Book Review: Room by Emma Donoghue

Room by Emma Donoghue

Brief Synopsis: Room is not just a noun. Room is a world, a whole universe. At least that is what our narrator, freshly five-year-old Jack, thinks since the 11x11 room he inhabits with his mother is the only environment he has ever known. He was born there on Rug, he measures Plant's leaves by the width of his hand there, he counts his cereals at Table, he runs his there-and-backs around the outside of Bed, and reads with Ma, all the books in the world: Alice in Wonderland, The Runaway Bunny, and Dylan the Digger. Jack lives his life in Room, right up until nine o' clock when he has to switch off inside Wardrobe, because nine o' clock is when Keypad beeps and Door finally opens. Nine o' clock is when Old Nick comes.

Published: 2010

Format Read: Trade paperback, some round-robin convenience reading on my iPhone when I snagged the Kindle version on Amazon's Deal of the Day.

Comparison: Bear with me here. First, let me say, I haven't read anything else like Room when it comes to the direct plot. One element of the book that did ring familiar, however, was the precociousness and wonderment of the narrator, Jack. It reminds me of The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery. Yes, it is a stretch to compare such a dark, adult novel to a beloved children's tale, but I would say there are a lot of similarities to Jack's story and that of the Little Prince. Besides, both books teach us that the voice of a child can carry a lot of wisdom, as long as an adult isn't too proud to listen.

In many ways, I saw Jack as the Little Prince and Ma as his beloved rose. Jack busies himself with his daily routines, just as the Little Prince was so careful to pull up the baobabs and sweep his volcanoes. He took care of his tiny, lonely planet as Jack cares for his friends in Room, even recognizing each object by it's proper name: Bath, Table, Plant, Bed, Wardrobe, etc. In The Little Prince, a rose finally grows on his tiny planet and becomes The Little Prince's companion. He loves the vain, beautiful rose, and he works to appease it and protect it. The rose is sometimes cold and demanding, which reminded me of when Ma would have her catatonic Gone days. I, the adult reader, know that she was overwhelmed, traumatized, desperate, and psychologically fragile, but Jack just knew she was Gone, and he struggled to keep his routine and play by Ma's rules, Room's rules. As the story unfolds, Ma begins to depend on Jack, even telling him at one point, "I thought you were supposed to be my superhero." Jack, terrified and confused, does his best to keep up his end of the bargain, just as the Little Prince did for his rose.

Jack wonders about the land of TV, where he believes all things outside of room reside, that they are all make-believe. His forays of imagination remind me of The Little Prince visiting other planets and learning about others different from him, and different from each other. Like the Little Prince, Jack soaks up every drop of information thrust upon him and he is brave and strong and resilient--but in the end, he endeavors only to be with his Ma. The Little Prince must always go back his rose.

I could see turning the tables and looking at it the other way, too. Ma is trapped in Room by herself, surviving the best she can, and then comes Jack. She loves him with all her love but it is a demanding task to be wholly responsible for the life of your child (and Jack is all child, just as egocentric as children his age are supposed to be), especially when they're stuck on what is ostensibly their own little planet.

Review: It is possible for something unpleasant to be beautiful. That is just how I would describe Room: unapologetically uncomfortable, and beautiful anyway.

It has been a long time since I read a book that got under my skin the way this one did. It devastated me, it challenged me, it confused me, hurt me, and healed me. It sent me around my house with a tape measure trying to understand what it would be like to exist--not just survive, but exist--only in an 11x11 space. It seeped into my dreams and turned them to nightmares, sometimes as simply as a key turning in a lock. It followed me to work, where I narrowed my eyes at the brown truck in front of me with the groceries in the back, thinking maybe it was Old Nick out bargain shopping for Sundaytreat.

Any book that sticks on your heels like that has done something right.

Diagram of Room courtesy of roomthebook.com. Go there.

