praise over The Savage Detectives, I hated this novel. It was like reading On the Road, which was a painfully boring experience despite its presence in the canon. But at least Kerouac knew the art of brevity – Bolano goes on for 650 pages! Frankly, I think it’s time for me to give up on Latin American fiction. With the exception of Jose Saramago, who I believe is a genius writer, I’ve hated everything from south of the border. From Marquez and his pastoral magic and peasant fantasies to Esquivel’s sex and recipe books, nothing has resonated. Give me West African literature any day of the week. Now THAT’s some good writing.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Random Family is incredibly gripping, totally readable and utterly depressing. For more than a decade, author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immersed herself in the lives of a group of Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx tenements.

Much like In Cold Blood, Random Family is a work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. Two women make up the central focus for LeBlanc – Jessica, whose dreams of escaping poverty lead her straight into the arms of the neighborhood’s drug kingpin, and Coco, a teen mother of five whose boyfriend is serving a life sentence in federal prison for murder.

Although the story centers on these two, their lives aren’t remarkable in the world as reported by LeBlanc. Nearly every girl in the neighborhood starts having children within months of their first period. Most of the young mothers have a husband, boyfriend or brother doing time. Every 1-bedroom apartment is home to dozens of family members and surrounded by violent crime. And all women in the book have been sexually abused as children, only to grow up to be slapped around or worse by their partners.

But LeBlanc doesn’t proselytize in Random Family. There are no critiques of social programs or the various government bureaucracies that support them. It’s just straight reporting of daily life, an important narrative choice given that most of the central characters in the book have no time to debate the politics of poverty. They have to live with the consequences.

Which is not to suggest the book isn’t frustrating. As a reader, I could understand how money gets tight, making it impossible to live anywhere but in crowded, dangerous neighborhoods. I could understand how the desire to escape poverty would lead young women to date cash-rich thugs or drop out of school to work. But I could not understand why girl after girl knowingly got pregnant at the age of 14. It’s not as if they didn’t know the basics of sex and its consequences – their own teenage mothers informed them early on. And it’s not as though saying no costs any money.

I also felt righteous anger with Coco, who doesn’t learn that her 7-year-old daughter has been raped until she’s diagnosed with genital warts. In fact, Coco, a sex abuse victim herself, barely tries to figure out who assaulted her child because her apartment has a revolving door, with family, friends and neighbors coming in and out at all hours. While the inherent risks of the neighborhood are higher and money for appropriate child care non-existent, shutting your door and limiting visitors to people you know seems a pretty basic precaution.

But then again, I’m not a high-school dropout with five kids whose primary daily concern is trying to figure out how to eat and pay rent with just a few hundred dollars a week. And that’s the point. If anything, Random Family does force you to take a look at someone else’s life, and experience the world as they do – a world where deprivation and abuse are just another part of a long day’s work.

The Slap Heard 'Round the World

In The Slap, suburban couple Hector and Aisha throw a backyard barbecue for friends and family. Aisha’s friends include Rosie and Gary and their 4-year old son, Hugo. Hugo is an uber brat who gets totally out of line, has a temper tantrum and is about to bash another kid in the head with a cricket bat until Hector’s cousin intervenes and smacks the child across the face. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.

Each chapter in The Slap is told by one of the witnesses, with Hector kicking it off to relay the incident with Hugo and the immediate aftermath of Rosie and Gary filing criminal assault charges. Other narrators include Harry, the slapper; Connie, a high-schooler who works part time in Aisha’s veterinary clinic; Connie’s gay friend, Ritchie; Hector’s father, Manolis; and Hugo’s mother, Rosie.

In the process of advancing the plot, the rotating narrators provide insights into each of the characters and how they interrelate. One such way is through rampant adultery – it’s like American Beauty in this neighborhood. Connie and Hector are having an affair. Aisha is sleeping with a married man from Canada. Harry is sleeping around all over the place.

The other is through their reactions to violence, which proves to be far more complicated than a cut-and-dry question of whether Hugo deserved to be smacked (he totally did).

