Magruder's Curisoity Cabinet a Worthy Coney Island Novel

MAGRUDER’S CURIOSITY CABINET (2016)

H.P. Wood

Sourcebooks Landmark, 368 pp.

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I’m fascinated by novels about Coney Island. I can’t explain why, though I’m hardly alone in my obsession; H. P. Wood’s debut novel is the third in the past three years to tackle Brooklyn’s den of pleasure, thrills, and iniquity. A short list of superb novels about Coney Island includes: Kevin Baker, Dreamland (1999); Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo (2004); Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014); and Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels (2015). I jumped at the chance provided by NetGalley to preview Wood’s entrée into the Coney Island oeuvre and was glad I did. Objectively speaking, Ms. Wood’s novel isn’t of the quality of any of the aforementioned and, it must be said, Magruder’s, her central setting, is highly derivative of Hoffman’s Museum of Extraordinary Things. But Wood spins a wonderful tale, which she tells with a deft mix of period values and modern sensibilities, as befits the imagined history around which the action takes place.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why Coney Island is so seductive, I’d say it’s because it’s long been a liminal zone between tawdriness and over-civilization. Drifters, grifters, and desperadoes once populated Norton’s Point--now the hoity-toity gated community of Sea Gate--and few from the carriage trade came to Coney until the 1840s. That launched the era of grand hotels, which was soon challenged by amusement parks that catered to a heterosocial set. Wood sets her novel in 1904, the year Dreamland opened to compete with Steeplechase (1897) and Luna (1903) parks. Amusement parks and hot competition threw a spanner into hopes of taming Coney Island, which became a veritable stationary carnival filled with mechanical wonders, breathtaking rides, sideshow acts, con artists, and show-biz types far removed from the legitimate stage. The glitzy parks and their high-powered barkers also spelled trouble for longtime down-market attractions such as Magruder’s, which were their day’s version of Ripley’s museums: a few marvels, some anthropological oddities, and lots of things that seemed to be too weird to be true and weren’t!

The novel pivots around Kitty Hayward, a young English woman who became separated from her mother, after their boat was quarantined. She is naïve, alone, hungry, and homeless, but receives assistance from an unlikely source: Archie, an ageing huckster who feeds her and takes her to Magruder’s after she inadvertently helps him pull a grift. There Kitty enters the world of the “Unusuals,” the name the assorted “freak show” acts assume for themselves. The cast at Magruder’s includes Zeph, a tart-tongued legless black man who zips around in a special cart designed by Doc Timur, the mad genius behind Magruder’s; Enzo, whose face is badly burned on one side; Rosalind, a transvestite man who identifies as a woman and has the hots for Enzo; and P-Ray, a seemingly mute Turkish boy who collects fleas for the Cabinet circus. Soon their little gang will be joined by two unlikely compatriots: Spencer, an arrogant rich boy fascinated by the automaton at Magruder’s, and his date, Nazan, a beautiful upper-class woman of Turkish extraction. All will spend quite a bit of time together when all of Coney Island is quarantined due to a deadly outbreak of “The Cough,” a strain of bubonic/pneumonic plague. That last part is purely imagined, though had Wood set her book in 1918-19, the influenza epidemic induced similar hysteria.

The novel plays out like a cross between Escape from New York, Day of the Locust, and Station Eleven-a mix of panic, impending apocalypse, and the will to survive. Wood keeps our interest throughout her ahistorical plot because she builds such memorable characters that we want them to preserve even when we find the externals implausible. This is especially true of Zeph; were this a play, we’d say he stole the show. It also helps that Wood introduces splashes of Keystone Kops-like humor. There’s even some romance, but probably not the kind you expected.

