Creative Types by Tom Bissell

Publsihed by ‎ Pantheon on December 14, 2021

It is difficult to identify a unifying theme in this volume of Tom Bissell stories. That’s one of the pleasures of reading the seven diverse stories in the collection. No story is similar to any other story. If they have anything in common, it is the suggestion that the choices we make about living our lives always merit examination.

My favorite story, “The Fifth Category,” is rooted in recent history. A man named John wakes up on a flight and discovers he is the only person on board the darkened plane. The man is a former government lawyer who wrote memos justifying the torture of American prisoners who were arbitrarily classified as enemy combatants, a lawyer who refuses to acknowledge his role in crimes against humanity. We aren’t told his last name but the character is obviously modeled upon John Yoo. The flight forces him to confront a reality that he had only considered in the abstract. The story is nuanced and somewhat sympathetic to Yoo without whitewashing his willful failure to anticipate the foreseeably ugly consequences of his work.

Four of the stories are, like “The Fifth Category,” smart and provocative:

The Jewish women who want to worship in an Italian synagogue are allowed to sit in a cage “if there’s room.” A tourist protests religiously inspired social injustice by removing his yarmulke, provoking a confrontation with the tour guide.

A writer whose older brother was killed while trying to prevent a crime eventually writes a critical article about a New York City vigilante who calls himself the Avenger. When the Avenger agrees to be interviewed, it is the writer who must answer questions about his failure to engage with his brother’s death.

Two men who were high school bullies together in the Midwest reunite in New York City. One of the men, now working as an editor, has changed. His visiting friend is still an ignorant, bullying bigot, a fact that triggers the editor as he’s forced to remember the person he once was.

An American makes friends with a Greyhound that attacks him in Estonia, then invites the Greyhound’s owner (the wealthy daughter of a criminal) to do coke. The daughter expects to make out with the American, but he’s more interested in discussing the philosophy of existence, an interest that forces the woman to think about the emptiness of her life and encourages a non-sexual bond of friendship.

The final two stories were less interesting to me, although they might resonate with (in the first case) couples with young children or (in the second) fans of Hollywood celebrities:

A hooker talks about her life with a Hollywood couple that hires her to spice up their post-baby sex life. The reality of life intrudes on the fantasy of spice.

An assistant to James (obviously James Franco) ponders his life before and after he makes an innocent mistake as Seth (obviously Seth Rogen) and James wrestle with a Saturday Night Live monologue.

The diversity of subject matter and the qualify of Bissell’s writing assures that most readers will find something to like in this collection. I found nothing to dislike. Five of the seven appealed to me, a pretty good batting average for any writer.

RECOMMENDED

Her Second Death by Melinda Leigh

Published by Amazon Original Stories on December 7, 2021

“Her Second Death” is part of the Amazon original short story series. It is billed as a prequel to the Bree Taggert series. The story has the feel of something that was dashed off in a couple of hours.

Detective Bree Taggert, newly assigned to homicide, investigates a shooting death. The victim was found in his car. When she contacts the victim’s wife, she learns that the wife was living apart from the victim and that he had their daughter for an overnight visitation. The missing child is a little blonde girl because of course it is.

Bree has empathy for the little girl because she hid under the porch during her parents’ murder-suicide. Because of course she did.

The police perform a bit of obvious police work that leads them to an obvious conclusion. The story generates no suspense because of course a little blonde girl isn’t going to be harmed in a story like this. Melinda Leigh makes no effort to make the reader feel she’s even at risk.

Nor is Bree ever at much risk, although weapons are pulled on her a couple of times. Her complete absence of situational awareness would be distressing if she were a real cop.

Like most missing child stories, this is a lazy effort at storytelling. If you really want to read about a missing kid, check out the review before this one. Winter Water tells a clever story. “Her Second Death” just isn’t interesting.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Winter Water by Susanne Jansson

Published in Sweden in 2020; published in translation by Grand Central Publishing on December 7, 2021

Winter Water straddles the border between crime fiction and horror. The story begins with a missing child, an overused crime fiction concept that challenges writers, usually without success, to take a fresh approach. Susanne Jansson meets the challenge by using ambiguity to create the suspense that most missing child novels lack. Did four-year-old Adam fall into the ocean and drown? His bucket at the water’s edge and the discovery of his boot in the water lend support to that theory. But Martin, Adam’s father, has been receiving anonymous threats, perhaps related to a property dispute with his neighbor. Is it possible that the neighbor, or someone else, kidnapped the child? And what should we make of other children who have disappeared in the same location and on the same day, January 11, during the last half century?

Martin theorizes that a little girl who drowned in the 1960s is calling other children to join her. He finds some evidence to support that view and even feels the pull himself, heightening the supernatural theme. A woman named Maya who befriends Martin as he struggles with loss and despair pursues the theory that the child was kidnapped. Maya has done some part-time police photography that has fueled her investigative instincts. She uncovers ambiguous evidence to support her kidnapping theory, although she nearly dies in the attempt to prove she’s right.

