THE 2021 MIMSIE AWARDS
The year 2021 was an odd one for me as a reader. Much of the reading I did was done in the service of some article I was writing. I’ve always wanted to write a long essay in praise of twentieth-century aviation fiction – i.e., novels written by the likes of Ernest K. Gann, Robert Serling, Neville Shute, and others who specialized in the fiction of flight – but I couldn’t figure out how to make it relevant enough for some publication to consider running it. But, early in 2021 I read The Skies Belong To Us, Brendan I. Koerner’s excellent nonfiction book from 2013 about the so-called “Golden Age of Skyjacking,” which stretched from 1965 to 1972. The book reminded me that November 2021 would bring about the fiftieth anniversary of the most famous skyjacking of all, D.B. Cooper’s Thanksgiving Day 1971 “parajacking” of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon (my home town at the time) to Seattle. I decided to write a long essay about aviation fiction and how the Golden Age of Skyjacking changed the very nature of it. To write the essay, however, I had to do a ton of reading. Normally I’m not a fan of required reading. I prefer to pick my next book almost randomly just by combing through my shelves, or the shelves of some good local used bookstore. But for the Aviation Fiction essay, which was published in Quillette in November of 2021, I found it necessary to read – and in many cases, re-read – a lot of airplane fictions (and even some nonfictions). Fortunately, the task proved to be highly enjoyable because, as you may have guessed, I like airplane stories. Among the airplane books I read this year were titles such as Robert Serling’s She’ll Never Get Off The Ground, Julia Cooke’s Come Fly The World, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Arthur Hailey’s Runway Zero-Eight, The President’s Plane Is Mission (Robert Serling again), McDermott’s Sky (Serling again), Come Fly With Us: A Global History of the Airline Hostess by Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock, Ernest K. Gann’s Band of Brothers and The Aviator, Neville Shute’s Round the Bend, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.
I have also for a very long time wanted to write an appreciation of the lowly novelization, aka the movie (or television) tie-in novel. I once wrote an entire (unpublished, alas) novel about a TV tie-in fanatic. When I learned that Quentin Tarantino was going to be publishing a novelization of his 2019 film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood in June of 2021, I figured the time was right for a long-form examination of the genre. I have read a ton of novelizations in my life, but I hadn’t read any in quite a few years, so it was necessary for me to do a little catching up. Thus, along with all the aviation fiction I was reading, I also had to start reading a lot of tie-in books. This too was a pleasure, but it also prevented me from being the kind of free-range reader I like to think of myself as.
For a few years now, I’ve noticed that books and essays critical of the so-called Baby Boom generation (of which I am a member) have become practically a stand-alone genre of nonfiction. For Quillette, I decided to write a review of three such books: Boomers by Helen Andrews, A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney, and OK, Boomer, Let’s Talk by Jill Filipovic. Those three books comprised a total of about 900 pages, which also consumed a lot of my 2021 reading hours.
Likewise, for years I have wanted to write a retrospective on the literary career of Avery Corman, whose best-known books are Oh, God! and Kramer vs. Kramer. He was hugely popular in the late 70s and early 80s but seems to have been largely forgotten of late. He’s still alive but doesn’t appear to be writing much any more. His last novel, The Boyfriend From Hell, published in 2006, is particularly interesting, because it seems to have been conceived as an unofficial sequel to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, and also as an apology for Corman’s earlier books, many of which drew criticism for being anti-feminist. In 2021, I finally decided to undertake this project, but it required reading (or re-reading) my way through much of Corman’s oeuvre of nine novels and one memoir. I wrote an essay about Corman and his work for Quillette which has been accepted for publication. But, as there is no immediate news hook to hang it upon, no one is in a hurry to bring it to publication. Which is fine with me. It allows me to keep tinkering with it.
In a similar vein, I read my way through much of the oeuvre of the late John Ball, best known as the author of In The Heat of the Night, and wrote an essay on his fascinating life and career. Quillette published it in April of last year. I can’t claim to have read my way through Ball’s entire bibliography, but I did read quite a bit of it, and had a fairly good time doing so.
Dominick Dunne was a member of a famous American writing clan, the Didion-Dunnes, which also included his brother John Gregory Dunne, and John’s wife, Joan Didion. All three were both journalists and novelists. Joan is widely regarded as far and away the best writer of the three. And I would agree that she was probably the best journalist of the lot. But in my opinion, Dominick was the best novelist of the three. Dominick died in 2009 so, once again, I had no immediate news hook on which to hang a piece about him. Joan was the only member of the trio still alive, and seeing as how she was in her late 80s, I decided to go ahead and write an essay arguing, among other things, that Dominick was a better novelist than Joan. I thought there was a possibility that Joan would die before the end of 2021, which would make my Dominick Dunne essay suddenly relevant. I completed the piece in late summer and waited around for some news hook to make it relevant. In November, HBO released the latest season of Succession, a television show about the horrible things that rich people can do and get away with because of their wealth and power. At roughly the same time, the film House of Gucci was released, another film about the rich and powerful. The misbehavior of rich and powerful people was an obsession of Dominick Dunne’s fiction and nonfiction. So I tied my essay to the late November release of both Succession and House of Gucci. Quillette accepted it and published it on December 11. Twelve days later, Joan Didion died, making the piece suddenly even more relevant. In order to write the piece, I had to go back and read (or re-read) my way through Dominick’s entire fiction oeuvre. I also read some selected works of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion.
Quillette hired me to review two books for the autumn of 2021, High White Notes, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson written by David S. Wills, and Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, written by Batya Ungar-Sargon. I read these two excellent books slowly and took copious notes in order to justice to both authors.
As you can see, I wasn’t able to spend 2021 just randomly reading whatever I felt like at the time. But I’m not complaining. I enjoyed most of my targeted reading. And it felt great to be able to publish so many words about my favorite of all subjects: books! But, one of my greatest joys every year is discovering one or more fat old epic novels that few people have ever heard of and bringing it to your attention. Almost every year it seems that among my absolute favorite books is some great historical novel such as Richard McGill’s Omamori, Kay McGrath’s The Seeds of Singing, Janice Young Brooks’s Seventrees, or Shaman’s Daughter by Nan F. Salerno and Rosamond M. Vanderburgh. This year I made no such discoveries. Don’t get me wrong, I did discover some brilliant, long-forgotten works of fiction. But none of these discoveries was a big fat historical epic of the kind I love. I read 85 books in 2021. I enjoyed many of them, but I am awarding Mimsies to only fifteen of them. And so, without further ado, here are the Mimsie Awards for 2021.
My fifteenth favorite book of 2021 was No Comebacks, a collection of short stories written by Frederick Forsyth and published in 1982. I wrote an essay about it for a blog maintained by the editor of Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine. Here is some of what I said about it:
One of the things that made No Comebacks fairly unusual is that it was a bestselling collection of crime stories from a lone author that didn’t feature any pre-existing characters. Such books still get published, but you practically have to be Stephen King to hit the bestseller list with a collection like that. Which probably explains why the closest thing we’ve seen to No Comebacks in the last few years is King’s 2015 bestseller The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, a collection of stories, many of them involving crime and punishment, that are not all connected by a main character or an obvious theme.
No Comebacks is by no means an obscure book. It has been in print for nearly forty years. It has a fairly high rating at the online book review site Goodreads, where nearly 4,000 people have rated it and nearly 200 have reviewed it. And those reviews suggest that this is more than just a decent old story collection.