This book is as bold and solid as Room's big metal door. You can't find the seams--just when I thought Jack was a little too aware, a little too clever to be an accurate five-year-old, he'd hit me with something so accurately childlike that would swing me back around. This can be a cheap trick in the hands of a lesser writer--whipping the reader back and forth like a tennis match--and it doesn't usually work. Not so with Jack. Donoghue makes the necessary excuses for Jack's ability to tell us this story, but she doesn't take unfair advantage of the situation. She builds us a well-crafted narrator, who is as honest as he is unreliable.

If the idea of an unreliable narrator makes you nervous, don't let it. The action happens in front of Jack's face, and while his limitations distort the experience, it only adds to the sense of foreboding we have, knowing we are so much bigger and stronger than him, that we understand so much more than this little boy.

If you're the type who likes symbolism, I'd say there is plenty to mine from here. For one, in a lot of ways, Room is like a womb where Jack has continued his isolated gestation. His mother still breastfeeds him, which first scandalized me, but later softened me. I had to think what it was like for Ma--what connection that must have brought her, what comfort for her son. There's also the pragmatic side of things as well. As long as she keeps her milk, no matter what Old Nick does to their food supply, she can keep Jack going just a little longer. The feeding becomes a kind of antenna for what is going on in the connection between Ma and Jack, and fits with the idea of Jack, Mr. Five, but also newborn in so many of the ways important to us readers. 

Working in the field of mental health and being a staunch advocate for those with mental health challenges, it was important for me that this book get the psychology right. I don't expect an author to get a degree in Developmental Psychology to be able to write a book like this, but they have to get the anchors in the right places. I'm pleased to say I think Emma Donoghue was right on the money. She had to filter everything through Jack, and he had to pick up on just the right things to cue us in without him understanding too much (a tall order if ever there was one), but she manages it beautifully, and we get a sincere understanding for the types of physical and emotional trauma and regrowth these characters must endure. She finds ways to sneak in terms and definitions, sure, but I found the real truth to be in their faltering strength and denial. Those are things I see all the time because no one wants to admit where they are weak and hurt, especially someone who has had those places exploited.

I don't want to say too much about the plot arc itself because I don't want to spoil the book, but it is fair to say it has two distinct halves. It is likely you will prefer one over the other depending on what you like to read, but personally, I enjoyed both for their individual merits. Both halves have their own objectives which I felt were achieved nicely.

I haven't read any of Emma Donoghue's other work, but I plan to seek it out. Even writing in the voice of a five-year-old, it is clear to see she is masterful with language, and she is not afraid to boldly show you her story without watering it down with unnecessary (and self-conscious) explanations.

Back when I was a bookseller, I had a few favorite books I liked to handsell. Among them were The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, and The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier. All of these books have something unconventional about them--structure, style, voice, plot--that would sometimes scare away a potential reader. I pressed those books into people's hands time and time again and said, "This is a Trust Novel. That means that no matter how many times you think in the beginning that you don't get it, that you don't understand, that there are too many 'whys', you have to promise yourself you are going to keep turning the pages. You are safe in this book, because no matter how hard it may seem at first, this author will take you where you need to be and it is so worth it."

Room is a Trust Novel. Emma Donoghue is not going to let you down. That's not to say everyone will like everything about this book, or any other, but if you give her a chance to draw you in, she will tell you a story that will haunt you and change the way you think.

Trust me.

Book Review: The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

Brief Synopsis: A mysterious storyteller regales a group of orphans and some adult birthday party-goers with the tale of an invisible sword that always finds its mark, but which reveals no wound until the victim reaches his or her fiftieth year of life. The back of the book gets to the point better than I can.

Published: Trick question! This book was first published in 2005 as a VERY limited edition of 1,000 copies. It was then published commercially in 2012.