If you don’t share my love of Coney Island novels and think you can only stomach one, it should be Hoffman’s magisterial Museum of Ordinary Things, or Hall’s gritty The Electric Michelangelo. But I say there’s always a place for another good book on just about anything and Magruder’s Curiosity Cabinet is like the rides of Coney Island—a cheap thrill in which you’ll be glad to have indulged. --Rob Weir

Josienne Clarke Scores Again on Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour

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JOSIENNE CLARKE and BEN WALKER

Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour (2014/download only in USA)

Folkroom Records

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You've heard me say it before, but I'll repeat it: Josienne Clarke is the next Sandy Denny. She and her guitar sidekick Ben Walker have won all manner of awards in Britain after their stunning 2013 release Fire and Fortune and that's as it should be. It also means that some serious cash was thrown into the follow-up, Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour. That's mostly a good thing, but sometimes the extra production gets in the way of the two things we want to hear most: Ms. Clarke's voice and Mr. Walker's accomplished acoustic guitar. The newest record is filled with cello, viola, fiddle, sax, flute, oboe, piano, trumpet, French horn and double bass, yet somehow the tracks that linger most are the simplest ones.

Clarke stretches her repertoire on this album on material that sounds time-tested, yet only three of the thirteen tracks are traditional, and Clarke penned the rest. Let's just add songwriting to her list of talents, shall we? The album opens with the elegant "Silverline," which has the lilt of a ballad from the Romantic Age and a passel of strings to enhance that feel. Clarke shows off a soprano voice that has clarity few can match. (Judy Collins comes to mind). Then she deftly cuts to the aptly named "A Simple Refrain," that is mostly her voice, Walker's backing falsetto, and his tasteful riffs. Then it's "I Would Not Be a Rose," that will start the Sandy Denny debates anew. It's also a Clarke original, though you'll swear it's drawn from a traditional well. And so it goes for another ten glorious tracks. As noted, Clarke does break out of the folk goddess mold from time to time. She gets a tad jazzy on "I Never Learned French," tosses in a bit of Americana giddy up on "Moving Speeches," and is downright torchy on "Water to Wine." But what she does best is use that supple voice of hers to make us weep, weep, weep. Check out the drop-dead gorgeousness of the melody of "The Tangled Tree." And then there are those three trads—"I Wonder What's Keeping My True Love Tonight," "Queen of Hearts," and "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme." The first of these was covered by Kate Rusby and it's not a patch on what Clarke has done with it—Clarke's that good! Clarke and Walker go Renaissance court music on "Queen of Hearts," complete with recorder interludes. "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" is an old song also known as "Spring of Thyme" and refers to a warning to maidens to protect their virginity. Among the many who have sung this are Anne Briggs, actress Carey Mulligan, and Jacqui McShee, but few have done so with Clarke's innocence or her ability to convey enormous power and fragility in the same breath.

The only thing that prevents me from declaring Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour a masterpiece is my sense that, like just about every artist who has gone this route, at some point in the future Clarke and Walker are likely to see it as overdone in places. (I'd concur on "Mainland" and "Earth and Ash and Dust.") Put another way, you don't need a beer chaser if someone hands you a perfect single-malt. Do I gush over Josienne Clarke? Guilty as charged. Take a listen and join me on the crying stool.

Rob Weir

Lucy Barton is More Lightweight than Englightening

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MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (2016)

By Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 208 pp.

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In her review for the New York Times Claire Messud asserted that wasn't "a scintilla of sentimentality" in Elizabeth Strout's latest. She's right—it's not a scintilla (speck); it's a boulder. I suppose we can say that its namesake protagonist finds something of herself by the novel's end, but the passive Lucy Barton is no Olive Kitteridge. Lucy Barton has been hyped to the skies, but my reading of it is that it's manipulative and lightweight. If you want me to believe that Lucy is any sort of role model for women, you'd better give that character better nicknames than "Wizzle" and "Button" and a life that doesn't live down to those handles.