The collection has many things to recommend it. Lets start with the twists in the tales. Forsyth is as much a master of the surprise ending as O. Henry, Saki, Richard Matheson, or Rod Serling. Like those masters, he is also capable of planting entertaining surprises at just about any point in a story. And because he grounds his stories in very specific details, generally pertaining to ordinary workaday life, Forsyth’s shocking plot twists never seem unbelievable.
The plots are fiendish. In “Money With Menaces,” a timid little insurance clerk seeks out a bit of extramarital companionship only to find himself being blackmailed by some very bad people. But is the insurance clerk really the milquetoast he appears to be? In “Used in Evidence,” a lone elderly holdout is preventing a development firm from razing a rundown housing project and building a shopping mall in its place. But is it just sentimentality that keeps the old man from wanting to surrender his home of thirty-plus years? None of us likes paying taxes, but you’ll be amazed when you see what lengths the protagonist of “A Careful Man” goes to in order to keep the UK’s Office of Inland Revenue from collecting what he owes them. A story called “There Are No Snakes In Ireland” might have made an excellent installment of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. In fact, it has an ending somewhat similar to the ending of “The Caterpillar,” one of Night Gallery’s most memorable episodes (it is colloquially known as “the earwig episode,” which makes more sense, because no caterpillar plays any role in the story).
Thus, Frederick Forsyth is awarded the first Mimsie of 2021. I should point out that, at the time I wrote my appreciation of No Comebacks for Janet Hutchings’s blog, I believed it to be Forsyth’s only story collection. But a keen-eyed reader of the blog, John Breen, pointed out to me that Forsyth also published a second collection, called The Veteran, in 2001. I immediately sought out a copy and read it. It is pretty much the equal of No Comebacks. So I am going to split this first Mimsie between the two collections.
Another ambitious writing project I worked on in 2021 was a survey of novels about abortion written before the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made the practice legal in America. Abortion was an important plot element in a lot of famous, and not so famous, American popular fictions of the 1950s and 1960s, including Peyton Place, The Valley of the Dolls, and even Airport. One of the best abortion novels I read for this (as yet) unpublished essay was A Place Called Saturday, published in 1968 and written by Mary Astor, best known as an actress in such classic films as The Maltese Falcon, The Prisoner of Zenda, and The Great Lie. Here is some of what I said about her book in my abortion fiction essay:
Astor was a staunch Democrat, very progressive in her politics, and a highly accomplished and independent woman. You might expect her novel to be a plea for the legalization of abortion. But you’d be wrong.
Her protagonist is Cora March, a married woman in her mid-twenties. Her husband, Rafael, works in the air-traffic control tower at the airport in Tucson, Arizona. Cora and Rafael have a nice home in a (fictional) rural town outside of Tucson called Sabado (“Saturday” in Spanish, hence the book’s title). They have been married for three years but the union has not yet been blessed with a child. As the novel opens, all four of Cora’s limbs are tied to her bed, her mouth is taped shut, and she is being raped by a stranger. After the stranger departs, Cora will remain tied up and gagged until Rafael returns home from work and finds her. He releases her from her bonds and then calls the cops and the local doctor. The police sweep the place for fingerprints (about the only evidence available to them back in the days before hair and semen and blood could be used to catch a culprit), and old Doc Titus looks after Cora’s physical wounds. Her (and Rafael’s) psychic wounds will be much more difficult to heal.
Life seems to be returning to a semblance of normalcy until Cora discovers that she is pregnant. Rafe (Cora always refers to her husband as Rafe, an odd choice in a book about rape) assumes as a matter of course that Cora will abort the child, even though it isn’t legal in Arizona at the time. He tells her, “We can’t ask Titus to do the job, of course. I’ll look into it. Find somebody good.” This is particularly painful to Cora because of how long she has been trying, and failing, to conceive. But Rafe tells her, “Well, we’ll just have to go on waiting, that’s all. It’s a damn shame.” But Cora, though a dutiful wife and somewhat intimidated by Rafe, refuses to consider an abortion. And at this point, they begin the kind of abortion debate that was pretty commonplace between men and women back before Roe v. Wade (see, for instance, the Hemingway story Hills Like White Elephants).
Astor doesn’t heavy-handedly weigh the argument in favor of Cora. Though by today’s standards Rafe often comes across as a pushy anti-feminist, in 1968 he wouldn’t have struck anyone as an awful husband or human being. And Astor also acknowledges the dangers of forcing women to seek illegal abortions. Over dinner one night, Cora’s physician, kindly Dr. Titus, tells his wife that he wishes he could offer Cora an abortion himself. He adds, “Of course, I didn’t let on what was in my mind, just gave her some pamphlets on prenatal care and told her to come back in a month for a checkup. I have a hunch I’ll be getting a call from them in a couple of weeks, ‘Please, doctor, can you stop the bleeding!’ In a hell of a state of shock. Exsanguinated. Mass of infection. They ought to have a law – so we could take proper care of these cases. Not leave ‘em to somebody like that lady butcher up in Phoenix. Simple little job like shelling a pea. Ought to have a law.”
Astor doesn’t seem to be arguing against legalizing abortion. She seems more interested in the moral arguments against it. Nowadays, some might reflexively dismiss her as a prudish old lady from a long-vanished, less enlightened era. But Astor was anything but. She overcame a lot of hardship in her life, much of it foisted on her by her own parents. Born in 1906, she made her screen debut in a Buster Keaton silent film in 1920, when she was just fourteen. Within a few years she was earning an astounding $2,500 a week, the equivalent of about $40,000 a week in inflation-adjusted dollars. Because she was a minor, her parents were able to pocket her income. They paid her an allowance of just $5 a week while they frittered away her earnings on a lavish mansion, bad investments, and other things. She didn’t gain control over her own finances until she was 26 years old, and even that required a court battle. Astor was not just a gifted actress but a gifted classical pianist as well. She earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Great Lie, a 1941 film in which she played a classical pianist who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy (instead of seeking an abortion, she hides out in a wilderness cabin until the baby is born and then allows it to be adopted by a frenemy played by Astor’s real-life pal Bette Davis). Astor was widowed at the age of 23 when her first husband, the brother of director Howard Hawks, was killed in an airplane crash. She married three more times, but these marriages all ended in divorce. She gave birth to two children, and in 1936 she was involved in a sensational scandal when her then-husband discovered she was having an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman after reading about it in her diary. When her husband decided to use it as ammunition in their child-custody battle, the diary became tabloid fodder, though most of what was reprinted in the tabloids was fabricated by him or made up out of whole cloth by various gossip columnists. You can read about the scandal in Edward Sorrel’s highly entertaining 2016 graphic novel Mary Astor’s Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936. Eventually the diary was seized by the court, held in sequestration for sixteen years, and then destroyed by order of the court. This was a woman who knew what it was like to suffer at the hands of a patriarchal society. She was a thoroughly modern woman of the twentieth century. She was sexually active, formidably talented, and supported herself financially from a very young age. When her film career cooled off she reinvented herself as a memoirist and novelist. Whatever it was that fueled her pro-life sentiment, it wasn’t prudishness or anti-feminism.
A Place Called Sunday is actually a highly intelligent and compelling book. I think it would appeal even to readers who don’t share Astor’s objections to abortion. The plot takes some interesting turns and the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with the moral questions surrounding abortion, just as many today still struggle with them. Mary Astor won an Oscar for her performance in the 1941 film The Great Lie. Until today, that was probably her greatest professional accomplishment. But now she has surpassed even that achievement. Now she has earned herself a Mimsie!
