The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

By the time I read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, it had been out for four years, garnered a critical mass of critical acclaim, and been followed up by a sequel both half again as late as expected and half again as long as its predecessor. The Wise Man’s Fear picks up almost exactly where the first book in the series left off. By way of summary: Kvothe, an extraordinarily intelligent and precocious gypsy child is orphaned by the brutal attack of a præternatural group called the Chandrian. His eventual enrollment in a university of engineering and magic lead him on a number of adventures both profitable (in many ways) and detrimental on his way to investigating and avenging the death of his parents. When we last left him, he had inadvertently called the True Name of the wind, which is the purest and most real form of magic.

If you have not read my review of The Name of the Wind, I would suggest doing so in order to understand why, immediately after finishing it, I read The Wise Man’s Fear, and why I felt so compelled and excited to do so. Though the second installment in the series came out a full four years after the first, and this in turn bodes poorly for the timetable of the third and final entry, I could not help but see what Rothfuss had in store for young Kvothe, whom I had, despite my general cynicism, come to care deeply about as a character. Rather than summarize the plot, which is large and intricate, I’ll instead cover some of the major themes, either narrative or responsive.

Kvothe hit puberty?

When dealing with adolescent protagonists as they grow (see: Harry Potter, Bella Swan), authors are left with the difficult task of narrating their eventual entry into the sexual world—either by praxis or imagination—in a way that is both convincing to readers (who, we must bear in mind, are generally familiar with at least one of the two forms) and not damaging to the general tone of the story, if such a danger is even applicable. Thus far, the story of Kvothe has been largely appropriate for all ages, short of its implied violence. Though there were women (all of them superbly attractive and attracted to Kvothe, natch), our young protagonist’s approach has been one of either disinterest or gentlemanly courtesy. Rothfuss must have been faced with the difficult problem of acclimating Kvothe, now 16, to the looming problem of his genitals; either because the author could think of no subtle way to do it or just because he likes narrating sex, Kvothe finds himself trapped in Fae (i.e., the land of the Fairies) with an ancient magical sexbot named Felurian, who teaches him the entire Fairy Kama Sutra of sex techniques, and is enraptured by Kvothe the Virgin’s innate sexual talent. Yes, this is ridiculous as it sounds. Over to Daniel Hemmens:

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She’s the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you’ll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he’s awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you’d be mad or dead” and he’s like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he’s definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn’t be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn’t sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

Faced with the notion of introducing Kvothe as Lover (even Kvothe as Legendary Lover), we really have two options: one is to admit Kvothe into the bed of some barmaid or peasant girl, where he stumbles and fumbles his way through the account, only to improve quickly and dramatically with practice. This would be in accordance with Kvothe’s story so far.

The other would be to have Kvothe learn, automagically, everything about sex and the fairer sex from the magical sex goddess. This would, although less in keeping with the tone so far, be an easy deus ex machina for Rothfuss to skirt the issue and have his protagonist emerge from the other side suitably versed in the carnal arts.

As Hemmens notes, however, the solution Rothfuss chooses is—bafflingly—to have Kvothe the young bumbler, Kvothe the romantic idiot, be so innately brilliant at sex that he wooes a centuries-old sex goddess, and still automagically increase his practical knowledge of physical intimacy by manifold. It’s a wild turn toward ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the salt to this nasty, gangrenous wound is Kvothe’s time in Ademre, the warrior-culture village where uniformly attractive women have sex as casually as you or I might blow our noses.

This sudden preoccupation with sex commandeers the latter half of the book, even though it seems to serve no purpose; indeed, it fails even to seem prurient or lurid, instead lending a sense of ridicule or burlesque to the book, as though listening to an inadvertently-knowledgeable child talk about how he is going to marry his first-grade crush and pee inside of her.

Whatever happened to the Chandrian?

While Kvothe is spending all his time in bed with every attractive woman in sight (except, notably, his long-time squeeze Denna), he is very obviously not doing what we all expected him to do, which is to continue his obsession with the group of demigods that killed his parents. The Name of the Wind saw Kvothe’s efforts stymied by the censored selection of books available to him in the University; because The Wise Man’s Fear sees him, after 300 pages or so, sent temporarily away from the University to “chase the wind” for a bit, it’s not unreasonable to readers to hope that the story will take our young heroes to exotic locales where he will begin to unravel the mysteries of the evil Chandrian—a search which, we can only assume, will come to a head in the third book.

But there’s almost nothing about the Chandrian to be found in The Wise Man’s Fear. Yes, Kvothe encountered one of their number leading a clutch of bandits; yes, he gets a juicy tidbit about them from the Maer (Mayor?) of Vint, for whom he is a servant for a long period of time. But our expectations—that we would know more about the Chandrian on page 900 than we did on page 1—are unfounded.

By the end of the book, we’ve established that Kvothe

• Is good at sex (and likes it)
• Learns how to fight from an Adem mercenary
• Is still in the Friend Zone with his crush, Denna.
• Is getting better at True Names, even though he still only uses them during extreme duress.

But that’s it. Kvothe just increases his powers and talents incrementally, as though we’re watching Rothfuss level up a World of Warcraft character.

Oh, I get it… Kvothe isn’t so great after all…

Though I noticed the trend during the first book, I saved its mention for this review because the notion really becomes apparent during The Wise Man’s Fear; namely, the initial impression we are given of Kvothe—a legend in his own time, rivaling Taborlin the Great—seems less and less truthful as he tells his story. Some bits of rumor or dispelled outright as Kvothe tells the corresponding true story behind some ridiculous bit of fiction; other times, it’s simply implied that a distant reference is being countered by a suspiciously similar and reasonably less fantastical one. What’s more, the “current” Kvothe (who is relating his story to The Chronicler) has been designed by Rothfuss to be a dejected, largely powerless schmuck who doesn’t at all resemble the fiery-spirited Kvothe of the story.

