#'s 13 & 15 The Tourist and The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer

In Olen Steinhauer’s novel The Tourist, Milo Weaver has tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind by giving up his job as a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity—and working a desk at the CIA’s New York headquarters. But staying retired from the field becomes impossible when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo’s oldest colleagues and friends. With new layers of intrigue being exposed in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s been pulling the strings once and for all.

What makes Milo Weaver so interesting as a character is that, as far as spy novel protagonists go, he is the anti-James Bond. Unlike Bond, Jason Bourne, and other literary/cinematic super-spies, Weaver is flawed, making many mistakes and errors in judgment along the way. In short, he acts like a real person caught up in extraordinary circumstances who, although competent and experienced, has to make split second life and death decisions.

Those decisions have a psychological impact. When we first meet Weaver, in a flashback that opens the book, he is mentally unhinged by his life as a tourist. He is sustained by booze and amphetamines and takes suicidal risks, subconsciously trying to end his disconnected, rudderless existence. The day is Sept. 11, 2001.

The novel doesn’t go there, thankfully, but the after-effects of that day are still rippling in the back ground as we jump to the present. Weaver is a “travel agent” managing tourist operations from an office in New York. From here the story is firmly grounded in a post-9/11 world of inter-security agency jurisdiction rivalries, press-leaked scandals, and justifying the agency’s existence in the face of looming budget cuts. Also, flying in the face of Bond’s bed-hopping alpha male archetype, Weaver is now happily married with a child. When the interrogation with the aforementioned assassin he had long been pursuing pulls him back into tourism, Weaver’s efforts to hold onto his family and stay grounded, while trying to do a job that doesn’t mesh with stability and connection, carries as much weight and tension in the story as resolving the main plot.

Steinhauer, while still crafting a thriller that’s entertaining as hell, proves himself a talented literary writer who can turn a phrase and craft great prose as well as move the plot along. He also creates truly multi-faceted and memorable characters. There are great twists and surprises and nothing and no one can be taken at face value. One of the best new characters I’ve read in a long time is German spymaster Erika Schwartz, who is 300-plus pounds, in her mid- to late-fifties, and ends each day with a snickers bar and a cheap bottle of Riesling. She figures prominently in the second book of the planned trilogy, The Nearest Exit, and is far from the caricature you assume her to be when she is first introduced.

Unlike another recent popular trilogy, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl who…” Millennium series, everything means something and is important to the story. I ripped through the first two books and felt a crushing sense of withdrawal and longing when I realized that I would probably have to wait at least a year to read the as-yet-unpublished concluding book in the series. If you like smart, fast paced thrillers, I recommend The Tourist to you without hesitation.

Reading update

Just got back from a whirlwind 2 weeks in California. Did some reading but didn't have much chance for writing. Expect review posts to resume this weekend for those wondering where they went. I'm almost to the half way mark in my "52 in 52" exercise. Here's my list so far

1. Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
2. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime – John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
3. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larsson
4. The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting – Jim Walsh
5. Then We Came To The End – Joshua Ferris
6. The Hunter - Richard Stark
7. The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson
8. Heart Shaped Box - Joe Hill
9. Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby
10. Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
11. Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
12. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
13. The Tourist - Olen Steinhauer
14. Night Soldiers - Alan Furst
15. The Nearest Exit - Olen Steinhauer
16. Kirby:King of Comics - Mark Evanier
17. Let It Blurt:The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic - Jim DeRogatis
18. The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
19. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
20. World War Z - Max Brooks
21. Neuromancer - William Gibson
22. Devil In A Blue Dress - Walter Mosley
23. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

As you can see my reading pace is faster than my writing pace. I plan on catching up with at least 2 or 3 blog posts a week for your reading pleasure, and as requested, I will probably go back and review some of the books I read before I started the blog.

Looking back, I've had a productive reading summer, having finished 13 books in the past month and a half, not counting magazines, comics and newspapers. That's some good reading. I'm finally making some real progress in my infinite "to read" pile.

#12 The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists is a novel about the quirky, maddening, endearing people who write and read an international newspaper based in Rome: from the obituary reporter who will do anything to avoid work, to the young freelancer who is manipulated by an egocentric war correspondent, to the dog-obsessed publisher who seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer.

