My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

Published in Spain in 2011; published in translation by Knopf on May 21, 2013

We are told that the events described in My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain are mostly true. We're also told that the novel's narrator (unnamed in the text, but I'll give him the author's first name since he claims to be telling us his own story) is unreliable. He warns the reader that his words can be taken either as truth or invention since he is incapable of distinguishing one from the other.

Patricio is a journalist who has an uneasy relationship with the truth. Entire years are missing from Patricio's memory, so it's fitting that some chapter numbers are missing from My Father's Ghost -- chapters skipped over, like the chapters of the narrator's life -- while other chapter numbers are out of sequence or repeated, presumably reflecting Patricio's scattered thoughts. Patricio blames the gaps in his life on the medications his psychiatrist was dispensing, drugs that made him feel like he was "floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface." The reader soon discovers, however, that Patricio's memory loss is a form of self-protection. Patricio grew up in Argentina, "a country called fear with a flag that was a face filled with dread." The terrors of life during Argentina's rule by a military dictatorship are best forgotten, but the novel is about Patricio's compulsion to remember.

After eight years in Germany, Patricio returns to Argentina to say goodbye to his father, who is languishing in a hospital bed. In his father's study, he finds a folder labeled Alberto Burdisso. Its contents describe a simple-minded man who has disappeared from El Trébol, the city where Patricio spent part of his childhood. Burdisso had been awarded reparations for his sister's disappearance three decades earlier, money that led to his death. As Patricio reads through the file's contents, he learns that the city he believed to be idyllic is in fact sordid, sullied, and sad.

Patricio takes us through the file, document by document. His investigation of the file becomes an attempt to find his father "in his last thoughts." In this, Patricio is like other Argentinians of his generation, solving their parents' pasts like detectives, "and what we were going to find out would seem like a mystery novel we wished we'd never bought." Yet literature is a "pale reflection" of, and cannot do justice to, the beliefs and ideals of his father's generation. In real life, unlike novels -- and particularly in Argentina during the 1970s -- mysteries go unsolved, crimes go unpunished, and the world outside the book is not "guided by the same principles of justice as the tale told inside."

Not surprisingly, in searching for his father Patricio begins to find himself. He comes to realize a truth: "You don't ever want to know certain things because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own." At the same time, he becomes convinced that he needs to tell the story of his father's generation because their ghost "was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm."

All of this is an excellent premise for a novel. Patricio Pron nearly pulls it off, but in the end, the excellent story he tells is just too slim to attain such a lofty goal. What we learn about the father is fragmentary (intentionally so, given the novel's structure) and superficial. The narrator tells us that "what my parents and their comrades had done didn't deserve to be forgotten," but we learn very little about their struggle. At the same time, Patricio shares few of his recovered memories with the reader. The novel ultimately reads like a preface to a greater story that needs to be told, but it isn't told here.

That isn't to say that I disliked the story Pron tells. There are some stunning sentences in My Father's Ghost, the kind that make you pause and reread them two or three times. Not all of My Father's Ghost works (a series of brief chapters that describe Patricio's fever dreams add nothing to the story), but through most of the novel, Pron's intense prose is riveting. Viewed as a slice of life, the beginning of a journey yet to be completed, this small novel is quite rewarding. 

RECOMMENDED

The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry

Published by Mysterious Press on May 21, 2013

The Shanghai Factor is not Charles McCarry's best effort, but even a lesser McCarry novel is entertaining. This one is as much a mystery novel as a spy story, but it never quite develops the suspense and intrigue that fans of those genres crave.

A new agent, assigned as a sleeper in Shanghai, immediately breaks the rules by taking on a girlfriend he knows only as Mei. The unnamed agent assumes Mei is a spy but he likes the sex so he doesn't much care. Circumstances force the agent to leave China, but he soon returns with a new assignment: to set up Guoanbu operatives so they will be denounced as American spies. The operation appears to fizzle out, as does (to his great disappointment) his relationship with Mei. Back in New York, the encounters a Chinese operative who attempts to recruit him. Eventually it becomes difficult to know whether he can trust anyone, as each person who plays a significant role in his life might be a potential enemy, including the various women he beds at home and abroad. He becomes a pawn in a game played by two men "of mystery and power," one in Washington and one in China, all the while kept in the dark about the true nature of the game.