Another book I read for my abortion piece was Thy Daughter’s Nakedness, a 1968 novel by Myron S. Kaufmann (no relation to George, as far as I know). Here’s some of what I wrote about it for my essay on how the abortion debate played out in American popular fiction:
Some examples of this debate can found in Thy Daughter’s Nakedness, another one of 1968’s biggest novels (literally, that is; my paperback copy runs to 803 pages of small print). Written by Myron S. Kaufmann, it’s the story of Millicent Gordon, the 21-year-old-daughter of a Massachusetts rabbi. Having recently graduated from the University of Chicago, she returns to her small hometown outside of Boston and enters the dating scene. The book is essentially an 800-page discussion of American sexual mores. After landing a job at a Boston newspaper and moving into an apartment with two other single girls, Millicent finds herself pressured for sex from a variety of men. Eventually she gives up her virginity to a young surgeon named Leslie Hollander. Several months into their relationship, her period fails to arrive on time and she begins to fear she might be pregnant. At that point, she urges Les to marry her, and he urges her to get an abortion. The argument ends without an agreement between the two parties. Millicent wishes she could share Les’s ideas about abortion, “But the thought of it, of the tampering, of the flesh, made her grimace. Who knew what a genius, what a great person she might let be scraped out?”
Unlike Astor’s novel, abortion isn’t the main theme of Thy Daughter’s Nakedness. In fact, it plays a relatively small role. Instead this novel is a minutely detailed account of how one Jewish family (and, by extension, many other American families) finds itself dealing with the loosening of certain moral standards that occurred in the years following World War Two, particular those pertaining to pre-marital and extra-marital sex. It isn’t a great novel, but it is very good. This is as close as I came to finding a great multi-generational family saga in 2021. It is definitely a long book about an American family but, oddly enough, it covers only about a year of time. Not a great book, but worthy of the thirteenth spot on this year’s Mimsie Awards list.
My twelfth favorite book of the year was Lucian Truscott IV’s 1997 military thriller Heart of War. My fondness for this book surprised me in many ways. For one thing, my only previous exposure to Truscott’s work came from his political essays published over the last decade or two in Salon.com. Although I tend to agree with much of what he says, I have never much admired his opinion pieces. They tend to be intemperate, intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him, and characterized mainly by moral posturing designed to make himself look like a paragon of virtue. Another reason I was surprised to find myself liking this book so much was the fact that, in general, novels about the military are not my cup of tea. I bought the book only because it was available in a signed limited edition published by the late, great Franklin Library, and I have recently become besotted with that particular publishing project. I began reading the book assuming that I would put it aside after consuming only 25 or fifty pages. But Truscott proved to be a far better thriller writer than he is a writer of political commentary. The Heart of War is brilliantly plotted, deftly written, and populated with some rather fascinating characters. Truscott often comes across as a chest-thumping macho man in his opinion pieces, so it was a revelation to me how sympathetically he wrote about women and gays in the military. This book was genuinely thrilling. I found myself sitting up late into the night several nights in a row because I was just too engrossed to put it down. Truscott played fair with his readers. The book was strewn with clues that made the plot’s conclusion surprising to me but not completely out of the blue. I will have to seek out more of his work soon. Truscott graduated from West Point in 1969. Now he has acquired an even greater distinction than that: he was won a Mimsie Award!
The next two books on my list, Children of the Pearl and Temple of the Moon, are both by Ching Yun Bezine, a Chinese-American author born in Beijing in 1937 and, as far as I can tell, still alive. These books are the first two parts of a trilogy that concludes with On Wings of Destiny, which I haven’t yet read but hope to soon. Because Temple of the Moon is a direct continuation of the story begun in Children of the Pearl I am treating them here as essentially one long novel. I wrote about Ching Yun Benzine’s fascinating life and work in an essay I posted to Substack last January called Forgotten Children. Here is some of what I wrote:
It is curious how American popular culture can produce a novel as fine as Children of the Pearl, by Ching Yun Bezine, and then largely ignore it. The novel, a paperback original (meaning it was never published in hardback) was published by Signet in October of 1991. Though “only” 399 pages long, the story has an epic sweep. It follows four Chinese teenagers as they leave behind their small town alongside China’s Pearl River and make their way to The Land of the Golden Mountain, which is what Chinese peasants called America. Believing that easy riches await them in America, where the streets are reportedly paved with gold, three young men – Fachai, Loone, and Quanming – and a young woman – Meiping – sign contracts with a labor trader, who pays their way to America aboard a ship full of other desperate characters. Fachai is a recently married man of 18 or 19. He and his father make a living fishing the waters of the Pearl River. But when their boat is destroyed, Fachai, who has recently married the love of his life, finds himself in need of money. He signs a contract with the labor trader in the hope of making a quick fortune in America and then returning to his beloved wife in the small Chinese town of White Stone. Quanming, whose brother was beheaded by the government for advocating human rights, wants to forget his many miseries, including the beautiful young Kao Yoto, who broke his heart by marrying another man, and find his fortune in America. Loone is an angry young man with a gift for painting and drawing. His parents have both died. All he cares about now is his art, and so he allows his uncle and aunt to sell him off to the labor trader. Loone figures he can paint and draw in America as well as in China. Sixteen-year-old Meiping is the daughter of a man and wife who run a small restaurant. She is tall for a Chinese girl, nearly six-feet, which makes her practically unmarriageable in China, where men do not want a wife taller than they are. She fights with her father constantly, so when the labor trader offers her a chance to start anew in America, she willing signs up.
What none of these four young people understand is that the labor trader is basically selling them into slavery. When they arrive in San Francisco, Meiping will find herself consigned by the labor trader to a whorehouse in Chinatown, operated by a ruthless Chinese-American businessman. Fachai was told by the labor trader that he would be allowed to work aboard a big modern fishing boat in the waters off San Francisco. Instead he will find himself working in a crowded and smelly factory that processes fish that have already been caught. He will work ten hours a day, seven days a week, gutting dead fish and cutting off their heads. He will never be allowed to work as a fisherman. Quanming will do slightly better than Fachai and Meiping. He will be apprenticed to a wealthy Chinese-American businessman in Chinatown. But before he can rise up the corporate ladder, he will have to spend years learning the English language and the ways of American business. He will fall in love with a beautiful young Caucasian girl, the sister of his English tutor, but neither his Chinese acquaintances nor the local Caucasian community will countenance this relationship. And Loone, the artist, will live above a Chinese restaurant owned by a kindly Chinese married couple. They treat him like a son but he has no interest in learning the restaurant business. All he wants to do is paint.
The story begins in 1912 and concludes around 1936. The characters will find love and lose it, experience triumphs and disasters, marriages and betrayals, and along the way lose touch with their Chinese roots, while never being truly accepted as Americans by the native-born community. This is a novel that moves swiftly and is filled with interesting characters and events. It is also well written and intelligent. I cannot fathom why its publisher didn’t treat it like a potential mega-bestseller and give it a large hardback release followed by an author tour, perhaps including some appearances on TV talk shows. Instead it got dropped quietly into the waters of the book world and barely made a splash. Which is a shame, because Ching Yun Bezine’s life story is at least as interesting as the book itself, and had it been written about in popular venues such as People magazine or The New York Times Magazine, she might have become, if only briefly, a celebrity author.
