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.