The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

Published by Bloomsbury USA on November 13, 2012

A woman who should be content with her marriage instead feels insecure and makes needless drama for her husband. A man maps the course of his self-destructive downfall and then feels sorry for himself, in part because he has alienated his son. Given the chance to join her daughter's celebration of her forthcoming marriage, a mother instead spends her time moping and brooding and, yes, creating drama for her poor daughter. Awash in self-pity, these gloomy characters from Belfast visit Amsterdam on the same weekend. I'm surprised the city survives.

Marion and Richard are taking a break from the business they own to spend a weekend in Amsterdam. Marion is obsessively and irrationally annoyed by Richard, a form of madness to which she is driven by her feelings of inadequacy. She is convinced that Richard is having, or is preparing to have, an affair with one of their employees. Marion responds to her fears in a way that struck me as utterly ridiculous, the sort of contrivance that would appear only in a novel, never in real life.

Also visiting Amsterdam is Karen, who works as a cleaner in a Belfast retirement home. Karen's daughter Shannon is having a "hen party" in Amsterdam before her wedding, an event that requires Karen to dress as an Indian on the flight and during the first night of partying. Karen might be the most complex of the book's characters, both in her relationship with her daughter (the nature of which she can't quite grasp) and in her inability to understand her own behavior. Karen's bitterness leads her to make the sort of self-indulgent proclamation that has fueled many a soap opera: if Shannon's father is invited to Shannon's wedding, Karen refuses to attend.

Alan is an art professor who lost his marriage over a brief dalliance with a graduate student. Alan's wife Susan wants to move to Spain to open a guest-house (doesn't everyone?), but the weekend she schedules to look at a property is the weekend Alan plans to spend in Amsterdam, attending a Bob Dylan concert. Alan charitably agrees to take their troubled sixteen-year-old, Jack, with him, thus freeing Susan to spend the weekend in Spain with the man Alan and Jack both depise. Jack is moody and withdrawn; he treats his parents with scorn. The sections of the novel that feature Alan and Jack focus on Alan's frustration as he attempts to connect with his son. Although their story is familiar and not particularly insightful, it at least feels authentic.

The characters come within sight of each other at the airport and cross paths from time to time as the novel progresses. The pace slows after the characters arrive in Amsterdam, as if David Park needed to give each of them something to do but didn't quite know what. Alan repeatedly runs into Karen and seems interested in her when any rational man would flee from her at top speed. Their interaction is all that ties the three stories together, yet it doesn't amount to much.

The story is marred by page after page of mind-numbing exposition as Park tells us what his characters are thinking -- and they are always thinking, always about themselves. The characters are introspective to a stupefying degree. They come packaged with soap opera quality backstories and they all seem intent on injecting needless drama into their lives. Perhaps the characters accurately represent the self-absorption of a significant percentage of the population, but the novel has little to say about them that isn't obvious, which makes reading about them a tedious enterprise.

Having vented my frustration with the book's characters, I should note that there are some aspects of The Light of Amsterdam that I admired. Sullen and resentful, afraid of doing the slightest thing that might call attention to himself, Jack is a keen portrayal of a teenager who is the embodiment of angst. Park's prose is lucid and his dialog is realistic. In the end, however, the story seems pointless, amounting to unresolved slices of wearisome lives, and the abrupt ending is bizarre.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

First published in 1956

Robert Heinlein is one of the legends of science fiction for a simple reason:  he was a masterful storyteller.  There have been finer prose stylists, and a few sf writers have crafted novels of greater power than Heinlein's, but rare are the authors who have so consistently grabbed a reader and commanded rapt attention from the first scene to the last, in novel after novel.  Double Star isn't one of Heinlein's best novels, but it was good enough to win a Hugo, Heinlein's first.

Spaceman Dak Broadbent hires Lornzo Smythe to impersonate a man.  Although Lorenzo is a talented actor (just ask him!), he is more of a con artist than an accomplished thespian.  Before Dak can explain the role, Dak and Lorenzo are fleeing, having killed a Martian and a human during a shootout.  The individual Lorenzo is to impersonate turns out to an important politician -- important to Earth's relationship with Mars and to the Expansionist Party's future.  As you would expect in politics, betrayal motivated by unrealized ambition threatens exposure of Dak's scheme.  Can Lorenzo get away with it?  That's the question that drives the plot and captivates the reader.

