Bookstorm

Normally, I would agree with Charles Mudede--"Summer is the time to read a long and challenging book"--but this summer, I've been subsisting on popular fiction. I raced through Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons (it was very good), and I'm still plowing through Justin Cronin's The Passage and Stephen King's Under the Dome. (I've mostly set aside Danielle Trussoni's Angelology, but I'll get back to it soon. It's quite enjoyable.)

I'm beginning to cool towards The Passage. I went back to it after Nine Dragons, and found myself flipping back to get my bearings. And that's when the book's flaws became immediate: the characters are largely indistinguishable, making it difficult to retrace their relationships. Cronin gave his imagination a workout in the novel's first half, but the second half is a mess. Characterization amounts to nothing more than tacking on a nickname. The more I read, the more I realize that Cronin's world hinges on the reader taking things for granted. The Passage isn't believable, but that's not the point. It's hard to care about what's going on. Cronin doesn't explain much, and the story's frequent jumps are jarring. It makes me wonder if he was bluffing the entire time.

There isn't much to say about Under the Dome. It's standard-issue King, a monster novel with a cool concept (an entire town is inexplicably trapped inside a Star Trek-like force field), lots of pop-culture references, and clunky dialogue. Unlike Cronin, however, King knows how to handle a large cast (I think he's at his best when he has lots of characters to work with), and he's having a lot of fun here--probably the most fun he's had since writing The Stand. I haven't really kept up with King, but Under the Dome (which he started and abandoned in 1976) could easily have been put out during his heyday. It may not be a great book, even by his standards, but at least it isn't marred by the narcissism of Lisey's Story (which also struck me as a bitter fuck you to the literary establishment) and the final three Dark Tower novels. Under the Dome is King as we know him: it's funny, unpretentious, and told in his own distinctive voice. It won't win any new converts, but it won't surprise anyone familiar with his work.

This is the Hangover Edition of my occasional round-ups ...

• National Public Radio humbly asks for your vote. (I don't think Justin Cronin's The Passage is a thriller--it's more science fiction than anything else--but I suppose this list proves how wide-open genre really is.)
• This is fun, but I soured when it told me I write like Chuck Palahniuk.
• "I consider calling another hooker but I can't stand the idea of any more small talk." Check out P. William Grimm's "Sunset Over LAX."
• Jeffrey Eugenides is working on his follow-up to Middlesex. And that's all he's giving us.

Now you can listen to William Faulkner's lectures from 1957 and 1958, when he served as the University of Virginia's first writer-in-residence. Have fun, kids.

Salon's first-ever reading club pick was Justin Cronin's The Passage, and now they have an interview with him.

Could you talk a bit about "The Passage's" intertextuality? How would you describe your novel's relationship to the texts it references through the epigraphs and the allusive character names?

I think it's disingenuous for any writer to pretend they're inventing the wheel, and that their book isn't a comment on and grappling with other books--especially when they're writing within an established storytelling tradition, such as vampire narrative. I decided to throw my arms around this basic truth of writing and openly invoke other novels, stories, plays and poems. Some of these references are subtle, little Easter eggs tucked in the grass, and some are overt, such as the works referenced in the epigraphs (especially "King Lear," "The Tempest" and "Twelfth Night"). The list of referenced works is actually so long I don't have space here to name them all, and no doubt there are more I'm not even aware of. They're absolutely part of the novel and my sense of it, but the reader doesn't need to be consciously aware of their presence to experience the story.

I've been reading Justin Cronin's The Passage, and if you'd spoken with me a week ago, I would've urged you to pick it up immediately. Now I've decided to reserve judgement. Sure, it's the mother of all disaster-horror novels--a virus that turns people into vampires decimates the United States and leaves survivors to band together and fight the good fight. (Imagine Stephen King's The Stand, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road wrapped into one big book.) The concept isn't entirely original or subtle--I'm not the most astute reader, but I can tell The Passage is an allegory for the war on terror--but it's still pretty enjoyable. But with an abrupt time and setting change (which explains the book's title), the narrative doesn't give readers anything familiar to hold on to. This isn't a bad thing--The Passage is a lot of fun, with adults finally getting their own modern vampire novel--but Cronin has set the bar pretty high for himself. I just hope he can clear it.

Joe's Luck: The World's Longest Literary Remix, hosted by GalleyCat, is now available for your amusement. You can find my contribution on page fifty-six.

José Saramago: dead at eighty-seven.

Happy Bloomsday, everyone. I'll spend most of the day reading Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect and lamenting the fact that I still don't have Justin Cronin's The Passage. (It's on its way, though.) For your Bloomsday reading, Rachel resurrected a long post, from 2005, recounting the publishing history of James Joyce's Ulysses. Rejoyce!

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is one book that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life. It's the most violent book I've ever read, and some of its images--especially one of an Indian wearing women's clothes during a massacre--aren't easily forgotten. Now a bunch of artists (including Zak Smith, author of We Did Porn, a book I heartily recommend) are getting together to illustrate McCarthy's masterpiece: "... great handfuls of viscera, genitals ... and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows." Looks like they've gotten it right.

The Los Angeles Times profiles Michael Connelly, who's one of my guilty-pleasure authors.

I've been reading Connelly's The Poet, which is one of the scariest serial-killer novels I've ever read. And I don't mean horror-movie scary, although there's plenty of gore and a few weird kills. (In one memorable instance, a young college student is found chopped in half.) There's nothing cheap about The Poet. It's gotten under my skin in ways I didn't expect. Even in his scant appearances, the Poet has more depth than the average serial killers you find in crime fiction. He's very creepy. Connelly drops clues and plays the plot--which is airtight--like a violin, but there's nothing manipulative about the book. It's pretty simple: Connelly's haunting procedural is scary because he's a great writer and a great storyteller.