A severed arm, a voodoo lady, and a detective on the roach patrol — and, oh yes, a very bad monkey

A review of Bad Monkey, by Carl Hiaasen

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

I miss Skink.

Skink, as you may be aware if you’re a Carl Hiaasen fan, is the deranged ex-Governor of Florida who now lives as a hermit in the Everglades and descends on environmental evil-doers of all stripes to wreak justice upon their bodies and souls alike, never to be forgotten. Skink is Justice personified. Yet there’s not a whiff of Skink — oh, yes, you can smell him from far away — in Hiaasen’s 17th novel for grown-ups, Bad Monkey.

Bad Monkey is a story of environmental crime in Florida only in passing. More properly, it’s a murder mystery and detective story. Hiaasen’s protagonist, Andrew Yancy, finds himself on the “roach patrol,” a restaurant health inspector, having been fired from the Miami PD (the result of reporting his sergeant for corruption) and then from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department (the result of an inspired but indecorous outburst of sadism effected upon his lover’s husband, unfortunately in public).

Here’s Hiaasen delicately referring to that incident: “Bonnie Witt, Yancy’s future former girlfriend, was prepared to testify that he’d assaulted her husband of fourteen years with a portable vacuum cleaner, specifically a tubular attachment designed for upholstery crevices. Clifford Witt had required some specialized medical care but he was more or less ambulatory within a week.”

Yancy, confined to the comforts of his lover and the bottle, suddenly finds himself the missing link of sorts to a gruesome incident at sea when the human arm in his freezer turns out not to be evidence of suicide but rather of . . . drum roll, please: murder.

Don’t ask how that arm got into Yancy’s freezer. You’ll have to read the book to find out. Suffice it to say that possession of the arm leads Yancy to make the acquaintance of a strikingly beautiful Cuban-American Miami coroner named Dr. Rosa Campesino, a more than worthy substitute for his now ex-lover, who turns out to be a fugitive from a felony count in Oklahoma. Yancy and Rosa team up to find the truth that lies behind the ghastly artifact, only to become involved in another murder. As the bodies pile up, the daring duo encounters the suspicious young widow of the armless deceased, his greedy estranged daughter, a Bahamian fisherman, a man-eating voodoo lady, and assorted no-goodniks and ne’er-do-wells throughout the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, plus one very bad monkey named Driggs. It’s all a spectacular clusterf***, and very funny. Structured as a murder mystery, it’s also full of suspense, brought on by a demonically clever plot.

Hiaasen’s view of officialdom in South Florida isn’t bright. “The new sheriff of Monroe County,” he writes, “was a local bubba named Sonny Summers who won office because he was the only candidate not in federal custody, the two front-runners having been locked up on unconnected racketeering charges eight days before the election.”

Truth be told, the author’s opinion of the assorted low-life to be found on the beaches of the keys isn’t much better. Writing about a beach bum who’d been bragging all over town about his $3,000 windfall (from committing a felony, of course), Hiaasen opines, in the voice of the now-deceased bum’s girlfriend, “‘Nobody said he was Alvin Einstein.’ Yancy thought it was fortunate that [the pair] hadn’t pooled their genes.”

Previously I’ve reviewed one of Carl Hiaasen’s adult novels, Star Island, and one of the four he has written for young adults, Chomp. However, I’m a Hiaasen fan from way back, having earlier read a number of his other books as well, and Bad Monkey will keep me coming back for more — even though Skink never showed his face in the book.

A funny book reveals more than you ever wanted to know about digestion and its byproducts

A review of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Mary Roach is a funny person, and I mean that in both senses of the word: funny ha-ha, and funny strange. For years now, she’s been writing amusing and often hilarious popular science books about peculiar subjects, including cadavers, the afterlife, the science of sex, life in space, and, now, digestion. Somehow, other science writers have tended to shy away from these topics. (I wonder why?)

So, now, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. 

You can get a pretty good sense of what Gulp is like by reading the table of contents. Check out these chapter titles, for example:

• The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
• Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff
• A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab
• Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive
• Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research

Got the picture? Good. But don’t get the impression that Gulp is just a funny book. It’s chock full of important information as well. For instance:

• You’ll learn about the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30.
• You’ll find out what Eskimos think of cats.
• You’ll know the difference between laundry detergent and the digestive juices in your stomach.
• You’ll learn which end of the cow its farts come out of.
• You’ll find out how Elvis Presley, President James Garfield, and Farrah Fawcett really died.