Format Read: Hardcover

Comparison: It is rare that I can compare anyone to the inimitable Walter Moers at all, much less cross-genre, but if there was such a thing as a horror version of The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Mark Z. Danielewski would be the guy to write it. Both Danielewski and Moers have declared war on the plain page, attacking it from angles and avenues that must make their typesetters put extra bottles of Tums in their desks. Moers is darkly funny, while Danielewski is just dark, but they both employ a kind of artful whimsy that makes me gape at each new storytelling device like the kid from A Christmas Story staring down his Red Ryder bee-bee gun: "Whoa!" followed by a mind-clearing headshake and a solid nod of respect for these new kind of authors, these word-artists. Of course, in calling them a new breed, I've got to give a nod to a notable progenitor: e.e. cummings. His poetry pushed the envelope in a number of ways, but his unconventional use of word placement on the page to add dimension to his work changed the game.

Review: The next time you're sitting around and trying to decide if you should rewatch the last episode of Game of Thrones or flip through that last issue of Entertainment Weekly you forgot to cancel, just don't. Go to a bookstore (indies rule!) and get this book. You will be able to read it in the same amount of time as it takes your food to arrive at a nice restaurant, and it is so much better for you.

Before I dive into the story, I have to point out the beauty of the book itself. This book, maybe more than any other I can readily think of, makes use of its very form as a way to suck you into the narrative world. It manipulates the third dimension, of which you, reader, are a part, and does not allow you to be a passive consumer. Of course, you won't know that until you read the book, but it's still a darn nice package. The dust jacket is pricked with pinholes, a nod to the photographic stitched illustrations in the book and the "protagonist" (if there is one, besides the sword), Chintana the seamstress. Beneath the dust jacket, the book itself carries the theme with tangled blobs of red stitching enfolding it.

The total package, including the glossy pages and unusual illustrations, is as much art book as novella, and will have you staring at it with new eyes once you've read the final pages. If you want to know how blobs of thread pictured on a bookcover can be a spoiler, you need to experience Danielewski.

The book is narrated by five rotating narrators, identified only by different colored quotation marks. The story itself is told as if it is a children's tale, a simple hero's journey that grows in tension and terror with every page turn.

I studied the text at first, trying to discern which speaker might be which. I didn't want to miss anything hidden between the lines, and there's no DOUBT Mr. Danielewski hid stuff between these lines. Before long, I lost the point of the story by thinking too hard about it and trying to diagram the narrative like it was rocket science.

It isn't. Just read the book. Don't worry about the quotation marks, don't worry about anything. Just read the book and it will do its job.

And it is quite a job.

I love books like this. I love them. This book had me using every one of my five senses to experience a story with less actual words in it than some Facebook posts, and it impacted me. It made me PROUD of the author. He exercised such planning and restraint, creativity that seemed to simultaneously run wild and hold its margins to create a complete, concise story to sock you in your gut. It gives me prickles in my darkest creative parts, the places that need waking up sometimes to provide shadow and highlight to my work and ideas.

I love it.

In the end, this book is not for everyone. I had trouble even writing a decent synopsis for it because I don't know where to start. It's hard to review because I don't know how to describe it. Is it a short story? Novella? Poem? Art-piece? Who is the main character, really? Who is who in those blasted colored quotation marks?

I'm okay still having those questions left in me after having read the whole book. A lot of people aren't. I haven't read tons of other reviews on this book, but I know it was divisive among Danielewski's fans. Personally, I didn't feel gypped or dissatisfied, I felt challenged. Then I felt silly for feeling challenged by something so straightforward and simple at its core.

Then I just shut up and enjoyed it.

You enjoy it, too.