Or so says the ad copy from the novels website, but it is so much more than that. The Imperfectionists details the last days of the aforementioned international, English language newspaper. Like most newspapers theses day it is struggling with declining readership and revenue in the digital age. What is so engaging about Rachman’s novel is that, not only does it encapsulate a soon to be bygone way of viewing the world and the people swept in the current of changing times and technology, but it does so in such an original and masterly way for a debut novelist.

Each chapter is basically a short story centering on one of the people who work for or are affiliated in some way with the newspaper. Even though the chapters are complete and self contained in and of themselves, taken together they form a tableau the tells the story of newspaper, it’s personality and internal politics. In between each chapter is a brief one or two page interlude detailing the history of the newspaper through the years.

What is brilliant about The Imperfectionists is the literary slight of hand Rachman uses to accomplish this feat, it all done through nuance, suggestion, and each character’s natural actions within the confines of their personal narrative. Except for the historical interludes, there is no overt exposition. Characters mentioned in passing, or shown as secondary characters in early chapters, become the main characters in later chapters and vice-versa giving the book a non-intrusive continuity that acts as a narrative thread between stories.

Taken on their own the chapters/stories themselves are marvels of characterization and short story writing. They are both funny and tragic, but also human in the most authentic way. There a couple of minor instances where things get a bit over the top, but that is a small quibble and is more than balanced out by the believability of the main characters and the interesting and ingenious ways the stories are told. The characters have surprising depth and stories go in unpredictable, but always believable, directions. In each chapter, the main character is irrevocably changed by the end along with the reader’s perception of them, which is what all great fiction should do.

If literature is meant to give insight and personal context to the time it is written in, The Imperfectionists is an instant classic. It is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

#11 Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is not an easy book to explain or summarize in a paragraph or two, so I’m going to place that burden on the Random House publicity department by cutting and pasting their summary from the Fortress of Solitude webpage. It still doesn’t do the story justice, but it’s as good as I could up with and certainly more pithy. My analysis follows.

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."



This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions-what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money-are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.



This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist. This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.

This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.

It is a testament Lethem that he successfully weaves so many themes and subjects into Fortress of Solitude without them seeming disparate or making the narrative chaotic. The fact that so many fully formed characters and viewpoints are not only represented but are essential to, not only each other, but also the overall story is quite an accomplishment.

Any one of half a dozen characters or themes in Fortress of Solitude could have sustained their own novel. The fact that the Lethem can shift through so many themes, subjects, and POV’s without alienating the reader is amazing. That’s not to say that some of the shifts aren’t abrupt or jarring, but with a bit of patience on the reader’s part it all fits together and makes sense within the story.

The most jarring example, for me, is the introduction of the magic ring halfway through the novel. Up until that point the story had been a straight period piece/coming-of-age story chronicling Dylan’s difficulties growing up a white Jewish kid in a black Brooklyn neighborhood during the early seventies. Early on Dylan mentions the “flying man” he sees out of the corner of his eye, but that can easily be dismissed as the symbolic figments of a comic obsessed kid. But when that flying man falls out of the sky and gives Dylan the ring, things change. The moment Dylan started flying was so shocking and out of left field for me that I questioned whether it really happened. However, this bit of magical realism opens the story up to explore the core characters and themes in insightful and original ways. The super-powers the ring confers are unpredictable and the personality of the wearer influences both how the ring works and how they act with it on so that it becomes another reflection of each individual character rather than a plot device.

Yet, underneath the period coming-of-age story and magical realism undertones, Fortress of Solitude is a story about race, identity, and culture and where those three things meet, diverge, and run parallel. It’s about the fragile politics of race between two best friends, one white and one black. It’s about the things we cling to, like art and music, which we use to shape our identities. It’s about escaping your upbringing and past and then learning to come to terms with it when you can’t let it go.

Lethem imbues the deeper cultural meaning with an understanding of pop-culture throughout the story that touches on the bigger pop-cultural events of the time like the burgeoning hip-hop and punk movements. This gives the reader reference points, be it an obscure comic book or fondly remembered one-hit-wonder single, which gives the story a knowing and authentic nostalgia.

Fortress of Solitude is a hard book to boil down and dissect. But, as with the best books, it lingers in your subconscious. You can’t help but think about it, and each time you do the story becomes deeper and richer. It’s smart, profound, identifiable and yes, exasperating at times, but overall a worthwhile reading experience.

