Review- Leonard, “Maximum Bob”

Elmore Leonard, “Maximum Bob” (1991) – This is the first Elmore Leonard I’ve read, and it lives up to expectations. It maybe doesn’t live up to all the accolades thrown at Leonard over his long career, but it’s pretty good. A tale of low life in south Florida, Maximum Bob is the nickname of a local judge, a sleazeball named after his preference for maximum sentences. In classic noir style, it all starts with a simple, if poorly-conceived plan to avoid hard conversations- get a con to sneak a dead alligator onto his property so his wife, who has a phobia (beyond the normal fear) of the critters, will leave. The wife has been increasingly going off the deep end of spirituality, claiming that she shared a body with the soul of a little slave girl (imagine the trouble she’d get in if she were a poster twenty years later!). Of course, the plan goes wrong, and draws in a number of characters in and around the south Florida demimonde. The main “good” characters are a handsome pair, a lady probation officer and a dude cop, who obviously get together while trying to figure out what’s going on with the judge, people shooting at the judge, the alligator, and the judge’s wife. They’re generally less interesting than the Florida Men on both sides of the law populating the tale. And I gotta say… after reading James Ellroy, this story feels a little tame, a little easy. But still, pretty good, and I plan on looking up more Leonard in the future. ****

Review- Johnson and Quinlan, “You’re Doing It Wrong!”

Bethany Johnson and Margaret Quinlan, “You’re Doing It Wrong!: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise” (2019) – Motherhood! Not easy, especially as everyone seems to have an opinion about how it should go, from how to get pregnant onwards. “You’re Doing It Wrong!” defies standard categorization- it’s part history, part communications study, and part relating the personal experiences of the two writers, both of whom are mothers of young children. It ranges from the mid-19th century until our own period of online expertise and social media to discuss how people think about various stages of early motherhood. Surprise surprise- as the title implies, from then until now, on every conceivable issue, experts believe that mothers are doing it wrong, and issue welters of contradictory advice. I had no idea how controversial cold cuts for expectant mothers were before this book! Moreover, Johnson and Quinlan illustrate the ways different categories of expert — from medical professionals to people with opinions — shade into each other, tread on each other’s territory, dispense similar (and similarly muddled) advice, etc. This was just as true in the days of patent medicine as it is today in our time of social media, which amplifies every dynamic the writers discuss. All in all, an interesting and methodologically novel read in a subject I don’t know well. ****’

Review- Himes, “If He Hollers Let Him Go”

Chester Himes, “If He Hollers Let Him Go” (1945) – Chester Himes takes us through the deeply uncomfortable racial atmosphere of Los Angeles during the Second World War in this, his first novel. Bob Johnson, the main character, works on building warships. Both black and white migrants from the South crowd Los Angeles and his workplace, causing the prevailing racism to reach a degree of ubiquity that haunts every action and interaction at Johnson’s workplace and elsewhere. Living in space involuntarily vacated by interned Japanese, Bob and other black workers work in segregated crews, most often with white leaders. Bob, who has had some college, is appointed the first black crew leader, a sort of experiment on the part of paternalistic management. This does nothing to ease the racial tensions on the production floor, as Bob is continually stonewalled by white colleagues when he needs their cooperation. Sex enters the mix as well- no one (other than some ineffectual Communist sympathizers) is willing to touch the toxic dynamic created by racist white women workers taking advantage of their position to terrorize black male coworkers. Bob’s resentments and desires intertwine to make both volatile- he considers killing a white coworker who attacked him during a card game, has a messed-up relationship with a woman from LA’s tiny black elite, and in general can never figure out if he wants to be accepted by society or to blow it all off. In the end, he gets the fate he had been trying to dodge- a forced enrollment in a Jim Crow institution, acceptance of a racist society whether he’s willing or not. A vivid, compelling read. ****’

Review- Mahfouz, “Sugar Street”

