Blast Off: My First Early Review

I mentioned earlier this week that I had been sent a copy of William Elliott Hazelgrove's new novel, Rocket Man. Hazelgrove wrote the book with the support of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park (Illinois), and got to work on the book in the house in which Hemingway was born. This is his fourth novel, and will be out from Pantonne Press later this month.

A week ago, the Booking Through Thursday question was related to these early review books, and whether or not reviewers should feel obligated to review them positively. Now that I've received one, I understand the dilemma a bit better. Getting a review copy, with a letter from the publisher, makes the endeavor much more personal. It's not some random book you happened to pluck off the shelves, written years ago by someone who's moved on to other projects by now, or maybe even moved on from this mortal coil altogether. It represents the hopes and dreams of a real person, and your response to it may help determine whether said real person will get to keep his or her home or not.

Even without all of this, Rocket Man probably would have been a challenge to write about. Picking up an independently published novel like this is a little like going to that sketchy dive in your neighborhood and ordering the food. Things in there are not quite what a diner who sticks mostly to known local places and/or chain restaurants has come to expect. There may be burned out light bulbs, battered carpeting, grotty restrooms, ass grooves in all of the chairs, and people smoking despite the fact that it's been illegal in the state for over five years. In some of those places, the food is in keeping with the decor. In others, it's much more delectable than at the four-star restaurant with the wait list down the street.

Rocket Man had its share of cosmetic problems: misspelled words, AWOL punctuation, continuity errors, and in at least one case, a word used incorrectly. But it turned out to be a decent book, that got better as it went along. If you pick this one up, you need to give it a chance.

It's hard to write about a character who is having an existential crisis, because such crises are always in one's head. In a sense, both G of Citizen Girl and Nathan of Summer People were in the grips of existential crises, but they just came off as whiny assholes, and at first, Dale Hammer comes off exactly the same way. His major damage seems to be that he and his family have moved out of a trendy city neighborhood to a wealthy suburban subdivision. Dale, a novelist, feels that he has sold out. He hates the community and the people in it, and misses no opportunity to sneer at their materialism, their shallowness, and their fidelity to law and order. The first scene of the book is about his decision to drive over an undeveloped lot to ferry a group of Cub Scouts from Dairy Queen to McDonald's, rather than use the roads like a normal person.

This scene gets five full pages, and is painted as a triumph of individual freedom over fascist repression (due to the fact that another adult is in the car and freaks out the entire time). I was starting to think that Hazelgrove could have used a good editor, and I guess this would be my main criticism of the book. Someone needed to put a stopper in sentences like: "The party around our marble bar on the patio was dried up salsa and obelisks of salted rims that had dashed many a margarita the night before." But fortunately, these ramblings got scaled back quickly in favor of more dialogue.

Dale is facing an uncertain future. He and his wife have been having problems ever since they moved to the suburbs. His writing is not going well, so he's taken up mortgage brokering, which is also not going well. He somehow got conned into being the "Rocket Man" for his son's Cub scout troop Rocket Day, and the higher-ups in the troop do not appreciate his laid-back attitude towards the particulars of Rocket Day (minor things like making sure the rockets are ordered, and learning how to launch them). His traveling salesman father appears on his doorstep, fired from another job and kicked out of the house by another wife, to sleep over his garage and meddle in his life.

It takes a while for all of these issues to fully emerge and settle on the reader's impression of Dale. I thought he was just an asshole at first. I especially disliked him after a scene between him and the man who started Rocket Day. Dale has never met this man before, as the man's son is several years over, but he goes to his house to obtain the launchers and learn how to operate them. He takes two cell phone calls during the course of his demonstration. At the end, the conversation takes a surprising turn as the man revealed how much being Rocket Man had meant to him, how much he was going to miss it, how difficult it was for him to watch his son get older, and what a noble and beautiful event he felt it was. The man's soliloquy actually made me cry when I read it, but Dale blows it off with a flip comment about how he was unsure whether to shake the man's hand or get the net. After bitching for nearly 100 pages about the phoniness, boredom, and materialism of everyone around him, when he actually is confronted with something real, he responds exactly the way the rest of the cyborgs would.

But I kept going with the book after that, and it did get better. Dale's dislike of everything around him is just a symptom of his real problems, and by the end of the book, he has made headway on them, even if they haven't all gone away. While I wouldn't describe this as a funny book, there are some genuinely funny scenes, such as when he drops in on a tenant to collect rent, who staggers out shirtless from behind the couch into a pile of dirty laundry to give an eloquent take on racism in America. Dale's father also provides constant comic relief, as he tries his gentlemanly southern charm routine on everyone he meets, sometimes to great effect, and sometimes not so much.

