Boy, are my arms tired! Spinster Librarian. Book Reviews.

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Generation Loss

By Elizabeth Hand
Harvest Books Harcourt

Elizabeth Hand’s novel, Generation Loss, is difficult to characterize. It’s partly a reflection on the emotional significance of art, partly a tale of personal redemption and partly a creepy mystery story.

The book follows a week in the life of Cassandra Neary, a New York art photographer who had a moment of fame thirty years earlier, during the punk era, but has now been living on the skids for so long that she wouldn’t know prosperity, happiness or even clean underwear if it smacked her across the jaw. She’s a bare survivor of too many drugs, too much violence and a disposition that beckons her toward, as she calls it, “damage” of every ilk. When an old friend offers her a job taking pictures of one of her photography heroines, Aphrodite Kamestos, she takes a week off from her dead-end job and treks to Kamestos’ island off the coast of Maine.

Perhaps it is Cass’ general inclination towards darkness that makes her view the village on the Paswegas coast as less-than-genial. Sure, she keeps seeing photocopied flyers inquiring about missing teens. Sure the folks at the local diner are taciturn. But since she spends her days in a perpetual hung-over, speed-fueled daze, it’s impossible to take her gloomy viewpoint seriously.

Cass makes it to the island only to find that Kamestos’ working years as an artist are long past, and she has become an angry, alcoholic, who has no interest in being interviewed, or even seen. She lives in squalid solitude, in the remains of a house that, during the hippie era, was part of an experimental commune. The island’s inhabitants, and her son, Gryffin, who has also shown up for this fateful week, both take care of her and take care to stay out of her way.

Realizing she will not be conducting an interview, getting portraits or even getting paid for this trip, Cass tries to get the hell off the island and back to New York. However, there is no regular boat service to the mainland, and she must spend the night at Kamestos’ house, with the unwelcoming Gryffin. As they tend to do in stories, events conspire to keep her from the mainland. Kamestos has an accident. Another teen goes missing. Cass oversleeps, and misses her morning sail. Mysterious people draw her into their disturbing dramas. Finally, Cass, who would rather be in a drug-induced stupor on the Lower East Side, must solve a murderous, artistic riddle to save own life.

Generation Loss is filled with unlikely situations and unappealing characters. Yet, Hand’s ability to evoke places and people, right down to their repulsive smells, makes this a strangely gripping read. The protagonist and her main sparring partners are almost impossible to like, yet the pacing of the story and the revelations of dark mystery at its core, make the book a page-turner anyway.

Rating:

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

By Christophen Hitchens
Hachette Book Group

Have you ever noticed how the Publisher’s Weekly reviews that are featured on the Amazon.com website rarely serve as actual critiques? Usually, they lord over all the reader reviews as if they were somehow relevant, when what they primarily do is synopsize a book without much editorializing. Yet, in the case of Christopher Hitchens’ atheist tome, God is Not Great, Publisher’s Weekly, at last, feels free to let loose with some real vitriol. One suspects this is because the need to defend religion finally trumps the need to reward publishers for their ad dollars. Or, as Hitchens says, ”Since human beings are naturally solipsistic, all forms of superstition enjoy what might be called a natural advantage.”

In God is Not Great, journalist Christopher Hitchens has joined a small, vocal group of authors, including Sam Harris with The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion who have lately exposed the illogic inherent in and the evils perpetrated by the world’s religions. In this book he explains why evolution makes sense and why Christianity, Judaism and Islam don’t. He even takes on Buddhists and Hindus, pointing out that their sects have had plenty of their own murderous crusades in the name of their Gods, and aren’t as gentle as the uneducated assume. Plus, he takes a crack at the cult of Mormonism to expose Joseph Smith for the horny charlatan that he was.

Hitchens, as a writer is, at best, a clever wordsmith and, at worst, a pontificating pit bull who will rip an argument to shreds whether he’s right or wrong. Surely his long, public defense of America’s war on Iraq is a good instance of the later. In this book, he is both clever and dogged when he takes on subjects like whether or not the text of the Bible is the actual word of God, as in the passage in which he excoriates Mel Gibson’s film, Passion of the Christ by pointing out: “He [Gibson] fell into the same error as do the Christians, in assuming that the four Gospels were in any sense a historical record. Their multiple authors — none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion — cannot agree on a thing of importance. Matthew and Luke cannot concur on the Virgin Birth or the genealogy of Jesus. They flatly contradict each other on the ‘Flight into Egypt.’

