Book Review & Analysis: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

      Is paradise eternal? Is reaching paradise even possible? How long can you remain exposed in pure sunlight before the shadows cast behind you catch up and overtake you? You can ask John Grady Cole, the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

The story starts out in the same kind of bleak Texas landscape where Peter Bogdanovich set films like Hud and The Last Picture Show. John Grady hopes to inherit his family’s ranch even though it is in rapid decline. His dysfunctional family has other ideas and he ends up on his own in a small town located in southwestern Texas. He sets off on horseback with Rawlins, his cousin and childhood companion. They head off for the border of Mexico and as they ride, the two teens realize that someone is following them. The follower, named Jimmy Blevins, catches up to the two and insists on joining them. He is a shadow encroaching on their sunlight. Rawlins is suspicious of his intentions and wants him to leave, but John Grady agrees just as long as he doesn’t cause any trouble. That initial encounter sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

Jimmy Blevins remains a mysterious character throughout the whole story. His identity and age are never certain. His background story can’t be verified. A couple things are obvious, one being that he has a high quality, expensive horse and gun while the other is that he has some desert survival skills that are unusual for a kid of his age. That horse and gun are the pivot on which the fate of all three teenagers depends.

As the trio cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and ride farther into the Sonoran desert, the landscape takes on a life of its own. The descriptions of the dusty brown soil, the vegetation, the vast sky, the arroyos, and the calm silence bracketed by gusts of wind is like a description of the Elysian Fields. McCarthy’s descriptions evoke a desert plain that is pulsing with life. The language he uses is lush and densely textured so that sentences unfold like blossoms of velvet. This is by far the best, and I might say the only, good descriptive writing I have encountered in McCarthy’s works to date. In a strange way, the transition from Texas to Mexico reminded me of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her bedroom door, leaves her dreary life in Kansas behind, and enters into a land that is both colorful and magical.

And this landscape is a perfect setting for adventure. The three continue into the foreign land with no other immediate goal beyond survival. They hunt for food, they search for water, and they continue south for a good long time. Most importantly, they succeed in surviving with little more than their horses and their wits. Their development as characters also comes out as they move on. John Grady remains the silent introspective one along with being the leader and decision maker. Blevins is equal parts clever and naive. Rawlins is the talker who never stops expressing doubts about Blevins; he takes every chance he can to convince John Grady to abandon the boy, but John Grady insists they have a responsibility to take care of him until they get someplace where he will be safe.

After Blevins’ horse and gun get stolen during a rainstorm, the three boys find them in a dusty village. They lose Blevins when he tries to retrieve his horse by stealing it. Meanwhile, John Grady and Rawlins continue heading south until they reach an hacienda where they find employment training horses in preparation for the market.

On the hacienda, John Grady proves to be a master of horsemanship as he far exceeds the abilities of the ranch hands when it comes to breaking wild horses. He quickly gets promoted to the top position and then falls in love with Alejandra, the hacendado’s daughter. This is when the shadows begin to gather and come for John Grady. Their love is forbidden by both Alejandra’s father and her aunt. The latter actually has a high opinion of John Grady, but since Mexico is such a class-stratified society, she worries about protecting her niece’s reputation and commands him to stop seeing her. This doesn’t stop Alejandra from sneaking out at night to be with him.

Something has been going on in the background. Lawmen have been consulting with Alejandra’s father and soon they arrive to haul him and Rawlins away to a prison where they meet up with Jimmy Blevins who had been arrested after he killed a man while trying to steal back his gun. First John Grady and Rawlins are relieved of Blevins’ company, and then they are taken to a brutal penitentiary where every day is a fight for survival. Before somebody on the outside mysteriously arranges for their release, John Grady kills a man in self defense.

Up until this point, aside from the brilliant descriptiveness, what is great about this novel is the way John Grady reaches such a high point in his life as if he is on the verge of entering paradise, riding the crest of a wave that is high beyond belief, and then the wave breaks and he is smashed down into the darkest pits of Hell. But in the middle of all this, John Grady remains stoic, steadfast, and unemotional. Ironically, his emotional content is carried externally in the prose throughout whatever setting he is in. The desert is euphoric and adventurous. That euphoria carries over into the hacienda where his dreams appear to be in reach. Remember that his ambition in Texas was to take over his family’s ranch and then he lands at the hacienda which seems like second best. Then that euphoria is completely eclipsed by the grit and danger of the penitentiary. The writing is saturated with deeply felt emotions even though John Grady barely expresses almost nothing more than a desire to continue on. This contrast between emotion and non-emotion is what gives McCarthy’s prose so much depth.

