2011, Atria

Filed under: Thriller

Goodreads

Kill Shot is Vince Flynn’s 12th novel to feature the assassin Mitch Rapp. It’s the second of those twelve in chronological order, a prequel of sorts, focusing on Rapp’s first year or so as a full-fledged CIA assassin.

His assignment: to systematically hunt and kill the members of the vast, vague terrorist network that killed 270 people in the Lockerbie/Pan Am attack (which is real). One of those people, in a rather pat motivational backstory, was Rapp’s girlfriend.

Because the terrorists Rapp kills all know each other, they soon catch onto Rapp’s mission and set a trap: they send the Libyan oil minister to a fancy hotel room in Paris, a ripe, easy target. When Rapp bursts in, he finds a secret squad of machine gun-wielding terrorists who fire about a thousand rounds at him (but he luckily escapes).

The world of Kill Shot, like a lot of airport fiction, requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. Flynn reports the effects of gunshot wounds and phone taps with fetishistic detail, but realism is nowhere to be found in Rapp’s cartoonish ability to survive quite preposterous situations.

However, Flynn does try to blur the lines between good guys and bad guys, offering a couple of double agents with questionable, ostensibly noble motives. Sadly, that simple moral gray area is well above average in a genre that likes to play wish fulfillment with clearly demarcated Good Guys and Bad Guys.

As far as that goes, Mitch Rapp is an unquestionable Good Guy, and he’s the perfect assassin, which annihilates any kind of real drama that might accidentally build at any point. You know he’s not going to be killed (after all, he has at least 10 subsequent novels to star in), and the only real question is whether he finds the source of a leak in the CIA, or whether he cuts with the American government forever.

The problem with Kill Shot isn’t so much that Rapp’s story is boring or formulaic—that’s to be expected—the problem is that Flynn shows us just a hint of a storyline that would’ve made for a much better thriller.

During the novel, Flynn flits between a dozen or so different perspectives, spending at least half the novel with characters other than Rapp. A lot of this is unnecessary and boring (like the CIA politicking, which is almost as dull as any intra-office maneuvering), and it underlines the fact that Rapp’s relatively simple story isn’t quite novel-sized.

But one of these B-stories is downright good. It concerns a high-ranking French police detective named Francine Neville, who gets assigned to the baffling result of an assassination gone wrong—nine dead bodies in a fancy hotel in the middle of Paris. Four men with suppressed automatic weapons are dead in a hotel room, along with a Libyan diplomat, a prostitute, and three civilians in the hallway. The French government claims that the men are the Libyan’s bodyguards, but that logic doesn’t hold water and Neville knows it.

To make matters worse, it looks like someone tampered with evidence, and that someone might be a high-ranking french’s gent in the French equivalent of the FBI, and he carries secret, questionable motives. If Neville goes after him, he could pull rank or personally attack her or both. Neville’s story is one of vulnerability and courage. It’s genuine drama.

Mitch Rapp has the skills and psychological makeup to simply disappear if things get too hairy. He has worldly contacts and extensive training in espionage and survival tactics. He’s 25, he has few emotional burdens, he’s in peak physical condition, and he’s fluent in several languages. He doesn’t have much to lose. Francine Neville, on the other hand, has a husband and a child, and a hard-won, fragile career that enemies could try to destroy. She has big weaknesses and so her actions, which propel her forward in spite of those weaknesses, create great suspense.

In short, Neville’s story all the standard elements of a simple, compelling thriller. While her and Rapp’s storylines are satisfying in the common-denominator way that all stock thrillers are (you know the good guys will win, and it feels good to watch them win), only Neville’s story really captivates and entertains. The downside to it is that it comprises perhaps 50 pages of Kill Shot’s nearly 400, and skitters away without even a pretense of an ending.

But, you know, endings are hard.

Similar books: Iron House, by John Hart; Fun & Games, by Duane Swierczynski; The Wreckage, by Michael Robotham

Tender Hour of Twilight, by Richard Seaver, reviewed by Michael Dirda (Washington Post)

With the modern publishing world edging ever closer to the abyss, it’s at least diverting to read about its heyday, when a young literature buff in Paris discovered and doggedly championed the work of an entirely unknown Irish writer named Samuel Beckett. Most of the rest of the memoir seems to be less historically important, but it sounds uniformly entertaining.