#10 Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

I’ve been on a bit of a James Bond kick lately. Until recently I’d never seen the Sean Connery Bond movies much to the chagrin of some of my friends. I had just never gotten around to it. When I was growing up Roger Moore was James Bond and while I enjoyed his portrayal as a kid, it didn’t set world on fire for me. However, I recently watched the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. This has in turn has reignited my interest in all things Bond, James Bond. And being the bibliophile that I am, has lead me to Ian Fleming’s original novels.

In Casino Royale, the first in the series, Monsieur Le Chiffre ("the cipher"), the treasurer of a Soviet-backed trade union in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, is running a baccarat game in the casino at Royale-les-Eaux, France, in order to recover union money he lost in a failed chain of brothels.

Expert baccarat player James Bond (British secret agent 007) is assigned the defeat of Le Chiffre, in the hope that his gambling debts will provoke Soviet espionage agency SMERSH to kill him. Add in Bond Girl/Femme Fatale Vesper Lynd and a few twists and turns and that’s basically what you get.

For those weaned on the film series (especially the aforementioned film version with Daniel Craig) this novel is going to be surprisingly sedate and down to earth. This is definitely Bond in his most formative state and Fleming seems to be feeling his way through the story as much as his main character. All the familiar Bond tropes – the slam bang opening action sequence, the gadgets, the suave personality, quips, and serial womanizing are not in evidence. This Bond is tentative, business-like, brutish and somewhat naïve. I’ve heard that Fleming became influenced by the film series as it developed and its more fantastical elements crept into later novels, but here we have a simple, low-key introduction to the character of James Bond and as such it’s probably one of the most realistic stories in the Bond canon.

For those used to the non-stop action and globetrotting of the films, that realism is going to be hard to take in places. The centerpiece of the novel is the baccarat game and long tedious passages are given over to explaining the intricacies of that card game. The few moments of action can be counted on one hand. However, when they do come, they are sudden, striking and give real weight and character complications to the story. Which is as it should be. Good spy stories are about intrigue, subterfuge, blinds and double blinds. Action is usually a result of something going wrong and should be surprising and have consequence.

While I enjoy the modern Bond, I wonder if he’s not a character of a certain time and place? Part of the appeal of Casino Royale for me is the cold war themes and the portrait of post-war Europe; there is real gravitas to an agent and agency of a humbled old world empire caught between the emerging U.S. and Soviet super-powers and finding its way in the new world order. That is something that is lost in the modern version. What is Bond’s place in the post-cold war era? Today he’s just a generic super secret agent.

I know this version is short lived as the series became more and more cartoonish as it progressed, but at least in Casino Royale, Fleming evokes the fear and tensions of that moment in history and a character figuring out his place in it.

#9 Juliet,Naked by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is a return to form in my eyes to the high points of High Fidelity and About A Boy. I absolutely loved those books, so much so, that the muddled, incomprehensible mess that was How To Be Good, Hornby’s follow up to About A Boy, turned me off to everything he’s written since. I felt too burned and betrayed to even bother. However, I read some good reviews for Juliet, Naked and heard an NPR interview with Hornby that intrigued me enough to give it a chance.

Juliet, Naked is the story of Annie, who lives in a decaying British seaside resort town that’s best days are behind it. She has been living with Duncan, a professor of pop cultural studies at the local college, for the last 15 years. It is a relationship build on a foundation of limited options, compromise and inertia. While not fulfilling to Annie in the least, she has settled into a stagnant yet comfortable routine.

The true passion in Duncan’s life is a singer named Tucker Crowe, who is a sort of fictional equivalent of Jackson Browne or Nick Drake. Twenty-five years earlier he released "Juliet", considered among his fans and critics to be his greatest work and a classic break-up album on par with Bob Dylan’s "Blood On Tracks" or Derek & The Domino’s "Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs". Shortly afterward Crowe mysteriously walked away from it all, and hasn’t recorded or made any public appearances since. Duncan runs a website dedicated to Crowe’s music and considers himself a “Croweologist”. Duncan and his small band of online devotee’s dissect the minutia of Crowe’s life and music looking for any clues to explain the singer’s self-imposed seclusion.

When Crowe’s record company sends Duncan a pre-release copy of acoustic demo’s of the songs from "Juliet" entitled "Juliet, Naked", Annie intercepts it in the mail and passive aggressively writes a scathing review of it on Duncan’s website. A few days later she receives an e-mail from Crowe himself who has been living quietly in Pennsylvania for the past twenty years and who agrees with her assessment. That set’s up an online “affair” that drives the novel.