“The scribes cannot even agree on the mythical elements: they disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas and Peter’s haunting ‘denial.’ Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion of the Resurrection.”

He hated the movie, too.

Hitchens works hard to point out how “religion poisons everything” in chapters entitled “Is Religion Child Abuse?” and “Does Religion Make People Behave?” He would not be the first to point out how children have been abused by churches and the church-going, or that the religious are no better behaved than those who don’t believe in higher powers. Yet, as part of the larger narrative, these arguments provide useful nails to hammer into God’s metaphorical coffin.

Will Hitchens convince anyone who wasn’t already an atheist or non-believer to throw off the security blanket of their omnipotent imaginary friend? Not likely. Today, almost no one is moved to change his or her opinion through arguments of logic. Sadly, people mainly change their minds by way of emotional manipulation. No, this book is, as they say, preaching to the choir. But, in the new millennium, awash with terrifying fundamentalists of every religion, atheists need a rousing sermon every so often, too.

Rating:

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BLESSEDLY BRIEF

Mort Zachter’s memoir, Dough, (University of Georgia Press) is built upon an appealing premise. It goes something like this: A young man’s hard-working immigrant family runs a commercial bakery in Brooklyn; two uncles and his parents work selling bread seven days a week; they live in squalid, near-poverty; the uncle who runs the bakery finally becomes senile and is put in a retirement home; the young man, now a married CPA in his 30s discovers that both uncles were really multi-millionaires.

As a story, it contains every tried-and-true plot point one could want. It’s a rags-to-riches saga. It reveals family secrets. It provides historical anecdotes for color. Yes, it has everything except the one thing that would make you actually finish the book: compelling prose.

It turns out, Zachter always wanted to be a writer, but his family’s penuriousness forced him, instead, to learn accounting and then law. So, by the time he came into wealth he had missed several decades’ worth of writing practice. So, l ike many neophyte writers, he repeatedly makes the fatal mistake of over-explaining. For instance, in one boring passage, in which he describes hiring a home-care worker, he says, “The morning the service began, I made sure I was in the apartment before the scheduled start time. When the buzzer downstairs rang, I ran down and opened the lobby door for a gentle-looking woman who reminded me of the actress Esther Rolle: she was heavyset with short-cropped hair and a smile that gave me hope this plan would work out.”

I’m pretty sure that if my merciless, former writing teacher had read this passage she would have told Mort to cut out the shit about waiting in the apartment, hearing the buzzer, going to the door, opening the door and then stopping the motion a little longer to share a vaguely racist memory. “Cut to the chase," would have been her advice. “The home care worker arrived,” would have been my edit.

Dough plods along in this manner, obscuring a potentially interesting story by describing loads of tedious, mechanical motions and shallow reflections. It’s true that everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone should tell his or hers without the help of a ghostwriter, or at least a good editor.

Just when you think you’ve had it with autobiographies, something refreshing comes along like David Carkeet’s Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia Press). This memoir, about growing up in small town Sonora, California, in the early 1960s is full of humor, good feeling and yes, tawdry sex. However, it’s not Carkeet’s sexploits we hear about. No, he captures the reader’s attention by recounting all the “good parts” of the eponymous, trashy novel written by one the teachers at his high school.

Published in 1962, Dale Koby’s Campus Sexpot tells the story of a married college teacher and his sexcapades with a teenaged student. When this potboiler appeared, filled with characters clearly based on the teachers at Carkeet’s high school, it created an uproar, both with the townspeople and inside the roiling gonads of the adolescent author.

Those of us of a certain age well remember our initial dirty book. It’s often the first real description we got of adult sexual relations and, for some, it informs the nature of their desires for years to come. Carkeet calls on his indelible memories of the novel to tell the story of his own budding and bumbling sexuality.

Using the original Campus Sexpot as a framing device for his story is both ingenious and hilarious. But ultimately, this baby boomer coming-of-age memoir is not as much about sex of any kind as it is a love letter to a way of life that will seem quaint to today’s youths who have already seen thousands of explicit sex scenes on television before they have reached adolescence.