Movie: Lizzie, about Lizzie Borden. With Chloe Sevigney and Kristen Stewart

I wasn't feeling great today, so I watched Lizzie, a movie I've wanted to see for awhile, on HBO Max. It's not supposed to be nonfiction, but it sticks close to the facts--except that it combines Uncle John with the town constable. This is unfair. The real Constable/Sheriff did a great job, actually, while the real Uncle John was indeed a shady character. As shady as he is in the movie, I don't know, but rather shady.

This movie tries to answer the Why more than the How. It shows that Lizzie did indeed commit the murders. It is very well directed and very well acted. If you have an interest in Lizzie Borden, it is well worth your time. If you don't, though, this may be a tough sell for you. It stretched the truth a little, but it really focuses on Lizzie Borden's possible lesbianism, and Bridget's, too, for that matter. I disagree with this approach for two reasons. A) though her lesbianism is possible, it isn't definitely proven in anything I've ever read--and this was the most heavily-covered crime of the 1890s, and it's still very popular. I'm not saying she wasn't gay. I'm just saying it isn't established fact. She did provably live with an actress from NH and NY for awhile at Maplecroft, but that doesn't mean she was heavily active as a gay woman. Had she been, someone would've proven it so. No one did, and no one has. And, B) Her possible lesbianism doesn't matter in terms of whether she committed the murders. She definitely and provably did, and her being gay actually didn't have anything to do with it. I'll come back to that.

The biggest difference of this movie, compared to other movies/shows/books, etc., is that Lizzie killed Abby while naked. John Douglas, in his book The Cases That Haunt Us, doubts that she did. (He mentions the movie, and the Elizabeth Montgomery flick.) He says No simply because Victorian women of a high class wouldn't do such a thing. I agree with almost everything Douglas has said about any crime or culprit in any of his books, but I disagree here. The problem with that logic is that it's the same thought the all-male jury had when they voted Lizzie not guilty. They simply couldn't believe a Victorian woman could commit these murders. They were very wrong. There was definitely a temporary insanity going on with Lizzie that day, and crazed people do things they wouldn't normally do, by definition. Now, this doesn't mean that she did kill Abby while naked, but it also doesn't mean she didn't. Being naked solves the problem of quickly washing in a basin (the house didn't have a tub or shower, or piping of any kind; Andrew was a miser in many ways), burning the clothes in the stove or fireplace, and re-dressing. Ultimately this doesn't matter; there's plenty of evidence that she killed Abby Borden. But the movie goes into Why, beyond the financial reasons.

The movie shows Bridget, the housekeeper, as a lover of Lizzie's, which is almost definitely false. It shows Bridget stripping naked to kill Andrew because he'd been sexually assaulting her. (And of failing to kill him, so Lizzie did, instead.) This is also not a proven thing, though it is a very commonly expressed option. It was common at the time for some wealthy men to assault the hired help. The movie also insinuates that he'd been doing the same to Lizzie beforehand. This has also never been proven, though it was not unheard of. In fact, it's a bit of an 1890s Victorian stereotype. But commonality isn't proof. John Douglas thinks it's possible that he did maybe assault Lizzie. I've read that in a few places, and that her kleptomania, the overkill, and other behaviors were indicative of that. But it's never been proven, and commonality isn't proof. I like to stick to the facts. And, again, I think the overkill could've been due solely to the proven fact that Andrew was leaving Abby almost everything in the will, and snubbing his daughters. This also explains why Abby was killed first, by an hour-and-a-half. His last existing will stated that in his demise, Abby got everything, but that if she deceased first, the money goes to his daughters. Which is what happened. Had he died first, the money immediately goes to Abby, and if she dies, even moments later, the money goes to her family--and Lizzie and Emma get nothing. That was reason enough for the overkill, IMO. Provably, before and after the murders, Lizzie cared a lot for her perceived social standing. An awful lot. For example, after the acquittal, she and her sister had millions. She could've gone anywhere in the world and started over. She could've lived in luxury anywhere. Changed her name. Become a new person. Been loved by new people. Instead, she returns to Fall River, buys Maplecroft and has that name engraved on the stairs and a gate--unusual for the time, even amongst the very rich--and lives on the hill, where she'd provably said a ton of times that she always wanted to be. It's just blocks from the modest house/murder scene. And the town ignored her. And she never left.