In other words, the initial disparity that Rothfuss creates, which causes readers to desire to understand why the Kvothe legend and the real Kvothe seem so different, may not simply be due to an RPG-like progression of skills and power as we might assume; it might, in fact, be an unfortunate misunderstanding all along, and that Kvothe the Narrator is still a schmuck who simply happens to have a good memory and is pretty good at sympathetic magic. That would—ha ha!—be a clever deconstruction of fantasy tropes and our linear expectations of power and character, although it would certainly make for a disappointing story. All of this remains to be seen, of course, and despite what seems like a number of deep faults with the second installment in the series, I find myself anxiously awaiting the conclusion.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind came up, a little unexpectedly, on a list of the top 100 or so science fiction and fantasy books of all time. These are about as common as oxygen nowadays, but this particular list was from NPR, so I stopped to read. Among the obvious Tolkien, Heinlein, Herbert, Orwell, and other thoroughly entrenched authors were some surprises. I first learned of Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, which was new to me but an old book with its sci-fi bona fides. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind was more puzzling, being the debut novel of an unknown writer, published a mere four years ago. My curiosity was piqued.

It would be a mistake to say that Rothfuss breaks new ground with The Name of the Wind, the first part of a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles. To the contrary, most of the appeal of Rothfuss is that, as a well-versed fan of science fiction and fantasy, he knows to cherry-pick the most interesting bits of all his various and sundry interests. The result is a mélange of influences, for better or worse.

This is a dangerous game to play. Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance cycle which ended this year, wrote from a similar position, and while the books were certainly successful, they were also uniformly awful—an uninspired pastiche of Middle Earth, Star Wars, and Pern. Because there was nothing unique about the books, and the characters similarly uncompelling (I found myself wishing for the untimely death of no smaller number of them), they were little more than lengthy Tolkien fan-fiction. From the very beginning, we knew that Eragon would eventually beat the evil Galbatorix; since the plot itself was invented by Paolini on the fly to suit whatever ends he felt at the time, the muddled mess in between Eragon’s discovery of a dragon egg and the final battle of the fourth books was narrative masturbation.

Rothfuss handles this with significantly more grace—or at least he does so far. The series is told as an extended flashback; from the very beginning, readers know that Kvothe, the hero with flaming red hair, is a living legend. We don’t know what he’s done, aside from a few tall tales, but we can intuit from the name of the series that regicide will ultimately be involved. We also come to understand, early on, that Kvothe is now living as an innkeeper under the assumed name of Kote. A strange and compelling scene indeed. Eventually, Kvothe relates his story for posterity to a writer named The Chronicler, and the book is mostly told as a story, punctuated by interludes in the present.

By way of a brief plot summary: Kvothe’s story begins when he is young boy, traveling with his family as part of a collective group of musicians and performers known as the Edema Ruh (think of gypsies, negative connotations and all). When a magician (“sympathist”) briefly traveled with them, the precocious Kvothe learns about magic and science. When his entire troupe is slaughtered by an ancient group of bogeymen known as the Chandrian, young Kvothe becomes a street urchin in the large city of Tarbean, homeless and wretched, before he finds his way to The University, which teaches sympathetic magic and other, more mundane topics. The rest of the book details Kvothe’s first few terms at the University.

This all sounds perfectly mundane, but I found myself drawn to Rothfuss’ story; I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, and I’m not the only one. The reasons are subtle, but important.

Whence Kvothe? Since we know immediately that at some point, Kvothe becomes legendary, with apparently unrivaled power, it’s important as readers for us to understand how he goes from a smart and precocious child to the stuff of myths. Especially when Kvothe spends much of the book desperately poor, beaten up, fearing for his life or his status in the University; even by the end of The Name of the Wind, the Kvothe we know doesn’t begin to approach Kvothe qua Legend. It’s a trap that Rothfuss sets; until this disparity between our a priori knowledge of Kvothe and the story of Kvote as Narrator is resolved, there’s a dramatic tension that holds us. A lot—even too much—time is spent with Kvothe worrying about his money as he lives a penny at the time.

Everyone loves ginger kids.... right?

Magic done right. Magic is easy to write, but it’s also boring. Anybody can cast Magic Missile; that, for instance, Harry Potter can wave his wand and do just about anything, makes the magic itself that much less compelling. Rothfuss’ approach to the topic, then, splits into a number of fronts. The more mundane kind of magic, known as “sympathy”, is a blend of traditional magic and more modern ideas like thermodynamics or quantum entanglement. A sympathist (not a magician) uses magic to link two similar objects; by using a handful of ash from a roaring fire, for instance, a sympathist can use its heat to start a fire even when spatially distant from said fire. The quality of the link depends on the similarity from the items, and when desperate, a sympathist can use the heat from their own blood to power a spell. This is a tricky form of magic whose uses and drawbacks aren’t immediately obvious, and so we can’t necessarily predict when or how Kvothe will be able to use them.

A love story, sort of. It’s not too long before Kvothe introduces Denna, a young girl about his age who is likewise a wanderer. The relationship is frustrating to readers because Kvothe remains solidly in the “Friend Zone” while Denna is courted by tens (hundreds?) of men and patrons; yet it is obvious to readers (and even to the characters themselves) that they’re crazy about each other. When Kvothe the Narrator first introduces the subject, however, he does so with an import that implies his relationship with Denna (who is only ever referred to in the past tense) will come to mean a lot more than the romantic-comedy foibles Rothfuss gives us in the first book.

Chicks dig rock stars. Perhaps the most unique—perhaps I should simply say “surprising”?—aspect of Kvothe’s story is that Kvothe is a highly skilled lute player, actor, and singer. His instrument of choice—a lute—features heavily in the story, and is the catalyst for his meeting Denna. Rothfuss’ invented world is gaga for musicians, and Kvothe’s performances routinely move people to tears and/or wild applause; this is perhaps a little difficult to swallow, but we accept it because Rothfuss is at least consistent in his treatment of the subject.

