TwoBusy: Three pets, two guests, and a major plot twist

September 17, 2008

Three pets, two guests, and a major plot twist

A weekend in bullet points:

On Friday afternoon, I fled my home, my job and my family for a weekend of gentle debauchery in New York - the upper west side, specifically - with old pals KK and Demoncrat. Evening #1 involved lots of trash talk, many beers, one frickin' enormous plum sake at a fine Japanese restaurant, and finally Demoncrat falling asleep on KK's dog bed. Good times.
We started Saturday by taking KK's gigantic, beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy to Central Park, wherein we discovered thousands of other New Yorkers doing the exact same thing. Observation: even on a lovely, sunny morning in September, standing out in an open field watching dogs frolic and play... New Yorkers just don't come off as terribly happy people. Call me crazy.
Then we hopped on the subway and traveled to the scenic Bronx for a matinee game at Yankee Stadium. The game served as our excuse for coming to New York - what with this being Yankee Stadium's last season, with the new version opening right across the street next year - and we had pretty decent seats along the first base line (upper tier, but still a great overview of the field). Being a Sox fan watching a Yanks/Rays game, I found myself torn... on the one hand, I wanted the Yankees to win and help the Sox catch up to Tampa in the standings (which turned out to be an irrelevant hope, as the Sox were simultaneously getting spanked by Toronto). On the other, I'm pretty sure I'd rather cut off and eat my own fingers - one by one - than actively root for the New York Yankees in any capacity. Finally, I decided that my best case scenario would involve the earth opening up in some kind of Old Testament-style act of God and swallowing both teams whole.
Which, uh, didn't actually happen.
The game itself actually kind of sucked. The Yanks came out flat, made some bad plays, and Tampa just stomped them into the ground. Which is fine, whatever, but the whole place felt lifeless -- which is just about the last thing I expected to experience in Yankee Stadium. Hell, even in Fenway when the Sox are getting kicked around there's still a sense of energy to the setting... but Yankee Stadium was just flat. Maybe this is just the by-product of the vaunted Yankees resigning themselves to a 4th-place season, but they played flat, the crowd was flat, the energy level in the Stadium was a flatline -- in the end, we were bored silly and ended up leaving during the 7th inning stretch. Pretty disappointing, overall.
Then we went back to KK's apartment, wrestled with her dog, watched her cat stalk us from the rafters, and ultimately had some more beers.(Good stuff, too -- Dogfish Head Raison D'Etres, Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale, lots of Long Trail stuff... all of it quality. God bless her.)
And then Demoncrat slept on her dog bed again.
On Sunday, we followed our walk through Central Park with a visitation to a sidewalk book/music sale, which included a fun encounter with a legit NYC nutcase -- an older woman who was flipping through the CDs and talking to herself with great energy and enthusiasm when she came upon an old Nirvana CD. Her reaction: "Fucking Kurt Cobain. He ruined everything in music. You can't even call it music. It's just fucking horrible." And then she actually picked the CD up and threw it across the table, to illustrate her disgust. "Jazz is real music," she continued, and then proceeded to explain to several dozen people just how stupid today's music is. (Note: she somehow browbeat KK into buying a David Sanborn CD. I'm still not sure how this happened, but I'm pretty sure I feel embarassed for KK.)
Then we kicked Demoncrat to the curb (whereupon he caught a cab to catch a train to return to DC to continue undermining our way of life with his devious visions of "fairness" and "hope."), and headed off to the biggest damn IMAX screen in the world to see - at long last - The Dark Knight. Which I won't bother telling you about, as I presume I'm one of the last people in the civilized world to catch it onscreen, other than to say that the helicopter shots when the camera swoops over the urban landscape before spotting Batman perched on the edge of some skyscraper? Truly fantastic/unnerving/vertigo-inducing when watched on a screen 3 stories high.
Then we went back to KK's swingin' bachelorette pad for an afternoon of mediocre Pats football.
