William J Cobb on books & film

Here’s the url to my review of Pete Dexter’s new novel, Spooner, which appears today in the Dallas Morning News:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_spooner_0927gd.ART.State.Edition1.4bb3c8d.html
It’s a terrific book. For Dexter fans, I’d say it’s my favorite since Deadwood and Paris Trout, vaulting it over The Paperboy, which is a good novel, but rather somber and murky. Spooner is out-and-out funny at times, such as toward the end, when it describes the end of a feud between Spooner and a pair of gay weight-lifters, and earlier, when it describes Spooner’s sadsack career as a door-to-door salesman.

So here’s a url to my short story “The Hidden Jesus,” currently in the new issue of The Hopkins Review (as in Johns-Hopkins University):
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_hopkins_review/v002/2.4.cobb.pdf
The cemetery mentioned in the story is based on a number of windswept, high-lonesome cemeteries I’ve wandered through in my killing-time hours in Colorado. The morbid onlooker in me loves a good cemetery, and the West has its share of classic Boot Hills. One of my favorites is the cemetery of Creede, Colorado, located on a plateau above that “ghost town,” although I know quite a few people who live there and are very much alive and kicking.
I lived in Creede in 1999, and loved it, great people, canyons and mountains. Just north of Creede is Lake City, site of the infamous Alferd Packer cannibal story of the 1870s. (Via Wikipedia comes the tidbit: In 1968, students at the University of Colorado at Boulder named their new cafeteria grill the Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill with the slogan “Have a friend for lunch!”) Bob Ford, Jesse James’ killer, was originally buried at the Creede cemetery, although someone later moved his body. Creede was also home for a time of  the legendary Bat Masterson, who has a juicy Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Masterson.
My other favorite cemetery is near Silvercliff, Colorado, which is known to have supernatural lights hover over it, ala the famous “Marfa Lights” of West Texas. It’s more anonymous and haunting, set in the Wet Mountain Valley with the awesome Sangre de Cristos to the west, which are MY mountains, as in my Colorado home is on their slopes. Above my house is a Christian resort, and is the model of the Christian rehab center of the story.
The original title of this story was “The View from Sorry Mountain.”

Neil Labute is an eviscerating playwright, screenwriter, and now, director, who makes squirmy films that are hard to ignore or look away from. Usually they present the dark side of male bonding and distrust of women, as in In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), which features Ben Stiller as a worldclass creep. But the star moment of that film is Jason Patric’s confession scene, when he describes his best, er, “romantic encounter,” as the time he raped a classmate in high school. Labute directed the recent upending of race-stereotypes, Lakeview Terrace (2008), which stars Samuel L. Jackson. For the first three-quarters this is a terrific and queasy film, with Jackson playing a menacing black cop who doesn’t like the mixed-race marriage of his new neighbors. What’s impressive is the moral, ethical, and legal gray areas he has the characters inhabit, where the white yuppie neighbor may be harmless, but more at fault than the menacing, close-to-exploding Jackson. I also liked how the film had me and my wife calling out at the characters like in a horror movie, “Don’t look in the closet!” Although in this case it was “Don’t complain about that stupid security light!” (Funny: I’ve lived in inner-city neighborhoods next to psycho neighbors. The main thing I did was a) ignore them, and b) stay out of their way.)
Overall Lakeview Terrace is a good film, intense and unsettling, although toward the end it does take a hokey turn for Hollywood fireworks. Eventually Jackson and the neighbors end up in the Big Confrontation Scene. It makes for some tense moments, but also seems contrived. Jackson does a great job playing the angry black cop, and the film weakens when he strays into the angry black maniacal cop zone. Plus there’s a fire metaphor that gets a bit heavy-handed at the end.
One of the suburbs threatened by the recent southern Cal fires was, you guessed it, Lakeview Terrace.