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith, reviewed by Paula Woods (L.A. Times)

Woods is disappointed with this final volume in Smith’s Leo Demidov trilogy—and it does sound like Smith keeps going back to a well that he rather expertly emptied in the trilogy’s first book, the excellent Child 44. I’ve been taking my time with the second book, and it looks like I should continue to dawdle.

Your Voice in My Head, by Emma Forrest, reviewed by Nicholas Lezard (Guardian)

This slight review—which seems to expend more effort on a (good) discussion of Voice’s cover than a discussion of the book’s real merits—sums up Lezard’s praise of Emma Forrest in a single simple phrase: “she can write.” Voice is a “memoir of madness” written by a talented young madwoman. Fair enough.

Da Vinci’s Ghost, by Toby Lester, reviewed by Jonathan Lopez (New York Times)

Another brief review, with a rather brief thesis statement: the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s (or perhaps anyone’s) most famous drawing, is not the pinnacle of his career, but rather a play for respect from the patrons of his day who favored ancient, sometimes unsound texts like the one by Virtuvius which inspired the sketch. It’s difficult to see how the book would satisfy, given that the story it tells is wrapped up in the few hundred words of Lopez’s review, but that review is worth the five minutes it takes.

In brief: Reviews of a couple of Book Radar picks: Zona, by Geoff Dyer, and No One Is Here Except All of Us, by Ramona Ausubel. … Elmore Leonard’s latest Raylan Givens novel looks possibly entertaining, even if it is short and written expressly to cash in on Justified. … Should we celebrate scathing book reviews? Um, yes, probably. Here’s one. … And more on Geoff Dyer, the author of my new favorite book that I haven’t read yet: here he picks five unusual histories. … In this semi-bizarre review of a book about dust jackets, Michael Dirda says, “Nobody blithely discards dust jackets anymore.” I beg your pardon, sir. I do and will continue to do so, for the rest of my natural life.

Author: Rod Rees

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Goodreads

This was my own fault. I’d been reading a lot of books that were good, but not very memorable. I wanted something that would get my juices flowing, and that meant either a really good book… or a really bad one. Bad books are much easier to find.

I’d taken a look at the The Demi-Monde: Winter a few weeks before, and I’d given up because its writing, even in just the first few pages, was wretched—full of cliches and clunkily unpoetic. But then, wanting a bad book, I turned back. And I got a bad book. I got everything I was asking for and much, much more. I barely made it through a hundred of Rees’s dense, awful pages before I had to put it back down. This review will be less a review than a catalog of what makes this book so bad. Take a deep breath.

Premise

In the year 2018, the “Demi-Monde” is an elaborate computer simulation made to train military cadets to fight in “asymmetric warfare environments” like Iraq and Afghanistan. The bulk of the action, as you might guess, will take place inside the simulation.

So far, this is a solid, if boring, idea. It’s also rather dramatically weak. Militaries use a lot of simulations, and they use them because there’s no risk for the participants. But “no risk involved” is not a good recipe for a thrilling novel, so Rees has to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, a concussed 5-year-old could come up with a more coherent imaginary world.

First of all, there’s a critical flaw in the Demi-Monde itself: if you die inside it, you die in real life, much like the Matrix. That makes it a more interesting place to set a thriller, but an utterly ludicrous method of training your army personnel. If a simulation is actually life-threatening, what’s the point of it? Just send your recruits straight into battle, where at least their deaths might not be entirely in vain.

Next up in Rod Rees’s cavalcade of bad ideas: the fact that the Demi-Monde is restricted to technology from the 1870s. A military simulation in 2018 teaches its participants how to use muskets. By gaslight. Ugh.

To make matters more ridiculous, all of the computer-controlled NPCs in the Demi-Monde (called “Dupes” or duplicates) are vampires. Why? Because the moronic simulation-designers needed a reason for everyone to be fighting all the time. And yes, they made a point of modeling their Dupes on history’s most notorious murderers and villains, but they needed another reason. They also programmed religious conflict literally into the dupes’ DNA, but they needed yet another reason for everyone to fight all the time. So they made the Dupes vampires, who must consume a lot of human blood every day in order to survive. Unfortunately the Dupes don’t have any human blood, only the army recruits (called, excruciatingly, “neoFights”) have blood. So every time the army sends in recruits, the Dupes capture them and turn them into living blood farms. The army can’t unplug them or wake them up because they’ll die.