There’s magic, and then there’s magic. I’ve already talked about sympathetic magic, which is a compromise between traditional fantasy thaumaturgy and steampunk science; in fact, the two meet more obviously in the art of “artificing”, which involves engineering mechanical objects which utilize sympathetic magic to do things—”sympathy lamps”, for instance, which use small amounts of the bearer’s body heat to produce a flameless light. But there’s another kind of magic to be had which is more important in Kvothe’s case. A widely-told legend in Kvothe’s universe is that of Taborlin the Great, who “knew the names of all things”; by “names”, we mean of course “True Names”, which is a convenient label for a metaphysical understanding of an object, and which has been used to greater or lesser degree in both other fantasy novels and in real-world myths and legends. Kvothe’s first knowledge of this comes when he botches a sympathetic link and essentially suffocates himself when learning magic from the wandering sympathist in the beginning of the book. The sympathist, who knows that Name of the Wind (you see?), called upon it to undo the binding. From that point forward, Kvothe seeks the Name of the Wind, and it isn’t until the end of the book that he calls it very much by accident and falls under the tutelage of the quirky Master Elodin, the University’s Master Namer.

All of these unsolved mysteries, taken as a whole, are enough to make The Name of the Wind extraordinarily compelling. There’s no small amount that Rothfuss does wrong in his writing, and I hesitate to say that The Kingkiller Chronicles will enter into the fantasy canon, but there’s no denying that the first book in the series is an engaging, playful, thorough beginning to what I hope will be an equally thrilling series.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp

Die Hard has been one of my favorite movies since on first saw it on TV as a child; it sparked my love affair with Bruce Willis and with antiheroes in general. When, only a few years later, I stood in a used book store in Fremont, Nebraska, and read the back cover of a old book called Nothing Lasts Forever and thought “Hunh, this sounds familiar” before putting it back on the shelf, I had no idea that Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel was, in fact, the inspiration for Willis’ break-out movie.

There’s a lot of similarities; there’s still a bored cop stuck in a highrise with a clutch of Teutonic terrorists; he still winds up shoeless and lacerated; he still talks to a black cop named Al Powell via CB radio. Other things are changed; instead of an estranged wife, Joe Leland (not John McClane) is visiting his estranged daughter Stephanie. Instead of a middle-aged (late-30s?), wisecracking nobody, our protagonist is actually a retired policeman who’s kind of a big deal in the security world; so McClane/Leland goes from being young and unimportant to old and famous and well-versed in tactics and gunplay.

The effect here is twofold: first, there’s a sense of geriatric anger and frustration that imbues Leland’s thoughts that is entirely disjoint from McClane’s alternating fear and snarky comments; second, Leland responds viscerally to killing in a way that McClane doesn’t. Both characters break the neck of their first terrorist; McClane does it by tossing a blond German down the stairs, where he lies still, but Leland does it by narrating how he places his shoulder at the back of the neck, shifts his weight, and feels the popping separation—then he vomits.

In Nothing Lasts Forever, the corporation, Klaxon Oil, is basically funneling money into a South American dictatorship; the terrorists, then, are actually leftist guerrillas, after a fashion, and their entire plot does seem to entail disrupting Klaxon’s operations, publicizing their crimes, and blowing $6 million in cash onto the streets of L.A. The makers of Die Hard actually make fun of that motivation by having leftist politics serve as a red herring so that the terrorists can steal bearer bonds and “sit on a beach, earning 20%”. I suppose the idea lost merit in the intervening decade between the book’s release and the filming of the movie.

In these respects, Nothing Lasts Forever represents a more subtle work that spends time cultivating the motivations of its characters; Leland spends no small amount of time reminiscing about his marriage and divorce, the eventual death of his ex-wife, his career as a security consultant, and more importantly, the preconditions and effects of violence. At the beginning of the book, when Leland flourishes his Browning at an irate taxi driver to make it to his flight on time, Thorp was actually giving us the first of many meditations on our disposition to violence. If Leland had not been so quick to pull his gun in order to solve a problem, he may have missed his flight; he would then not be trapped in a highrise fighting twelve armed terrorists. If he hadn’t put up armed resistance, would the terrorists have killed as many people as they did? In the movie, it’s clear that the terrorists planned to blow up their hostage to cover their escape, but the notion is left in doubt in the book, given the gloss of “freedom fighter” mystique that clashes with the terrorists cold-blooded-murder personas. In other words, Nothing Lasts Forever is a short pulp novel which is actually a sustained inquiry into the repercussions of easy violence, even if only threatened or implied.

Reginald VelJohnson is born to play cops

One notable deficit is that because the authorial voice is third-person, but not omniscient (that is, it’s limited to Leland’s knowledge), we miss out on the characterization of Hans Gruber (Anton “Little Tony” Gruber in the book) as done so brilliant by Alan Rickman. In the book, Gruber is a throwaway villain, just as the other terrorists, and even much of the action, is itself throwaway in the manner of so many action pulps of the Don Pendleton variety. Al Powell—in the book a baby-faced rookie—is similarly one-dimensional, little more than a voice on the radio, rather than an empathetic character with his own backstory.

Nothing Lasts Forever, then, is a more subtle work in the sense that its approach to its hero as a sad, lonely older man makes for a rather unique hero, and his framing of the villains as violent (approaching sadistic) leftist Robin Hoods introduces doubt into the neat good/bad binary that we like to expect from pulpy action stories; it is also, however, a thinner and less substantial work in that its cast of supporting characters is one-dimensional, and its narration therefore spirals into mopey solipsism. Nothing Lasts Forever is simply sad; it begins with a sad man regretting the loss of his relationships, and ends with a bloody, critically-injured man regretting the loss of even more relationships and questioning whether his heroism actually cost more lives than it saved. I’m left with no doubt that the film version is better, but I can’t quite decide if the book is good in the first place. I suppose that means Thorp did something right.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

There’s no denying that Alan Moore is a force to be reckoned with in comic books; his work has produced a number of very famous books (Watchmen and V for Vendetta being two notable examples that have also been turned into major films) and popularized the “graphic novel” format. At the same time, one can’t help but find, eventually, that Moore’s strangeness, preponderance of imagined dystopias, and penchant for oddity, to be somewhat laborious.

