03-20-14:Dave Barry Warns 'You Can Date Boys When You're Forty'
Five Star General Humor
Humor is a fascinating literary experience. As readers, we have little understanding of just what is happening, but when a writer is able to make us laugh, the effect is undeniable. And what's most interesting about great humor — and make no mistake this book has lots of great humor — is that even when you know the joke, you can still have that experience, again and again.
Dave Barry's 'You Can Date Boys When You're Forty' goes a bit beyond humor, and the hallmark of his talent as a writer is that even when Barry is not being funny he's just as engaging as when he's making you laugh. The material here is all-new and original to this book, and Barry is not shy about using the book format to give the collection a diverse feel. You get goofy lists, personal anecdotes, a lengthy and sweet travelogue, even advice on how to be a professional author. You also get a book you will want to read again and again, even if it's just to find the anagram for a famous actor's name.
Barry's insights into the writing life, which begin the book in an Introduction that explains the title, read as if he's saying the nicest things you've ever heard. But there's a great dualistic nature to the writing that's very funny. You read so fast you have no time to notice the craft that goes into the experience. In Dave Barry books, laughter happens.
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Barry covers a wide variety of humor styles in this collection. A number of the essays stem from his home life. His experience as the parent of a thirteen-year-old girl informs "Sophie, Stella and the Bieber Plan," while he touches on married life (and other topics) in "What Women Want," :"Nothing! Really" and "Death." One of Barry's strengths is that he eschews the sort of humor that draws on discomforting embarrassment. He's willing to take aim at some targets (Viagra commercials and '50 Shades of Grey'), but he does so in a manner that emphasizes silliness and absurdity.
Other essays are exercises in high silliness, with lists of what's manly, lessons on good grammar and an air traveler's FAQ played out in deadpan perfection. He offers advice for the millions of would-be bestselling authors haunting the online bookselling and publishing world, and manages the neat trick of addressing them in a genial manner that is nonetheless quite hilarious.
The centerpiece of the book is his Israel travelogue, "Seeking WiFi in the Holy Land." There are loots of laughs here, but there's also quite a bit more. Barry effortlessly slips effortlessly from humor into poignancy and then back to the laughs with a disarming ease. He's well aware that he's treading in territory that demands a certain level of seriousness and he manages this but never loses his sunny, absurd outlook. It's an exemplary piece of writing that manages be both thought and laughter provoking.
'You Can Date Boys When You're Forty' is not a big book of deep thoughts, but it's a smart book for both the reader and the writer. The prose is crisp and easy enough to read to make the jokes go down easy any time you pick it up to read it. And behind all those jokes there's a world-class mind at work, hard at work, dismantling our oh-so serious selves one sentence at a time. Putting yourself back together afterwards is an exercise left for the reader.
03-17-14:Michael Marshall (Smith) Sees 'Bad Things'
Dark of the Heart
Even the most logical of us, who accept a chaotic, unfurling universe, must sometimes sense an ordering intelligence that we cannot see. And even those who believe in the ultimate power of such an intelligence must sometimes sense the formless chaos that undermines all belief. Most of us spend our lives between these two poles of discovery and faith, until something bad happens. No matter what we believe, bad things will cause us to question those beliefs.
For John Henderson, the bad thing is the death of his four-year-old son, Scott, one moment living and standing on the side of a pier, the next a lifeless body in John's arms. This is where Michael Marshall's intense 'Bad Things' begins, and the immediate follow-on is has the inevitable feel of deep sorrow. John's marriage dissolves. He moves. He moves on, to the degree that he can, to a small town where he waits on tables and tries to forget his past. Once, he did bad things for our government. Now, he waits for them to happen to him again. They begin with an email; I know what happened.
'Bad Things' is a tension-filled journey to find out just what happened to Scott and why. When Henderson returns to the town where he and his wife had built their lives, the memories, good and bad return. John meets some new people and re-acquaints himself with some old friends. Few of us are who we say we are and we see that play out in the plot of 'Bad Things.' Just what is happening, and why, are best left for the readers.
Along the way, expect prose that is generally sparse and lean, unless Marshall is trying to dial us into someone's perceptions. Then the words and the world are likely to become more elastic and surreal. Marshall marries his prose with an unusual approach to storytelling. Much of the novel is told from the first-person viewpoint of John Henderson, but there are plenty of other portions told in third person as we catch up with his understandably bitter wife, some of the town's people and Kristina, a woman who knows a bit more than she's willing to admit.
Marshall's cast is nicely rendered. Most of them have more weaknesses than strengths. They feel real even when what they're doing pushes the boundaries of common experience. Marshall turns around some seeming-thugs into sympathetic characters. It's a great reversal that gives the whole novel an aura of believability. Whatever is happening is clearly happening to people you might actually know or hope o know.
'Bad Things' is shot through with horror and real humor. Marshall uses his point-of-view changes to modulate the tone and keep the tension extremely high. On a sentence level, he's can be quietly elegant and then laugh-out-loud funny. He deploys all these in the name of toe-tapping terror. He's able to maintain a rather remarkable level of suspense until the final page of the novel, and yet his reveals are richly satisfying. What happens in 'Bad Things' feels like real things happening to real people. For the readers, that proves to be a very good thing indeed.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
