Book Review

The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

     Olivia Manning is not a well-known writer. Why this is I really don’t know. The Balkan Trilogy is a great accomplishment and any young writer who is serious about learning how the craft should take a few cues from it. There are three aspects of great writing that Manning masters. One is the building of characters through dialogue, another is a strong sense of place, and the third is the building of tension and suspense.

The Balkan Trilogy tells the story of Harriet and Guy Pringle, a young couple who have just gotten married after knowing each other for a week. The two arrive in Bucharest, Romania since Guy works for the British Legation, teaching English literature at the university. The British Legation is a branch of the colonial ministry and the British relation with Romania is one that is a mixture of political alliance and colonial possession. The first two books, “The Great Fortune” and “The Spoilt City” take place in Bucharest while the third, “Friends and Heroes”, takes place in Athens where the Pringles go to escape from the Nazi invasion of Romania. They get involved with a whole cast of other characters along the way. One of the most memorable is Yakimov, an exiled Belorussian prince who has fallen into poverty since his wife died and his inheritance has dwindled down to a trickle. There are other colonial bureaucrats and journalists in Bucharest. The expatriate community is a network of socialites and they have little more than loose associations with the Romanian people who mostly stay in the background.

It is fair to say that there is not any overarching plot in this trilogy. Rather there are a lot of subplots, or I might actually call them “micro-plots”, that support an overarching theme. That theme is the shaky relationship between Harriet and Guy. Both of them are naive and both also came from lower class backgrounds, a detail that isn’t thoroughly explored but does, however, give insight into why the two of them act the way they do. Harriet is smart and perceptive, possibly the most intelligent character in the novels. Her desire is to get closer to her husband and discover who he really is while also discovering Romanian society and getting to know herself. Guy, on the other hand, is gregarious by nature, always willing to help the downtrodden and generous to a fault. This is both the best and the worst trait of his personality. Guy is book-smart and ideological, but tragically naive when it comes to other people. He wants to spend time with everybody he meets, everybody, that is, except Harriet who he treats like a kid sister that he doesn’t want tagging along while he goes off to do what he thinks of as more important things. Sometimes these things involve socializing with people who are down and out, looking for ways to take advantage of him.

From the beginning, we get a clear picture of who Guy and Harriet are. This is primarily done through dialogue, not just with the Pringles but also with the other people they interact with. The characters stand alone as individual humans, but their personalities and psychology are built for the reader by how they interact with others. They are who they are but they become much more because of how they socialize; it is a gestalt effect where the overall picture is much larger than the sum of its parts. Olivia Manning isn’t the only writer to have employed this technique but she does do it better than most any other authors I have read. Some readers compare her to Jane Austen but I think she is better at dialogue mostly because I find Austen to be a crashing bore.

The theme of the Pringles’ marriage carries through the whole trilogy. The first book intoruduces this theme which is especially seen where Guy directs a stage production of Shakespeare, despite the political turbulence that has begun to set in. During rehearsals, Guy all but commands Harriet to stay away even though she wants to be a part of the project. In the second book, as the political situation gets worse, the two of them start to grow closer together. When the monarchy gets overthrown by Antonescu, the fascist Iron Guard starts crawling out of the woodwork, and the German Nazi presence in Bucharest grows on a daily basis, the Pringles begin to face some hard decision making. This is exacerbated by Guy allowing two people to stay in the apartment, Yakimov, who is homeless, and Sasha Drucker, the son of a Jewish banker who abandoned his military service because the soldiers where persecuting Jews. An even more absurd situation occurs when the Legation flies a scholar named Primrose into Bucharest to give a lecture when the entire country is being shut down by the Nazis and British citizens are being commanded to leave the country. Although Harriet continues to feel alienated from Guy and the rest of the expat community, she is drawn by circumstances to spend more time with him, even if it is solely for pragmatic reasons. The peak of their relationship comes when they take a retreat in the nearby mountains and have some serious discussions about their future.

And that theme continues when they move on to Greece. The German occupation of Bucharest puts their lives in danger, so they flee to Athens, a city that Harriet immediately becomes enamored with. She hopes that being there will bring her closer together with her husband, but he just returns to being his old self again. He spends most of his time socializing in cafes or working on lectures even though he isn’t formally employed. As the Italian and German fascists begin closing in on Greece, though, food becomes scarce, the situation becomes dire, and again the two of them are forced to spend time together because of the miserable circumstances. Guy continues to be optimistic and naive; he never gives up hope even though an aristocrat who has influence over the Legation in Greece and possible ties to the fascists keeps stabbing him in the back as Guy tries to get the Legation school running again. Guy also puts on variety shows for the benefit of the British soldiers who have shown up in Athens to defend Greece against the Nazis. This offends his boss and Guy can’t comprehend why. His strength of character and desire to do good for everybody while keeping a stiff upper lip is proven to be a symptom of weakness because he misreads these situations. He begins looking like he needs public adoration to feel good about himself, a flaw in his character which prevents his marriage from success. There are times when you might feel like slapping him and telling him to wake up and look at reality. Harriet, on the other hand, continues to get stronger. She develops an intuition for reading people that is more accurate than Guy’s perceptions. Even if she doesn’t solve all their problems, she does a good job of explaining the psychology of the other characters. By the time they leave Greece, Harriet has Guy and herself all figured out too. She realizes she has more potential as a career woman than he does as a lecturer due to his chronic problem of misplacing his priorities and ambitions. Some critics have criticized Manning for not sufficiently addressing feminist themes, but I think this unfair because the strength of Harriet’s character and intelligence speaks for itself. Just because Manning isn’t hysterically ranting about destroying the patriarchy doesn’t mean she isn’t sensitive to women’s issues. Besides, battering people over the head with a message doesn’t always mean it will be received; sometimes being subtle is a stronger way of communicating. This is something people in the 21^st century don’t seem to understand. We live in an age of loudmouthed know-nothings who think they know everything.