It's less romantic if you remember that Guy Fawkes was tortured, hanged, and mutilated

Still, it must be said that, at least in a few well-known cases, Moore manages to make compelling stories, whose narrative complexity, breadth of allusion, and characterization easily outstrip those of “real” novels. I have never been a follower of comic books, but the few graphic novels I’ve read in recent years have instilled a fondness for them in telling certain kinds of stories. Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine The Watchmen as a novel; V for Vendetta likewise strains my creativity in pondering an alternate universe where is a standard novel. It could be done, surely, but would it not be a fundamentally different work? Also, we’d be left without the familiar anarchic symbol of the Guy Fawkes mask, recently co-opted by Anonymous.

For those unfamiliar, V for Vendetta tells the story of a near-future England, run by a white supremacist movement called Norsefire. This dystopia encompasses a number of fatalistic ideas of Moore’s: the first is the reemergence of institutionalized racism and eventually ethnic cleansing, and the second is the growth of a police state, wherein liberty is traded for perceived security. After a nuclear war and a plague that may or may not have been real, England is one of the few nations in the world to be relatively prosperous, in part because of the election of the Norsefire Party, which quickly revitalized the nation at the cost of pretty much everything a civilized people hold dear. Non-whites are rounded up and terminated, homosexuals are driven into hiding or outright exterminated, and all items of cultural relevance—books, records, art, &tc.—are declared contraband and destroyed. Imagine a melange of Nazi Germany with handful of Stalinist USSR mixed in; it’s one of many recent works which borrow heavily from Orwell’s 1984.

Enter “V”, a masked outlaw who seeks to overthrow the incumbent regime. After blowing up an important landmark, he saved the life of Evey, a young girl about to be sexually assaulted and likely “disappeared” by the secret police, known as “The Finger”. Thus Evey becomes a part of V’s plans, which include the assassination of a number of prominent politicians and public figures. V’s plans themselves become an issue as readers are made to wonder where his personal revenge stops and his battle to overthrow the fascist government begins.

The language of the graphic novel is not particularly realistic, at least where V himself is concerned. There’s a lot of flowery narration on his part, solemn intonations, and poem-perfect turns of phrase that nonetheless seem to work because Moore wants us (initially) to see V as supernatural. The issue of mortality, when it does arise, is superseded by the notion that ideas are immortal when not invested in a single mortal man. “Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.” Thus, it is not simply V’s design to destroy, one by one, the institutions and leaders of Norsefire; rather, his aim is to convince England’s citizens (who, you may remember, elected Norsefire in the first place) to overthrow the government themselves. His narrative proxy in this is young Evey, whom he draws into his plans and into whom he instills his anarchic ideas; her slow progression from fear to uncertainty to acceptance, we are to take as a synecdoche for all of England.

Alan Moore: Totally Not Creepy At All

I’m told that V for Vendetta was originally inked in black and white; the version of the graphic novel I read was in color, but a terrible washed-out palette of mucous and menses that simply made the panels muddled and the characters difficult to differentiate. It was actually confusing at times which identically-dressed government agent was which. Then, too, I had my own quibbles with Moore and Lloyd’s work itself: the leader of Norsefire has a strange and fetishistic obsession with a computer network called FATE, which makes it too easy to dismiss the man as a raving lunatic; villains who are insane are generally cliché, and do nothing for a story. The movie version wisely omitted this small and insipid subplot.

Though Watchmen was partially a black comedy, V for Vendetta has very little comedic elements, darksome or otherwise. Though one could say it has a happy ending, it is largely a long funeral dirge; a succession of death and dismay. For all that, it is difficult for those with rebellious minds not to feel a stirring in their hearts at the righteous anti-authoritarian sentiment.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Boxset by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I should disclose right away that prior to the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I had never heard of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s superlative graphic novel(s). The only reason I watched it, in fact, was a combination of my friends’ rave reviews (despite lackluster box office performance) and the fact that I absolute adore directory Edgar Wright’s previous films. My reaction to the film was positive and visceral, as it seems to hit all the right stylistic notes, and of course its contents were a geekfest of epic proportions.

The Scott Pilgrim series came in six parts between 2004 and 2010, with the last entry arriving a mere month before the movie’s debut. Though the movie is named after the second book of the series, its plot comprises the entire six books, so either my information is wrong or O’Malley let the screenwriters in on the secret well in advance.

It’s difficult to talk about the graphic novel without talking about the movie, at least for me, since the I enjoyed latter the both first and tremendously. Upon beginning the graphic novel, I was immediately struck both by how spot-on the casting was for the film and how faithful the movie was to the graphic novel, at least until about halfway through, at which point the movie appeared to diverge for the sake of time. I will now stop talking the movie, since there’s nothing more obnoxious than someone reviewing one medium by prattling about a different one.

Everything about the story of the Scott Pilgrim series is great. I say that unabashedly, even though it sounds rabid and not very helpful. Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old Canadian slacker with no job, who plays bass in a crappy band (the Sex Bob-Ombs), lives in a run-down apartment with a gay roommate named Wallace, dates a 17-year-old Chinese schoolgirl named Knives Chau, and—worst of all—lives in Canada. In other words, Scott Pilgrim is a loser, and we have very little reason to like him other than (a) we sometimes like losers and (b) he’s good at other things, like fighting robots.

Everything changes when he meets Ramona Flowers, a hipster chick with dyed hair and rollerblades, fresh from America, for whom he falls like a hammer-head. In order to date Ramona, however, Scott must defeat her Seven Evil Exes. This takes the form of literal fights in the style of anime and video games; in fact, much of the fantastical aspects of Scott Pilgrim come straight from that geek tradition, and the whole series is full of such references, either generic genre references…

Did they have skateboards in Fallout...?

