Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People by Matthew Diffee

Published by Scribner on May 26, 2015

Matthew Diffey's cartoons are regularly published in the New Yorker. Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People might be described as a book of cartoons mixed with stand-up comedy. In fact, Diffey tells us that in terms of stand-up comedy, he is just like Chris Rock, except that Rock owns a mansion and Diffy owns some really nice pencils.

Narrative comedy introduces each chapter. The chapters collect (mostly) single-panel cartoons that will appeal to smart, attractive people (like you). Each chapter addresses a particular category of people: doctors, lumberjacks, pet owners, people in relationships, old people, people with tattoos, etc. Diffey sometimes mixes in multiple-panel cartoons and occasionally graces the bottom of a page with a sketch of someone delivering a one-liner.

My favorite cartoon: a seedy looking guy says to a florist "I want some flowers that say, `Here, have some friggin' flowers'." First runner up: a doorman says to a hooker, "And will he know what this is regarding?" Other highlights include an interview with a pretentious potato chip critic and a two page guide that will help you identify the religion that is best for you. But really, there are too many outstanding cartoons and jokes in this book to make it easy to single out any part of it. It's all pretty funny.

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Radiant Angel by Nelson DeMille

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 26, 2015

Colonel Vasily Petrov of the SVR receives a coded message instructing him to carry out his mission. John Corey, now working as a federal contract agent with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group, is assigned to watch Petrov. Corey and the DSG know Petrov is with the SVR but they don't know what nefarious purpose has caused him to masquerade as a diplomat. Corey is conducting surveillance with Tess, who claims to be a trainee with aspirations of joining the FBI. Corey isn't quite certain that her claim is truthful. He also has trust issues concerning his wife, which turns into a minor subplot as the story nears its conclusion.

Corey has an irreverent attitude that makes him a fun character. He holds some grudges against the CIA over a nasty incident in Yemen. He has more than a few grudges against Islamic terrorists but he's convinced that Russia continues to pose a greater security threat (an opinion that doesn't sit well with the State Department, politicians, or most of the intelligence community). Of course, following the universal law of thriller fiction, Corey is right and everyone else is wrong.

The first third of Radiant Angel, setting up the puzzle of what Petrov might be up to, is quite good. The next section, in which the focus shifts to Petrov, some Russian thugs, and a horde of hookers, is standard thriller fare. It moves quickly but the Russians are fairly dull and they're up to the same brand of mischief that has characterized Russian thriller villains for the last half century. The final third brings Corey and Tess back into the picture and the fun resumes.

Nelson DeMille kicked the rust off of a reliable formula and put it back in action, creating an unimaginative story that nevertheless conveys a sense of realism. DeMille has an undeniable gift for generating excitement, but Radiant Angel feels like a story I have read many times before. I give it high marks for "fun factor" but a low score for originality.

DeMille writes with a good deal of wit. Dialog is particularly enjoyable. Corey is an easy character to like. Those factors and the novel's excitement are all good reasons to enjoy the story, which I did. Still, Radiant Angel's staleness and its predictable ending prevent me from placing it on the top shelf of thriller fiction.

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Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Published by Minotaur Books on March 10, 2015

This is the second novel I've read that focuses on the horror story of Quebec's Duplessis orphanage, which was turned into an asylum because the church could collect more government funds by pretending that the orphans were mentally ill. Orphans were given experimental drug treatments and were abused in other ways. Building upon that real-life tragedy, Jeanette De Beauvoir concocts a plot involving a CIA-backed program to conduct experiments of a different nature. The nature of the CIA's nefarious dealings are the ordinary stuff of thrillers, plowing ground that is no longer fertile, but other aspects of De Beauvoir's story have greater value.

Martine LeDuc works for Montreal's mayor, running the city's public relations department. Montreal is in need of some good PR, given the four women have been killed in the city, apparently at random. LeDuc is assigned to act as liaison between the mayor and the chief of police, neither of whom like her. A detective, unpopular because he is Anglo rather than Franco, is assigned to babysit LeDuc. Naturally they work together to find the killer despite the absence of the words "criminal investigation" in Martine's job description.

The murder victims were all raped and mutilated, their bodies left left sitting upright on park benches. Their ages, appearances, and occupations are varied. Fans of serial killer novels know that discovering the connection between the victims is the key to catching the killer. That's a reliable crime novel formula but it is not put to good use here. The motivation for the murders is far-fetched and contrived. I didn't buy it.

LeDuc is given a stepmother's hectic home life that helps establish her personality, but some of the domestic scenes are mundane. The Montreal setting is used to nice effect as the reader is taken on a tour of the neighborhoods where the victims lived and the parks where their bodies were discovered. Simple French words like bon and alors constantly crop up in an apparent reminder that people speak French in Montreal, but since the rest of their dialog is in English, the frequent appearances of "first year French" are silly.

Italicized sections of the novel are told in the first person by Gabrielle, who was abandoned in an orphanage after being born to an unmarried woman who experienced a "moral lapse." The nuns who raised her later transferred her to Duplessis. Gabrielle's story is not as emotionally affecting as it was probably meant to be.