Except! Wait! Wait! While walking back to her swingin' bachelorette pad, I got a call from TheWife, who had an update on our friend ElF. Who has continued to have all kinds of weird medical stuff going on, and to be honest when TheWife called and said, "I need to tell you what happened to ElF," I was fully expecting that she was going to tell me she'd died.
Which wasn't quite what happened. What did happen was that last Friday, ElF was found unconscious on the ground in the parking lot of her son's school. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was immediately set up for all kinds of tests. But before they could even launch into the really crazy, esoteric cardiopulmonary stuff they had in mind, they got back the results of the initial blood draw they did when they admitted her in the ER. And discovered that her blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. In other words, the kind of blood alcohol level that's toxic to most people... except hard-core alcoholics.
(Which means, yes, I'm suddenly seeing the title of the ElF post linked above in a somewhat different light.)
When confronted with this discovery, ElF denied, denied, denied... then admitted. And spent 48 hours in an inpatient thing detoxing, and then went home.
She's apparently enrolled in some kind of outpatient thing, and has 1 shot to get it right.
When she screws up - and to be clear, it's a when, not an if - she'll be tossed into an inpatient program.
Did I mention that she came by our house last Tuesday night - while TheWife was at a Sox game - to say that she'd been a half-hour late picking up her son from afterschool-care, because she'd been in medical testing all morning and was on new meds and had overslept and was just so disoriented and confused and... and, of course, I bought it all, because it all made total sense, but when she and her son left to go back out to their car and - honestly - she looked just incredibly unsteady, and I offered to give them a ride (because, you know, she was unsteady from the meds and the sleeping, which was completely reasonable) and she said "No, no -- I'm totally fine" and I watched her basically weave up my walkway to her car, and load her son in, and then back out and drive away...
Clearly, she was fucking blasted out of her mind the entire time. And lied to me. And drove off, dead drunk, with her 5-year old son sitting in her back seat.
Which is why I haven't responded to an e-mail she sent us last night, thanking us for our support and offer to help out with her son. Because, in all honestly, I'm so angry I want to fucking strangle her right now.
(Was that enough of a digression? Helluva a plot twist, you've gotta admit.)
Anyhow. After picking myself up off the sidewalk in the wake of that news, I went back to KK's place and watched the Pats scratch one out against the Jets. And to be clear: I called for Cassel's head no less than a half-dozen times during the course of the game. For the record: I have no confidence in him. And I realize I may be rushing to judgment... but I just don't feel good about the Cassel era. At all.
I ended up staying at KK's on Sunday night, because I had a Monday morning meeting in upstate New York. Hooray! (And to clarify: yes, TheWife is cool with me staying with KK -- in fact, she called several times over the course of the weekend to discuss scheduling for when she could ditch me with the kids to go shopping with KK in Manhattan.)
So. Monday morning. I was up before the crack of dawn (thanks, offspring, for ruining forever my ability to sleep past 6am), showered and ready to go before KK was even conscious. That being said, she woke up as I was preparing to take off and meandered down to her kitchen - which is next to the front door - to put together some whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-Rhodesian-Ridgebacks-eat. All of a sudden, she let out this bloodcurdling scream -- like, to the degree that I thought she'd accidentally sliced her hand open with a knife or something. So I come sprinting across the apartment (keep in mind that it's Manhattan, so we're talking a solid 8 feet here) to find her pointing at the floor...
Where I see what is almost certainly the biggest fucking cockroach I've ever seen in my life. Do you have a ruler handy? Pull it out, look at the distance between 0-3 inches, and then picture a cockroach that big.
Did I mention that I have a major problem with large-scale bugs and spiders?
Oh. My. God. And as KK pointed at it, I swear - hand to heart - that it started moving towards her. At which point we both freaked out and jumped back. And at which point her big friendly Rhodesian Ridgeback decided he wanted to be friends, so he ran after it -- with the cat watching us all from a safe distance.