I'll backtrack for a second. It's almost definitely not true that Bridget and Lizzie were lovers for a few reasons. First, there were no secrets in that house, and nobody proved they were lovers. (Admittedly, it's also possible that nobody from law enforcement ever asked. Such questions were not asked--and the law enforcement did a good job here. Even though 90% of the city's police were at Rocky Point that day!) Second, Bridget would never have jeopardized her job like that. Plenty of evidence showed that she needed it badly, and that she liked working there. Which leads to, third, she and the two sisters have not been proven to actually get along. Lizzie and Emma called her Maggie, after the former housekeeper, and that may also have been a possibly-negative name for Irish help in general. Andrew and Emma called her by her actual name, and there's a ton of evidence that she really liked and respected Emma. And Bridget was not one who would lie well enough to get away with it. And she almost definitely wasn't in the house at all when either of them were murdered. I'll get back to that.

So, about the time of the murder, and the suspects. I've never read anywhere how incredibly convenient it was that Lizzie was the only one in the house at the time. If I were to write a book about all this--which I hope to hell I will--I would focus on how much Emma, Bridget and maybe (but probably not) Uncle John had to know about the murders in advance. I say this because a) Emma went to see friends in Fairhaven for a few days before the morning of the murders. Okay, she did this often, but it's still a coincidence that she and Bridget and Uncle John were all out of the house at the same time. But it's also been proven that Emma waited a few days to return when she was informed of the murders. There were three or four train trips between Fall River and Fairhaven before she finally took one. You get the call--yes, a phone call--that your father and step-mother have been murdered, and you...wait a few days to return? Seems like she wanted it all to blow over a bit, to get her bearings, to rehearse what she was going to say and do, doesn't it? And b) Bridget was washing windows and hanging up laundry the whole day. Sure, washing all the windows of the house is an all-day job, but she is coincidentally doing them on this day. And, she was violently ill that day, provably throwing up lots of times that day. Whether it was because of another failed all-family (or, accidentally, for Bridget) poisoning, or whether it was because Andrew was so cheap, he'd made everyone eat bad mutton stew for a few days (both have been proven; Lizzie went to three or four places that week to buy poison, which she said she needed to kill lice on capes and coats. Every store proprietor refused to sell it to her--because she'd bought some weeks before, and because you needed a prescription at the time to buy poison for any reason, and she never had one)--still, do you climb ladders and stand in the August heat all day if you're nauseous and throwing up all day? You do if you have to be out of the house and seen by others, right? Because she was seen by neighbors and by people on the busy street. The house was sandwiched between other homes and the busy street, and still is. And, c) Uncle John was again walking around town that day, as he had the previous few days he'd stayed over. He'd been doing small errands for Andrew, his brother, and he'd also just been hanging around town. But the day of the murders, when he approached the house, he was seen lingering outside for a few hours, eating pears from their tree, standing around the yard, talking to people. You see tons of townspeople, and the police and doctors, at your brother's house, where you've been a few days, and you don't break down, cry, yell, push past people to get inside, to see if everyone's all right? Seems just like Emma in Fairhaven, doesn't it? 

Emma and Bridget had a life-long falling out with Lizzie. Bridget, after she was brought back from the inquest and testifying, packed up, spent time with people in the city, and ultimately moved to Montana. (My novel starts there. Bridget had gotten deathly sick at some point, and told a loved one she had something about the case to confess. But she got better before she did, and apparently never again spoke of it.) Emma moved in with Bridget in Maplecroft for awhile. She left during the time Lizzie had tons of parties there for her actress lover--who also left her quickly. Emma moved to NH and lived in solitude, unmarried and without lovers or children, just as Lizzie did. They'd also had an earlier falling out while Lizzie was in prison awaiting trial, but reconciled before they split again.

So the movie doesn't show any of that. It focuses on the unnecessary (to evidence and to history), possible gayness of Lizzie and Bridget. Some nice touches in the movie include:

--using the same hatchet that Andrew had used on her favorite birds when she'd broken into his office and into Abby's room and stolen jewelry. The killing of the birds is a possibly apocryphal story that John Douglas didn't think actually happened. Andrew was said to be cheap, cold and cruel, but not necessarily a killer, of animals or otherwise. I agree, because I think he'd be too cheap to sacrifice eggs and meat later. Anyway, that same hatchet was then washed thoroughly by Lizzie, and then she used it to kill more birds, so that when it was found, the blood tested would just be the birds'. The movie shows her breaking off the wooden handle and burning that, to get rid of the fingerprints.

