More Doughty than a Fan Can Handle

goldendeliciouscover.jpgMike Doughty’s got a new album out, it’s called Golden Delicious, and I was already hooked just from hearing the 30-second samples.

I’m a monstrously big fan of Soul Coughing. My first take on Haughty Melodic (Doughty’s first “real” solo album) was unfair disappointment that it didn’t sound like Soul Coughing, but over time it burrowed its way down into my brain. My gut reaction to Golden Delicious is that it’s halfway between Haughty Melodic and an over-produced version of Irresistible Bliss (“More Bacon than the Pan Can Handle” might as well be a previously-unreleased track from one of the Soul Coughing records). It’s a little bit more experimental than the last record, but lacks that one’s consistency.

But then, there’s a reason I don’t write much about music.

He’s going on tour very soon, and will be in San Francisco at the Fillmore on April 29th, and I’ve already bought a couple of tickets. (At least I hope I did; the website seems to still be in transition).

Savvy record-buyers should be aware that there’s an extra exclusive track on the iTunes version of Golden Delicious. I still went with the Amazon MP3 version, because Amazon’s MP3 Downloads section is excellent. I’ve never been one of those shrill and obnoxious anti-DRM people, but obviously, getting something without DRM is better than with it. Plus, Amazon’s stuff is cheaper, it’s indistinguishably well-integrated with iTunes, and their customer service is excellent. I’m still an Apple fan and all that, but my loyalty is cheap and can be bought with only $1 per album.

Come on and dance

I went looking around the internet for an explanation of the title of last Thursday’s “Lost,” which was called “Eggtown.” That turned up nothing, forcing me to resort to a Steve Miller Band reference. It’s tenuous at best, but I assure you that one bad title is not indicative of my entire oeuvre.

One thing you do discover looking for “Lost” stuff on the internet is that “Lost” fans are wacky. Reading the comments just on one random blog posting about the episode, you can find:

  • People who didn’t hear the end, and missed the entire point of the episode
  • Eighteen-paragraph long analyses of how this episode’s flash-forwards fit into the overall space/time continuum theory on the island
  • DOES ANYBODY KNOWS WHAT THE BLACK SMOKE IS???????
  • At least a dozen calls to order
  • Detailed explanations that refer to characters by names I don’t recognize at all
  • Whoooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!! [note: that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the exclamation-point 1 used non-ironically.]
  • Debates over whether the baby would technically count as one of the Oceanic 6
  • Debates over who’s hotter
  • A tangential flame war over Downs syndrome

I dunno what I could add to all that. I thought it was a fine episode, continuing the momentum of this season without blowing me away or anything. I could see the end coming from a mile away, as soon as they showed Kate & Claire at the clothesline and Sun talking about her baby (as opposed to “our baby.”)

Attempts to turn Locke back into a bad-ass fail when he comes across as such a tool at the beginning. There’s a real fine line to his character, and they keep jumping back and forth over it — this is like the eight thousandth time he’s gotten completely played by Ben, which doesn’t make him seem like a tragic figure under the control of an evil mastermind, but like a doofus. And the way he handled Kate’s mini-insurrection wasn’t so much power-mad dictator as snippy condo organization spokesman. Making a dude bite down on a grenade doesn’t do a whole lot to make him seem any cooler.

Especially when said dude is, after only two episodes, already giving Michael a run for his money as most annoying person you could ever get stuck on a deserted island with. I think the real mystery of the island is how it manages to attract such a ridiculously high jackass-to-normal-person ratio. Any day now I’m expecting a catamaran to wash ashore carrying the dehydrated bodies of Andy Dick and Nancy Grace.

I don’t know any particularly big questions raised by this episode, except how does the end tie in with the prophecy that psychic gave Claire? That horrible things would happen if her baby were raised by someone else? Is it somehow the cause of Jack’s beard?

Grotesk

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Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts.

I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple of sections are downright clever. You can find plenty of reviews from people who never expected to be at all interested in a documentary about a font, but came out pleasantly surprised.

My problem with it is the same thing that pleasantly surprises people about it: it’s not quite a documentary about a font. They do a great job of giving you the history of it, and the intention behind its design and use, and showing how ubiquitous it’s become, and gauging all the different reactions to it.