While The Balkan Trilogy is largely about human relationships, these relationships take place against a background that is atmospheric, historical, and political. The second most distinct aspect of Manning’s prose is her ability to capture the feeling of a time and place with her language. For one thing, the dramatic shifts in the Romanian climate do a lot to move the pacing along. From the balmy and humid summers to the rainy autumn and heavy winter snowfall with its perpetually grey skies, she creates an environment you can really feel. She does just as well with the climate in Greece. Her descriptions of Bucharest and Athens are accurate as well. I know because I have spent time in both cities. The descriptions of Bucharest, called the Paris of the East in the pre-communist era, are vivid and show all sides of the city. Romania has always been at the crossroads of history. Once an outpost of the Roman Empire and a thoroughfare for migrating tribes from the Slavic lands and Central Asia, they were eventually conquered by the Ottomans who had ambitions for seizing territories farther west. In the cafe culture, street life, peasant markets, and restaurants you can see the ebbs and tides of history washing through the city. The aristocrats, mimicking the ways of the French upper classes are sinking into irrelevance. The peasants and Romani people ply their trades on the streets. The Jews are eternal scapegoats, and the English are popular because the Romanian king is allied to Great Britain. Things change quickly when Romania ditches the U.K. to join the axis with Hitler while Hungary claims Transylvania and the Soviet Unions claims Bukovina and Besarabia which is now Moldova. The social atmosphere of Bucharest, as portrayed by Manning, is fickle and emotionally detached. This contrasts sharply when the Pringles visit the mountains and have some freedom to contemplate their lives. The scenery is described as majestic and elysian although a shadow enters the paradise when Harriet sees the cruel way that the peasants treat their domestic animals.

The atmosphere is described just as vividly in Athens with its busy cafes, noisy bars, and restaurants. This inner city atmosphere contrasts nicely with the time the characters spend in the calm of gardens, on the beach, visiting the Acropolis, and hiking in the hills and forests that surround the city. The atmosphere continues to darken as the fascists progress towards the borders of Greece, food becomes scarce, and the country is plunged into a winter with downpouring rain. It is an atmosphere of hope deferred while the city plunges into the misery of starvation and fear.

Then there is the building of tension, another aspect of Mannin’g writing that makes it high quality. On a small scale, micro-plots are used frequently to keep the narrative interesting. One such micro-plot involves the arrival of an inconspicuous British secret agent in Bucharest who conspires to blow up Romania’s oil reserves if the Nazis ever take over the country. Guy gets involved with this and brings home a paper with the details of a bomb, but the conspiracy gets thwarted and nothing comes of it. The paper comes up again later in a second micro-plot involving Yakimov, the homeless former prince from White Russia who gets taken in by Guy to sleep in the spare bedroom. Yakimov is a complete leech who refuses to work and lives by begging for money and eating other people’s food. He gets angry at Guy for a petty reason and steals the paper then hands it over to a Nazi official in northern Transylvania. While Yakimov is angry at Guy, his ultimate motivation is to curry favor with the Nazi so he can get some food from him. Yakimov really is shallow and amoral, kind of like stray dog that begs for food and never reciprocates the kindness. He never considers that this action could lead to the Iron Guard harassing the Pringles and chasing them out of Romania. There are literally dozens of other subplots involving the affairs of the Legation, the activities of the journalists, and the relations between the large cast of characters in the Balkan region of Europe.

Another impressive way that Manning builds tension is with the creeping specter of World War II getting closer and closer. At the beginning, the movement of the Nazis across Europe happens far away and is of little concern to the expats in Romania. They are worried but the threat isn’t close enough to actually prevent them from pursuing an ordinary life. As the Nazis come closer to the Romanian border and finally occupy the country, showing up more and more around the city of Bucharest, it is like an ominous dark cloud moving over the sun. The closer the war comes, the more British nationals from their community start to leave and living in Bucharest becomes more and more precarious. Finally acts of violence against members of the Legation come like lightning strikes and it becomes obvious that the Pringles have to leave. What is so brilliant in the writing is the way the way the war starts off as little more than a small noise in the distance and becomes louder as it approaches until it is deafening roar in the narrative. When the Pringles arrive in Athens, the process starts all over again. At first they wax optimistically when the Greek army defeats the Italians invading from Albania, but then it wanes as the Germans move in and begin bombing Greece. The story moves gradually from joy to doom and you can see how it effects the characters psychologically like a noose tightening around their necks as they realize that trouble is coming their way.

It is almost tempting to say that this trilogy is a work of perfection if only there weren’t some glaring mistakes. There are a few spots where the narrative degenerates into purple prose and Manning also has a tendency to use long lists of adjectives that come off as amateurish and silly. There certainly isn’t enough of this to ruin the book though. Yet another problem is some sloppy editing. I usually overlook this when reading good literature, but it is almost embarrassing at times in Manning’s writing. In one scene after Yakimov has fled Romania and arrived in Istanbul, he walks into the Pringles’ apartment. After that he disappears from the narrative until they meet up with him again in Athens. In other scenes, characters speak up in conversations without the author telling us they were present. Some of these characters were never even introduced into the story so you scratch your head in wonder trying to figure out who they are or why they are there. The proofreading was done hastily to the detriment of the writing.

The Balkan Trilogy comes close to perfection in terms of both style and content. The story is deeply engaging and smooth, often moving at a fast enough pace to keep you going despite its length of over 900 pages. It is easy to read and as anyone who knows about writing will tell you, writing something that is easy to read, especially while maintaining a certain level of complexity, is extremely difficult to do. I don’t know how good Manning’s other books are, but she certainly hit the ball out of the park on this one. The Balkan Trilogy deserves to be a classic.

 

Book Review

Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

     I hate to say anything bad about a Kurt Vonnegut novel but Hocus Pocus was not one of his best. The narrative is written in the non-linear style that has become a Vonnegut trademark. The main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, is a typical Vonnegut protagonist too. The story also fits in neatly with the kind of satirical poke at modern society that you would expect. Overall though, the novel suffers because the actual theme of the book is unclear.