This is awesome stuff! It explains the real hatchet that was found and put into evidence as the murder weapon, minus the shaft. The labs did test it and it did have just birds' blood and hair on it. This did make the police look bad at the actual trial. This is great stuff, except--could Lizzie be as CSI aware as we are today? Could she have known to do that, knowing the police would find it, test it, and look bad, thereby making her look more innocent? I don't think so. I'm not saying she wasn't dumb or calculating; I'm saying nobody in 1893 would know to do this, for these reasons. But that's a nice irony, using the same hatchet as Andrew had to kill him, and then to hide her guilt by killing her favorite birds with it, as he is said to have done. But I don't think so. Could she have done this, in a fit of frenzy, just in case? Maybe. If so, she was lucky. But during the investigation and the trial, she had in fact been very lucky. Today, the labs would find microscopic particles of their blood on it. Or, the police just got unlucky and bagged the wrong hatchet. There had to be others. Or, maybe she just got rid of it somewhere entirely.

--after killing Andrew, in a moment of love and pity, she placed a pillow, and then his folded coat, beneath his very bloody head. This is great, too. There had never been a pillow beneath his head, just his folded jacket, and this has perplexed us for over a hundred years. Would a miser infamous for his cheapness fold his expensive coat like a pillow and take a nap on it, awkwardly, in a half-seated position, on the couch? Investigators say No, but the evidence shows that he did. He'd been whacked with the hatchet while his head was on the folded coat, close to the arm of the couch, while his feet were still on the floor, like he'd just passed out. This was very possibly the case, as he'd also been sick from his own ripe mutton stew (and maybe a little poison) and he'd just returned from overseeing a few of his businesses and property, on a very hot day. He could've just sat down, realized he was going to pass out, and folded his coat and half-lied down and passed out. It's plausible. But what this movie shows, that he was killed while simply sitting there, and in the process he'd fallen sideways with his feet still on the floor, and that Lizzie had lovingly placed the coat beneath his head afterwards--Man, that just fits his personality better, and it's just a helluva nice touch. Haven't you ever fallen asleep on an arm of a couch when you can't find a pillow? Have you put a coat or a backpack beneath your head moments before you passed out? I've done both. Behaviorists and profilers like John Douglas (and I'm an acolyte) would like that, too. He's shown a ton of times how when someone kills a loved one, they do something loving and personal--like but a blanket over the body, cover the face, fold the hands over the stomach, or in this case, give the father a pillow that he wouldn't have given himself.

Well, that's it! Thanks for reading my geek-out about Lizzie Borden and the case. Lizzie is currently streaming on HBOMax.

Harlon Coben's Home: How Far Would You Go to Defend Your Child? Is It Ever Too Far?

Photo: from kirkusreviews.com, here.

It's been awhile since I've read a Myron Bolitar novel. I don't remember why, exactly. It's just one of those things: I picked up Nesbo, stopped reading him for awhile...and I've been reading other things since. But when my neighbor, a huge Bolitar / Harlan Coben fan (I'm more a fan of the latter than the former, because Coben was nice enough to buy me lunch once, and talk to me about how he wrote--but that's another story) asked me if I wanted to borrow his latest--in return for my letting him borrow all my Bolitar books--I said sure. (Thanks, Jim Fitz!) As it's a three-day weekend, and my sinuses are again out of control and I feel like crap, I started reading it and didn't put it down except to sleep. I started it yesterday and finished it today. (I read 90% of it yesterday, so there wasn't much to finish.)

It was that good. The mystery is very mysterious, and the pace and tension are so good that you'll be flipping pages, fast, like I did. The gist of the book is the title, though more specifically, it's about who your home is, not as much about the structure. Home is where the heart is, right? So where's your heart? That last question means more to the book than you'd think, and more than I'm letting on. (I'm a little proud of myself for this.) The book is about how far we'd go for our loved ones--specifically, how far a mother will go to protect her child.

The short answer: Very far. I know this. At my job I often see this, parents going to ridiculous lengths to defend their kid, even when the kid doesn't need defending.

This is an important distinction. We all know bad parents, right? Someone who lets the kid get away with everything: talking back, and badly, to them; showing bad manners, like not thanking people for gifts; and, perhaps the worst, defending them about everything, to the extent that nothing's the fault of the kid, so the kid never learns to grow up, to be responsible, to be self-reliant. We all know parents like this. Right now I'm sitting here, counting the ones I know who fit this distinction to a T, and I'm thinking 4, maybe 5--wait, there was a 6th, from a few years ago. It's more often the mother than the father, from my experience, though that last one had both.

So this book is about that question: How far will you go to defend your child? But...does the child need defending? And are you really defending the child, or are you defending, and / or celebrating, yourself? You ever see a parent so out of control with this defending thing that you wonder who, exactly, they're defending? Is it the kid who can never be wrong, or the parent who can never be wrong--so the parent, of course, couldn't raise an imperfect kid. Good God, if that happens, then that means the parent is also imperfect, right? Well--No, but they don't know that. Narcissists are not known for their logic. Watch for that, next time: Is the kid perfect, or is the parent defending the kid perfect, which is why the kid is perfect? From my experience, it's the latter.