Naguib Mahfouz, “Sugar Street” (1957) (translated from the Arabic by William Hutchins, Olive Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan) – The end of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy finds us at the tail end of the Egyptian monarchy with a new generation — the grandchildren of the people who started the series — poised to take center stage. This generation includes a communist and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, unthinkable positions for the comfortably bourgeois Al-Jawad family a few decades before. The series as a whole and especially this volume takes a panoramic view of the family’s experiences, and the closest to a main character is Kamal, part of the second generation, who we last saw in “Palace of Desire” in the throes of unrequited love. As he enters his twenties and eventually thirties (“Sugar Street” covers more time faster than the other two volumes), Kamal becomes an increasingly detached intellectual, remaining in touch with his family but becoming a skeptic about everything, including love. He was about Mahfouz’s age; one wonders how much this is based on him. There’s an autumnal feeling to this book, as the older generation dies off, the hopes of the second generation either decline or are fulfilled in odd ways, and the third generation heads into what will become, as Mahfouz is writing, the Nasser era. All in all, a decent enough series in the Dickensian “chunk of life in a big city” tradition. ****

Review- Reynolds, “Beneath the American Renaissance”

David Reynolds, “Beneath the American Renaissance: the Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville” (1988) – This is a pretty interesting book about the well-trod territory of the American Renaissance writers, here defined by a big seven: Melville, Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Rather than isolated geniuses acting out against the strictures of a conventional god-fearing culture, Reynolds argues convincingly that the American Renaissance writers drew strongly from the popular culture at the time. In particular, he claims, they drew from the “subversive imagination.” This was the late eighties, when “subversive” was a word to swear by in criticism, though it seemed more about subverting literary expectations than anything social or political.

The subversive imagination encompassed new, more emotive methods of preaching, more radical reform movements, and an array of more-or-less scandalous popular literatures from bloody war stories to “city-mysteries” quasi-exposés to outright literary pornography. Reynolds is at his strongest excavating the pop literature of the nineteenth century and such figures as radical writer George Lippard (who apparently wrote the mother of all American city-mysteries about Philadelphia, a work I’d like to look at) and the sailor’s preacher Edward Taylor. The book shows that the major writers were all influenced by this popular culture of grotesquerie, sensationalism, and irrationality to one degree or another (he’s stronger on this with Whitman, Melville, and Poe than with Dickinson and Thoreau, say).

He also argues they transcended the merely subversive to become truly literary. Instead of the hit-you-over-the-head ironies of pastors behaving poorly, you have the introspection of “The Scarlet Letter”; Whitman transfiguring the prurient literature of the day in “Leaves of Grass”; Melville transforming adventure stories into high art and Poe doing the same with sensationalist gothic crime stories, etc etc. Reynolds’ idea seems to that you wash the genre stink off, slap on some capital-T Themes, and you’ve got yourself genuine literature.

On the one hand, I’m an admirer of much of the American Renaissance (Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne- I’ve got little use for Emerson or Thoreau). On the other, this sounds like the kind of artistic hierarchy that leads to praising dullards and shortchanging hardworking genre artists. It also tends to be politically enervating- Reynolds sees Whitman’s and Emerson’s posturing as far more literary, hence worthy, than taking firm sides on something like abolitionism. And Dickinson is to a certain degree shoehorned in with some unsolicited advice for feminist scholarship. Still, agree with it or not, it is the sort of big, toothsome read I enjoy on a topic that interests me. ****’

Review- Delbanco, “The Puritan Ordeal”

Andrew Delbanco, “The Puritan Ordeal” (1989) – I think I’m stuck with the Puritans the same way other people see themselves stuck with their lineages. Which is funny, because my actual lineage is a rogues gallery of the sorts of Catholics the Puritans feared and loathed most, along with Jews, who the Puritans thought they had essentially replaced. I don’t believe in blood magic but I do believe in history, not just as something taught in schools but something written into the texture of everyday life.

I’m not going to pretend that over and above everything else, I’m not a product of late twentieth century undifferentiated American capitalist culture. But New England, one way or another, shapes my thoughts, expectations, etc., in a way I relate to when, say, John Dolan writes about California. The Puritans loom over New England in a weak echo of the way God loomed over the Puritans. Several major habituses — from the urban ethnic one pioneered by the Irish the Puritans despised to the suburban liberalism that the Puritans’ descendants played a strong role in shaping — have developed to give New England a culture specifically in reaction to the problems in Puritanism. They’ve by and succeeded but the Puritan grapple with God, man, and time still lives on. It’s there in the way the towns are set up, in the weather, the way people interact, what you learn when you’re little, the niggling worries about abstractions in the back of your head.