Hornby is at his best when he is examining his pet themes, the ennui produced by self doubt and the past that immobilizes people, and the collector mentality and how people substitute the obsessive compulsive love of things (records, movies) for real intimacy with people.

Where in High Fidelity, Hornby’s obsessive music geeks gathered in the social nexus of a record store to debate their endless top five lists, in Juliet, Naked, Duncan and his “Croweologists” know each other only by online screen names. Hornby perfectly illustrates the insular online message board mentality, were anonymous and far-flung fans endlessly debate the details of their chosen obsessions until reality and objectivity warp. I knew someone like Duncan, he was my roommate in college, and Hornby has that character and fan driven website culture down to a “T”. The boxes that people close themselves off in while feeling that they are part of a “community”, in which they can feel a part of something without actually having to venture out of the security of their bedroom. It also gets into the issue of intimacy online, and do you really know someone if your sole interaction is online?

Like Hornby himself, his characters are now either entering middle-age or on the cusp of it and facing the realities associated with that time of life. In High Fidelity and About A Boy, Rob Fleming and Will Freeman get second chances to right themselves from the corners they’ve backed themselves into, things are not that simple for Annie and Tucker. They are facing the reality that they’ve let decades slip by wasted, that their most productive years are gone and now they have to figure out what increasingly limited options they have left. The book has many instances of characters being stuck in past and how the world has an unforgiving way of moving on without them.

Juliet, Naked’s reality is a stark one for it’s characters, but the story is told with Hornby’s trademark humor and eye for pop-culture detail, both past and present. While not quite as good as High Fidelity or About A Boy, it’s entertaining, poignant, has something to say for itself and is worth a read.

#8 Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

If the horror novel Heart Shaped Box has an air of familiarity about it, it’s because its author comes by it naturally. Joe Hill is the pen name of Joe King, whose father Steven is known for writing a horror novel or two in his time.

Heart Shaped Box tells the story of middle aged heavy metal star Judas “Jude” Coyne (yes the pun gets addressed in the book) who is now largely retired and reclusive, living on his farm in upstate New York with a series of twenty something women that he nicknames after the state they’re from (he’s currently with “Georgia”). His main pastime is collecting macabre items and memorabilia, such as paintings by serial killers and an authentic snuff film passed on to him from a fan in law enforcement. As such, he can’t resist when he is emailed a link to an online auction in which someone is selling the ghost of their recently departed stepfather. The winner gets the dead man’s favorite suit and his spectral presence along with it.

Of course, everything is not as it seems, the suit which arrives in a large heart shaped candy box was sent by the family of “Florida” a depressive young girl who Jude sent on her way when she got to be too much for him to handle. Florida committed suicide shortly afterward and the family, both dead and alive, are looking to make Jude pay for his past sins.

Hill, like his father, has a knack for turning over common, everyday things and exposing the creepy underbelly. This is used to great effect in a number of unsettling and eerie scenes including one in a Denny’s in which the diner next to them is using one of those electronic voice box microphones which starts talking on its own.

Also like his father, Hill has the talent for developing fully realized and individual characters. There is not one main character in this book that you do not fully find out who they are and their back-story, which makes it all the more horrifying when bad things happen to them.

That’s not to say that Hill is merely a cipher. He is a very talented writer that possesses a dexterity with words and a talent for turning a phrase that has always eluded the older King. Based on his writing, I can easily foresee him producing a literary novel of some note. That is why, ultimately, I find some disappointment with Heart Shaped Box. The potential of the writer is not fully realized. So much more could be done with it. Haunting as metaphor for the regrets, mistakes, and people we have wronged that cling to us, especially in middle age when we begin to face our mortality is so ripe for an in-depth treatment. Unfortunately after a promising beginning, that is not what we get here. The book falls into a comfortable, slightly rote, thriller track about mid-way. It’s entertaining but wholly predicable.

Jude is a little too easily redeemed, the guy was a pretty big asshole at the beginning, and that shouldn’t be completely washed away. Also, can we have a moratorium on sexual abuse in horror/thriller novels? It becoming a little overused as the underlying “big bad” simmering beneath the surface and its use for shock value is wearing thin.

Heart Shaped Box, while not all it could be, has a lot to offer for a debut novel. If you’re a horror fan it has all the requisite chills and thrills. Hill is a talented writer and I hope to see him develop that talent beyond his obvious comfort zone.