This book isn't just about that, of course. It's about Win. In fact, it starts off with him, which threw me for a minute before I figured it out: Win's chapters are 1st-person narration; Bolitar's are third person. Limited or omniscient, you ask? Ah, there's my own caveat. (You knew there'd be one, right?) The third person omniscient narrator is almost a character himself. He hides behind the curtain, but he's there. He breaks the fourth wall to remind you he's there. Sometimes he masquerades as Bolitar's thoughts and voice-overs--and, unfortunately, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference--but he's there, trying very, very hard to be hip and snazzy. This third-person narrator (who reminds me a little uncomfortably of the narrator Snowman in those Christmas cartoons of the 60s) interrupts his own narration to often point out the obvious, or to point out the cliche, or to introduce the cliche, or to...You can either take it or you can't. Most of the time, I could.

I wish overall that Harlan Coben wouldn't do this, but I understand why he does: Something has to set the writing apart, right? Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Harlan Coben and a couple of others--Frankly, they write about the same genre, and the almost-same plots, and something has got to be different, right? I'm thinking now of Robert Parker's last 10 books or so. If you threw a title at me, and asked me to summarize the plot, I wouldn't be able to do it. I suspect that if I'd read all of Lee Childs's, or all of Coben's, I'd say the same about theirs. That's not exactly a drawback, either: One of the odd things about the genre is that a series character is like a pair of comfortable slippers. You slip them on, and you forgive their age, or their holes, or whatever, because they're comfortable. That the genre's books all blend together is actually part of the charm, not a detraction. The way to tell Coben's Bolitar apart from Parker's Spenser (as an example)? Why, Bolitar books have the narrator who frequently breaks the wall and speaks directly to the reader, even going so far as to use the second-person "you." That's no small thing, by the way, and it's a way to ease your feet back into those comfortable slippers. Every mystery writer wants a series cash cow with a main protagonist and his questionable sidekick / partner. Coben has Bolitar and Win as Parker had Spenser and Hawk. And, of course, if it works--which Coben's series obviously has--then you keep going, right? And you don't fix what's not broken.

So read this one, because the tension and plot and mystery are so good that you'll forgive the third-person narrator's trespasses, if that's even necessary for you to begin with. And at the end, you'll have a moral question to answer: Did the character go too far defending the child? (I'm having an image now of the adults who beat the piss out of each other to get the latest Christmas must-have. Remember those videos of grown people beating the snot out of others so their kid could get the store's last Tickle Me Elmo?) I would say Yes, because of the people I explained above, but I'll bet quite a few people will also say No, that you protect your child at all costs.

Even if the child doesn't need defending.

Signs You're Gettin' Old

--You read an article about seven necessary exercises for men and you read this, "Functional exercises train the muscles that are used for everyday activities like mowing the lawn..." and you think, Damn it, mowing the lawn IS my exercise.

--Followed immediately by: Now it's an everyday activity I need to exercise for?

--You put two bricks into the ground to complete a planting barrier, and then surround a plant with six more bricks that you basically just stomped into the ground, and you think that's a good day's work in the sun.

--And it's just in the high 40s. And it took just half an hour.

--You wake up the next morning and your body is a tad sore from this "rigorous work."

--You appreciate sitting in the sun--in a room in your house that gets a lot of sun.

--And you appreciate this room, like you never knew it got so much good sun.

--Because you didn't know, though you've lived in the house for almost five years.

--You realize you're as old as your father was when you thought he was old.

--Your doctor says, "We need to think about your prostate."

--And, "When was the last time you had your cholesterol tested?"

--After hearing this, you feel your blood pressure spiking and you're grateful they've already done that test.

--You monitor how much coffee and water you're drinking, so you don't have to do #1 when you know you'll be in the middle of something important.

--Like, going to see a movie. Or "working" outside.

--You're seriously considering fiber bars and cranberry juice.

--You find yourself typing articles about what gettin' old feels like.

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Photo: from the author's webpage and bio section.  It's on her latest books, too.  And in Entertainment Weekly, which says that her newest, Station Eleven, is "the must-read of the fall."  I don't doubt that it is.  I love her writing, from her first book, reviewed here, to her online essays.  Good writing is good writing, no matter the form or the genre.

An exquisitely-written, stays-with-you little gem of a book, more about the people who are left behind than about the people who leave.