Book Review: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

Brief Synopsis: The Slocumb family is no stranger to a vengeful God. Ginny "Big" Slocumb fetched up pregnant with her headstrong daughter, "Little" Liza, at the age of fifteen and was promptly booted out of her Southern Baptist home to fend for herself. Another fifteen years later, Liza showed up pregnant herself and left home shortly after the baby's birth, only to show back up on her mother's doorstep two hard-lived years later. Now her daughter, Mosey, is fifteen, and the Slocumbs are dead in the middle of another "trouble year." Liza, at a too-close-to-home thirty years old, has suffered a stroke that they chalk up to her rough past and methamphetamine use. Mosey is shrugging around in her skin, trying to figure out if she's sharing it with a sex-maniac who could take over any minute and repeat Slocumb history. When Big has Liza's favorite willow tree pulled up by the roots to make room for a therapeutic swimming pool, a box of tiny bones rips out what seams are left holding all of their lives together.

Published: 2012

Format read: Hardcover, until Husband caught me reading my signed first edition and made me buy the e-book to finish. Meanie.

Comparison: It is hard to compare this book directly to any other book because I haven't read anything else quite like it. Joshilyn Jackson's writing is whip-smart and tangy a la Haven Kimmel, but there's depth there, too. In this book, especially with Liza, she yet again shows off her unique skill in capturing the tangled-up complexity of the human spirit held in bondage that I've only seen done half as well in A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. In this work and all her others, she writes about poverty with a truthful, almost journalistic eye which reminds me of John Steinbeck. Her voice is so very different, but the heart is the same. She tells the worst of it like it is without pointing a single, judgmental fingernail. It is just how Steinbeck used the hard-luck Joads not only to break our hearts in The Grapes of Wrath, but to underline the tenacity of the human spirit, the universal worth of mankind, and hope which keeps right on springing up, even from nothing but salted earth. She does that so well that it squeezes my heart to pieces and I can taste sweat and dirt on my tongue.

Review: I have been a devoted fan of Joshilyn Jackson's work since I first read gods in Alabama as an ARC (Advance Readers Copy) when I was a wide-eyed, story-starved bookseller. I got the book off the freebie shelf in the back room of the store where it was mixed in with a pile of this and that. I picked it for the simple reason that it was the only book on that particular shelf that didn't have a black and white spine. Dumb way to pick a book, I know, but it worked out for me. I read that book in one voracious setting and have been an advocate for Ms. Jackson's books ever since. I've read everything she has put out to the public, including her wonderful blog, Faster Than Kudzu, and so should you.

If Joshilyn Jackson has a mid-life crisis and gives up fiction writing to spend the rest of her life writing the backs of cereal boxes, I will throw out all my Honey Nut Cheerios and read on.

So should you.

What I'm saying is that her books are good. Very.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty does not disappoint. It has the same salty southern women running down its spine, this time three generations deep. The POV shifts between the characters, with Big and Mosey in first person (a feat in itself given the gap in their ages and personalities), and third person limited for Liza. In all of them, Jackson manages to keep in her signature playful style without sacrificing the individual voices of the characters. I have yet to figure out how she does it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns and basically batting around syntax like a cat with a ball of yarn, and somehow it makes things more clear. Maybe that's why her work feels so heartfelt. She says things the way we mean them, not the way we're told to say them.

I will admit that I had some trouble with this one when I started reading it. It was Liza. Right off the bat, we're told that she was a hellion from the womb, yet when we first meet her, she is a raisin-soft shadow of her former self. I had trouble picturing her young. My age. It was too wrong, too wasteful and unfair. Reading her chapters was hard going. I couldn't be in her head like I could be in Big's and Mosey's. I had to work my way in from a distance. Like Mosey and Big interpreting her "Mosey-baby" noise, or her "yes" and "no" signals, there was a tendency for me to throw my hands up and say it was too hard, too sad to look at her with her scrambled eggs trailing down the bad side of her face. I was feeling what Big and Mosey must have felt, and the frustration was almost unbearable.

Having read all of Ms. Jackson's work, I should have known better.

She does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Even when they're broken. Even when they think they're used up and spent. Even when they're captive in their own bodies. Even when she lets you pity them, it will only be for a flash, because she does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Eventually, Liza's chapters became my favorites. There was so much complexity to her character, this woman who did all the things we're told makes someone "bad" but she is so very, very good, so truly herself even when she is lost inside of her own broken body. A firecracker forced underwater is no less a firecracker at its core.

