Thursday, July 05, 2007
In search of non-depressing escape literature
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The task of reading newspapers and watching CNN comes with the column; else I would not be able to produce incisive and topical 800 word essays for your pleasure. Needless to say, such reading and watching can be depressing beyond belief. This puts a premium on some heavy-duty escape reading, because TV comedy is toilet quality, TV drama is flab, or violent, good old movies are scarce, and Law and Order is too intense to relax.
Escape reading and watching can be really a matter of mental and physical health, as necessary as a vacations and more accessible, and we know that active humor therapy is effective – it cured Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review, as documented in cancer and oncology literature.
But even with the riches of the world’s literature at our disposal, good escape reading is not easily found. Current "good" literature is excessively filled with psycho-pathological problems, contributing to the worldwide mongery of despair. The fiction in The New Yorker has been unreadable since the passing of James Thurber and J. D. Salinger. That leaves me with re-reading old and trusted books, and my favorite mid century authors are too dismal. The dystopian society fantasies of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut are too evocative to revisit, John Cheever’s suburbanites too corrupt, and the wartime characters of Norman Mailer and James Jones bring on more bad vibes. Going back further, James Joyce, Hemingway and Mark Twain are good in parts, but Dickens has too much aspera before the astra.
The salvation lies in the spy and detective literature, although much of current stuff is either excessively bloody or unbelievable, or ambivalently dark – the good guys do not always win. The sadistic James Patterson novels and Patricia Cornwell’s tales, with her forensic expert Dr. Kay Scarpetta walking through accumulations of dead bodies are too much like the Middle East. Ugh!
Of today’s mystery writers, Alexander McCall Smith and his Botswana detective lady heroine are joyful. Likewise, the heirs of Thomas Pinchon’s highflying stream of consciousness imagery (see the satire The Crying of Lot 49), such as Carl Hiassen and his successors Tom Corcoran (detective Alex Rutledge in Air Dance Iguana) and Tom Dorsey (insane killer Serge A. Storms and his drugged-up buddy Lenny in Stingray Shuffle), although the latter can turn icky.
Reliably cheerful is formula writer Sue Crafton, with detective Kinsey Milhone in the formula series (from A Is for Alibi she’s up to T Is For Trespass), with interludes of domesticity and lovers. Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Lt. Joe Leaphorn is reliable.
The old Florida novels of John D. MacDonald, featuring Travis McGee, his economist buddy Meyer and innumerable tall blondes with long brown legs coming to Slip 17 in the Fort Lauderdale Marina looking for help and retaliation, are still upbeat. More rescuers of damsels-in-distress, a bit hoary – The Saint of Leslie Charteris’s domain; Archie Goodwin, aide to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Archie McNally in the Lawrence Sander’s series, very P. G. Wodehouse-like, has his own Jeeves. The other MacDonald, Ross, creator of the hard-boiled Lew Archer (not of Archer and Spade) is not cheerful, and neither is Dashiel Hammett of the Continental Op and Maltese Falcon (yep, that’s A & S). Raymond Chandler’s Marlove is quirky, and the Big Sleep is too dark. Lawrence Bloch’s burglarizing bookseller Bernie is amusing and literate but too black in concept. Whew.
This brings me to the most reliable of positive escape writers, Robert B. Parker and his Boston, er, Cambridge hero Spencer, with a black sidekick Hawk, who speaks either educated or ghetto English, as required, and girlfriend, Susan Silberman, PhD, who speaks pop-psych and sex, as required. Spencer is the most reliable of today’s thug-detective characters whom you can trust to do justice, and he is known to cry after an unavoidable killing (Looking for Rachel Wallace).
On the Boston theme, Linda Barnes’s private eye Carlotta Carlyle is an ex-cop, part-time cab driver, who has a good-guy Mafia lover and a homicide lieutenant beau; Jean Evanovich’s New Jerseyite Stephanie Plum, ex-model now bounty hunter has similar appendages; both are funny but a bit too formula-prone. Feminist writers such as the modern doyenne of the genre Sara Paretsky and her lawyer lady detective I. V. Warshawski (Indemnity Only, 1982) do produce trustworthy drama that, if not necessarily uplifting, will not blow off the reader. Ditto Dana Stabenov’s Alaskan native ex-DI investigator Kate Shugak.
Some U. K. resources: re-reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 novels can be cheering, also early Kingsley Amis. As for older detective writers: Agatha Christie today seems a trifle flat, the humor of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey still works, P. G. Wodehouse is essential.
This is my first-cut 101 survey of health-saving escape literature, to be continued. For addenda or critiques write to wally@ix.netcom.com or editor. No personal answers, state whether you mind being quoted. Next week we may talk about the fulfillment of this column’s Bloomberg forecast of May 2007.
