The Book of Joan

Judging by a name I had never heard before, I assumed the author of this novel, Lidia Yuknavich, was from Eastern Europe and that the book had been translated. Turns out she is an American living in Oregon. At its simplest, The Book of Joan is a dystopian novel in which a ruined planet is abandoned by the wealthy who live in an orbiting station. Joan, a human savior figure, has tremendous and unexplained "superpowers" that derive from her connection to the soil. The author's prose, when it rings with clarity, is excellent. The messages, thinly veiled, warn of where the planet is heading both environmentally and politically. There is quite a bit more in the plot, but I'm not sure it was worth following down every rabbit hole. There is also a fair amount of gore, which was in fact refreshing.

Q&A

Edwin Torres followed up Carlito's Way with this crime novel, like the earlier book also made into an entertaining film. Torres has a great ear for dialogue and a talent for pacing. The time jumps to flesh out the characters' back stories are seamless and effective.

Mecca

This novel by Susan Straight offers insights into the Californian communities that live mostly in the shadows, at least from the point of view of the Anglo world. These are not immigrants in the common usage of the term, but people whose roots to the state date back in some cases hundreds of years. And yet they are still treated as aliens, outsiders, and dangerous. The book appears to have been fused together from several stories, and the welding joints are not smooth. Straight also has an annoying habit of spewing perfectly quotidian details, firehose style, as if they were pearls of wisdom. In a few moving passages the characters transcend archetype, but much of the novel fails to launch.  

Allow Me to Retort

Elie Mystal's book, subtitled "A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution," contains the requisite anger needed for our times while also breaking down the errors of the Supreme Court and what can be done to reverse them. It is bracing to read how the very Constitution conservatives pretend to revere is utterly discarded when it comes to due process rights or, for example, the Ninth Amendment. His case for eliminating the Electoral College is airtight, as is his opposition to forced birth laws. It becomes clear on finishing this helpful work that the opponents of fascism are going to have to take a much more radical approach to defending democracy, or else all is doomed.

The Ink Truck

William Kennedy's first novel, set in a nameless Albany but not part of that cycle of books, suffers from the overheated prose often connected with first-timers. It is a little too proud of its quirkiness and cleverness. The hero, Bailey, a newspaper Guild member carrying on a doomed strike, is a character that is by turns fascinating (at least in his misadventures and dreams) and tiresome. Still, there is plenty to like  amid the fireworks and much that presages the greater books to come.

The Twilight World

Werner Herzog's fascination with the jungle is on display in this slight novel about a Japanese soldier who remained on a Philippine island for 30 years after the end of World War II. 

Roger Corman: How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime

Roger Corman is an artist, a businessman, and a teacher. His autobiography lays out his economic approach to movies (get the distributor to pay off the negative costs upfront so the company stays debt-free and the next project can be launched), as well as the technical details of shooting (plan, plan, plan, then fast, fast, fast). Also, recycle sets and bits of film from previous films to economize. As an artist, Corman puts the emphasis on keeping the eyeball interested by the use of movement and depth. In other words, interesting camera angles, not using the same view repeatedly (which "tires" the eye), and filling the foreground, middle distance and background with interesting things to look at. Directors like Coppola, Demme, Ron Howard and others cut their teeth with Corman, who was by all accounts a willing and generous teacher. One of the benefits of reading this excellent life story was being directed to a Corman-directed race drama, The Intruder, starring William Shatner in what is arguably his finest role. The story is bold, beautifully filmed and acted, and carries a strong message on the human mass mind.

Watergate: A New History

Fifty years after the Watergate break-in, Garrett Graff's detailed retelling of the fall of Richard Nixon helpfully expands the narrative to include all manner of violations of law and ethics to make the point that the burglary was a piece of a much larger, multifaceted scandal. All of the Watergate detail is there, but so are explanations of the ITT scandal, milk price-fixing, tax evasion, Agnew, campaign dirty tricks, and meddling in Johnson's Vietnam peace talks. Nixon's idea – if the president does it, that means it's legal – has now metastasized throughout America, and the treatment for this "cancer" (John Dean's word) does not appear to exist.

The Great Passion

This historical novel by James Runcie covers the period in Leipzig leading up to J.S. Bach's composition of the St. Matthew Passion in 1727. Runcie uses a 13-year-old boy, writing retrospectively from 1750, as narrator. The local color is vaguely interesting, but the Bach character never lifts off the page into the reader's imagination: He is too prone to droning sermonettes and repetitive instructions to singers and musicians.

Red Pill

This 2020 novel is my introduction to Hari Kunzru, and it gives appetite to read his earlier five novels. The story is a mixture of the personal and the political, with plenty of ideas thrown around, but the main attraction is the author's prose style, which is a toned-down and highly engaging variant of, say, Bernhard or Houellebecq.