There is much more to the story and my summary doesn’t even touch upon the events related in the sequel, Temple of the Moon. But Bezine’s novels are full of fascinating characters and riveting incidents. They are jointly awarded eleventh place on my list of 2021 Mimsie winners.
We now break into the top ten category of my list. In tenth place is Hebert Tarr’s 1989 novel A Woman of Spirit. This is a multi-generational tale of a Jewish family that migrates to New York from Eastern Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. The only thing that disqualifies it from being a “saga” in the sense that I employ that word is the fact that it runs to only about 300 pages. Nonetheless, this is a densely populated novel about a fascinating Jewish woman and the people in her orbit – husband, children, in-laws, friends, associates, enemies, etc. While it doesn’t quite run to saga length, it feels almost as long and satisfying as the best fictional sagas American pop fiction has to offer. This is one of those novels that has a huge surprise embedded in it, somewhere near the midpoint of the story. One character dies and we suddenly discover a fact that colors everything that has come before this revelation and everything that comes afterwards. I can’t be more specific without ruining much of the fun that comes from reading the book. “Fun” may seem like an odd word to describe a story that has so much grinding poverty and heartbreak in it, but that is one of the things that distinguishes the best Jewish family sagas: no matter how grim things get, the characters and their authors can often find humor in the situation. This is not a novel in which characters accomplish the kinds of great deeds found in more melodramatic stories – achieve great fame, rise to the top of their profession, acquire political power, leave behind a legacy of fabulous works. This is a book about poor people struggling to attain middle-class respectability. Some of them will, to one degree or another, achieve what they are striving for. Tarr’s greatest achievement in this book is to give us a protagonist, Hannah Trilling, who is outwardly as ordinary as it is possible for an American woman to be, and then make her memorable just by describing so accurately the spirited way she rises above every hardship life throws at her – and it throws plenty of them. She reminded me of the title character in Katherine Anne Porter’s famous story The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, which is also about the way one seemingly ordinary American woman responds to loss by again and again soldiering on in spite of it. Herbert Tarr (1929-93) was a reform rabbi who gave up religion in favor of novel-writing because he believed it allowed him to address the woes of society more directly. Tarr wrote five novels. A Woman of Spirit was his final novel and it appears to be so thoroughly forgotten that even Wikipedia doesn’t list it in its bibliography of Tarr. That is a pity. I haven’t yet read any other of Tarr’s novels, but I can say for certain that A Woman of Spirit does not deserve its obscurity. It is a very moving and inspiring book, filled with warmth and humor, about one woman’s triumphant battle against human hardship.
A Woman of the People, a 1966 novel by Benjamin Capps, is another book that, like A Woman of Spirit, falls into an oxymoronic category: the short saga. My paperback edition runs to only 224 pages but it left behind an impact similar to the best epic sagas. In some ways it reminded me of one of last year’s Mimsie winners, the aforementioned Shaman’s Daughters, which ran well over twice as long. A Woman of the People is one of numerous pop fictions inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of nine-year-old Cynthia Parker, a Caucasian Texan, by a band of Comanche Indians. Parker became so much a part of the Comanche tribe which took her that, after her “rescue” by the Texas Rangers, 24 years later, she found herself completely unable to readapt to the ways of the white man. Eventually she lost the will to live, stopped eating, and died at the age of 43. Among the novels inspired by Parker’s story are Alan Le May’s The Searchers (published in 1954 and the source of John Ford’s 1956 film of the same name), Lucia St. Clair Robinson’s Ride The Wind (1982), Douglas C. Jones’ Season of Yellow Leaf (1983), and Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon (1997). The title story in Elmore Leonard’s 1998 collection The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories was probably at least partially inspired by Parker’s story. Many lesser novels have also used the tragedy of Cynthia Parker as a springboard for their fictional tales. Benjamin Capps’s A Woman of the People is one of the best fictional treatments of the subject. His protagonist is named Helen Morrison. She and her five-year-old sister Katy are taken captive by a Comanche war party that has murdered their parents and their older brother. Naturally Helen begins the novel with a fierce hatred of her captors. She wants nothing more than to escape them and to take Katy with her. Alas, Katy is young and, within a few months, seems to be forgetting about her murdered parents. The Comanche tribe she is now a part of has plenty of children her age and they accept her into their play as one of them. Helen, being older, has a much harder time adapting to the ways of her captors. She passes up a few opportunities to escape because she refuses to leave without Katy, even though Katy no longer has any desire to leave. Helen makes a valiant effort to keep the memory of her parents and her brother alive in her memory, so that someday she can recall them to Katy. Capps’s greatest achievement here is the way in which he dramatizes Helen’s very slow conversion from a white girl into an Indian woman. Almost against her will, Helen finds herself embracing the Indian culture into which she has been thrust. In part this comes about simply because, as her body matures, she finds herself longing for a sexual companion and for children of her own. Like the best fictions based on the Cynthia Parker incident, Capps’s novel begins with a tragedy – white girl kidnapped by Indians – and concludes with a plot twist that would appear to be a happy one – white girl must return to the world of the white man – but which, in context, strikes the reader as at least as sad as the original tragedy, if not more so. If you know anything at all about the Parker story, then you already know how this tale begins and ends. Where Capps’s book shines is in the in-between – the limbic stage during which Helen Morrison, almost without realizing it is happening to her, transforms from a Caucasian to an Indian in every way that matters. This is the only novel I read in 2021 that left me in tears at the end. In fact, I was so overpowered by it that I went back and re-read Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel The Light In The Forest, which explores a similar theme. Richter’s novel was probably partially inspired by Parker’s story, even though Richter’s protagonist is a young white boy and he manages to be “rescued” from his Indian captors at a fairly young age. Like many a Baby Boomer I read Richter’s novel in grade school and it made a huge impression on me. After re-reading it this year, I found that it still holds up as a fine piece of historical storytelling. But I believe Capps’s novel to be even better. It is a shame that it isn’t better known today. I feel somewhat guilty placing it at ninth on the list, because it is better written than some of the books rated above it. It may well be the best novel on the list, but because it treated a subject I have read about many times, and because I tend to prefer less lugubrious tales, I wasn’t able to rate it any higher. But your mileage may vary. This is a genuine lost classic of American fiction.
In eighth place comes the only nonfiction book ever to win a Mimsie (at least as far as I can recall). I vastly prefer fiction to nonfiction, but this year my journalistic efforts required that I read a fair number of nonfiction books as well. The best of these was the aforementioned The Skies Belong To Us by Brendan I. Koerner. This book was crazy good. No fiction writer would dare include so many insane incidents in a novel for fear that his readers would simply lose the ability to suspend their disbelief. I wrote about this book at length in my Quillette piece about aviation fiction. I suggest you Google my name, Koerner, and Quillette and read the whole piece. As I wrote in the essay, “By the late 1960s, so many flights were being hijacked to Cuba that the Federal Aviation Administration considered building an exact replica of Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport on the coast of Florida. The pilots of hijacked airplanes would then land their jets at this Potemkin airport and American air marshals dressed as Cuban authorities would come out to greet the hijackers with open arms, handcuffing and arresting them as soon as it was safe to do so.” That may sound nutty, but many of the actual hijackings are so crazy that they make the Potemkin airport scheme seem downright sensible by comparison.