Eugene Debs Hartke, like so many other characters created by this author, is a mediocrity with some ironic eccentricities. As a teenager, he gets humiliated when his father, employed as an engineer, does his science fair project and tries to trick everybody into thinking it was the work of young Eugene. The boy later goes on to a military academy and gets shipped off to duty as a mid-level commanding officer in the Vietnam War. When he returns he becomes a professor of physics and music appreciation at a college that caters to children with learning disabilities who come from wealthy families. Located on one of the Finger Lakes south of Rochester, New York (my hometown), the college sits on the shore opposite a prison. As the story goes, Hartke gets fired from his job and goes to work as a teacher in the prison. But one night there is a jailbreak, and a gang of prisoners escape and take over the college during the winter break between semesters. Hartke, sympathetic to the prisoners who he teaches, joins them and tries to act as a negotiator between them and the authorities. But the result is that Hartke gets arrested for assisting them instead.

As a character study, the portrayal of Eugene Debs Hartke has some strengths and weaknesses. He is written about with irony and humor, some of which really delivers, while he tries to navigate a world where circumstances are never in his favor and mostly beyond his control, the quintessential existentialist non-hero. He is halfway in between a bumbling mediocrity and a man destined for greatness. On one hand, he becomes famous in Vietnam for giving powerful pep talks while on the other hand he realizes the pointlessness of the whole war. His speeches are nonsense but they fool people into not giving up. He appears to be destined for an important role in activism and reform, hence his name being that of the historical socialist labor union leader, but his attempts at being a Vietnam War critic and being an effective leader in the prison only bring him failure and humiliation. He later gets fired by the conservative, right wing board of directors at the university for his comments which get recorded by a student with a hidden tape recorder. Hartke is also a chronic womanizer, keeping a list of all the women he has slept with along side a list of all the people he killed, directly or indirectly, as a member of the US military. This contrasts with his benevolent role as a husband who takes care of his wife and her mother, both of them living in his house and both of them suffering from mental illness.

Some of the novel suffers from lack of detail. We learn that his wife and her mother are mentally ill but we never learn what their mental illness is. Hartke also never reconciles the conflicting thoughts he has about the prisoners; he sympathizes with them, trying to be their educator and mentor, but he also points out that they are guilty of terrible crimes like murder and rape. He never does any authentic soul searching to reconcile this conflict. He feels sorry for them simply because they are prisoners and mostly non-white. The motivation behind his thinking never gets clarified.

The theme of parallels is also not fully examined. One parallel is the two worlds of the university and the prison. This contrasts a world of freedom with a world of restraint, but the purpose of the contrast is not explicitly spelled out. You might deduce that the university is more like a prison since Hartke is not able to express his freedom to critique America there, and the prison is more like a university since that is where he finds the most success and personal satisfaction as a teacher. Another parallel is the list of people Hartke killed and the women he has slept with. Neither accomplishment is anything admirable. He feels ashamed for having killed people in Vietnam and, even worse, American society hated him for it when he returned. Then he loses his job for speaking out against the war. As a chronic womanizer, he also sees how he has become more well-known on campus for his promiscuity and his reputation has suffered because of the women he has hurt with his insensitivity. Having seduced the university president’s wife, he also suffers because this is used as another reason for him to be fired. But none of this is directly stated and it may not have even been the author’s intended purpose in writing about them.

Then there is all the other “stuff” in the book. I put the word “stuff” in quotation marks because a lot of it just seems like extra, arbitrary, generic add-ons that don’t contribute anything useful or necessary to the overall narrative. There are things like a Mercedes that Hartke received as a gift from a student and one he rarely drives because it keeps getting vandalized, a woman’s disastrous art show in Buffalo, a computer that can predict the course of people’s lives based on their current circumstances, a skull found buried on campus, and even the Tralfamadorians put in an appearance. They show up in a science-fiction story published in a porn magazine which explains that they have chosen humans as vectors to spread germs throughout the universe. As usual, Vonnegut reminds us that, if there is any purpose to human existence, it is something so mundane, so not obvious, and so meaningless to us that we can never comprehend it. But why are these things even in the story? They seem like extraneous information and it even appears that Vonnegut himself could never be satisfied with his own work unless he mentions the Tralfamadorians whether doing so made sense or not.

Even more to the author’s discredit is the complete lack of emotional affect that characterizes Eugene Debs Hartke. Despite everything that happens to him, he proceeds throughout most of the novel without showing any signs of pain, frustration, anger, joy, confusion, pride, or anything thing else that an ordinary person might feel throughout the course of their lives. Then again, writing characters that had emotional depth was never a strong point of Vonnegut’s to begin with, despite any other legitimate claims to genius he might otherwise have.

Aside from being a flawed character study of Eugene Debs Hartke, I think Vonnegut’s intentions in this novel are to, first, write a zeitgeist piece about the apocalyptic end of the 20^th century, and second, to show how language can be deceptive. In the former case, the novel is fairly successful. Japanese businessmen have bought out most American corporations including the for-profit prison across from the university. The economy is in ruins. The fuel supply is dwindling. The environment is destroyed. Racism and social injustice have become predominant to the point where nothing really matters anymore. This theme is not entirely successful though because the author tries to comment on too much. It reads like he had a checklist of things rhat have gone wrong and he was sure to check every box as he wrote regardless of how well the criticisms fit into the narrative. But at least the book has a left wing political bent as it should while simultaneously showing the ineffectiveness of liberal politics in a society full of stupid conservative people. The latter theme of language was not given enough attention to fully work. The title specifically refers to the meeting that Hartke has with the college board in which they give reasons for his dismissal. The reasons they give are nothing more than a smokescreen, just some hocus pocus to distract him from the real reasons they have for terminating his professorship. Also the speeches Hartke gives in Vietnam are nothing but hocus pocus, sleight if mind designed to distract the soldiers from thinking about the absurdity of the war. Hartke also uses lies and deception to seduce women, promising the president’s wife a trip to Venice to get her into bed. Vonnegut is telling us that society is nothing but bullshit since truth and honesty get nothing accomplished while deceit leads to results every time. He doesn’t develop this theme to completion, though, so it winds up being an obscure point.