Gulp brims over with surprises. And the truly funny thing is, you’ll actually learn a good deal about the digestive process along the way. Mary Roach knows her stuff. This book is far more than a comic tour de force: it’s actually a superior example of science journalism. Kudos to Mary Roach!

Gulp is Mary Roach’s sixth book-length study. The first was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers a decade ago. Then two years later came  Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex three years after that. Her most recent book before Gulp was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void in 2010. My review of Packing for Mars is here, and the one for Bonk is here.

Christopher Buckley: Funny ha-ha, and funny strange

A review of No Way To Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Humor is a funny  thing. Not long ago I introduced Christopher Buckley to an audience of about 100 people in Berkeley. (No, I didn’t go to Yale with him. This was solely on the strength of having given favorable reviews to several of his novels.) Buckley spoke off the cuff rather than read from his writing, and I found him hilarious. So did about half the audience. Some seemed to be on the verge of falling off their chairs from time to time. But the other half of the audience sat stone-faced, often with arms crossed and eyes darting right and left, apparently waiting for a chance to sneak out of the room.

All this is to say that I read No Way to Treat a First Lady, laughing all the way — and maybe you won’t. Whenever as a child I told my mother that something was funny, she would ask, “Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?” Well, this one is a little of both. No Way to Treat a First Lady tells the tale of a philandering President and a long-suffering wife who has, apparently, murdered him in his sleep. See what I mean?

Christopher Buckley’s humor is grounded in such situations, not too many steps removed from reality. Don’t get me wrong. The leading characters in this novel in no way resemble two recent residents of the White House. And the supporting cast would be a better fit in a Marx Brothers film than in today’s Washington, DC: the best criminal defense lawyer money can buy, who incidentally was the jilted law-school lover of the First Lady; a blonde Court TV superstar, who is the current, much-younger squeeze of the self-important defense lawyer; bumbling rival trial attorneys; and a motley assortment of FBI and Secret Service agents and White House hangers-on. Even so, you can practically see them behind today’s headlines.

I won’t spoil the story by summarizing the plot, which is deliciously complex and as full of surprises as a best-selling thriller. You deserve the chance to discover it on your own.

Forewarned, then, that I think Christopher Buckley is one of the funniest writers currently walking the planet, I commend you to my previous reviews of his books: Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, The White House Mess, and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? If you read (or have read) these reviews, you know that I don’t think they’re all equally good — Florence of Arabia, for example, was just a little too real for me.

Pretty soon I’m going to run out of Buckley’s books, and I’ll just have to start reading them all over again.

Enough already! An open letter to Janet Evanovich

A review of Notorious Nineteen, by Janet Evanovich

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Dear Janet (if I may be so bold),

Maybe it’s me, but I doubt that. After you’ve written — what is it? 50? 51? — novels all told, I think you’re losing steam. Notorious Nineteen is, of course, the 19th in your Stephanie Plum series, and it shows. Here are a few of the most prominent signs:

• Not one but two cars Stephanie is driving are blown up;
• Lula consumes at least 8,000 calories of junk food in a single day;
• Ranger rescues Stephanie from imminent death not once but twice;
• A really bad guy gets blown up trying to kill Stephanie; and
• Morelli and Stephanie still aren’t ready to get married after talking about it for 10 years.

Truth to tell, some of this is funny as it happens, which is why I kept reading this series of comic novels so long. But the humor is fast fading, and so is the guilty pleasure I’ve taken so long in this series.

I don’t know about you, Janet, but I’m ready to put Stephanie out to pasture at last. Appearances notwithstanding, she’s really pushing 60 now, right? Isn’t it time to lay off the staff on that assembly-line writing factory of yours and see what you can do on your own again?

Think about it. You may not be able to write anything original, but you won’t know unless you try, no?

Your erstwhile fan,

Mal Warwick

The 5 best novels I’ve read in 2012

Truth to tell, I haven’t read all that many trade novels during the past year, and, anyway, in general I tend to stay away from the literary “masterpieces” trumpeted so loudly by the likes of the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. More often than not, I find the darlings of the literary set are writing not for me but for, well, the literary set. I’ve seen far too many impenetrable tomes lauded as fine literature. Give me a good, gripping story any day of the year, and I’ll gladly forego pretty much any one of the Booker Prize winners of recent years. I truly enjoyed reading all five of the books listed below.

