William J Cobb on books & film

All summer I’ve been trying to get through Andrew Ross Sorkin’s terrific book about the financial meltdown (or as I like to call it, The Big Fall) of 2007-8, Too Big To Fail, and I think I’m going to have to give up. This is a failing on my part, too much to read and not enough time. He’s awfully detailed, and provides great background on financial heavyweights like Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, and many others. Warren Buffet has an early cameo in the story that reinforces my (and most others’) idea of him as a financial guru worth his reputation, when he’s called in to analyze one of the big failing investment firms (either Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros., I forget) and confesses he can’t figure out anything from their suspicious accounts. Sorkin describes one banker getting a call at dinner, in which he’s asked if he can make a THIRTY BILLION DOLLAR loan. I want to finish this one, and I’ll try. But for now it’s in a stack of wannareads. Is that a new word? Should I send it to the Urban Dictionary?

Here’s a url to my review of Rick Moody’s new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, which appears in today’s Dallas Morning News. TFFOD is awfully long, but I was sucked into the vortex of the middle of the book, most of which is set on a comical mission to Mars. I liked how the astronauts seemed totally unfit for space travel. It’s like Kubrick’s 2001 done by The Daily Show writers.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_moody_0801gd.ART.State.Bulldog.356ccc0.html

So I’m loathe to do any literary name-dropping but in this case I think it’s worthy: Yesterday I had lunch with Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong (1999, a finalist for and should have won the National Book Award), and Eventide (2004, for my money even better than Plainsong, both knockouts), among others. He’s a great guy, soft spoken, modest, and self-effacing. Which is all important because I rank him as one of our best contemporary fiction writers, up there with Cormac McCarthy, and it’s a pleasure to meet a major writer who is not a stuffy egomaniac. He lives near Salida, Colorado, and we talked about living in the mountains, our shared annoyance of ATV riders. He said he’s close to being done with a new novel, and I would bet it will be good, too.

So I’m reviewing Rick Moody’s new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, which, after a rocky start, is turning out to be a fun read. A couple quick observations: It’s 700 plus pages, as in Infinite Jest long long long. It’s wacky and rife with high Postmodern hijinks, like a cross between Wall-E and Stephen King’s The Stand, with a dash of Mark Leyner’s The Tetherballs of Bouganville (1997), an underrated gem. Much of it’s about Mars, but the end involves a killer virus and a crawling hand. I think it will get a lot of attention soon.