The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book – Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, 1985 ★★

Curtain Call

The Bob & Ray era was winding down when this third and final volume of their collected sketches came out in 1985. More a hit and miss compilation than their first two books, The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book at least starts out on something of a roll.

In a broadcast studio, a man in the audience introduces himself as “one of the very few people in America with a name that is completely unpronounceable,” which he spells W-W-Q-L-C-W: “I’d like to say hello to my brother on your program, but I don’t know how to pronounce his name, either. 

A hard-luck would-be anthropologist explains how he spent all his money trying to discover a tribe of uncontacted natives somewhere in New York City: “My brother-in-law was here about a year ago. And he said he ran into some people out in Queens who seemed awfully crude to him. But I haven’t found any trace of them yet.”

Fat Ollie’s Book – Ed McBain, 2002 ★½

Side Character Takes Over

Ed McBain wrote two kinds of 87^th Precinct novels. In one he details a single story that more or less takes over the entire book. The other is when he hops around, juggling multiple plots.

Fat Ollie’s Book is very much in the latter mold, a novel that dances around quite a bit keeping you trying to keep up, playing multi-layered games of who is fooling who, and even favoring us with fictional writing from one of the series’s most despicable characters.

It should be fun, since McBain knew how to tweak his established formula for humor and thrills. But somewhere along the line, he lost interest in providing the very thing readers expect when they pick up one of his books: a tight, involving police procedural.

Controversies & Commanders: Dispatches From The Army Of The Potomac – Stephen W. Sears, 1999 ★★

War is Hell on Generals, Too

Throughout the first half of the Civil War, the U. S. Army on the field performed like beer-league backups against a team of All-Stars. It is natural a series of essays about its leadership would present a dispiriting chronicle of utter ineptitude. Mostly it does.

Stephen W. Sears, who has written about those early years of the Army of the Potomac across several campaign-specific books, takes stock of Northern leadership performance during the war as a whole. He would seem the right author; yet for all his expertise Controversies & Commanders is not as satisfying as his other works.

It may just be that much of this book is ground he covered before, in chapters of other books. Or the brevity of his essays, or the lack of their originality as he mostly plumbs secondary sources and offers non-controversial conclusions.

Puppet On A Chain – Alistair MacLean, 1969 ★★★

 A Nastier Sort of Thrill Ride

Alistair MacLean knew how to write exciting adventure stories. Deep into the second decade of his bestselling career, he had it down to a formula. Kick things off with a deadly encounter in chapter one, keep raising the odds in every chapter, and never let up on the wisecracks.

Interpol agent Paul Sherman has just arrived in Amsterdam and before he can even leave Schiphol Airport he has already witnessed the gunning down of his main contact, been knocked half-unconscious by an assassin, tangled with a mysterious woman, and clashed with local authorities who can’t believe he’s a lawman.

Othello – William Shakespeare, c. 1603 ★★★½

Shakespeare's Least-Great Masterpiece

Shakespeare’s tragedies are recognized to be enduring classics above and beyond even the most celebrated literature. Of them, Othello maybe has the strongest case for contemporary resonance. The themes of irrational enmity and racial hatred have certainly not dated it at all.

But the case for Othello doesn’t ring as solidly to me as Shakespeare’s other three top tragedies: Hamlet, MacBeth, and King Lear. The main plot is constrained and deterministic. Its characters are relatively few and mono-dimensional, lacking for life. The comedic interludes are slight to the point of pointlessness. While Shakespeare tragedies deliver a kind of catharsis amid the Act V tears, here you get just bitter silence.

You get a great villain, one of the greatest of all time, and scenes of deep complexity and wit worth turning over in one’s head. But I never enjoy this one like I do the others. It only commands my respect.

White Noise – Don DeLillo, 1985 ★

Embracing the Chaos

Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.

Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.

Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.

A Handful Of Dust – Evelyn Waugh, 1934 ★★★★★

Achieving Perfection Imperfectly

There may be no such thing as a completely perfect novel. Yet few achieve greatness despite missing perfection quite like this one. What makes A Handful Of Dust a classic are the same things that catch readers like me short on a first read. It’s the grittiness that grabs you.

Take a set of cold, seemingly unknowable characters. A radical tone shift from comedy to drama. A dire third act with an O. Henry twist out of nowhere. An abrupt finale that can’t be anything but anticlimactic.

If I was a book publisher in the 1930s with this manuscript in my hands, I would have sent Evelyn Waugh back for a rewrite, probably grumbling at him on his way out. Thus the world might have missed out on one of the century’s greatest literary works.