After being released from prison, Rawlins takes a bus back to America while John Grady ties up some loose ends and settles his scores. This involves last encounters with Alejandra and her aunt, getting revenge on the policeman who sent him to jail, and, most importantly, collecting the three horses that he, Rawlins, and Belvins rode through the desert of Mexico. After dealing with this business, John Grady returns to Texas where two significant things happen.

First John Grady gets taken to civil court in order to prove he did not steal his horses. This is complicated by the fact that he has no official papers of ownership, but the avuncular Judge takes a liking to him, finds him not guilty, and later they have a discussion in the Judge’s home where John Grady tries to make sense of everything he went through in Mexico. The Judge advises him not to worry because everything bad that happened there was not his fault. As a teenager, he might have made the wrong decisions in some ambiguous situations, but he was a victim of circumstances without any grounds for moral condemnation. Of course, the Judge has to pass judgment on John Grady to make that judgment authoritative, bringing gravitas and closure to the life trial he had gone through.

Secondly, John Grady goes in search of Jimmy Blevins’s family to return his horse and tell them the bad news about their son. Unable to locate them, he ends up at the home of a radio preacher named Jimmy Blevins where he is treated to a huge meal cooked by his wife and offered a new vision of domestic bliss. At this point I couldn’t help recalling The Wizard of Oz again. Like Dorothy, John Grady leaves his dismal home, travels into a land of exotic beauty, gets plunged into the depths of Hell, and learns there is no place like home. All the while he is at the mercy of good and evil forces that are beyond his control, just as Dorothy is pushed and pulled along by the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the East. Could those witches correspond to Alejandra’s father and aunt, the former trying to destroy John Grady and the latter trying to save him and send him hone? As exciting and magical as Mexico could be for him, it just wasn’t where he belonged just like Dorothy didn’t belong in Oz. But unlike Dorothy, John Grady doesn’t find a home in the end. What he does find is a better sense of what a good home could be. The novel ends with him hitting the road on horseback in search of it once again. He doesn’t get to Heaven, but he does find himself traveling in Purgatory.

So what are the horses about? John Grady is closer to horses than anybody else in the novel. He understands them. He communicates with them. He trusts them and all the affection he gives them is reciprocated. He connects with the horses on a deep level that is uncanny and borders on the mystical. To understand the horses though I think you need to contrast what happens in the presence and absence of them. When John Grady is in their presence, he is riding south in the Mexican, desert, he is working on the hacienda and having a romance with Alejandra, he is returning to America, and he is wandering on horseback at the end searching for something that remains a mystery to the reader. When the horses are absent, John Grady is in the Mexican prison system or else he is seeing Alejandra for the last time before she leaves him for good. He regains control over his life by gaining control over the three horses that Rawlins, Blevins, and himself rode into Mexico on. It is also significant that the three go their separate ways when Blevins’ horse gets stolen. When John Grady is in the presence of his horses, he is in control of his life; when the horses are absent, he is in misery and his life is falling apart. My interpretation is that the horses represent the cornerstone of John Grady’s existence and you might even say they represent his soul. Another possibility is that the horses are a MacGuffin, meaning a thing or person that is central to the plot but otherwise has no inherent symbolic meaning to the narrative.

Another element of interest I find is the presence and absence of modern technology. John Grady thrives in the absence of technology. The times when he is thriving most and living with maximal freedom is when he is either riding in the desert with his companions or spending time with Alejandra. The only modern technology around at most of those times is his gun. Otherwise, the places with the most technology are the towns, the hacienda, and the prison which are all places where the most severe conflicts arise or else are just necessary stopping points for taking care of business along the route of his journey. There is no reason to think McCarthy is making a deliberate statement about technology. I actually believe that this is a narrative technique he uses to draw a sharp contrast between the best and worst times of John Grady’s travels.

I also find the contrast between the presence and absence of technology creates a sense of timelessness in the narrative. Throughout most of the book it is difficult to tell when it takes place. (If you read carefully, you can deduce it is in the year of 1949 since early on Rawlins gives his age as 17 and when he enters prison he tells the intake officer he was born in 1932) It has the ambiance and feeling of a traditional western story, but there are infrequent intrusions of things like cars and radios. This suspension of definite time markers and the dependence on the cycles of sunrises and sunsets infuses the narrative with a dreamlike feeling of other worldliness. The passages with modern technology in the background deflate that feeling and bring the narrative down to the ground. This is why I say the language McCarthy writes with is richly layered.