Here’s another moronic detail: before the soldiers-in-training are dropped into the Demi-Monde, they are each implanted with a nano-computer that gives them a nearly unlimited store of knowledge about combat techniques, important people, terrain, etc. Remember, the Demi-Monde is itself a training ground for some other greater war. So, as I found myself asking, why don’t they use the nanocomputers to train their soldiers instead of this stupid simulation?

After considering all of these painfully stupid facets of this painfully stupid premise, it becomes clear that the Demi-Monde is not a simulation and was never intended to be. If it was, it would be the worst, most idiotic simulation in the history of the world. There’s a big plot twist down the road, and Rees thinks that we readers are as stupid as his characters (more on that in a minute), and can’t see it coming. But, of course, we can.

Plot

“Why don’t you just cut bait and close it down?” says the voice of reason in the person of one of the book’s heroes, Ella Thomas.

“Somehow,” an idiot Demi-Monde designer replies, “Norma Williams, the daughter of the president, has become lost in the Demi-Monde.”

Dear Rod Rees, please go look up “deus ex machina” and then never write again.

Characters

Ella Thomas is an 18-year-old black female jazz singer and genius. She talks like this, “‘Are you on the level? You’re not just blowing me shit… winding me up?’” and she thinks like this, “Jazz was so unhip it had a limp,” and also like this, “I ain’t got a ‘racial aspect.’ I’ve got a black skin.”

And then sometimes she talks like this, “I don’t wish to seem brutal,” and sometimes she thinks like this, “He looked like an undertaker, though his long, Roman nose, his dark button eyes that snarled out at Ella from behind shaded glasses and his oiled black hair made him an extremely aggressive-looking undertaker.”

In other words, she’s not very well-developed because Rod Rees is hopeless at writing a character with a single voice, especially when that character is an 18-year-old black woman. I mean, he’s hopeless at writing in general (eyes don’t “snarl,” and definitely not from behind shaded glasses intended to block those eyes from view), but he’s really bad at characters and especially really bad at Ella.

Ella is supposed to be a genius, but she is in fact really really stupid. When we first meet her, she’s spent a full week auditioning for a gig singing jazz for the Army. That week has included a battery of physical and psychological tests, and field tests such as “building … a raft from a couple of old oil drums, some driftwood and a length of rope and use it to float across a river.”

After all this, an officer lets it slip that she’s going to the Demi-Monde. Instead of cottoning onto the fact that she’s been lied to, this is the sum total of her thinking on the issue:

“Demi-Monde? wondered Ella. Weird name for a club.”

Yes, because a) the Army hires a ton of jazz singers, and b) they all have to be to good raft-builders. You moron.

Writing

The marquee Dupe in the Demi-Monde is modeled after Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s underlings and the architect of the Holocaust. This kind of thing—real people interacting with history’s worst monsters—is ostensibly the big idea behind the book. But, in Rees’s hands, it flops.

Before the idiot Army honchos send Ella into the Demi-Monde, they sit her down with a copy of Heydrich’s Dupe. This is quite stupid, because it will show her the kind of evil she’ll be up against, but of course, those men are quite stupid, so I guess it makes sense. In any case, Ella’s meeting with Heydrich is predictably ludicrous and poorly written.

The honchos, for whatever reason, want Ella to get Heydrich to explain who he is and what he’s done. Again, this is a young black woman speaking to the man who created the Holocaust, a racist and bigot if ever there was one. Here’s a brief synthesis of their conversation. Heydrich speaks first:

“I am wondering why I should be obliged to discuss my career with … a member of a more primitive race.”

… “I understand you are an officer, Herr Heydrich. Then surely your duty as an officer is to help those of lesser ability?”

… “Very well.”

Excuse me, what? Why would the job of military officers, especially NAZI officers, be to “help those of lesser ability”? Why would a Nazi officer want to help anybody? And why does that fool him into doing what she wants? Why would he talk to her at all? Why would discussing his career help her anyway? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE AT ALL.