The book weaves in and out of their three lives, and eventually you come to see that there is far less truthful communication between the characters who can talk to each other than there is with poor damaged Liza. Big is tormented by loss and responsibility, and bursting with love for her family--and for what her family should be. Mosey is such an engaging character, wise for her years, but not so much that she's not a believable fifteen-year-old. She and her best friend Roger have a great, three-dimensional relationship that earns Roger his place as the Encyclopedia Brown clue-finder to assist with furthering the plot. There is enough mystery and puzzle-solving to keep the pages turning, but as I went, I realized that I wasn't just reading for the answers like the back of a crossword puzzle book (as I'm apt to do with many mysteries/thrillers. I'm looking at you, Dan Brown). I cared about the answers because I cared about the characters and all their jagged pieces. I wanted them to fit together, somehow, so that they could finally be whole.

That's the mark of a good literary fiction novel--you don't just want to know what happens/happened, you just want to know. Anything. Everything.

I would also throw in a mention that I wish more men would pick up books like this one. Yes, the cover is feminine, it has "pretty" in the title, and it doesn't just have a woman protagonist, it has THREE of them. However, I think if more men read books like this one, they would understand women so much more--what maternal instinct looks like from the inside, how fiercely we can love, how fiercely we can fight, and not to count us out, not even in what looks like the end of days. Strong women are not to be feared or reviled or ignored, but should be seen for their truth. We are allies, and when necessary, warriors.

"You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you." --A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, by Joshilyn Jackson.

Book Review: Red Rain by R.L. Stine

Red Rain by R.L. Stine

Brief Synopsis: Red Rain is a rare attempt by R.L Stine at writing for an adult audience. Travel writer Lea Sutter visits a remote island off the coast of South Carolina known as Cape Le Chat Noir when a hurricane hits, devastating the island and all its inhabitants. She finds two young twin boys who state that they lost everything in the hurricane, and she quickly adopts them and brings them back to her home in Long Island. Soon after, the sweet, grateful boys appear to be more than meets the eye and the Sutters' lives begin to fall apart.

Published: 2012

Format read: eBook, read alternately on my Kindle Paperwhite, my iPad, and my iPhone

Comparison: It is like a grown-up version of the Fear Street books by the same author. Those books were written for a teen audience and have none of the sex or profanity found in Red Rain, but the bones are similar. It is natural to compare almost any modern, mainstream horror work to that of Stephen King, and I think that holds up here. The style is different, but there were moments when I was reminded of some of King's work, especially when he went for the gross-out instead of the scare.

Review: I have a sudden urge to go out and buy an Ace of Base cassette and watch a few episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon while I write this review in my hot-pink and purple Trapper Keeper. Why? Because it is somewhere around 1994 in my mind.

This happens whenever I think of R.L. Stine.

Like everyone my age, I grew up in the nineties, and like everyone my age, that meant my bookshelf was full of R.L. Stine's Fear Street and Goosebumps books. I ordered my first Goosebumps book, Say Cheese and Die, from a Scholastic book order at the ripe old age of eleven and quickly graduated to the Fear Street series as well.

They were okay, I guess.

I may or may not have been a member of the official Fear Street Fan Club, which meant that I got two brand new Fear Street books in the mail every month along with some other little macabre trinket.

I may or may not have obsessively checked the mail so often that I practically wore the hinges off my mailbox.

I may or may not still have a little glow-in-the-dark skeleton key ring I got in one of those packages.

I may or may not still have a handful of Fear Street books camping out on my shelf along with some dusty Christopher Pikes and Caroline B. Cooneys.

May or may not.