At its best it is a book about tough love, the meaning of "home," and the search for self. We first meet Lucy in a New York City hospital bed during the 1980s—gravely ill from an unnamed infection. She yearns for her young daughters, who are kept at bay, and for affection from her cold fish husband who is "too busy" to visit her in the hospital. Instead she gets her mother, whom she hasn't seen for years and who flies to New York from the family home near Amgash, Illinois, to spend five days at Lucy' bedside. Their conversations take up the bulk of the book and, in dribbles punctuated by gossip about people Lucy barely recalls, we get flashbacks about Lucy's childhood before she fled Illinois for college and a writer's life in Manhattan. The conversations are, on the surface, mostly banal, but I got the point. They reminded me of strained chit-chat I used to have with my own parents after I moved away–complete with feigning interest in the lives of people whose names I didn't actually remember at all. So far, so good. But as we unveil the meatier dribbles and they reveal a childhood marred by poverty of the abusive variety, one begins to wonder why Lucy's mother is there in the first place. Is this some twisted attempt at atonement? Delayed parenting? Are we being set up to muse upon the question of whether biology is destiny? If so, good luck determining whether Lucy is an apple from the tree, or a hybrid graft that blossomed elsewhere.

I suspect the book is really about home–is it where you were raised, or where you put down roots? Is it about what makes you feel connected, or what brings you meaning? Is it the antidote for loneliness? Or is it something you find within, not on a map? Once Lucy leaves the hospital, the next four decades elide in the novel in a Whitman's Sampler of things that shape (reshape?) Lucy. I liked Lucy much better toward the end, but I found Strout's elision unconvincing and thin. Several flawed mentors appear—Jeremy in the 1980s and writer Sara Payne at other junctures–but it's ambiguous what Lucy takes from either aside from a few aphorisms. Nor did Strout offer enough to convince me that Lucy was a person who made things happen rather than one who just learned to roll with life's punches. I found Lucy cloyingly passive in the first part of the book, annoyingly so on too many levels later in life, yet inexplicably resilient in other ways. As much as I wanted to feel sympathy for the bad hands she was dealt, too many of the lessons Lucy draws felt like solipsism rather that self-discovery.

 I generally deplore the label "chick-lit," but I haven't felt this much gender manipulation since I reached the midpoint of Eat Pay Love, hurled it across the room, and never opened it again. Okay—maybe there's a mother-daughter thing going on in Lucy Barton that I just don't get, but before you call out the feminist hounds, ask yourself how you'd react to a father-son book written in such a frilly way. I loved Strout's Olive Kitteridge because Olive was everything Lucy Barton isn't: outwardly smart, assertive, self-contained, and principled. She's cranky, but she also has a moral center that didn't revolve around herself. Lucy Barton? Well—at least her story was short enough that I actually finished it.     Rob Weir

Midnight Plan of the Repo Man a Delicious Read

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THE MIDNIGHT PLAN OF THE REPO MAN (2014)

W. Bruce Cameron

Forge Books, 334 pages

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I’ve wanted to read this novel for quite a while, but the library wait list was so long I simply bought a copy. Now I understand why the demand is so high. The Midnight Plan isn’t exactly path-breaking literature, but it sure is a satisfying read. It is, at turns, social commentary, a ghost story, a murder mystery, a romance, and a black comedy. It’s also surprisingly well plotted (even when implausible) for a writer hitherto known mainly as a humor writer specializing in dog/human connections and disconnections.

The book’s protagonist is Ruddy McCann, a former college football superstar destined for an NFL career. That dream disintegrated in a single bad night in which circumstance, poor judgment, and bad luck aligned in a perfect storm. Now he’s 30, single, and living in the backwater town of Kalkaska, Michigan, in an unkempt bachelor pad he shares with an elderly dog named Jake. The bright lights of the NFL have given way to late nights: Ruddy is a repo man for a local collector/small-time operator, and doubles as a bouncer and co-manager at his sister Becky's not-very-successful bar and club. Shall we say that neither job is anyone’s idea of the fast track? Ruddy has become, simultaneously, an object of pity and a big fish in a small pond that includes characters such as malaprop-prone Kermit; hunky, dumb-as-a-brick and naïve-as-a-kitten Jimmy; and the lovely Katie, who may or may not be interested in Ruddy.

