Death of the Black-Haired Girl a Cut above Standard Thrillers

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DEATH OF THE BLACK-HAIRED GIRL (2013)

Robert Stone

Houghton-Mifflin, 978-0618386239, 288 pp.  

* * *

Robert Stone gained literary fame when Dog Soldiers won a National Book Award in 1975. Back then he was known for having been on the fringes of both the counterculture and the gonzo journalism movements, though he wasn't really immersed in the first and wrote too coherently for the second. He did/does have the edge of gonzo journalists, though fiction has always been his métier.

Death of the Black-Haired Girl, his latest novel feels less weighty and important than his previous works but it's still a very good read that raises important considerations. On the surface it's a pretty simple book. Maud Stack is a beautiful, combative, student from Queens who is studying at a tony New England college because–in regional parlance–she's wicked smaht. That does not mean she always makes intelligent choices. For instance, she decides to take on the anti-abortion movement by writing an article that uses the same tactics against it: hyperbole, character assassination, incendiary language, and graphic images. She absolutely slanders the Catholic Church. Her mentor, English professor Stephen Brookman, has made some pretty dumb choices of his own. He's Maud's lover, though he is married to Ellie, a Mennonite woman and has one child and another on the way and can't find the inner strength to break with Maud. Nor did he talk her out of publishing her article. When Maud and Stephen have a confrontation on his doorstep, Maud steps into what was supposed to be a blocked-off street and is killed by a speeding hit-and-run driver. Did she walk into its path, or was she pushed? Accident or murder?

This may sound like a run-of-the-mill mystery thriller and so it is to some degree, but Stone has more depth than the average purveyor of pulp. It is a book about decisions and consequences. Maud is reckless in other ways. She frequents dives along the town's seedy wharf area, walks in areas known to be unsafe, doesn't avoid the mentally ill street people who lurk in the shadows of her campus, and is so self-righteous she absolutely refuses to exercise caution when her article yields death threats. Maybe it's a reaction against her father, Eddie, a beat cop who retired after 9/11 and spends his wallowing in guilt and being ineffectual.

Explorations of religious faith are a Stone staple. Death features dogma-blinded anti-abortionists, a scary Kentucky minister named Russell Fumes, Ellie's Mennonite beliefs, and a college counselor named Jo Carr who is an ex-nun who lost much but not all of her faith and worries that one of the crazies she sees wandering across campus may be the psychotic revolutionary priest she knew when working in Central America. Mainly she worries about Maud, post pre- and postmortem.

Stone also plumbs questions of madness and forces us to see the type that lurks on the surface and the varieties that linger within. The plot of this novel may owe something to a 1988 murder at Yale, and though the novel is set in a town called Amesbury, it sure feels like New Haven, CT, a place where the lines between order and chaos are exceedingly thin. (Stone also taught at Yale for a time, so it's certainly plausible to think New Haven was in his thoughts.)

 Not everything in this novel works. Maud's roommate, Southern-born actress Shelby Magoffin, isn't a well-realized character, and her ex-husband, John Clammer, is akin to a two-dimensional cardboard silhouette. The investigation into what happened to Maud–which involves her father and a former colleague–is pretty conventional, at least until Eddie and Stephen meet. But Stone is very good at showing the frisson between Maud and Stephen, and deliciously cold when members of the college must own the consequences of their inaction. Stone is at his Hawthorne-like best when reminding us that both action and non-action demand payment to the piper.

-Rob Weir

Benghazi, Bergdahl, and Bullshit

What does it tell you when she's more trustworthy than the GOP?

I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, but she’s the next coming of Socrates on the wisdom scale compared to moron Republicans that want to castigate her for the Benghazi tragedy or President Obama for the prisoner exchange that returned Bowe Bergdhal to the United States. Republican behavior has officially slithered across the line separating sleaziness from insanity.

In her new book, Clinton recalls how Republicans attempted to grill her over Benghazi. It’s small wonder they’re out there slandering her from afar, because she made mincemeat of them in the Senate chamber in 2013. When asked to clarify why Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in Benghazi she testily replied, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’ll go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?” If you think she’s apologizing for such a terse remark, think again. In her book she states categorically, “I will not be part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans.”