The roach disappeared for a minute, and KK started to wig out. (Rightfully so, I might add.) We stood there for a minute, just stunned, and then started to talk about what to do. I asked if she had any kind of bug killer spray, so she went to her cabinet and pulled out... Windex.
Then the roach was suddenly out on the open floor again, so she bravely pushed forward and started spraying it. With Windex. "I think you're making it shinier," I said.
Then the dog started playing with it again, and it scuttled off somewhere.
We spent a minute talking about it - mostly, I was trying to calm her down, but truthfully I was pretty freaked out myself - and it finally came to the point where I said, "Get a tupperware and trap it. Then give me a call to let me know how it worked out." At which point I grabbed my bag and headed for the door.
"Hey! Heyheyhey!" She called at me. "Have a nice day with your three pets!" I called back, and then listened to her door slam shut behind me just as she started to drop a whole boatload of F-bombs.
And then I got the hell outta New York. Phew!
The end.

04:25 PM | Permalink

Comments

A weekend in bullet points:

On Friday afternoon, I fled my home, my job and my family for a weekend of gentle debauchery in New York - the upper west side, specifically - with old pals KK and Demoncrat. Evening #1 involved lots of trash talk, many beers, one frickin' enormous plum sake at a fine Japanese restaurant, and finally Demoncrat falling asleep on KK's dog bed. Good times.
We started Saturday by taking KK's gigantic, beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy to Central Park, wherein we discovered thousands of other New Yorkers doing the exact same thing. Observation: even on a lovely, sunny morning in September, standing out in an open field watching dogs frolic and play... New Yorkers just don't come off as terribly happy people. Call me crazy.
Then we hopped on the subway and traveled to the scenic Bronx for a matinee game at Yankee Stadium. The game served as our excuse for coming to New York - what with this being Yankee Stadium's last season, with the new version opening right across the street next year - and we had pretty decent seats along the first base line (upper tier, but still a great overview of the field). Being a Sox fan watching a Yanks/Rays game, I found myself torn... on the one hand, I wanted the Yankees to win and help the Sox catch up to Tampa in the standings (which turned out to be an irrelevant hope, as the Sox were simultaneously getting spanked by Toronto). On the other, I'm pretty sure I'd rather cut off and eat my own fingers - one by one - than actively root for the New York Yankees in any capacity. Finally, I decided that my best case scenario would involve the earth opening up in some kind of Old Testament-style act of God and swallowing both teams whole.
Which, uh, didn't actually happen.
The game itself actually kind of sucked. The Yanks came out flat, made some bad plays, and Tampa just stomped them into the ground. Which is fine, whatever, but the whole place felt lifeless -- which is just about the last thing I expected to experience in Yankee Stadium. Hell, even in Fenway when the Sox are getting kicked around there's still a sense of energy to the setting... but Yankee Stadium was just flat. Maybe this is just the by-product of the vaunted Yankees resigning themselves to a 4th-place season, but they played flat, the crowd was flat, the energy level in the Stadium was a flatline -- in the end, we were bored silly and ended up leaving during the 7th inning stretch. Pretty disappointing, overall.
Then we went back to KK's apartment, wrestled with her dog, watched her cat stalk us from the rafters, and ultimately had some more beers.(Good stuff, too -- Dogfish Head Raison D'Etres, Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale, lots of Long Trail stuff... all of it quality. God bless her.)
And then Demoncrat slept on her dog bed again.
On Sunday, we followed our walk through Central Park with a visitation to a sidewalk book/music sale, which included a fun encounter with a legit NYC nutcase -- an older woman who was flipping through the CDs and talking to herself with great energy and enthusiasm when she came upon an old Nirvana CD. Her reaction: "Fucking Kurt Cobain. He ruined everything in music. You can't even call it music. It's just fucking horrible." And then she actually picked the CD up and threw it across the table, to illustrate her disgust. "Jazz is real music," she continued, and then proceeded to explain to several dozen people just how stupid today's music is. (Note: she somehow browbeat KK into buying a David Sanborn CD. I'm still not sure how this happened, but I'm pretty sure I feel embarassed for KK.)