I think I’m also stuck with the early American Studies scholars, despite the fact I agree with them about as much as I agree with seventeenth century Calvinism. I still find myself pulling their books or books about them from shelves. Another set of overachieving ancestors who were wrong-headed in some fundamental ways, they also baked themselves into the definition of American culture even as they were writing about how the Puritans did the same thing. Both had a faith in the power of canonical texts that verged on the psychotic. Part of me wonders if both weren’t playing some deeper game, the kind of thing you could make a scifi plot out of… the Puritans are much likelier and more interesting candidates for protagonists, I grant.

Well, anyway, this book. Not strictly an early American Studies text but something of a throwback; Andrew Delbanco, later to become Melville’s biographer, writing an exegesis on Puritan spiritual/social practice while the 1980s culture war raged all around him. His main argument is that while the Puritans are (again, for the most part rightly- there’s good reason to dislike them) associated with the idea of evil as a force in and of itself, operative in the world, that earlier on many of them were believers in Augustine’s idea of evil as the absence of good, or privative evil as it’s called. This carries along with it an idea of human perfectibility that is far from the dour self-hatred we associate with the Puritans from Hawthorne and the witch trials. The fall from this privative sensibility and millenarian vision, Delbanco argues, came with the pressures on the new colony and the efforts of its leaders to control it socially.

He makes a broader point about immigrant generations, citing the way immigrant Jews often felt that their American-born children fell away from the truth and the way immigrant children feel small next to their ancestors. This sounds like an overgeneralization. But I think, in his… knowing, half-ironically filiopietistic Nth generation American Studies way, Delbanco got at something of the way the Puritans achieved their remarkable “stickiness,” to use some Silicon Valley jargon. They colonized not just this cold appendage of America, but the whole practice of relating introspection to social structure, as undisentangleable as western philosophy is from what a few Athenians thought a long time ago. I don’t think it’s just me and a few other pedants stuck with them, in the end. ****’

Review- Johnson, “Street Justice”

Marilynn Johnson, “Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City” (2003) – A former professor of mine wrote this book. A work of social history, it makes use of the archive left by complaints against the NYPD (both official and unofficial) and the defenses and reforms mounted by the police and their supervisors over the years- which is to say, a lot of the story isn’t and can’t be told, as it’s already been swept under the rug, in some cases for over a century. There’s a dispiriting regularity to how waves of police reform go. The police engage in systematic violence, from “clubbing” passers-by in the nineteenth century to the “third degree” in interrogation in the early twentieth with violent ethnic/racial/class profiling throughout. Coalitions of affected groups, liberal, leftists, and reformers get together to reign things in. You get some questioning of what the police are for and what they’re doing, but in the end discourses against the abuse of “respectable” citizens (implicitly approving of roughing up everyone else) and “professionalism” take the fore, being pressed by more organized and wealthier groups. The police squawk at both radicals and reformers and insist the sky will fall if they can’t torture suspects/club people when they feel like it/profile black people/whatever. But in the end, they wind up becoming quite cozy with the more moderate reformers, many of whom wind up giving police more resources and control in the name of professionalism. The structural issues are left in place, violence finds more permissible targets, and the cycle begins again. In this moment, the forces pressing for structural change seem stronger than they have in a long time, but the dynamics of reform are still depressingly similar. ****

Review- Maurer, “The Big Con”

David Maurer, “The Big Con: the Story of the Confidence Man” (1940) – Who doesn’t like old-timey flim-flam men? David Maurer was a linguist who approached the underworld of his time in search of its peculiar argot. Along the way, he got to know dozens of con men, who became his sources for this book. As the title promises, it focuses on the “big” con games, defined by “the send” – the act of sending the mark home to get more money. Ten thousand dollars was considered the minimum score for a big con, and Maurer regales us with tales — typically told by the conmen themselves in their dialect — of routinely taking rich men for hundreds of thousands of dollars, back in the twenties and thirties when that was the equivalent of millions.