At their core, all the characters are selfish and terrified of adult responsibility. The teens are afraid of the unknowns ahead as they prepare for relationships, living on their own and college life. The adults want to revisit salad days of youth with multiple casual sex partners and avoided obligations. Even Hugo the four-year-old is adamant in his refusal to stop breast feeding. (Note to my lady readers out there….if your kid is old enough to ask for breast milk, they’re too old to receive it. I don’t care what happens in an African village. Africans breast feed older children because they have scarce food resources and milk is a predictable staple. We do not. It’s not OK. Read Freud.)

But even though they are selfish, the characters do have their moments. Aisha in particular comes across with great likability. She’s having an affair, but it’s really an attempt to lash out at her husband, who she knows is cheating, too. She’s bedrock for her family, even taking a strong role when her husband confesses his infidelity and turns into a blubbering mess in need of her emotional support to cope with problems of his own making.

Others are despicable. Harry is a total pig cavorting about town as though it’s rutting season. He adds to that “charm” with a dose of wife beating, which explains why his BBQ slap becomes so polarizing. Regardless of whether or not the kid deserved it, there’s concern that Harry may have moved on from beating his wife to beating children. Rosie and Gary are both naïve hypocrites who are completely dislikable. She’s a hippy-dippy earth mother who will overcoddle her child into sociopathy. He’s a bitter, drunken, failed artist that can’t be bothered to care about his family unless they give him an excuse to attack others who are more successful than he is (read everyone!).

The subjects are crude, but the larger point is to show the malaise of modern suburbia and the frustration that comes with parenthood, the constant quest for financial or career superiority, the pining for a life without obligation. But each character is victim only to their own choices. Part of the charm behind The Slap is that the author never pretends that’s not the reality - none of the characters has an epiphany, no one sees the light and reforms. By the time you’re a 40-year-old married homeowner with kids, it’s frankly too late for a do-over.

Drood: It Was 800 Pages, Ya’ll!

I picked up Drood based on the strength of the write up on the back cover. Reading that, I thought the novel was a macabre mystery story involving Charles Dickens dueling it out with a savage murderer, accompanied by his Salieri-esque friend/rival, Wilkie Collins. And that is in there. Just not very often.

Really, the story isn’t about Dickens or Drood at all. It’s about Wilkie. And Wilkie is boring. You’d think he’d be a rich and compelling character considering that he’s a Victorian serial novelist with two mistresses and an opium addiction that prompts visual hallucinations of a woman with green skin and his own doppelganger. But he’s not.

Instead of these attributes being exciting, Wilkie manages to make them cumbersome with 800 pages of detail. There’s nothing saucy about the mistresses – Wilkie prefers to describe the affairs by focusing on the uninteresting, repeatedly listing the addresses where he’s got them shacked up and the pseudonymns he uses for them at the boarding house. The opium addiction is Wilkie’s excuse to bemoan all his chronic ailments that necessitate pain relief, including arthritis and gout, and to obsessively chronicle every single trip he takes to the opium den. Even the hallucinations are snoozers. The doppelganger mostly just sits and stares and the green woman just makes feeble lunges at Wilkie.

But there are highlights. As the back cover indicates, the interesting parts of the book involve the curious case of Drood. Dickens first tells Wilkie of Drood after a railway accident that kills most of the passengers – save Dickens and his party. In the carnage, Dickens spots a bizarre caped figure that I pictured to be a cross between Nosferatu and Lord Voldemort ministering to the injured. Problem is, all the people “helped” by Drood end up dead.

This piques Dickens’ interest, and he decides to find Drood with Wilkie’s help by tracking him down through the slums of London. They pick up a lead that sends them into a pauper’s cemetery and a subterranean sewer world accessed through an underground crypt and filled with the poorest and most degenerate of London’s underclass. But even though we get 100 pages on this decent into the underworld, we never see Drood because our dull narrator only goes on part of the quest – for the big payoff, Dickens goes alone.