It is easy for the main ideas to become obscure in Hocus Pocus. Kurt Vonnegut bombards us with so much information it is hard to pick out what he intends to say or at least what he is prioritizing. This approach works well with maximalist novelists like Joyce and Pynchon, but in this case Vonnegut’s end of-career novel comes off as bloated, overbearing, and without any definite direction. There are just too many threads and most of them are loose. Or is that the intention? This is a work of postmodernism so all I can say is maybe. In any case, it is far from Kurt Vonnegut’s best work. It isn’t a terrible book either; I just don’t think it is worth reading more than once. By the time he wrote this, he had already earned his stature as one of America’s greatest writers so it probably doesn’t matter much anyways. 

 

Book Review

The Sirens of Titans

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 

     What is the meaning of life? How is it possible that the richest man in America could be so unhappy? These two questions sound like the kind of trite cliches that serve as fodder for predictable Hollywood movies and cheesy novels on the bestseller list. But when taken on by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in the earliest phase of his writing career, they get treated with a unique twist that only this singular author could pull off. The Sirens of Titan has earned its reputation as one of Vonnegut’s best and as an American classic as well.

It tells the story of Malachi Constant , whose name changes throughout the novel to mark different stages in his growth as a human being. He inherits a fortune from his father, who he never knew, and lives a meaningless life of debauchery, getting whatever he wants, and never achieving any sense of purpose. But we’ll come back to him later.

There is another important character who goes by the name of Rumfoord. He also is rich and lives in a mansion with his uptight wife Beatrice who thinks that other people are nothing more than pollution. She has preserved her virginity all throughout their marriage. Rumfoord doesn’t actually live in the mansion though. He lives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, and he travels through time and space with his dog, making occasional appearances on Earth that attract massive crowds of people who look to him to explain the meaning of life. Rumfoord can see the future and make things happen as he pleases. His purpose in the world is to start a new religion unlike the ones that already exist in that this new one will unite all of humanity rather than dividing us all, causing us to fight with each other interminably. His function in the narrative is to act as both chorus and deus ex machina. You could say he is Vonnegut’s doppleganger since the author of a novel is the god and creator of the world inside his writing. But Rumfoord clearly explains that he is not God even though he has godlike powers.

So getting back to Malachi Constant...Rumfoord arranges to meet with him and tell him about his future. Constant is to travel into outer space where he will impregnate Rumfoord’s wife Beatrice. Riffing off of Oedipus Rex, Malachi and Beatrice do everything they can to prevent this from happening and yet it happens on a flying saucer that is taking them to Mars.

Vonnegut’s mastery of writing technique is on display here in the way the narrative shifts to Mars. And this is Mars the planet, not Mars, Pennsylvania. Yes there really is a town called Mars in Pennsylvania (and if you think that’s crazy, there is also a town called Bucksnort in Tennessee, a town called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, and a city called Batman in eastern Turkey). Vonnegut creates a dramatic contrast in time, space, and narrative structure with these dramatic disjunctions of location and the accompanying dissociative fugue suffered by his characters. This technique has come to be a characteristic of postmodernist fiction, but something tells me Vonnegut cared little for that kind of labeling. The section about Mars starts with an army private named Unk who has been brainwashed so that he can remember nothing of his past. Unk, along with all the other soldiers, has electrodes placed under their scalps and are remote controlled by commanding officers to obey orders or else suffer excruciating pain. Unk, along with everyone else in the army, had formerly been a disgruntled Earthling who got recruited to Mars where Rumfoord builds an army. His plan is to invade Earth. Unk’s memory starts to return and he finds a letter he wrote to himself before they performed the brainwashing surgery. The letter tells him he has a wife and son on Mars and his duty is to rescue them so they can return to Earth and live as a family. But when he finds them them, Unk ;earns they have no interest in him or his plans. Here we learn that Unk is actually Malachi Constant after having his memory erased and his wife is Beatrice. Just like Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, Malachi and Beatrice can not escape their fate and their son Chrono is the result.

What can be gathered from this section is that, first, Vonnegut is critiquing the military. After being traumatized by his experiences in World War II, Vonnegut took every opportunity he could to remind us all that wars should never be fought. By constructing an army on Mars of brainwashed men without memory, unable to think, and capable of nothing but obeying orders, most specifically orders to kill without conscience, Vonnegut reminds us of the inhumanity of the military. It turns men into machines. At the same time, the contrast between Malachi and his Martian identity as Unk shows that he is developing as a human being. The pain he feels when he tries to disobey orders shows that he is becoming self-aware in ways that he wasn’t when living on Earth where he lived without effort or self-consciousness. Furthermore, when he found his letter and realized he had a family on Mars, his impulse was to rescue them; this contrasts sharply with the hedonistic and selfish Malachi who cared about nothing but promiscuity before coming to Mars.

The third stage in Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he returns to Earth and meets up with Beatrice and Chrono at the mansion owned by Rumfoord. The space-travelling millionaire had organized the army on Mars to attack Earth and lose the war. By doing so, the entire human race had to stop fighting with each other and unite in order to defeat the alien invaders. Vonnegut knew that humans achieve strength in unity mostly when they have a common enemy. In ordinary circumstances that common enemy is other people, but Vonnegut via Rumfoord depicts the benefit of having the entire planet fighting a common enemy and so the Martian invasion becomes a necessity. You would think the climate crisis would be enough of a threat to unite us in this way, but I guess we are too dumb to see that. Rumfoord uses the opportunity to start a new religion in which all humans cooperate, living in harmony and peace. This is one of three passages where Vonnegut explains his concept of what life is meant to be about.

Malachi Constant, otherwise known as Unk, receives yet another name when he arrives in a flying saucer. He is dubbed the Space Wanderer and he emerges from his spaceship in Maine with a beard and long hair, a bit Christ-like you might suppose. The satire of Jesus Christ does not end there. As the central figure of this new religion, plastic trinkets of the Space Wanderer hanging dead with a noose around his neck are commonplace among followers of this new religion. This is an obvious jab at the prevalence of the cross and Jesus crucified on it found in so many Christian homes and on so many t-shirts and necklaces worn by the Christian faithful. There is something perverse and sickly about the Christian fascination for the gory torture of their savior as if they take sadistic delight in seeing their messiah suffering in maximum pain.