This has to be No. 1 in some weird category of Books I Like But Have Not Read. I’ve mentioned it before: Steve Hely’s satiric/comic novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist, which came out this summer, and it sounds funny. Here are two of the rules that touch on issues I’ve written about recently:
“Rule #1: Abandon Truth: People will believe thousands of different lies in succession rather than confront a single scintilla of truth. People like love that crosses the years, funny workplaces, goofy dads who save Christmas, laser battles, whiny hags who marry charming Italians, and stylish detectives. But try telling somebody a single true thing about human experience and they’ll turn on the TV or adjust their Netflix queue while you starve to death in the rain.
“Rule #4: Must Include a Murder: Not including a murder is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?”
I recently blogged about That Murder Problem. As convenient as the murder plotline is for novels/storytelling, how much of life are we avoiding to follow that old killer song and dance? While promoting my novel Goodnight, Texas I got some laughs at a bookseller event (an industry thing where you meet and greet with bookstore owners/buyers) when I confessed that there was no murder in my book, “But maybe I should have killed someone?” I asked. This followed a dozen novelists who described their books as about 1) a recently divorced Manhattan D.A. 2) who stumbles on a plot to assassinate the president, while investigating the murder of a call girl linked to her ex-husband, 3) who has joint custody of their mutt, a scruffy beagle/dachsund/airedale mix who is the most lovable perp-biter since McGruff the Crime Dog—who has a blog, by the way: www.mcgruff.org/.

So this weekend I read Nick Reding’s Methland, a nonfiction book about the effects of the crystal meth “epidemic” on America (this is harped on too much) and in particular, on the town of Oelwein, Iowa. In part I read it because it seems to have gotten good press about speaking to The Decline of Small-Town America. (My novel Goodnight, Texas focused on this problem, too. I’m simpatico.) I also live in two small towns, one tiny (Westcliffe, Colorado—population 1500 maybe?) and the other medium-sized (State College, Pennsylvania—population 90,000 maybe?). I don’t doubt that both towns have crystal meth users, but I’d also bet that both towns have more binge drinkers than speed freaks. It’s the kind of book that may be full of accurate statistics (which should always be taken with a grain of salt) and juicy anecdotes (it needed many more of these), but still seemed to hype its argument. No doubt meth use and Mexican drug cartels are major problems, but where would they land on the list of Our Worst Problems? I don’t know.
Reding does a good job of tying the drug problems to bigger issues like Big Agriculture and Big Pharmacy. But he also seems to hang out in bars mainly to socialize with the meth users, and I have no doubt that if I hung out in bars a lot I’d probably meet some ne’er-do-wells, too. But both of my towns aren’t really defined by the bars and druggies. It’s a matter of how you look at it. The people I socialize with in Westcliffe tend to be smart, hard-working, upbeat, and outdoor-oriented. State College tends toward the yuppie vision of the world, parents with kids in preschool, good jobs, and a Starbucks latte habit. The Great Recession seems a bigger problem for the country right now.

So being the father of a two-year-old, it took me a while to watch the based-on-a-true-story Changeling (2008)—a star turn for Angelina Jolie (whom I sympathize with; she seems like a kind mom, even if she is a Hollywood brat, perhaps grown wiser now), and another stunner directed by Clint Eastwood. Imdb.com has some great details about this, including that most of the film is true to life, although it’s hard to ever trust Hollywood. The writer, J. Michael Straczynski, supposedly wrote the screenplay in seven days, after months of research on the real-life Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. I can believe it. The story is riveting and dense with odd details that work best because it’s based on an actual event. I immediately wanted to know how much of the story was accurate. It seems that much of it was. A great example of the power of fiction vs. nonfiction. If it was all fictionalized, I don’t think it would be as good a film or story. When Jolie’s character is placed in a psychopathic ward by the police, that would seem too rhetorical (message = bad police) if it had not happened.
As a novelist, I pay attention to the patterns of classic stories/novels/films, and have sometimes squirmed against the preponderance of murder plots. It’s the ultimate sin, perhaps, the ultimate bitter end. I admire the storyteller who can avoid murder plots and write a great book. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary come to mind, but since both feature suicides, that’s a squishy distinction—suicide is self-murder. Lolita is a classic murder story, although the heart of the story is not the murder, but Humbert’s forbidden love. I’ve written about Out Stealing Horses as one of my favorite recent novels, and it has an accidental death in it, an accidental murder.
Now I know that the definition of murder implies a deliberate, not accidental, killing. So technically when Lars kills Odd in Out Stealing Horses, it’s not murder. But still. It’s an Unnatural Death. Perhaps that’s what novels seem to feature most often, The Unnatural Death. Why?
The simple answer: it ups the ante. An easy question for storytelling is: What’s at stake? With a murder, it’s all. What more can you lose?

So there’s a minidebate in the NY Times this week about nonfiction writers writing about family, the painful and embarrassing moments. It arises from a book published in the U.K. and recently in the U.S., Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child, about her son’s “drug addiction,” told in horrifying tones. When I learned it was weed, I thought it all sounded overheated. (The Sunday NY Times review of it was even more overheated, with the (humorous?) tag, Reefer Madness:
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Browning-t.html?_r=1&ref=books
After the many fake memoirs, I don’t trust the genre. The best books can convince the reader, of course. But in a case like the notorious James Frey, many readers had been suspicious before the news broke that he had faked much of it. (Notice the connection: Rehab, anyone?) The writers usually hide behind the old “that’s how I remember it” dodge, which I think works as long as no one is hurt by what you write. But many are basically juiced-up because the subject wouldn’t sell without some added drama. In plain English, they’re lying. Now if we’re talking about “making things up,” that’s what fiction does best. With style and pizzazz. Only fiction doesn’t sell as well as “nonfiction.” So these ‘memoirs’ are placed in that category because of the confessional craze, because they will sell better. Here are some writers responding to that question of What can you write about? in the NY Times:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/the-memoir-and-childrens-privacy/?hp
The second guy is basically saying, Anything for a buck. It’s best not to know him. The other three do acknowledge the complexity of the issue, and the need for tact. It’s not like this is something that suddenly developed in the memoir craze. For centuries writers have written thinly veiled fiction (and less so, nonfiction) about their families: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) is a classic. I don’t remember a single embarrassing, nasty incident in all that beautiful book. Too bad his son didn’t want to get high. I imagine Nabokov would have made it funny.
I’ve written about family in my novel The Fire Eaters, much fictionalized. I did speak with my mother and sisters, and some of them weren’t thrilled with some of their depictions, but then again, they were supportive, and the most dramatic moments, in general, were fictionalized. I left many events out that would be too painful. That’s another story, the one that hurts.

Here’s a gem from Sunday’s NY Times “Inside the List” piece in the Book Review:
HARRY POTTER, YEAR ZERO: Speaking of Harry, here are the 10 titles grown-ups were reading when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, made its debut (at No. 16) on the adult hardcover fiction best-seller list, on Dec. 27, 1998. Note that there is only one vampire novel on the list.
1) “A Man in Full,” by Tom Wolfe.
2) “Bag of Bones,” by Stephen King.
3) “The Simple Truth,” by David Baldacci.
4) “Mirror Image,” by Danielle Steel.
5) “Rainbow Six,” by Tom Clancy.
6) “The Poisonwood Bible,” by Barbara Kingsolver.
7) “When the Wind Blows,” by James Patterson.
8) “All Through the Night,” by Mary Higgins Clark.
9) “The Vampire Armand,” by Anne Rice.
10) “Memoirs of a Geisha,” by Arthur Golden.
On this Sunday’s list, four titles fit the fantasy-genre category. I think. I’m not really sure what a “werepanther” is (DEAD AND GONE, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) “Sookie Stackhouse searches for the killer of a werepanther”), but it sounds like you don’t want to stand in your yard and try to coax it to a bowl of milk, calling, “Kitty kitty kitty.” Also, three titles in ’98 would (loosely) fit the ‘literary’ category (Golden, Kingsolver, Woolf); today that number appears to be one (Russo). I’m not sure. With many of these writers, I’m only working with the brief description, which can be deceptive. Memoirs of a Geisha, by the way, is a terrific read. The movie was pretty, but missed the power of the book.

So I’m reading the NY Times this morning and encounter a head-in-the-sand scolding the notion of Peak Oil here: www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html
I’ve read much about this idea and some of it includes (hopefully) laughable doomsday scenarios, and some of it seems quite rational and worrisome, particularly Matthew Simmons’ excellent book, “Twilight in the Desert,” about the mysterious state of the Saudi oil industry. In a nutshell, the Saudis have historically one of the greatest supergiant (industry term) oil fields, which may be declining. Aramco, their oil company, keeps their information secret, so we don’t really know. Simmons is honest about this. He notes we still have plenty of oil, and make new discoveries all the time, but makes the logical statement that, from what we know, we do probably face the likelihood of declines in production during this century. He doesn’t predict the next Mad Max replay, but he does say it’s logical to face the fact that at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, we will want to use more than we have, which will affect price, and global geopolitical stability. 
Lynch discounts that altogether, and moreover, makes not one mention of climate change. E.O. Wilson, the eminent science writer, makes the simple statement that if we burn all the oil we have underground, the planet will be uninhabitable. I imagine Lynch would discount that notion as well, and go shoot some birds with Dick Cheney. But you can’t talk about how much oil we have and use without realizing how it affects climate change.
Actually, perhaps Lynch’s vision of the future could be summed up by the film “Wall-E,” with its rusting tankers drydocked in a dead planet.

I wrote the following as a request for a former student, to be posted on the Southeast Review’s webpage:
Mystery in Storytelling
One of the tricks in story telling—and believe me, there’s a hundred tricks that the best writers use unconsciously, subconsciously, accidentally, purposefully, or not—lies in how to keep you interested, keep you turning the pages. As a young writer it was my good fortune to study with Donald Barthelme (whose Sixty Stories is only of the best book o’ stories ever) and Edward Albee (the Broadway boy wonder who was kind and generous as a professor, whom I saw direct a knockout performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only one of the best American plays ever), and both of them said, “Surprise the reader.” Yet a basic problem arises with the element of surprise: how to keep it from being corny or forced. That’s where it’s useful to have some idea of the greater notion of Mystery.
First off, let me dispense with the notion of Mystery as some trump card that’s played at the end of a mystery novel—murder with an icicle, where the weapon melts away, as in Sherlock Holmes and later, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), as the way the murderer/rapist is ultimately dispatched by a hand from heaven. That’s all fine and dandy, but not what I mean by Mystery. It’s part of it, no doubt, but not the whole enchilada. The best sense of Mystery is almost indefinable, ineffable—a sense that things aren’t what they seem (in Life as in Fiction, they rarely are), that something is wrong here but you can’t put your finger on it, that there is something interesting just behind that door, lurking in the shadows, in the odd expression that woman at the dentist’s office just gave you, in the foreboding you feel as you hear the telephone ring in the dark of night.
One of the best novels of our fresh-faced 21^st century is Out Stealing Horses (2006) by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson.  From the get-go you know that something’s amiss: An aging man retires to the countryside to live in peace and harmony, after some implied calamity in his life, and meets an old acquaintance on the road of his remote neighborhood. Not to spoil too much—if you haven’t read this novel, you should—this brief meeting with an old acquaintance stirs to the surface a childhood tale of accidental death, unhappy marriage, and heroism during World War II. What I find remarkable about Horses is that all of the people are essentially good, decent, honorable human beings, although things go terribly awry by the end. There are no villains, but there are mistakes, misdeeds, cruelty and heartbreak. Even the Nazis seem like decent human beings, and you feel sympathy and compassion for them.
Here’s the trick, and I don’t feel any guilt here, as magicians do in giving up the illusion—Mystery lies in what is left unsaid. What is hidden. Held back. Until that perfect moment for it to be revealed, whatever it happens to be.  In Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (a gorgeous title, isn’t it?), which is arguably one of the best novels of its time, he holds back a stunner about the narrator’s dignified, beloved father until the very end. At that moment, all the mysteries and quizzical, emotionally charged moments come into sharp relief, and it delivers a kick to the gut that is the mark of a terrific novel. Which is what we all want to write, isn’t it?
The only recent novel that outshines Out Stealing Horses in its darkest-of-the-dark way is Cormac McCarthy’s end-of-the-world howl to the human condition, The Road (2006). We all have our little special moments in our little careers and grab bag of Hopes & Dreams, and two of mine have involved somehow brushing shoulders with the greatness of McCarthy: once he won a literary book award the same year I won an award for a story, and we were listed side-by-side (he got more money, natch), and the second occurred at the release of my last novel, Goodnight, Texas, which was reviewed in one magazine side-by-side with The Road. A friend of mine criticized The Road’s plot because, “I could guess what would happen from the beginning.” As in that the father would die, the son would live on. I agree. That’s not hard to figure out. But then again, that’s not the Mystery.
In one of Vladmir Nabokov’s wickedly good novels of the 1930s, Laughter in the Dark (1938), he sums up the plot at the outset: “Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.”
Mystery often lies in the details, what makes up the meat and bones of our lives. In The Road, the scene where the father and son open the trapdoor to discover the huddled slaves of the cannibal-clan is one of the creepiest, most horrific images I’ve ever read. The scene where the father/son stumble upon a cache of food just as they are about to starve to death creates a feeling of joy and exultation. That’s not a trick. It’s natural and true to the heart.
Part of the Mystery of The Road rests in what will become of the human race: Is the boy a savior? Will they/we all perish? It closes with one of the best endings in contemporary literature, and in that coda, McCarthy suggests a time when all that we know and care about will be gone and forgotten: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
I can’t top that. The Mystery of the world. That’s what makes us gasp and glow.