So, let us just say that I am well-versed in writings for young people by Mr. Stine, though I am old and rusty and mortgage-paying at this point in my life. Even so, I decided to reread one of the Fear Street books just for the sake of comparison to Red Rain. Not for fun, you understand. Never for that.

Boo does not like for me to have fun.

What I found was this: Some things never change, and some writing techniques, weak as they are, work on adults as well as teenagers.

Some things in common:
1) There is a town in which strange, supernatural things happen and nobody seems to question what the heck is going on.

The Fear Street books are all set in Shadyside (your first clue) and the protagonists all live on Fear Street (duh) and attend Shadyside High. There are murders, ghosts, ancient burial grounds, hidden identities--you name it--going on in this town, and the National Guard never comes and shuts them down. Not one single time. 

In Red Rain, the story begins on island Cape Le Chat Noir about which Lea Sutter quickly tells the reader no one visits because it is "totally creepy." It turns out that Cape Le Chat Noir was host to a devastating Labor Day hurricane in 1935 and there's another one heading right for it. Oh, and they have some ritual called "Revenir" that brings people back to life. No big deal. Of course, when the hurricane hits at Cape Le Chat Noir, the National Guard does come. They don't do anything about the apparent zombies, but they come. At least there's that.

2) Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. This is something that R.L. Stine is notorious for, from the very simplest of his books for kids all the way up to his small handful of adult works. Cliffhangers and twist endings are his bread and butter, and Red Rain is no different. Most of the cliffhangers, at least in the first act, end up having "false bottoms" that are quickly dispelled in the first lines of the subsequent chapter. In the Fear Street comparison sample I read, Sunburn, this was almost laughable at times. It is still effective; you want to see what happens next even if it is just to see how he worms out of the obvious.

I've drawn out the general shape of the narrative (written sloppily on the back of an index card because that's how I roll):

Index Card Analysis, patent pending

Again, this is not to say that this pattern isn't effective. It gets the job done--you want to keep turning the pages and you end up devouring the book in half the time you expected. That works for him because he writes probably three or four books a day between breakfast and lunch and he wants you to run out and buy them all. I imagine that the above structure is also how he is able to write so much so quickly--he has the One Outline to Rule Them All.

3) R.L. Stine is not exactly what I would call a master of physical description. In Red Rain and in every Fear Street book I can recall, he "cheats" on describing his characters by likening them to celebrities. Red Rain's Mark Sutter is frequently referred to as "Gyllenhaal" and referenced as "looking like that guy from Brokeback Mountain." This kind of thing gets under my skin as a writer because it's such a blatant cop out. If he looks like Jake Gyllenhaal, use your chops to write a description of Jake Gyllenhaal that the reader can see. Does it really matter that he looks like Jake Gyllenhaal? What if the reader abhors Jake Gyllenhaal? Give us the building blocks and we readers can bring our imagination to the table to build our own version of Mark Sutter, which may or may not look like Jake Gyllenhaal, but who will be handsome, have dark hair, and look younger than he is.

The bigger problem with this is that it seriously dates the work and irrevocably connects the character to the celebrity mentioned, for good or ill. One of the Fear Street books likens a teenage character meant to be a stunning, youthful beauty with silky black hair and strong cheekbones to looking like Cher.

Yeah...Cher don't look like that no more.

I have to say that there were some moments in Red Rain in which I was pleasantly surprised by a string of pretty words. This is not Stine's forte, and it doesn't need to be for him to accomplish his aims. Still, I'm a lit-fic writer and reader, and pretty words matter to me enough that finding a few in the prose makes me cock my head and say, "Aww," while growing in affection for the book. Then someone would lose a limb or something and I'd forget what the pretty words said, but not that they were there.

Red Rain itself:  
On the whole, Red Rain is not a work of high literature, but it is not meant to be. R.L. Stine mentioned in an interview that he wrote this book for people like me, kids who grew up with his work and are now in their twenties and thirties and still looking for a few chills and thrills from their old pal Bob Stine.