If we're confident today that there are no Martians on Mars, it's still fun to imagine the future as Heinlein saw it:  a colonized moon and outer planets, space yachts, the strange customs of Martians and Venusians, and all the other trappings of 1950s science fiction that Heinlein helped create.  It is a future that his characters, who are living in it, naturally take for granted -- unlike some current, ego-driven sf authors who can't resist bogging down their narratives with detailed descriptions of the technological advances they envision.

Heinlein, of course, loved to pontificate, and Lorenzo's crash course in politics gave Heinlein a chance to opine on a variety of topics, from philosophy to moral instruction, from economics to political equality.  Not surprisingly, the freedom-heavy political model that Lorenzo adopts mirrors Heinlein's own:  free trade, free travel, a minimalist approach to lawmaking, the primacy of the individual (balanced by the individual's understanding that functioning communities require self-sacrifice).  Yet Heinlein's gift was his ability to put story first.  His characters pontificate because, in the context of the story, it's the natural thing for them to do.  Their opinions never get in the way of the story; in fact, they often advance it.  Heinlein always managed to convey heavy opinions with a light touch, a technique that few authors have managed with such skill.

Politics, Lorenzo learns, is a game often suited to dirty players, but what if an election is based on a hoax?  Yes, I know, conspiracy theorists and party hacks are always claiming that elections are based on hoaxes, making Double Star a novel that will always be timely.  But is it a great novel?  Double Star is an entertaining send-up of politics, making the point in stark terms that great politicians are great actors, that the difference between performance and reality is often blurred to obscurity, but the novel lacks the depth of Heinlein's best work.  The ending is a little too obvious, a little too easy.  Even second-tier Heinlein, though, is a better read than most authors can manage.  Double Star is an unpadded novel written in a breezy, fast-moving style.  More than a half century after it was written, it is a novel that both sf fans and readers of political fiction can continue to enjoy.

RECOMMENDED

Crashed by Timothy Hallinan

 

Self-published in 2010; published by Soho Crime on November 13, 2012

Some crime novels are just fun. Crashed is one of those. It's also smart, absorbing, and fast-moving. Timothy Hallinan does everything a writer should do whose goal is to keep a reader entertained from the first sentence to the last.

Crashed was originally self-published as an ebook, apparently because Hallinan's editors at HarperCollins can't recognize good writing when they see it and thus turned it down. Hallinan had the good sense to jump to Soho Crime, which has published Crashed and will soon publish the next two books in the series. The books deserve the wider audience that they'll now have.

Junior Bender is commissioned to steal a painting. The robbery goes spectacularly wrong, culminating in Bender's kidnapping at gunpoint and eventual delivery to Trey Annunziato, a young woman who is managing an enormously profitable criminal enterprise. Trey needs Bender to find out who is sabotaging the most successful porn flick that will ever be made, featuring a former child sitcom star named Thistle Downing. Trey both blackmails and threatens Bender to assure his cooperation.

Who is responsible for the sabotage? Who killed Bender's friend while the friend was watching Thistle's apartment? Why do two girls keep popping up and running away? The story works well as a mystery and it's sufficiently goofy to work as light comedy. One of the mysteries (the killer's identity) is resolved in a surprising way about three-fourths of the way into the novel, quickly followed by an explanation of the two girls. The solution to the mystery of the saboteur's identity isn't entirely unexpected, but the novel's resolution is immensely satisfying.

It's difficult to make a washed-up Hollywood junkie into a sympathetic character, but Hallinan does that with Thistle, in part by giving the reader a glimpse of Thistle's journal, a mad howl of anguish and despair coupled with a sincere desire for a better life, and in part by letting us see Thistle's downfall through the eyes of her sympathetic TV mom (her real mom, by contrast, is a barracuda). Bender, of course, is also a likable character, despite his criminal propensities. He is, in fact, a criminal with a heart, and helping Trey assure that Thistle makes a porn movie she detests causes Bender more than a few moral qualms. Despite the blackmail and threats, the reader knows that Bender will find a way to rescue Thistle.