Very short, at 220 pages, but very deep about obsession, depression, leaving and staying behind.  The characters are all representatives, of course, more than they are flesh-and-blood, exactly, which made me hate Lilia a little less at the end, when we learn in the last few sentences of the book that she lived happily-ever-after (mostly) after all, despite all the (mostly unintentional, but c'mon) heartbreak she left in her wake.

But she has been thrown through a window, seen a man driven off the road, seen a woman pulverized by a subway train, and she never had a lasting friendship or relationship until she married in her late-20s after finally staying somewhere--in this case, Italy.  Some reviews hated on her character, and I could see their point, especially how this waif with tight dark hair just so easily grabbed relationships with men and women (bisexuality is hinted at in the book)--and all she has to do to get them is to read in cultured little coffeeshops...  Yet, I don't doubt that there are a lot of Lilias out there, and that there are indeed affected women who sit in coffeeshops all the time, and bookish male intellectuals trip over themselves to be with them.  Plus, looking at the author's picture, I think it might be a bit of a self-description.  Maybe a little Freudian analysis is necessary here.  But I digress...

Lilia is representative of a type, and not full-blooded, so I ultimately gave her a pass.  After awhile of thinking about it.  Plus, I'd sit down next to her in a coffeeshop...

But all the characters are this way.  They're representative, and many of them come off far worse than she.  There's the aforementioned mother who threw her young child out the window...which was closed, by the way.  And she left the child in the winter snow to freeze, too.  Luckily that didn't happen--the freezing, I mean. 

Then there's the detective father who is the real obsessive of the book.  He leaves his wife and daughter for weeks, months and, yes, years at a time, to track down Lilia and her father, long after her abduction ceased to be worth tracking down.  (She's in her 20s, and plus she was better off away from the free-throwing mother.)  This guy's wife leaves him, then he leaves his 15-year old daughter alone as he again obsessively tracks Lilia down.  Ultimately he ends up returning to his young daughter for a short time, but then he leaves again and disappears forever from her life.  It's possible he commits suicide somewhere. 

This girl, his daughter, quits school, which he doesn't notice, and eventually befriends Lilia, and then her ex- (who Lilia leaves at the beginning and who tracks her down in Montreal, in a fashion, but he actually latches on to this guy's grown-up daughter, kinda gets obsessed with her for two weeks and never really seems that intent to find Lilia...) and then she becomes a stripper, learns something even more unsettling about her father, and then kills herself.

She's the real victim here.

The above paragraph may make the book sound like a soap opera, but it's really not.  In lesser, untalented hands, this would have been a real mess, and worthy of mockery and lampooning--but it's in great hands, and really stylishly and compactly written.  It's not my kind of book, normally, but there's huge buzz right now about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, so I wanted to read her early stuff first.  I also read a couple of her online articles--one about NYC's reaction to Ebola before the doctor got sick there--and those were very well-written as well.

You've got to read this one.  For the writing.  For the interweaving structure.  For what it says about those who leave.  And for what it shows about those who are left.

It's well-constructed, a bit haunting and lyrical, and it'll stay with you.  It'll resonate.

And, oh yeah--Don't go to Montreal in the winter.

Godzilla (2014)

Photo: Godzilla's movie poster, from its Wikipedia page.

Some quick bullets about Godzilla 2014.  Bottom line: if you like action movies, monster movies, or war movies (yes; see first bullet, below), you should go see this.

--The real star of this movie (even more than Godzilla and his pals) is the director, Gareth Edwards.  The direction for this movie is truly unbelievably good, much more so than is necessary for a movie like this.  Even critics who didn't love the movie said Edwards did a great job.  The best thing I liked about the direction was that it purposely shied away from shots of the monsters fighting, and instead focused on the people below in a you-are-there kind of way.  It was like combining a Godzilla movie with The Hurt Locker.  If two giant moth monsters were to suddenly awake, and try to get together to mate, and were intercepted by Godzilla, it would look exactly like this to the people on the ground, caught in the middle of it all.

--There are so many nods to other movies in this movie, I lost track.  The ones I remember: Jurassic Park (many scenes; one in particular: the one where Jurassic Park's Dr. Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm sat in the stopped car in the pouring rain, and wiped away the mist from the window to worriedly see outside; this is enacted exactly the same in Godzilla); 2001: A Space Odyssey (many scenes; especially when the guys in Godzilla parachute into the battlezone to the same exact insane singing as in the ending of 2001, when David passed Jupiter and entered the psychedelic light); countless 50s and 60s Godzilla movies, especially the ones where the dino costume seemed way too big (and Godzilla's roar is the same as it was in the 50s, amped up for 2014; oh, and don't miss the Mothra sign); Jaws (the main family's last name is Brody, and someone says, "Are you Brody?" just like in Jaws).  There's a motion-detector that looks exactly like the one in James Cameron's Aliens.  Sounds just like it, too.  That's all just off the top of my head.  There are many more.  This became one of the joys of the film for me--finding all the homages.  This sounds distracting, but it wasn't.