But to do this in a film without its turning into a dry History Channel-style documentary, they have to interview a lot of people. People who have strong opinions about fonts. In other words, the kind of people you really wouldn’t want to be spending much time around in real life.

Part of my problem with the movie is that I like to believe that geekery is a contained phenomenon, and not some global pandemic that’s all part of the human condition. It’s like Sanctuary for the people inside the city in Logan’s Run* — I know that in the circles I travel in, people obsess over comic books and TV series continuity and the efficiency of algorithms; but I want to believe that there’s a better world outside where the people are free of that.

But this just perpetuates the idea that because of the Original Sin or something, we’re all mired in our own little worlds of pointless obsessions. I have to hear insufferable people claiming that they know they won’t be popular for this, but The People simply must hear their opinions of “Battlestar Galactica” or BioShock or “Sam & Max”. And now I realize that others have to hear insufferable people saying that Helvetica represents corporate oppression and war, or that they realize they are being iconoclasts and their views might not be popular, but they cannot condone using more than one typeface in a publication.

It’s movies like this that make me think humanity was just better off back when we had to spend all our time worried about finding food and not being mauled by large animals.

* The fact that I used Logan’s Run as an example merely proves my point.

Literacy 2008: Book 4: Baltimore

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Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden

Synopsis
On a battlefield late in World War I, allied soldier Lord Baltimore is attacked by a strange bat-like creature. Now, the war is over, but a mysterious plague has spread through all of Europe. Three of Baltimore’s friends are summoned to a tavern in a dying city, swapping stories of their own encounters with the supernatural while they wait for his arrival and an explanation of what’s causing the plague (spoiler: it’s vampires).

Pros
Inspired combination of Lovecraftian apocalyptic dread, old folk tales, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, and even Blade, which feels like it’s creating a new mythology from its disparate sources. Mignola’s illustrations are perfectly chosen and placed throughout the book, conveying a sense of portent and doom as well in prose as they do in his Hellboy comics. Uses the antiquated story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure to set the time period and mood, but still manages to incorporate a killer fight scene. Makes vampires scary again: tells a vampire story without gimmicks or attempts to make them unnecessarily contemporary.

Cons
Because it’s literally humorless, it feels like a Hellboy story arc with a layer stripped away; there’s the action, and the sense of dread, and the exhaustively-researched set of source material, but nothing to ground it or make it feel “real.” Some passages suffer from overly affected writing. Despite being short and full of illustrations, it still feels ponderous and self-important.

Verdict
A deliberately old-school vampire story that manages to be genuinely scary (and gave me several nights of weird nightmares). But I doubt I would’ve been interested were I not already a fan of Hellboy — it’s got all the same components as a Hellboy story arc told in prose, but without that spark of humor that makes it come alive.

The Orchid

LostOrchidStill.jpgAs I mentioned, I was confused for most of last year’s ComicCon, so I missed the “Lost” panel. I wasn’t aware until reading about it on a message board just now, that during that panel they showed another Dharma Initiative orientation film, that was later repeated on ABC’s website.

This one is for station 6, “The Orchid.” And watching it has me more excited about “Lost” than anything since the first orientation film. I’ve already been impressed with the show because of the strength of this season’s episodes, but this just confirms that they’ve still got the same cleverness and attention to detail they did when they first introduced the bunker and the Dharma Initiative. And now they have the freedom to take the story where they want and draw it all towards a conclusion.

In short: I love this series again. Now I’m going to check out the Season 3 DVDs for any special features. You really need to watch the video if you haven’t see it yet.

Edit: As it turns out, the Orchid video is included on the Season 3 set (I’d gotten a copy as a Christmas gift, but hadn’t watched them until today). They’ve also got a thing where the executive producers give definitive answers on some of the questions that have been circulating. There’s nothing earth-shattering there; in pretty much every case, they’re just confirming that the most obvious answer is the “correct” one (e.g., Desmond’s failure to push the button is what caused the 815 crash). It is good that they’re reminding viewers that they haven’t forgotten everything from the first couple of seasons, though.