In that respect, I liked the book. It felt comfortable and familiar, and I got a little taste of the buzz I used to get when I would crack open a brand new Fear Street. The story was predictable, the characters more caricatures, and the supernatural elements strained the limits of my ability to suspend disbelief (and I have a capacity for suspension of disbelief that could overflow an ocean. I'm a very forgiving reader). The book wasn't so much scary as it was gross. Stephen King once said, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."

I would say that he would have given R.L. Stine a high-five on some of the gross-outs in this book.

I would recommend reading this book at a fast pace. Some books are made to be savored, but the longer you take with books like this one, the longer you have to think about it and it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Swallow it fast and let it burn your throat on the way down, that's the way it was meant to be consumed.

After reading through Red Rain and Sunburn, I got the itch to take some of what I learned back to my own writing. My work is in no way similar to these kinds of books, but there is always something to be learned from someone who has been at the craft a long time. R.L. Stine does not get stuck. If someone needs to kiss someone, they kiss them and they get it over with and they don't sit and ruminate over it. If someone needs to stab someone in the face, same thing. I tend to get stuck in transition a lot, and he just simply does not have that problem. If he needs to get someone across town to murder someone, he doesn't worry about where they sat in the car, if they had to stop for gas, or if there even was a car. Most of the time this works out for him, sometimes it creates a plot hole, but if you're reading this stuff the way he intended, you're swallowing it whole and not looking too closely to spoil the ride.

This is work meant for a dark room, so why bother flipping on the lights and ruining your own good time?

That is what it is in the end. It's just meant to be a good time that you don't have to think too hard about to enjoy (or to be grossed-out). If you're a child of the nineties like me, just pretend it says Fear Street at the top and dive on in.

Book Review: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

They Shoot Horses, Don't they? by Horace McCoy
 

Brief Synopsis: 
In the height of the Great Depression, two young Hollywood hopefuls with empty pockets meet and decide to hitch their dreams on a marathon dance. They are forced to stay on their feet for weeks on end, swaying, dancing, and competing in "derbies" in which they heel-toe around a track like racehorses, fighting to stay in the contest one more day where they might be "discovered" by a director and win a $1000 prize. Robert and Gloria explore the limits of their humanity and the jagged edges of mercy.

Published: 1935

Format read: eBook (I read this on my shiny new Kindle Paperwhite, but if I had it to do over, I would have sought out a floppy old mass market paperback, well used with musty, yellowed pages. There is just something about reading a moody book full of grit and truth in a format that mirrors that experience. Sometimes eBooks are just too...virgin.)

Genre: Most often considered "crime noir", but there is a lot of character and symbolism to chew on here.

Comparison: It is kind of a cross between The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel. It is set in the Depression and centered around characters who are struggling with internal demons amid a parallel event, in this case a dance marathon, that shakes up their insides until they froth out on the surface and soak into the ground.

There is an element of the gray desperation that permeates The Grapes of Wrath but without Steinbeck's peculiar eye for simple beauty and hopefulness. Short, tight, and dramatic, it has a little of the flavor of Marigolds, but in an inverted form. The depraved enmity and bitterness shown by Beatrice in Marigolds is also present in Gloria from Horses, as are Tillie's hardiness and (to a lesser extent) faith present in Robert, though in this case, they are basically dumped over his head, worthless as water.

Review: This novel did not fare well in the US when it was first released. It was not until the deep days of WWII that it found its way into the hands of French existentialists. They were a natural audience, given the contrast between Robert's "take it as it comes" attitude and Gloria's fatalistic bitterness.

Robert finds meaning in life through whatever opportunities present themselves, and he desires to become a director of short films that demonstrate the daily lives of average people. Some could argue that he invented reality television, but that's neither here nor there.

