Inhuman Swill

Update: Since writing this little review, I've learned that Elmore Leonard gave the manuscript of Raylan to the writers of Justified a couple of years ago so they could "hang it up and strip it for parts." This answers some questions of mine but doesn't change my opinion of the book.

Let me say up front that I adore Elmore Leonard. Wait, rever might be a better word. Worship. Idolize. I've been working my way through his immense canon for years. When I bought my iPad, the first thing I did was load it up with his ebooks. His minimalist, dialog-driven prose conveys more than most writers' wordier, clumsy attempts at clarity. He's surely our greatest living writer of crime fiction, and I wish I could write like he does.

That said, Leonard has always had a problem with sequels, which is what his new novel Raylan essentially is. Whether bringing Chili Palmer from Get Shorty back in Be Cool or Jack Foley from Out of Sight back in Road Dogs, he simply seems to have trouble finding a story of equal weight to build around characters who've already had their perfect turn in the spotlight. I appreciate the fact that major characters from some Leonard novels often show up in supporting roles in others, but two major outings always seems to be one too many.

This, I regret to say, is the case with Raylan. U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens was a supporting character in Leonard's 1993 novel Pronto, then a more major character in 1995's Riding the Rap, but he probably enjoyed his finest role in the 2000 novella "Fire in the Hole." In that story Givens, who sees himself as a modern-day gunslinging lawman, is punished for his trigger-happy ways with a reassignment from Florida to Kentucky, where he grew up and mined coal as a teenager. He is drawn reluctantly but inevitably into a showdown with his former friend and colleague Boyd Crowder, who has gone the other way into a life of crime and violence.

"Fire in the Hole" was the direct inspiration for the FX series Justified, which is in its third season and is currently one of my favorite shows on television. Unfortunately Justified seems to have been the direct inspiration for Raylan, which is less a novel than three slightly overlapping Raylan Givens novellas smooshed together into one book. The first plotline, about a gang who steal kidneys and then try to sell them back to the victims, has appeared in slightly different form on Justified already this season. The second, about a mining company's attempts to intimidate land owners into selling, was the story underlying most of Justified's second season. The third features hookers coerced into committing dangerous robberies in exchange for oxycontin, a plotline that appeared in last week's Justified, and I think it's reasonable to assume that the high-stakes poker subplot will show up in a future episode.

I found the book to be an unfocused, disappointing mess. I'm not sure whether Leonard assembled it from scenarios he'd generated himself as an executive producer of Justified or borrowed ideas from the show's writers, but either way it's hard to see how it would appeal to anyone. The narrative is too fractured and too reliant on familiarity with past Givens stories to appeal to new readers, and it recycles too much familiar material from the show to appeal to Justified fans.

In the end, though I'm pained to say it, Raylan simply comes off as a crass attempt to cash in on the popularity of the show, and on that level I guess it worked. It fooled me into parting with my 25 bucks.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

I was complaining about The Walking Dead a couple of weeks ago. I finally saw the mid-season finale (an oxymoron, for sure), after having somehow managed to avoid any spoilers. I have to say, it was great, it was visceral, it was shocking, it recast the entire season so far. What it did not do, though, was atone for how boring the season was up to that point. Here's hoping the remainder of the season can maintain that level of intensity, even if the characters are still more types than people.

In other follow-up news, I've been waiting for the Mormon missionaries to call me after their visit back in October, but they still haven't. I feel rejected. I feel jilted. I feel not worth saving. I feel upset that I haven't been able to invite them in and then tell them that praying out loud is not permitted under my roof.

Dammit. Maybe they found out more about me and are afraid. Maybe they just didn't like me. Oh, well, life is short.

Dan Sinker, a/k/a @MayorEmanuel, appeared on The Colbert Report Tuesday night, and I have to say he hit it out of the park. Occasionally a guest will say something so funny or bizarre that Colbert has nothing to say in response. Sinker did it twice.

The first clip here sets up the interview in the second clip:

( Dan Sinker on The Colbert Report )

I love the AMC series Rubicon so much that I tracked down a copy of one of the out-of-print collections of producer/writer Henry Bromell's New Yorker short stories from the '70s. I've started I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, and so far I'm very taken with the hallucinatory prose style. Can't wait to finish it.

I think it's the first time that someone's television work has prompted me to seek out his or her fiction. Racing through The Wire is what finally prompted me to read David Simon's non-fiction Homicide, a book that had been mocking me from the shelf for twenty years. (Interestingly, Bromell also worked on the Homicide television series.) I started watching Justified precisely because I was a fan of the Elmore Leonard novels featuring Raylan Givens. (Of course, it also didn't hurt that Timothy Olyphant from Deadwood was playing the character.)

But I'm pretty sure the Bromell conversion is a first. If I keep enjoying the stories, his novel Little America, a semi-autobiographical (I gather) tale of a son trying to understand his father's C.I.A. career, sounds pretty interesting.

---

Any of you other Rubicon fans recognize the name Joseph Purcell?

Hold onto your head scarves. There are 103 full episodes of "21 Jump Street" available on Hulu. Johnny Depp must be so pleased. You needed to know.

All that's going on in the world today and in my life lately has apparently not been enough to drag my short attention span away from Twitter*, but there's a television series that just managed it.