…or even very specific but unstressed references to particular games, such as this obvious (I think) allusion to Final Fantasy VII…

Come this spring.... I'm leaving this town for Midgar.

What’s so interesting about Scott Pilgrim is the way O’Malley blurs the distinction between what happens literally in the comic, and what is a fantastical representation of something mundane. Scott Pilgrim, for instance, fights Ramona’s evil exes until they burst/explode into a pile of coins—of course we aren’t supposed to take this literally…. right? Remember too that Scott Pilgrim is a scrawny loser, and yet he’s renowned in his small town as a fighter. This makes sense only when you consider the real/fantasy fights as a proxy for the sort of video game expertise so valued by Scott Pilgrim‘s likely readers. Even more interesting, though, is that although O’Malley appears to initiate a sort of contract with his readers in which we agree to suspend our disbelief and accept either that Scott Pilgrim literally fights people in the manner of Anime or read the fights as an interesting metaphor for social turmoil, it becomes clear later on in the book that the representation of these fights, especially when told through the lens of Scott’s memory, is unreliable.

Realistically, would the tale of Scott Pilgrim be interesting without the videogame physics? The mithril skateboards or extra lives or subspace purses? I don’t necessarily think so—at least not in graphic novel form. And yet by the end of the book, we’ve come to realize (or at least I did) that boss fights and other such geeky fantastika aren’t nearly as interesting as we thought, and in the meantime we’ve come to care for Scott and Ramona and the rest of the roster, even though their problems are stupid and dramatic soap opera nonsense. It’s a dirty trick, of course, but it’s also a small slice of genius on O’Malley’s part.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

When I reviewed The Magicians last year, I noted that, despite my mixed feelings for Lev Grossman, which includes an outright antipathy for his notions of good storytelling, I was nonetheless impressed by the novelty of what he’d accomplished with his new novel. Almost an anti-bildungsroman, it took every good aspect of magical tales and flushed them down the toilet—ostensibly as a creative way of writing the general malaise that affects the unambitious or ambivalent.

This review may contain spoilers if you have not read the first book.

The Magicians nonetheless seemed like a one-shot contrivance: Grossman’s ass-over-teakettle turning of the boy-meets-magic trope is quite clever, but won’t surprise anybody twice. Grossman’s gifts as a fabulist are less than exemplary (e.g., his world-building is virtually nil), so I was curious just what he’d find to write about in a sequel. As it turns out, the answer is “everything and nothing”.

The Magician King finds Quentin, our anti-hero, back on one of the four thrones of the magical kingdom Fillory, and bored out of his skull. Thirsting for an adventure, he embarks on a voyage to a far-flung island of Fillory, ends up questing for Seven Golden Keys, and suddenly finds himself, along with his traumatized former crush Julia, back in the Real World. This present a problem, since they have no way of returning to Fillory.

Julia herself is a centerpiece of the novel, though she was largely absent from the first book. Grossman tells the tale how she learned magic the unofficial way, populating a series of flophouses for amateur magicians to learn her craft rather than attending the prestigious Brakebills College, Quentin’s alma mater. In a series of vignettes which pepper the main narrative, readers learn the slow process by which Julia became an excellent magician and manages to lose her humanity, both literally and figuratively, leaving her a bit “emo”, to say the least. One gets the impression that she will become important by this series’ (trilogy’s?) end.

Yeah, but what's magic done for me *lately*?

But the main narrative of The Magician King is rather unfocused; though it by and large consists of Quentin and Julia attempting to return to Fillory and complete their Quest, it simultaneously sets up a much larger conflict which will likely form the primary antagonist of the final novel; the premise is interesting, insofar as it’s the first fantasy book I’ve ever read which talks about the fundamental nature of magic; it’s also maddeningly glib and vague, which I can’t yet determine to be either shrewd writing or sheer ineptitude on Grossman’s part. The idea of the series turning into a bona fide fantasy story is somewhat at odds with the sneering, palatially-hollow thesis of the first book.

In other words, The Magician King is a long description of the interstices between the lewd and brazen disappointments of the book and whatever fiery conclusion is yet to come; if The Magicians set up the characters without any real story, then The Magician King sets up a (potential) story without any real characterization to speak of, unless you count Julia’s backstory. There isn’t a rising action in the way of most famous cinematic middle-children like The Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers, so other than a sense of general but undirected unease about the plot and the remote possibility of empathy with the characters, who, as we’ve established, are assholes, The Magician King ends with an ersatz finality, with a narrative roadblock dropped in front of Quentin the audience knows will be swiftly overcome, and an impending disaster that’s only important because Grossman tells us it’s important, not because we’ve come to realize it on our own.

In Grossman’s article for the Wall Street Journal in July of this year, he gives some insight into what drives his creative process. Wizards and faeries and magic wands are all de rigueur, of course, but all Grossman indicates that all good fantasy has more to do with character development than swords and sorcery:

But what’s the point, when you can just use magic to fix everything? It’s just wish-fulfillment [says a hypothetical hater of fantasy novels]

The more fantasy you read, the more you notice that even after the hero comes of age, it is rare that all those fancy powers that he has gained solve all his problems. It’s not about wish-fulfillment, or at least it’s not just about that.

Harry Potter’s problems don’t end when he becomes a wizard, they’re just beginning. The moment that I look for in a serious fantasy novel is when the hero realizes that yes, I can now speak to animals or move between worlds or bend the raw energy of the unknown to my will. But my problems remain the same. At which point the hero realizes that magic is the easy stuff. The real battles, the hard battles, are the ones that get fought on the inside.

To whatever extent I can call Grossman a talented writer, I think he did a novel job of getting this across in The Magicians by co-opting a currently popular genre and subverting it with this notion. But while The Magician King plays with these same notions, the novelty is gone, and despite Grossman’s intentions of repositioning his series more firmly in the fanasty genre this time around, with slightly less cynical subversion, one can’t help get the idea that characters are doing little more than farting around. If this is the setup for an explosive third novel, it’s the most mind-numbing and arbitrary rising action I’ve ever read.