1. They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

Political satire of the highest order. I found myself laughing hysterically, sometimes for pages at a time. But, like all superior satire, this book isn’t just funny — its droll treatment of politics in Washington and Beijing is spot-on accurate.

2. The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. Set in Bangkok in the 23rd century, this wildly inventive story examines humanity’s plight once the oceans have risen twenty feet, and most of the human race in in thrall to the American and Chinese “calorie companies” that have killed off virtually all traditional sources of food with genetically engineered plagues.

3. The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

A chilling novel set in Geneva, where a brilliant and eccentric American physicist has teamed up with an unscrupulous English financier to use the scientist’s breakthrough techniques in artificial intelligence to manipulate the financial markets.

4. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson

The Orwellian story of a North Korean “tunnel rat,” trained in kidnapping and hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels leading under the DMZ to South Korea, who briefly becomes a confidante of the country’s elite military commanders and of the Dear Leader himself, only later to find himself confined to a prison mine, where citizens who run afoul of officialdom are worked to death underground.

5. Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

A deeply unsettling novel structured as an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a devastated young mother whose husband and young son have died in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer game in London.

Feminism? In Arabia? Read it here first

A review of Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Christopher Buckley proved to me that he’s one of the funniest writers alive today with Thank You For Smoking, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, and Little Green Men (the latter two of which I’ve reviewed in this blog and hyperlinked their titles to my reviews). Florence of Arabia is, like them, a satirical novel rooted in contemporary issues, but once Buckley had introduced his protagonist and set up the story that revolves around her, I found myself laughing less and less. The difference here is that the issue the novel addresses — the brutal subjugation of women in ultra-conservative Muslim societies — is simply not funny. However preposterous the characters or improbable the circumstances, the subject just isn’t laughable at all.

In other ways, however, Florence of Arabia showed off Buckley’s exceptional talent: deliciously convoluted (if not Byzantine) plotting, overblown characters that somehow still seem true to life, and thorough grounding in the facts on the ground to make the story seem dangerously close to reality. All this made the book worth reading, even though I pretty much stopped chuckling about one-third of the way through the story.

So, here’s what happens: State Department bureaucrat Florence (born Firenze) Farfaletti is driven to feminist activism when an old friend from her tour in Wasabia (read: Saudi Arabia) is beheaded at the orders of her husband, the Wasabian Ambassador to the U.S., when she contacts Florence during an attempt to escape her stifling life in the Embassy. Improbably bankrolled by a shadowy government official named “Uncle Sam” to engineer a feminist revolution in Wasabia, Florence teams up with a CIA master-spy, a totally unprincipled PR man, and her gay State Department friend, George, a brilliant linguist and political analyst. Together, the four hapless warriors translate themselves to the Emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”) where they set Florence’s cockamamie scheme into motion with the support of the Emir’s wife, a former television anchor in the UK.

Mayhem ensues. What else?

Books that make great gifts

You won’t find coffee-table art books, slim volumes of poetry, or door-stopper romance novels among the twenty recommendations here, but you will find a wide range of great fiction and nonfiction: eight novels, eight nonfiction books, and four mysteries and thrillers are featured in this post. (Each of the titles below is linked to my full review.)

TRADE FICTION

Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon

Intrigue, romance, and betrayal in the turbulent world of espionage in post-World War II Istanbul.

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

A wildly funny send-up of life inside the Beltway — and in the Forbidden City — by one of the greatest comic writers in the business today.

 

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

22nd-Century Bangkok after the seas have risen and humanity is struggling to survive. One of the best science-fiction novels I’ve ever read.

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

An engrossing thriller about high finance and high-speed trading on the securities markets, by the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland.

The Debba, by Avner Mandelman

The history of Israel from Independence to the present as reflected in a heart-pounding tale of intrigue and conflict between Arab and Jew.

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Set in Salonika, Greece, in the early years of World War II, this complex story of espionage and war involves an underground railway for Jews escaping Hitler and an anti-Nazi coup in what was then Yugoslavia.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks

An insightful and revealing novel about the plague in England by one of today’s best historical novels, grounded in history but delving deep into the emotional realities of individual people as they might have been.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh reaffirms his place as one of contemporary India’s greatest writers with this extraordinarily rich tale of class conflict, exploitation, and forbidden love against the background of the opium trade in the years leading up to the Opium War of the mid-19th Century.

