merrill whatley

Books: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; The Darling; The Sweet Hereafter; See No Evil; and, on a sadder note: The Kite Runner; Fools Rush In; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Movie: Syriana

You ever get waist-deep into a book and realize there’s very little chance it can be redeemed from itself? And you think you’ve gotten this far and you might as well finish it? And then you find yourself reading it in a hurried fashion and just trying to slog through it? And you get mad and start yelling at the book?

Before you think I have anger management issues, you should realize that I am speaking mainly of The Kite Runner. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. It makes you yell at it! That bad!

The problem is, the first three chapters lead you to believe that it’s going to be good. So its life cycle must have been:

- author wrote three chapters and sent them to a publisher;
- publisher said “Excellent! Can you print up the rest of it and have it to us on Monday?”
- author said, “Uhhhh… sure!” and had to finish it in three days.

Unfortunately, I got sucked in by all the positive reviews. Turns out all the one-star voters on Amazon were pretty dead-on with their reviews. Be sure to sort by ranking when you look it up.

What happened here? Everyone had to love it because it was about Afghanistan? Was this part of the Patriot Act? Eh, probably.

I followed this book with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This was a bad follow-up. Luckily, reading anything lessened the sting of Kite Runner — the manual to our microwave became a gripping lunchtime read (did you know it recommends use of foil in certain situations? In case you ever decide to microwave a pork loin roast from raw and want blackened edges, now you know) — but Loud and Close proved a pretentious and wholly unbelievable read which played on emotions from September 11.

On a positive note, I should mention The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the book I read prior to those two. It was quite good, and for a long time qualified as the “last good book I read” since those two followed. It’s a sort of coming-of-age story of an autistic boy, narrated by him. The author taught autistic children for years prior to writing this book. It’s very sympathetic and very lovingly told. I dig it.

After the dark period — I really can’t express sincerely and repeatedly enough how bad Kite Runner is — I read The Darling by Russell Banks. If you haven’t read Banks, he’s incredible. This book may not be a good “first read” if you’ve not read him before just because it is so densely packed… it really took a while to read. This narrator was a bit cagey. Banks is so good with voice — sometimes, you’ll read two books of his and wonder how the same person could have written them both. The Sweet Hereafter is particularly interesting in that the book is split into multiple sections, each from a different viewpoint. It’s beautiful.

In The Darling, Hannah Musgrave tells her story, a story of a woman of multiple aliases who flees the U.S. after being involved in the Weather Underground and an incident involving a bomb going off at the wrong time and killing a couple of people. Thinking she is being tracked down, she flees to Africa, eventually ending up in Liberia and peripherally (and occasionally centrally) involved in the process that brought Charles Taylor to power. Some character traits of the narrator end up being even stronger than her on-her-sleeve idealism, and the honesty with which she tells the story, in a way that unearths her character’s serious flaws and show how she was used by several entities, is fascinating.

If only a narrator’s character flaws were always interesting… which brings us to Fools Rush In.

While in Sarajevo, I picked up Fools Rush In (by Bill Carter) from Matt and Shannon. Oh. Dear. God. This is… well, the subject matter itself, the siege of Sarajevo, is interesting and gripping. The author is just awful. Not as a writer, but — well, I’d hate to ever be around him. If you’re tempted to read this, try to borrow it or steal it. If you have the option of skipping every passage about his now-dead ex-girlfriend — which, by the way, covers much of the book — you’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Seriously: you’ll think they knew each other for 30 years until you reach the part where he lets you know, in fact, it was less than a year. And they really hardly knew each other, at that. And her character in the book has about as much depth as the page itself… all of which helps lead to Carter being an unreliable narrator, projecting his own issues onto every situation, so much so that the story becomes more about him than about the serious issues at hand. The parts about him teaming up with U2 to broadcast reports from Sarajevo to their tour are very cool; the part where he makes a big deal about Bono not thanking him by name from the stage when performing in Sarajevo is not so cool. The part where he arranges some rocks into a message of love pointing to the sky for his long-lost love will make you want to vomit, especially with the inconsistencies between these actions and his behavior towards other women in the book.

That being said, the story of Sarajevo somehow gets through. And the story of Sarajevo is amazing. There are probably better books about it which will make the reader less angry (or, at least, angry for all the right reasons).

Well, there’s a completely uninvited post about books. By the way, just saw the movie Syriana the other night and have now picked up See No Evil, the book by which it was “inspired” or “suggested” or whatever. Just starting the book, but as for the movie: it’ll make you consider the bus. Or a hybrid, I guess.