Only time will tell if Grossman manages to turn his story arc into something grand and vindicating, however darksome, or if it will end up a muddled mess of boneless characters and fuzzy math. My suspicions point me toward the latter, though I yearn to be wrong this time around.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go is yet another in a long list of influential science fiction that I keep meaning to read. It won a Hugo in 1972, and represents the first in a series of books known as Riverworld. As with all good science fiction (I don’t know how many times I’ve said this), it’s not even particularly science-fictional except in narrative skeleton, but instead spends most of its time exploring sociological issues.

One of the more interesting things about …Scattered Bodies… is that its protagonist is a real historical figure—namely Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890). An all-around badass, Burton was a consummate explorer in an age long before GPS; he was also before his time in many ways, such as his stance against colonialism. At least in Farmer’s universe, he’s also a lover, fighter, skeptic, stoic, and all-around excellent guy to have on your team if you wake up on a strange planet wearing no clothes and under the apparent watch of a technologically-advanced race of beings whose intentions may be malevolent.

Burton, in the book’s timeline, dies in 1890 and wakes up on Riverworld, an alternate world (actually, a planet in the far future), in what is clearly some sort of experiment. The length of the river, which appears to stretch for hundreds of miles, is lined with “grail stones”, which provide food in the form of, basically, MREs, for all of the billions of inhabitants, all them historical persons resurrected along the river. They are people from all places and times, from modern 1970s Americans to Neolithic nomads. Farmer alludes to the inherent problems of communications, and the disparity of technological progress among peoples, but largely smooths these over as a function of time and practice. It’s a cheap tactic, but in fairness, I can’t think of solving it any other way short of magic. Burton, in any case, takes charge, attracting a small group of followers who either want his protection (ladies from Victorian England) or know for historical fact that he is, in fact, a badass (20th century American admirers), or simply intuit it (neanderthals). Also, he can’t shake off an apparent connection with none other than Hermann Göring, drug addicted Nazi and all-around terrible human being.

He's bringing sexy back

Obviously, if you find yourself on a strange world along with every other person in existence who has ever died, your natural assumption is that you’ve found a rather strange afterlife. This is one of the themes that Farmer explores in-depth, though to no real conclusion. Many people, of course, renounce faith in the face of what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that their scriptures were wrong. Still other kept their beliefs, assuming that what was prophesied to them was simply yet to come. Of course others charlatans formed new groups, preaching that they knew the answers, if only you would join their group. To Your Scattered Bodies Go isn’t, of course, a comment on religion, since it becomes clear that it does not deal with an afterlife; rather, it is to some degree a book about how people react when information is scarce. Think Lord of the Flies meets Foundation.

But of course Riverworld is not an afterlife, as Burton finds. Though early on, the book’s resolution is time is minute, it later skips ahead by months and even years as Burton eventually seeks the river’s headwaters and the architects of the world. In the meantime, he meets a rogue member of bespoke architects, sails up and down the river, falls into and escapes enslavement by various tyrants, and dies—sometimes intentionally—hundreds of times, only to be resurrected as in the book’s beginning, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther from the river’s headwaters; Burton calls this the “Suicide Express”.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not answer the all questions it raises—many are, I imagine, saved for sequels. This makes it a little difficult to evaluate the book on its own; as the whole, the series may be internally consistent and neatly resolved, or it could be an incoherent mess, but one cannot know for sure without reading the rest of the series. Despite its Hugo award and raft of praise, the book didn’t capture my imagination or curiosity quite enough to continue the series, which leaves me in the uncomfortable position of either foregoing the knowledge of Riverworld’s architects, reading a plot summary online, or simply adding the sequels to the end of my Brobdingnagian list of books to read.

John Dies at the End by David Wong

As a young boy, my brother tended to get Cracked magazine rather than Mad magazine; I think it was probably cheaper for essentially the same content (or so it seemed to a young boy). In any case, he (and therefore I) grew up with Cracked. By the time the magazine itself went under, of course, I had stopped paying attention, but at some point in the last few years, I began regularly checking the new Cracked.com, which I find is much funnier than it likely should be.

At the helm of this new digital enterprise (sans Sylvester P. Smythe) is senior editor David Wong, a pseudonym for Jason Pargin. It was really only via this association that I learned about John Dies at the End, Wong/Pargin’s satirical horror novel, recently rescued from an indie publisher by St. Martin’s Griffin. Given my positive associations with the new Cracked, giving John Dies at the End a shot was a no-brainer. Also, it’s being adapted into a movie with Paul Giamatti.

I expected more out&out slapstick and or snide commentary, but I never got it; John Dies at the End, though full of enough random events and subtle digs at horror tropes to fulfill Wong’s contractual obligations for what constitutes hilarity in horror novel. For all that, though, he’s managed what is—most of the time—and engaging “B Horror” book, the sort of which reminds me of my youth watching MonsterVision and the indomitable Joe Bob Briggs.

The book is split roughly into three parts, indicating its origins as a serial publication on the web. Its prologue (I don’t know if it was added for the final manuscript or if it existed in serial form as well) is somewhat misleading, as it introduces its characters as something of a midpoint in the story, and—if I might editorialize—assigns them a confidence and skill that they don’t have. David Wong and John Cheese are ghostbusters, or something to that effect; the prologue is intentionally vague about the nature of what they do, but it nonetheless finds the dysfunctional duo (and the dog Molly) venturing to an isolated farmhouse where, with great aplomb, they do battle against a malicious, paranormal force. Though the impression of David and John as slackers and somewhat bumbling malcontents is inescapable, one can’t help but feel as though they are just a little badass.