In the end, this book was a big surprise. I thought Blood Meridian was poorly written and downright boring. The Road was one of the worst novels I’ve ever read being nothing more than a thin trickle of literary diarrhea. All the Pretty Horses is certainly a more mature and well-developed work of art, worth reading for the use of language and literary technique alone. The trajectory of the story makes it even more complete and approaches the universal in its themes. As a western novel it is one that clearly transcends its genre. Most westerns don’t actually mean anything. They just involve gunfights between good guys and bad guys. But transcendence means the story entails something more thoughtful than violence for the sake of entertainment. My final thought is that this novel addresses boundaries and what happens when they get crossed. National boundaries are arbitrary and some might even say imaginary. Social boundaries including those of class, ethnicity, culture, and language may be less imaginary, but they are not impermeable. Crossing boundaries entails expanding and enhancing our understanding of the world by experience whatever is outside our knowledge. But crossing boundaries also entails risk. However dangerous that risk might be, it is one worth taking because, in most cases, no matter what it is we go through, be it bad or good, we grow and come out stronger in the end. If we don't cross boundaries we never grow. If we don't grow we have no chance of coming closer to what it is we can truly be.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian

or The Eevening Redness In the West

by Cormac McCarthy

      What a disappointment. A lot of people rave about how Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the darkest, the most disturbing, the most awful, the most evil, and the best novel ever written. I had high expectations going into this one. What I got was barely more compelling than an amusement park haunted house.

The book starts off alright. We get introduced to the Kid. Actually, “introduced” might not be the right word since so little is said about him that he doesn’t actually feel like a literary character. But he leaves his family in Tennessee. We know he’s violent and that’s about all. His initial encounter with another character is with Toadvine, another non-entity who knows about nothing other than violence. The two try to kill each other as if fighting is the only way they can relate. Then they form a strange bond as they attack some random guy in a hotel room. They split up but Toadvine will appear agaun later. You’d think with a name like Toadvine, there might be something of interest in this character’s life story. There isn’t; he’s just a walking embodiment of violence without any substance.

The Kid moves on and then spends a rainy night in a shack with an old man whose whole philosophy on life is that it is impossible to tell what other people think. This seems to be offered as a philosophical framework for the novel as a whole and if it’s meant to be, it works, not because that theme is sufficiently articulated but because the character development is so weak that it’s impossible to understand any of the players in the story. If that’s a result of bad writing, then it can be written off as just a trapping of genre fiction; if it’s deliberate, then McCarthy is a lazy author or else he just outright fails at writing ambiguity into his work.

But the Kid moves on and settles in with a gang of Americans who naively invade Mexico, thinking it will be an easy victory. Instead they all get slaughtered by Indians except for the Kid who moves on to jin another gang. That gang is led by Glanton, another character who is just as one dimensional as most of the other characters. Their most prominent member, however, is Judge Holden, most often just referred to as the Judge. Toadvine is also a member of this gang, though why this might be of significance is never explained. The gang is strangely multi-ethnic, consisting of mostly white men, but also including a couple Mexicans, some Delaware Indians, a Jew, and a Black cowboy who constantly fights with a white guy. This band of sadistic thugs is racially tolerant as long as the minorities are just as cruel and homicidal as the white guys. Is this meant to be social commentary? I don’t know.

Otherwise, McCarthy never tells us how many members the gang has and as a group they are just as non-descript as its individual members. It’s frustrating when out of nowhere, a character appears, says some arbitrary lines, and then disappears, never to be found in the narrative again.

One thing that can be said about Glanton’s gang is that they are indifferent to any kind of suffering, even when it is another gang member who needs help. In one of the better scenes, one member is injured after a fight and they all refuse to help him dress his wounds. They remind me of the kinds of assholes you’d find in an Ayn Rand novel; if you need help from someone else that’s your own problem and no one else’s. The only kind of teamwork they engage in is when they are involved in acts of destruction or warfare even though strength in numbers gives and advantage in combat. That’s probably why the gang shrinks from attrition and eventually disbands.

The Glanton gang get hired by the mayor of a city to hunt down and murder Apaches who are terrorizing the Mexican citizenry. The mercenaries collect their scalps for monetary reward, although they boost their incomes by taking scalps from mestizos, old women, and children then turning them in for reward. After getting paid, they celebrate by getting drunk and reveling in sex and violence to the dismay of the city’s inhabitants. Then they move on. When they’ve exhausted the supply of Apaches, they start attacking anyone they meet just because they have nothing better to do with themselves.

