The “true” story chronicles Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). a heroin dealer who adopts the financial wizardry of his Italian mafia peers to run the Harlemites working under him, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, his arm still aching from throwing telephones at concierges), a cop whose honesty makes him a pariah within the corrupt police community. Even with that handicap, Roberts spends the movie closing in on the bust he needs to put Lucas away.

Not that we care. Director Ridley Scott is so concerned with developing the paradoxes of these two characters (Lucas as a Pablo Escobarian enemy of the state, but a community philanthropist and responsible family-man; Roberts a good cop but a fuck-up at home) that he neglects the plot and, difficult to fathom, character development.

Indeed, his characters are chess pieces—their abilities limited as Scott clumsily tosses foreshadowing and extraneous information into this 157-minute epic, giving the movie an “oh, but first this happened” feel.
Because it’s based on a true story, we’d normally forgive the obligatory car explosion, cop vs. criminal shoot-out, drive-by shooting, bad guy’s suicide via .22 to the mouth; but the whole movie is a cliché. Worst of all, it roots for Denzel’s ruthless,drug-dealing Lucas.

If you want genuine, gritty, ghetto realism, watch Full House re-runs.

-- Eric Siegel

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.

Meanwhile, firefighters, carrying impossible 90-pound loads, perished. The book’s most indelible image is that of a hundred fire fighters, exhausted, resting on the 19th floor of the North Tower. Because of obsolete walkie-talkies, they didn’t know about the South Tower’s collapse.

Here, verbatim, is the scene as court officers Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender, who’ve come down from floor 51, reach floor 19, and see the resting firefighters:

Most were sitting, and had stripped off their turnout coats. Helmets off. Some were down to their blue T-shirts, maps of sweat blotting through the fabric emblazoned with the Fire Department shield. Wender saw that some were lying down. Axes resting against oxygen tanks. They could not be hearing, Wender thought, what we are hearing.

Baccellieri and Moscola took in the scene. They guessed there were at least 100 firefighters on the floor.

“We’re getting out of here,” Baccellieri yelled. “We’ve been told we’ve got to get out of the building.”

No one moved.

Baccellieri, Moscola, and Wender survived. All 100 firefighters died. Reason being no one told them that the tower they were in was already leaning and, near the top, buckling.

In spare, eloquent prose, the authors reconstruct these scenes. And unlike the moronic football fans who, in weeks following the attack, painted their faces red, white, blue — as if the post-9/11 trauma were a football pep rally — they never romanticize. They tell the truth: the firefighters, though brave, marched with way too much equipment to their doom. Office workers, like the poor souls who worked for Mizuho, descended to the lobby and were told to go back, where they died. Jumpers leapt to their horrific deaths, not because they were brave, but because the heat was unbearable. The towers, because of design flaws, were ripe for collapse. Most ordinary people, such as Abe Zelmanowitz, who, rather than saving himself, stuck by his quadriplegic friend Ed Beyea, acted with heroic unselfishness. Someone oughta build a statue to these guys.

And someone oughta give Dwyer and Flynn one of those fancy writing awards. They explain, in layman’s terms, the reasons why the buildings collapsed, the unique architecture, the lack of fire-proofing. And over everything they write hangs the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the attack that should have spurred the fire-proofers to work doubly fast; they didn’t. By Sept 11, only 20 floors had been adequately fire-proofed. This appalling ineptness, along with corrupt building codes from the 60s—including bunching elevators and staircases at the buildings’ cores to increase rentable office space—killed thousands.

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.

I too was a New York loser-journalist guiltily-smitten with celebrity, though I worked at the Village Voice, and my celebrities were not as Brad Pittish as yours.

The Voice is not Vanity Fair, but the high-school cliques were the same. Most everyone at the Voice was younger than me (I was around 40 at the time), so I didn’t get invited out to lunch much (ever, in fact). Also, I was married and had a kid; that was a problem (I think the world is divided into those who have kids and those who don’t). And the political correctness was probably even more obnoxious than Vanity Fair’s—in the fact-checking room, for example, workers protested because a supply box was labeled “colored paper.” On another occasion, a fact-checker angrily insisted I change the word “freshmen” to “freshpeople.”

Still, the Voice—it was under John Larsen in those days, half of one of those power couples you write so disturbingly about at the end of your book—published serious stuff: about politics, the environment, public schools, even if the pieces were sometimes a little long-winded and boring.