So, is Drood real or is he another of Wilkie’s opium-induced imaginary friends? You never learn for certain because Wilkie is the epitome of the unreliable narrator. Instead, you get pages upon pages of Wilkie fretting about it and slowly descending into disjointed paranoid fantasies about both Drood and Dickens. And while I get the point (Wilkie was no Dickens and his narration in print, like in life, is a chore to slog through) that doesn’t necessarily mean that the point was interesting to read.

And Then We Came to The End: Petty Never Seemed So Perfect

And Then We Came to the End is the book I wish I’d written. Like Joshua Farris’ highly-believable characters, I worked for a small start-up company at the height of the dot bomb bust. In the process, I watched my office turn from a convivial den of idle gossip into a toxic snake pit of wild accusations, paranoia and desperation as people fought to keep their jobs amid waves upon waves of layoffs.

Work does strange things to people, and Farris totally gets it. It can be our social network with office happy hours and group lunches. It can provide validation and a sense of importance. But it can also be a source of tremendous anxiety when the money runs out and the layoffs have to start. When this starts happening, the social network of the office breaks down, and people….well….they lose it.

And Farris’s characters lose it with aplomb! The best such incident involves the desk chair caper, whereby people start swapping their desk chairs with better ones left behind by laid off co-workers. The machinating over these chairs is hilarious for about 20 pages, and then turns obsessive as employees sneak around late at night trying to steal the best, highest status chairs. But the plot thickens when it occurs to one co-worker that the desk chairs are bar coded – Gasp! – and HR can easily discover who’s sitting in what chair. This, of course, prompts a mad scramble as employees try to replace what they’ve taken. In the end, no one had the chair they thought they did, and no one in management ever cared.

Another involves a gossip firestorm after one woman in the office gets a haircut and overnight becomes “hot”.

Is it petty? Very. But in an office where people are struggling every day to prove their value and retain their status in the office pecking order, it rings true, too.

And it’s not all petty. One of the characters in management is trying to gracefully juggle a diagnosis of breast cancer while her small company slowly implodes around her. In many ways, she’s the heart and moral conscience of the novel, and I appreciated the fact that she was also the head of the company – And Then We Came to the End is far too multi-layered to be just a screed about working for “the man” or just about how work sucks. It is about that, but it’s also about how work is also like a family, filled with pranks, oddballs, good conversation and interesting people with interesting lives.

Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse…..or Die Trying

My fiancé and I are pretty into zombies. We own all the classic zombie movies, and routinely have discussions about zombie politics. Which is better – slow or fast zombies? I prefer fast, but he likes slow. Which Romero film is best? No question – it’s Dawn. What’s the best zombie comedy? Of course, it’s Shaun of the Dead. But what are the best zombie books? Well, dear reader, I have the answers.

World War Z –Max Brooks tells the tale of a global zombie pandemic from the varied perspectives of survivors. Some of the recounts are positively bone chilling and rival early Stephen King for their ability to give you nightmares.

The most unsettling depicts a crew going into the Paris catacombs to clean out the zombies who have settled there. It’s dark, dank and filled with corpses - not to mention hoards of hidden, subterranean undead. Another involves droves of people trying to flee the zombie outbreak in India by crossing over a mountain pass into Pakistan. Seeing the coming influx, the Pakistani government decides to blow up the pass rather than taking in thousands of refugees, condemning thousands to certain death.

What makes it so good is the narrative style, which allows Brooks to take a multi-faceted look at all the issues that would come up if the dead were to rise. There are political aides who see the outbreak as a governance challenge. There are public health officials who tell you how the zombie virus spreads. There are military accounts explaining what works and what doesn’t in zombie combat. Together, the stories create a holistic tapestry that takes you from the beginning of the outbreak all the way to reconstruction after World War Z.