The publisher told me that this was a book for the times. I'm not sure if I'd go quite that far, but it's an excellent read. Whatever the final verdict on this book winds up being, it was nice to read something with so much heart. A lot of the books out there are very formulaic. You know what's going to happen in them just from reading the back. No one involved in its production ever loved for itself, just for its ability to move lots of units and hopefully become optioned as a movie or television show. The reason Rocket Man was published was because people believed in it, and wanted to share it with you and me. I'm glad for the opportunity to read something like that. Here's hoping it goes as far as it can.

Thankfulness

Booking Through Thursday, one day late for the holiday:

Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S.

Now, you may have noticed that the global economy isn’t exactly doing well. There’s war. Starvation. All sorts of bad, scary things going on.

So–just for today–how about sharing 7 things that you’re thankful for?

This can be about books, sure–authors you appreciate, books you love, an ode to your public library–but also, how about other things, too? Because in times like these, with bills piling up and disaster seemingly lurking around every corner, it’s more important than ever to stop and take stock of the things we’re grateful for. Family. Friends. Good health (I hope). Coffee and tea. Turkey. Sunshine. Wagging tails. Curling up with a good book.

So, how about it? Spread a little positive thinking and tell the world what there is to be thankful for.

This is a good one! Here is my list:

1. Thankful for my family, including my boyfriend and cats, and friends. They're always there when I need them, and always make me feel better about things. We have a lot of fun together and share a lot of things. Even when things aren't perfect, they're wonderful and we always work them out.

2. I'm thankful for my mentors. I met them by pure chance several years ago. They've helped me so much, serving as graduate school and professional references, and getting me involved with a local professional organization. Right now, they're all doing well, and I'm not. This would be a perfect time for them to turn their backs on me. It happens to people who lose their jobs all the time: people who have been friends and/or mentors for years suddenly look at them and see not their longtime associate, but their worst nightmare come to life. But my mentors are still there for me, providing as much advice and moral support as they can, and still offering to serve as references for me whenever I get a glimmer of hope. There's nothing in it for them at all. They're just excellent people and I'm lucky to have them in my life.

3. I'm thankful for orchestra. It gets me out of the house a couple of times a week, it helps me connect with something I love doing, makes me feel like a part of things and keeps me sane.

4. I'm thankful for Barack Obama, more specifically, that he got voted into office. The country needs change, optimism and a fresh outlook. He's got a lot of challenges ahead of him, but I think he's up for them.

5. I'm thankful for the libraries. My area has lost a few of them over the past few years, and may lose a few more in the near future. Libraries have always seemed almost too good to be true to me, though, and I'm glad they're still around, in any form.

6. I'm thankful for my apartment. Low rent, spacious, decent neighborhood, offstreet parking, porch, dishwasher, garden, free heat and laundry -- it has everything. I'm glad I opted for a cheaper place, too.

7. I'm thankful that I don't work at my old job anymore. I've been thinking about them more lately for some reason.And every time I do, I almost laugh out loud, I'm so happy not to be there anymore. I will continue to feel that way even if the next best job I can get is cleaning bus station toilets with my tongue, I'll laugh between gargles. And be glad that I'll never have to go back there or deal with those people ever again.

Happy, but somber, Thanksgiving!

I set my home page to cnn.com a while ago to force myself to pay more attention to what's going on in the world. Usually the featured articles are things like "Woman has 1000-pound tumor removed from leg". But in this visual era, you can tell when something serious is going on by the design of the page. So I knew that the terrorist attacks in India were a big deal without even reading through. I was even more surprised this morning to learn that they're not over and the group responsible is still holding hostages and killing people.

It's so terrifying to think about, and so odd that the rest of us on the other side of the globe will go on with their days, eating turkey, hanging with family, and watching football. It's going to be a shitty Thanksgiving for lots of Americans, who maybe haven't worked in a while, or are looking at heading back to work after retirement, or are wondering how they're going to provide any kind of holiday for their families. I guess this kind of puts it in a grim perspective. Even if you don't think you have anything to be thankful about this day, there are about 125 people -- and counting -- who would gladly trade places with you.

