Madam Bovary
By Gustave Faulbert
Fiction

“Madam Bovary” remains a must-read classic and may be one of the most beautifully written novels ever penned. Flaubert’s impeccable eye for details can be breathtaking. He manages to capture setting by evoking the small, telling details of a room. He expertly punctuates character through dress, movement, and dialogue. What is so impressive about “Madam Bovary” is that the subject matter – a woman’s futile attempt to attain happiness through materialism and adultery – still resonates today in our celebrity obsessed culture. The ugliness of the characters – their flaws, prejudices, pettiness, and self-centeredness – can be found today in any suburb of the United States. The irony is thick in Flaubert and may be too much for modern readers, but this is a novel to savior, to read slowly so you can enjoy the language.

Grade: A

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Fiction

Let me be upfront about my general dismissal of most of Cormac McCarthy’s work. I’ve never found the pretentious, awkward language he uses in “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing” all that compelling. I found myself distracted by his style, tone, and refusal to use proper punctuation. I may have to revisit McCarthy after reading “The Road.” This is a savage, heart-wrenchingly beautiful novel about the love of a man and his son set in the post-apocalyptic devastation of the United States. The world has been destroyed – there are no animals, few plants, the landscape is filled with ash, and the sky is a gray hole. The world is populated by ferocious survivors – many who have banded together into gangs and live by cannibalism. Into this utter decay and chaos, we follow a nameless man and his young son as they journey down a road in search for the ocean and a better life. Be prepared for one of the best father and son novels written in the last two decades. This is a can’t miss novel.

Grade: A

A Man Without A Country
By Kurt Vonnegut
Non-fiction

This series of essays by the master of wit is fun and insightful most of the time. This isn’t Vonnegut at his best, but he wrote the book at age 82 and most of the essays feel like they come from a very bitter and angry old man. The good news is that it is Vonnegut so you can mine lots of nuggets from it. He takes a lot of joy in pounding the President Bush and his staff of buffoons, but it doesn’t take much effort to take potshots at a president with a less than 30 percent approval rating. The book is scary short and can be read from cover to cover on a short airplane ride. One wonders what could have been if Vonnegut spent more time and effort to really flesh out these essays. Instead, they have the feel of a rant rather than a thought out criticism.

Grade: C+

Moonraker
By Ian Fleming
Fiction

I’ve been slowly reading the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming and enjoying them thoroughly. This is the third novel in the series and so far the weakest of the lot. Although, “Moonraker” did hit new highs for drama and tension during the first 100 pages when Bond is asked to catch a card cheat named Hugo Drax at M’s upper-crust social club. How Bond catches Drax and then cons him into betting more than he can handle is the best part of the book. The second half slides into a standard action book fare. The plot – about Drax trying to blow up London with an Atom bomb – has less to offer than the card playing sequences – which is amazing in and of itself. This one is for Bond die-hards only.

Grade: C

Read out first "Cracked-Back" Book Reviews here

Labels: book review, Cormac McCarthy, Cracked-Back, Gustave Faulbert, Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, literature

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Summary: In the not-so-distant future, a criminal mastermind named Billy the Poet is on the loose and on his way to Cape Cod. His goal is to deflower one of the hostesses at the Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis. The world government runs the parlors and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. The government also suppresses the population’s sexual desire with drugs that numb them from the waist down. Despite a sting by the authorities, Billy the Poet outwits them and kidnaps six-foot blond hostess, Nancy McLuhan. McLuhan vows to fight Billy to the very end, but the drugs wear off, and when she is deflowered by Billy, her mind opens as well. Billy convinces her that sex and death aren’t the answer – birth control pills are. In the end, Billy lets Nancy go, but she is forever a changed woman.

Analysis: “THIMK.”

This is one of the plaques on the desk of the World President in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s short story “Welcome to the Monkey House.” What else is there really to say? That one word encapsulates the future world Vonnegut creates in this witty, clever satire that often makes you snicker out loud.

A couple of his gems:

- On the pills that keep your body numb from the waist down to suppress sexual longing: “The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.”

- On the one drug that would counteract the anti-sex pills: “Nancy went over in her mind all the terrible drugs she’d learned about in school, persuaded herself that the women had taken the worst one of all. That drug was so powerful, Nancy’s teachers had told her, that even a person numb from the waist down would copulate repeatedly and enthusiastically after just one glass. That had to be the answer: The women, and probably the men, too, had been drinking gin.”

The beauty of Vonnegut is that he disguises biting social commentary as mild parody. He rarely takes big, tasty bites out of his targets, but prefers to take small nips at them until their ideas have more holes than a spaghetti colander. His main victims here are the religious right and big government, but he also takes the time to skewer the UN, blonds, the pharmaceutical industry, and assisted suicide.

Vonnegut’s strengths in his short fiction are also his weaknesses. He tends to exaggerate his victim’s politics to such ridiculous ends that it’s easy to dismiss his barbs. It backfires in stories like “Harrison Bergeron” when he creates a society based on equality of everything – from IQ to physical gifts. But no supporter of equal rights advocates for that type of society. Vonnegut simply distorts their real philosophy for his story – but ends up undermining his own points. It never reaches this level in “Welcome to the Monkey House,” although he does resort to an unnecessary, overly preachy lecture at the conclusion.

What you do get with “Welcome to the Monkey House” are Vonnegut’s witty, telling observations about the future: ocean water replaced by blue concrete, the extinction of birds and bugs, rampart overpopulation, government ownership of everything, and a passive society kept happy by TV. Keep in mind that Vonnegut wrote this piece in 1968.

The best part of “Welcome to the Monkey House” is Vonnegut’s wicked snipe at the religious right – which makes the story so relevant 38 years later. The population has exploded (New York City has 63 million people) and the government requires all adults to take anti-sex pills. Because of the influence of religious conservatives, the government believes it would be immoral to use birth control, so the government instead uses the pills to remove all pleasure and desire for sex. Even so, the population continues to increase so the government opens suicide boutiques staffed by beautiful women in revealing outfits to attract volunteers to kill themselves (sex for death, but not for pleasure).

The creator of the pills, J. Edgar Nation (that name alone had me snickering), decided to invent the pills when, after church services one Easter, he takes his wife and 11 kids to the Grand Rapids zoo. Mr. Nation tells us: “There is nothing like an Easter morning to make a man feel clean and reborn and at one with God’s intentions.” But inside the monkey house, his family is shocked to discover a masturbating monkey. So Mr. Nation develops his pill to “Make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see.”

Ahem. “Welcome to the Monkey House,” indeed.

Labels: Kurt Vonnegut, literary criticism, literature

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