The start of the book proper immediately dismisses the second impression, heaving the reader bodily back to the recent past, with David and John as grunts at a struggling video rental store at an undisclosed, unremarkable Midwestern town. At a local music festival, David and John get tangled up with a lost dog, a crazy Jamaican drug dealer, and a strange drug called “soy sauce” which, it turns out, is made of cryptozoological “rods“, and gives its users rare powers such as clairvoyance if it doesn’t kill them instead. Because of this “soy sauce”, David and John are launched into a series of adventures which contain a whole host of horror and science fiction tropes, intentionally referential and somewhat scatterbrained. Shadow people from other dimensions, demons inhabiting humanoid forms comprised of sausages or cockroaches, exorcisms, lots of violence and gore that seems somehow too incredible or ridiculous to be disgusting (e.g. Kill Bill Part I), and a nonchalance with respect to the space-time continuum that is either lazy or brilliant. Continuity in general is something of a problem, either by design or simply because it was too difficult to take certain things back when published serially; Molly the dog is alive, possessed, dead, alive again, and potentially dead again, with no particular explanation as to why or how. Trips to other dimensions to meet Korrok, a demon/demigod and the book’s official(?) malefactor, pay homage to the Doom video games and turn decidedly scifi with Artificial Intelligences and ray guns. Most of this is wrapped in a frame narrative of David telling his story (or at least the first two parts) to a skeptical human interest reporter named Arnie Blondestone, and even this frame narrative ends up taking a strange twist that makes little sense because Arnie is dead before the interview even begins.

Oh Google, is there anything you can't find?

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

In my review of Franzen’s previous bestseller, The Corrections, I noted that the story was a thoroughly midwestern one—that is, its character is thoroughly understated and unextraordinary, and yet somehow Franzen’s treatment is surprisingly vicious. It isn’t that the gentle midwestern family hides monsters (as least not in his stories), but that the superficially serene exterior of the atomic midwestern family hides a pathological dysfunction. What makes Franzen’s approach to this dysfunction so unique is that he allows his characters to implode with nary a ripple outside of their clan. It’s simultaneously beautiful and damning.

Freedom is, in many ways, the same story told over again. This time an atomic family in suburban Minnesota disintegrates before our very eyes, beginning (retrospectively) with grandparents and trickling down through the generations, like bad plumbing reaching the floors below. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that, like The Corrections, Freedom concludes with a sort of uneasy armistice that appears to be a “happy ending” until you stop and think about it.

Wordsmithy

When Freedom came out, the most common criticism I heard about it was Franzen putting words into his characters mouths that they would never, ever say in real life; the implicit criticism is that Franzen’s a pompous ivory-tower academic who writes books divorced from realism and the people they purport to represent. It’s not a small criticism; nor is it wildly off the mark, as Franzen has noted it and done a hat dance around it.

My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and capturings and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time. Just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as the cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. It’s not all ice cream, but sauteed broccoli rabe has charms of its own.

I’d recommend reading that entire essay, long though it may be. Franzen in this way is very much like his late friend, David Foster Wallace, feeling viscerally compelled to avoid impenetrable academic speech (e.g. Judith Butler), yet apparently incapable of narratively representing themselves as simply and accessibly as lesser writers. I would argue this is perfectly natural, and there is a direct (asymptotic) relationship between complexity of topic and complexity of narrative and speech.

In critique of Franzen, however, his grist for the mill this time around comes from his decision to make a large part of the book be a “book within a book”, written by one of the characters, but the narrative style never changes. Patty Berglund as narrator is not one iota different from Jonathan Franzen as narrator. I questioned, while reading, the wisdom of such a device, until it became important later on; still, a writer of Franzen’s caliber should have found a way around it.

The Normal and the Transgressive

Walter and Patty Berglund are two liberal middle-class parents in a gentrified St. Paul suburb, raising their two children, Jessica and Joey, engaged in a passive-aggressive feud with their neighbor, Carol Monaghan, whose daughter Connie is sexually involved with Joey. The impression we are very purposely given is that Walter is an unremarkable milquetoast who studiously avoids conflict and aggressive; Patty is a neurotic soccer mom with a tremendous mean streak; Jessica remains largely absent from the novel; Joey, despite everyone’s best efforts to deny it, is the spitting image of his mother.

One of the most interesting parts of the book—but one that is also somewhat predictable—is the extended flashback to Patty and Walter’s youth and college years. Each deals with emotional baggage that I won’t deal with here, but it’s important to note that although Walter and Patty end up married, the path to said marriage was not at all obvious or easy in retrospect. Patty, former athlete, aggressive and lusty, pined for a long time after Walter’s rockstar friend Richard Katz, ignoring Walter’s constant and faithful entreaties for a relationship. Walter, the self-described feminist, the safe choice, whose sexual style could be be described as a “light touch”, was silver medal that Patty finally settled for.

The aggressive/transgressive sex (life, really) that Patty always lusted after remained wrapped up in Richard Katz, with whom the Berglunds kept in contact, and which Patty finally consummated in her middle age, as the entire Berglund family started to unwind.

The motif of transgression unsurprisingly rears up in Joey’s life. Still with Connie, years after their sexual relationship started, he begins to feel trapped in the relationship; Connie, though faithful, obedient, and compliant, doesn’t seem an appropriate match for Joey, who wants himself sow his wild oats. It is, unironically, Connie’s willingness for unorthodox sex that keeps Joey in the relationship, and despite eventual infidelity from both, they end up together in a way that hearkens suspiciously to Walter and Patty’s earlier coupling.

Freedom

Everything comes to us filtered through (mostly latent, sometimes explicit) anger and depression, a disheartening but somehow realistic motif that colors the novel from its first page to its last. Consider Franzen’s recent article in The New Yorker, largely a transcription of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College.

And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

[...]

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

There is a latent fear shared by all of the characters of Freedom, it seems, to admit their imperfections and be loved in spite of them. Instead, an obsession with the superficial and an intolerance for emotional honesty dominate, and ultimately destroy, the Berglunds’ lives. The concept of freedom comes up in conversations between characters, though it’s mostly of a superficial, free-market sort of freedom. Franzen has said the title itself refers to the existential freedom given to you by accepting what you are rather than clutching your misleading “freedom” to be whatever you want. Franzen has created what Sam Anderson of New York Magazine calls “a social-realist epic about a depressive, entropic midwestern family being swallowed and digested by the insatiable anaconda of modernity.” But he’s also created a bold statement about what it does and doesn’t mean to love someone or something, and what happens when we forget these very basic ideas.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I’d never heard of Justin Cronin before picking up The Passage; he’s won awards for previous work, though I’m given to understand that this latest work represents something of a departure for him. It may be new to Cronin, but it’s certainly not (or shouldn’t be) new to most readers, as The Passage is an overly-long pastiche of well-worn horror and sci-fi tropes, with a lot of solemn navel-gazing as filler.