When the Space Wanderer meets up with Beatrice and Chrono on a scaffolding on the walls of Rumfoord’s estate, Rumfoord climbs up into a tree and addresses them through a loudspeaker as if speaking with the voice of God coming out of the sky. But he isn’t God, he is just a man in a tree with a microphone. Anyhow, he confronts the family with their dilemma by asking if any of them have ever done anything that wasn’t entirely selfish. Being unable to answer the question, they board another flying saucer and take off again for outer space. The irony is that the Space Wanderer as Unk and Malachi Constant did do things that were beneficial to other people, trying to rescue his family from Mars for instance. He just lacked the self-awareness to realize he had done so. This passage represents the awakening of his morality and takes him further down the path to self-consciousness that will later distinguish him as a fully realized human being who understands the meaning of life.

The final stage of Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he arrives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, to find Salo, the companion robot to Rumfoord who lives there in a palace before he dies. Salo, being a robot who developed human emotions, has dedicated his life to serving Rumfoord but disassembls himself when Rumfoord sinks into a depression and tells him to leave. Rumfoord learns that he wasn’t the master of Earth at all and is, in fact, being used by forces in the universe he can never comprehend. His purpose, and the purpose of the human race is entirely mundane and everything we think we know through religion and philosophy is nothing but wrong-headed delusions of grandeur. But Malachi arrives with Beatrice and Chrono and since they are the only people on the moon, they are forced to take care of each other. Chrono disappears into the woods to live with a flock of birds and the two remaining people find happiness by taking care of each other. They learn that the ultimate purpose in life is to take care of the people around you. The ending of this novel is beautiful in ways that can’t easily be expressed in this review.

As mentioned before, Vonnegut gives three scenarios in which he depicts life as it should be. One, as already stated, is the religious gathering that happens after the Earth is invaded and the human race unites to win the war. Another instance is where Chrono, after abandoning his parents on Titan, goes to live with the birds in the forest; he becomes like the birds by learning to fly and transcends his own humanity by becoming a part of nature. The third instance is when Unk and Boaz’s spaceship gets redirected on its way to Earth and lands in a cavern on Mercury. Boaz is an African-American and the commanding officer of Unk. In the cave, he renounces his position as Unk’s superior and finds a species of creatures called harmoniums that nourish themselves with vibrations (there was a Canadian progressive rock band named after these creatures so check them out if you are so musically inclined). When Boaz plays music for them, they gather around him and he falls in love with them. Being an African-American orphan, he finds his peace in life by playing music for creatures that honor him with admiration. He also realized his responsibility to them when he finds they die if they get too close to his cassette player which is the source of his music. With love comes responsibility. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and I’m sure that had something to do with his portrayal of the music-appreciating Boaz who wanted peace more than war. Notice how the people who find happiness in this story all have to leave Earth to achieve it.

Something should be said about the title too. In the narrative, the Sirens of Titan make only infrequent appearances. Rumfoord shows a picture of them to Malachi Constant in order to lure him to Mars with the possibility that he might get to sleep with them since they are more beautiful than any Earth women he has ever seen. After receiving this picture, it begins showing up in advertisements for cigarettes. I believe Vonnegut is commenting on the use of sex in advertising. The Sirens are used as a lure for Malachi, and used by the tobacco industry for commercial gain. But at the end of the book, Malachi finds the Sirens are actually a statue on the bottom of Rumfoord’s swimming pool at his palace on Titan. The pool is polluted with algae and the Sirens are covered with slime and muck, but Malachi doesn’t care since he has grown to live a life of devotion to his wife Beatrice and is no longer temped by lust. Promiscuity and profits are no longer relevant when he finds he has a purpose. This is emblematic of how he has reached full maturity as a human being. While the book is framed as being about the search for the meaning of life, I think that the underlying thrust of the novel is that Malachi Constant is a man like Howard W. Campbell Jr. in Mother Night and maybe even like Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (which I consider to be the most misinterpreted book in the history of fiction except for the Bible); he is a man lacking in self-awareness. He only begins to grow when he confronts himself and develop the self-awareness he needs in order to become fully human. This process of transformation is the whole point of the story.

There isn’t much to detract from this novel. You could say that Beatrice is underdeveloped as a character as so many of the politically correct will say. But ultimately, The Sirens of Titan has too much going for it for me to really care.

And it is amazing how ahead of its time this book was. Written in the 1950s, it expresses the values of the late 1960s counter-cultures on an uncanny level. It is pro-peace and anti-war, it expresses the desire for all humans to unite, it portrays an African-American man who finds the love and justice he desires though music no less, it calls for a new way of living in the world, it involves space travel, exoticism, and fantasy that approach the kinds of psychedelia that would later show up in movies like Barbarella. It also serves as a statement about how beautiful world peace could be while poignantly reminding us that such an existence will likely never be possible. But despite that, we can still find meaning in life. Vonnegut’s optimism had a bitter tinge to it that reminds the reader how human we really are. Unlike Icarus, we will never fly too close to the sun and maybe that is something good. The Sirens of Titan makes me feel that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. will be remembered as a great American satirist, humanist, and humorist along the lines of Mark Twain. I realize now how lucky I am to have read this.

 

Book Review

Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

     Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Mother Night is the darkest novel by this author I have encountered so far. As an early novel, it contains some of the types of characters, situations, ironies, and philosophical explortions that would be developed in his later works. But this is one of his first publications so it isn’t as polished or fully-realized as his subsequent works would be.

Mother Night tells the story of Howard Campbell Jr., a bland, everyday kind of American male. The narrative starts with him writing his final work of literature while confined in an Israeli prison since he is on trial for war crimes during World War II. How he got there is the obvious thrust of the plot. As a young man, Campbell went to live in Germany where he found a German wife and became a playwright of stature. When World War II broke out, his prominence in the theater scene earned him special status with the Nazis who admired his work. They gave him a job writing and delivering speeches in favor of the Third Reich. Campbell justified this to himself because he was also a double agent, working for the American military. After being approached by a spy in a German park, he agreed to lace his radio speeches with hidden meanings that could easily be picked up by commanding officers in the field. So Campbell had the unique distinction of promoting the cause of the allies and the axis simultaneously.