This kind of face-to-face conflict with one of history’s most evil men appears to be the emotional heart of the novel, and yet it’s neither interesting nor realistic, and it shows Rees’s utter lack of intensity and creativity.

The Final Accounting

I could keep going, about the misconceived characters, more holes in the plot, gaping logical inconsistencies patently ignored or not seen by both author and editor (and remember, I only read the first hundred pages)—but 1500 words is enough.

This ill-conceived novel is the first of four that Rees has planned (and evidently already written) about the Demi-Monde. Obviously, this project should never have been accepted by a major publishing house—I don’t honestly know how they got past the first few pages.

The Demi-Monde: Winter also got nominated as an Indie Next book, which is where I heard about it. In the Indie Next blurb, the recommending bookseller compares Rees to Neal Stephenson, which would be a capital crime if I ran the world.

The difference between Rod Rees and Neal Stephenson, or any good author, is that Rees offers absolutely nothing new. There’s nothing new in his prose, and there’s nothing new in his idea of the Demi-Monde. It’s the Matrix, minus a believable reason for existing, plus some random paranormal/steampunk elements, because, hell, that’d make a cool book, right?

AVOID.

Similar books: The City & The City, by China Mieville; The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano

Zona, by Geoff Dyer (2/21)

The subtitle is “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It’s a rumination on Stalker, a weird old Russian sci-fi movie considered to be one of the best films of all time. So far this sounds utterly boring, but Dyer has a secret weapon: he’s unpredictable and his thought process is entirely unique. A really weird book is at least better than a bad book. The flap copy says, “the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live.” And James Wood, in the New Yorker, says Dyer “combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.” Sounds like a dice-roll, but one with a good prize for a winner.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (2/7)

Englander has a world of talent, and his books are reliably very good, if perhaps not always phenomenal. The eight stories in Englander’s second collection explore themes as big in scope as the nature of evil and justice, and as personal as sexual longing and intimacy. One of these stories even apppears in the Best American Short Stories of 2011.

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan (2/28)

When the Booker prize shortlist was announced five months ago, several of the books weren’t yet available in America. Rather miraculously (if the incompetence of publishers can be considered a miracle), one of them still isn’t available, and it’s the one I wanted to read most (except for the one I’d already read). Half Blood Blues follows a black German trumpeteer who gets vanished by the Nazis during WWII. Fifty years later, his bandmates embark on a journey to find out exactly what happened to him, and who betrayed him.

The Technologists, by Matthew Pearl (2/21)

In post-Civil War Boston, the fifteen-member inaugural class of the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology is nearing graduation, when a series of mysterious explosions in Boston Harbor pits them against the more well-renowned (but less scientifically masterful) Harvard. That appears to actually be the premise of Matthew Pearl’s new thriller. It sounds pretty far-fetched for historical fiction, but Pearl comes highly recommended. I’m on the fence.

The Bedlam Detective, by Stephen Gallagher (out 2/7)

The synopsis of this detective novel starts out a little limp—a medical investigator sets out to see if a wealthy old man is mentally capable or not. Ho-hum. But then the old man seems tied to a series of child murders, and the plot promises a traveling freak show, a trip to the Amazon, and more. Again, an on-the-fencer.

No One Is Here Except All of Us, by Ramona Ausubel (2/2)

I can’t imagine pitching this novel. In a remote Jewish village in Romania in 1939, people sense and fear the war coming for them. So, naturally, they “decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.” This imagining creates hope somehow, but as “the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one,” things get complicated. If I pick this one up, it’ll be to see how the hell Ausubel portrays a village consciously living in a parallel, fictional reality.

The Odds, by Stewart O’Nan (out now)

O’Nan’s 13th novel is a “bittersweet love story” about a couple that goes to Niagara Falls to save their finances (via roulette wheel) and their marriage. I’ve yet to try him, but O’Nan comes highly recommended, including kind words by Ed Champion, who doesn’t give As to every kid in the class.

Stay Awake, by Dan Chaon (2/7)

I’ve read some great Dan Chaon stories and some quite boring ones. In this latest collection, “lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland.”