This is familiar ground for a spy novel, but the story is well told, often moving in unexpected directions. Most of it is credible, although some events near the novel's end seem both forced and implausible. McCarry maintains the novel's pace and the story is never dull. McCarry's observational talent is on full display, whether he's describing filth floating on the Yangtze or the curves of lover's body. His thoughts about the selective and uncertain nature of trust are not new to the genre, but they're well phrased. The same can be said of his observations about the power of coincidence and its relationship to fate.

For all its interest, however, the story is surprisingly light on suspense. The mystery's resolution is reasonably satisfying but not particularly surprising. The Shanghai Factor is the work of a supremely capable technician, but it lacks the "wow" factor that the best spy novels (and mysteries) produce. The agent is a well-defined character but not one I found myself caring much about. None of those complaints prevented me from enjoying the novel, but they prevent me from shelving it in the first tier of spy fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Zeroville by Steve Erickson

First published in 2007; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 30, 2013 

Steve Erickson's 2007 novel begins with 227 consecutively numbered chapters, followed by 226 chapters that are numbered like a countdown, from 226 to 0. Talk about a story arc! Apart from its unusual structure, Zeroville isn't quite like any other novel I've read. As one of the characters remarks near the novel's end, "What you thought you knew all along turns out to be something else." That's a fitting description of the story.

Vikar arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. With Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on the sides of his shaved head, Vikar -- still known by the name Ike Jerome -- has an encyclopedic knowledge of movie trivia. He did not come by it easily, given his Calvinist upbringing by a father who did not permit exposure to television, movies, or books other than the Bible. Having abandoned his study of architecture after the model of a church he designed was criticized for having no door, Vikar hopes to get a job in the film industry. He's disappointed to discover that the only person in Hollywood who shares his love and knowledge of movies is a burglar ("a foot soldier in the armed struggle against the white oppressor") who steals his television.

When Vikar later finds a job building sets at a movie studio, he finally meets people who understand movies: a film editor named Dotty who worked on A Place in the Sun, and a screenwriter named Viking Man, who believes "God loves two things and that's the Movies and the Bomb." The novel follows Vikar as he works his way into the film industry, including unwelcome detours to Cannes and Franco's Spain and an unhappy stay in New York, where he's regarded as an avant garde film editor (or an idiot savant) because he says things like "In every false movie is the true movie that must be set free." Since nobody understands his work, he is deemed a genius, both in Hollywood and abroad.

Vikar frequently reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncey Gardiner, a seemingly clueless character who hears phrases he doesn't necessarily understand and later repeats them out of context with hilarious results. Vikar's mind is oddly wired. He does not believe in continuity, in movies or in life. He dreams in an ancient language that he doesn't understand. He's obsessed with the biblical story of Isaac. Late in the novel, fueled by his dreams and obsessions, Vikar begins what another character describes as an heroic quest, although it's really more of a lunatic's mission, the culmination of lifelong obsessions.

Zeroville is usually light but sometimes dark, often very funny but occasionally sad, brilliantly daffy but profoundly serious. Children play a role in the novel, as they do in the movies, and how they are treated by their parents is one of the novel's themes. In Vikar's view, God is not kind to children (and neither is the Devil, at least in The Exorcist, a movie Vikar mistakes for a comedy).

Apart from being an opinionated homage to Hollywood, actors, directors, and everyone else associated with film production, Zeroville pokes wicked fun at Hollywood, actors, directors, and everyone else associated with film production. Still, movie lovers should appreciate the nuanced discussions of classic films and the people who made them great. The book convinced me to take a second look (sometimes a first look) at several of the films the characters discuss.

In the end, however, Zeroville takes a provocative look at the influence movies have on our lives and at the unhealthy tendency of fans to worship their stars and creators. It inspires thought about the difference (if any) between illusion and reality, between celluloid characters and the people we know, between the plots we watch on screens and the lives we live. You can learn something about life by watching good movies ... and by reading Zeroville.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

Published in French in 1995; published in translation by Europa Editions on May 7, 2013 

First published in 1995, Total Chaos is French literary noir. Three friends from the melting pot of Marseilles (whose parents spoke Italian or Spanish at home) bond in their youth over their outsider status and a shared love of poetry and old books. That, and their shared love of the beautiful Lole. The three friends once participated in a series of armed robberies, but their adult lives have gone in different directions. Fabio Montale became a cop. Manu is dead. Pierre Ugolini, having spent some time drifting, returns to Marseilles to avenge Manu's killing. It is a question of honor, and honor is all that matters in Marseilles. It doesn't end well for Ugolini, and that's where the story begins.