The twisted thing about this all is that Campbell is entirely apolitical. He only agrees to these arrangements so he can stay in Germany to be with his wife who dies soon after the war starts. At the beginning of the war, Campbell begins work on a statement about his apolitical stance, a play called A Nation of Two meant to explain that his only commitment in life is to his marriage, not to any political cause. He feels no hatred towards anybody whether they be Jews, Germans, Americans, Russians, Black people or anything. He feels no lyalty to them either. You could say that he has never reached full development as a human being. Campbell is also the kind of man who never says “no” to anybody. He acts under no agency of his own and lets himself be manipulated by anybody he encounters. The only exception to this is when he writes. In this way, Vonnegut draws a sharp distinction between Campbell’s public persona and his vacuous inner life. This dichotomy is set up to drive one point home that Vonnegut wants to make about human nature.

True to this author’s writing style, the narrative jumps around from place to place and from time to time. After the war ends, the U.S. military sneaks Campbell into New York City where he settles down in a brownstone attic, a place that becomes like a prison cell. In the apartment below lives a Jewish doctor and his mother who are both Holocaust survivors and below them, an elderly painter named Kraft that Campbell befriends. He doesn’t know it at first, but this man is a Soviet secret agent who has plans for Campbell as he acts as the deus ex machina of the novel.

Kraft secretly arranges for a dentist named Jones to show up at Campbell’s apartment. Jones is a middle-American crank, a white supremacist who listened to Campbell’s speeches via shortwave radio during the war. He regards Campbell as a hero. He shows up at the attic with his friends, a Nazi named Krapptauer, a Catholic priest named Keeley, and an African-American man he calls the Black Fuehrer. Later, when Jones is confronted by the police as to how he could be friends with a Catholic and a Black man, two groups of people he claims to hate, he says they are friends because they all have the same enemy, the Jews. Again, we are given another piece of the puzzle that Vonnegut constructs for the reader. He also brings a woman who says she is Helga, Campbell’s German wife. But nothing about her is as simple as it seems on the surface.

Helga turns out to be, in actuality, her sister Resi. After revealing this secret to Campbell, they agree to stay together as man and wife. Resi is yet another character who has contradictions in her personality. Aside from deceiving Campbell about her identity, she is also a secret agent for the communists. One thing she reveals to him that a Russian soldier, while fighting in Germany, found a trunk full of Campbell’s writings. He took them to the USSR and published them under his own name where they took off in popularity. His success as a writer is actually beyond his control, happens without him knowing about it, and even without his making any effort at getting published. Vonnegut is telling us that our work can have consequences beyond our reach, taking on a life of their own, and going places we never intended them to go. All the more reason we need to be careful.

Meanwhile, Krapptauer dies of exhaustion after climbing a staircase and Campbell agrees to give a speech at the funeral in front of a group of neo-Nazi teenagers despite his inner repugnance to their cause. Campbell remains characteristically unemotional and without affect throughout the whole book. As he meets up with Helga/Resi and the white supremacists at the funeral, his past is paraded in front of his eyes so that he sees the unintended consequences of his actions. He describes himself as being numb and emotionally dead. He is unable to reconcile the conflict of being a hero to Americans, Nazis, and Communists all that same time and he is also unable to fully engage with the atrocities of the Holocaust that he helped perpetuate. The simplest thing to do is to suppress his emotions, shut off his mind, and plunge himself into a catatonic stupor of anhedonia.

Campbell’s turning point comes when he gets stalked by an American soldier named O’Hare who confronts him in his attic. O’Hare represents a whole other side of Vonnegut’s world view. After returning from the war and being given a medal then sent on his way, he sinks into misery and poverty, becoming an alcoholic and moving from one dead-end job to another without purpose or glory. He expected to live the life of a war hero and instead becomes a bum and a loser. His solution is to hunt down and kill Campbell, the known Nazi war criminal.

Campbell, after coming face to face with his past, is ready to take control over his own life and atone for his sins. He fights off O’Hare and turns himself in to the Israeli embassy to be put on trial in Tel Aviv. He solves all his contradictions and liberates himself by voluntarily going to prison.

So what does it all mean? First off, Campbell exemplifies how we are what we do. In the eyes of society we can be different things to different people. We play different roles in a play depending on who we are talking to. This was written in the era of the sociologist Erving Goffman. To the American military, Campbell is an agent who helped them win the war. To the Nazis he is an effective propagandist. To the Soviets, he is celebrated as a writer of subversive literature, clandestinely sending subtle messages of resistance to the citizens of the oppressive Communist state. He was all of these and none of these at the same time. The fact that he believes in no political ideology is irrelevant during his trial because it is by his public persona that he get judged. Our inner lives, our true, selves, are of little or no consequence in how the public perceives us. However, the one thing we do know about Campbell’s inner life is the he was madly in love with his wife Helga. And so we are forced to ask the question of how far would we go to stay together with the person who matters most. Campbell did what he had to do to keep his marriage, his sacred bond, alive. Given this contradictory bundle of actions and motivations, are we still at liberty to judge Campbell as a person who is either good or bad?

The public personas that Vonnegut portrays are contradictory and confusing though. Each character’s flaws and virtues are on full display so we can examine why people do the confusing things that they do. Kraft, the Russian spy, sought a career in the Soviet secret service so he can live in America. Resi pretended to be her sister Helga so she can be with the man she had loved all her life. The Jewish doctor helped Campbell, the Nazi propagandist, because he learned from the Holocaust that helping people in need was better than judging them. The white supremacist Jones can be friends with a Catholic and an African-American because he believes they are all fighting for the same cause, no matter how idiotic that cause may be. O’Hare wanted to kill Campbell so that people who think of him as a nobody would see him as somebody. What Vonnegut is saying is that people are complex and life is confusing. To eliminate this confusion, people try to see the world in either/or dichotomies of black vs. white or good vs. evil. But this only muddies the waters more, creating more confusion and sometimes causing people to make bad decisions. Whether we support the axis or the allies, we are all coming from the same place and that place is one of confusion. Vonnegut isn’t asking us to forgive or sympathize with the Nazis, rather, he is asking us to admit that the confusion of life can lead people astray, causing them to do the wrong things and sometimes even terrible things. Asking us to examine the human side of Nazis is always a risky business, but I think Vonnegut is saying it is a necessity if we are going to prevent other atrocities like the Holocaust in the future. We don’t want to become like the Nazis we oppose. Vonnegut himself survived life in a prison camp during the bombing of Dresden. The trauma of this experience made him feel like equalized with people on all sides of the war and led him to write the kinds of novels he did for the sake of preventing future wars. The sincerity of his endeavor shines through in books like this and that is why he can get away with posing such controversial questions.

