Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Alfred Hitchcock’s Deathmate (1973)

     Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Alfred Hitchcock’s Deathmate (1973) Most of the stories date from the early 60s, which means that the dollar figures don’t have the impact they should have; the reader should mentally multiply by 10. Hitchcock likes stories with a twist, usually a dark one, and characterisation etc don’t matter except to drive the plot. Amusing stories, worth a read when you have no energy for anything demanding and there’s no TV handy. ** (2002)

Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983)

     Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983) Funny, this isn’t. There are a few pieces that elicit laughter (eg, Nora Ephron’s piece about breasts, Rosten’s tale of Hyman Kaplan, or Leacock’s brilliant “Gertrude,” one of his Nonsense Novels), but most of the fiction is about sad, pathetic losers. Only one of the satires (Bruce McCall’s parody of Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics) has the combination of fun and sharp criticism that I expect of the “best”.
     The pieces are very well written, but too many ask us to laugh at their protagonists, not with them. That is of course the function of satire, but when the targets are lower class caught in a web they never made and cannot escape, the laughter sounds mean. Those targets are too easy. The earlier pieces tend to be funnier than the later ones, even when their satire is sharp (as in Sullivan’s “Cliche Expert....”) The newer pieces have a sour tone, and there is a nasty streak of class superiority in many of them. Is this one of the reasons Richler chose them? The humour, what there is of it, relies a lot on the insider’s knowledge of already dated class and ethnic peculiarities. Some of the stories elicit compassion rather than laughter, but I suspect that Richler laughed rather than wept when he read them.
      Was Richler trying to demonstrate his cultural superiority over the rest of us once again? That has been the repeated theme in his pieces about Canada. Those pieces strike me as prime examples of the whine of the colonial who has felt the contempt of the mother country, and forever after feels that he must show he is really not a colonial after all. The book is worth keeping because of the few classics in it, but it reflects badly on Richler’s’ taste. But when I consider his own output, I shouldn’t be surprised. After Duddy Kravitz, his work becomes more and more peevish; that peevishness informs this collection, unfortunately. His early short stories about Montreal, for example, combine sharp satiric observation with a compassion for the humanity in us all. In his later work, that compassion appears fitfully and weakly, like the silent lightning of distant thunder storms, if it appears at all. * to *** (2002)

Stephen Jay Gould. I Have Landed (2002)

     Stephen Jay Gould. I Have Landed (2002) Gould’s last collection of essays. They display both his strengths and his weaknesses. As his fame as an essayist grew, Gould became increasingly self-conscious about himself as a writer, and occasionally that results in comments that should have been edited out. He also developed an unnecessarily multi-syllabic style, and some verbal tics (eg, “optimal” for “best”) that I noticed too often, and which began to annoy me. But these are minor cavils.
     What shines through more clearly than ever is Gould’s generosity, wonder, and awe. He simply refuses to put down past sages because they happened to be wrong: they did the best they could with the data and theoretical frameworks they had. Just as we do. If we put down the past for not having our advantages, surely our descendants will do the same to us when their turn comes.
     Gould loved this world we live in, he loved to trace out the many surprising connections between its parts, and between the people who described, thought about, and tried to explain those connections. He was I think a very joyful man, although his life had grief enough for anyone: the cancer that killed him after 20 or so years of acute episodes and remissions; an autistic son; and a first marriage that faltered and broke; not to mention misappropriation of his words by Creationists when they weren’t attacking him.
     Gould describes himself as a humanist, but he was without a doubt a man of faith. His faith did not rest in a personal God such as is proffered by his Jewish tradition, or its Christian and Muslim derivatives. But he knew that the realm of ought-to-be and would-it-were are absolutely necessary to us as human beings, and that we must construct an ethic that will enable us to act with compassion and justice, and to share our joys and griefs. His comments on the attacks of September 11th show this clearly: he contrasts the many thousand acts of kindness and decency that make our communal life worth living with the horrendous evil perpetrated by a few. He notes this asymmetry of numbers, and argues that it should give us hope. By far the vast majority of us want to live not only the good life, but the moral life, and so we do. That’s why our daily life does not make news. It’s the rare and unusual acts that make news, and the rarer they are, the greater their news value. The acts of greatest evil are the rarest of all. They are for most of us simply unimaginable until they happen, and for many still unimaginable then.
     As to why the perpetrators commit their acts of evil, Gould does not attempt to answer this question beyond the usual general hints of social and personal damage of some kind. But he does emphasise that one of the main sources of evil is the kind of limited and limiting faith he rejects, the belief in a personal God with an exclusive relationship with the faithful few.
     Yet in the end, Gould quotes from the Bible. I think Gould shows that faith need not be exclusivist or narrow; it need not be in a personal God. It’s more an attitude towards the world than a creed. That attitude starts with awe, and ends with joy.
     Rest in peace, Stephen. (2002) ***