Republicans, of course, charge Mrs. Clinton with trying to dodge the consequences of her mistakes. Just like they accuse President Obama of not doing his homework before exchanging five Taliban terrorists held at Guantanamo for Sgt. Bergdhal, who might (pretty significant qualification) have abandoned his unit. “Bad trade!” they cry. Do Republicans really want to pursue either line of reasoning? Let’s do just that.

Let’s look at the Great American Faux Hero: Ronald Reagan. Let’s hunt down everyone still alive from his administration. We want to know about Lebanon. We want them to explain how it was possible to attack a U.S. facility in April of 1983 and kill 63, yes 63, Americans. And after such a senseless tragedy, how is it conceivable the Old Cowboy could be so friggin’ dumb as to allow a suicide bomber to wipe out 241—that’s two hundred and forty-one—Marines in their own barracks. Let’s dig up Ronnie and throw his bones to the dogs of war.

But wait! It gets worse. The USA tucked its tail between its legs and left Lebanon, but not before the terrorist group Hezbollah seized 14 hostages. Shall we discuss bad deals? One of the hostages was William Buckley (not the journalist), the head of CIA operations for the entire region. We wanted this dude back very badly. So Trader Ron opened secret channels with none other than Iran—the same Iran that seized 53 U.S. hostages just four years earlier. Team Reagan sent several planeloads of weapons to Iran for some cash--which was filtered via third parties to the Nicaraguan Contras-- and Iran’s promise to exert influence with Hezbollah to secure release of the hostages. Iran helped release exactly two hostages, neither of whom was Buckley, who died under torture. While it was happening, three more hostages were taken. Old math: 14 take away 2 and add three = 15, eight of whom remained captive until 1992. Now that’s what I call a really bad trade! Oh, did I mention that all of this was illegal and that Reagan could/should have been impeached for it? He probably would have if Lyin’ Ollie North hadn’t taken the bullet. (Ollie later admitted that Reagan knew all the details.)

So how do we parse the Republican position on Benghazi and Bergdahl? Let’s try a nine-letter word that begins with “hypo” and ends in “crisy.” I’d give you the unassailable facts about Benghazi and Bergdahl except that there aren’t any. Here’s what we know for sure—if you send Americans into dangerous situations amongst people who hate their guts, bad things are likely to happen. At this point we’ve no idea if Bergdahl was a deserter or a CIA operative. Likewise, for all we know, the CIA turned one or more of the prisoners exchanged for him. Or maybe it planted tracker-bots in them during a medical exam. Sound farfetched? Compared to what? Thinking Iran would help secure the release of the CIA’s bureau chief?

Hillary’s right. Once an American is dead, the discussion is moot. She stated that “there will never be perfect clarity on everything that happened [in Benghazi].” She took the moral high ground and called the current posturing nothing more than a “political slugfest.” Here’s the debate we ought to be having: Should Americans even be in places such as Lebanon in 1983, or Afghanistan in 2014? If you answered yes, be prepared for Americans to die and/or be taken hostage. If you think they can all be secured, you’re a fool. I’ll take the low road and say that any other discussion is just bullshit.

Ahmed Nasheed: Voice from the Maldives

 

AHMED NASHEED

Dhaalu Raa

Assai Records 001

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No Wikipedia peeking­—Where are the Maldives and what do you know about them? You’ll find them in the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka, about halfway between the Horn of Africa and Sumatra—a string of 28 small islands upon which fewer than 400,000 people live. It’s also a nation under Shar’ia law with a horrifying human rights record. In all, an unlikely place to find a musician who counts among his heroes The Beatles and Pink Floyd, and tackles women’s rights, environmental stewardship, and government corruption. Ahmed Nasheed is so out of sync with the powers that be that he gets no national airplay and has to peddle his music in tourist shops and abroad.

Ahmed’s music is a pastiche of Western rock, North African guitar, and variants of a regional style known as rairvaru, a hypnotic folk style found in the Indian subcontinent. Two of the more interesting elements are the use of female backup singers whose harmonies evoke Township music and of the log drums, the latter of which are heartbeat-like in acoustic songs, but are pounded with the fury of a Western drum kit when Ahmed plugs in for crunchy power chords. The log drums reflect the album’s dual nature: quieter songs rooted in the East and Western-influenced electric sets. Close listeners will detect musical homage and lifted phrases. “Rasge,” an anti-corruption song, leaps to reworked “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” riffs and “Sihuru” has passages similar to “You Keep Me Hanging On.” If “Fihivalhu” and a few other tunes sound like they could have come from The Beatles’ White album, it’s because Ahmed openly admires (the late) George Harrison.

The rock songs sound the most familiar to Western ears, but are perhaps too familiar. I much preferred Ahmed’s tradition-based quieter material. “Dhiyssnsge Huvafen,” for instance, is a tribute to Princess Diana, but sung in a slow chant-like fashion in which Ahmed’s expressive elides structure mood shifts. “Sheyvaa” is not a raga, but it’s evocative of music one might hear in the south of India. Ahmed is a soulful singer and a skilled guitarist who tries to merge East and West. He faces an enormous challenge­—getting Western audiences to tune into Muslim folk-rock, and getting Muslim Maldivians to open their minds to ecumenical Western culture. –Rob Weir      

Orphan Train a Glorious Ride

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ORPHAN TRAIN (2013)

Christina Baker Kline

William Morrow 979-0061950728

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I believe in ghosts. They're the ones haunt us, the ones who have left us behind. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened…. Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, like bread dough rising under cloth.

These words from the prologue of Christina Baker Kline's new novel give us a sense of Baker's facility with prose and set the table for the literary feast that unfolds. They come from 91-year-old Vivian Daly, born Niamh Powers, but also known (in succession) as just plain "Dorothy," Dorothy Nielson, Vivian Nielson, and (finally) Vivian Daly. As Gillian Welch sings, "I have no mother, no father/No sister, no brother/I am an orphan girl."

In Niamh/Dorothy/Vivian's case, those are autobiographical lines. Born in Ireland, she was (presumably) the sole survivor of an immigrant family destroyed by drink, insanity, and a tragic fire. In 1929, nine-year-old Niamh finds herself on a train to Minnesota charged by her social worker guardians with caring for an infant. They were two of numerous youngsters aboard an "orphan train" headed for the Midwest to find new families. Will they find security and love or, as wisecracking "Dutchy" warns, are they just free labor for farmers?

This is a work of fiction, but orphan trains were real. They were the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, a pioneer in foster care, but a field still in its (wordplay intended) infancy during the years 1853 and 1929, when a quarter of a million children–foundlings, orphans, "street Arabs," and homeless–left New York City for new lives. The Children's Aid Society (and several Catholic charities) placed them. Host families were told the children had to receive board and an education, but there was little effort to determine the suitability of the placement and even less given to follow-up inspections. From the children's perspective, adoption was a crapshoot in which some got very lucky and others endured Dickensian horrors. Until quite recently, little has been written about orphan train children, often because they–like the fictional Vivian–chose to confine their ghosts to the attic.

Vivian's ghosts are about to be stirred by Molly Ayers, a half-Penobscot 17-year-old ward of the Maine courts who has been in and out of over a dozen foster families in her young life–nearly all of them wildly inappropriate. She is outwardly Goth, but that's as much turtle's shell as essence. She's wicked smart, but so jaded that she's the kind of kid who exchanges her virginity for a tattoo and hides her emotions behind a poker face and a tangle of misshapen hair. She's living on Mt. Dessert Island with Ralph and Dina Byrnes, he a classic milquetoast and she a raving evangelical bitch. With just nine months to go before she's free, Molly screws up by trying to lift a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre (her favorite book) from the town library. All that stands between she and "juvie" is a new boyfriend, Jack, who believes in her, and successful conclusion of 50 hours of community service. Jack withholds vital details from his mother, Vivian's daytime aide, so that Molly can do her time helping Vivian Daly clean out her attic.

You can probably see where this is headed–young orphan bonds with old orphan. The story arc is predictable, but how we get there is akin to opening Vivian's boxes. As it transpires, Vivian doesn't want to throw things away; she wants to stir the old ghosts and remember. Lids come off literally and metaphorically, the device Baker uses to dump out the details of the two orphans' lives. Both lives were filled with sorrows and injustices that made any sort of normal childhood impossible, but also moments of humor, joy, and clarity. You won't come away feeling good about the childcare industry, but you will love both Vivian and Molly.

Find out the significance of Vivian's claddagh pin.

To be sure, there are flaws in Baker's novel–including her need to tie together loose ends too neatly. Her major characters undergo personality changes with the speed of a jailhouse religious conversion, and Baker sometimes slathers us with both pathos and orphan inferences. (Guess what Vivian's favorite book is–Anne of Green Gables!) Vivian generally seems more 51 than 91. Do we, for instance, believe that an elder who has never touched a computer will impulsively buy a laptop and effortlessly solve 60-year-old mysteries? Never mind–Orphan Train will haunt you and you'll soon forget its literary strays. --Rob Weir

Julie Otsuka's Poetic Buddha in the Attic

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC (2011)

Julie Otsuka

Anchor (144 p.) 978-0307744425

* * *

This recent winner of a Pen/Faulkner prize is poetic point-of-view saga of Japanese ‘picture brides,’ young women arranged to be married to Japanese men who immigrated to San Francisco. As the term suggests, all they knew of their future husbands was what could be inferred from their photos and, in some cases, letters sent by the affianced. Otsuka follows these women from their stormy passage across the Pacific to their new lives, new families, new roles, and new social standings in America.

A shipboard line sums up much of what the women encounter: “This is America, we would say to ourselves. There is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.” The first shock was the discovery that the men in the pictures were often not as handsome or young in real life, or that the content of the letters was filled with exaggerations and falsehoods. Their new American "home” might consist of a chicken coop, a barn, a box car, or a room behind a shop; if one was lucky, perhaps a humble house.

Otsuka‘s story of immigrants coping to adjust and assimilate is now a familiar one; we’ve long known that the melting pot was ideal and myth, not reality. But Otsuka also makes us see, through women’s eyes, the manner in which gender, culture, and race complicated immigrant dreams. Very few names appear in Otsuka’s novel and it's almost entirely written in the first-person plural. “We” is used to make the reader see experience from women’s points of view and to infer both the variety of those experiences and their underlying similarity. Patriarchy, domesticity, and hard work for instance, were givens. In a short, but powerful chapter titled “First Night,” Otsuka captures the initial encounter with sex with a pointed and poignant sentence: “They took us quickly.”

Each of Otsuka’s chapter headings signal the life experience contained therein—“Babies,” the variety of circumstances in which women gave birth; “Whites” the encounter between East and West. Most of the women were strangers in a strange land whose only link between Japan and the United States were husbands—also strangers (in both senses). As the women gained some facility with English and, in some cases, acquired white neighbors, they learned exactly how ‘foreign’ they were perceived to be. Many felt the despair social and cultural disconnectuin. As Otsuka puts it, “We forgot abut Buddha. We forgot about God….” Many encountered overt racism, but all learned to be suspicious even when they encountered smiles and outward friendliness. That would prove wise. Otsuka’s action covers the decades up to and including World War II, when West Coast Japanese and Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Otsuka titles these chapters “Traitors” and “A Disappearance.”

This is a short book, a wise decision given that the (nearly exclusive) use of the first-person plural means we are drawn into a collective worldview in which there are few individual stories to follow for more than a few sentences. Otsuka’s prose is at once eloquent and spare, a style that elides detail to all that we need to comprehend, but which also threatens to grow tiresome. Sometimes it's as if we are reading a chronicle with commentary. But even when the points are belabored, one must give high marks to Otsuka for her bold approach, the clarity with which she shows cultural differences, and—above all—for putting us behind the eyes of often nameless women. She forces us to think of the things one takes on a journey and what one is forced to leave behind. More poignantly still, what would you, the reader, take and leave behind if you knew your journey was a one-way passage to a land utterly unlike your own?

 --Rob Weir

   

NRA's New Plan in Light of Isla Vista Murders

In a statement that surprised even some ardent defenders of the Second Amendment, National Rifle Association spokesman Trigg R. Happy seized upon the May 23 Isla Vista, California murders to issue a wake-up call to gun owners. "I'm sick of all the liberal namby-pambies calling for gun control," said Happy. "Hell's bells, three of them seven people what died in California was stabbed. That's unacceptable." Happy went on to call gunman Eliot Rodger a "weenie" for stabbing three of the victims. According to Happy, "A real man woulda used a big f'in' gun. I think Rodger killed hisself with a gun outta shame for not shootin' the other three."