Mother Night is not perfect and I wouldn’t recommend it as the first Kurt Vonnegut novel anybody should read. He follows the dictum of showing without telling a little too carefully, and at times the narrative is so opaque that it might benefit from a little bit more explanation. There is a lot to unpack in this story and it may require some second-order thinking after you finish it. It is not his most direct writing. The flaws are few and minor though and Vonnegut would later iron out such wrinkles in other books.

Mother Night is a probe into the darkest regions of human motivations. It is a probe that levels all of its characters by stripping away all their appearances and exposing the messes inside them and around them. It shows how people are thrown into a world of confusion while making futile attempts at understanding it, shooting wildly in the dark, and bungling everything up further while tricking themselves into thinking we are on the side of the good. But it is impossible to know if we are really doing good so all we can do is keep doing what we do while hoping it is right. The ontological foundation of our existence is one of chaos and nonsense, but we can only forgive ourselves when we are courageous enough to admit that we made mistakes in our judgments, however terrible those mistakes may be. This is the bitterest of pills tp swallow, but one that may be necessary if we are to make progress as a species. And whatever you do, don’t be a man like Howard Campbell Jr., a man with no convictions, living without will and making no effort to take control over his life, getting blown around in whatever direction the wind takes him. Being informed and knowledgeable doesn’t guarantee you won’t make bad decisions, but at least it increases the chances that you might get something right.

 

Book Review

Hasidism: A New History

by David Biale et al

     If you’ve ever been to New York, be it upstate, downstate, or in the city itself, you have no doubt encountered Hasidic Jews at some time. Due to their distinctive clothing they are hard not to notice. Sooner or later, curiosity gets the better of us and we start to wonder who these people are and what they are all about. Answers are not always easy to come by. There are not many books written about the Hasidim and your average person isn’t well informed. Therefore, the acclaimed Jewish historian David Biale and a team of seven other scholars put together this 800 page cement block of a tome called Hasidism: A New History. Despite its size, it is an accessible book that should answer a lot of questions that any curious person might have about this enigmatic community.

As it should, this historical account begins with the founding of the movement. In the 1700s, there was a Jewish scholar named Israel Ba’al Shem Tov who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation encompassing what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov was a scholar of the kabbalah and a tsaddik which is something like a Jewish shaman. His practice emphasized trances, ecstatic prayer, singing, dancing, and the experience of devekut, a mystical union with God. He actually had no intention of starting a religious movement. He was simple a scholar who, at various times in his life, attracted other like-minded scholars of The Torah and other Jewish texts. Many of these scholars returned to their communities and shared their newfound knowledge with others and groups, known as Hasidim, began to form into courts around each tsaddik. The tsaddiks were elevated to the status of rebbes, which, if I understand correctly, are strong authority figures who guide their court’s beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. Membership in these Hasidic communities was initially limited to men only. Each Hasidic court operated independently of the others and they all varied from one another on matters of doctrine and ritual. Sometimes this led to conflict between competing Hasidic courts.

Another source of conflict came from other members of the Eastern European Jewish communities who came to be known as the Mitnaggdim. Since most of the Hasidim were illiterate, they never wrote down their own history so what we know about them came from the Mitnaggdim who wrote books and pamphlets in opposition to the new movement. Therefore it is up to the scholar to sort out what is fact and what is derogatory propaganda. When the Mitnaggdim characterized the Hasidim as a bunch of drunken, Dionysian revelers, we can’t dismiss the allegation entirely. Since the Hasidim practiced devekut through singing, dancing, and ecstatic ritual prayer, you can say that Hasidim valued experience over intellectualism. The Hasidim were not necessarily anti-intellectual; it is just that they valued communal ritual practice over scholarship and attention to Jewish law which is what differentiates them from other strains of Orthodox Judaism to this day.

As time went on, the tsaddiks got older and passed their leadership roles down to their sons so that dynasties were formed. These dynasties were named after their places of origin so when we hear names like Chabad-Lubavitch, Chernobyl, Ger, Belz, and others we can trace back the lineage to the location and rebbe of its first court.

The authors characterize the nineteenth century as the Golden Age of Hasidism. That was the time when the movement spread outside of Poland-Lithuania into Russia and the Austro-Hungarian territories. As they gathered momentum, they picked up new members along the way. The Hasidim were primarily rural people who survived by farming. With the invention of the railroad, pilgrimages to visit Hasidic courts became more frequent and these annual journeys became the high points of many adherents’ lives. All the while, the borders of the Hasidic community were porous so that some Jews attended the courts without being full-fledged members. Some Hasidim moved from court to court, sometimes belonging to two or more at the same time. Gentiles sometimes found themselves attracted to the courts as well and were known for seeking out medical aid, the blessing of talismans, or simple spiritual advice from nearby tsaddiks.

Of course, this burst of energy led to an eventual decline as Modernism set in. Impoverished Jews were forced to move to cities to live where they encountered more cosmopolitan ideas including socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and reformed Judaism. The Hasdic courts were decimated, but what remained became a bulwark of anti-modernity and a haven for traditional, and some would say reactionary and backwards, forms of Judaism.