Not looking forward to: The Mirage, by Matt Ruff (2/7)

Will an alternate-history 9/11 novel feel less exploitative and uncomfortable than a real-history one? In Ruff’s designed-to-provoke-controversy premise, Christian fundamentalists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in Baghdad on November 9th (11/9 … GET IT?!), and the United Arab States declare a War on Terror against America. But don’t worry! It’s all, as the title promises, a meaningless mirage.

The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, reviewed by J. Robert Lennon (New York Times)

Ben Marcus, while an excellent prose stylist, has never written a book with a “traditional narrative.” His latest, the uber-hyped Flame Alphabet, has only metaphorical plot struts (children’s voices become toxic to adults), but “It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller,” which makes it, as Lennon sees it, a hybrid of experimentation and traditional narrative. As should be expected, by virtue of Marcus’s extensive experience with experimentation, and null experience with narrative, the traditional implodes and the experimental succeeds. The implosion, says Lennon, takes with it the thrill of Marcus’s sentences, his greatest strength. I was on the fence about Flame Alphabet. Now I am not.

The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)

Chan Koonchung’s first novel to be translated into English imagines 2013 in China, after a devastating economic collapse has crippled the rest of the world, and the Chinese government, thriving according to the Chinese government, has loosened its grip on its people. As the narrator says, “90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough?” It’s simultaneously a satire of contemporary China, in which only being censored a little would be a big improvement, and the West, where freedoms of speech and information are fiercely protected, but most citizens are too lazy to take advantage of them. David L. Ulin sorts this all out, as well as the role of atmosphere in fiction.

The Face Thief, by Eli Gottlieb, reviewed by Anna Mundow (B&N Review)

This thriller about face-reading and con artistry appears to be brash and melodramatic, if this line—spoken by the deceptive, seductive female lead—is any indication: “The real reason we have faces is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” That rather soapy philosophy hints at a narrative less rigorously realistic than perhaps a novel about the quite-real science of face-reading should be. But it could also be fun.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey, reviewed by Sarah Towers (New York Times)

Emerson’s own Margot Livesey has a new novel, and it’s been getting a ton of press. Gemma Hardy is a combination and “recasting” of Jane Eyre and Livesey’s own childhood. Towers calls it “a delight.”

In brief: Authors are finally starting to take advantage of the unique abilities of digital books. … The L.A. Review of Books’s monthly crime fiction column is worth reading for crime fans. … And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has inexplicably been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The Onion A.V. Club gave Extremely Loud a rare unqualified F, and the it was voted 5th worst movie of the year in Vulture’s critics’ poll. Evidently its director threatened to keep running these tasteless ads unless it was nominated.

Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

This reaction confuses me, because iBooks Author’s EULA says exactly what I expected it to say, namely that you can’t sell the books you make with iBooks Author through any distributor except Apple.

Why is this even a surprise? For one thing, iBooks Author is free. It’s obviously intended to ease creation of content for sale through iTunes, because Apple makes a ton of money on those content sales. Why would they make a free tool that would let users create content for other platforms? Why is not doing so “greedy” and “evil”?

On a more practical level, it’s frankly not that big a deal. If you’re formatting a traditional book (i.e. only words), then the process should mostly involve cutting and pasting those words from your .doc file. You will have to format your ePubs for other distributors separately, which is a drag mostly because ePub-formatting programs suck (when we publish books here at C4, we use Smashwords; it’s not perfect but it is better and easier than other formatting and publishing options we’ve tried).

So yes, Apple has not given you a free, easy, universal ePub creator. But iBooks Author isn’t geared toward creating plain old ePubs anyway, it’s specifically geared toward creating “Multi-Touch books for iPad.” In other words, this sort of thing. Because iBooks Author simplifies the formatting process, the rich-media interactive ebooks you make with it will almost certainly only work on an iPad. Even if you could export them to universal ePubs, they would look like garbage on all other devices.

Apple won’t own your copyright, your content, or the versions you make for all other platforms. You’re free to use that content however you please, even according to that reactionary ZDNet writer’s reading of the EULA. Claims that “only Apple can ever publish your work” are simply not true.