In seventh place on the list of Mimsie Award winners comes John Ball’s cross-cultural romance Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms. This fish-out-of-water tale is the story of Richard Seaton, a thirtysomething engineer and mid-level executive at a conservative Massachusetts manufacturing company. One day, during a business trip to Tokyo, Dick will fall in love with a beautiful geisha, and this will unleash all sorts of disasters, both comic and tragic. Published in 1968, it is the best of the Ball novels I have read so far, even better than his best-known novel, In The Heat of the Night, which is also about racial and cultural differences. Ball was an expert on Japan. He spoke the language and was proficient in Aikido, a Japanese martial art. In 2021 I also read and enjoyed his 1975 novel The Winds of Mitamura. I didn’t think it was quite as good as Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, but I wrote about it for Janet Hutchings’s blog because, unlike Spring Blossoms, it was a crime-adjacent novel. Here’s what I had to say about it:
His 1975 novel, The Winds of Mitamura, tells of two young American academics who travel to a small farming community in Japan in order to conduct an anthropological study on the people there. Peter Storm, one of the academics, is white, and Marjorie Saunders, his partner on the project, is African-American. Ball, who appears to have known Japanese culture almost as well as he knew his own, provides the reader with a fascinating exploration of how race plays out across the globe. The residents of the small community are honored to have a white American professor in their midst. But they are terrified of Marjorie Saunders. They have never seen a Black person before. They are highly superstitious and fear that she might be a devil whose presence will cause this year’s rice crop to be ruined. Marjorie, because she is the well-educated daughter of an upper-class family (her father is a surgeon), hasn’t experienced the worst of American racism, the kind reserved for the poor and underprivileged. Thus, her story, like Virgil’s in In The Heat of the Night, is a tale of a fish out of water, and dangerously so at that. Though it isn’t technically a crime novel, it often reads like one. In the forest at the edge of the farming community lives a hermit, a former resident of the community who lost his mind when his wife was raped and killed by an American serviceman stationed in Japan about a decade after WWII. Because the American serviceman was Black, the unhinged forest-dweller believes all Black people to be murderous devils. This creates a nightmarish scenario when, one day, Marjorie decides to wander off into the woods by herself…
I’m giving a Mimsie only to Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, but if you like that book you will almost certainly enjoy The Winds of Mitamura also.
In sixth place comes the first novelization ever to win a Mimsie (as least, I think that is the case, but I’m old and senile, so don’t take my word for it). Here’s what I wrote for Quillette about Marc Norman’s 1973 book Oklahoma Crude, a novelization of the screenplay he wrote for the Stanley Kramer film of the same title:
Norman’s entry at Wikipedia asserts (without citing a source) that his screenplay for Oklahoma Crude came first and that the novel was adapted from it. If this is so, then it gets my vote for greatest stealth novelization of all time. The book is a small comic masterpiece reminiscent in some ways of Charles Portis’ True Grit. Here’s Norman’s opening paragraph:
I’m aware the public at large holds the plains cowboy to be illiterate and a rowdy, and while the latter is fair enough, the former is not. The cowboys I knew would read everything and anything they could get their hands on, a habit most of them picked up from long frozen winters locked in a line shack where it was either read, whittle, or bugger each other, and of the three, reading was both the most acceptable and the most educating. Whatever words found on paper were devoured, be it the Old Testament or a course in crocheting, and as many shawls came out of the woods with spring thaw as lay preachers.
The movie tie-in book is one of the least pretentious genres in all of literature, right down there with the dirty limerick. And Marc Norman’s stealth novelization of Oklahoma Crude is practically a paean to unpretentiousness. The narrator is able to make poetry out of the names of the unglamorous components of an oilrig (auger stem, rope socket, temper screw, walking beam, pitman arm, Sampson post, calf wheel, bull wheel, crown-block pulley, etc.). But even he knows that employing too much specialized terminology is the height of pretentiousness:
Inventing a lingo to me is the product of men at a dull task trying to make it sound complicated, usually to impress somebody, and it’s been years since I amused myself with the knowledge I was speaking of things only one out of ten men around me could understand. I used to go on – I would say things like, “There was a cat’s ass in the line so bad I had to take a preacher’s prick to it,” and think myself quite a rake, but then I was in a grocery store one day and heard the term preacher’s prick applied by the grocer to that stick thing with jaws he used to fish cans off the high shelves, and I’ve been simply saying kinks in the cable and wrenches ever since.
In fifth place we find Jean Hanff Korelitz’s literary thriller The Plot, a book that I read shortly after its publication in May of 2021. In years past, I attempted to read two other novels by this author, Admission (2010) and You Should Have Known (2014). In both cases I found them slow and prolix. The plots were pretty good, a fact which I discovered only after watching their Hollywood incarnations, but Korelitz’s admirable effort to bring her fictional worlds alive in great detail simply overpowered them (and me). In hardback, those two novels ran 464 pages and 448 pages respectively. The Plot, on the other hand, ran a relatively terse 336 pages, which is even more impressive when you consider the fact that The Plot contains two separate, but fully integrated, thrillers within its pages. On the surface, it is the story of Jacob Finch Bonner, a once-promising novelist whose writing career has been in decline for a decade or so. His successful first novel was followed by a couple of stinkers, and now he makes ends meet by teaching at a variety of second-tier writers conferences, work that he dislikes a great deal. During one such conference he makes the acquaintance of a cocky young writing student named Evan Parker. Parker keeps insisting that he’s not too concerned about the niceties of language and writing style because he has come up with a plot for a novel so compelling that no publisher could possibly reject it. Bonner has seen this type of arrogant prick before and almost (but not quite) pities him. He tries to assure Parker that no plot is writer-proof. If a book’s pacing is bad, its writing clichéd, its characters unconvincing, then even a great story idea may not be enough to earn it a publishing contract. Parker remains unswayed by this argument. He is reluctant to disclose the plot of his masterpiece to Bonner for fear that Bonner will steal it. Eventually, though, towards the end of the conference, Parker breaks down and tells Bonner the entire plot of his story. The reader isn’t privy to this conversation, but Bonner is forced to concede that Parker’s plot is indeed a doozy. At this point, I assumed that the plot of Parker’s novel would be forever unrevealed to the reader of Korelitz’s. After all, no plot could possibly live up to the enthusiasm both Parker and Bonner seem to have for this undisclosed fictional plot. If you wrote a novel about a pop song so great that it became a huge sensation, you probably wouldn’t provide the sheet music to it in your book because, unless it was actually the greatest pop song ever written, the reader is sure to be disappointed by it. Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit, a 1986 novel by Marianne Gingher, was an entertaining tale about a pop song and its effect on the girl who inspired it, but Gingher wisely omitted the tune from the book. To Korelitz’s credit, she does eventually begin to unspool the plot of Parker’s novel in chapters that alternate with her own story – i.e. a novel within a novel. But before we get to that point, Jacob Bonner’s story has to unspool a bit also. A few years go by. Bonner’s career is still in the doldrums. He hasn’t kept in touch with Parker, but he wonders why, with his surefire plot, Parker hasn’t yet become a bestselling author. So, one day, Bonner begins searching for info about Evan Parker online and discovers that he died in a house fire. At this point Bonner assumes that Parker must have died without revealing the plot of the novel he was writing to anyone else. Bonner, desperate for literary success, decides that, since Parker is dead, there can be no harm in stealing his story idea. And so he does. And a year or so later, after the publication of this novel – which Bonner has titled Crib, – Bonner finds himself on top of the bestseller list and on top of the literary world. Hollywood is beckoning. His publisher is eager for more books. Even his moribund love life seems to be picking up, after he meets a young woman while doing a promotional appearance in Seattle. But just as his life seems to have become every commercial novelists’ dream, he gets an email from an anonymous source. The mysterious correspondent tells Bonner that he knows the plot of Crib was stolen. And, in later emails, he threatens to expose Bonner for this act of plagiarism. Now Bonner’s own life has become a nightmarish thriller and it unfolds for the reader in chapters that alternate with chapters of Crib. Thus we get two thrillers for the price of one. And eventually both books will just sort of blend into a single heart-stopping tale. To say more than this about the plot of The Plot would be unfair to those who plan to read it. But if you like literate, intelligent thrillers, don’t wait for this one to become an HBO miniseries (like “The Undoing,” which was based on Korelitz’s You Should Have Known). Rush right out and get your hands on a copy of this super-charged page-turner. Plenty of other intellectual properties have employed a plot similar to The Plot – the 1988 film D.O.A., Donald Westlake’s 2001 novel The Hook, even my short story “The Gallows Bird,” which appeared in the May 2013 issue of Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine – but to my knowledge the old plagiarism plot has never been done better than it was done by Jean Hanff Korelitz just last year.