Then there is the Judge. He is resourceful, highly educated, and excessively cruel. He is unusual looking too, being seven feet tall and without any hair whatsoever on his entire body which can be verified because he likes to dance naked in the moonlight. I picture him as looking like Tom Homan, that mashed potato faced nazi creep who is our current head of ICE, the one responsible for deporting children and legal immigrants to hell holes like prisons in El Salvador and South Sudan without due process of law. Like Homan, the Judge also has no sympathy for humanity in any way. His whole existence is based around killing people and when he gets a hold of children, he does some unsavory things to them before he murders them and takes their scalps. In one of the most interesting passages, the Judge is sitting with the gang around a fire. He takes out a collection of things he found in the desert, sketches them in a note pad, writes a brief description, then destroys them. He explains that anything he doesn’t know about doesn’t have his permission to live. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but it characterizes him as ultimately narcissistic, psychotic, and evil. The Judge is also strangely happy as he takes delight in his extreme acts of sadism and carnage. In the Judge, McCarthy has created a memorable character, but he doesn’t take his development far enugh. Understating his personality and psychology looks like an attempt at making the Judge mysterious and enigmatic, but this attempt fails in the end. There just isn’t enough there to see him as a substantial person evil, good, or otherwise. The Judge, along with the Kid, are more like elemental forces than people.

Like the Judge, the Kid also fails in this way, but even more so. It is hard to tell if he is the main character or not. His travels take up large portions at the beginning and end of the book, but after he joins up with Glanton and gang, he almost entirely disappears from the narrative save for some gunfights and other random events. He becomes a little more interesting towards the end as he begins to mellow with age and show some compassion for others, although there really is no build up to this and his change just happens arbitrarily. In one memorable scene, a procession of Penitentes gets massacred by Apaches. There is one survivor, an old woman, and he offers to protect her and get her back to safety. But on closer inspection he learns that she is a mummified corpse that had been long dead, making you question whether the massacre was a hallucination or not. This signfies that his attempt at compassion is an empty gesture and that, in all honesty, he has little of it. This is underscored later when he is confronted by a disrespectful teenager who he shoots impulsively during an argument. The Kid’s final confrontation with the Judge revolves around his infrequent displays of sympathy for others which the Judge sees as being a weakness. What is the Judge actually a judge of? We never really know, but one thing is for sure: he has sentenced everyone and everything to death.

This novel also prominently displays a hallmark of McCarthy’s writing: people wandering around aimlessly in an empty landscape. A lot of people comment on his ability to describe the desert of Mexico. In the beginning, at least, the descriptions of the lowlands of Chihuahua are good, but they eventually become redundant and boring. Like I always say, there is a difference between writing and listing and at times McCarthy isn’t writing. He inventories the desert in a way that is reminiscent of what makes Walt Whitman’s poetry so annoying to read. There are long stretches of the narrative that are nothing but repetitions of the same landscape, broken up at times by scenes of extreme violence. The violence, by the way, isn’t as disturbing as some claim it to be. It does nothing to alleviate the boredom of reading about the desert, comes off as juvenile at times, and serves no apparent purpose in the story other than being gratuitous. And the descriptions of the desert aren’t the best I’ve ever read either. Edward Abbey does a far superior job at that. I’ve lived in the American Southwest and done some extensive backpacking in those deserts, and what McCarthy writes here doesn’t even come close to how vibrant and alive the desert on both sides of the border actually is. His descriptions of the Sierra Madres are deficient too. While he does an adequate job of describing the planes and valleys, his ability to visually depict mountains is weak. They resemble paintings on a wall done by an amateur artists. He makes the mountains look like one dimensional objects in a three dimensional landscape. Again, I think this is just bad and lazy writing.

Blood Meridian is underwhelming. I think it mostly appeals to hipster types who like to brag on the internet about how edgy they are because they read disturbing books. But this one isn’t as transgressive as anything written by J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, or the Marquis de Sade, all of which I’ve previously read. Those authors are more authentically shocking because they use transgression to make social statements. Even Sade can be read as a satirical polemic against the European aristocracy. Blood Meridian doesn’t really have any message. It’s meant to be a portrait of Hell, but Hell doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how people got there. As an anti-western, it’s meant to say that the Frontier Expansion era wasn’t as heroic as it is portrayed in Hollywood movies. But so what? Any student of American history, or any realist for that matter, would already know that. Besides that theme has already been explored in depth in the cinematic works of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and John Ford. Even Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven deflates the myth that gunfighting is noble. And I don’t care if Harold Bloom loved this book; I never liked him anyways. Blood Meridian does have some memorable passages and I don’t think it’s a complete failure. It’s certainly not as bad as The Road which I thought was vapid, pretentious, and probably the most overrated book I’ve ever read. Blood Meridian is the kind of book I would only read once. Most of it is boring and it doesn’t live up to its hype. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

      We commemorate death and dying. But death is not what matters. What does matter is the life we live from birth until our exit from the world. Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz is all about the life of a Mexican business man, revolutionary soldier, and failed lover.