So everybody please calm down about this EULA. It’s not nearly as greedy or evil as they’d have you believe.

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller

Goodreads

Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:

There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.

Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.

This structure has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it lets Wilson skip around however he likes, highlighting the most interesting details of a massive story, and it gives the reader a sense of the war’s breadth and depth.

On the other hand, it takes a writer of unusual talent to make such a project feel like more than a fast-cutting mashup of un-fleshed out characters. Wilson, despite a few early glimmers of real promise, does not have that unusual talent.

Still, you’re reading Robocopalypse, not Shakespeare. The idea of sentient robots rebelling against humanity is as old as robots themselves. This is not original, and it’s not literature, but within that framework, Wilson delivers more than I expected.

He especially excels at interior character moments when he comes at them from the right angle. In the passage I quoted above, after Wallace gets his flamethrower operational, he fries the heat-seeking stumpers by the score:

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they don’t even care. They’re too simple to understand what’s happening to them.

They love the heat.

That is a solid, complex moment, both entertainingly written and insightful, as it connotes the dissatisfaction of fighting something that’s too stupid to know it’s losing.

Here’s another one, when the manager of a small fast food joint is attacked by one of the first rogue domestic robots and, bleeding, and then dragged toward safety by his one employee (with whom he’s only recently made friends):

Felipe grabs me by the waist and drags me back around the counter without even looking at the door. He’s panting and taking little crab steps. I can smell the joint in his front pocket. I watch my blood smearing behind me on the tile floor and I think, Shit, man, I just mopped that.

This chapter is one of my favorites. Felipe and this idiot manager display more character, complexity, and pathos in a short, tangential vignette than most of the main characters display during the entire novel.

That’s not entirely to say that those main characters are bad. But they are a bit shallow. If personal interior moments are Wilson’s strength, his weakness is the heartfelt portrayal of climactic scenes. When one character’s closest relation dies quite horribly, their last words to each other are a series of hamfisted callbacks to some of the dorkier things they’ve said in the novel. There’s not much in the way of growth here, or nuance.

I didn’t really expect nuance from a robot apocalypse novel, but I did want it to live up to its potential. Robopocalypse shows flashes, here and there, of great fiction, or at least signs of bringing novelty to the robot-apocalypse genre.

There’s the old man whose lover is a low-quality android. There are the sentient robots who begin to resent the superintelligent Big Rob, seeing their conscription in Big Rob’s war on humanity as enslavement, equal to or worse than their previous lives as servants of humans. There are the experiments Rob conducts on human subjects, replacing flesh with robotic parts—some of those test subjects escape and become Rob’s greatest enemies.

These are interesting ideas and Wilson is in a relatively specialized position to offer them: he’s not just cashing in with a one-off robot book, he actually holds a Ph.D. in Robotics and writes almost exclusively about robots. Unfortunately, the real heft of those ideas comes from the internal struggle with them, not the external ramifications. In other words, the fact that unhappy robots fight with humans against Big Rob is not interesting in terms of the tactics of the battle itself (especially since we know from the beginning that the humans will win), it’s interesting as an exploration of slavery, computer viruses, free will, and the definition of life.

While Wilson is not entirely unequipped to fully exploit these ideas—as his couple of great interior moments show—he does not succeed with them.

It’s a shame, but all is not lost. Robopocalypse is still an entertaining read, good enough for me to read Wilson’s next book, Amped which comes out in June. Hopefully, he’ll stick with one voice and one main character, and he’ll be able to flesh it out well enough to meet its potential.

Similar books: Machine Man, by Max Barry; World War Z, by Max Brooks

Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?, by Henry Alford, reviewed by Charles Isherwood (New York Times)

The world—or at least a large percentage of the people I see on my commute—could use a lesson in manners. Alford, a “humorist” (a kludgy word for a supposedly fluid entity), offers a “whimsically haphazard” survey of manners. While certain of Alford’s strategies sound more passive-aggressive than effective, maybe that’s sounder than my personal tactic of staring at bus-riding cell phone talkers and pointedly following their conversation until they get creeped out and hang up.