--Not too much acting is expected out of the actors.  When Elizabeth Olson headlines your cast, this is a good thing.  But this isn't a Merchant / Ivory film anyway, if you know what I mean.

--The film has no pretense to be anything more than what it is: A wonderfully directed, at times breathtakingly beautiful action movie that has three monsters.  (I see this as more of an action movie than as a monster movie.)

--The action scenes do not last too long, as a few of Man of Steel's did.

--David S. Goyer and Frank Darabont assisted with the screenplay.  Those are Dark Knight and Walking Dead names.

--There are no subplots involving a dumb romance, or a boring father / son conflict, or a cardboard villain.  Just monsters and mayhem.  The main character / hero saves a little boy or two, but that's okay.  He's supposed to do that, right?  And it's not drawn out or sappy when he does.  This was the problem with 1998's Godzilla, which had very good special effects and action scenes, but aspirations of personal conflict and relationship issues that nobody cared about.

--It's not too long.  Just over two hours.

What else do you need?  Go see it.

The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz

 Photo: Cover of the book, from imagesbn.com (bn.com; Barnes and Noble)

My friend Sheryl Sorrentino has crafted a sort of unique novel in a style that she calls "real fiction."  In an Afterword, she describes "real fiction" as "...provocative, culturally-inclusive stories that explore women's inner struggles in a socially-significant context."

Sheryl's "real fiction" novel, Later With Myself: The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz, is about a middle-aged woman who is rocked by the death of her father.  His death leads to various skeletons escaping from her family's closets.  Millie must make sense of it all to find some peace not only with her present, but also with her troubled past.

It starts off with a twelve-year old Millie trying to find some sense of belonging.  She's a product of a troubled family, of adults with their own powerful issues, and she feels neglected and without any role models to teach her what she should, and should not, do for attention. Without this knowledge, and without a solid role model to tell her differently, Millie unfortunately gets the wrong sort of attention from men without morals, and she becomes pregnant.

The book then flashes forward to Millie's present: she's married to an African-American (she's white) and is the mother of two daughters.  She's a successful attorney, and she hasn't heard from her father, or from her brothers, in many years.

And then she gets the phone call.

Later With Myself: The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz is indeed a novel that, in a sort of fictional memoir sort of way, tackles these issues--and many others--head-on.  In her Afterword, the author mentions that much of the book is at least semi-autobiographical, while much of it is straight-up autobiography.  A lot of it is, of course, completely made-up as well, but the reader can see the dots of the author's life being connected, and as such it is an extra benefit to see how the author constructed her book to put those pieces together.

I wished the author had focused a little more on the young Millie, because she's a kid you really root for, and for whom you wish better things.  Like Em, the main character of one of my favorite YA novels, Norma Fox Mazer's When She Was Good, the young Millie has an existence that wouldn't be wished upon anyone, and which is caused, predominantly, by forces outside of her control that make her a lost soul in a tough world.  Lost kids will do lost things, as they both do.  Em--the narrator of Mazer's book--fares a bit better than does Millie, at first, but it was a joy to see Em learn things on her own, and become the more put-together person the reader knows she's going to be.  I would've liked to've seen a bit more of that in Sorrentino's book, but that's not the gist or purpose of the work, as I've said.

But the first few pages are so good, so detailed and so strong, that clearly Sorrentino has a future in the YA genre if she ever wanted to tell a story that limited itself to that time-frame of a young girl's life.

So if you like socially-relevant issues explored in a middle-aged woman's (and a young girl's) life, with a bit of soul-searching, peace-finding, the mafia, a father's long-standing mistress, and disgruntled family members all thrown in, please check out Sheryl Sorrentino's book.  You can read more reviews about it (at least 30, averaging over 4+ stars!) at this Goodreads page.  You can get a copy at this Amazon page, in various formats: Kindle ($2.99) and in used (starting at $2.94) or new (starting at $11.22) copies.

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Photo: The book's cover, from goodreads.com

Eh.

That's really all I was going to write.  After months of anticipation, after all that time reading its 528 pages (well, okay, that took me just a few days), even after being the tome that drove me to the bookstore to write the most recent blog entry--yeah, "eh" was all I was going to write.

But then I got disappointed.  Really, really disappointed.  I mean, this is how Danny Torrance ended up?  Not bad, but...eh?  That's it?  After everything he went through in The Shining, this is the denouement of his life?  (Or, probably, the Act IV before the Act V resolution.)