On the Trail of Our Founders

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in America. The stated meaning of this holiday is a celebration of friendship and collaboration among the Pilgrims and the Indians, the anniversary of the day when they pooled their resources to celebrate harvest together.

The real story of the beginning of America is much less simple, more geographically diffuse, with more characters than the Pilgrims from England and the Wampanoag Tribe from coastal Massachusetts. The real story has Vikings and Spaniards and Indian tribes that once had massive agricultural empires. This is the story that Tony Horwitz attempts to trace in A Voyage Long And Strange.

I loved Horwitz's other two books, but as I said last week, this one was missing something. About halfway through, I figured out what it was: a sidekick. In Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz's guide through much of the former Confederacy was the eccentric Robert Lee Hodge, a hardcore re-enactor who went on crash diets to maintain the appearance of a half-starved Confederate soldier, studied photographs of the dead on battlefields to improve the realism of both his gear and his deaths, and worked a menial job at Home Depot because they were willing to leave him off the schedule whenever he had a re-enactment to attend. In Blue Latitudes, his companion was the sardonic, adventurous Roger Williamson. In this book, he's flying solo and, like real-life solo travel, it tends to get monotonous.

I was also complaining that Horwitz doesn't give enough time to the modern folks. I loved this aspect of his other books best, the way in which he took such a major event and showed how it influenced individual lives decades and centuries later. This book didn't do this as much. He meets a lot of interesting people: a wide variety of re-enactors; a woman involved in the "identification repentence" movement; members of the Paumunkey Tribe in Virginia, one of the few tribes that occupies their original lands as a result of one of the few treaties that was actually honored; Roanoke colony theorists, and members of several heritage societies like the Degree of Pocahontas and the First Families of Virginia. But most of them only get a couple of pages, and they seem more like eccentrics and less like living evidence of the impact of conquest and colonization.

I guess I never really got into this one. I did like his final conclusion, about the dominance of myth over fact, and the ongoing power of Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower in American imagination. If I had picked up this book expecting something different -- a simple history of the exploration of North America, using primary source documents and interviews with modern experts -- I probably would have viewed the book differently. As it is, I was glad to be done with this one...and very sorry to be saying that.

About NaBloPoMo

So, I've been seriously thinking about whether I want to do this again next year. Last year was my first time doing it, and I got a lot out of it. I started this blog because I was inspired by my friend Hedwig (see sidebar). I saw how much she got out of her blog, and I realized one night that I could do a blog about the books I read, since I didn't have cable at the time and had precious little else to do at night but read. But I'd always kind of done it half-assed. I'd post when I felt like it, forget about it the rest of the time, and I never seriously worked at bringing more traffic to the blog, or becoming part of a community of bloggers, or anything like that.

I learned about NaBloPoMo at Jen Lancaster's blog (also on sidebar) and decided to try it. Last year, I really enjoyed it. I joined a million groups and started a lot more. Every time I went to their site, there was a lot of action. The groups were all busy, people supported one another, I got a lot of new readers and learned about a lot of cool new blogs.

This year...not so much. The site is starting to take on the same feel as a virtually-abandoned mall, where the proprietors of the few remaining businesses stand in front of their stores, alone amidst a sea of vacant spaces while handfuls of elderly mallwalkers meander by. Only a handful of new groups were created this year, and all of the groups I made and joined have been deader than dead. I tried to get some discussion going in a couple of them, but no one replied. A "poll of the week" question remained the same for about three weeks straight before it was taken down and not replaced. Even the activity section has slacked off. It used to be that the "latest posts" all hit within the last two minutes: in other words, new posts were constantly going up. I looked now and some of them have been up there for over a half hour.

So on one hand, I'm not sure if I'm going to do it next year. But on the other hand, maybe NaBloPoMo has transcended its site. Maybe people aren't going there to talk about it anymore, maybe they're just doing it. But I miss the sense of community, personally. Now that I'm in the home stretch, this has started to feel less like fun, and more like how I have to clean the coffeepot out every day.

Careful What You Wish For

As I was getting out of the shower today, I realized that all of my jeans were still in the dryer. I begged my boyfriend to go downstairs and get them. He came back with not only the laundry, but a package for me.

"I didn't order anything," I said. I got paranoid for a minute, remembering that they never did find out who was mailing anthrax to people several years back. But I decided to open it anyway, and it turned out to be...a review book!

Remember how I was just saying that Library Thing never picks me? Well, I got picked this time, apparently. It may have been a random thing, as I didn't register for books this month (I forgot) and the book is from an independent publisher.