Crashed is an unusual example of crime fiction in that the story is always believable. While other writers think shock and awe is the key to success, Hallinan knows that solid writing and appealing characters make a novel stand out. Hallinan's prose is lively and clever. This is light entertainment, the sort of novel that's often classed as a beach read, and it's an expertly crafted example of its type. Some of the scenes are played for laughs (Bender swinging from a chandelier, for instance) but Hallinan never goes so far over-the-top that the story loses credibility. Action scenes are underplayed, a refreshing departure from most crime fiction. Some scenes in Crashed are touching, many are amusing, one or two are surprisingly intense, and every bit of the tightly-plotted story is a joy to read.

RECOMMENDED

What's a Dog For? by John Homans

Published by Penguin Press on November 8, 2012 

"Canine science is intended to shed light not only on what makes dogs dogs but on what makes people people," says John Homans. What's a Dog For? reviews a wealth of canine science. Some of it pertains to wolves, the dog's genetic ancestor, but wolves don't necessarily tell us much about dogs, at least from a behavioral perspective. Some of it examines a dog's cognitive skills, including the ability to interpret human gestures. Some of it addresses the reasons people seek canine companionship. Dogs are a hedge against loneliness. Dogs are part of our families, but they also fill the gaps when our families disintegrate. When we gaze into a dog's eyes, our levels of oxytocin -- a hormone that promotes bonding and attachment --spike. Perhaps a dog's purpose is to sustain the mental health of dog lovers. While the health benefits of dog ownership are disputed, one study result stands out in my mind as being undeniably correct: dogs are better stress relievers than spouses.

We bestow honorary personhood upon dogs (at least the dogs we love), but are they entitled to it? The central question, according to Homans, is whether dogs, during the course of their long association with humans, have taken on human qualities. It's clear that dogs have developed communicative and cooperative abilities that surpass those of their ancestral wolves, but those abilities appear to be an outgrowth of tameness and are not necessarily unique to dogs (tame Siberian foxes, for instance, exhibit some of the same traits). But that may mean that dogs (and some other tame animals) are much like humans in this sense: they have evolved a capacity for cooperation that supplants the instinctive trait of competition. In other words, dogs are like humans because they are willing to look to others for help when they need it (and dogs need lots of help, given their inability to open the refrigerator by themselves). Like many other propositions advanced by canine scientists, this one is far from undisputed. In fact, canine science is a field that is riddled with disagreement. Homans offers a balanced view, taking care to interview scientists who have sharply differing opinions about canine evolution, canine intelligence, canine communication, and a host of other canine topics.

Of course, science only takes us so far. Scientists caution against anthropomorphism while dog lovers (including Charles Darwin) readily attribute human traits to their canine companions. Homans' survey of the research is filtered through his relationship with his dog Stella. He believes Stella experiences guilt and jealousy and that she has a sense of fairness (although her sense of fairness is skewed in her favor: "two treats for me, one for you"). Yet he understands that his yearning for a connection with Stella inclines him toward a bias. Of course Stella experiences human emotions. Of course she's smiling at her family members. Well, maybe she is and maybe she isn't. Separating anthropomorphism from rigorous analysis isn't easy.

Stella is part Labrador, so we learn a good bit about the history of Labs. This leads to a discussion of breeding for pedigree (which served the whims of the aristocracy rather than the needs of dogs) and dog shows (which an early breeder demeaned as "the greatest humbug in the world"). Homans also discusses the genetic basis for cross-breeding (to produce, for instance, hypoallergenic dogs) and the risk that such techniques will lead to puppy mills. He takes a look at stray dogs and the ethical controversy that surrounds the practice of euthanizing them, as well as the growing market for rescue dogs. All of this is interesting if familiar, but only tangentially relevant to the question posed by the book's title.