Then we kicked Demoncrat to the curb (whereupon he caught a cab to catch a train to return to DC to continue undermining our way of life with his devious visions of "fairness" and "hope."), and headed off to the biggest damn IMAX screen in the world to see - at long last - The Dark Knight. Which I won't bother telling you about, as I presume I'm one of the last people in the civilized world to catch it onscreen, other than to say that the helicopter shots when the camera swoops over the urban landscape before spotting Batman perched on the edge of some skyscraper? Truly fantastic/unnerving/vertigo-inducing when watched on a screen 3 stories high.
Then we went back to KK's swingin' bachelorette pad for an afternoon of mediocre Pats football.
Except! Wait! Wait! While walking back to her swingin' bachelorette pad, I got a call from TheWife, who had an update on our friend ElF. Who has continued to have all kinds of weird medical stuff going on, and to be honest when TheWife called and said, "I need to tell you what happened to ElF," I was fully expecting that she was going to tell me she'd died.
Which wasn't quite what happened. What did happen was that last Friday, ElF was found unconscious on the ground in the parking lot of her son's school. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was immediately set up for all kinds of tests. But before they could even launch into the really crazy, esoteric cardiopulmonary stuff they had in mind, they got back the results of the initial blood draw they did when they admitted her in the ER. And discovered that her blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. In other words, the kind of blood alcohol level that's toxic to most people... except hard-core alcoholics.
(Which means, yes, I'm suddenly seeing the title of the ElF post linked above in a somewhat different light.)
When confronted with this discovery, ElF denied, denied, denied... then admitted. And spent 48 hours in an inpatient thing detoxing, and then went home.
She's apparently enrolled in some kind of outpatient thing, and has 1 shot to get it right.
When she screws up - and to be clear, it's a when, not an if - she'll be tossed into an inpatient program.
Did I mention that she came by our house last Tuesday night - while TheWife was at a Sox game - to say that she'd been a half-hour late picking up her son from afterschool-care, because she'd been in medical testing all morning and was on new meds and had overslept and was just so disoriented and confused and... and, of course, I bought it all, because it all made total sense, but when she and her son left to go back out to their car and - honestly - she looked just incredibly unsteady, and I offered to give them a ride (because, you know, she was unsteady from the meds and the sleeping, which was completely reasonable) and she said "No, no -- I'm totally fine" and I watched her basically weave up my walkway to her car, and load her son in, and then back out and drive away...
Clearly, she was fucking blasted out of her mind the entire time. And lied to me. And drove off, dead drunk, with her 5-year old son sitting in her back seat.
Which is why I haven't responded to an e-mail she sent us last night, thanking us for our support and offer to help out with her son. Because, in all honestly, I'm so angry I want to fucking strangle her right now.
(Was that enough of a digression? Helluva a plot twist, you've gotta admit.)
Anyhow. After picking myself up off the sidewalk in the wake of that news, I went back to KK's place and watched the Pats scratch one out against the Jets. And to be clear: I called for Cassel's head no less than a half-dozen times during the course of the game. For the record: I have no confidence in him. And I realize I may be rushing to judgment... but I just don't feel good about the Cassel era. At all.
I ended up staying at KK's on Sunday night, because I had a Monday morning meeting in upstate New York. Hooray! (And to clarify: yes, TheWife is cool with me staying with KK -- in fact, she called several times over the course of the weekend to discuss scheduling for when she could ditch me with the kids to go shopping with KK in Manhattan.)