So even though I enjoyed your book, read it straight through (one of the few books recommended to me lately that I haven’t forced myself to finish—more on that later), I was inwardly laughing that the people you write about are from a caste stratospherically different from the vast majority of drones who make this city run.

Not that I’m saying you didn’t bring up issues that I thought and thought about even when I wasn’t reading your memoir—classless America vs. aristocratic England, political correctness in journalism (I shudder what would happen to Mencken were he alive), money and beauty and getting laid (obviously, you were dating before Craig’s List—being a writer, you would have scored many, many times).

Above all, I took the book to be a love letter to Graydon Carter. Seriously. I can’t imagine anyone—and I’ve read a few reviews to this effect—thinking this was a nasty portrait. He came off as so infinitely patient, even fatherly, towards you, that anyone suggesting otherwise must be nuts.

As for everyone else, I marked one passage in your book that struck me:

…Time and again during the five years I spent in Manhattan, I had a sense of encountering people who weren’t quite human…as if they all came off the same production line; they lacked the divine spark that makes all human beings unique.

You could say thee same for almost all white-collar jobbers. (You might read Andrew Sullivan’s essay on homosexuality in America, about this drive towards diversity, but only if the members of each group are Americanized and homogenous). I find no tolerance for bad jokes, bad dressers, bad haircuts, less-than-perfect hygiene, incorrect language (or, God forbid, bad spelling). Words that are banished one year—“chick,” “babe,” “broad,” “girl,” “negro”—are magically resurrected the next. Freedom-of-thought wise, it sucks.

I have also been thinking a lot about what you wrote because I have a special needs friend. He is smart, but he doesn’t fit in. He is the opposite of your friend Alex. He is way more socially inept than even you (by the way, I think you overdo the self-deprecation thing a tad—yes, it made you more likeable and thus your critiques more believable, but sometimes you were straining. I mean how socially-inept can you be if your roommate is Sophie Dahl?). Anyway, I am pissed as hell that someone with a pure heart, who cannot lie, who forgives his tormentors, spends his life alone because people are so fucked-up. He won’t make anyone’s A list.

Speaking of good-looking, politically-correct people, just before your book, I read The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Yeah, it was an interesting treatise on the Indian caste system, but the prose was preciously self-conscious, and if I read one more novel with an adult-rendered-mute-because-of-childhood-trauma, I will rip out what’s left of my hair. Anyway, I think another reason—aside from the preciousness—the novel won the Booker Prize, is because Roy is so damn good-looking. She taught aerobics, right? She’s got saucer eyes and luscious lips, right? She’s a South Asian Zadie Smith, right? Are there any ugly, best-selling authoresses in England?

Oh well, it must feel good knowing that everyone back at VF is reading your book, pissed they weren’t mentioned.

Dear Steven and Stephen,

Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s rave, having understood and loved the book’s premise—that hidden statistics we don’t want to look at tell the real story—we expected a lot from your bestseller, Freakonomics.

We were not completely disappointed. Freakanomics is always thought-provoking, and scores a number of bull eyes. For example, your attack on the theories of why crime plunged in the 90s (and, indirectly, the Giuliani myth) is pure fun (though, last time we looked, abortion is still legal and serious crime is going up).

A lot of your other stuff is lame.

Take the chapter on what teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common (they both cheat). No problem with the part about Sumo wrestlers. We know zero about the sport, but what you say is fascinating and believable.

But then you send up exactly the sort of pompous declaration you love to deflate. You present a set of interesting, credible statistics that probably show that a number of Chicago public school teachers have cheated on their students’ standardized tests—by changing answers after the tests were handed in.

The first problem with this story is that it is not news. The fact that public school teachers change answers is pre-Cambrian. Anyone who assumes otherwise doesn’t know much about public school teaching. We taught in New York City public schools for eight years, and some of our principals “accidentally” gave us the tests a few days in advance. You bet we reviewed the problems with the kids. Some teachers walked between the desks, mouthing correct answers to kids who promptly complied. Our incentives for doing so had nothing to do with negative consequences for lower scores.

Indeed, incentives—your own chosen ground—is where you guys really falter. You claim that teachers in Chicago cheated on standardized tests because of new “high-stakes testing” meaning testing that carries consequences for the teachers:

With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion. If the entire school does poorly, federal funding can be withheld; if the school is put on probation, the teacher stands to be fired.