NONFICTION

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

A brilliant account of the emergence of deadly new infectious diseases around the world — those you’ve heard of, and those you haven’t — with gripping accounts of the scientists, physicians, and veterinarians who are on humanity’s front line of defense against them.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

Illuminating, insightful, provocative — there is no way to overstate the brilliance of this account of the long-obscure ancient thinkers whose insights seeded the Renaissance in Europe and inspired Thomas Jefferson.

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

You’ll never look at global politics or world history the same way you did if you read this masterful study of the intertwined roles of geography and history in shaping human events and the destiny of nations.

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman

Yesterday’s heroes come to life in this fascinating tale of the astonishing conversion of America’s faltering peacetime economy into the “arsenal of nations” that supplied the ships, tanks, and guns used to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Operation Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

If your image of successful spies has been formed by Ian Fleming’s books or even John Le Carre’s, you’ll be blown away by the eccentrics and impostors who played large roles in Britain’s successful efforts to draw Hitler’s attention away from the Normandy Invasion.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro

It may be difficult for one who didn’t experience the 1960s as an adult to appreciate the consequential impact of Johnson’s career,

both for good and for bad. This extraordinary book helps close the gap.

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan

A readable and inspiring survey of social entrepreneurship around the world and of the brilliant individuals who are expanding its reach at a breakneck pace.

The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham

Chances are, you already know that Ayn Rand’s portrait of the heroic “job creator” is fraudulent. This outstanding little book explains why, revealing how dependent on government and community support are even the most successful corporations.

MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS

Liberation Movements, by Olen Steinhauer

A suspenseful tale of love, betrayal, and terrorism set in Eastern Europe during the heyday of post-War Communism, with two interlocking stories spanning the years 1968 to 1975.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

Few murder mysteries have kept me guessing longer or propelled me toward the finish with such speed and power. An extraordinary example of the mystery writer’s craft.

The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

The events that take place in the Midnight House over a two-month period in 2008 are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of Botswana’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency, is listening to her assistant, Mma Makutsi, cheer up one of Mma Ramotswe’s best friends, Mma Potokwane. “’Nobody is useless,’ Mma Makutsi said heatedly, ‘and you are less useless than nobody else, Mma. Definitely.’ This remark was greeted with silence while Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane had tried to work out what it meant. The spirit in which it was made, though, was clear enough, and Mma Potokwane simply thanked her.”

Ever wondered where those UFOs come from? Christopher Buckley has the answer

A review of Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Perhaps it requires a rarefied sense of humor to appreciate Christopher Buckley, but you wouldn’t know it from the sales figures on his books. Anyone who can write a book with endlessly eccentric characters named Sir Reginald Pigg-Vigorish, Col. Roscoe J. Murfletit, General Tunklebunker, and Deputy FBI Director Bargenberfer may be reaching the pre-adolescent in me, but he makes me laugh, dammit, and I’m not going to apologize for it, so there!

In Little Green Men, not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs! Could anyone possibly wish for more?

Like so many of Buckley’s satirical novels, Little Green Men tells the story of a hapless (though in this case willing) victim of the absurd circumstances surrounding him — circumstances caused in large part by a witless supporting cast with names such as those listed in the opening paragraph of this review. Buckley’s antihero here is John Oliver Banion, a pompous Sunday-morning public affairs television talk show host with a pedigree that looks just a little bit like Christopher Buckley’s (including Yale, of course!). In fact, Buckley is never better than when skewering People Like Us, and he does it with such skill that I can almost imagine him cackling in the background as he types away.

One fine day John O. Banion is slicing into the rough on his exclusive country club golf course when he is abducted and “probed” by aliens — not Little Green Men, actually, but silver ones whom UFO taxonomists call Tall Nordics. The action that radiates from this inexplicable event is far too complicated, and far too unlikely — not to mention funny — to sum up, so I’ll leave it to you when you read this beautifully crafted little book.

Little Green Men is the fourth of the nine satirical novels Christopher Buckley has published since 1986. I’ve read most of them and reviewed two in this blog. You can see my previous reviews by clicking on these titles: The White House Mess and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? I also found Boomsday and Supreme Courtship hilarious, though I read them before starting this blog.

A glorious new novel from Michael Chabon, set in my neighborhood

A review of Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re thinking that this is the story of Berkeley in the 60s, when Telegraph Avenue entered the national consciousness with marijuana and teargas, you’ll soon find that your expectations are off by several decades and a couple of miles. Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue is set farther south, on a less familiar stretch of the eponymous street that straddles South Berkeley and North Oakland, and the events in the book transpire in 2004, even though they have roots in the 70s.

