I’d seen trees before—so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn’t know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the idea of Connecticut was sort of interesting…The traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford.

Cute, this presumption that Essrog, who. in his 20s or 30s, and has been all over New York City, has never heard of Hartford. Likewise for the other characters in the novel: Gerard, the street-tough-turned Zen master; Kimmery, the naïve Zen novice Essrog boinks; the Polish giant who kills his boss and beats him up; the black detective who is terrified of these Brooklyn low-lifes; and finally Julia, who, we are to believe, grew up in Nantucket and becomes a bleached-blond, tough-talking, boink-everyone-with-an-X-chromosome, Brooklyn moll.

The book, from the narrator’s highly-literate first line (“Context is everything”) to the contrived ending, has been a stupendous marketing success: Lethem won a McCarther “genius” award, and pretention meister Edward Norton is turning it into a movie. We don’t care about any that shit. The book sucks because Essrog is just not believable.

Oh, the creativity. We picture A-rod burning the midnight oil, hunched over his computer writing and rewriting each sentence till the prosaic rhythms ring with diamond clarity.

Rodriguez, through his publicity machine (let us not forgot that main reason the Mets didn’t buy him a few years back was because he wanted them to pay for his own P.R. team) announces that he wrote this book all by his very own self. And after reading the synopis, we believe him.

He also says that the book is about someone like himself--an underdog.

What amazes us are not the banalities that Rodriguez and his people spew, but that newspapers actually report it.

Let’s get something straight. Writing a good children’s book is harder than writing a good adult book. The people who’ve done it consistently — E.B. White and William Steig to name just two — are geniuses.

If he goes to the Mets, we’re moving to Argentina.

a) it is a Big Important Book

b) it is a bestseller and

c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.

Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — have humor or soul--they’re pretentious prigs, prosy show-offs, and, worse, unbelievable.

Then, after leading us to that abyss into which we’ve thrown a billion crappy books, Ian McEwan pulls us back with a terrifying plot twist: a good, innocent young man with a bright future is falsely accused of rape by a young girl with an overripe imagination. Part 2, the reason we read the book, takes place in France during the British retreat to Dunkirk, and in a London hospital receiving the wounded and dead. It fed the ending, but it wasn’t, as someone said, “the most realistic depiction of war ever.”

It is the final and shortest part of the book, deceptively called “London, 1999″ that sucker-punched us hard. In this blithely, even warmly told denouement, we discover that the book’s elderly author is the young girl who made the false accusations. And what she tells us in her casual-to-the-point-of-cruelty way is too much to bear. It is an indictment not only of the woman telling the tale, but, weirdly, of all writers.

Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language--spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.

Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you what happened.

I do remember a little of the first story—“Pick-up on Noon Street”—because the beginning was cool. Guy tries to pick up a floozy, but she’ll only do him for lots of liquor. He doesn’t have money, so he plots a stick-up. Pete Anglich, alkie (seems as if all of Chandler’s heroes are, um, Problem Drinkers), a sort of retired detective (ditto) ends up killing the guy in a flophouse (with vividly seedy interiors), then gets tricked into picking up a package he shouldn’t. A seedy movie star is involved—or maybe that’s the next story. I get them mixed up. Is this sameness of plot Chandler’s fault or my deteriorating brain’s?The plots do, in the end, neatly tie themselves up, but they are not exactly memorable.

What’s memorable are faces, interiors, clothes—descriptions that make me quiver in disgusted delight. Consider this excerpt from “Smart Aleck Kill”:

Derek Waldon opened the door. He was about forty-five, possibly a little more, and had a lot of powdery gray hair and a handsome, dissipated face that was beginning to go pouchy. He had on a monogrammed lounging robe and a glass full of whisky in his hand. He was a little drunk.

Pleasantly depraved, especially the kicker. Here’s another from the same story:

Dolmers and the girl sat in a small booth with hard seats and looped-back green curtains. There were high partitions between the booths. There was a long bar down the other side of the room and a big jukebox at the end of it.

After reading that, I want a Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of water.

Here, from “Nevada Gas,” is ’a description of Hugo Candless, a big, obnoxious, newly rich bastard getting dressed in his country club locker room, while Dial, his paddleball partner watches:

Candless didn’t answer, didn’t look at him. Dial stood silent with his drink and watched the big man put on monogrammed satin underclothes, purple socks with gray clocks, a monogrammed silk shirt, a suit of tiny black and white checks that made him look as big as a barn.