In fourth place is another first. I believe that The Monkey’s Mask, a 1995 book by the late Australian poet Dorothy Porter, is the first ever novel-in-verse to win a Mimsie Award. I was so impressed by it that, immediately upon finishing it, I mailed my copy to a friend who was sheltering at home because he is immuno-compromised and fearful of catching COVID-19. I sent it to him because he is a huge fan of film noir and of noir crime novels. The Monkey’s Mask is a detective story set in 1990s Australia. It tells the story of a lesbian private detective who is approached one day by the parents of a missing 17-year-old girl. The girl is a poetry fanatic. She loves to write it, she loves to hang out at places where poetry is recited, and she loves to seek out professional poets to talk with about poetry. Alas, before the detective can even begin her investigation, the girl’s murdered body is found by the police. But the dead girl’s parents don’t cancel the private investigation. Now they want the private eye to figure out who killed the girl. I am writing about this book in somewhat vague terms – no names, no mention of the city where it mostly takes place – because, as I said, I gave away my copy and no longer have it handy. I meant to order a replacement copy before it became time to write up this essay but, typically, I forgot. I no longer own the book, so I can’t quote from it or give you any details of the plot (which I wouldn’t do anyway, because there is great pleasure to be derived from watching it all unfold on the page). Suffice it to say that this book genuinely succeeds as a mystery novel/crime story/thriller despite being written in (mostly unrhymed) verse. The characters are well drawn. The language is, well, poetic. And the story is very satisfying (although the resolution was slightly mishandled, in my opinion). The Monkey’s Mask is not a perfect novel but it is one of the best recent novels-in-verse I have read. Better, in my opinion, than Vikram Seth’s far-better-known The Golden Gate.
In third place we find an obscure and long-forgotten thriller by Richard Owen called White Slave. I wrote a long essay about it, called Better Run Through The Jungle, for this Substack blog. I posted it back on February 1, 2021. You can still find it there. Here are a few excerpts of my review:
For every beautifully polished gem of American popular fiction – Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, say, or Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby – there are dozens of lesser known nuggets that might have shone just as brightly had they not been unjustly neglected by readers and critics when they were first published. Richard Owen’s 1987 thriller, White Slave, is just such a novel. No, it’s not an all-time masterpiece of serious literature. But as American page-turners go, it is definitely a one-percenter. Few thrillers are as smart, as taut, as well constructed, or as…well, thrilling as White Slave.
The opening chapter is reminiscent of a lot of good Harlan Coben and Mary Higgins Clark novels, wherein a sympathetic character – often a child – goes suddenly and mysteriously missing. In this case, the child is 13-year-old Kim Mitchell. She is the daughter of Tom Mitchell, a former New York City prosecuting attorney who made a name for himself by going after notoriously-hard-to-convict drug dealers. But when his wife died of cancer, the prosecutorial zeal went out of him. He moved from New York to a small town in Connecticut. Now he runs a quiet one-man law practice and spends his workdays writing up wills and family trusts. Kim is the light of his life now. Like her father, she is a baseball fan. She is also the only girl on her local Little League team. As the novel opens, Kim is on the pitcher’s mound trying to put away the last few hitters of the opposing team. After the victory, Tom informs Kim and her teammates that he’ll buy sodas and snacks for everyone down at the nearby drug store. The boys all go off to the boys’ locker room to change their clothes. Kim goes by herself to the girls’ locker room. Tom goes off to the drug store to await the arrival of the kids. Eventually the boys all show up. But Kim doesn’t. Ever. The chapter ends and the next section of the book begins with the words “Seven years later…”
That’s really all you should read of my February 2021 review if you want to enjoy an optimal reading experience. In fact, I probably shouldn’t even have given away that lapel-grabbing opening scene. The pace slackens a bit over the course of the next 20 or 30 pages, but it gradually begins to pick up again and by the end of the novel nothing will be able to tear you away from it. There’s one really ridiculously convenient coincidence that mars the plot but, all in all, this thriller is as good as any written by Thomas Harris. High praise, indeed!
On May 21, 2021, I posted a review of James Leigh’s 1968 novel Downstairs At Ramsey’s, my second favorite book of 2021. Don’t check out the entire review unless you have first read the book. But here are a few excerpts:
James Leigh’s 1968 book Downstairs at Ramsey’s is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of excellent American novels that have never been properly recognized as the masterpieces they are. The book’s narrator is H. Victor Ramsey, an actor who, for decades, has made a good living in Hollywood portraying stuffy British butlers in American films. A naturalized American citizen, he opts to retire from acting in the late 1960s, despite the fact that his skills are still in demand. His agent implores him to reconsider, telling him, “Vic, your proper destiny is to drop dead serving tea to Cary Grant.” But Ramsey is determined to retire, and so he purchases a home in the Hollywood Hills from an ancient silent film star. It is an odd house – two houses actually, one directly on top of the other. The only difference between the upper house and the lower is that the upper has a wide screened balcony. The houses are hidden from the street by a 12-foot-high stucco wall, interrupted only by an arched wrought-iron gate. The silent film star informs Ramsey that the upper home is the better of the two, but doesn’t explain why. Thus, Ramsey decides to live in the upper house and rent out the one below. He wants a tenant who will be interesting, perhaps someone of the younger generation with an active social life. He gets exactly that. He rents the lower house to a 37-year-old writer named Hardy Brewster. A promising playwright in his university days, Brewster has since given up the theater and is now embarked upon writing a critical history of jazz, of which he is a huge fan (James Leigh is also a jazz fan and has written at least one book on the subject). Brewster picks up a little extra money doing ghostwriting work for other authors.