To which we say, What happened to your righteous statistical thrusts?

Let’s make the likely assumption that many students in the Chicago public schools did poorly on the high-stakes test (though, strangely, the book never says how many). While you present compelling statistics that were used to catch teachers who probably cheated, you never say how many teachers were actually fired or were passed over for a raise or promotion. Taking a wild guess, we’d say, for tenured teachers, it was less than ten. And how many schools lost federal funding because of low test scores? You don’t say. (By the way, we’ve heard of stupid, counter-productive consequences, but this one takes the cake. Why punish kids for having bad teachers?). Oh, and how many schools were put on probation? Again, your book that relies so heavily on numbers does not say. And does putting a school on probation make the teachers teach better? We’ve never read any evidence that a similar program in New York State (SUR) did so.

Back to incentives. You incentive freaks don’t get that teachers don’t cheat on standardized tests because they want to get raises or promotions—raises are meager and unfair and why would you promote a good teacher out of the classroom—they cheat because they want to make sure the kids they hate, the kids who’ve shit on every carefully-planned math lesson for ten months, get promoted. Some of us cheat because we know keeping a kid back, according to studies that have been done on social promotion, makes the kid stupider.

Without any fear of rebuttal, we can state the main issue in nearly every public school classroom, especially those in neighborhoods with underequipped and overwhelmed families, is student behavior. Or, put in the vernacular of teacher lunchroom chatter—how to dump the bad kids and replace them with good kids. If you don’t know that, then you haven’t taught in a bad school (sorry, University of Chicago doesn’t qualify). While you rightly slam School Choice for being an empty promise, you overlook the reason for the idea’s popularity: school people embraced School Choice because it allows the schools to pick the kids—not the other way around. And what schools want are good kids.

Best,

Recharger The Dog

Mahler makes two mistakes.
(1) He covers too much territory without the necessary connective tissue. Moby Dick was long, covered a lot of water, but the White Whale was the unifying force. This book—what’ s Mario Cuomo got to do with Reggie Jackson?(2) Mahler mutes his prose. We need here a voice like a screech of subway brakes, like the smell of a bagel in the morning, like the hottest day in July. Instead we get the New York Times. I screamed, “C’mon, Jonathan, get mad!” But, good journalist he, he kept his goddamned emotions out of it.

How can you mute the anger over the looting that accompanied the blackout? How can you make an anti-climax of Reggie’s three homeruns—three titanic orgasms ending a terrible summer (I even heard about it, and I was teaching school in Wales at the time)?

I think Mahler’s biggest problem—despite his opening disclaimer—was that he started writing a book about the Yankee’s 1977 season, and chose to widen the subject to a Summer of Sam project (no, I don’t think Spike Lee got it right—stupid, superficial movie). That’s too much territory, Jonathan. You shoulda stuck to the Blackout (an amazing subject, given the euphoric experience many of us had during the blackout three summers ago).

The next problem—forgive me, I’m a Mets fan—is that Mahler clearly thinks the Yankees are an Important Subject. I go with—and have always gone with—the axiom that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors. To keep this thesis short, let’s start with Derek Jeter—a great player who is also an ASSHOLE. Last year, this demi-god ordered security guards to eject a fan for heckling him. Way to go, Jeter, you puerile, self-aggrandizing penis-brain. Yes, the conflict between Reggie and Billy was epic, and that should have been Mahler’s hotdog—nothing else.

(I really don’t get why people like the Yankees—it’s like rooting for Nazi Germany in 1939).

I have two big memories of 1977: my trip to New York from Wisconsin (where I was attending school) with my horrible, paranoid Wisconsin girlfriend who, despite her hippie credentials, kept whining about Son of Sam shooting us. Son of Sam shooting us. My second memory was standing in a Merritt Farms (such a nice name for a place that sold only grease) on the Upper East Side when an friend walked in and said “The king is dead.” “What are you talking about?” I said. “The king is dead,” he repeated, “Elvis. He died.”

It was hot and we were surrounded by fried and battered chicken and shrimp and fish and pork chops and fries and the king was dead.

How do you capture that moment—the heat and despairing futility of a summer night in New York City during that murderous summer? I’m sure I couldn’t.
Neither did Mahler.