Two things dudes admire: skill and power (as shown here in one tidy bike-racing package¹). All this month’s featured authors are skillful and powerful in their own ways.
To start, there’s the sheer magnificent talent behind the forceful ideas and gentle delivery of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the outré kook of Miranda July’s Cheryl Glickman in The First Bad Man. Also scoring high on the ole skill-and-power-o-meter are the selections from Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) and Michael Punke (The Revenant). Though nothing alike, the worlds that they have built come from startlingly deep imaginations. And if Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor needs no introduction, Spencer Stephens could use one. His debut novel Church of Golf: A Novel About Second Chances is a skillfully constructed, wonderfully paced, vibrant, and funny examination of life through the eyes of a dude who’s been doing it wrong for his entire life.
So, let’s review: skill + power = YES! Bear in mind, of course, that dudes also admire the odd failure now and again, so go figure. The only thing that will stop you reading these selections straight through is the bathroom², work³, or falling asleep.
How much can power and skill can you endure? Find out this month in Books for Dudes, Reader’s Advisory for curious, energetic, fun readers!
DeAngelis, Camille. Bones & All. St. Martin’s. Mar. 2015. 304p. ISBN 9781250046505. $24.99; ebk. ISBN 9781466846777. F
Maren (Latin for ‘Star of the Sea’) is a bit more troubled than the average teen. She does this, uh, thing with people who get close to her. While it’s never graphically described, think Piers Paul Read’s Alive leaving behind bloody clothes. After her mother abandons her, Maren sets out to find the father she never knew. Like many young heroines, Maren shows a healthy dose of self-loathing, thinking things like, “I wanted to pull my skin off and leave it in the bushes and nobody would recognize me” and wishing she was a slut instead of a “‘monster.” Maren’s loneliness is a very real, well-drawn element of the story, and readers will rejoice when she finds friends—even if they are conveniently plotted. The first, an older man named Sully, shows up and conveniently, uh, dispenses of the need for the coroner after a death. He’s likable, but apart from the obvious there’s something off about the guy. Then there’s Lee, bighearted and about 18, who shares Maren’s special uh, habit and shows up about halfway through the story. An older brother figure, Lee lends Maren perspective and helps find her father who is institutionalized and who proves that, uh, the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. By the time of the great twist ending, Maren has achieved a modicum of comfort with herself, and her journey will make readers ask themselves: Are cannibals really all that different from the rest of us? VERDICT While the “eater” aspect is a good hook, this is too tame for a horror novel and too intense for a YA sticker. Though it moves breezily apace, and readers will be curious to see what happens next, the rest of the book is just average.
July, Miranda. The First Bad Man. Scribner. 2015. 288p. ISBN 9781439172568. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781439172605. F
This book is a totally wild trip, sort of an enema for the senses. Forty-three-year-old swf Cheryl Glickman lives very much in her own mind. “Like a rich person,” she narrates, “I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy.” For Cheryl, that’s a fairly rational statement. Her job is her life, especially given her obsessive fixation on board member Phillip, who doesn’t know she exists. Even Cheryl’s ailments (e.g., globus hystericus) are the product of her imagination. Though her company produces self-defense products, Cheryl is as helpless as the day she was born, a fact that’s made abundantly clear when a house guest is forced upon her. Impolite, disrespectful, and piggish, Clee disrupts her home and routines and generally sucks; she even physically attacks Cheryl. Spurred by Phillip’s obliviousness and Clee’s cruelty, Cheryl somehow grows, eventually accepting Clee as the child she never had. While she emerges feeling better and healthier, it’s still pretty fucking unfathomable: “[m]y old self,” she thinks, “was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt.” Like most real people, it’s difficult to know if Cheryl is whacked or simply too wrapped up in herself to perceive how damaged she is; either way, she’s completely alien and utterly fascinating. Though akin to Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Cheryl is much, much further down her own wormhole than Macon Leary ever was. VERDICT An ass-kicking work by critics’ darling and debut novelist July, this is a breezy and somewhat nutty read, a lustrous character study of one person’s perception of reality vs. her eventual grounding in an actual reality.
Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Tor. 2014. 400p. tr. from Chinese by Ken Liu. ISBN 9780765377067. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9781466853447. F
Wang Miao, an industrious and open-minded Chinese nanomaterials researcher, is thrown ass over teakettle into a bottomless international crisis resulting from a project that began 40 years earlier, after the Cultural Revolution. In this secret, high-level freakout, exhausted men and women strategize in Earth’s “Battle Command Center” directing combat zones against an enemy from outer space. Wang is told by a general that “…the entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended. Prepare for the worst.” Shaken to learn that humanity’s concept of physics doesn’t exist, and with growing anxiety, Wang retreats to his hobby of photography, but even this devolves into a doom-filled exercise, his images dominated by a countdown clock. Can it get weirder, you ask? The answer comes: Yes. After a visit to the mysterious group Frontiers of Science, Wang tries the online civilization-building puzzle “Three Body'”about keeping a fictive society alive amid chaos (and an analog of the titular problem) and it’s when these worlds merge that shit really starts coming apart. Rooting Wang in reality (or perhaps more accurately, unreality) is his alliance with grizzled rogue cop Da Shi. VERDICT Liu’s tale is so smoothly imaginative and well constructed that it seems, at times, plausible. Characters, while not terribly deep, are realistic and effective vessels for ideas. Absorbing speculative fiction reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson.
McCloud, Scott (text & illus.). The Sculptor. First Second. 2015. 496p. ISBN 9781596435735. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9781466887299. Graphic Novels
A tidy Faustian tale in GN format by McCloud, the lauded author of Understanding Comics. The story follows talented young sculptor David Smith (no, not that one, though this is a kind of homage) who, while great with his hands, sucks at dealing with people. After alienating a sugar daddy–esque patron, he spirals downward to his last few shekels and we find him drunkenly accepting a classic deal with death: incredible talent and fame but only 200 days to live David falls in love almost immediately with puckish Meg and the two circle each other as he hones his talent; the work is striking, death having granted David the ability to free-sculpt metal and concrete. As the clock ticks down he settles on creating huge public sculptures, guerilla style. Yet even as he has accepted the ultimate moral degradation (fame for death), David remains a conflicted figure, struggling with issues of integrity, originality, and faithfulness. He bounces all these concepts off of the manic-depressive Meg, and the two prove to be calming influences on each other, full of understanding and support. As they share feelings of sadness and happiness, their relationship becomes more genuine—but time ticks by and McCloud carefully brings both art/love aspects through to a beautiful, non-Hollywood ending. Simple, direct drawings and workman-like images make this direct, unfanciful, and breezy. While it’s roughly as helpful to describe drawings with words as it is (to quote Elvis Costello) to dance about architecture, McCloud’s style is just “normal,” e.g., something like Archie (or maybe Unshelved) and clearly differentiated characters make it easy to follow. VERDICT Should come with a warning—do not open within T-minus one hour to bedtime.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf. May 2015. 160p. ISBN 9781555977078. $23; ebk. ISBN 9781555973407. MEMOIR
A review in 12 points (well, 13).
- This very personal book by the critically acclaimed Nelson is difficult to access. It would be far easier to simply label it as “great” without taking the time to try to understand it. But I tried.
- Nelson has a big brain. She and her brain were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010—U.S. & Canada Competition, Creative Arts—General Nonfiction) for being all smart and stuff.
- Most of the book seems to be about Nelson’s coming to grips with and sharing about being in a loving relationship that may or may not be gender-specific.
- On page 14, Nelson writes that her partner is, “…neither male nor female….”
- It’s up to the reader whether they want to make something of that.
- Nelson is lost in love and it’s so nice, at one point she writes, I “…felt dizzy with my luck…so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you.”
- The Argonauts is a bunch of different explorations and etudes about gender and self that are smooshed into a big…thing. Did I mention she lives in California? There’s much less of this in Flint, MI, or Jacksonville, FL.
- Nelson quotes a lot of famous thinkers (e.g., Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan), identifying them in the margins. Cool.