It’s also good that they thought to include a bit after each “answer” where they interview a bunch of people for their take on the “new info.” Because I just couldn’t rest until I knew how Jimmy Kimmel interpreted the big mysteries of “Lost.” Hopefully the Disney Corporate Synergy department will work its magic on future releases, so I can hear Raven, Miley Cyrus, and the cast of “High School Musical” give their take on the series.

The Sayid Ultimatum

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This week’s “Lost” was called “The Economist,” and the series is continuing on its trajectory of pure awesomeness. I genuinely feel bad for the people who’ve given up on the show, because I feel like my patience has paid off. They’re doing exactly what I was hoping they’d do, but better than I imagined they’d be able to pull it off: questions are getting answered. Stuff is really happening. But they’re not just tying together loose ends; they’re still playing with the format, introducing new characters, throwing in tons of new questions, and always feeling like it’s going somewhere instead of stalling for time.

The opening of this episode is my second favorite in a series that’s had some killer openings (my favorite is still Desmond’s introduction, with “Make Your Own Kind of Music”). They’re finally taking advantage of Sayid’s bad-assery, and somehow finding ways to make what could’ve been a cliched, predictable espionage story and keeping me genuinely surprised. It feels like the flash-forwards have blown the series wide open, and the writers have been rejuvenated with the potential to do whatever they want.

(Wouldn’t anyone get bored spending four years to tell a story that takes place over 100 days, with characters who’ve been mostly “set” from the beginning? Isn’t it easy to understand why they keep trying stuff like introducing the tail end, Nikki and Paolo, and the “natives?”)

Big questions raised in this episode: Who’s the “R.C.” in Naomi’s bracelet? Was Sayid’s girlfriend wearing an identical bracelet? What’s with the time difference in the rocket sent from the ship? In particular, am I the only one expecting there to be a greater time difference, or the rocket not to show up at all? What are they going to do with angry ghostbuster Miles? What happened to Jacob’s cabin? Why is Sayid such a puss who keeps falling weepily in love at the drop of a hat? And we’re seeing a lot more of Naomi than we have of other dead people: can we expect her to be coming back?

Literacy 2008: Book 3: Jingo

jingocover.jpgBook
Jingo by Terry Pratchett

In a series
21st in the series of Discworld books.

Synopsis
The lost island of Leshp suddenly rises in the middle of the ocean, sparking a war between the nations of Ankh-Morpork and Klatch over ownership of the new land. Sam Vimes and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch get pulled into the war via a murder mystery surrounding the Klatchian Prince.

Pros
It’s a Discworld book: clever, funny, cynical-but-lighthearted, and astoundingly readable and entertaining, while still having enough “meat” in its social commentary and satire that it doesn’t feel like empty, disposable entertainment.

Cons
The Discworld books are so consistently entertaining, it feels like cheating to include one in a New Year’s resolution list. Has occasional, brief passages that suffer from the Impenetrable Wall of Cleverness syndrome: where the story gets pushed to the background in favor of an extended gag or pun. Very much a middle book in the series; gives enough introduction to the characters so you can follow what’s going on, but leaves it to the other books to establish their depth.

Verdict
Terry Pratchett is simply one of the best living writers, and it’s a shame that the Discworld books’ origins as fantasy parodies keeps them just shy of being recognized as “Great Literature.” Jingo would be a bad choice for your first Discworld book (I’d recommend either Mort, Small Gods, or my favorite, Night Watch), but it’s a very solid entry in the series.

Edit: I forgot to mention my favorite thing about this book. Instead of just relying on the valid but obvious statement “racism, prejudice, and jingoism are bad,” Pratchett is careful to show both sides of the brewing war, and makes a profound statement about our potential to over-compensate. We can get so locked into the idea of “Them” as innocent victims of the failings of “Us,” that we forget that “They” have just as much capacity for both evil and goodness as “We” do. No matter how well-intentioned it may be, seeing any group of people as nothing more than “the good guys” or “the victims” does as much to rob them of their humanity as overt racism does.

You have 21 years to comply

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I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight.

I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall — I was sure it’d be entertaining enough, but stupid. Even after seeing Starship Troopers and (after a month or two) finally realizing how brilliant that movie is, I still wasn’t that interested in RoboCop.