The task of reading newspapers and watching CNN comes with the column; else I would not be able to produce incisive and topical 800 word essays for your pleasure. Needless to say, such reading and watching can be depressing beyond belief. This puts a premium on some heavy-duty escape reading, because TV comedy is toilet quality, TV drama is flab, or violent, good old movies are scarce, and Law and Order is too intense to relax.
Escape reading and watching can be really a matter of mental and physical health, as necessary as a vacations and more accessible, and we know that active humor therapy is effective – it cured Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review, as documented in cancer and oncology literature.
But even with the riches of the world’s literature at our disposal, good escape reading is not easily found. Current "good" literature is excessively filled with psycho-pathological problems, contributing to the worldwide mongery of despair. The fiction in The New Yorker has been unreadable since the passing of James Thurber and J. D. Salinger. That leaves me with re-reading old and trusted books, and my favorite mid century authors are too dismal. The dystopian society fantasies of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut are too evocative to revisit, John Cheever’s suburbanites too corrupt, and the wartime characters of Norman Mailer and James Jones bring on more bad vibes. Going back further, James Joyce, Hemingway and Mark Twain are good in parts, but Dickens has too much aspera before the astra.
The salvation lies in the spy and detective literature, although much of current stuff is either excessively bloody or unbelievable, or ambivalently dark – the good guys do not always win. The sadistic James Patterson novels and Patricia Cornwell’s tales, with her forensic expert Dr. Kay Scarpetta walking through accumulations of dead bodies are too much like the Middle East. Ugh!
Of today’s mystery writers, Alexander McCall Smith and his Botswana detective lady heroine are joyful. Likewise, the heirs of Thomas Pinchon’s highflying stream of consciousness imagery (see the satire The Crying of Lot 49), such as Carl Hiassen and his successors Tom Corcoran (detective Alex Rutledge in Air Dance Iguana) and Tom Dorsey (insane killer Serge A. Storms and his drugged-up buddy Lenny in Stingray Shuffle), although the latter can turn icky.
Reliably cheerful is formula writer Sue Crafton, with detective Kinsey Milhone in the formula series (from A Is for Alibi she’s up to T Is For Trespass), with interludes of domesticity and lovers. Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Lt. Joe Leaphorn is reliable.
The old Florida novels of John D. MacDonald, featuring Travis McGee, his economist buddy Meyer and innumerable tall blondes with long brown legs coming to Slip 17 in the Fort Lauderdale Marina looking for help and retaliation, are still upbeat. More rescuers of damsels-in-distress, a bit hoary – The Saint of Leslie Charteris’s domain; Archie Goodwin, aide to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Archie McNally in the Lawrence Sander’s series, very P. G. Wodehouse-like, has his own Jeeves. The other MacDonald, Ross, creator of the hard-boiled Lew Archer (not of Archer and Spade) is not cheerful, and neither is Dashiel Hammett of the Continental Op and Maltese Falcon (yep, that’s A & S). Raymond Chandler’s Marlove is quirky, and the Big Sleep is too dark. Lawrence Bloch’s burglarizing bookseller Bernie is amusing and literate but too black in concept. Whew.
This brings me to the most reliable of positive escape writers, Robert B. Parker and his Boston, er, Cambridge hero Spencer, with a black sidekick Hawk, who speaks either educated or ghetto English, as required, and girlfriend, Susan Silberman, PhD, who speaks pop-psych and sex, as required. Spencer is the most reliable of today’s thug-detective characters whom you can trust to do justice, and he is known to cry after an unavoidable killing (Looking for Rachel Wallace).
On the Boston theme, Linda Barnes’s private eye Carlotta Carlyle is an ex-cop, part-time cab driver, who has a good-guy Mafia lover and a homicide lieutenant beau; Jean Evanovich’s New Jerseyite Stephanie Plum, ex-model now bounty hunter has similar appendages; both are funny but a bit too formula-prone. Feminist writers such as the modern doyenne of the genre Sara Paretsky and her lawyer lady detective I. V. Warshawski (Indemnity Only, 1982) do produce trustworthy drama that, if not necessarily uplifting, will not blow off the reader. Ditto Dana Stabenov’s Alaskan native ex-DI investigator Kate Shugak.
Some U. K. resources: re-reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 novels can be cheering, also early Kingsley Amis. As for older detective writers: Agatha Christie today seems a trifle flat, the humor of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey still works, P. G. Wodehouse is essential.
This is my first-cut 101 survey of health-saving escape literature, to be continued. For addenda or critiques write to wally@ix.netcom.com or editor. No personal answers, state whether you mind being quoted. Next week we may talk about the fulfillment of this column’s Bloomberg forecast of May 2007.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:10 PM 