As we learn, Ruddy’s repo work—mostly cars in auto-crazed/cash-poor/post-industrial Michigan—is a combination of dullness, danger, tact, daring, and sleaziness. It’s fueled by adrenaline and caffeine and it's so stressful that it has its own associated malady: “Repo Madness,” a variety of slow nervous breakdown marked by squirrely behavior, insularity, and under-the-breath muttering. Ruddy is pretty sure he has it when a voice appears in his head and claims to be that of Alan Lottner, a dead realtor who has no idea how he has come to be inside Ruddy’s body.  Alan becomes a combination mentor, superego, nag, and major inconvenience, but somebody needs to help Ruddy think beyond his next repo job. And, as it turns out, Alan needs Ruddy’s help as well––he’s pretty sure he was murdered, but by whom and why? There’s your murder mystery connection, and Cameron spins a dizzy little swirl that involves swindle, infidelity, real estate, and small-town graft. 

Of course, none of Cameron’s tale is pure fantasy. This book isn’t intended to be anything other than what it purports to be: a frothy read. Cameron concocts memorable characters about whom we care, even though we know that their circumstances are implausible and the action set-ups equally improbable. People do really dumb stuff in this book, but we appreciate it, because we harbor gnawing suspicions that our own foibles are only a few degrees separated from theirs.  Ruddy thinks he does his best repo work after midnight, though we quickly discover that’s part of the self-deception he needs to jettison. But then there’s Ruddy’s Alan Lottner alter ego to remind us that we’re often not the best judges of our own strengths and weaknesses. Credit Cameron for making us laugh at all of this.

I ripped through this book like it was a package of opened Oreos sitting beside a glass of milk. Add this one to your summer-read list. Take it to the beach, curl up on your beach chair like lazy old Jake, and gobble it.  Rob Weir

High Mountains of Portugal Needlessly Obtuse

THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL (2015)

Yann Martel

Spiegel & Grau, 353 pp.

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Those who've read Yann Martel's 2002 Man Brooker Prize-wining The Life of Pi know that he thinks animals communicate with humans in deep, unspoken ways. That theme was evident also in his third book, Beatrice and Virgil, and it's repeated in The High Mountains of Portugal. This one has been highly praised by critics, but I found it a work with more valleys than peaks.  

Martel is a hard-to-categorize writer as his work has elements of magical realism, but doesn't really fit that bill. In his latest, it's often hard to know whether Martel is spinning fantasy, metaphor, allegory, or just cloaked self-indulgence. High Mountains is decidedly a meditation upon grief, belief, solitude, faith, anguish, and mystery. Its structure is that three interlocking novellas, each set roughly 30 years apart. I was amused by the first, baffled by the second, and mildly touched by the third, though the last felt contrived. It centers on three men, each of whom has lost a wife. Each is going through the motions, but is essentially an empty husk from which meaning has been wrenched. Empty vessels, of course, can be refilled. Sort of.

Part one is set in 1904, and its protagonist, a Portuguese museum curator named Tomàs, is so damaged by the death of his wife and son that he walks backward everywhere he goes–as if he's literally turning his back on God. Purposefulness of a sort comes reenters his life when he discovers a medieval diary from an obscure priest that mentions having deposited a great treasure at an unspecified chapel in the High Mountains of Portugal. Already Martel is having us on a bit, as his "high mountains" are not the Serra da Estrela of central Portugal, rather in the far northeast corner of Portugal near Bragança and the Spanish border, which is a grassy plain that Martel populates with oddly shaped boulders. Tomàs decides to find the treasure, with the vague goal of brining it back to the museum and with the implied goal of perhaps restoring his faith. He prevails upon a rich relative, who loans a 1904 14 hp Renault, one of the first motorcars seen in the country, though Tomàs hasn't the foggiest idea of how to operate it and there are few paved roads outside of Lisbon. I enjoyed this part of the book tremendously. Let's call it an eventful journey–and a very funny one to boot, despite a tragedy at its heart. Without giving away a thing I tell you that neither the fate of the car nor the treasure is expected. I also enjoyed this section because of Martel's precise geographical descriptions of places I've actually been.

None of this prepared me for part two, set in 1938, where Eusebio, a pathologist and Agatha Christie enthusiast, holds imaginary debates with his deceased wife. This sad, but familiar ritual is interrupted by an ancient woman who comes to his lab carrying the body of her dead husband in a suitcase and demands an on-the-spot autopsy, which she insists upon witnessing. Shall we say that the grand opening unveils unexpected things?