I think my crippling fear of Ronny Cox had something to do with it, too.

Whatever the case, I finally know what all the fuss was about. What a great, bizarre movie. I can’t even imagine the confidence it’d take to pull something like that off — there’s absolutely nothing subtle about it, and yet you spend the whole time knowing that they’re in on the joke and still wondering if they’re taking it all seriously. It’s kind of like a quantum movie: simultaneously a straightforward, sleazy, cheesy 80s action movie and a satire of those movies and the 80s in general. (The movie has a guy instantly mutated by toxic waste, and Miguel Ferrer snorting coke off a woman’s chest!)

I mentioned it took me a while to get what was going on with Starship Troopers, and that movie was even more obviously campy, plus it came ten years later, after the audience had plenty of time to get used to deconstructionism. I remember watching True Lies and thinking it was such a clever spoof of action movies, but it didn’t even survive two years before seeming clumsy, vapid and obvious. RoboCop feels like it has after-burners: ride the initial launch as a super-violent action movie that seems a little smarter than average; ride through the irony wave of the 90s as a part of pop culture, surviving references and attempts to make fun of it; then gain a new appreciation two decades later, when viewers can marvel at seeing Laura Palmer’s dad as a hip club-goer and Eric’s dad from “That 70s Show” dropping f-bombs and shooting off people’s hands with a shotgun. And even with the jerky stop-motion and the barrage of 80s hair and glasses, you still have to watch it and think, “that’s just cool.”

I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have understood RoboCop in 1987, since 99% of the movies and TV made in the 80s was exactly like that, with no sense of irony. At the time, “Moonlighting” was still a years-ahead-of-its-time masterpiece of self-awareness and post-modernism, and looking back at those episodes now is almost painful.

The genius of RoboCop (and Starship Troopers, to a lesser degree) is that it still works as an action movie, even if you’re not in the mood for satire on urban decay, the evil that corporations do, and the emptiness of the media. It’s pretty ballsy to make movies that unapologetically say “screw you” to everyone, including the movie’s main characters themselves; to do that and make it not angry and pointlessly cynical, but actually entertaining, takes a hell of a lot of talent. And it leaves you vulnerable to so much that can fail from concept to execution — as Basic Instinct and Showgirls both prove.

Best of all: I finally get another reference from an old episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In “Catalina Capers,” there’s a scene where the bots are saying their bedtime prayers, and Crow says, “and God bless ED-209, although I don’t know why you’d make a robot who couldn’t walk down stairs.” I’ve made it my goal that by the time I die, I’ll have gotten every reference the MST3K guys ever made. There’s still only a few thousand left.

Confirmed Awesome

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Thursday’s episode of “Lost” was called “Confirmed Dead” and correct me if I’m wrong, but by my count it had (spoilers!):

  • Four new characters with immediate flashbacks
  • An irritable Asian ghostbuster who uses a dustbuster
  • The sunken, decaying corpse of Greg Grunberg
  • A through-the-body bullet wound with a tie-in to Locke’s continuity
  • Three cases of Ben getting the tar beat out of him
  • Vincent the dog leading the gang on a wild goose chase, confirming my suspicions that he’s the ultimate mastermind behind the entire mystery
  • A polar bear skeleton in the desert
  • More of the mysterious new Live and Let Die-esque villain
  • Post-Grindhouse Jeff “Lawnmower Man” Fahey as a cross between Jimmy Buffet, Jeff Lebowski, and pure drunken badassery

I’d say that this was getting back to the “Lost” I used to know, but “Lost” was never that cool. This is what I wanted the old “Lost” to be, the kind of coolness that it always hinted at but never quite delivered on. It’s like they finally said, “Screw it, let’s take the training wheels off” and let her ride with whatever wacky stuff they felt like throwing in there.

Story still doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and it’s got too much of people standing around looking confused or just moving for the sake of getting to the next plot point for me to say it’s approaching “high art”. But hell if it ain’t moving.

