Category: Brilliant Storytelling

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins read by Bernadette Dunne (!)

I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:

This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.

The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.

He became, she tells us,

by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”

And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.

It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.

And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child read by Dick Hill

Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a flesh palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger. .. The grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass cased shell socketing home the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears, and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them. His life and his history lacked many things: he had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came for exactly what they were….

This perfectly tuned register and processor of mechanical sounds is Jack Reacher, calculator and decipherer of numerical messages, auditor and predictor of probable forces of character, probable explosions of personality, probable damage to friends and country. Reacher is a ‘restless’ ex MP who left his happy gang of Special Investigators ten years ago, and has an unsettled and unsettling personality. He does not believe in carrying a spare shirt:

The Door to December by Dean Koontz read by George Guidall

For those of you who have been reading or not reading Koontz lately, it may not be obvious that there are two Koontzes: the early Koontz and the late Koontz. Like the early Heidegger and the late Heidegger. The distinction should open the door to hours and hours and hours of delightful, unadulterated intelligence, humorous rumination, and lines of imaginative flight: emotional transport, sideways, to use a Koontzian term. For those of us who know who Sammy Davis Jr. and Mr. Wizard are, add hours of being-with-a-member-of-one’s-own-generation type pleasure. The ease of recognition. The Door to December is early Koontz — performed by a seasoned master: George Guidall. The first actor, in fact, hired by Recorded Books, a New York City based studio that used actors (rather than babysitters) to read books out loud.

And now to the battle of principalities. Yes, principalities. Early Koontz is political and politics is always about principalities. Consider the ex-husband that kidnaps the daughter and disappears for 5 years. Consider the mother. These are characters, but they are also theories. She is a psychiatrist specializing in child psychology, and he is a behavioral psychologist specializing in behavior modification. Their theoretical differences underpin the moral-emotional ones. One theory locks the child in a gray room, isolates it, deprives it, shocks it, plays with it and forces it to change. The other theory lacks scientific rigour, but feels better. It is the theory of the mother who tries to heal the beaten child.

And alongside the good mother is the good cop. Defiant, tenacious, competent, the cop and the mother talk the child away from the institution of evil. Talk is play, talk is confession, talk is a technique which can organize both good and bad emotions.

Someday the totalitarians will take over and they’ll pass laws so you can’t pee unless you have permission from the official federal urinary gatekeeper. Then you’ll come to me with your bladder bursting and you’ll say Luther, my God, why didn’t you warn me about these people?

In Las Vegas…

…there were hundreds of people …standing around the craps tables, people in suits and evening gowns, people in slacks and jeans conscienciously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory.”

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a recipe for food of last resort that my father has apparently squirrelled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else turn to shit, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup… At heart, it’s an anxious romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner. But when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel….

Southern Living by Ad Hudler read by Cynthia Darlow

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’…Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women — a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife — track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.

Sandra Nichols Found Dead by George Higgins::George Guidall

When a lawyer and a cop reconstruct the life of a pretty, jolly slut they recover hundreds of small, dishonourable wrongs, shameful and unpretty. Sandra Nichols loved to fuck, and she liked men, and she married them. And then she left them, and started again.

Her children are a sad disarray of nervous and neurotic plaintiffs in Kyle v Wade, the wrongful death case they bring against Sandra’s last husband. Peter Wade, who wasn’t meant for Williams College, nor perhaps for this planet, would not stand trial for the murder of Sandra Nichols. Instead, Peter would be compelled to give these demented children all the money he will have had to give Sandra, if he’d divorced her, according to the prenuptual agreement he had signed. A pretty good hat trick for a criminal lawyer, newly versed in Chapter 229 section 2 of the Massachusetts Criminal Code and the 1972 Compensatory Wrongful Death Act.

Nevil Shute No Highway read by Robin Bailey

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….

— John Masefield

Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.

Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.

India Knight’s My Life on a Plate read by Jill Tanner

More than a little over the top, Clara Hutt is dropping her 2 boys off this morning wearing her pajama bottoms (again) and wondering (again) why all the other mothers can arrive at school with perfectly starched blouses and expertly applied makiage. Not now, Darling, I’m Paaaarking,” and again, “I AM PAAARKING,” and again “Stop it, Charlie, don’t make me want to break your legs.”

There are so many things wrong with this picture that the fact that Clara doesn’t speak to her children like the mummies in books is, well, funny. Indeed, Charlie is six and already has a “vast panoply of hideous, faintly disturbing, terms of abuse.” “You tiresome retard” he says to his brother. Or to some hapless toddler on a play date: “God! You exasperating creature! What is it? Talk for God’s sake!! God. God. Bloody God!” She is, of course, to blame she thinks, while she watches Naomi The Perfect Mother and Crossing Guard doing her pelvic floor exercises. Hup two three four and hoooooolddd.

I think Clara is darling. In perfectly bad faith for the nought generation, Clara has all the elements of a mad Greek family member. But she is English, and thanks to Jill Tanner’s drawn out vowels and enthusiastic syntax, we are happy to relocate our tragic flaws.

Clara’s mother is, on the other hand, global.

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile read by Christopher Lane

Imagine overhearing the comments of secretaries, girlfriends, GS-11s, GS-18s, CIA heads of station, assistants to CIA heads of station, busty, born-again Texan society matrons, outrageously charming right-wing politicians with more friends than God, superstitious immigrants and sons of immigrants, Muj(ahadeen) terrorists, Afghani torturers, Pakistani tyrants, Egyptian defense ministers turned mule and donkey merchants, so that you can actually see the pieces of history being pushed into place, so that a cult of personalities and a war become cause and effect. Almost. Because things are not so simple….

It is the genius of Crile, ace reporter, that manages these unmanageable personalities and tracks one mad Texan after another, one fanatic after another across the Washington political stage, quoting all the way.

“Now [Avracatos] was forced to recognize that without Charlie he would still be roaming the halls of the CIA without purpose….The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered he actually loved Charlie Wilson.”

He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking Congressman in the last 40 years have gone to bat publically to get the CIA more money? …Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles when the cold war was one big fucking goat fuck, noone was publically calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatamela or Cuba or anywhere.

This is not just a text read out loud. This is not a written momento of what was written about guns, mules, Afghanis. It is a tale of what was said, who said it to whom and how, with what kind of accent, and what they were wearing when they said it and who was looking at them when they said it and who wanted to fuck them because they said it …. and how they were fucked. Short, hard, telegrammic statements that moved men and things and boundaries. What Sartre would have called: the gossip, the rumours, the news. Told, and told again because it was originally told, this story which when read is re-heard, again. But differently.