Part three unfolds in the late 1960s, where a widowed Canadian politician, Senator Peter Tovy, engages in an ambassadorial visit that takes him to an Oklahoma primate research center. Within weeks he decides to resign his post, purchase a lab chimpanzee (Odo), and move to a village in the High Mountains of Portugal, where he and Odo share a house and are treated as residents. This section is also amusing and affecting, but it feels like a forced completion of a triptych. The ending, I presume, is allegorical, though I'm not sure of what.

Albrecht Durer (1515)--He never actually saw a rhino

That ending is one of several things that feel self-indulgent. Chimps factor into all three sections, but why? Are we supposed to see humans as thinly haired primates so lost in their own self-centeredness that they have lost sight of what is of value? Muse upon our curse of living in the past rather than the present? Think upon the uneasy relationship between nature and faith? Reflect upon the curse of grief? Conclude that Nietzsche was right about God? Or do I give Martel too much credit? The book also contains references to the Portuguese rhinoceros, but these make no sense at all other than the fact that wooly rhinos were there 150,000 years ago. Martel's ploy is more likely either a reference to a sketch made by Albrecht Dűrer in 1515, or to the gift of a rhino made to King Sebastian in 1577. If this sounds to you like thin soil for a metaphor, I'd agree. Overall, The High Mountains of Portugal reads too much like an author penning thoughts for himself rather than an external audience.

Rob Weir

Cowboy Junkies Live at the Belly Up: June Album of the Month

THE COWBOY JUNKIES

Live at the Belly Up (2015)

Noisetrade https://noisetrade.com/cowboyjunkies/live-at-the-belly-up

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A few ago, I was famous for a New York minute for teaching a college-level course on the Grateful Dead. (Put aside your outrage: It was really just a hook for exploring recent US history.) Even now, someone—students, media, a person I met at a conference—corners me to ask, "What's your favorite jam band?" They expected me to name groups like Phish, Assembly of Dust, Umphrey's McGee, or String Cheese Incident, but my answer is: The Cowboy Junkies. Students often reply, "Who?" It's a fair question in an unfair world. The CJs, after all, are Canadian and haven't charted in the U.S. since 1994. Those a bit older may recall that their "Sweet Jane" rose as high as # 5 on the pop charts back in 1989*, and that "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning" went to #11 the next year. That's a long time ago, I suppose, but the Junkies never went away: 17 studio albums, 9 live albums, 4 compilations, and 10 singles in the past 26 years.

Let me go a step further. If you ask me to name the best jam band of all time, I'm tempted to say The Cowboy Junkies. Before you call me nuts, here's the deal of the century: go to Noisetrade's Website, and for a suggested "tip" of $5 you can download a 2014 concert from the Belly Up in San Diego whose 12 tracks sample from various CJ releases from 1988 through 2012. One of the things you'll hear on this and the band's other live albums is that, unlike the Dead, the Junkies never gave a bad performance and they continued to grow as they got older. The other thing you'll hear is lead singer Margo Timmins and if you never have before, you'll curse those who've kept her a secret from you. I like to think of her as a singer with the husk, power, and sexiness of Janis Joplin, but with the control of Grace Slick. You'll also hear that, like the Dead, the Junkies' repertoire draws from psychedelia, the blues, country, and jazz. In fact, on acid rock offerings such as "Sweet Jane," "Wrong Piano,"** and "Hunted," you can mentally time travel up the coast to the Bay Area and imagine yourself at the Fillmore circa 1967 (except the sound quality will be better)—fuzzed out electric guitar, reverb, sonic walls through whose cracks liquid guitar notes pore, robust swirls, and bring-me-up-ease-me-down arrangements. Check out also the country blues vibe of "MisguidedAngel," *** which is the sort of song Joplin would have sung, but maybe not as well as Ms. Timmins. It's about a woman in love with a bad boy. She knows the relationship is an addiction and won't end well, but she's all in. Timmins grinds out the pathos, but she never goes over the top, which heightens her vulnerability.