Maybe not as repulsive as Humpert Humpert throwing on a bathrobe and flouncing downstairs to suckle Lolita’s toes, but still pretty gross. No wonder Candless gets knocked off a few pages later.

Kind of hard to ignore, by the way, that Chandler has a thing for dressing his creeps in monogrammed clothes.

Unfortunately, the racism that makes frequent appearances in Chandler’s world is also hard to ignore. Sure, negroes with rolling eyes and thick lips were stock characters of movies and books, but the caricatures here are painfully dated. The blacks are simple doorman or feeling-their-oats-but-dumb criminals. In other words, big-lipped cartoons. Gangsters and morons—or both. Not that white people are particularly saintly but they come off a little smarter.

So what do we do with Chandler? His blacks are racist props. His plots—at least in these stories—are interchangeable. But his writing is laser-focused on a creepy nighttime Los Angeles where men are weak and appealingly flawed, women are weak and understandably dishonest, a Los Angeles of intense and foreboding reality that Chandler fashioned out of clothes, faces, and décor. Yowza.

Here at Recharger The Dog, we have a rule: never read a bestseller recommended by more than one person.

Ignoring our own advice, we started The Alchemist with trepidation. It began with a cliché that we’ve come to detest—the uneducated working class lad who secretly reads Big Books. This sappy device was used by James Jones in From Here to Eternity (Pruitt, the reluctant boxer or trumpeter—can’t remember which—has a list of Big Books stashed in his pocket), nearly ruining that novel. In The Alchemist, the shepherd is a deep thinking reader searching for his “Personal Legend.” What that phrase means, we cannot, without the aid of LSD, say.

Anyway, after about 20 pages, we realized this was not just a bad book, or even a very bad book, it was a book of such horrific badness, such poor writing and story-telling and, above all, such monumental VAPIDITY, that it makes the Berenstain Bears look like The Odyssey, it makes Jonathan Livingston Seagull look like the Book of Job; it makes The Kite Runner look like Lolita, it makes Manischewitz look like wine.

Don’t believe us? We give you two excerpts (more than that and you will run screaming into traffic). Here is the alchemist, the shallowest wise man in the history of literature, telling the boy to leave Fatima, the oasis girl he’s just met and fallen in lust with at first sight:

You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love…the love that speaks the Language of the World.

What the annoyingly capitalized “Personal Legend” and “Language of the World” mean is never explained. They just sound important, in a way that appeals to 14-year-olds. Indeed, every one and everything the boy meets speaks the “Language of the World.” And, given the radiactive vagueness in nearly every one of the books sentences, the Language of the World--though Recharger doesn’t speak it himself--must have been invented by presidential speech-writers. Take the above paragraph. What is it about? Does it mean we should ditch the chicks we fall for, and if they don’t understand—too fucking bad?

Another Coelho mantra goes like this:

If a man seeks his Personal Legend, then the whole universe conspires to help him.

Uh, Paulo, this doesn’t explain all the people that have died with broken dreams. But who cares? This is not supposed to be a serious book. It’s a book English teachers— the ones who never read any books themselves—assign their students. Over and over, what is supposed to pass for wisdom in The Alchemist is the acme, the paragon, the Mt. Everest, of drivel.

Here, for example, the alchemist is telling the boy not to worry about leaving Fatima back at the oasis:

If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always comes back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

Last time I looked, fish is pure matter--and it spoils pretty damn fast. But who cares? The whole book is like that—paragraph after fast-food paragraph, for 169 pages, the longest book ever written. A literary 9/11. That metaphor, we do not lightly use. If this is what people are reading and—judging by the rave reviews on Amazon.com—thinking is an important book, then there is no hope for humanity. No wonder the majority of Americans  think Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks; no wonder most Americans don’t believe in Darwin’s theories of adaptation; no wonder most Americans think Friends is funny. Taste, intelligence, literature, nuance--the joy and pain that have inspired philosophers and theologians--are dead.

Trademark your name; I will drink any chocolate milk called Shorto.

As for your enlightening, lugubrious history of New Amsterdam—Manhattan--I was disturbed for the following reasons:

It gave me a creepy case of the academics. I did not like slogging through a book. I wanted to feel as if I were in Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back machine; the thrill I got from Jack Finney’s Time And Again (yes, a novel, and the setting was 200 years after yours). I wanted to smell the forest as Adrien Van der Donck—your well-chosen, long-forgotten hero--hiked to his pow-wow with Indians. I wanted to taste New Amsterdam before docks obscured rocks. I wanted to smell fireplaces and listen to church hymns and gossip in the street. You gave me some of that, but mostly you gave me a stiff, overly chronological tour of events from Henry Hudson’s voyage (the mutiny that doomed him, by the way, was the best part of the book) to the English takeover. Interesting, yes. Informative, yup. Thought-provoking, at times. Admirable, of course. Involving—not as much as I would have liked. Somehow, even as you painted Van der Donck arguing his case against the Dutch West India Company, you didn’t quite bring Holland to life.

I also had trouble with those Dutch immigrants. What, aside from money, compelled them to pack up their lives for a dangerous cross-ocean voyage and a muddy village? After reading your fine book, I still don’t know.
Can you tell, Mr. Shorto, by my polite, quasi-professorial tone that Island at the Center of the World is not my idea of a beach book? That if your book were a girl, she’d win my respect, but not my lust?

Granted, your book is mainly about the struggle between Van der Donck and Peter Stuyvesant, and later the English and Peter Stuyvesant, to control the future of Manhattan and thus America. Still, I longed for some of what T.C. Boyle gave me in World’s End. Boyle’s characters were huge, frightening, fascinating Dutchmen decked in fantastic togs, outrageous personalities, absurd situations. Your Stuyvesant and Van der Donck were, by contrast, respectively, constipated and choir-boyish.

Worse, by the end of the book, I didn’t feel smarter.

As the world sinks into pathology, as my kids drift further from me, as I creak towards 53 years—pot-bellied, lonely, strange, starved for affection, grieving lost family life, I ask, Why read novels?

I read The God of all Small Things because, according to a Korean woman who seemed intelligent and who used it to teach her CUNY students, it is a Good Book.

I have developed an allergy to Good Books.

Roy is an annoyingly precious writer. Her words scream, I Am A Writer. I keep my chin high as I describe tragic events with bitter irony, events which are, I assure you, as much products of history as of small-minded prejudice.

A nutshell: on a visit to her Indian father, several months after her beloved step-father dies in a car accident in England, Sophie Mol drowns, though Roy doesn’t explain how until the last 20 pages. To create the book’s magical, tragic effect, Rahel, the adult narrator, switches from the days leading up to the tragedy to her visit many years later.

Rahel is Sophie Mol’s cousin. She and her twin brother Estha are so close they can read each other’s minds. Ammu, their single mother, falls for Velutha, an untouchable. After their affair is discovered she is locked in her room by an enraged brother. Mourning her lost love affair, she accuses the twins of ruining her life. Hurt, they attempt to run away with their visiting cousin, crossing the river in a leaky boat that sinks and drowns Sophie Mol. The Paravan, a good-hearted, free-thinker with a genius for fixing things is beaten to death for his supposed transgression. Ammu leaves home, eventually dying alone as a prostitute. Rahel moves to America, to a lousy marriage and divorce, Estha is sent to live with relatives. He grows up mute. The story is a Faulknerian metaphor for India’s senseless violence and ethnic slaughter.
In other words, this is a Big Meaningful Novel.

But unlike Faulkner Roy’s carefully-wrought, self-conscious prose begins to bug the shit out of me. Page after gothic page, I struggled to pay attention, to follow the dry wit, the show-offy sentences, the Booker Prize strutting syntax, feeling increasingly like a did the eleven times I tried to read Ulysses. Stupid.

It is not a bad book—it has a big heart and a story with truths galore—but it tries too hard to trumpet it’s importance, like a beautiful woman with too much makeup.

And the story-seen-through-the-eyes-of-babes artifice grows tiresome, as if the child’s innocent voice, and the grown-up child’s not-so-innocent memories are supposed to deepen the tragedy. They don’t. The tragedy speaks for itself.

A second annoyance was Estha, Rahel’s brother rendered mute by childhood trauma. I am really tired of characters-rendered-mute (or schizophrenic, etc.)-by childhood trauma. Doesn’t anyone go nuts for no reason anymore? Because, say, the brain chemical are fucked up? And why doesn’t someone write a crazy character that is immensely unpleasant, the way many real crazy people are? Someone we’d really rather not know better? Why do we have to go through the Maya Angelou deceit again? (Angelou, in one of her books, claims that after being raped, she didn’t talk for two years—funny how in real life trauma never seems to lead to muteness; it usually leads to other, much less pretty behaviors—meth addiction, sleeping around, armed-robbery, shitty grades—never has any child I’ve known gone all delicate like Estha and wandered gracefully and mutely through town and market till his sister feels the need to fuck him. (Yes, they have sex, though the narrator claims it’s not lust, but “shared grief”).