It's called "Rocket Man," and it's a novel about a man who moves to the suburbs, is accused of knocking over the sign to his subdivision and is also roped into organizing some sort of Boy Scout "Rocket Day" for his son's troop. That's virtually all I know about it. The publisher says that it's a book for the times, like On The Road and Brith Lights, Big City. We will see. I'm almost done with the Tony Horwitz, so I'll start on this one next. I'm supposed to post a review of it over at Library Thing, but you know I'll post one here too!

BTW, thanks to Stella Devine for the new name for yesterday's feature: Little Sister Syndrome!

A New Feature: Insert Name Here

I don't know what to call this one, but inspiration hit when I saw a copy of George Orwell's Burmese Days on my bookshelf. Most people know Orwell from 1984 or Animal Farm. Before he wrote either of the books that was turn his name into an adjective, he wrote this novel, inspired by the years he spent living and working in colonial Burma. I'd never the hell heard of it before my Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature professor assigned it, but it's very good. So the idea behind the feature is that it profiles lesser-known works by well-known authors. The Blue Castle instead of Anne of Green Gables. The Town and the City instead of On the Road. Sometimes, they're lesser-known for the fact that they aren't very good. Sometimes, they're lesser-known because the other works are so big they overtake the ones that don't fit in.

This is the case with Burmese Days, I think. Unlike Orwell's two better-known works, this one is utterly realistic and set in the time in which it was written. Everything in the story could have happened exactly the way it did. In fact, one gets the impression that elements of the story happened throughout much of the British Empire in Southeast Asia.

The story centers around Flory, a man who's about 35 and has lived in Burma much of his adult life, working for a timber company. He hates it. He hates, most of all, his British co-workers and the stifling society that they've imported there. Forced into an unfamiliar environment, they've clung to their British ways, and that includes a strict social hierarchy that native Burmese do not have a place in. There are so few British people out there that doing whatever you want isn't really an option.

Flory has, against all odds, made a Burmese friend, but it's not a friendship of equals. Dr. Veraswami admires the British a great deal and admires Flory, too. He sees him as more of a powerful ally than a true friend, and early in the story, asks for his help in getting admitted to Flory's social club, as there's a man in the area who is seeking to discredit him. Yet, this would never fly with the racist members of Flory's club, putting Flory in the unenviable position of having to hurt a friend to placate people he can't stand.

In the midst of all this appear Elizabeth. Women were apparently rare enough in colonial Burma, and single women were downright oddities. Elizabeth runs practically straight into Flory on her first day in Burma, and Flory grasps at this straw immediately. From a few comments she makes, he senses that she's an intellectual, one that could be a true partner to him and enjoy the native culture as much as he does. The tragedy of this story is that he has the entirely wrong idea about her. Elizabeth hates books and art, has no interest whatsoever in native culture, and simply wants to find a husband.

All these controversies that suddenly boil over into Flory's previously dull life take a heavy toll on all those invovled, and Burma ultimately winds up chewing up Flory and spitting him out. It's an excellent picture of a culture clash. The British tried to impose morals and customs on a setting that couldn't accomodate them, holding dances when there was no one to dance with, demanding ice for their drinks when it had to be imported, refusing to mix at all. But even truly mixing wasn't an option, because of everything that had happened before. Previous waves of British people had made it perfectly clear that they viewed Burmese as inferior to themselves, so most Burmese either hated them for their arrogance, exploited them for their money (like Flory's Burmese consort), or revered them as something just less than gods, as Dr. Veraswami did.

Flory even came to feel that leaving wasn't an option. At some point, he realized that he wouldn't fit in to true British society any better than he'd fit in to the imported version or to Burmese society itself. He talked of realizing, all at once, that his youth had gone and that Burma was now his home, for better or for worse. Despite the fact that none of his colleagues come off well, and that history shows how the various colonial experiments worked out, one can't help but feel a bit sorry for them in spite of themselves. All of his co-workers were alcoholics of one degree or another, and the scenes in the club are always full of bitter, angry talk about the natives and the weather. He writes of the fate of those that wind up going back, to live in boarding houses and talk incessantly of their lives abroad until cirrhosis claims them.

It's been years since I've read Orwell's better-known works, so it's hard for me to judge this against them. But taken on its own, I thought it was a fascinating depiction of life in the British Colonies, with fully developed characters and an interesting plot. I'd reccommend this one as worth a look.

Now, does anyone have an idea for a name for this feature?