I think the last season ended up redeeming itself by the end, but even after the best episodes, I was never fired up to see the next one. But as it is now, I can’t wait to see what happens next week. Who’s the rest of the Oceanic 6? What’s happening with the cabin? How does Taller Walt Ghost fit in? Who’s Ben’s “man on the boat?” What connection do the new people have with flight 815? Why did they want Ben? What’s the deal with Naomi? When is Libby coming back into the picture? Or Penny and Desmond? Why doesn’t Ben know what the smoke monster is? When do we find out more about Forever Young Nestor Carbonell?

It used to be I had no faith that the show would ever answer its questions; now I’m saying they should keep piling ’em on. And how cool is a show that can make me genuinely interested in the answer to a question as cheesy as “Who are the Oceanic 6?”

Literacy 2008: Book 2: Old Man’s War

oldmanswarcover.jpgBook
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Recommended by
Wil Wheaton, plus dozens of commenters on half the blogs I read (including John Scalzi’s own blog).

Disclaimer
I have read very little science fiction (Douglas Adams and Star Wars novelizations don’t count). I’ve read none of Robert Heinlein, who is mentioned in almost every review of this book, and in the author’s own acknowledgements. So I might be missing out on a lot of context, homage, invention, deconstruction and/or re-invention here.

Synopsis
Humanity has begun colonizing planets outside our solar system, but the technology to do so is kept under tight control by the Colonial Defense Force. Anyone at the age of 75 can enlist in the CDF, where he’ll be restored to fighting condition and given a chance at a second life, in return for a few years of service in a war that no one on Earth knows anything about.

Highs
Clear, straightforward writing throughout; the book reads less like hard science fiction and more like a series of well-written blog posts from the future. Various “hard” science fiction concepts are introduced and quickly given a rational, plausible explanation. Good pacing, where the next key moment is always just over the horizon, and you want to keep reading past the chapter breaks.

Lows
The book reads less like science fiction and more like a series of blog posts. The “and then that happened” style and the quick explanations of concepts do keep the book straightforward, but also rob it of any real suspense or sense of wonder. Has frequent passages of Michael Crichton-esque exposition, where a squad of people from each relevant school of expertise happens to be on-hand to give a short speech explaining the next topic. Frequently feels like fan fiction, where the author hasn’t created characters so much as inserted himself and people he knows into the book; anyone with any real distinguishable personality becomes a “villain” of sorts, and is quickly dealt with.

Verdict
Does exactly what (I imagine) it sets out to do: tell a military science fiction story that’s rational, plausible, personal, relatable, and above all, readable. It’s opinionated without being overbearing, light without being silly, intelligent without being tedious, and understandable without being too condescending. Unfortunately, it’s also engaging without being fascinating. I can imagine it’d be welcome to science fiction fans who’ve been overrun with fantastic space operas and ponderous analyses of theoretical physics, and want something in the middle. I’m not a big fan of the genre, and I was ultimately underwhelmed by this book, but I can still see myself giving the other two books in the series a try.

Earnest Goes to Dublin

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The way I see it, there’s two different groups of people who wouldn’t be completely bowled over by the movie Once:

  1. Musicians living in Dublin, who wouldn’t see what the big deal is, and
  2. Unholy creatures cursed to walk the earth for eternity after having their souls ripped from their rotting corpses.

I’d been hearing about the movie for what must be months, since it’s gotten nearly universal praise, an Oscar nomination for its song “Falling Slowly” (the second best song in the movie), and fairly frequent breathless write-ups in Entertainment Weekly claiming it was impossible not to like it.

So I had a combination of high expectations and the feeling I’d get around to watching it eventually. I expected a painfully earnest, small and sensitive indie film about two singer/songwriters who find each other against all odds. Two very different people, joined together by their music, their hearts would soar onto the screen, the strings of their acoustic guitars pulling the audience into the screen and casting a spell of heartfelt enchantment on young and old.

The funny thing is: that’s pretty much exactly what it is, and it totally works.

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It’s filmed not like a musical, or even an indie-film Sundance-ready romance, but as a “behind the music”-style documentary. In a making-of documentary on the special features, the director says that he didn’t want actors who could half-sing, but singers who could half-act. He got better than that, because their performances are completely believable and their musical performances are astounding.