- Nelson spends time as a stepmom to her mate’s three-year-old boy. They play “Fallen Soldier,” which sounds lovely. The kid will collapse, and Nelson will play Florence Nightingale over his prostrate form: “But where could this soldier have come from? How did he get so far from home?” and also provides a few wise meditations on being a stepparent: “…you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it….”
- There is much brilliance, such as a reference to the title: “Just as the Argo‘s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use…”
- Pretty haunting, challenging, and out there. Also, there are no exploding cars whatsoever. This is ground that not many dudes will be willing to travel.
- With respect to the mighty level of brainwork and language-stretching that went into creating this work, I’m not quite sure that the effort is worth it.
- VERDICT You’re either an open-minded person or you’re not, and reading this heartfelt, intimate, diarylike document of Nelson’s self-discovery, however sincere and self-effacing and egoless it is, won’t make you go from point A to point B. It reinforces the fact that love is love is love, and it can sometimes look pretty damned unconventional.
Punke, Michael. The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Picador. 2015. 272p. ISBN 9781250066626. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781250066633. F
Hugh Glass is a frontiersman working for a fur-trapping outfit in 1823 Missouri, and after a grizzly bear mauls him he is “…shredded from head to foot.” It’s so bad that his first sensation on awakening is of drowning. “He coughed…as his body attempted to clear the blood from his throat and lungs.” The two men guarding him until they can bury him instead simply burgle and abandon him. In the mother of all “‘how pissed off was he?” scenarios, Glass crawls after them, hell-bent on revenge, doing whatever he needs to survive: eating bugs, fending off animals, and befriending Native Americans. Punke’s (Fire and Brimstone) keen descriptions of the wilderness bring home how entwined life was with nature a hundred years ago, and it’s also interesting (and sad) to note the complete disregard that commerce had for human life. While Glass is a developed character, he’s not what you’d call deep (probably like a lot of 1820s frontiersmen). Indeed, the story is populated by unidimensional dudes and propelled with a distinct lack of fancy literary technique. The simple plot moves quickly and lacks artifice/sentiment. It’s a sort of literary “‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” I mean, come on, during this time in America, dudes trapped beaver, transported the plews⁴, fended off attacks from hostile Indians, and worked on their vocabulary development (e.g., parfleche⁵). VERDICT Punke originally published this in 2002, and Glass was the subject of the 1971 Richard Harris movie Man in the Wilderness. It is a “true” Western story containing most every known man-theme: the loner, man vs. adversity, revenge, pack mentality, survival, the hunt. Read it with a lobster bib because the testosterone drips off the page. Also? Great cover.
Stephens, Spencer. Church of Golf: A Novel About Second Chances. Saint Pete Pr. 2014. 370p. ISBN 9780990843702. pap. $14.25. F
Donald Gibson knows that crazy good luck is a fine thing to have in your pocket; what he learns is that you can’t build your life expecting it. A former college football hero, Donald coasted on waves of luck and ease until middle age crept up; now he’s broke, in a loveless marriage⁶ and pilloried as a lout. Perhaps because his luck has run out, Donald instead receives a blessing of an out: If he moves to La’nai (that’s in Hawaii, Chumley), and lives on a golf course for three years, he’ll inherit a fortune. He gradually learns the catch: he needs to become a fully grown-up human being, and this he fights with every fiber of his being. The growing pains are both adorable and painful because he’s such an asshole. Unmoved by the word “no,” this is a guy who thinks only of himself, makes scenes, swears in front of women and children. He doesn’t even fix the turf divots he makes. He pisses off everyone with his lying, littering, and impatience (and bandit golfing!). Even when he admits it, “…I act like the rules don’t apply to me and I’m living in a magic bubble where I’m always right and stuff is never my fault…” he’s laughingly dismissing what someone else said about him. Slowly, under the influence of the tight-knit group of about a hundred islanders, Don evolves. From two elderly sisters he learns compassion, from Ramona the kid with the magic swing, he learns beauty, from unofficial “Kahuna” Bobby Joe Fu he learns humility. VERDICT Readers will truly care about how Don is going to become human because Stephens nimbly tells the story in imaginative language that draws on all five senses. Sparkly prose and a satisfying, uplifting message.