Montale's job is to preempt rioting in a neighborhood where the French regard everyone who isn't of French ancestry as a dirty Arab. When Leila Mouloud disappears -- an Arab student upon whom Montale has something more than a crush -- Montale assures her father that he will find her. At the same time, Montale is determined to understand what happened to Manu. Therein lies the plot -- such as it is.

Montale spends quite a bit of time revisiting the past -- too much time, as the story is often slow to move forward. Much of the novel seems directionless. A fair amount of the novel -- apart from Montale showing off his exquisite taste in food, alcohol, and music -- consists of Montale's internal monologue. Some of it (particularly the woeful condition of immigrants) is interesting, but his redundant thoughts did not always hold my attention. I expect a certain amount of existential angst in a noir protagonist, but Montale just won't shut up about his relentlessly downbeat view of the world. There are only so many times I can read things like "We were all like insects caught in a spider's web. We struggled, but the spider would eat us in the end" before I want to slit my throat. Or maybe Montale's, to put him out of his misery.

Montale is a classic noir character, the alienated tough guy with a soft heart. He doesn't fit in with the police -- he too frequently identifies with the outlaws, rooting for the underdog -- but he cannot abide the pain caused by crime. He's surrounded by corruption and despair (from which, conveniently enough, frequent sexual encounters provide his only respite). He easily falls in love but never holds onto it, perhaps because he doesn't really want it. He tells us, more than once, that he loves women too much. Eventually, his "I am so passionate, I love every woman I take to bed, including the prostitutes; I cook wonderful meals for them with fennel and garlic but I will never be happy" attitude starts to wear thin. Maybe it's a French thing. And maybe observations like this are a French thing -- "There in front of me was every man's dream: a mother, a sister, and a whore!" -- but even by noir standards, that's a little too cute for my taste.

There are things about Total Chaos I admired. Jean-Claude Izzo writes short, punchy sentences that are well suited to the story he tells. He captures the atmosphere of Marseilles -- its music, ethnic restaurants, and commuter trains full of tough-acting kids -- in vivid terms (the city is "an ancient tragedy in which the hero is death"). While there is the skeleton of a good story here, it is given too little flesh. I like the way the twin mysteries are eventually resolved, but the story is too often dull, and noir should never be dull. Montale does no detective work to speak of, opting to drift through the novel, making existential comments upon the seedy events he observes ("life didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was death"). Not quite all: sex and cognac and sex and well-prepared food and sex also matter to Montale. It's unfortunate that he's too awash in self-absorbed despair to recognize the pleasure in the things that obviously give him so much pleasure. Total Chaos is the first novel of a trilogy, but it failed to inspire me to read the other two. I'm not sure I would survive the experience.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on May 14, 2013 

The good (if not particularly surprising) news for Easy Rawlins fans is that Easy isn't dead -- he just thinks he is. A few paragraphs into the opening chapter, his revival from a coma gives birth to a new Easy Rawlins adventure. Even before he is back on his feet he has a mission: to find a missing boy named Evander Noon (a/k/a Little Green). At about the novel's midpoint, Easy takes on a second assignment, helping a friend who is the victim of a blackmail scheme.

Walter Mosley always captures the place and time in which his novels are set in high definition detail. Little Green takes place Los Angeles in 1967, a time when hippies were still a phenomenon and the Watts riots were the prism through which whites viewed blacks. Mosley builds characters who, over time, become as familiar and as real as distant friends, yet -- like real people -- they're still capable of surprising behavior. For Easy Rawlins fans, Little Green is worth reading to discover the new stage of his life that Easy has reached. This is a mellower, more optimistic Easy, one who is finally coming to terms with his difficult life, one who, having been reborn, is starting over (just as, in many senses, the country was doing).

It's a given that Mosley's dynamic prose will sweep a reader along from his first word to his last. The plot of Little Green, on the other hand, is less engrossing than Mosley has delivered on his better days. The story moves at a steady pace but it never soars. There are so many backstories in play that they tend to overshadow the central plot. The voodoo medicine that keeps Rawlins going is a silly distraction. Yet Mosley has always been a chronicler of the human condition, and if the plot is unexciting, it nonetheless has revelatory moments that illuminate the darkness within his characters, as well as their struggles to overcome it. Little Green is ultimately a story about a changing world, one that offers more hope than despair. Viewed in that light, the novel is a modest success.

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