This story begins with Artemio Cruz lying on his death bed, surrounded by doctors, a priest, a business partner, and his family, all of which have some degree of respect for him, but no particular feelings of love. Through flashbacks, memories, reminiscences, and recorded conversations being played back on tape, the story of Mexico’s most powerful businessman is told. If it sounds a lot like Citizen Kane, that’s because the film by Orson Welles was a huge inspiration on Fuentes in his writing of this story. This isn’t just a retelling of that classic film as it goes off into so many different directions, some of which are more personal. One difference is that an early passage in the book goes into extensive detail about Cruz’s body, described both internally and externally along with all the physical pains and discomforts he suffers as he dies. At first you may wonder why Fuentes went through the trouble of describing a body in all its details, especially when physiology is such common knowledge. But the body is the center of everybody’s life; without it we wouldn’t exist so it serves as a starting point for the biography. One thing we gather is that Artemio Cruz has the same body that most people have. He doesn’t start out in life being any different from most other people in that way. At the base of this extraordinarily powerful man is an ordinary body. Fuentes starts playing on our sympathies from the start. Add to this the physical suffering of Cruz and we are forced to see his humanity before any other details are added.

The details that get added are not always favorable to Cruz. As the narrative alters between past and present, we understand how terrible he could be as a businessman. We get taken back to the end of the Mexican Revolution when Cruz marries Catalina in order to inherit her father’s estate, an hacienda and a treasure trove of material wealth. Due to the laws of primogeniture, the estate should rightfully have gone to Catalina’s brother who died in the Revolution. She blames Artemio Cruz for his death, but marries him anyways. Cruz had originally joined the Revolution because of the promised agrarian reform, but in the end he uses that reform to acquire wealth and property, betraying the ideals and the other soldiers who fought by his side. As a shrewd and ruthless businessman, his empire grows The more successful he grows, the more callous he becomes until he is unable to have feelings for anybody, possibly not even for himself.

Artemio Cruz’s thick skin serves him well as he fights in the Revolution. Several flashbacks from his deathbed tell the stories of gunfights, battlefields, imprisonment, and how he connived his way out of getting shot in a duel. His actions could almost be seen as heroic even though he leaves one soldier to die when he could have saved his life. That incident is the big turning point in his biography. He abandons that wounded soldier to return to a village he had spent the night in before. He had fallen in love with a young lady named Regina and spent the night with her. Upon his return he finds that she has been hung from a tree, along with other villagers, by troops of Federales. Distraught by her murder, Cruz carries memories of her throughout the rest of his life.

If there is anything we can have sympathy for in Artemio Cruz, it is his inability to fulfill his desire for love. His wife Catalina does’nt love him and only stays in the marriage to hold on to her wealth which she I inherited through him. His daughter does not love him either and her sole concern is inheriting his money when he dies. One humorous scene has Cruz sick in his bed. His wife and daughter ask him where he keeps his will and he amuses himself at their expense by lying about where it is kept while watching them frantically dig through his possessions in search of it and then crying when they can’t find it. Catalina isn’t without love though since she does love her daughter and she loved her son whose death she blames on Artemio Cruz. Otherwise, Cruz spends his life pursuing misstresses who don’t reciprocate his love or who hold on to him for a short time because they want his money. He was luckless with love and this failure casts a melancholy tone over the whole story.

This all comes back to Regina. Cruz revisits her name throughout his life story in the way the word “rosebud” keeps reappearing in Citizen Kane. For him , she is the only woman who ever said she loved him like she meant it. She died the day after they met. After all his romantic failures, he ends his life with nothing more than a memory of one night. It is hard to tell if Regina even loved him. His memory could be inaccurate or he could be deceiving himself. She could have just been a prostitute that he hired for one night. We can never be sure how she truly felt. But he clings on to the memory of his love as if that one victory were the only one that ever mattered in his life, a memory that would crush him if he ceased believing in it.

The only other source of love in Cruz’s life is his son Lorenzo. When they travel together back to the derelict hacienda on the beach in Veracruz where Artemio Cruz grew up, they bond as father and son. And yet, the young Lorenzo tells his father that he has chosen to go abroad to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. (This might be a nod in the direction of Hemingway) It is there where Lorenzo dies. Catalina blames Cruz for the tragedy, but through a clever narrative device, we have to infer why from a later passage in the story.