So. Monday morning. I was up before the crack of dawn (thanks, offspring, for ruining forever my ability to sleep past 6am), showered and ready to go before KK was even conscious. That being said, she woke up as I was preparing to take off and meandered down to her kitchen - which is next to the front door - to put together some whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-Rhodesian-Ridgebacks-eat. All of a sudden, she let out this bloodcurdling scream -- like, to the degree that I thought she'd accidentally sliced her hand open with a knife or something. So I come sprinting across the apartment (keep in mind that it's Manhattan, so we're talking a solid 8 feet here) to find her pointing at the floor...
Where I see what is almost certainly the biggest fucking cockroach I've ever seen in my life. Do you have a ruler handy? Pull it out, look at the distance between 0-3 inches, and then picture a cockroach that big.
Did I mention that I have a major problem with large-scale bugs and spiders?
Oh. My. God. And as KK pointed at it, I swear - hand to heart - that it started moving towards her. At which point we both freaked out and jumped back. And at which point her big friendly Rhodesian Ridgeback decided he wanted to be friends, so he ran after it -- with the cat watching us all from a safe distance.
The roach disappeared for a minute, and KK started to wig out. (Rightfully so, I might add.) We stood there for a minute, just stunned, and then started to talk about what to do. I asked if she had any kind of bug killer spray, so she went to her cabinet and pulled out... Windex.
Then the roach was suddenly out on the open floor again, so she bravely pushed forward and started spraying it. With Windex. "I think you're making it shinier," I said.
Then the dog started playing with it again, and it scuttled off somewhere.
We spent a minute talking about it - mostly, I was trying to calm her down, but truthfully I was pretty freaked out myself - and it finally came to the point where I said, "Get a tupperware and trap it. Then give me a call to let me know how it worked out." At which point I grabbed my bag and headed for the door.
"Hey! Heyheyhey!" She called at me. "Have a nice day with your three pets!" I called back, and then listened to her door slam shut behind me just as she started to drop a whole boatload of F-bombs.
And then I got the hell outta New York. Phew!
The end.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory for the Sullen
My 2011 album of the year. Achingly gorgeous neo-classical compositions designed to leave you on the verge of tears. I've been listening to it almost non-stop for months; you should do the same.
Hammock: Longest Year EP
There are few things more frustrating than trying to describe the gorgeous, evocative and profoundly atmospheric post-rock music of Hammock without A) resorting to clichés that, while not necessarily inaccurate, do little to accurately describe the listening experience; or B) having the musical vocabulary to adequately describe just what it is about these lengthy, largely wordless compositions that hypnotizes and moves me so profoundly. So I'll just say: imagine a film. No words; just images. Flashing, semi-grainy images of someone from your past — impossibly beautiful, vibrant and full of life. Someone lost to you forever. Imagine that feeling, of love and impossible longing and desperate, hopeless desire to recapture that moment and make it last forever. Now hunt down the title track to this EP, close your eyes, and listen. And you will know: this is the music for that feeling.
Peter Gabriel: New Blood
Man, what a disappointment this turned out to be. I've been a fan of Peter Gabriel's for more than 20 years, and while his post-Passion albums have been uneven at best... I was thrilled when I heard that he was re-recording some of his best songs with an orchestra. I grabbed it on the day it was released, tossed it in my trusty CD player, and... um... didn't love it. So I listened to it again. And again. And again. And now, after four full listens, I've concluded: this isn't music I can love. I mean, some of the songs work pretty well (generally the quieter ones — San Jacinto, Mercy Street and Wallflower are fairly lovely), but as a whole the album comes off as more of a compositional exercise than an attempt to create songs of real and lasting beauty. It's a crime, really, because the great strengths of Gabriel's music have always been rooted in his ability to marry thoughtful lyrics to passionate vocals and complex, deeply-emotional music that supports the first two elements. But here? The lyrics and vocals (and PG is, admittedly, still in very fine voice) are subordinated to overly-busy arrangements that rob the music of the very things that make it so extraordinary. It's a disappointing discovery, and to be completely honest the best thing about this album is the fact that it's forced me to go back to the original executions and appreciate, with a freshened perspective, just how wonderful they are.