Brewster does, indeed, have an active social life, and this creates a bit of a moral dilemma for Ramsey. Shortly after Brewster moves in to the lower house, Ramsey discovers that he can hear everything that takes place in Brewster’s rental through vents that have been strategically embedded in the walls of every room. They look like heating vents but they actually carry sound back and forth between the two houses. Thus, when occupying his kitchen, Ramsey can hear what is going on in Brewster’s kitchen. When occupying his living room, he can hear what is going on in Brewster’s living room. Presumably, Brewster would be able to hear any noises being made in Ramsey’s upstairs home, but Ramsey lives alone and is by nature a quiet man. Brewster’s life, on the other hand, is anything but quiet. He is a confirmed bachelor who makes no secret of that fact. He involves himself only with women whom he has no plans to ever marry. His current girlfriend is Rita, a somewhat ditzy divorcee in her 30s. She comes to Brewster’s house frequently and prattles on about the people in her life, particularly a troublesome young woman she calls “Dee,” and whose name is actually Delilah. At first, Ramsey has no idea who this mysterious Dee is and doesn’t really care. He is annoyed by all the chatter going on below and he calls up a home-repair company to see if they can come out and seal up the sound-carrying vents. The repairman comes and gives Ramsey an estimate for the work. Ramsey finds the estimate satisfactory and urges the repairman to begin work at once. Alas, the repair company is backed up. It will be weeks before they can come out and seal up the vents. Ramsey resigns himself to this wait. He doesn’t tell Brewster about the problem because he doesn’t want to trouble him. But, as the weeks go by and the repair company continues to push back the starting date of the work, Ramsey finds himself more and more captivated by the soap opera of Hardy Brewster’s life. So captivated, in fact, that he eventually calls off the repair work. Listening in on Brewster’s life has become an obsession with him…
The book has something in common with Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film about voyeurism. But whereas Hitchcock’s voyeur, L.B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart), can watch people but can’t hear very well what they are saying to each other, H. Victor Ramsey can listen to his subjects clearly but can see them only when they leave the house below his own. Hitchcock’s tale deals with murder. James Leigh’s tale deals with a more commonplace crime. Nonetheless it is riveting, funny, smart, sexy, and thoroughly enjoyable. The book is filled with wonderful observations about life, love, art, etc. Here are a few:
In young and old, a lack of curiosity is commonly held a lack of complete health, yet who will say where a healthy curiosity becomes a perverse inquisitiveness?
To call something unthinkable is indeed to think of it.
Unhappiness which admits of no solution is a monotonous business.
Peace is only appreciated in full when punctuated regularly by war.
Women are as exhilarated by the prospect of buying something they don’t need as men are by the prospect of seducing a woman they don’t want.
I can no longer remember how I stumbled across this book, but I’m glad I did. It was a delight from first to last and the second most enjoyable book I read in 2021.
I’m almost embarrassed to mention my favorite book of 2021. It isn’t by any means obscure or old or forgotten. It was published in 2021 and drew quite a bit of publicity. It was written by a very famous American, albeit an American who isn’t famous for writing novels. I thought of dropping it down the list a bit just so I wouldn’t look like too much of a contemporary culture junkie. But, if I’m being honest with myself (and you), I have to confess that I enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of his 2019 film Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood more than any other book I read this year. This may not be the best-written book I read this year, but it was way better written than I expected it to be. On August 4, Janet Hutchings published on her blog a review I wrote of Tarantino’s book. Earlier, on July 7, I posted a much longer version of that review on this Substack blog. One reason why I found this book so enjoyable is because Tarantino and I are very close in age. We’re both late Boomers, and we grew up addicted to the same kind of pop-cultural junk food: movie novelizations, TV westerns, Star Trek, B movies, etc. I recognize that Tarantino’s novelization is not an all time classic of American literature, but I think it is one of the greatest novelizations ever written. I have argued in a previous essay that 1975 was the single greatest year for American crime fiction. The bestselling novel of 1975 was Ragtime, an historical crime novel written by E.L. Doctorow. Tarantino’s book, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (the ellipses of the film title are not used in the title of the book), is presented as though it were published sometime around 1975. The publisher filled the back pages of the book with spurious advertisements for various bestselling novels of the 1970s. Other clues suggest that the book should be approached as though it were published in 1975. With that in mind, I wrote the following in my review of Tarantino’s novelization:
Though literary purists might object, I believe Tarantino’s novel compares favorably with Doctorow’s masterpiece Ragtime. Doctorow’s novel is loosely connected to the real-life murder of famed architect Stanford White, who was killed by Harry Thaw, the deranged husband of legendary beauty Evelyn Nesbit, whom White had deflowered when she was still a teenager. Though Thaw and his crimes are mentioned in Ragtime, Doctorow seems much more interested in exploring a particular time (the turn of the twentieth century) and place (New York City and its environs). And he seems most interested in weaving the real-life stories of various celebrities of the era (Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, and many others) with the fictional stories of his own invented characters. This is pretty much what Tarantino does in his book. He explores a particular time (late 1960s) and place (Hollywood and environs) and weaves the real-life stories of various celebrities (Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, Bruce Lee, James Stacey, Jay Sebring, and many others) with the stories of his own invented characters. Doctorow is the more careful prose stylist, but there’s something endearing and addictive in Tarantino’s more conversational, expletive-laden, narrative style. It’s like he’s sitting in the room with you, telling a compelling story but interrupting it often to interject equally compelling commentary on movies, music, pop fiction, etc. Tarantino’s prose isn’t as well-behaved as Doctorow’s, but good behavior isn’t everything.
At this late date, younger readers may look at an old hardback copy of Doctorow’s Ragtime – with its ornate lettering and dry, unillustrated cover; the jacket flap copy describing a book set in a long-gone era – and come away with the notion that this was a fairly sedate historical novel. But they’d be wrong. Ragtime is filled with horrific violence, most of it race-related, and it is probably just as relevant to our present day predicament in America as it was in 1975. The well-behaved prose belies an angry, incendiary story about a Black man who retaliates against a racist society by trying to violently overthrow its government. The well-mannered prose works in counterpart to the ill-mannered behavior of many of Doctorow’s characters.
Tarantino, on the other hand, doesn’t try to keep any kind of a cool distance between the narrator and his characters. Tarantino is, for all intents and purposes, a character in his own book, perhaps the main character. His expositional asides about such things as the films of Akira Kurosawa are as full of foul language as the rants of the characters are. Doctorow’s well-mannered prose was appropriate to the historical setting of Ragtime. But Tarantino’s prose is equally as appropriate to the historical setting of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (whose very title announces – as does Doctorow’s – that the book is historical fiction). And though Tarantino doesn’t foreground racism the way Doctorow did in Ragtime, he does remind his readers that Manson feared Black men and was hoping to incite a race war in America.
What’s more, Tarantino’s prose isn’t at all bad. It’s conversational and often profane, but it also manages to be quite impressive at times. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is the one in which Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) picks a fight with legendary martial artist Bruce Lee on the set of the TV series The Green Hornet. The same scene appears in the book, but here Tarantino slows it down and gives us the thoughts of both Booth and Lee. The men have decided to have a contest. The first one to knock the other on his ass twice wins. In the book we hear Cliff’s strategy running through his head. He decides to let Lee knock him down easily in their first clash. If it happens easily, Cliff figures Lee will get lazy and try the exact same assault tactic the second time around. But once Cliff knows the tactic, he’ll be able to anticipate it and knock Lee on his ass. In the book (unlike the film) we learn that Cliff is a World War II vet who killed more Japanese soldiers in up-close combat (with his hands and a knife, usually) than any other American. He did this mostly in the jungles of the Philippines, in the company of Filipino resistance fighters. He’s killed plenty of dangerous Asians and isn’t even slightly fearful of Lee. But Lee doesn’t know this at first. He attacks and easily knocks Cliff on his ass. And, as expected, he comes back with an identical second assault, but this time Cliff easily defends himself, throwing Lee up against a car and causing injury to the martial artist. Suddenly Bruce understands exactly what has happened, that the first strike was a set up. Here’s Tarantino describing what’s going on in Lee’s head now:
Bruce also quickly recognized that, while Cliff wasn’t anywhere near as skilled as the opponents he fought in any of his martial-arts tournaments, he was something they weren’t.