John Penn. An Ad for Murder (1982)

     John Penn. An Ad for Murder (1982) A pleasant entertainment, in which what seems to be an advertisement for a forthcoming book turns out to be a warning of an actual murder. The murder happens, but apparently the wrong person is the victim. Until Inspector Taylor on a hunch (and because of a deepening interest in the victim’s daughter) decides the murderer accomplished his task exactly as intended, and proceeds to unravel a very knotted plot. The puzzle is a good one, the characters are pleasant, the author sometimes shifts point of view for no good reason, and the police procedure is a bit wonky, but all in all, the story works. It would make a nice little 2-hour TV special, and for all I know has been done. **-½ (2002)

Paul Fussell. BAD: Or, The Dumbing of America. (1991)

     Paul Fussell. BAD: Or, The Dumbing of America. (1991) A collection of rants of varying quality. The style is often oddly flat and ponderous. It seems as if Fussell had written a few of these pieces, and then someone suggested he make a book, which pushed him into forced humour, soggy satire, and jejune jokes. Well, not entirely: many of the points he makes are valid enough.
     However, much of what he discusses is really matter of taste or fashion, both of which are impervious to skewering, and are rendered silly by time alone. Some of his targets are too easy, such as ads aimed at the semi-literate and semi-cultured, offering them “exclusive heirloom” collectibles, manufactured by the tens of thousands, to store in a cheap glass fronted case for future generations to ooh and aah over.
     Fussell’s rage at the dumbing down of academic studies is worth reading, but I doubt many university presidents these day are even capable of understanding his critiques, and none I would think would want to act on them. Provincial premiers (and State governors) might stare suspiciously at anyone offering these critiques, aware that they are missing something, but uncertain just what it might be. That’s perhaps the saddest conclusion to take away from his book, that much of what Fussell has to say can’t be understood by those who might profit from it, but merely provides reasons for a mean-spirited sense of superiority for many of those who can understand. At his best, Fussell laughs at follies we might otherwise weep over; at his worst, he sounds merely peevish. I suppose that’s the risk a curmudgeon takes. ** (2002)

Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974)

     Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974) Howard wrote far more stories than he ever sold, and often plagiarised himself, changing stories to suit different markets. This collection includes one published, seven unpublished, and two accepted but never published stories (the magazine went out of business.) I read the introduction, which retails these facts, and part of the first story. Howard tries to reproduce the dialect of a lower class fellow who is good with his fists. The attempt fails. It takes more than the odd “phonetic” misspelling to convince me that I’m listening to a sailor with more wit than education. So I stopped reading.
     Howard is best known for his Conan the Barbarian series; the movie adaptations made Arnold Schwarzenegger famous. If this book is any indication of Howard’s talents, the movies are much better than the books. Howard is good at imagining content, but his execrable style makes the tales almost impossible to read. Readers whose main interest is in what happens next won’t be put off. Readers who want a sense of living in a well-imagined universe will find it hard to read Howard for other than “academic” reasons. It’s a good thing that writing style doesn’t transfer to a movie, except perhaps for dialogue, which in the Conan movies is mercifully brief. (2002)

S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967)

     S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967) Bottersnikes are nasty, scale beasts with sharp teeth, and their ears turn red hot when they are angry (which is most of the time). Red-hot ears are useful for starting fires. They live in garbage dumps and are very, very lazy. This deprives them of the comforts of life, so they are very, very bad tempered. Gumbles are agreeable, soft and furry, and squishy. They giggle a lot, and live in the bush, where they chat, play games, soak up the sun, and do just enough work to feel comfortable. Bottersnikes want Gumbles to work for them, so they put them in jam tins. Gumbles occasionally get away from the Bottersnikes, but as soon as they get the giggles, they are helpless, and the Bottersnikes put them in jam tins again. And so on.
     This is a Puffin book, designed to make eight-year-olds giggle like Gumbles, I suppose. However, the premise promises more than it delivers. The humour is strained and contrived as often as not, and the stories don’t have much point. That’s probably why this book never had a sequel, and its characters never showed up on TV. The author is Australian. Maybe the book’s humour is too Aussie for me. * (2002)