Of greater value, although not explored at length, is a section discussing cultural attitudes toward dogs. Although many dog owners treat their dogs as family members, many others (predominantly in the south) view dogs as property and consider themselves free to fill canvas bags with rocks and unwanted puppies and drop them off a bridge as a means of population control. "To many a southerner," Homans writes, "the notion that a dog is entitled to humanlike treatment is simply loopy." I don't want to disparage southerners, but I'd like to throw them off a bridge if they think they have the right to murder dogs. In any event, Homans makes the telling point that if dogs earn honorary personhood at the moment of adoption, the same rights of personhood should obtain at the moment of birth -- hence the need (even in the South) to regulate puppy mills and build no-kill shelters. Stella, in fact, traveled to a Long Island shelter from Tennessee -- a fortunate journey for both Stella and Homans.

The book concludes with a discussion of the growing consensus that animals deserve to be treated with empathy and compassion. This sets the stage for the ultimate question: To what extent should dogs have rights that override the owner's property rights? It is a broad question more easily asked than answered, and Homans' analysis -- focused largely on the euthanasia versus no-kill debate -- is a bit superficial.

Homans' prose is lively and evocative, making What's a Dog For? a pleasure to read. In the end, all of the historical and scientific information that Homans assembles is interesting and intellectually stimulating, but science and history do little to answer the philosophical question posed by the book's title. Homans addresses it in a final chapter that is both sweet and sad. To me, and to most dog owners, the answer is obvious. What's a dog for? I love my dog. That's what a dog's for.

RECOMMENDED

Wendolin Kramer by Laura Fernández

First published in Spain in 2011; published in translation by Barcelona eBooks on October 16, 2012

Wendolin Kramer frequently wears a Wondergirl costume (of sorts) and imagines herself as a superhero, a role for which she is not ideally suited. Nor is she a likely detective, although she advertises her services (using the name W. Kramer) and considers her bedroom to be her detective office. A potential client wants to hire Wen but believes W. Kramer is a man, forcing Wen to play the role of W. Kramer's secretary when she meets the client. Her adventures bring her into the literary world, where a blackmail scheme threatens to expose the truth about a revered writer.

Other significant characters include: Marvin Rodriguez, who runs a comic book store and has an abusive relationship with a life-size blowup doll named Mary Jane (Spiderman's girlfriend); Erlinda Largo, who has dedicated her feminist bookstore to a dead writer named Vendolin Woolfin; Francis Domino, a writer/detective/gigilo who intends to ruin publisher Roberta Glanton (who holds the publication rights to Woolfin's work) by telling a journalist the truth about Woolfin; Clay Gomez, a mediocre journalist and failed writer who must decide whether to publish the truth about Woolfin; and Donatelo Garcia, a canine psychiatrist.

The novel's most interesting character is a dog. Earl can't talk, but he maintains a running commentary on matters pertinent to dogs. Earl is unhappy that he has been forced to undergo psychoanalysis after an unfortunate incident with a poodle at a beauty contest.  This would have been a better novel if Earl had been given a more central role.

Reduced to its essence, the story has merit. Fans of the absurd might like the novel more than I did, but for my taste the novel's bizarre nature is annoying. Like her mother, Wen occasionally speaks in German for no apparent reason. Different characters call Earl by different names. Laura Fernández can't mention anyone's name (Tarantino, Hitchcock, Kirk Cameron) without explaining in simplistic terms who that person is.  That's supposed to be funny, I think, but it isn't.

At some points, the story is written as if it were a comic book, with parenthetical words like KOFF KOFF appearing when a character is coughing, just as you might see them in a comic (except in a comic they would probably be inked in red). Sentences regularly appear along the lines of: "It would blow their minds. BOOM." and "He scratched his chin (SKRITCH SKRITCH)." Reproducing comic book "sound effects" in that way is an interesting technique, but after awhile it becomes tedious.

There is a certain cleverness to the twisty plot. If the novel had been less absurd I would probably be able to work up some enthusiasm for it. Fernández has the potential to be an interesting storyteller. I'd like to see more of her work, but only if she omits the bothersome elements that mar this novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED