If Beavis and Butt-Head were real people, but less funny and far more tortured, they might remind you of the duo at the center of Fight Scenes (Counterpoint, 144 pp., $20).

Growing up in Bottoms' world is a mundane series of trials and errors. Greg and Mark drink beer in abandoned houses with the town idiot who suspiciously provides the kids liquor and seeks their company. He captures the disorientation followed by the ominous feelings of "what am I doing with my life?" after smoking cheap weed with Mark. He dates the town slut, another misunderstood creature in this world of outcasts, until she breaks his heart.

A violent showdown against Bottoms' bigger, stronger 16-year-old nemesis — imagine Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story on steroids and a lot less lovable — is written as if the author was distracted by "Return to Thunderdome" as he wrote, some of it osmotically absorbed into his subconscious. This scene is the only real violent action in the story; most of the plot is about the relationship between the boys as they ar...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/30/size-matters http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/30/size-matters Fiction review

Roberto Bolaño

Last year, the English translation of The Savage Detectives earned late Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño a host of new fans. At 577 pages, it also tired a few of them out.

Even supercritic James Wood called the novel "long," while praising its musical control and precision in his New York Times review.

The good news for Bolaño fans is that the new translation of his curiously titled 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is available Nov. 11. The daunting news is that it's as thick as a Bible.

But those who take on the 912-page novel will not regret it. The stunning talent, humor and inventiveness on display in 2666 is more proof that when Bolaño died in 2003 at age 50, the world lost not just a great Latin American writer, but perhaps one of its greatest writers, period.

One of Bolaño's great strengths in 2666 is that he avoids emotional gimmicks. He writes like an anthropologist: An amusing sex scene or a person's admiration for the beauty of seaweed is described in an objective, controlled voice that seems to appreciate all human behavior. The rigor of this technique allows Bolaño to create a novel that is as intricate and trustworthy as the aluminum and carbon-fiber body of a 747.

His expansive five-part plot revolves around the dark recent history of a Mexican border town, Santa Teresa, based on a real place called Ciudad Juárez, near El Paso, Texas. (Since 1993, more than 450 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez, many of whom have also been kidnapped, raped and mutilated, their bodies dumped in the desert, their killer or killers never found. The women, who hoped to cross the border and escape poverty, were mostly workers at local swe...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/02/up-on-dec http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/10/02/up-on-dec

Bubbling with sheer giddy pleasure at the thought of road-tripping through the States in promotion of his book, Irish author Declan Burke talks about starting small and the joys of thinking very, very big; a wife who always knows best; and tireless self-promotion. In town Oct. 8 for the latest installment of Philly's Noir @ the Bar, Burke chatted with us by phone about his latest novel, The Big O (Harcourt, $24), on the day his baby was released.

City Paper: This must be a busy day for you!

Declan Burke: It is a busy day, yes, but the kind of busy you always dream of being. I'm seeing my little baby toddle off across the Atlantic.

CP: This is your first publication in the States, right?

DB: This is the first proper publication that I've had. It's the second novel and we're quite excited about it because it's come from such a small and humble beginning as a co-published, more or less self-published, novel.

CP: How much of the publicity did you do on your own?

DB: The book was co-published with Hag's Head Press in Ireland, and they're what we like to call a boutique publisher — but that's just code for the smallest publisher in the world. We literally had no money to publicize the book and hence I started up the blog Crime Always Pays (crimealwayspays.blogspot.com) to promote both The Big O and other Irish crime writers. So in the beginning I was doing 100 percent of the publicity. I don't know how familiar you are with the crime-writing community, both readers and writers, but it's the most welcoming, generous and friendly community I have ever come across. At this point they're almost doing the publicity on my behalf. It's fantastic, it really is. Now, I'm delighted that Harcourt, this company with a great reputation, well, it's a bit of a surprise to be honest, but I'm delighted, absolutely delighted. It's a great day. http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/07/17/lost-boys http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/07/17/lost-boys

It isn't often that giants like Steve Niles — the wry, dry author of comix fare such as 30 Days of Night — get together with giants like Gary Panter, the painter and graphic artist best known for his work in RAW, designs for Pee Wee's Playhouse, album covers for Frank Zappa and The Residents and friendship with Philly's Bardo Pond. But sometimes that's how giants roll.

So on the occasion of the release of Niles' revolutionary Zune Arts graphic novel, The Lost Ones, he'll hang in Philly with one of its artists. This is no one-illustrator gig: The Lost Ones' tale of four extreme-sport pals in a time-traveling interplanetary race for life and limb features four different artists tackling Niles' thrilling narrative, including Dr. Revolt from NYC's graffiti crew The Rolling Thunder Writers; Brooklyn design duo Morning Breath; fashion designer Kime Buzzelli; and Panter.

Panter had never met Niles. "I knew his work, but we'd never talked before," says Panter, whose style for The Lost Ones — inked with brush, flat colors — is similar to the Marvel comic he did recently for Jonathan Lethem's Omega. "There wasn't time to make a baroque comic, but Lost Ones' script was better told with a straightforward style — little cross-hatching or patterning." For Niles' gripping plot, the novelist figured Panter would be perfect. "But it was a bit intimidating, to be honest," says Niles. "He's a legend and I sort of froze. But that's what I love about this project. I mean, what are the chances Panter and I would ever work together?"

Zune Arts, in its quest to move beyond solely digit...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/07/10/politics-and-prose http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/07/10/politics-and-prose

Escape the barrage of election-year coverage in every morning paper and take a trip to Saline, N.Y., circa 1970, where Ethan Canin's wistful novel about politics and ambition, America America (Random House), takes place.

Saline is the quiet town where rugged narrator Corey Sifter learns to be stoic, like his blue-collar dad, and to value hard work and family. What eventually separates father from son is that Corey gets to see firsthand how their beloved senator, Henry "Working Man's Hero" Bonwiller, ruins his own shot at the presidency.

Corey sees this while working as a handyman for the wealthy Metarey family, which founded Saline. They treat Corey like a son, since their own is in Vietnam. But life gets ugly after the Metareys bankroll randy old Bonwiller's White House dream.

After private school and college, Corey grows up to become a newspaper publisher and raise his own family. He studies how the trajectory of his life eclipsed his father's, weighing the virtues and dangers of personal and political ambition. He frets that the better life he earned working for the Metareys came, predictably, with a cost: knowledge of evil.

Canin presents generations of Metareys and Sifters, rich and poor, with graceful moves in time that give key revelations a steady resonance. He withholds facts to build suspense, which makes the reading fun. The story jumps lightly along and his characters are likable, if somewhat cardboard. Some major plot points are cliché, and the language falters as he tries to cram in generations of family wisdom.

His strongest writing delivers weighty detail, as in this scene of the Sifters at home before a day at work for the Metareys: "On the s...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/03/20/things-come-together http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/03/20/things-come-together

The Roots didn't name their acclaimed 1999 album Things Fall Apart after W.B. Yeats, even though there is such a phrase in his creepy poem, "The Second Coming."

Rather, the title was a nod to the first novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, a powerful allegory about colonial destruction set in an isolated Igbo village in the 1890s. Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," to describe the atrocities he saw in World War I. Achebe used it to describe the effects of Christianity and British rule on village life in Africa. Things Fall Apart was published in 1958 and quickly became the centerpiece of contemporary African literature, even though its sad, doomed tone was out of step with the nationalist optimism prevalent in Africa at the time. By 1960, Nigeria would be independent. By 1967, it would be immersed in one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 20th century. Things fall apart, indeed.

The book was a declaration of independence for African literature. It tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo villager who rises from humble beginnings to become despotic and respected, only to lose everything in confusion and exile. Confronted with the problem of telling a colonial story using the colonizers' language, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in a distinctly African English — taut, economical, metaphorical.

But Achebe's courage came at a price. Things Fall Apart wasn't just attacking colonialism; it was attacking the literary canon, specifically Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Authors like Conrad, although ostensibly anti-colonial, used Africa as a metaphor for senselessness, for unreason. <...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/28/fuck-americanstyle http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/28/fuck-americanstyle

You can tell a lot about a society by its wildest dreams and darkest fantasies. Sex for America's two dozen short stories suggest we are one sick nation.

The hottest — and healthiest — tale is Alison Tyler's "Measure A, B, or Me?" A civic-minded husband has been neglecting his less fervent wife, but a little role-playing relieves their frustration. While it's a touch formulaic, there's nothing wrong with sticking to a routine that works.

Not every contribution is meant to titillate, and most don't. Professional dominatrix Mistress Morgana's witty essay "An Open Letter to the Bush Administration" takes the president's inner circle to task for taking all the fun out of her job. "I have a better international travel record than Mr. Bush, a stronger right arm than Mr. Rumsfeld, and a better rack than Ms. Rice," she notes, "but I don't have anything close to your operating budget, and I adhere to a code of ethics and social responsibility that prevents me from competing with you on any sort of real level."

Degradation rules here, and violent sex — both consensual and non-consensual — is the norm. Oval Office trysts are out; torture's in. And I lost count of the bloody asses. "Escape and Evasion," by Jarhead author Anthony Swofford, follows a Marine who gets off on raping lovers and fighters before getting what's coming to him; in Tsaurah Litzky's "Purple Tulip," a resentful Dutchman expresses his distaste for the U.S. by tearing into his American conquest until she passes out.

Few of the stories' encounters satisfy their subjects, let alone a reader who just wants release; among those set in the future, there's nothing but misery and servitude for women. "Tamar's Prayers," by Avital Gad-Cykman, is an atomic-age update on King David's daughter, with Tamar subjecting herself to a gang rape to prevent nuclear war. High school girls are recruited to blow soldiers in Jami Attenberg's "Victory Garden"; in Michelle Richmond's "Milk," an unwed mother redeems herself by luring enemy soldiers to their deaths by suckling them with poisoned breast milk.

If this is the sta...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/14/extended-labor http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/02/14/extended-labor Fanon By John Edgar WidemanHoughton Mifflin, 229 pp., $24

Fanon must have had a difficult birth. As the first novel in a decade for celebrated Pittsburgh writer John Edgar Wideman, the book makes it clear that some kind of "Fanon project" had been incubating unwritten for years. This version bears the scars of a long gestation.

Born Afro-Caribbean in Martinique, Frantz Fanon fought with the Free French in World War II, ultimately qualified as a psychiatrist in France, but spent the close of his life fighting against France in the Algerian revolution. More important is the legacy of his writings — Black Skin, White Masks, which explored Fanon's own cultural dislocation as a black intellectual in France; and The Wretched of the Earth, which psychoanalyzed the dregs of colonialism and jump-started postmodern, postcolonial critique.

Wideman tells Fanon's story, but it's the least important of the three. More an extended meditation than a novel, Fanon opens with Wideman addressing dead Fanon directly, then showily shifts to the story of Thomas, an invented author-manqué worrying away at the same topic. The movement of the book's first pages, from Wideman introducing fictional Thomas obsessed with biographical Fanon, shows the difficulty Wideman has had in approaching this project as clearly as anything he says outright. And the language he delivers, postmodern-precious and cleverly allusive, drowns all but the hardiest of moments — most often memoir-scenes involving the author's wheelchair-bound mother and incarcerated brother.

Those hard, bright, carefully observed moments come from a seasoned writer at the height of his craft; the welter of language that surrounds and isolates those scenes, though, bears witness to what a difficult labor of love this project has been for him. Wideman puts up a dazzling curtain of talk and meditation, but gets at the heart of his project only when he twitches that curtain aside.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

John Edgar Wideman w...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/27/likely-stories http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/27/likely-stories

Tin House's Fantastic Women (224 pp., $16.95) My favorite issue of a litmag issue this year is still on the shelves. This collection of stories by Lydia Millet, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link and lots more does not limit itself to a certain tone or worldview and is memorable as any best-of comp.

A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi (W.W. Norton, 176 pp., $21.95) A chemist and Holocaust survivor, Levi had some unique perspectives on the cruelest and kindest machinations of the human brain. Some of these stories — translated from the Italian for the first time — are so terse and satisfying, they're practically allegories or fables. Except, like his progeny George Saunders, Levi sometimes leaves it up to the reader to bring some sense of morality to the proceedings. It's not a moral world, people.

Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis (Harper Perennial, 272 pp., $13.95) Even when the characters are trapped in snow storms, impoverished beyond belief, seemingly unlucky in every facet of human existence, you want to keep reading just in case there's something resembling redemption or relief on the next page. There usually isn't. These are gloriously constructed tales of desperation.

One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box (McSweeney's, 300 pp., $25) Put this in the category of extra extra short. It's a three-volume hardcover set of nanofiction by Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso and Deb Olin Unferth. Flash/sudden fic sometimes comes off as an experiment on the reader, but these tales are thoughtfully plotted and character-driven, with no bragging about how quickly they were banged out.

(pat@citypaper.net)

It's the classic question: If money were no object, what would you do? For Tom McCarthy's unnamed protagonist, the answer is simple: whatever it takes to attain inner peace. After the Everyman awakens from a coma to a big cash settlement of corporate hush money, things begin benignly enough. He has little difficulty finding others to assist him with his plans (and relieve him of his wealth), and money becomes the enabler greasing the slopes of eccentricity to the point where those individuals in it for the money realize too late that things have gotten horribly, horribly out of hand. Remainder is a mesmerizing novel, and McCarthy's gripping prose draws the reader into the increasingly off-kilter orbit of a man without conscience or financial obstacles following his unusual desires to their furthest conclusions.

—Jesse Delaney

Every year they give us the "it" book, usually by a comely young writer universally praised by critics and snarked-upon by bloggers. Ferris is this year's Marisha Pessl (the Ben Kunkel of 2006), and his highly anticipated comedic novel is a worthy debut and easy sell. A tale told in first person plural, the "we" is the staff of a struggling Chicago ad agency facing the downside of the '90s boom that reads like a well-developed screenplay for a clever office farce. Nick Hornby described Then We Came to the End as "The Office meets Kafka," and the writing matches its ability to entertain.

—Kristin McGonigle

Bad Monkeys http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/bamboo-essays-and-criticism http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/bamboo-essays-and-criticism

Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

By William Boyd

Bloomsbury, 528 pp., $22.95

Until now, William Boyd, who created the great Nat Tate hoax and penned Any Human Heart, the fictional journals of Logan Mountstuart, has eschewed writing his own autobiography. Bamboo, a persuasive and infectious collection of essays and criticisms, is the closest he's come. The book traces his appreciation of art, literature and film back to Boyd's childhood in Africa and his boarding school days in Scotland. His "New York Walk" is one that readers will want to take, and the trio of essays about African writer/activist Ken Saro-Wiwa encourage immediate interest. But what makes Bamboo resonate is that just as the title plant stalks multiply, many essays yield other riffs. "The First World War," about his grandfather, inspired Boyd to write and direct The Trench. An essay that follows describes making the film and taking it to Cannes. Bamboo reveals how intrinsically connected are Boyd's life and work and supports the claim made in Any Human Heart, that "every life is both ordinary and extraordinary."

 

...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/rome-and-jerusalem-the-clash-of-ancient-civilizations http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/rome-and-jerusalem-the-clash-of-ancient-civilizations

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

By Martin Goodman

Knopf, 624 pp., $35

While Martin Goodman isn't quite as skilled a storyteller as he is a historian, Rome and Jerusalem still manages to provide valuable insight into the origins of both Christianity and anti-Semitism, as well as a fine overview of the Roman world in the first and second centuries CE (not to mention odd historical tidbits, like the fact that bored Roman Legionaries would occasionally break up the monotony by crucifying prisoners in "humorous" positions). And if Goodman's main theory, that a clash between Roman and Jewish civilization was not inevitable — despite their obvious differences, both societies had developed an amazingly close relationship as evidenced by the fact that the Jewish monarch Herod Agrippa I facilitated Claudius' ascension to the Imperial throne — and that the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by Roman troops was an accident that was rebranded as an early form of "shock and awe" by Titus for political reasons is correct, the parallels to and the possible implications for the current U.S. presence in the Middle East are more than a little disturbing.

 

...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/darkmans http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/12/20/darkmans Darkmans

Nicola Barker must be at least a little nonplussed with the reception her latest novel, Darkmans, has received in its native England. In large part, it's been glowing, with good notices and a spot on the Booker shortlist. But even among British reviewers, who tend to be more colorful and definite than their American counterparts, certain phrases reappear, almost with a will of their own, from one review to the next. One of those, delightfully, is "salad-fearing Kurd." But another one is "trust me." That's dismaying enough, but when "trust me" comes in conjunction with an 800-plus-page length, it's almost an assurance that the book you're considering is like a vegan cupcake — unsmiling nourishment, deceptively tarted up, and awfully hard to finish. Instead, what Barker accomplishes is the sort of comprehensive and wide-ranging novel that towers over the single-note memoirs, genre pieces and pink-cover chick-lit books that so outnumber it. Barker incorporates patricians and guttersnipes, serious ontological meditation and slapstick, modern anomie and historical scholarship and pulp-terror dread into a single package, like the great Victorians could, or Ackroyd or Amis would do 20 years ago. She sets a full table; Gaffar, the salad-fearing Kurd, is just the frosting.

The future's hardly what it used to be. Even William Gibson, as responsible as anyone for the trope of a grimy but tech-enhanced future, points out that 20 years ago, his version was hopeful simply by being post-apocalyptic — humanity could survive arms races and nuclear winter. Increasingly, though, the post-apocalyptic tune has been played by literary writers who've pulled it out of its normal place in genre fiction — just this year in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Matthew Sharpe's difficult Jamestown and now in Arthur Nersesian's latest novel. Like Sharpe, Nersesian constructs an alternate timeline, with Watergate quashed and the counterculture exiled to a replica New York built in the Nevada desert. His plot is scrambled out of The Odyssey, but it's really only an easel for the cabinet of curiosities his replica city contains. Nersesian's book shares many of the flaws of his fellow literary apocalypts: None of these fine writers invest the imagination or weight of description a genre writer would to create a palpable sense of place. But instead, many take the genre's framework and graft idiosyncratic concerns atop it — Nersesian especially well, with a biting satire made from the sparse materials of toxic ersatz Staten Island.

Ed Hamilton moved in to the Chelsea Hotel 12 years ago to become a writer. The idea was to channel the creative energy of past residents like Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas into his novel, but he soon found himself against the constant distraction of the hotel's eccentric guests, residents and staff. They eventually became the basis of his work and he began blogging about life in the hotel in 2005, which is what led to his chaotic compilation Legends of the Chelsea Hotel.

The episodic blogyssey through New York's most infamous hotel voyages into new publishing territory; it's common for print publications to duplicate and archive material online, but giving Web content corporeal existence is as rare as it is bold. And it takes more planning than copying and pasting. The series of slice-of-life sketches do eventually build up to form a portrait of the hotel, but if more care had been taken to weed out the less colorful renderings, the final result wouldn't be so hazy.

Not everyone with creative dreams can be successful, observes Hamilton, who originally set out to document the bizarre everyday struggles of unknown artists living in the Chelsea. It seems that this might be true for his book, too.

Short biographies of the pseudo-famous are inserted into his stories for context but disrupt the flow. (On the Web, these interruptions would be relegated to hyperlinks and pop-ups, and wouldn't seem so crowded.) Too often, he tries to tangentially force himself into these biographies: He once saw Patti Smith on a stairwell, he suspects he might use Thomas Wolfe's bathroom. But just because his strange endeavor didn't come out perfectly doesn't mean it's a complete failure, either.

Hamilton's best sketches come from direct observations and firsthand experiences — and don't worry, there are plenty of them. In "Expert Advice on Combating T...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/25/rattled-by-the-rush http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/25/rattled-by-the-rush Vibrator

By Mari Akasaka, Soft Skull, $13.95, 156 p.

The disorienting stream-of-consciousness opening to Mari Akasaka's Vibrator could be either very appropriate, or very, very crass. Rei, the 30-ish journalist who narrates this short novel, shows all sorts of self-destructive tendencies: Early on, she discusses her bulimia at length, giving a detailed primer for self-induced vomiting with the mix of pride and precision normally reserved for some sacred ceremony. The wash of voices in Rei's head tumbles out in the same way, in a confused, purging rush. Akasaka's rendering of her character's mental state, her contradictions and impulses and self-loathing, demands a great deal of skill and delicacy. Akasaka has these in abundance.

Vibrator relies on an almost mannerist restriction of scope. The novel uses only Rei's voice. It concerns only two characters, takes place in a little over a day, and confines its action largely to the cab of a long-haul truck. Akasaka makes rich use of all of it, though, taking her very simple setup — alcoholic, bulimic Rei letting herself be picked up by a trucker with a criminal past for a night and a day of sex and driving — and explores it with subtlety and completeness, making a story that sounds unpromising at best into a resonant and satisfying meditation.

The key to Vibrator isn't scandal, although the explicitness of the sex and the frankness with which Rei expresses her desires and confusions are striking. Indeed, these are the elements that made the book a success in Japan, where it got read as a picture of a generation in crisis. Rather, it's the skill Akasaka brings to her narration that translates so well, and allows the pain of Rei's existence to be soothed by the journey. Her stream of consciousness owes less to showy Molly Bloom pyrotechnics than to the detailed sensorium of a Henry James character. And while Akasaka's novel carries neither the weight nor the bloat of James, she's similarly attuned to the very small movements of character and event that can open into broad resonance.

(<...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/30/mean-girls http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/30/mean-girls

Some books you can read for a few minutes before you go to sleep. You can leave them at home when you go out. Then there's The Exception.

In the award-winning Danish author Christian Jungersen's English-language debut, the four staffers at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide are sincerely trying to educate the world and put an end to genocide. This could be nutritious, but dull. Fortunately, The Exception, already an international best-seller, is as wonderfully creepy and suspenseful as it is nutritious.

We meet Iben first. A semi-celebrity in her native Denmark since she was a hostage in Nairobi, she's still haunted by flashbacks to her captivity while dressing for a night out in Copenhagen. She meets a possible love interest, then, as quickly as we've become accustomed to the world through Iben's eyes, the point of view changes to that of Malene, Iben's best friend and co-worker.

Malene is vivacious but needy. She's been flirting with Iben's romantic prospect for years, and a potential connection between him and Iben now has different implications. Anne-Lisa, the DCIG librarian, can't see the resulting tension; she's too desperate to belong to the office clique, which is rounded out by the secretive secretary, Camilla.

Into this fraught world come two anonymous death threats for Iben and Malene, and the women begin to cast about for suspects. First they suppose it's a war criminal they've covered. Then they start looking closer to home, at one another. A good old-fashioned witch hunt ensues.

You'd expect genocide researchers to be experts on physical and psychological torture. What you might not expect is that they'd prove such natural and adept torturers themselves. This is where Jungersen shines: In a deceptively low-key style, he methodically ratchets these earnest, educated people into monsters. Homes and offices are ...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/23/soft-kiss http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/23/soft-kiss

A Killer's Kiss
By William Lashner
William Morrow
$24.95, 321 pp.

Her bags were packed. His were, too — right there under his eyes. Sure, William Lashner begins A Killer's Kiss, his seventh Victor Carl novel, with his usual bang, but this time around Victor seems a little tuckered out.

You hate Carl, Lashner's bumbling Philadelphia mob lawyer cum ambulance-chaser. You love him, too, and you hate yourself just a little for loving him. This time around, his former fiancée finds herself nearer to the maybe-loving end of the spectrum. A brunette bombshell with ruby red lips and gams up to there, she decides it's time to rekindle the old flame and comes knocking. Her little tap-tap-tap precedes the arrival of two homicide dicks who "weren't wearing fedoras, but they might as well have been," and just after her husband has been murdered.

Doing his best to channel Chandler, Hammett and scads of other pulp fiction scribes, Lashner stumbles like a drunk after his first half-dozen whiskeys. Which is to say he's a little unsteady, but can still touch his finger to his nose, recite the alphabet without a hitch and spin a decent yarn. While everything feels pretty darn good, the edges have gone a smidge fuzzy.

Once set into motion, the story speeds along nicely, zooming around corners, up blind hills and down narrow lanes. Lashner enjoys a good roller coaster and A Killer's Kiss doesn't disappoint, but it's missing the hard-boiled intensity, droll wit, attention to detail and sizzling plots that set his preceding six novels a cut above the rest of the detective fiction that lines bookstore shelves.

Besides, Philadelphia deserves a crime novelist who'll do her justice. Lashner drops token references to Rittenhouse Square and the delectable Amada, but if you substituted Central Park and Elaine'...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/16/ghost-world http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/16/ghost-world

If Spook Country doesn't prove William Gibson's extraordinarily sharp sense of our current technological age for you, then you may as well spend your days surfing cyberspace. (Cyberspace: Ever hear of it? Gibson coined the term.)

The story — a sequel of sorts to 2003's Pattern Recognition — follows a handful of different people separately. First is Hollis Henry, who has been contracted by European geek-tech magazine Node to do a story about a new piece of technologically advanced artistic hardware. Next there's Tito, a young Russian-fluent Cuban from a family with a rich history in espionage; Brown (an agency man) and Milgrim (a high-end drug addict), who are shadowing Tito; and Bobby Chombo, a paranoid programmer who refuses to sleep in the same space twice. To say how these characters come together, if at all, would be giving things away; adherent to its title, though, the book does provide furtive newspaper-wrapped iPod handoffs to old men in public parks, Volapuk-coded text-message interceptions, salt-cartridged Bulgarian handguns and giant videographic squids.

Gibson clearly understands the technological reality of the present. In the real world, one could say that people are losing their accents among the mystery and jumble of what is now a widespread tech vocabulary: Web 2.0, user-generated content, iPod. Gibson gets this phenomenon, and in the book's carefully crafted world of spatially tagged hypermedia, animated ghosts and intelligence spooks, unwinding technological mysteries becomes, as is noted, the root of cool.

In short, this may be Gibson's most widely accessible book to date, and you need to read it. If you're not a science fiction reader, it shouldn't matter. Spook Country is sci-fi the way Verne's giant submarine is today's mod_perl. Meaning, Gibson is our current leading author in a genre of a different kind, something like "technofutural fiction," and Spook Country becomes a must-read as it further defines this genre.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Spook Country http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/16/dial-215-for-murder http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/16/dial-215-for-murder

It's interesting, and sometimes telling, to see how a writer uses a city — especially one you know well — as source material: which areas he visits, how his locations influence character and direct action, what he picks up on or misses. This is why, initially, Richard Montanari's Merciless worried me; it's a book with Philly's City Hall on the cover, but it's written by a writer based in Cleveland.

Montanari, to his credit, nails his backdrops. The book opens with a character lamenting the closing of the Silk City diner, up until a month ago a dead-on detail. He goes beyond the tourist tour (Boathouse Row, the Roundhouse) into the neighborhoods that line the Schuylkill. He even draws his fictional settings from area reality, staging a handful of scenes in a theme park akin to an Atlantic County original.

Montanari also puts together an entirely competent serial-killer thriller. While it's hardly groundbreaking — cops hunting pathological murderers haven't done much new since Clarice Starling — Montanari develops his detectives skillfully, and he plays out his plot twists like a seasoned pro, avoiding the lapses in logic or plausibility that handicap much of the genre.

With all of this going for it, though, Merciless is a difficult read. At least, it's difficult in this city, in the middle of this bloody summer. Montanari's highly competent serial-killer ride feels like the wrong book in the wrong place. It's not that Merciless is crime fiction — there are excellent and hard-hitting crime writers who benefit from great love and knowledge of their cities; Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos in Boston and D.C. are the best at this. Nor is it necessarily the whiteness of Montanari's Philadelphia that scans wrong, even though his entire city seems as homogenous as my old-Irish river ward neighborhood.

Instead, it's the disconnect t...]]>