Uncertainty builds suspense as Martin tries to go about his life during the year following the disappearance, always wondering about Adam and occasionally feeling the temptation to join him if he, in fact, accepted a drowned girl’s invitation to meet her beneath the waves. Maya’s investigation, on the other hand, seems to reach a dead end until new information helps her pull some clues together. Even after Adam’s fate is revealed, suspense continues to drive the story.

The characterization in Winter Water is more subtle than a reader might expect from a missing child story. Martin understandably falls apart, feeling the guilt of failing to prevent his son’s disappearance. His wife holds it together for the sake a new baby until their roles reverse and she falls apart. All of this is handled with admirable restraint. Where an American writer might have turned out horribly weepy scenes, Scandinavian writers seem to take tragedy and depression in stride, regarding them (as they often are) as a natural part of life that can be depicted without melodrama. Maya also gains sympathy in a relationship subplot as her investigation impedes a blossoming romance.

Jansson skillfully blends the conventions of crime fiction and horror stories to keep the reader guessing about Adam for most of the novel. Both theories about Adam's disappearance are plausible (at least for readers who suspend their disbelief in the supernatural for the sake of a good story). Without spoiling the clever plot, I can say that in some sense, both theories are valid. Jansson’s ability to balance the genres should make Winter Water appealing to horror fans and crime fiction fans, or to any reader who enjoys a good story.

RECOMMENDED

The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico

Published in Italy in 2018; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on December 7, 2021

Through Marcello, the narrator of The Women I Love, Francesco Pacifico tells us that the novel is an “experiment in how to talk about women.” Talking about women might be easier than talking to them, a skill Marcello has not mastered. He mansplains, even to the extent of telling women what they are feeling. He is more in touch with his own feelings than the feelings of the women he loves, but Marcello’s feelings are difficult to understand. For no obvious reason, he tells us that he has lost “every feeling, every certainty that went into the experience of loving and being loved.” Marcello’s drama stems from jealousy, a strange reaction in light of the ease with which Marcello betrays Barbara, the woman he marries during the course of the novel. The Women I Love has been described as a parody of toxic masculinity in literature, and perhaps toxic is the best way to characterize Marcello’s experiment. Fortunately, the toxin is amusingly weak, much like Marcello.

Marcello is a poet turned editor. Marcello lives with Barbara in Rome and, early in the novel, is splitting his work life between the Milan and Rome offices of his employer. He begins his story with Eleonora, a lover he apparently took in the belief that having a girlfriend on the side is a duty of Italian men. Marcello tells Eleonora that their relationship is based on an excess of passion, not on anything that could be the foundation of a marriage. Still, Marcello seems surprised (or at least distressed) when Eleonora decides it is time to move on. Having convinced himself that Eleonora used him to get her editing job, Marcello naturally believes that Eleonora slept with the boss to get more prestigious editing assignments than Marcello is receiving. In reality, Eleonora simply cares about the content of books more than Marcello, whose is more concerned with promoting books than improving them.

Marcello tells us that Eleonora is the only one of his loves he doesn’t understand. It seems clear, however, that Marcello has made little effort to understood any of the women in his life. Even as Marcello describes the women in his memories, he wonders whether he understands women well enough to write about them. He addresses the male perception that women are incomprehensible by referring to writers like Philip Roth: “In these great males novels, men are restless, they make mistakes, they struggle, and the novel is a pinball machine where the women are bumpers that ring and light up when touched — they’re so striking, so crucial, that they seem like main characters, but they’re really only a function of the man’s little steel ball.”

When he thinks about women, Marcello wonders if he is only rating them from one to ten, judging them as if he were at a cow auction. No reader will accuse Marcello of being woke when it comes to women, although he might deserve credit for recognizing the superficiality of his interactions with them. As a writer, he claims to be making an effort to give them a serious role, to portray them as something more than background characters who support or condemn men. He wants to feel “truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows.” That is a worthy goal for a writer even if Pacifico addresses it in parody.

Each chapter in The Women I Love is devoted to one of Marcello’s loves. At varying times in his life, Marcello’s thoughts of Eleonora and Barbara are passionate. His relationships with his sister, his mother, and his sister-in-law are platonic, although he’s certain that all men view their brothers’ wives as sex objects (a belief that, in my experience, is not remotely true). He also objectifies a friend’s live-in girlfriend, a woman who occasionally sleeps with his sister. Marcello feels like an idiot for taking so long to realize that his sister is a lesbian, a symptom of his failure to pay much attention to women at all unless he wants to screw them. Marcello gives us biographical details of his mother but then admits he doesn’t know her: “my language is muddled, imprecise — it’s all hearsay.” Although she doesn’t get her own chapter, Marcello’s grandmother also receives some love.