At a ball thrown by Artemio Cruz for the upper classes where he lives, we learn how he has no friends. The attendees are nothing but entertainment for him. They are puppets and he pulls their strings. That is all he wants from other people. He wants to make them dance since his sole amusement in life is control over others. A young man approaches him and asks for a loan to start a business. Cruz lectures him on his philosophy of life. Power is the result of rebellion. Power has to be earned. During this explication, there are flashbacks to Cruz and Lorenzo riding horses in the jungle of Veracruz. If you put this conversation together with the cause of Lorenzo’s demise, you can deduce why Catalina blames her husband for their son’s death. The same narrative device is used to narrate the death of Regina. Cruz returns to the village and learns about the hanging of the villagers. He sees a body hung from a tree. One of them has the feet of Regina and he sees the hem of her dress. It is never explicitly stated that she died, but your mind is directed to a blank space in the narrative that is inevitably filled in. It is all the more horrifying because the brutality is shown indirectly, leaving your mind to see it subjectively. This technique is used in film. Notice that in the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you never actually see the knife stabbing into the woman.

The closer we get to Artemio Cruz’s death, the farther back in time the flashbacks go. The story of his childhood is the last thing we learn about him before his demise. Although surrounded by the lush jungles of Veracruz and the paradise of the nearby beach, it is a childhood of poverty where he was raised by a mulatto on an hacienda that was burned down during an uprising. His unenviable childhood at the bottom of society comes full circle as Artemio Cruz dies as one of the richest and most powerful men in Mexico. As the birth and death of this man are tied together at the end of the narrative, Carlos Fuentes writes some lyrical passages portraying all the natural landscapes and the varieties of people inhabiting the land of Mexico. He thereby makes Artemio Cruz a cipher for the nation of Mexico and its entire history up to the modern era.

It is impossible to talk about this novel without mentioning its literary technique. Such a technique can be said to be nothing short of cinematic. In fact a lot of film techniques are used in the narrative construction. A craeful analysis reveals not only the use of flashbacks for narrative layering, but also camera techniques like overlays, close ups, panning, montage, and rapid cuts. The action sequences have the visual impact of western movies too. This is not accidental as Fuentes consciously used film techniques to write. It isn’t just visually cinematic though. Fuentes adds in the subjective dimensions of literature that are inaccessible through the medium of film. The sensation of feeling internal physical pain or the sadness one feels when haunted by the memories of failed love affairs can only be delivered through dialogue in cinema, but literature as a subjective form can use language to deliver these sensations in a direct way that other mediums can not. This is done successfully in this novel.

But as entrancing as this whole book may be, it does have its flaws. In a postmodern sense, the narrative has the feel of a collage incorporating different author’s styles in different passages. While Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway were previously mentioned, there are other passages that mimic the styles of Faulkner, Joyce, Sartre, Neruda, and others. At times this mimicry feels too obvious and derivative. Another flaw is that in the attempt to make Cruz an all-encompassing symbol of Mexico in the same way that James Joyce made Leopold Bloom a symbol of Ireland, doesn’t quite work. Although Cruz experiences Mexico at all the levels of its social strata and embodies the contradiction at the heart of the Mexican Revolution in the way he betrays its ideals, he isn’t quite big enough as a symbol to contain all that Mexico has to offer. The pre- and post-Conquest eras of Mexico up to the Revolution barely figure into his story, for example, and it’s not convincing to say that Mexico is as unlovable as a country as Cruz is as a person. Mexico really is a country that has a lot to love in its culture, its history, its geography, and its everyday people. Despite these flaws, this is still an amazing novel and one of those books that you really must read before you die.

The Death of Artemio Cruz is a landmark, a turning point, and a cornerstone in the development of Latin American fiction. The writing style is tricky and off-putting at first, but the effort to understand it is worthwhile. Against your better judgments, you may find yourself sympathizing in part with Artemio Cruz as he suffers while dying. Just give in to those feelings, but don’t forget the terrible things he does as well. That’s what literature is for. The world is a messy and confusing place and experiencing that through the written word can only enhance our understanding of it if we take the time to think.

 

Book Review: Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien

Two Of a Kind:

The Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

      By the late 1970s, America was in the grip of a new source of anxiety. Along with the cult scare of the time there was also a serial killer scare. Lone wolf killers who mostly preyed on vulnerable women were showing up more and more in the news. The media, always hungry for stories that shock and disturb people for the sake of attention grabbing, latched on to this trend, bringing it further into the public eye and possibly influencing an unprecedented number of copycat homicides. One of the early fascinations for serial killers was for the Hillside Strangler, then written in the singular because no one knew the killings were done by a pair of men. Darcy O’Brien’s Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers is the definitive account of this pair that came into prominence as the serial killer scare of the time began taking off.

The first thing to note about this true crime book is its lucidity, it polished prose, and its clear writing style. The author was obviously aiming to write another novelization of murder the way Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood. This book includes everything you would find in a formulaic, mainstream novel including character development, a plot arc, subplots, a conflict resolution as a climax, and moral commentary. This is all good for the sake of readability, but in a detrimental sense, reality is messy and fitting it into the template of a novel makes this book a little too slick. There are times when you might doubt the reliability of the narration just because the pieces of the puzzle’s plot fit together a little too securely to be believable.