On the latter score, many CJ songs deal with women in precarious, even dangerous, situations, but her women are more complex than mere victims. Add solid songwriting to the list of CJ virtues. How about this line from "Sun Comes Up…:" Lunchtime. I start to dial your number/then I remember and reach for something to smoke/and anyways, I'd rather listen to Coltrane/than go through all that shit again.  Or this one from "Misguided Angel:" Telephone's ringing but I don't answer it/'Cause everyone knows that good news always sleeps till noon.

If you can buy a better album than this one for five bucks, buy two and I'll reimburse you for the second, plus shipping. Buy this record folks. Then get out your floodlight, shine it through a glass pie plate filled with veggie oil, drop some colored water onto the surface, crank up the Junkies, turn off the room lights, swirl the pan, and groove. You can enhance your time travel by listening to songs that take down hucksters and a lot of crap that used to be dismissed as "plastic." Peace, brothers and sisters.

Rob Weir   

*Oddly, "Sweet Jane" never charted for Lou Reed, though he wrote it. It first appeared on a Velvet Underground album in 1970 and didn't make it onto the rock/pop charts because the Underground eschewed commercialism. Reed released it as a solo single in 1974, but it never cracked the top 100. Today, of course, it's an iconic Reed song, but he always claimed that the Cowboy Junkies' version was the best he ever heard.

** "Wrong Piano" was written by a sadly neglected musician, Vic Chestnutt (1964-2009), who was paralyzed in an auto accident in 1982, but continued to write and perform until his untimely death at 45.  

*** On this clip, Timmins shares the song with Natalie Merchant. Wish I had been a fly on the wall for that one! 

Maarja Nuut :Avant-Garde Fiddle from Estonia

MAARJA NUUT

Une Meeles

www.maarjanuut.com

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Estonia is a Baltic nation that isn't Scandinavian, but has been controlled by Danes and Swedes (as well as Russia). At times its wild keening vocals sound Balkan, but they're not. At times, the exuberance of fiddlers such as Maarja Nuut sounds Finnish, though that's incidental and the only thing really Finnish about Estonians is that they share common language roots. Why the geography lesson? Because Maarja Nuut's music is hard to pin down; it will remind you of lots of things, without really being any of them. Especially given the fact that her tastes run more toward the avant-garde than the folk wellspring. Consider, for instance, a song titled "Kiik Tabab Kindaid," which translates "The Swing Wants Mittens." A lot of fiddle tunes have odd names, but this one personifies the swing, muses on marriage, and the composition unfolds beneath, then above, a field recording of humming cellphone cables. Nutt's strings squeal in resonance with the cables, then drop to a drone to accompany primal vocals. Memo: This is not for die-hard traditionalists.

At every step of the way Nuut challenges, pushes sonic borders, and at times begs the question: What is music? "Kargus" opens to a saw-like barrage of notes that reduce in volume and become something that sounds to my ear like a drone/triplet hybrid. Nutt this time uses a light melodic voice to add contrast. "Sammud" is a waltz, but one looped to body moment and the tune's namesake "Footsteps." Add some plucked notes and we hear scraping and tapping feet, a 1-2-3 cadence, and a lovely little melody all at once. The effect is hypnotic. It's oddly delicate, as opposed to the free-spirited and wilder feel of "Kuradipolka" ("The Devil's Polka").  It too has a repeating thread of notes, but these serve to fray the tune rather than unify it. High notes drift to the edge of our aural comfort zone and then the entire piece ends abruptly. Or would you prefer some unbridled village-like rapid-fire vocalizations and some clip-clop percussion? Check out "Hobusemäng" ("The Horse Game"), which apparently is a variation of a ritual game linked to casting spells. In other words, Maarja Nuut's music is a flight into places where reality, magic, experimentation, programming, and dreams collide–appropriate for a project whose Estonian title means "In the Hold of a Dream." Like most avant-garde projects, this one will confuse some listeners and induce wonder in others. Place me in the second camp. 

Here's a YouTube sampler of this unusual artist.

Rob Weir