Book roundup

A month ago, in large part because of the sports-to-TV time ratio of the Olympics clocking in at about one-to-five, I took a break from my remedial excursions into 19th century British literature to reacquaint myself with good ol'-fashioned American paperback novels from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Let's jam through this.

I don't know where Recoil falls in Jim Thompson's bibliography*, but it reads like an early work foreshadowing his zenith when novels such as The Killer Inside Me flowed like wine! The story's more than a little diverting: a small-time bank robber is sprung from prison, where he's serving what amounts to an unlimited sentence, by an influential lobbyist in a Rust Belt town. In exchange for what appears to be nothing, our pleasantly unprepossessing hood is given a job, a car, a room, and fashionable clothes. This leaves him understandably suspicious.

Though the ending involves a distressing amount of expositional dialogue spoken by characters all in one room - which is why it seems like a novel published before Thompson's weird denouement period - the protagonist's common-sense paranoia keeps the story moving nicely.

I can only imagine what someone under 40 would make of Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon. The story, told in diary form, of an intellectually disabled adult who transforms into the biggest genius this side of Albert Einstein Nietzche Oppenheimer Burton thanks to a miracle of medical science, isn't objectionable by itself. But kIdZ these daze seem to make a BFD out of many nouns and adjectives, so words like "retardation," et. al., might act as a sort of turd in what otherwise is an interesting if melancholic punchbowl of sci-fi writing**. (It didn't occur to me until I was finished that the book was considered sci-fi - though it obviously is - because of its dearth of aliens, robots, and ray guns.)

There's a certain amount of medical and intellectual mumbo jumbo used to signify "genius," but the novel makes an interesting point once you get past the fluff - to what extent does profound change to one's person really change someone as a person in his totality. My answer: I don't know!

Tishomingo Blues is yet another endlessly entertaining novel by Elmore Leonard. A bit windier than his earlier stuff to no deleterious effect, it's a crime caper where the less the reader knows, the better. Suffice it to say the setting for criminal act is as funny and original as anything I've ever read. It's a good thing crooks don't read much because it doesn't defy credulity to see the plan working under modified circumstances.

Somewhat less compelling is Samuel Delaney's Nova, a novel which I'm told put Delaney on the Hugo Award trail to greatness. It's not that it's bad - two sides battle it out with spaceships, ray guns, and extensive jargon over a source of primal energy that will enable the victor to rule the galaxy - so much as it's a single-minded expression of literary competence. Like Joanna Russ's Picnic on Paradise, you could do worse.

Finally, between these novels and a stemwinding bio of Henry Clay (by Robert Remini), an engaging history of the Mongols (The Mongol Storm by Nicholas Morton), and a Dos Passos novel (a James Joyce-lite number The 42nd Parallel, the first of his USA Trilogy), I had to lighten things up with one of P.G. Wodehouse's collection of golf stories, The Heart of a Goof. I've watched golf. I've listened to people talk about golf. I've even played golf.

So I know nothing about golf, but I didn't let that get in the way and am glad of it. Wodehouse's comic thesis is everything short of love is a secondary consideration to 18 holes and he gets considerable mileage out of it. As ever, the three-act stories unfold with great wit and cleverness, while he creates vivid characters using only a paragraph or two, though he occasionally recycles them from other stories. (There are two butlers not named Jeeves who are awfully reminiscent of Bertie Wooster's accomplice.)

But it's his asides that leave me giggling. He describes a London apartment, now inhabited by a couple with one son, Braid, on the outs with each other: "There was a nice bedroom for Jane, a delightful cupboard for Braid Vardon, and a cosy corner behind a Japanese screen for William. Most compact."

*I'm not looking it up.

**The novel is most famous for what it spawned - the 1968 flick Charly starring Cliff Robertson as the manboy turned rocket scientist. Though it left me in tears as a child, it is now most famous for the notion, articulated by Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, of not going "full-retard" in a cinematic performance of an intellectually challenged person. Robertson goes full-retard in his performance, at times beyond, and was rewarded with an Oscar. Others have not subsequently been so indulged.