Low: C'mon
A tremendous and much-appreciated return to form for this legendary Duluth, MN slowcore trio, and a welcome reminder of why they are both one of the very best and most interesting bands in the world. From the gorgeous, chilly-yet-warm harmonies of married folk Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk to the impeccable sense of atmosphere and dynamics that have always defined their finest work as a heady blend of atmosphere, melancholy and quiet beauty... it's all here. Look: just give a listen to "Especially Me" or "Try To Sleep" and tell me you're not charmed, moved and completely hooked. I defy you.
The Cure: Disintegration (Deluxe Edition) (3CD)
Why spring for the 3-CD deluxe edition, even if this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded? Three reasons: 1) Because the original album has been remastered, and now sounds better than ever — the bass is now audible, and the songs now offer a crystalline clarity that bring the aching beauty of Plainsong and Closedown to new levels. 2) The 2nd disc, which offers demos of most of Disintegration's songs, offer a fascinating glimpse into Smith's creative process. 3) The 3rd disc is a live album, and its version of Pictures of You is, simply, astonishing. One note: even better than springing for this? Is having @MrLady do it for you. I highly recommend that approach.

Reading is Fundamental

Daryl Gregory: Raising Stony Mayhall
Man, Daryl Gregory is an interesting writer. This is a zombie novel, but it's utterly unlike any other zombie novel I've read (and let's be clear: from The Angels Are The Reapers to World War Z and Breathers, there's a wiiiide range of very good ones out there). Why? Because our title character is a part of the Living Dead community — and he's as rich and fully realized a character as you'll ever come across: an individual loved by his family, first hidden from and then feared by the world, and desperately curious to explore and understand his nature. What, exactly, is he? How is it possible that he was born dead, is and has always been composed of unliving tissue... and yet still grew up? Gregory couples this greatly realized characterization with a compelling plot that follows Stony from his "childhood" on an Iowa farm to a growing Living Dead underground community to prison and revolution and beyond — and the result is a truly compelling read that blends some fascinating questions with a sense of fun and engagement that never wavers. This is a worthy follow-up to Gregory's "The Devil's Alphabet," and while neither of these two novels quite matches the dizzying heights he reached with his stunning debut, "Pandemonium," it's still a terrific read that deserves your attention.
Dennis Lehane: Moonlight Mile
When an author returns to a series years after abandoning it, it's frequently a journey fraught with peril. All too often, they seem to lose their handle on the characters and unique tone that made their earlier work so fun and successful, and you finish the book kind of wishing they'd never gone down this road. Having said that, I was grateful to discover that Dennis Lehane's return to Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in "Moonlight Mile" is an energetic and very successful reintroduction of the deeply sardonic (and funny) dialogue and dark & twisty plotting that made his early novels such an incredible pleasure. It's been more than a decade since Lehane left them behind to move on to "Mystic River" (still one of the best things I've ever read)... and when we rejoin Patrick and Angie, we discover that a decade has passed in their lives, as well. They've grown older (and possibly a little wiser), just another couple in Boston doing their best to make ends meet — when suddenly they find themselves launched into a search for Amanda McCready, a 16yo girl who a dozen years previously was the missing girl at the heart of Lehane's wonderful "Gone Baby Gone" (as well as Ben Affleck's outstanding film adaptation of the same). What happens from that point forward is nothing if not tremendously satisfying, and while as a novel this may not reach quite the same dizzying heights of some of Lehane's other work... it's an absolute, uncompromising pleasure and a welcome reminder of why we fell in love with his writing and these characters in the first place. Great, great stuff.