Maurer lingers on the details of the craft: the division of labor within the con mobs, the rules of the different games (which all seemed pretty much the same to me- maybe I’m just a poor mark!), the setup of “stores”: fake gambling clubs and stock brokerages where ropers took marks to get fleeced. More than the simpler short cons, the big con relies on the complicity of the mark. Everything about the mob’s performance and the shop setting is designed to “stir the larceny in the mark’s blood.” “You can’t cheat an honest man,” they say- all the games rely on telling the mark that the conmen are bringing them in on the real, i.e. underhanded, way to make big money. They make use of the greed and pride of men who fancy themselves big wheels because favored by the big game of capitalism, but who have niggling suspicions that they’re not in on the real action.

Maurer sued the makers of the movie “The Sting” for allegedly ripping off his book (they settled out of court). You can see why- I thought the elaborate fake storefront they used in that movie was unrealistic, but I guess not. You already need a big bankroll to start a big con game, to pay for premises, help, and fixing the police. That’s another way the con games mirror capitalism as a whole- those with the money to start with are in the best position to gain more. I wonder what an updated version looks like- as far as I can tell, the big con has mostly turned into stock swindles, and the short con is everywhere online, but who knows? Either way, a good read both in content and tone. ****’

Review- Wodehouse, “Pigs Have Wings”

P.G. Wodehouse, “Pigs Have Wings” (1952) – What to say about P.G. Wodehouse that hasn’t already been said? His books are more-or-less pure wholesome fun. Everyone at the time liked and respected him with very few exceptions and people who read him now have the same feelings. He had a more-or-less blameless, happy life except for letting the Nazis bully him into doing self-effacing radio vignettes when they had him captured, and he never complained about the Brits being mad at him for it. Everyone in humor writing imitates him but nobody duplicated him. Even people like me inclined to dislike the British upper-crust milieu he illustrates find little fault with him, if nothing else because his characters are so ludicrous and awful (but always in a funny way). By the 1950s when this, the seventh book set at rural Blandings Castle, was published, he had been going for forty years and would go for another twenty. His later work, in my opinion, doesn’t have quite the zip or beauty of construction that characterized his mid-career stride from the twenties to the forties, but it’s still amusing and worth reading. This one is no exception- he had nailed the formula well before then. It’s the twenties, there’s a bunch of twenties-types — befuddled aristocrats, star-struck lovers, gadabouts, vicious aunts, servants of varying degrees of capability and trustworthiness — all bouncing off each other in a plot centered around two prize-winning pigs and four young people who need to be properly paired off. Everything comes together with only a few audible creaks in the machinery, and you’ve got Wodehouse set out to give- finely-crafted literary entertainment in a light vein. ****

Review- Sciascia, “The Moro Affair”

Leonardo Sciascia, “The Moro Affair” (1978) (translated from the Italian by Sacha Rabinovich) – The kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 gave the squalor of the “Years of Lead” a symbolic central narrative. Novelist/journalist Leonardo Sciascia did a lot to define that narrative with his book on the topic. For the most part, Sciascia allows both the Red Brigades and Moro speak for themselves, and for the Italian state to speak for itself through its silences and obfuscations. Moro had the chance to write several public letters while in Red Brigade captivity for almost two months. He starts out relatively resolute and gets more and more unbelieving that the state — run by the party he dedicated his life to, the Christian Democrats — would not negotiate for his release. The C-Dems developed, all of a sudden, an aversion to prisoner swaps that Moro and Sciascia saw as antithetical to what philosophy the party could be said to have.

Of course, that’s largely the point- Christian Democracy was essentially the court philosophy of the people who ran the Italian state, and so was not particularly Christian or democratic. Sciascia suggests that the Red Brigades, while otherwise a vain and bloody-minded lot with more in common with the Mafia than they’d like to admit, didn’t particularly want to kill Moro- they wanted a prisoner exchange and to make a point. But Giulio Andreotti and the others running Italy wanted to make a point, too, and so Moro wound up dead. Sciascia translates everyone’s communiques into something like actual communication, and it all said that for everyone who mattered at the key moment, Moro dead was worth more than Moro alive. ****