Another thing: can ugly chick write? Are there any non-white Booker-prize winners who are not frighteningly beautiful? Are drop-dead good ethnic looks a prerequisite for winning literary prizes? Judging from photos of Roy and Zadie Smith, no.  Just wondering.

Women dig Darcy. They are stuck on him because he is rich, handsome, shy. The shyness covers, Austen makes clear, destructive pride. He disdains Elizabeth because a) he is not at first attracted to her and b) she is lower class—though in Austen’s world the lower classes live in huge houses, with gardens and lawns and don’t work and spend their free time either hiding in the den or attending balls or playing cards.

Nevertheless, Darcy’s shyness, his hurt puppydog shtick (though he apparently has none of the usual reasons for turning into a hurt puppy dog—a history of abuse, a fiancé who jilted him, and incurable disease, a crazy mom) serves him well. All the girls, excepting the perspicacious Elizabeth, want to mother him.

But to me he is so boring. And uptight. And, in contrast to Elizabeth Bennett (whom I love nearly as must as I love Sandra Oh), he has no sense of humor. Isn’t a Sense of Humor the sine non qua of all women-searching-for-men Craigslist listings? Instead of cracking jokes, he festers and broods and writes long creepy letters and is eaten up inside by his long-running beef with Wickham.

Wickham is another problem. Yeah, he lies, he womanizes, he cheats and gambles—an all-around ne’re-do-well—and he betrays Darcy. But he’s got reasons. His dad worked for Darcy’s dad; he and Darcy were boyhood chums. But from the start it was clear to him that he was never Darcy’s equal. Unlike Darcy, he’d have to work for a living because he was born lower than Darcy. Worse, Darcy’s family pushed him into the clergy, a profession Austen trashes through the character of Mr. Collins. Call me a Marxist, but this situation strikes me as unfair.
Speaking of class, having servants gush to Elizabeth their love for Darcy gives me a serious case of the creeps. As if they who spend their time cleaning and polishing and showing the obsequiousness that befits their stations would truly admire their master. Yeah, right.
It’s okay to write fantasy, but I get the feeling Austen was inventing the perfect husband she lacked.
Not that I fault Elizabeth for marrying a handsome, rich, humorless, useless fop. Given her situation—aching as we all are for love, facing dispossession by the unctuous Mr. Collins—who wouldn’t do the same? I fault her for loving him. Real love is more complex. One doesn’t fall for the guy who saves your life (see the end Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights), one falls for the bad boy, the guy with thee hint of danger.
Another big problem: Darcy’s Brithishness, every American (and, I increasingly discover, Asian) girl’s wet dream. The pinched smile that hides—as I found during some extensive hitchhiking through England in 1977—a population that thinks incessantly, perversely, hungrily about sex. The most disgusting modern example of this human illusion is Pierce Brosnan who, with a boyish face, rose all the way from a second-rate TV gig (Remington Steel) to a James Bond impersonation that was embarrassing (made more so by the silly whiskers he grew) and got more than a few young (and, I assume, retarded) girls to fall for him—one even told me, and I’m not making this up, that Brosnan is preferable in the role to Sean Connery.
I like Connery because a) he’s aged well and b) managed, despite being required to bed numerous women, to show genuine fear on screen, and to shine in other films.
Darcy hasn’t aged well and he shows no fear. But the thing I really hate about Darcy is that he’s the anti-Jew—uptight, disdainful, devoid of onions or lox or money-grubbing self-depredation. Not a hint of ethnic self-hatred. He is ashamed for pre-judging perfect Elizabeth at the beginning of the story, but to the delight of every woman who has deigned to forgive an oafish husband, who has fantasized about a Darcy with the same fever as an eight-year-old fantasizes about Barbie, he spends the rest of the novel—hundreds of pages—patiently, silently, steadfastly trying to make up for his initial priggishness, going so far as to pay off arch-enemy Wickham’s debts.
Which brings me, unexpectedly, to Jackie Mason, who once quipped that the closest thing to a Japanese wife is a Jewish husband; a whipped, demasculated, guilt-ridden, knows-his-place obsequiant, who, in real-life time, makes Darcy look like the epitome of hedonism. Real Jewish men eat quiche.
Ergo, Darcy is the anti-Jew, a de-ethnicized hero (and we know how those 18th and 19th century British writers loved to mock the Jews) and Pride and Prejudice is, implicitly, an anti-semitic novel.
And Darcy, the progenitor of Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Hugh Grant, Clive Owen, Laurence Olivier etc. is as vapid as Wonder Bread with mayonnaise.