Review in the New London Day

John Ruddy of the New London Day has given me a very positive review. He could have mentioned that "Homegrown Terror" is similar or nearly identical to the term the people of the time used, "parricide," in order to show that I wasn't just pulling that concept from a hat. But otherwise this is a perfect reading of my book, with a complete understanding of what I was trying to do. The article was later picked up by Stars and Stripes and a couple other sites.

Review of Afoot in Connecticut

A wonderful book review of Afoot in Connecticut by Chris Vola is up at the Small Press Book Review blog. It reads, in part: "Lehman has succeeded in crafting a moving, intricate ode to the inextricable bonds that bind person and place, a book that is, at its heart, a call to those who have not yet forsaken the sterility of the indoors for the soul-quenching of a good walking stick and a nearby trail, and a reminder for those who have already traveled to find a greater journey." Read the rest of the review here.

Review of The Great Gatsby and On the Road

This will be a short review, but it is something I have not read elsewhere. And as a writer myself, I think I can make this statement with the proper ethos.

There is nothing more boring than a film about someone becoming a writer.

That's right. I can think of exceptions of course - Henry and June, Out of Africa. But the worst part of the past year's two "literary" films was the fact that the narrator is "writing" the book, and we have scenes where the narrator "becomes" an author. Just awful. Unnecessary. And worst of all, not accurate.

I am no purist - I love a film adaptation. The Lord of the Rings was for many years my favorite book, and I had no problems with the many changes made there. In fact, I understand completely the need to change the plots and details of books for the film medium. This is not an argument about purity, because neither of these films is too far from the book. In fact, the only part that is really inaccurate is that both filmmakers decided to make the main character a "writer." Worse than inaccuracy though, is the way it changes the story for the reader, demeans it, lessens it, makes it a reflexive story about writing, the most boring kind of story of all.

In the case of On the Road, this is somewhat accurate. Sal Paradise is, in fact, a writer, obviously based on or embodying Kerouac himself. But his "writing" is ancillary, and not important to the book's story. The key moment comes in the book and the film, at the end, when Sal rejects Dean Moriarty on a cold New York street. That is wonderfully included in the film and superbly acted by the two leads. But its emotional power is sapped by the fact that Sal is shown "writing" this scene, destroying the dramatic intensity. The director gets the film right in many respects - this is a story about men, a whole country in fact, without fathers. But the film is also, mostly, about becoming a writer. It lessens the impact, and was not the point of Kerouac's work. It is the point of far too many directors who adapt books who, because they are books, think they need to make the films about books.

In the case of The Great Gatsby, the director, or perhaps the script writer, clearly wants to show off how well he understands the book. Every theme is explained ad infinitum. This making explicit of the symbolic and metaphoric is only irritating for those who do know the book, and worse for those who are discovering it through the film. There is nothing for them to discover - there is only the surface - the implied dumbed down to the obvious. And worse, bizarrely, though there is no mention of Nick Carraway becoming a writer in the book, the director has chosen to make him become a writer, to "write" the story of the film. Thus, the film is doubly "literary" and doubly boring because of it.

It is the story that matters, not the fact that it is a written story originally in a novel form. Most book adaptations are terrible not because the books cannot be adapted, but because some directors cannot forget that they are books.

Dr. Sax by Jack Kerouac

Dr. Sax is one of Jack Kerouac’s most troubling books for readers, peering behind the curtain of his childhood rather than exploring those later years of Beats and bodhisattvas. Nevertheless, it remains a startling achievement, unique not only among Kerouac’s works, but among those books that it seems to mirror. It is primarily a book about growing up, similar to such European classics as Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Hermann Hesse’s Demian, or Jean Giono’s Blue Boy. These books all explore the “magic” of youth by allowing adult readers to see through the eyes of children again, when the magic was real.

Kerouac anchors us in the real world of industrial Lowell with wonderful details like: “The Huge Trees of Lowell lament the July evening in a song begins in meadow and ends up above Bridge Street, the Bunker Hill farms and cottages of Centralville — to the sweet night that flows along the Concord in South Lowell where railroads cry the roundroll — to the massive lake like archeries and calms of the Boulevard lover lanes of cars, nightslap, and fried clams of Pete’s and Glennie’s ice cream…” He also gives us the games and problems of the children that live in that world: “In the bottom of the 8th Scot comes to bat for his licks, wearing his pitching jacket, and swinging the bat around loosely in his powerful hands.” The prose has built up a brick and mortar city and we believe in it. We must, because Kerouac is about to take us into what Alain Fournier called the lost domaine.

As Lowell experiences an epic flood, the mysterious and semi-mythical figure of Dr. Sax swoops into the foreground. He is trying to fight the minions of the great world snake, which is no myth, and really does live curled up underneath the mansion on Snake Hill. This fantastic battle of good and evil is woven into the tapestry of baseball games and ice cream stands. “Blook is a huge bald fat giant somewhat ineffectual who cannot advance through the alley but reaches over his 20-foot arms along the all tops like great glue spreading, with no expression on his floury pastry face — an awful ugh — a beast of the first water, more gelatinous than terrifying.” Suddenly the magic of imagination takes over and the line of actuality wavers and shakes. We picture our own childhood battles with monsters, so much more real and important than a fight on the playground with a bully.

In other books of this genre, the authors always pull us back into adulthood at the end of the book. The loss of childhood is universal, and so the plot ends with the child realizing that he must leave the magic behind, and enter a different world. Not so with Dr. Sax. Kerouac’s literary mirror is from a dark funhouse, twisting the classic logic of the novel of education, leaving the reader unsettled and vexed. Kerouac muses at one point: “Eternity hears hollow voices in a rock? Eternity hears ordinary voices in the parlor.” Those ordinary parlors of Lowell are the place for battles against absolute evil more than some nether realm. And so Kerouac shows us how the fantastic world of childhood is twisted like the great world snake itself into the fabric of reality, and will never let go.

Originally published at Empty Mirror Books.