Sweet relief, almost

Someone give me a beer. My week from Hades is almost over. I gave the stats test today, so I can cruise for the rest of the week. Yes, I still have to grade it, but I've always been more the grasshopper than the ant.

How relieved am I? Well you may have detected a few changes to the third b blog today. Yes, I'm experimenting with new templates and color schemes. I may never decorate my house, but I will play around with my blog.

So what to "talk" about now that I have some time? Let's see, ... How about a book review?

WARNING: Per "Anonymous", this is a long, boring book review. If you don't like book reviews, skip it.

Have you ever read a "hot book", one that's generating lots of buzz, and at the end you just go, HUH? Well, that's what happened to me with The Ha Ha. In case you don't know, The Ha Ha is the debut novel by one Dave King. It's been lauded far and wide; it has a 5 star average Amazon rating; it even has a cover blurb by Richard Freaking Russo! The problem is I just don't get it.

The Ha Ha is the story of Howie Kapostash (strike number 1 -- I hate hard to pronounce names in books, though that's not a hard and fast rule or I'd never read any Haruki Murakami). Anyway, Howie is a disabled Vietnam vet trying to get by in the modern world. What is his disability? He fell on his head shortly after going in country and now he cannot speak, read, or write. It seems we've done the Vietnam vet novel before, but I don't hold that against the book. What I hold against the book is its suffocating dullness.

Howie has now moved on. He shares his house with 3 renters and he even has a job (off the books) as a handyman type at the local convent. His world is rocked, though, when his high school sweetheart, who he still pines for, dumps her kid on him while she checks into rehab. The gist of the story is how Ryan (the kid) pulls Howie out of his perpetual gloom and brings him into the sunshine.

Because of Ryan, Howie finally connects with his housemates and starts to come out of his shell. He takes Ryan to get a haircut. He signs Ryan up for Little League and even participates as a volunteer coach. Yes, everything is great now that Ryan is around. Where's this going? C'mon, you can guess.

The former sweetheart gets out of rehab, Ryan goes away, Howie is crushed. Of course that's not how it ends. There has to be a sweet moment of redemption where everything works out and Howie's new perspective on life is validated, right? Yep.

The ending, in and of itself didn't bother me too much, it's just that this particular ending was so painful (and predictable) to get to. Ryan is surly, then Ryan loves Howie. How'd that happen? I haven't a clue. King devotes long passages to the transformation in Ryan and Howie, but a careful reading shows said passages to be "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There's one climactic scene where Ryan throws a fit and races around the yard crashing into various objects, injuring Howie, and basically raising hell. That particular scene drove me nuts because King takes 2 or 3 pages just to describe Ryan's path. He gives us such things as (this is paraphrased and exaggerated from memory):

"Ryan approached the trellis and cut hard left as dust spewed from beneath his red sneakers. He then tacked 45-degrees to starboard (okay, he didn't really use starboard) and headed for the crepe myrtle located just two feet right of Howie's bedroom window. Finally, he raced through the flower bed, just behind the begonias and in front of the day lilies, careful not to step on the petunias, until he reached the kitchen door, with the knob on the right rather than the left, like all the other doors on the house."

As I said, that was not an actual quote from the book, but King had a bad habit of wandering off into mind numbing detail rather than telling his story. Any excitement I might have felt at the beginning of Ryan's meltdown was dissipated long before King got through describing it. Much of the book read more like a script with stage directions than a novel. (More on that in a bit.)

Then there was the ending -- cue the violins. I know I said it wasn't the ending, in and of itself, that bothered me, but it sort of did. Every reader past the Dick and Jane level knows at least a somewhat happy resolution is coming, but this one was straight off the Hallmark Channel. Not to ruin it for any potential readers, but Howie and his female housemate, Laurel (a Texan of Vietnamese origin), go to visit Ryan and the book closes with them sitting in Howie's truck watching from the shadows as Ryan plays kickball with his pals. As they watch, Laurel, leans over and rests her head on Howie as they watch dusk fall on the cavorting kids -- fade to black and roll credits.

I think that was the biggest objection I had. The book read like a Hallmark movie. Evidently I'm not the only one to feel that way. At least one reviewer bucked the trend. The New Yorker (they do very nice book and movie reviews) said, "But it’s a setup waiting for pathos, and when Howie’s coke-addicted high-school girlfriend saddles him with her nine-year-old son the plot moves predictably (damaged vet cheering at school pageant; vet buying catcher’s mitt) toward movie-ready redemption."

Actually, that wasn't my biggest issue. The biggest problem I had was that I never got a feel for King's characters. He gives Howie a quirky war injury and though there are lots of flashbacks, I never got to know Howie. Laurel is Vietnamese/Texan and King throws in lots of little snippets about her accent and such, but all that seemed unnecessary. Oh, and the semi-attraction between Howie and Laurel -- where did that come from? King just drops it in once or twice so he can bring it up again at the end. Nowhere in the book did he build a relationship between them.

In the end it seemed to me that Dave King took a sympathetic protagonist, a hard luck story, and some quirky supporting characters and threw them in a blender. Here's my imaginary conversation with Dave King:

St. Caffeine: Your book is dull.
Dave King: But it's got a vet trying to overcome a disability.
SC: Your book is dull.
DK: But it's got a bunch of quirky, non-standard character types.
SC: Your book is dull.
DK: But it's got a mixed race kid and a strung out mom.
SC: Your book is dull.
DK: But it's got one quirky character overcoming prejudice to sort of admit attraction to the injured vet.
SC: Yes, but YOUR BOOK IS DULL!

Hollywood may welcome the story, but I found it dull as dirt.

I wish I could come up with a better closing simile, but it's late and I'm tired. Besides, I'd never top Tom Carson's review of Jane Fonda's recent memoir in the July/August issue of The Atlantic (sorry, subscription only). In describing Fonda's treatment of THE ISSUE, he says:

"[H]er own account of what happened during a "two-minute lapse of sanity [that] will haunt me until I die" is predictably overwrought, a mite disingenuous, and as fascinating as a lecture on zeppelin safety from the Hindenburg's captain."

Now that's a simile.