The most notable aspect of this comic novel is Chabon’s showmanship with words, which cascade down the page in glorious profusion, evoking image after image. I’ve never before seen so many similes and metaphors crammed onto a single page, but again and again — and Chabon isn’t showing off, he’s conveying an intense reality in spectacular Technicolor and 3-D. (Well, maybe he was showing off a little with one run-on sentence, a whole chapter, that rivals anything in Faulkner or Joyce.) Though Telegraph Avenue is packed with humor, I found myself marveling at the language instead of laughing, and I come away from reading the book with vivid images of Chabon’s unforgettable characters and a smile on my face rather than memories of laughing out loud.

The themes in Telegraph Avenue include birth and death, loss and betrayal, the glories of fatherhood, teenage angst, the continuing challenges of interracial relationships, and the intensely present power of music in the lives of so many Americans. Chabon lays bare these themes in the lives of four forty-something residents of the Telegraph Avenue corridor: two Caucasians, Nat Jaffe (jazz fanatic and co-owner of Brokeland Records, which sells old vinyl) and his wife Aviva Roth-Jaffe (dean of Berkeley midwives); and two African-Americans, the on-again off-again couple of Archy Stallings (co-owner of Brokeland Records) and Gwen Shanks (Aviva’s partner in Berkeley Birth Partners). In the ups and downs (mostly downs) of these four interconnected lives, and a full cast of extraordinary secondary characters who surround them (including Barack Obama as a State Senator), Chabon explores his themes with a sure hand.

Telegraph Avenue works for me on every level. Once again, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon has proven himself to be one of the most extraordinary storytellers and wordsmiths at work on Planet Earth today.

Chabon’s work has been enthusiastically received from the very start of his career with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 1988. His previous novels also include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007). Of Chabon’s seven novels, I’ve now read those three as well as Telegraph Avenue, and all were outstanding. And I’m proud to say that Michael Chabon is my landsman (as my grandfathers would say), a fellow Berkeleyite.

If you like weird stories about eccentric people, you’ll love this novel

A review of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, by Maria Semple

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Whenever I needed an excuse for something questionable I’d done as a child, I made up a story. Some of those stories — there were a lot of them — were colorful, detailed, and complex, based on the theory that the more I talked, the more likely it was that my parents would get bored and hence the less likely I would be punished. That actually seemed to work. Often as not, instead of moving to do something tragic, such as confine me to my room for a day, they would roll their eyes and say, “A likely story!”

Now, you may not be able to hear the intonation in that phrase, as I do, but I hope you get the point: the tale I’d told was beyond the realm of credibility, since my imagination had run away with me.

In that same sense, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a likely story.

I picked up this book because so many of the reviews I’d seen had labeled it “hilarious.” Sadly, I didn’t find it hilarious. Amusing, yes, even genuinely funny at times. Unusually well written, to be sure. Cleverly plotted, without question. And imaginative — to the max.

The Bernadette of the title is a 40-something suburban mom in Seattle who is anything but typical (if, in fact, there is such a person). She is a refugee from a former life in L.A., where by happenstance she was awarded a McArthur “genius” grant for her bold, unconventional work in architecture. Bernadette was “green” before there was green, or so the story goes. However, shortly after the national recognition she received as a result of the grant, Bernadette went off the rails and fled to Seattle with her husband, Elgin, who had conveniently sold his artificial intelligence company to Microsoft and secured a senior position to continue his work there.

Cut to Seattle, where the tale begins. Bernadette and Elgin have purchased a cavernous former “school for wayward girls” on a hilltop overlooking one of the city’s exclusive, high-income suburbs. Their 15-year-old daughter Bee (nee Balakrishna) narrates the unfolding story of Bernadette’s protracted nervous breakdown and later disappearance, interspersing her commentaries with email messages and official documents.

Author Maria Semple, who lives in Seattle, has practically nothing good to say about the place, and Microsoft bothers her, too. In fact, Semple doesn’t seem to like much of anything or anybody, as absolutely no one in this cockamamie novel comes off as completely sane and desirable — except for Antarctica, which possesses the rare virtues of being home to lots of penguins and very few people. You’ll have to find out for yourself how the story gravitates from Seattle to Antarctica.