Okay.  Speaking of The Shining, this book is obviously its sequel, and the comparisons, while impossible not to make, are unfair.  As King himself wrote in his afterword, "...people change.  The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining..."  True enough.  And on the same page, he makes the point that the first real scare will always be the best (He compared Hitchcock's Psycho to Mick Garris's good, but not as good, Psycho IV).  This is also true enough.

But the disconcerting thing is that I wasn't expecting the genius of The Shining.  I believe, as King said above, that that man is gone, never to return.  I don't expect the genius, the scariness, of The Shining, of IT, of a few others, ever again.  And that's not necessarily a bad thing.  The creepiness and the wistful and sad nostalgia of the last third of Insomnia (which I thought was a different kind of greatness) could not have been written by Shining's King, for example.  Other good parts of other better books could not have been written by 70s King, including Bag of Bones (which is very underrated) and any of the four novellas of Different Seasons.  So different and new is not always bad.

What is bad here is that this book does not scare.  At all.  In fact, only three small sections were even creepy--and I'm not sure if it's because of how he wrote them, or because of the imagination I brought to them, of how I interpreted them and imagined them.  I'm pretty sure that the images I gave myself after I read those three small parts creeped me out more than the parts themselves did.  So the book does not scare at all.  It only barely creeps you out.  And it's got a little of that sad nostalgic thing he's been doing for a long time now, but even that was miniscule.

Unfortunately, what it does do is judge.  There's a lot of author intrusion there, mostly upon the RV People.  (What else is there to call them?)  They're called lots of bad names, and often not just by the characters.  King often seems to jump in the fray and cuss at them, too.  Of course, they're killers (and, most notably, child killers), so you don't feel bad for them, per se.  But the way he draws them, what else could they be?  They're not really people, but they once were, perhaps, and there's the rub, maybe.  But maybe not.  Essentially, they were all once victims of somebody else, like a vampire who kills by sucking blood exactly, and only, because they were victims of a vampire themselves.  At that point, they're no longer fully responsible for what they have to do to survive.  Maybe such creatures kill themselves in Anne Rice's world (or in Stephanie Meyers' world), but that's not "realistic."  Something needs to be done about them, of course, but with such anger and hatred?  Very unlike King.  It's very distasteful.  Especially when you consider that King portrays them all as so human otherwise.  Some RVers are funny; some are smart.  Some are annoying.  A few are physical goddesses.  There's an old man who smells, and a computer geek who loves the newest technology, and a numbers guy who you'd love to be your own accountant.

And there's Andi, the victim that the book practically starts off with.  She's been raped and molested by her father for years, and then she finally kills him, and to survive, she steals money by (sort of) seducing men--who we're blatantly told she doesn't like--and while she doesn't kill them, she leaves a visible calling card on their faces that they won't soon (if ever) forget.  The problem here is that the reader sort of likes that about her, and when she becomes a victim of the RVers, we don't like it, and we wish better for her.  And then the book virtually ignores her as it focuses on the sex goddess in charge (see the cover), and we don't see Andi again until about 80% to 85% of the way through the book.  When we do, it's all over so fast that we wonder why we got to know her to begin with.  And if you're like me, you won't like how that happens, either, or the meanness behind it.

The three creepy scenes, for me, happened in the first quarter or so of the book, and the rest is just...this happens, and then this happens, and then this, and then...without fanfare, creepiness, chills or thrills.  Really, after the scene with the woman and her child after the first 25%, it's all plot, little character (except for the RVers, which is part of the book's problem right there), and---eh.  I hate to say it, but if you were to put the book down halfway through, you really wouldn't miss much.  Seriously.  Send me an email and ask me how it ends, if you'd like, but, I'm tellin' ya...

--A little aside: Maybe I can start a part-time business like that.  I read the books, and if people don't want to finish them, they email me for how it ends, because you always want to know that, right?  For this I charge a minimal fee.  You get your ending, I get my money, and I feel that I haven't totally wasted my time reading the book, since I'm also making money from it.  Maybe I could do that for movies, too.--

Anyway, I digress.  I just didn't like it.  I hate to say it like that, but there it is.  There are maybe three or four very good scenes--and, again, I don't know if that's more reader imagination than author's writing--and all the rest is just eh.  Not bad, exactly, but not really good, either.  Sort of like the difference between an A student, who tries very hard, and a C-, D student who wants to pass, but doesn't really give a damn.  The kinds who pass, but who don't learn anything.  The ones who sit there all day long, emanating eh.