The scene where the two stars perform “Falling Slowly” in a music shop is pretty much the defining scene of the movie, but my favorite is “If You Want Me.” The girl (both characters are unnamed in the movie) walks back from a corner store in the middle of the night, in her pajamas, where she’d gone to buy batteries for a CD player so that she could listen to the guy’s music while she wrote the lyrics for it. It’s the closest the movie gets to a traditional movie musical, while still feeling so natural and so genuine that it fits in perfectly.

What finally completely won me over was a scene at a party, where all the guests are required to perform songs for each other. Now, any claim I could make to knowing what life in Dublin is really like, would be hopelessly false — I spent a total of four days in the city, visiting only the most tourist-laden places, and I was half-full of Guinness the entire time. But it’s what I want Dublin to be like — dark rooms packed with indiscriminately friendly people sharing drinks and some of the most incredible music you’ll ever hear.

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In another part of the making-of documentary, Glen Hansard says that he and his costar, Marketa Irglova — who recorded an album in 2006 that provides several of the songs in the movie — were friends, so the most difficult parts were acting as if they’d just met. My favorite quote from the documentary is when he describes the casting; he says he recommended Irglova for the part because he knew she could act, only because she can do everything else so well.

You seldom get the chance to see the characters’ relationship as anything but genuine, since it’s so simple and straightforward. And there’s absolutely no question that their music is genuine — if I had just heard it, I might’ve dismissed it as overwrought Coldplay-style pseudo-folk pop. But when you see how music just seems to flow out of Irglova as if it were simply another language, and when you see the passion for these songs played out on Hansard’s face, it strips away any sense of artifice.

I have only two complaints about the whole thing: first, that they overused the song “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” when there are at least three other songs in the movie I would’ve preferred to hear more of. Second, there’s only one false moment in the entire movie, when the gruff recording engineer at a studio has dismissed our plucky band as talentless oddballs, but is quickly won over by the passion of their music. But both of these are nitpicks, brief and barely perceptible flaws that keep the movie just short of perfect.

It was a perfect time for me to watch this movie, because I’ve been getting more and more discouraged at the state of pop culture lately. The internet is a hateful place, and spending too much time on it has a corrupting cynical influence — to the point where you could even read a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a father’s relationship with his son and the nature of goodness, and just start picking out faults in it. I was starting to wonder if it’s even possible to make an earnest, sincere movie anymore, without its getting dismissed as schmaltz. As it turns out, it is possible, and the result is amazing.

Literacy 2008: Book 1: The Road

theroadcover.jpgBook
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Selling Points
Oprah liked it! (And it won a Pulitzer Prize, too.) But look! Oprah!

Disclaimer
I tried to be open-minded and objective while I was reading this book, but I was definitely prejudiced against it from the start, because of all the hype and because of how much I disliked the No Country for Old Men movie. Also, I don’t like post-apocalyptic stories in general.

Synopsis
Ash cold gray ashes the man the boy dark scared okay fire. Repeat for 300 pages.

Highs
Quick and pretty easy to read. Excellent pacing, conveying long stretches of unchanging tedium punctuated by unexpected terror. Dialogue between the boy and his father seems genuine. Aggressively literate, with occasional descriptions that are surprisingly vivid. Subtly flows between gray reality and the dreams and memories of the main character using stylistic changes from terse and straightforward to nightmarish and verbose.

Lows
By “verbose” I mean it’s often self-consciously over-written. Sometimes feels sabotaged by passages of vapid nihilism, or a wordy but empty description. As a result, it often feels like someone writing with a thesaurus open, as if the author didn’t trust his honest, genuine message not to come across as trite or maudlin unless it were padded with “edge” or “literary merit.” As much as I liked the book’s ending, it was like a stunt pilot pulling out of a 270-page nose dive right before the moment of impact. I still can’t tell if the sections that struck me as pointlessly cynical were momentary lapses of the narrator’s character, or if they’re the author’s genuine attempts to make a point.

Verdict
Ultimately a masterfully written, honest story of fatherhood and allegory about morality. It creates a powerful image of “goodness” as a force that simply exists — independent of religion, society, privilege, or even sustenance — and survives, despite any attempts to extinguish it. I just wish it didn’t keep making me think, “So this is what it would be like if Larry McMurtry had grown up as a goth kid.”