Tuesday, September 26, 2017

2017 read #4: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente
150 pages
Published 2017
Read from September 25 to September 26
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Valente is one of my favorite authors, and this novella of interconnected tales -- the viewpoints of comic book heroines killed or bereaved or discarded to further the dramatic arcs of male superheroes -- might be my second favorite book of hers, bested only by the intoxicating Radiance.

In recent years, especially, I've felt that Valente has come to rely on a particular self-aware, metafictional narrative voice, half noirish pitter-patter, half "Auntie Cathy tells the kiddies a tale." At times (as in the disappointing Speak Easy), it can seem as if Valente got stuck in that voice halfway through writing her Fairyland series, and can't help but churn out puns and genre-aware wordplay to the tune of a secret knock on a bootlegger's door. Monologues begins in a similar key: "Dead. Dead. Dead. Flying Ace of the Corpse Corps. Stepping the light Deathtastic. I don't actually know what a doornail is, but we have a lot in common." My fears that this would prove to be another Speak Easy were quickly buried, thankfully, under the weight of how awesome this book is. Valente's go-to voice might make it hard to tell her books apart, but it can still be an effective tool when wielded with this precision.

The narrators, almost all of them "fridged" inhabitants of Deadtown, are excellent pastiches of certain funny-book characters whose names are not public domain. There's the Gwen Stacy figure, the Jane Grey/Phoenix psychokinetic, the Harley Quinn, the Atlantean princess whose only mistake was to fall in love with Aquaman. The chapter on the non-union equivalent of Harley Quinn and her pyromaniac love for "Mr. Punch" might be the best thing to have ever come out of the Batman mythos -- and I'm including The Lego Batman Movie in that category.

This is no mere work of fan-fiction, however. Valente's incisive, memorable phrases -- normally the highlight of any of her works -- here serve to shape a picture of the toxic boys'-club of fiction, and not just the kind printed in four colors. Monologues is a work of elegant rage, a knife-tip against a festering boil of literature's manocentric maleocracy, a literary landscape where female characters are set-dressings to be employed or tossed away however they best fit the male heroes' dramatic arcs.

Saturday, September 9, 2017

2017 read #3: Stardust by Neil Gaiman.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman
238 pages
Published 1998
Read from September 1 to September 8
Rating: 3 out of 5

One of my earliest fixations when I began this blog, all those years ago, was stories of Faerie or the Fey Realm intruding upon the modern world of cities. I read every such book I could find, for quite a while; an early staple of urban fantasy, this scenario generated many books for me to find. As with all fixations, of course, I began to tire of the same old storyline eventually. I'd start an urban faerie book, get bored as the author went through the usual motions, and drop out before the magic I still desired managed to charm me.

That almost happened with Stardust. It's a breeze of a book to read, written straightforwardly and printed with generously-sized font and margins; in the old days I would have finished it in a day, easily. It's charming and at no point can it be said to become a chore. But a couple chapters in, I reached a point when I went, "Well, that's nice enough," and couldn't motivate myself to make time for it. It just wasn't a pressing interest -- I'd read this exact story (more or less) a dozen times before. It certainly didn't help that the tale is of a nebbishy young man who barges into a magical situation he doesn't understand, runs into a spunky heroine who rolls her eyes at him and calls him an idiot and a dunderhead, and learns to navigate the supranatural realm sufficiently well to save her bacon and (spoilers) win her heart. With minor variations, that describes at least half of Gaiman's novels. I could even swear "idiot" and "dunderhead" turning into terms of endearment was repeated in another one of his books.

So that was all fine, and charming enough, and also completely unremarkable. This time I persevered, though (possibly out of a sense of completionism -- Stardust was the last major Gaiman novel I hadn't read), and I'm happy I did. The central romance plot began on some iffy ground; chaining up a woman (who is literally magical) to accomplish your own selfish desires, then treating it all as some wacky mix-up that can be forgiven after the man has a change of heart, leaves a lot of baggage (gender baggage, power dynamic baggage) to unpack. Nonetheless, the happy ending pleased me, and I especially appreciated how the major conflicts were resolved by the heroes exercising newfound emotional maturity rather than devolving into "action."

Friday, September 1, 2017

2017 read #2: 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller.

1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller
334 pages
Published 2000
Read from August 28 to September 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Once I had finally resolved to sit down and read some books again, I had assumed it would take weeks or months to scrape the rust off and get my attention span back in working order. Turns out, I just needed a book that could hold my interest. While not a classic of the genre, 1700 is an absorbing example of "street level history," emphasizing quotidian glimpses of lower and middle class life to illustrate larger social trends rather than framing history as a sequence of great men and great events. If I had one quibble with Waller's presentation, it was her habit of printing the observations of moralists and social "superiors" at face value -- relying, perhaps, on the sophistication of her intended readership to place Daniel Dafoe's opprobrium of the lowest classes within socioeconomic context.