Then something else strikes a sour note at the beginning. O’Brien apologizes to the readers for his graphic descriptions of the Hillside Strangler’s crimes. This might be a small point of contention, but seriously, are you kidding me? Apologizing? Call me naive if you want, but I’d assume that anyone who picks up this book does so because they want all the gory details. Why else would anybody want to read this? Well, I can think of one or two other reasons having to do with the legal system and the trial, but we’ll return to that later.

The Hillside Stranglers were two cousins from my hometown of Rochester, New York. (I actually attended the same grammar school as them, although they were there a good ten years before I was) Actually, they weren’t cousins by blood since the younger of the two was adopted. Angelo Buono left the great city of Rottenchester for the greener pastures of Hollywood. Never mind that Hollywood is in a desert. You know what I mean. Buono bought a house and opened a car upholstery shop back when they had things like that. His younger cousin Ken Bianchi followed him out there and moved in while trying to get his feet on the ground. Bianchi tried to make money by opening a fake psychotherapy clinic, offering counseling services at discount prices even though he never graduated from college.

Angelo Buono had a rough childhood. Violent from the start, he had a long criminal record and spent most of his youth in trouble with the law and other kids his age. When married he molested his step-daughter and step-son. Ken Bianchi, on the other hand, was less prone to violence, but he had been a compulsive lair from the time he could speak. He was impressed by the older Buono’s ability to pick up women for casual sex, effortlessly and with ease. Bianchi looked up to Buono and thought of him as a mentor. The bad childhood doesn’t serve as a sufficient explanation for what went wrong. Lots of people have bad upbringings and most of them don’t become mass murderers. The author never grapples with why the Hillside Stranglers diverged from the rest of us.

Since Bianchi was failing to make a sufficient income, mostly due to his unwillingness to engage in any real work, the two psychos decided to enter the profession of pimping. They kidnapped two fourteen year old girls from Denver and forced them to work as prostitutes. But as the gangsta rapper MJG says, “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” The two girls escaped and the sad sadists, Buono and Bianchi, were so emotionally distraught that they decided to vent their frustrations by posing as cops, abducting a girl, raping her, torturing her, and then strangling her. They dumped her body in a public place with the intention of it being seen. Serial killing became a hobby for the two and they used a similar routine every time. They began referring to their nights out on the town as “The Scam”. They went about their work as casually as two guys shopping for sports equipment at the mall. Or at least that’s how the author makes it look.

As you might imagine, leaving corpses around the Hollywood hills captured the attention of the police. LAPD detective Bob Grogan sits at the center of the story since he was the only one who agreed to collaborate on this book. Other than being a detective on the case, Bob Grogan is not an especially interesting person. He hangs out in bars, he cheats on his wife, he has a boat, and plays cheesy music on the electric Hammond organ he has at home. He’s also a jerk who thinks he’s superior to everybody else. He spouts off a lot of shallow right wing ideas and laments the fact that the American criminal justice system was simpler 100 years ago without realizing that America probably wasn’t any safer then than it is now. It just seems that way to him because he doesn’t know that forensic science at that time was rudimentary, meaning a lot more crimes went unsolved or undetected and a lot more criminals got away with murder. And that also means that a lot more innocent people were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Back in those days, a knife wound in the hand could be just as deadly as a bullet in the brain because they had no penicillin to stop deadly infections. Blood feuds were common in rural areas. Lynch mobs were certainly never convicted for murder either. So 100 years ago, everything was better? Don’t be so naive, Bob Grogan. If you think life was simpler in the 1880s, you’re just displaying your own ignorance of history and the simplicity if your own mind. The author Darcy O”Brien could have spared us the details of this cop’s private life and thoughts. Grogan deserves any credit he gets for catching the killers, but other than that he’s neither here nor there.

Despite some small annoyances on the author’s part, the first third of this book is good and definitely the best section of it all. Abd, yes, the murders as they are described are nothing short of disgusting.

Ken Bianchi decides Hollywood is heating up too much for him so he runs off to a hick town in Oregon where he gets arrested after strangling two college students. The LAPD sees a connection to the case of the Hillside Stranglers and it doesn’t take long to get a confession out of Bianchi. Being the sociopath he is, Bianchi is a pathological liar. Under hypnosis, he confesses to his crimes, but convinces a team of psychiatrists he has multiple personality disorder. Of course, hypnosis is considered by some to be a pseudo-science and the existence of multiple personality disorder is also in dispute. Deeper scientific inquiries prove that Bianchi is faking and this is a big relief to the detectives of LAPD since a plea of insanity could have kept him out of prison. Bianchi realizes his only way out would be a plea bargain, sparing him the death penalty in exchange for testifying against Angelo Buono. While not as gripping as the accounts of the murders and the police investigations, this second section of the book is still interesting since it gives some insight into the mind of Ken Bianchi, or at least what little is actually in the empty space between his ears. He is a man of superficial charm, but entirely lacking in substance, a textbook case of psychopathy.