Smut, by Alan Bennett, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)

David L. Ulin quietly but insightfully dissects Alan Bennett’s new pair of novellas. This is the kind of thing Ulin excels at:

Here, Bennett highlights a conflict central to both novellas: that there is a difference between pretense and self-preservation, and the roles we play (matron, widow) often serve to protect our inner selves. At the same time, there’s more at work here—since what we try to conceal is often obvious anyway.

In the end, Smut doesn’t sound like my kind of book. But the review is worth your time.

Terrorists in Love, by Ken Ballen, reviewed by Dina Temple-Raston (Washington Post)

This arresting nonfiction book attempts to discover and explain the reasons that Islamists turn to violent jihad. It’s composed of six anecdotal stories about men who were involved in violent jihad for various reasons. Ballen, the founder of an anti-terrorism nonprofit, comes to the conclusion that a lack of love on earth inspires these wayward souls to win God’s favor in the afterlife. It is, as Temple-Raston notes, not a very all-inclusive theory, but the discussion about it is quite interesting.

Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine, reviewed by Rebecca Barry (New York Times)

“I’m partial,” confesses Barry, in the opening of this review, “to a book with exclamation points in its title.” Not me. I’m gunshy about them, ever since the one in Swamplandia! turned out to be a bear trap. However, I am partial to “a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent,” which Barry claims for Treasure Island!!!. Before I get my hopes up, there’s no mention of either treasure or islands. It sounds, honestly, like another one of these literary novels whose purpose is to subvert all your expectations. It better be funny.

In brief: A “pale, lifeless” Jeff Bezos biography disappoints. … Houllebecq’s latest is also his first to feature a main character not modeled on himself. … The guy who named the main character of a long-running series “Harry Hole” writes a series of children’s books about farts? That makes sense, actually. And Simon & Schuster, the publisher who will readily sell their dignity, publishes it? That also makes sense. Carry on. … Christopher Paolini’s house is crazy. (Also, kids, when a major paper comes to do a profile on you, put on some damn shoes for the pictures.)

2011, Harper Perennial

Filed under: Literary

Goodreads

The first few pages of The Call can be a bit discombobulating. The main character, a 40ish man named David, is a veterinarian in rural New England. He answers calls from surrounding farms and ranches, and drives out to tend to different animals. The novel takes the form of David’s work diary, in which he records the calls he takes, his actions, the results, and his thoughts along the way. Like this:

CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.

ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.

RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs, and torso still inside the mother.

THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?

Quickly, the pages of the diary become a place for David to ponder and exposit about his life and the world. The form of the diary—with its procedural headings that David coopts to better reflect his own experiences—becomes a counterpoint for his interior life.

It’s a “voice-driven” novel in the sense that the voices of characters, especially David, form the experience of reading it. Luckily, David’s voice is charming and calm and occasionally funny, and that experience is a pleasure.

Here’s another sample:

CALL: Alpaca down.

ACTION: Drove to farm. Remembered not to look alpaca in the eye.

RESULT: Looked alpaca in the eye by mistake. Got spit in the eye. Alpaca nice and angry now. Alpaca got up. Owner thankful. Handed me a rag that smelled like gasoline. I wiped my eye. Asked owner if he had seen the bright lights, the object moving back and forth in the sky the night before. The owner shook his head, he hadn’t seen anything.

There are a few dramatic happenings in The Call, like those lights in the sky that he ascribes (not really believing it) to a spaceship. There’s also his semi-contentious relationship with his wife, which gets significantly more contentious after David goes hunting with his teenage son, Sam, and the boy gets shot by an unseen hunter, falls out of a deer stand onto his head, and winds up in a coma.

Later, David’s other son (conceived by sperm donation and unknown to David until he shows up unannounced) appears suddenly, with something of a secret.

But, even though Murphy plays a few of these for dramatic tension, she stays far away from the neat resolutions and even plot beats of an airport thriller. David’s mission isn’t to find the right response to things, or even necessarily to act. His mission is to live in such a way that he can still enjoy his drive home after he pull the legs off a dead breached calf.

Similarly, The Call isn’t about epiphanies in the Joycean sense, it’s about the slow small moments of life that can be either enjoyed or trod upon. Ultimately it’s time enjoyably spent with a wise country vet.

Similar books: The Sportswriter, and the rest of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, by Richard Ford