LeDuc finds herself threated by the killer toward the novel's end but (1) that section of the novel is too predictable to generate suspense and (2) since the killer should know that LeDuc has blabbed her suspicions about him to pretty much the whole world, killing LeDuc would be an act of supreme idiocy. The lengthy talkfest that follows, as the killer explains himself, is just dull.

I liked De Beauvoir's prose style. There are aspects of the novel that make for enjoyable reading, but the predictable ending, the failure to generate tension, and the far-fetched plot lead to disappointment by the novel's end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Whale Chaser by Tony Ardizzone

First published in 2010; published by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2015

Vince Sansone lives in Tofino, a fishing village near Vancouver. It is 1974 and Vince has lived in Canada for seven years, having left behind a less than idyllic life in America. Vince's father was a fish monger and Vince, despite his intense need to rebel against his childhood, is gutting fish for a living. Fortunately, his thoughts are frequently diverted by drugs and sex and his career eventually follows a different path.

Like many guys (especially those who alphabetize their jazz albums), Vince has a knack for picking women who leave him. He is befriended by a Native named Ignatius who has a Catholic education like his own, giving Tony Ardizzone a primary vehicle for discussions of philosophy and human nature. Ignatius and other characters are more widely read than Vince, who spends many of his self-pitying moments drinking beer, smoking weed, and feeling stupid.

In alternating sections of the novel we see Vince's childhood in Chicago, where nuns taught him how to bear the suffering inflicted by his father and the world in general. He tells a typical but occasionally engaging story of life in an ethnic (Italian) neighborhood where people maintain closer ties to the old country than to their current home. He spends his time fretting about girls, wondering whether he should become a butcher, and fretting about the butcher's daughter when he's not fretting about a different girl. He also describes sex in tedious detail (it is quite an accomplishment to make me view descriptions of sex as tedious). Much of the Chicago story (and even the Canada story) is "boy meets girls, boy loses girls, boy wallows in self-pity until he meets more girls." It is well written but unoriginal.

Many of the events that Vince describes are probably of greater interest to Vince than they were to me, although the ill-treatment of Italians in Monterey during World War II (one of many factors that might contribute to Vince's father's anger) is one of the novel's strong points. The Whale Chaser also makes it clear that there are more people in the world than those we encounter in our own tiny existence and that all those people have value equal to our own even if we never think about them.

It takes some time for the story to reach the dramatic moment (Chicago 1967) that explains why Vince moved to Canada. By that time, I had trouble caring. In any event, Vince's coming-of-age moment, like the rest of the Chicago story, is unoriginal. His second coming of age (or coming to maturity) moment (Canada 1980) is hokey.

At some point young Vince discusses Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of stories about characters who (depending on your perspective) have no choice about their fates or make unhappy choices or lack the courage to make choices that might make them happy. That seems to be the point of The Whale Chaser. Vince makes a choice or he responds to events in his life in the only way he can or he simply lacks the courage to face the reality of his life. I liked some of the book, primarily the Canadian setting and the prose, but nothing in the story generated a strong emotional impact. On the whole, I can only give this novel a guarded recommendation, more for its prose than for its intermittently intriguing content.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on May 12, 2015

Walter Mosley has a unique ability to see the uncommon in common people, to perceive the humanity to which inhuman circumstances give birth. His characters are damaged and betrayed. They have been abused and they have been abusive. They often live on the fringes of society, yet they retain their dignity, their wisdom, and their strength. They reinvent themselves every day because that's what life is -- a process of reinvention. Few writers convey that as well as Mosley.

When a beautiful woman walks into Leonid McGill's life (or, at any rate, sits next to him on the train), he knows he is in for trouble. Five minutes later, Marella Herzog owes him $1,500, his fee for protecting her from an attacker who was supposedly sent by her former fiancé. Throughout And Sometimes I Wonder About You, McGill ruminates about the powerful women who dominate his life, including the wife who is receiving convalescent care, the dissatisfied part-time lover, the secretary who is finding ways to recover from a horrific childhood, and now Marella.

Also playing a vital role in the story is McGill's son Twill, who has taken on a private investigation of his own. Of course, his activities cause problems for McGill. And then there's Hiram Stent, a vagrant whose case McGill turns down until, inevitably, his sense of justice compels him to look into Hiram's problem by finding a missing woman. In the time-honored tradition of PI fiction, McGill is soon working for free, because helping those in need is the right thing to do. Before the end of the novel, McGill's sense of justice has made him the target of three groups of people who want to kill him. In other words, a typical day in McGill's life.

The family element -- not just with Twill, but also with McGill's absent father, whose absence ends in this novel -- is just as strong as the larger plot threads. As he so often does with consummate skill, Mosley weaves it all together to create a tight, fast-moving story that works as a thriller, as a family drama, as an unconventional love story, and as a psychological portrait of a man who is struggling to come to terms with his past and to invent a better future.

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