In the final stretch, the two year long trial is examined in detail. While the trial itself is interesting, O’Brien’s account of it is marred by his constant quips about how terrible America has become because of Liberal politicians. His portrayal of the team defending the Hillside Stranglers is so negative that it’s hard to take seriously. Predictably, Bob Grogan whines about due process of law and believes the killers should be executed without a trial. Forget about the Constitution. It’s funny how a cop can claim to be upholding the law while expressing disgust over the legality of due process, something which exists for a definite purpose. Without due process, courts would be nothing more than kangaroo courts and arenas for scapegoating. As wrong and faulty as due process sometimes is, it acts as a guardrail against innocent people being thrown in jail or executed. It doesn’t always work, but it is the best we have as of now. Bob Grogan wants to condemn a criminal for murdering a woman, but if the same woman were sent to the electric chair in error because there was no due process, he would be celebrating because someone was found guilty. That is sick minded hypocrisy on a grand scale.

The author’s portrayal of the criminal defense team doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny either. Hating criminal defense lawyers because they represent criminals is a cheap shot and betrays a poor understanding of due process. The point of criminal defense is to point out all the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. The jury therefore has to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence provided to evaluate whether the criminal charges are justifiable or not. Without defense attorneys, the prosecutors would have a free ride to convict anybody brought to trial whether there was a justifiable cause for conviction or not. As stated before, the criminal defenders act as a guardrail against innocent people getting convicted. Just because it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time doesn’t mean it isn’t legitimate. If people in law enforcement truly respect the law, then they should respect the fact that everybody who gets brought to trial, no matter how egregious the charges may be, deserves a fair trial. By not respecting that right, law enforcement loses its moral high ground and sinks to the level of the criminals they prosecute.

O’Brien portrays the defense team as conniving, lying, cheating, conspiratorial, and evil with personalities to match all their negative character traits. He makes them resemble characters in a bad TV series that didn’t survive past its first season. This is done on purpose to manipulate the reader’s emotions, making you hate them. He wants the reptilian part of your brain to override your rational faculties as if it isn’t enough that we hate the killers already. But it’s such a transparent literary technique, straight out of the most shallow genre fiction, that it makes the whole portrayal look fake. It’s possible that it might be an accurate portrayal; I don’t know because I wasn’t there. But with all the cheap shots O’Brien and the windbag Bob Grogan take at Liberals throughout the story, it casts doubt over O’Brien’s credibility.

The crux of the matter is that this book is supposed to be about the Hillside Stranglers. No matter how smooth and lucid the writing is, using it as a platform for pushing right wing politics down our throats nearly ruins it. Even worse, O’Brien dishes out insults to Liberals without ever building a systematic argument in favor of his conservative beliefs. He offers nothing more than petty put downs. It’s like being kicked in the shin by a dwarf who then brags about beating you up. He underestimates the intelligence of his audience which is insulting to say the least. I gather Darcy O’Brien thinks Liberal politicians have turned America into a crime ridden hellhole because their compassion has led the country astray and yet he also wants us to believe that Liberals believe in due process because they are vicious, sadistic, criminal sympathizers who want to destroy the world. Compassionate and cruel? You can’t have it both ways, Mr. O’Brien. There is a time and a place for political discourse and I’d say a biography of serial killers is not the right one. If the author wanted to push his politics on people, he should have written a scholarly work on conservative interpretations of legal theory instead.

Two Of a Kind is not as good of a book as it should have been. Darcy O’Brien is obviously skilled at his craft, but he doesn’t know when to keep his opinions to himself. Thankfully, the Hillside Stranglers went to prison for life and Angelo Buono is now dead. Thankfully also, the number of serial killers in America peaked in the 1990s. According to the FBI, there are currently only about 20-30 known serial killers at loose in America. On a much darker note, America also has far more serial killers per capita than any other country on Earth. Most likely, there is something about American culture that is causing this to happen. Liberal politics are an unlikely cause. The majority of serial killers are white heterosexual males, middle class, between the ages of 25-40, and holding conservative political and religious beliefs. You might want to look beyond the weakness of Liberals for causes. It’s more likely a problem with the character and toxic cultural climate of the American people. We are a nation that breeds assholes like no other. And if you ever meet Bob Grogan in real life, shake his hand for catching the Hillside Stranglers, but walk away as soon as he starts to speak.