Marcello tells the reader that The Women I Love is “a novel of my memories.” True to its post-modernist form, Marcello speaks directly to the reader, occasionally explaining his textual revisions and stylistic choices, his decision to conceal certain names or details to avoid disturbing friendships after publication (“the enzyme of fiction allows for this: first confess, then conceal”). Sometimes he questions the inaccuracy of his memory; other times he discusses Italian literature.

The Women I Love has nothing approaching a plot, although it does follow Marcello through his late 30s as he gets married, separates, repeatedly changes jobs and his residence, and makes a wrong-footed attempt to rekindle a relationship with Eleonora, perhaps committing a sexual assault by refusing to acknowedge the word "stop." The novel ends abruptly, Marcello apparently having exhausted his observations of the women he loves. The reader might regard some of those observations as insightful. Other observations might just be intended to shock. Marcello rejects the common view that relationship success requires hard work. “What a bourgeois crock of shit,” he writes, “the couple as a business venture, where every day you roll up the shutter door, then roll up your sleeves.” Marcello also rejects the idea of women saving men because, in novels written by men, “a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to woman in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.” The value of The Women I Love is its ability to provoke thoughts or conversation about nuggets like these, regardless of whether the reader ultimately agrees with or lampoons Marcello’s conclusions. For that reason, the novel might be a good book club selection, particularly if the book club has both male and female participants.

RECOMMENDED

Pay or Play by Howard Michael Gould

Published by Severn House on December 7, 2021

A drug dealer who mixes the language of the street with erudite references to literature and history takes an interest in the death of a homeless man he regards as his doppelgänger. From his study of literature, he knows that if someone disrespects your doppelgänger, “shit is on.” The dealer coerces Charlie Waldo into investigating the homeless man’s death.

The police assumed that the homeless man’s death was accidental, a conclusion that turns out to be unsupported by the man’s autopsy. Since the man was homeless, the police see no reason to question their initial assumption. Before he died, the victim went to legal aid and rambled something about “a hole under the fire.” As Charlie Waldo investigates the death, several attempts on Waldo’s life convince him that there is more to the death than he understands.

Waldo’s primary investigation, however, involves an attempt to blackmail a television judge, the disrespectful and nasty kind of judge (Judge Judy, Judge Wapner) that television viewers seem to crave. A blackmailer is threatening to expose Judge Ida’s involvement in an apparently accidental death that occurred during a frat initiation 35 years earlier. The blackmailer says the death was a murder. While denying her involvement, Judge Ida wants Waldo to find out if there’s any evidence that might link her to the death. After a long investigation built on false starts, digressions, and an uncomfortable expenditure of carbon emissions, Waldo realizes that he has a doppelgänger of his own. The ending is satisfying in its recognition that not all problems can be solved without giving birth to new and different problems.

Readers who have followed this series will know that Charlie Waldo represents quirkiness on steroids. He was a celebrated police detective until he left the force after blaming himself for an unnecessary death. To atone, he has become obsessed with living responsibly. He comes as near as he can to having a zero carbon footprint. He rides his collapsible bicycle wherever he can. To assure that he does no harm to the planet or its occupants, he allows himself to own only 100 Things at any given time. He won’t eat processed foods or drink beverages that have been packaged. All of that makes Waldo an amusing character, particularly when he needs to decide what Thing he can shed in order to possess, however temporarily, a new Thing. Waldo is also a refreshing change from crime novel protagonists in that he rarely finds it necessary to hit or shoot someone.

Followers of the series will also know that Waldo is locked in a struggle with his girlfriend, Lorena Nascimento, who wants him to work full-time for her detective agency. Lorena drives Waldo crazy by purchasing gadgets, particularly her single-serving coffee maker with its incredibly wasteful pods. The conflict heats up in Pay or Play as Waldo’s interest in solving a murder is at odds with Lorena’s belief that accusing her clients of murder is bad for business. Waldo has no interest in money; Lorena is driven by it. Yet her arguments in favor of earning a living aren’t all bad and she clearly loves Waldo. Whether their oil-and-water relationship has any chance of surviving is a question that will encourage romantic readers to keep returning to the series.

The plot of Pay or Play is intricate without becoming convoluted. Each new development challenges the reader to spot the murderers involved in each of the two deaths. As he did in his earlier Waldo novels, Howard Michael Gould has demonstrated his skill in creating clever mysteries with nontraditional characters. The entertainment value is enhanced by Gould’s characterization of Waldo as a man who knows his behavior is bizarre and that his personality is a bit alienating. His desire for redemption may be a sign of mental illness, but Waldo is such a good person that the world would be a nicer place if we all shared his concern with ethical and responsible behavior. He might be a bit extreme in his rigid adherence to owning no more than 100 Things, but his heart is in the right place. That makes Charlie Waldo one of my favorite modern crime novel protagonists.

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