A few minutes ago, I finished watching the season 2 finale of AMC's original series Breaking Bad. I should be working on my novel right now, but I've been awake since 3:30 this morning when thunderstorms woke up the dog and consequently woke us up. As long as I was up anyway, I took the dog to the couch and started watching TV shows from the DVR. I watched an episode of Reaper, then an episode of Lie to Me, and then, because I just couldn't resist putting the reward off any longer, last night's episode of Breaking Bad.

If you're not familiar with the series, it's the story of a high school chemistry teacher named Walter White (Malcolm in the Middle's Bryan Cranston) who is diagnosed with lung cancer and starts a meth lab to provide money for his family for after he's gone. I love the series not just for the impeccable acting and directing, but for the pitilessness of the writing. Even when Walt makes his best and smartest decisions, the remorseless logic of his situation (and in fact of his own pride and anger) twists him deeper and deeper into a trap of his own making. His bid to save his family—and, it must be said, his desire to demonstrate to himself how smart he is—only ends up driving them all apart, and the consequences for the lesser players who enter his orbit are even worse.

Why does this relentless arc make me so happy to watch, even when watching sometimes feels like taking a knife in the gut? Maybe it's something of the same impulse that makes Eminem's rapping so compelling, even when (as in "3 A.M.") the content is repulsive. It's the thrill of watching artists in utter control of their tools.

Take Breaking Bad's second-season arc (which I will attempt to discuss without major spoilers). The season opened with a half-burned teddy bear floating in a swimming pool. That image (and the episode's title, "Seven-Thirty-Seven") would not be explained for thirteen more episodes, but gave the viewer confidence that the minds behind the show were not merely flying by the seats of their pants but knew exactly where they were going from the beginning. The season finale opened with the same image, and went further to show workers in hazmat suits laying two shrouded bodies in the driveway of Walt's house.

( Video: Season Two, Episode One )

From there, the season finale (like the season itself, in miniature) took absolutely none of the expected turns, and even offered a cryptic glimpse of the teddy bear in a wall mural. In its third act, the episode jumped suddenly seven weeks ahead to detonate the emotional bombs that had been planted all throughout the season. If Walt thought he was finally out of the woods with his family, he was wrong, and the revelation of what Jane's father Donald (John de Lancie—yes, Q.) does for a living sets off a countdown of dread when it dawns just where that damn charred bear is going to come from.

Is it presposterous? On one level, yes. But on a more important level, it's absolutely perfect because it illustrates for us, if not for Walt, just how far-reaching the expanding ripples of his first unwise decision have grown. It's a superb example of unity of theme. All kudos to series creator Vince Gilligan, a veteran writer/producer of The X-Files.

But to climb down from my ivory tower, I simply find Breaking Bad a thrilling viewing experience. If you appreciate crime drama with nuance and consequence, you should watch it. Season 1 is available on DVD, and I can only assume season 2 will be also before the third season comes along.

---

* Okay, a much larger part of it is that I'm about halfway through writing a novel called Technomancers, and my larger chunks of time go to reading manuscripts for an upcoming workshop and re-editing old audio files for my new podcast.

Friday night we headed over to the Landmark Theater at the Century Centre for a late-night showing of the Bruce Campbell–directed Bruce Campbell flick My Name Is Bruce. My review is over at SciFi.com.

If you have any scintilla of interest in the Campbell oeuvre, you should see this flick. Campbell is currently on a promotional tour, and you can check here to see if he's coming to your town (or, um, if he's already been and you missed it). His live, faux-hostile Q&A sessions after the movie are possibly more entertaining than the movie itself, and should not be missed.

We were lucky enough that Campbell's Burn Notice costar Jeffrey Donovan, who is in town appearing in Don't Dress for Dinner at the Royal George Theater, joined the Q&A here as a surprise guest. Laura, who is a big fan, just about lost her mind. Campbell and Donovan together were as funny and profane as fuck. My 13-year-old son, in town with us for Thanksgiving, was beside himself, and actually held his own with Campbell in an exchange about the movie Congo.

I guess I've watched way too many episodes of The Wire lately, and read too much Richard Price. Now, every time I go to the kitchen to refill my coffee mug I think of it as the "re-up."

On an almost separate note, I'm delighted to report that besides my cubby at Writers WorkSpace, there are a couple of coffee shops right by our apartment that are laptop-friendly. It's less than a block to this one, where (taking a page from the gregvaneekhout playbook) I spent a little time on Thursday afternoon:



This is why you live in a city, kids.

Since we were discussing Coupling here recently, I wanted to mention a rather jarring piece of advertising Laura and I saw last night. We DVR reruns of Coupling on BBC America to try to catch episodes we've missed in the past. Laura had never seen the very first episode, so that's what we were watching. As I fast-forwarded through the commercials, though, I realizes we were seeing an ad for The Lamb of God, a free Easter video from the LDS Church. (Sample bits here and here.) Seriously, the Mormons were advertising on one of the most frank, sexually themed sitcoms of all time. I have to wonder if that was deliberate or if it was a case of block ad-buying like the one that put Mitt Romney's campaign ads on Gay.com. What's next? Christian Scientists advertising on House? Scientologists advertising on Mythbusters?

In other amusing news, someone is selling The Lamb of God on eBay. Which is funny because the Mormon Church will send you a copy for free.

In other bittersweet news, How I Met Your Mother seems to have hit its stride again after a bit of a creative slump early in the season. The last few episodes have been sharp and as tightly written as Coupling, and Laura and I could barely breathe for laughing through this week's episode. This, just in time for the writers strike.

You've probably seen this already, but I finally got a chance to watch it...