He was a killer.
Bruce could see Cliff had killed men before with his bare hands.
He could see Cliff wasn’t fighting Bruce Lee.
Cliff was fighting his instinct to kill Bruce Lee.
Lee is right to be afraid of Cliff. In the film it is strongly suggested that Cliff might have murdered his wife. The book leaves no doubt about it. Cliff cut his wife in half with a spear gun meant to kill sharks. And she’s not the only person Cliff has killed since the end of the war. In a flashback to the days when Cliff was newly returned to America after his World War II service (and following a brief stint as a Parisian pimp), Cliff finds himself being threatened in a pizza parlor by two low-level Italian-American goons. What follows is somewhat reminiscent of the legendary “Sicilian scene” in the 1993 Tony Scott film True Romance, which Tarantino wrote. In the Sicilian scene, Dennis Hopper finds himself outnumbered by a gang of Sicilian-American gangsters led by Christopher Walken. He knows they plan to kill him, but he buys himself a little time by telling a story about the evolution of the Sicilian people. At first the story is merely sort of dryly amusing, so Walken lets him ramble on. Eventually though, Hopper turns the story into a slur on the Sicilian race, at which point Walken murders him. The pizza parlor scene in Tarantino’s novelization mirrors this somewhat, but has a much happier outcome for the person (Cliff) telling the story…
Even if you’ve already seen Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, you ought to read the novelization. It differs from the film in many ways. The climactic scene of the film – a showdown between Cliff, Rick Dalton, and some members of the Manson family – isn’t even dramatized in the book. It is mentioned in passing and then dropped entirely. The ending of the book is entirely different than the ending of the film, but it is also much more moving and subtle. Surprisingly, for a novel written by the maker of The Hateful 8 and Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2, the ending of this novelization is soft and sweet.
One of Tarantino’s most impressive feats is the way that he turns the plot of the pilot episode of Lancer into a novel-within-a-novel. Lancer was an actual short-lived (two seasons) TV series that debuted in 1968. In both the film and the book, many of Rick Dalton’s scenes concern his guest-starring role in the Lancer pilot, in which he plays a villain named Caleb DeCoteau (Rick think the last name is pronounced “Dakota”). In the film, we’re told very little about the TV series. We know it is a Western drama but we aren’t told much about the time or the place. We don’t know the back-stories of its characters. In the novelization, Tarantino gives us a complete panoramic Western tale that explains how Caleb DeCoteau came to cross paths with Johnny Madrid, the half-Mexican bastard son of Murdoch Lancer, a fabulously wealthy cattle baron who owns a massive Texas ranch somewhere near the Mexican border. Mind you, Tarantino doesn’t treat this as fictional material but as a parallel story running alongside the contemporary one. True, it is sketched out in the manner of a film treatment or a cheap novelization but, quite obviously, those aren’t genres Tarantino considers beneath him.
So there you have it, the fifteen best books I read in 2021. And thus another installment of The Mimsie Awards comes to its conclusion. Below you will find a list of the 85 books I read in 2021, in the approximate order in which I read them. Due to laziness on my part, if I couldn’t remember the author’s name, I left it off (and some of the names I have included may be partially mistaken). I boldfaced the titles of books that didn’t win a Mimsie but were nonetheless very good.
See you next year!
Kevin’s 2021 Reading List
Hatter Fox by Marilyn Hughes
Incubus by Ray Russell
The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell
OK, Boomer by Jill Filipovic
Boomers by Helen Andrews
A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Children of the Pearl by Chung Yin Bezine
Sardonicus by Ray Russell
The Haunted Mesa by Louis L’Amour
Last of the Breed by L’Amour
Education of a Wandering Man by L’Amour
White Slave by Richard Owen
The Land of the Golden Mountain by C.Y. Lee
Ragtime by Doctorow
Lover’s Point by C.Y. Lee
The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter
Maggie Now by Betty Smith
Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson
San Francisco by John Haase
Miss 1000 Spring Blossoms by John Ball
Temple of the Moon by Bezine
The Virgin Market by C.Y. Lee
Five Pieces of Jade by John Ball
In the Heat of the Night by John Ball
The Eyes of the Buddha by John Ball
Sayonara by John Ball
Death of a Playmate by John Ball
Oklahoma Crude by Marc Norman
Altered States by Paddy Chayevsky
She’ll Never Get Off the Ground by Robert Serling
Come Fly The World by Julia Cooke
Films Into Books by Randall D. Larson (if you are interested in film and TV novelizations this is a must-have reference book)
The Cowboys by William Dale Jennings
The Plot by Jean Korletz
Downstairs at Ramsey’s by James Leigh
The Skies Belong to Us by Brendan I. Koerner
The President’s Plane is Missing by Robert Serling
Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
One by Richard Bach (worst book of the year)
Runway Zero-Eight by Arthur Hailey
Nuts (a novelization of the film starring Barbra Streisand and Richard Dreyfus)
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moonie by Marjorie Kellogg
You and Me, Babe by Chuck Barris
Della by Chuck Barris
Illusions by Richard Bach (also dreadful)
McDermott’s Sky by Robert Serling
Come Fly With Us by Omelia and Waldock
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Tarantino
The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth
Band of Brothers by Ernest K. Gann
Round the Bend by Neville Shute
Malibu Colony by Pamela Wallace (totally cheesy but great fun)
No Comebacks by Forsyth
The Phantom of Manhattan by Forsyth
9/30/55 by John Minahan
That Janitor by John Minahan
High White Notes by David S. Wills
The Domino Principal by Adam Kennedy
Killshot by Tom Alibrandi (interesting variation on Walter Tevis’s The Hustler but involving the world of handball rather than billiards)
Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon
The Owl Service by Alan Garner (the year’s biggest disappointment, considering how highly others think of it)
The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell by Richard Setlowe
The Sexual Conquest of Japan by Richard Setlowe (a failure but it has its moments)
The Winds of Mitamura by John Ball
A Great Idea At The Time by Alex Beam
Travels by Michael Crichton
The Generous Years by Chet Huntley
Not That You Asked by Andy Rooney
The Veteran by Frederick Forsyth
The Boyfriend From Hell by Avery Corman
The Old Neighborhood by Avery Corman
Anything Considered by Peter Mayle
A Woman of Spirit by Herbert Tarr
50 by Avery Corman
A Woman of the People by Benjamin Capps
A Light In the Forest by Conrad Richter
Heart of War by Lucian Truscott IV
People Like Us by Dominick Dunne
The Winners by Dominick Dunne
A Place Called Saturday by Mary Astor
A Case of Need by Jeffrey Hunter (pseudonym for Michael Crichton)
Thy Daughter’s Nakedness by Myron S. Kaufmann
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
The 10th Month by Laura Z. Hobson
In 2021 I sort of speed-read my way through some books that I had read years ago but needed to reacquaint myself with for some journalistic project. This includes titles such as Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Joan Didion’s Run, River, John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions and Dutch Shea, Avery Corman’s Kramer vs. Kramer and Oh, God! Because I sped through these I didn’t list them among the 85 books that I read fully. Some of the books I re-read, such as Ragtime, I read fully, so they are listed in the main document. I have also omitted the many books that I started but gave up on after five, ten, 25, or 50 pages. These weren’t necessarily bad books. Some of them I may eventually return to. I may have just attempted to read them at the wrong time.