The Walking Dead –The Walking Dead is a series of comics. And they rule. Forget your image of the Sunday funnies, The Walking Dead explores serious issues set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Here’s the basic premise: a group survivors flee the zombies by hunkering down in an abandoned prison. A smart choice given all the bars, fences, riot gear, lookout towers and years worth of canned food.

But it proves to be too smart a choice. When the world goes to hell, the prison becomes more desirable than ocean front property in Malibu, and a heavily armed, sadistic lunatic who calls himself “The Governor” decides he and his followers should evict the current tenants and move in themselves. And that’s just in the first six trades!

The Walking Dead explores the human condition, and makes you question which is worse: living with zombies or living with other survivors.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – This takes the classic Austen and adds in zombies. The result is pure hilarity. Juxtaposing the parlor politics of Austen’s era with flesh-eating ghouls creates some awesomely memorable moments, such as the time Elizabeth is admonished for inadvertently exposing her ankle during hand-to-hand combat with a zombie. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the question isn’t whether the ladies went to the right finishing schools, it’s whether they studied “the deadly arts” in Japan or China (Japan, apparently, is much more posh and fitting for ladies).

The Bennett sisters still whine about their marriage prospects and Darcy is still a jerk, but it’s much more entertaining to hear their problems discussed when they are surrounded by undead who are hell bent on eating them.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Believe the Hype

When people saw me reading this book, I was repeatedly told, “It starts off slowly, but stick with it – it gets much better.” As someone who devoured every delicious word of the text, I can’t fathom how anyone could conclude this book was slow!

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first in Stieg Larsson’s so-called “Millenium” series, has all the requisite pieces of a riveting noir thriller. Mikael Blomkvist, a down-on-his luck reporter is about to do jail time for libel after publishing an unsubstantiated account of corporate corruption. The publicity around the case, as well as Blomkvist’s eye for investigative journalism, attracts the attention on Henrik Vanger, an aged tycoon who’s obsessed with the bizarre disappearance of his niece some 40 years ago. Vanger hires Blomkvist to take another shot at solving the cold case and uncovering who among his dysfunctional family could have kidnapped and/or murdered the young girl.

And we’re off to the races!

Once Blomkvist starts digging, the book begins a page-turning investigation into the Vanger family and a gruesome series of torture rape/murders in the Swedish countryside that are all linked by their – spoiler alert – Old Testament-style cruelty. Fascism, incest, misogyny, and mental illness all factor heavily in the tale, and are revealed in bombshell moments that keep the novel humming and the thrill factor taut.

While the plot is great, the real gem is the character of Lisbeth Salandar, a 24-year old hacker and part-time investigator. When Blomkvist hires Salandar to begin working the Vanger case with him, we get to know this girl with the dragon tattoo, who stands out as one of the most compelling and best-written female characters in recent fiction. A punk rock version of Amelie, Salander is an antisocial pixie, a feminist, a sometime lesbian, and a full-time troublemaker. But none of these archetypical attributes falls into the realm of cliché, and Salandar emerges as a richly complicated, fully formed person who jumps out of the pages with her middle finger raised and a “fuck you” scowl on her face.

It is through Salander that we get the book’s subplot involving our heroine and her pervy legal “guardian,” which brings the brutality of the rape/murders she’s investigating to her own back yard. But unlike the women of the countryside, little Lisbeth has a penchant for revenge, and the scene where she settles the score makes it clear that she’s nobody’s victim and has every right to her contemptuous, antisocial attitude

The novel isn't perfect - Blomkvist is disingenuous as a feminist who's disturbed at the treatment of women in Sweden, yet not feminist enough to avoid using every female character for sex. Moreover, the book winds down in an anticlimax that, after hundreds of pages of originality, reads like Larsson was less interested in a strong finish than just getting to the end. I found it fairly easy to overlook the conflicting sketch of Blomkvist because Salandar was such an amazing study in character development. And I forgave the ending in light of the fascinating dual plots of the Vanger case and Salandar's revenge. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably will not make it into the literary cannon, but most certainly presents the reader with highly memorable scenes and characters that more than live up to its hype.