You'll see Dick Halloran, and Wendy and Jack Torrance (the last at the very end, and huh?), but you'll see them for such a short time, and with such varying degrees of solidity that you wonder why they're there at all.

And here's where I have an answer I don't like.  I think King wrote this for three reasons--and in hopefully this order:

1.  He was actually seriously wondering what Danny Torrance was doing these days.  (Who hasn't been after they read The Shining?)

2.  He wanted to write about his alcohol and drug recovery.  (AA stuff takes up a vast majority of stuff space in the book.)

3.  He wanted to distance his characters from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name.

The first reason is solid.  The second reason is okay, too, but maybe not for the boy from The Shining.  Yes, his father was an alcoholic, and we learn that his grandparents, etc. were, too (though only the men, apparently).  But his mother wasn't, and neither was anyone on her side of the family.  And that story was more Jack Torrance's than his son's, anyway.  But if I'm Stephen King, and I'm curious about what Danny was doing, and I wanted to write about my own addiction and recovery, and that life, then why not put them together?  I didn't like the result, but maybe it was doable.  Okay.

But the last reason is maybe not as okay.  King notoriously dislikes Kubrick's movie, and I don't blame him.  I like the movie, but I don't love it.  I read the book first, and it's so unlike the book that I can only like the movie if I completely forget about the book.  Sometimes I can do that; others, I can't.  In short, the reason King and I both dislike the movie is that King's book is about a good, but very flawed, man, who has his weaknesses used against him by the evils of the Overlook Hotel, but who redeems himself by sacrificing himself at the end to save his son.  The movie is about an A-hole who becomes more and more of an insane A-hole before the movie ends.  Add into that the fact that Wendy Torrance in the book is a very blonde, beautiful, tough chick, and that Shelley Duvall in the movie was a sniveling whiner (and viewers need to give her a break, as that characterization was all Kubrick's, and he was literally driving her crazy) who nobody could stand (and the same might be said of the movie Danny as well), and there you have it.  King and I agree that the movie was visually stunning (as every Kubrick movie is), and perhaps worth seeing for that reason alone, but it's not the book, and the very spirit of the book is lost with it.  The book was a five-act Shakespearean tragedy (King himself describes it that way) and the film is a stunning movie with characters who didn't at all come from the book, which changes the texture of the whole thing.  And, considering all this, it must have been especially annoying for King when you realize that a great percentage of the movie's dialogue comes directly from the book.  I'm talkin' verbatim.

Having said all that (and sorry if I insinuated above that King and I have actually had conversations about this), Doctor Sleep ultimately fails because it also lacks consistent characterization.  Dan Torrance does not develop after about a third of the way through.  Once he settles in NH, it's all happenstance.  The characters who actually take over the character arc are the RVers, and this is yet another example lately (Under the Dome was the most recent, and don't even get me started on the bad book and the even worse tv show) of Stephen King focusing more on his antagonists than on his protagonists, as if even he is bored with what his main characters have become.  Notice that through the whole second half, the RVers are the only characters who change.

And are they really solid antagonists?  You'll have to be the judge, but I vote Nay.  They went not with a bang, but with a whimper.  And with relative ease.

So...that's it.

Huge disappointment.

Just.....eh.   

My Father's Awesomeness

Spoke to my better half's mom today, and she mentioned that at her first gathering with my family at my relative's place--where she didn't know anyone else but my better half and myself, and (barely), my father--he bought her a small box of chocolates and wrapped it up, and put her name on it, just so she got at least one thing there from somebody and didn't feel too much like a stranger spending a holiday at someone else's place.  (She and my better half and I had exchanged gifts already at my place.)

The point: That's how awesome my father was.  He thought of everyone else, and of the little things they may feel.  Who thinks about how the girlfriend's mother will feel at my relative's place?  He did.  And so here are a just a few other things that show my father's awesomeness:

--He visited our tax advisor with boxes and boxes of paper and envelopes, of all sizes.  She makes her living with these things, so they're like gold to her.  When she told me this recently, she couldn't stop crying, explaining how much she'd liked him and how nice he'd been to her.  "Who thinks of his tax advisor?" she cried.

--A guy he bought train parts from spoke to me for maybe half an hour about how nice he was, and about how he'd miss him.

--His landscaper speaks to me constantly about how kind he was to him on several occasions.

--The across-the-street neighbors tell me all the time about how he got their mail, collected their paper from the driveway, and either shoveled their driveway himself or paid the landscaper to do it.  (These neighbors are in their 80s.)

I could give a ton more examples, but you get the picture by now.  My father was awesome.  It can be explained in one word: Kindness.

He was a gentleman.  Rare these days.