Summer reading recommendations No. 2

By Scott Dickensheets

Here’s what we’re gonna do. Instead of suggesting books you should read this summer, because how would I know?, I’ll tell you what I plan to read — hope to read — foolishly believe I’ll actually read — in the next few months. (It’s hard, people; the heat messes with my brain.) Since I haven’t read any of ’em yet, I can’t recommend them on any basis except that something about each has goosed it toward the top of my to-read pile.

FICTION

Okay, I’m mildly contradicting myself first thing, because I have read 10 or 15 pages of Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, which I was relieved to discover is not, in fact, about a pregnant widow. It is about sex, but that’s not why I want to read it; it’s also about rich, textured language, which is why. (Also, it’s about sex.) Newly out in paperback, its story involves randy young Brits experiencing a hot, wet Italian summer back in the 60s, when sex was still incredible and filled with meaning. If that’s not enough British fiction for me, I have a copy of Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot idling at the ready, although I fear it might actually be about Flaubert’s parrot.

Flaubert was French, which I mention solely because it transitions smoothy into Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy’s forthcoming (July 19) novel about that other great French literary prospect, Season in Hell poet Arthur Rimbaud. Duffy is an acclaimed and brainy writer — he previously novelized upon the life of Wittgenstein — and Rimbaud is a notorious figure (transformed poetry by age 20, then quit literature for African gun-running), who inspired such great performers as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and Eddie and the Cruisers. So it should be heavy duty.

When I want some light duty, though — and I surely will, summer being the season of escapist reading — I’ll turn to Death Likes It Hot, one of the mystery novels Gore Vidal wrote under the name Edgar Box back in the 1950s. It stars a dashing PR man, which is how you know it’s fiction.

NONFICTION

No one noticed this book when it came out late last year: The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story From Buchenwald to New Orleans. In it, journalist Mark Jacobson tries to learn the origin of a lamp with a shade made of human skin. It screams Nazi, of course, and Jacobson runs down that angle, but he also uses the occasion to investigate death, hatred and evil. Jacobson’s a good reporter and a great stylist, so I expect the book to be filled with terrific place descriptions and nicely drawn characters. I’ll probably augment that by reading Rescuing Evil: What We Lose, Ron Rosenbaum’s 22-page essay, available as a Kindle Single, about the pitfalls of trying to ameliorate the concept of evil.

My pal Steve Friedman’s memoir of life and bad behavior in the trenches of romance and the Manhattan media world, Lost on Treasure Island, comes out any minute and will show you a good time: breezily self-lacerating one moment, bleakly revelatory the next, and funny throughout.

A trio of books coming out in late August or the first of September will let me end the season in a blurt of — I trust — quality reading. Christopher Hitchens’ Arguably collects a batch of his essays on politics, which I don’t always agree with, and literature, which I don’t always understand. But I almost always enjoy watching his mind work. Tom Piazza’s Devil Sent the Rain is a collection of essays about about America, music and, if I’m reading the title correctly, New Orleans, about which he’s written before.

And the book I’m most curious about: Colby Buzzell’s Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey. Expanding on a transcontinental ramble he took for Esquire magazine, Buzzell’s book should be a ground-level look at our country, through the haunted eyes of a former soldier wracked by his service in Iraq and wondering what America is all about. Some quality about Buzzell’s prose, something I can’t pin down and analyze, has stuck with me since his Esquire days. Can’t wait.

Mood Lighting in the Vegas Cube: William Gibson’s ‘Zero History’

By Scott Dickensheets

The cool-hunting PR mogul who’s not merely in the background of William Gibson’s Zero History, but who is the background, maintains a series of what he calls “Vegas cubes.” Secret rooms stripped down to their pristine essentials: “It looked to Milgrim like a very small art gallery between shows.” This allows utter control over the space. Someone explains: “He” — the mogul, Hubertus Bigend — “loves Las Vegas casinos. The sort of thought that goes into them. How they enforce a temporal isolation. No clocks, no windows, artificial light. He likes to think in environments like that.” 

Gibson likes his stories to unfold in environments like that, too — hermetic spaces, every element deeply conceived, exactingly controlled. Consider the quiet virtuosity of a passing detail like this, the stairs in a London boutique hotel: “marbled in shades of aged honey, petroleum jelly and nicotine.” Not on any color wheel you’ll find in the Lowe’s paint department, yet eerily perfect.

Zero History, the third novel in a trilogy* about the hidden structures of contemporary culture, follows roughly the same narrative arc as the other two, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country: Bigend, his seismos tuned to obscure flutters in the pop-culture marketplace, hires an unlikely surrogate to dig into some sub-underground phenomenon. In Pattern Recognition, it was snippets of enigmatic Internet film; in Spook Country, it was “locative art,” holograms you could only see at certain GPS coordinates and with the right equipment; this time, Hollis Henry (returning from Spook Country) reluctantly agrees to investigate a line of secretive clothing, Gabriel Hounds, so deeply recessed into anti-marketing philosophy that it doesn’t have a store, a catalog, a website — any kind of commercial presence. In each case, of course, something larger, more global and vastly more higher-stakes is going on.

For a thriller, there’s remarkably little action in Zero History. As with the others, there’s a little travel, some searching, a minor scrape or two, plenty of clipped conversations — Gibson’s characters speak with the condensed clarity, if not the comic zest, of the actors in His Gal Friday — in which the book’s ideas are nudged forward … and then, finally, a burst of violent action toward the end.

And yet, because of its squeaky-tight, Vegas-cube construction, Zero History maintains suspense. In such a rigorously controlled space, just fiddling with the mood lighting creates a rising sense of drama.

By chance, not long after I finished Zero History I belatedly read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and while there’s a limited value in playing a couple of random books off of each other, it still made for an interesting comparison. While Stieg Larsson infilled his story with plenty of context — extensive family backgrounds, historical summaries, lots of presumably character revealing actions unrelated to the plot (there’s a lot of eating and random smoking) — Zero History finally offers the more fully realized, lived-in world. Larsson smothers you in detail, and the problem isn’t so much that it all doesn’t advance the story — the color of the stairs doesn’t push Gibson’s story forward, either — it’s that a lot of these details don’t really do anything. They seem to be there out of a misguided sense of completeness, an unnecessary fully-roundedness. They’re there for the same reason a historian would put them in a nonfiction work. Inert, they’re just baggage. (And Larsson  doesn’t give you passages like this one from Zero History, describing a woman “whose intelligence protruded through her beauty, Milgrim felt, like the outline of unforgiving machinery pressing against a taut silk scarf.” It’s a startling simile and one that feels intuitively right: I’ve met women like that.) But Gibson’s stair colors, and hundreds of similar offbeat details, force you not only into a cohesive fictional world that’s both familiar and slightly off-kilter, but (allow me to go meta for a sec) a reading headspace in which the familiar is continually being overlaid with new, slightly exoticized detail. There’s an alertness to the prose that spills into the reading experience. It’s a crackling, electric place to be, despite the hard-to-buy plot twist at the end — spoiler alert: Bigend + Iceland + voodoo math — and even if you don’t care about fashion.

(*You needn’t have read the first two to get Zero History, but there is one scene — which still makes perfect sense — that will be deepened a bit if you’ve read Pattern Recognition.)