The Stand (Spy v. Spy)

The Passage begins (in a roundabout way) with the destruction of humanity by an viral outbreak which turns the infected into some reasonable facsimile of vampires—superhuman creatures who eviscerate any survivors lucky enough to escape infection. I’m not divulging any spoilers when I say this, as the vampire apocalypse is the narrative premise of the entire book, but said apocalypse doesn’t actually occur until more than 200 pages into the book. Compare this to, say, Stephen King’s The Stand, from where Cronin borrows many of his ideas, in which the end of humanity happens both early and swiftly; the rest of the The Stand‘s literally biblical length is divided between narration relevant to the plot and tangential character-building which does not necessarily have any impact upon the novel. However much may be said about The Stand‘s cultural importance—which is, I believe, vast, or at least so within the genre—it is at its most basic a very simplistic good v. evil story so aptly illustrated by the Spy vs. Spy cover art which adorns one of its editions.

Chronologically, the book can be split into three sections, although the third is really a subset of the second:

1. Near-future, c. 2018. South African bats carry a virus which affects humans. Government conspiracy ensues. Uh oh.
2. Far future, c. 2108 (or ≈90 A.V.). Small enclaves attempt to resist the large monster population.
3. (Really) Distant future, c. 3018 (or ≈1000 A.V.). Some kind of human civilization allows for universities and academic conferences, at least in the antipodean world, far from the initial site of outbreak.

In the near-future, a scientist documents his ill-fated trip into South America. The biological phenomenon being studied is one which has the potential to create ageless humans by reactivating the thymus, but the trip and the knowledge in question ultimately kills mankind as we know it (oops). In the far future, scattered enclaves of humans survive on century-old technology which is rapidly falling into decay. Excerpts from written documentation about the apocalypse and the time after, listed in the book as being presented/read at a conference in New Zealand almost a thousand years after the outbreak of the virus (or so we can intuit from the designation “A.V.”) more or less indicate to readers that humanity survives, and moreover survives to a point where it can hold academic conferences, even if they’re relegated to far-flung locations like New Zealand. In other words, Cronin immediately removes some of his narrative suspense by letting slip the fact that humanity survives the spread of a virus, even if it takes a millennium to do so, effectively eliminating this question as a potential point of tension for readers. What’s left? There’s either the sheer interest of post-apocalyptic life (hint: this isn’t it), or else Cronin has co-opted the Mad-Max-Meets-Team-Edward schtick for a character drama. We know that Amy Bellafonte, the mysterious young girl around whom the book revolves, is an anti-personality and therefore of only morbid curiosity; early characters, such as the government agent Brad Wallgast (father-figure for Amy and essentially a co-conspirator for the viral outbreak), come and go, built into passingly-interesting characters whose involvement ends abruptly for reasons one can easily surmise.

It’s important to note here that The Passage, despite its length, is only the first of a planned trilogy, meaning that just because a plot point failed to be important in The Passage doesn’t mean it won’t become important at some future point. Still, one feels a little cheated when humanity takes 200 pages to end; for all intents and purposes, Cronin could have spend 20 pages on the pre-apocalypse portion and not appreciably altered the story that came after. Why, one must ask, does Cronin see fit to tell Amy’s history by first telling the story of Amy’s teenage mother, who is given a detailed back-story and a tragic parting-of-ways which has no bearing on the plot? Is it because this will become important in successive novels (unlikely) or because Cronin subscribes to the Stephen King school of writing, wherein any character development, whether in a vacuum or written to a particular end, is considered important? I remember reading The Stand, and thinking during most of it that King could stand to learn a few things from Poe.

One thing that both King and Cronin share is a strange desire to mix the scientific with the mystical. In both The Stand and The Passage (and, for that matter, Richard Matheson’s superior I Am Legend), the root cause is viral (or, more accurately, pathogenic). Cronin, in fact, begins with a Harvard scientist emailing his colleague from the jungles of South America, where an attack by uncommonly-aggressive bats sets events in motion. But both ultimately devolve from a scenario wherein understandable, biological causes are the root of the problem to one wherein a lot of predestination, extra-sensory knowledge, and other hocus pocus come into play. In King’s novel, at least, one accepted the fight between good and evil as a simple dichotomy and one that was at least largely allegorical, even if Randall Flagg quickly approaches the designation of a literal devil; by contrast, Cronin attempts to explain all the voodoo of the “virals” as analogous to the social structure of ants, but the layman’s explanation falls short and the whole situation smells like a bad case of stock supernatural lore, explained by modern science (sort of), which then regains all of its original mystique and inscrutability by way of solemn pronunciations, predestination, and narrative hyperbole. It’s a valiant effort, I suppose, but it ultimately stinks of inconsistency, and one wonders just what kind of book Cronin is trying to write: The Stand and/or I Am Legend, wherein a realistic story has a supernatural engine, or Twilight, wherein the supernatural is literally magical for no purpose other than sparkles. I don’t know, and I suspect Cronin didn’t quite either; the resulting mélange is surprisingly two-dimensional and wholly unsatisfying.

As I mentioned, The Passage is the first entry in a planned trilogy to be released in rapid succession; the thought of having to slog through two more ponderous novels of the same indecisive nonsense makes me weary: there isn’t enough narrative tension to make me interested, I don’t like the characters enough to care who dies, and I don’t enjoy the writing enough to read it for the thrill of the art. Clearly, The Passage is not a storyline I’ll be continuing.