Happy also called upon NRA members to "pick up the pace." He cited statistics that showed that in the past three decades "only 335,609 'Muricans has been murdered by guns. Dammmit, that's only the population of St. Louis, Nebraska," said Happy, who mislocated Missouri's largest city. He also expressed outrage that there have been only 70 mass shootings since 2000. "They's more n' 19,000 cities, towns, n' villages in this here nation and just a few of 'em have had mass shootins.' What's wrong with NRA members? I think they's been pussywhipped by lib'rals and feminazis. Well I'm here to say, 'Wake up people. Commence a-shootin be4 them comminis' Obama-lovin' lib'rals takes away yer guns.' Ev'ry town in Murica needs a good killin' or two to make foolish non-gun owners realize if they ain't packin,' they ain't breathin'."

Happy was immediately invited to appear on Fox News' Sean Insanity's show to promote his views on "true Americanism." To represent the position of kneejerk liberals, the Insanity Show has also invited Sunshine Getalong of the Peace, Rainbows, and Cuddly Puppies Coalition to make a plea that we all hug and seek to understand each other.

In other news, Fairness in Media issued an independent report. According to Cameron Greenroom, a lowly intern with FIM, "Our report shows that there is some validity in the NRA's allegation. Each day about 38 Americans die from gunshot wounds. But people forget that there are 314,000,000 people in this country. That means that every day 313,999,962 people are not murdered by guns." NRA President Bob "Dead Eye" Wuntooth responded to the FIM statement by remarking, "That's what I'm talkin' about Them numbers is way to [sic] low. We kin do better as a nation."

But are there holes in the NRA ranks? Not all gun owners agree with the NRA's position. "I've been huntin' for 50 years," said former Vice President Dick Cheney, "and I've shot just the one person." A survey of imprisoned U.S. gun murderers indicated that 73% of them were "satisfied" with their output, and had "little or no desire" to shoot anyone else. In a chilling side note, though, former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez said he "wouldn't mind putting a few more in the [rifle] sites."

Locke a Psychological Masterpiece

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LOCKE (2014)

Directed and written by Steven Knight

85 minutes, R (language)

* * * * *

Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) sits in his BMW and drives from Birmingham to London. It takes 85 minutes. That's all that physically happens in the film Locke. There are no explosions, no shoot-outs, no menacing bad guys, and no FX–just dialogue. For all that it lacks in the traditional movie-making sense, Locke is also the most thrilling, tense, and psychologically taut ride you'll take all year. It is no exaggeration to attach the label 'masterpiece' to Steven Knight's screenplay and film. 

If your skepticism needle is dancing in the red zone, so was mine until I saw this film. An early scene sets the tone. Ivan Locke walks from a massive construction site through the gathering darkness, opens his car door, drives a short distance, stops at a signal, and activates his turn signal. When the light turns green he sits frozen at the intersection until honked by a truck behind him. Locke wipes the fatigue from his face and turns in the opposite direction. We soon learn that Locke–a successful contractor who, in the morning is supposed to supervise the largest civilian concrete pour in European history–is headed for London, not his suburban home where his wife and two sons await. Why?

We also discover that Locke is such a man of routine, competence, probity, reason, and dependability that, deviations like the one upon which he has embarked are (as we're reminded) "not like" him. Details emerge through a series of phone calls between Ivan and his boss, an assistant prone to drink, his son, his wife, a city council member, and a woman he barely knows. As Ivan drives, he tries to command the winds of a perfect storm. All that's riding on any slip-up is the fate of a multi-billion-dollar project, his career, his marriage, his legacy, and his honor. We're never quite sure if Ivan is a god orchestrating the fate of others, or an obsessive-compulsive rushing toward madness as orderliness unravels.

Locke was filmed (mostly) in real time. We see what Ivan sees–the rain-slicked roads, the speeding lorries, the hypnotic glare of taillights and highway lamps, the glow of the dashboard, and fatigue-induced mirages. Those who recall Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) will recognize Locke's visual style. Just as Robert De Niro fueled the beatific horror of Taxi Driver, so too is Tom Hardy the driving force of Locke. Steven Knight's crisp screenplay is worthy of accolades in its own right but like other dialogue-heavy films such as Diner or Glengarry Glen Ross, words fall flat unless they are articulated by talented actors. I reiterate–Ivan Locke's drive to London is all that happens in this film. Tom Hardy's genius is making the audience passengers in both the car and his mind. Is he orchestrating us as well, or does he need company as he transgresses the line between control and passion? –Rob Weir