Gloria, on the other hand, has no meaning in life and nothing to strive for. She's not even striving to strive. The dance marathon is so symbolic of the way she has lived her life until that point--moving, moving, moving, resting for shattered moments, patching up only the most broken bits, and doing so only waiting to see how long it takes until it all ends. She is simply through with the world and everything in it. She doesn't care about anyone's feelings because she doesn't care about her own.

An existentialist might say that the world means only what a person brings to it, and Gloria comes with empty hands--limp, painful, empty hands. When Robert comes to realize that she is broken and that she will never be able to hold onto any sort of meaning which would bring her anything but misery, he has to resort to his own internal framework for right and wrong and must act based on his own personal experiences of mercy.

This novel is a tight one, so tight you could probably bounce a quarter off the cover and end up with two dimes and a nickel. It's almost like a play and has been adapted for the stage and screen. The novel is in first person POV, but even then doesn't linger much in Robert's inner monologue, and when it does, it is worth it.

There are some spots when a little more color could have been dabbed on to make the setting and characters more vivid, but somehow the drab tone works. It becomes experiential--the tone of the novel mimics for the reader what the characters are feeling, which is predominantly dehumanization. They are numb, they are holed up in a dark, sweaty space, and they are shuffled around from trough to trailer to track until they fall on their faces. 

The absence of "color" offers the reader a heightened sense of contrast, just like going outside after a long time in a darkened room. There is one notable passage when Robert dances his way into a triangle of sunlight streaming through a window. He stays in that triangle, swaying, until it creeps all the way up his body, finally standing on his tiptoes so that it can linger on his face as long as possible before leaving him back in the dark. Later, a character leaves under duress and Robert finds himself staring through the crack in the door as he goes, drinking in a flash of red from a fiery sunset. Though he should have felt sorry for the character's departure, he states that it had been the greatest part of his day because he had been allowed to see the sun. When Robert and Gloria finally go outside, there is a brief but beautiful passage detailing Robert's first breaths of sea air after being inside for nearly 900 hours:

"It was after two o' clock in the morning. The air was damp and thick and clean. It was so thick and so clean that I could feel my lungs biting it off in huge chunks." 

He's hungry, so hungry. What a great way to show it. 

One of the things I enjoyed about this novel is the way McCoy layers on the symbolism. Maybe he meant to, maybe he didn't, but that's one of the most important tenets of understanding art: it is a collaboration between creator and consumer. Either way, there were some elements that were striking to me, and in keeping with the kinds of literature that we normally consider "higher station" (which doesn't mean a heck of a lot to me).

Pay special attention to the parallels between the lives of these "kids" and the lives of horses. They are forced to compete in "derbies," in which the male partners have special belts for their female partners to hold onto, like a jockey on a horse. They are herded and fed and offered sleep and medical care insofar as it keeps them on the dance floor. Once they are past their point of usefulness or turn up last in a derby, they are little more than dog meat.

There appeared to be some parallels between Robert's shifting view of the Pacific Ocean and his shifting view of life. He mentions that he comes to resent the Pacific, which rolls endlessly under his feet beneath the dance floor without his permission. This becomes symbolic of life rolling along, vast and ageless, knocking us off our balance and driving us mad with its persistence.

This is not a book to read after a rough day, and it is certainly not going to leave you with a smile. However, if you pay attention and dig for the nut in the shell, you'll find that it leaves you with a lot to think about that is worth thinking about. It can be read in one good-sized setting, and I think it benefits from that kind of momentum. It adds a sort of meta-effect that strengthens the emotional resonance of the book. If you get tired of reading it, it just gives you a tiny taste of the what the dance marathon is doing to the characters. Where you, reader, become antsy and start thinking about the leftovers in the fridge, the characters are coming apart at the seams, worn to their washed-out bones.

I'm planning on seeking out the 1969 Sydney Pollack film, which I know took a lot of liberties and stretched out the narrative like a stiff piece of taffy. Even so, it has a great rep among film buffs, and I'm eager to see Pollack's interpretation of this little book. It sure does pack a punch.