Emma Donoghue: Room
Yeah. It's every bit as good as you've heard. And every bit as lovely, heartbreaking and tragic, too. The idea is brilliant: Jack is five years old, and has lived his entire life in Room. With his Ma. And with occasional, after-dark visits from Old Nick — who, Jack doesn't realize, is the man who years ago kidnapped and imprisoned a then-19yo girl in Room. As far as Jack is aware, he, Ma and Old Nick are the only real people in the universe. Everything else - what he sees on TV and what little he can view through the tiny skylight at the top of room - is make-believe. I could say more to describe what happens, but really... there's no way I'm going to give anything away. I'll just say, instead, that Donoghue does an impossibly masterful job of creating an entirely believable 5-year old boy who might have been born and raised in such an environment — and who might react to the things he experiences in the way that Jack ultimately does. Every piece of this story has the ring of absolute truth, and that (more than anything else) is what helps to define it as one of the most haunting things I've read in a long, long time. Highly, highly recommended.
Greg Olear: Fathermucker: A Novel
I wanted to like this. I really, really wanted to like this. The concept sounded terrific: a SAHD in an upper-middle class enclave in upstate NY is told, during the course of a playdate, that there is suspicion his wife is having an affair. The idea is pure gold — a setting and a cast of characters impossibly ripe for comedy, plus an opportunity to add some emotional depth via the very troubling idea of a beloved wife (in an imperfect marriage) who may be quietly shattering our protagonist's heart. Unfortunately... the execution fell far short of my expectations. Let me be clear: Olear can write — he knows how to craft language and put together an interesting story. And he certainly does a credible job of recreating the vast wilderness of SAHM/D life in the 'burbs. But in terms of really delivering on either the comedic or tragic implications of the story... it fails. Problem 1: it's not funny. At all. And the fact that Olear clearly has the ideas and chops to deliver on a strong comic premise - and yet, consistently, fails to do so - became an ongoing source of frustration for me as I went through the book. I'll put it this way: a full-length comic novel that makes you smile and/or laugh a grand total of once? Is not a very successful comic novel. Problem 2: it offers multiple opportunities to broaden into really emotionally resonant territory, both as a function of exploring the wife's possible infidelity and in exploring the emotional impact of having a child on the autism spectrum (Asperger's, in this case) on a marriage. And yet, every time it starts moving in that direction... Olear instead veers into a machine-gun spatter of pages-long paragraphs listing people who attended a playdate and how they interact with and/or screw around with each other (or some other, similar tactic). It's as if he's hoping that if he dances realrealrealfast, no one will notice that he's not ready or willing to write with anything approaching real emotion. All of which leads me to this conclusion: I've read far, far worse books this year... but none that made me feel more frustrated or actively angry for not being better. (Disclosure: I was sent this book by the very kind people at Fathermucker's publishing house, whose name I can't think of right now. Thanks and sorry — I really wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did.)
Warren Fahy: Fragment
Remember back when Michael Crichton was cranking out blockbuster-movie-plots-disguised-as-novels and every review was pretty much the same? The details varied from book to book, but almost without exception you'd read a review and learn that he'd put together a book with a propulsive plot, a bunch of surprises and thrills, lots of technical and/or scientific detail to show off all the research he did, and little doubt that the characters and dialogue were anything more than paper-thin. Well, Crichton is gone — but with Fragment, Warren Fahy makes a solid attempt to recreate the Crichton model... for better and for worse. The novel is basically built around the same initial concept as King Kong: a tiny, remote island out in the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific is discovered — and is quickly found to be inhabited by all kinds of fascinating monsters. Boatloads of energetic scenes of people getting shredded by the aforementioned monsters inevitably ensues. Fahy's Crichton-esque take is to cast this island and its bizarre inhabitants as an ultraviolent evolutionary offshoot, where billions of years of isolation have resulted in the creation of all kinds of horrifying and efficiently bloodthirsty inhabitants, including (most memorably) the spiger, which basically looks like a 15-foot long hybrid of a spider and a tiger (it even has orange stripes). Sounds promising, right? Until you realize that Fahy has failed to back up this premise with things like "believable characters" or "dialogue" or "depth." Which leaves us with a passable beach or airplane read... and not much more.