Then came the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The authors don’t dwell too long on the Holocaust and for good reason. We all know what happened there and giving fine details about that nightmare wouldn’t lend much of value to the intentions of this history. What they do go into in great detail is how the Holocaust effected the Hasidim, the ways in which it influenced their self-concept as a religious movement, and what it did to change the structures of their communities. Of other great importance is the mass emigration of Hasidim to America and Israel. The most surprising thing to be learned from this book is that many Hasidim, even those who live in Israel, are anti-Zionist. The reasoning behind this is sufficiently explained but still a little hard to grasp for those of us who are outside the community. The experience of their immigration to America is entirely different. Not only are they now forced to live as an anti-modernist movement in a modernist society, but it is a multicultural society as well, a fact that has hurt and helped the Hasidim in many ways. But at the end of it all, the authors demonstrate how the American experience has been a great blessing to the Hasidim because it is the place where they have been able to thrive unlike any other place they have been in the world.

What is really impressive about this book is that it is so easy to follow. With eight different authors, you would expect it to vary in quality and style from chapter to chapter, but that just isn’t the case. The writing is consistent in its pacing and clarity all the way through. Even some of the more esoteric aspects of things like the kabbalah, theodicy, and devekut are explained with enough skill to make them comprehensible to those of us who aren’t so familiar with what they are. The tone is also as neutral as possible; the authors don’t exoticize the Hasidim like a species of strange animal nor do they judge them. They simple describe them and leave it at that. The biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t provide enough of an insider’s point of view. As a reader, it made me feel like I was voyeuristically watching the Hasidim from a distance through a pair of binoculars. But this is a history book and not a work of social science. To get a better understanding of the experience of Hasidic ritual and practice, I found some good documentaries on the internet to supplement my reading. Some of the Hasidim are incredibly talented musicians and singers.

If you are not a member of the Hasidic community and you want to know what these people are all about, Hasidim: A New History is possibly the best place to start. Not only is it informative about who the Hasidim are, but I think it also goes a long way in explaining what it might be like to be an ethnic or religious minority in America. In conclusion, while I can’t speak for the Hasidim themselves, I do think they could benefit with a little more outreach to other Americans outside their community. It is true that some members of Chabad-Lubavitch are making some attempts at this, I know because I have spoken with a couple of them myself, but we are living in dangerous times when anti-Semitism is on the rise and the Hasidim mark themselves out visually as an American Other. This makes them a prime target for scapegoating by the more ignorant members of our society. As the Crown Heights Affair of 1992 proved, sometimes being the Other in America is not so easy. We should all make an effort to tolerate those who are different from us, but sometimes you have to be the one to initiate that first step. In the end I get the impression that the Hasidim are just a bunch of harmless, regular people like the rest of us. They just happen to live by a different set of rules. Besides, they dedicate their lives to the experience of joy. Shouldn’t that be a part of all our lives anyways?

 

Book Review

Garbage World

by Charles Platt

     “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me/I wanna be dirty,” sang Janet Weiss, played by Susan Sarandon, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It could very well be the theme song of Roach, a character in Garbage World by Charles Platt since it fits his transformation from neat-freak to filth monger as the plot progresses. Roach is the pivot on which the novel turns. It is a book with a simple and unoriginal plot, and it makes a definite statement about class conflict, but it isn’t an entirely serious book and if you read it thatv way, it can be rewarding.

Somewhere in outer space there is a political entity called the United Asteroid Belt Pleasure Worlds Federation. While the asteroids these people inhabit are never fully described, we do learn that they are a high-tech civilization with high living standards, and an abundance of wealth. Their biggest problem is waste disposal. What they do is fill up blimps with garbage and then drop them on another asteroid named Kopra, which is also the Greek word for “feces”. The problem is that so much trash has been dropped on Kopra that the asteroid is fracturing under the weight and will soon break into pieces, spreading all the garbage throughout the immediate surroundings and ruining the cleanliness of the more developed asteroids in the federation.

Roach arrives in a spaceship with his commanding officer Larkin with plans to move the inhabitants of Kopra off the asteroid until they are able to fix it to prevent the catastrophe. The people living on Kopra are led by Gaylord, a giant bearish man with no sense of cleanliness or refinement. He earned his status as leader by accumulating the biggest hoard of junk which he has organized and labeled like pieces in a museum in his basement. His hoard makes Gaylord powerful because he is resourceful enough to know what to do with all his garbage when the time requires it. Larkin and Roach are anal-retentive germaphobes, but Gaylord finds common ground with Roach and a friendship grows between them. Roach also falls in love with Gaylord’s daughter Juliette. Gaylord also has a son named Oliver who leans a little bit more to the clean side and secretly agrees to help Larkin who has not been entirely honest about their mission on Kopra.

Roach is a bit of a humanitarian whose job is to collect information about the inhabitants of Kopra. He goes about studying them like an anthropologist. By that I mean he studies them with all the haughtiness and contempt that anthropologists in the colonial era studied so-called “primitive societies”. Still he cares enough about the Koprans to want to save them from their dirty and lowly status in the universe. Larkin, however, cannot be trusted and his plan is to exterminate the people there along with his efforts to prevent Kopra from exploding and polluting the entire asteroid belt with the filth his people have dumped on Kopra.

There are other inhabitants on the asteroid they call the Nomads. They live in the jungle under much rougher conditions and also survive by scavenging the junk that falls in blimps from the sky. Roach sets out with Gaylord and Juliette to find the Nomads so they can bring them back to the spaceship to be taken away while the asteroid of Kopra gets repaired. However, somebody sabotaged their vehicle and they come close to death, but the nomads save them from disaster. T o their surprise, the nomads turn out to be peaceful and hospitable people. The whole middle section of this novel is a series of adventures in the strange and dirty landscape of Kopra. Along the way, Roach begins to respect the Koprans more and more as he becomes accustomed to being dirty and gradually adapting to the environment of filth.

Roach’s transformation is complete when he falls into a warm mud pit with Juliette and the two get it on, having some truly dirty sex. This was actually my favorite part of the novel; Platt’s description of love making while submerged in warm and slimy mud was actually quite arousing. It wasn’t overly described either. There was just enough there to give you the tactile sensation necessary to make Kopra seem like it could actually be a nice place to visit. Needless to say, Roach has gone native at this point and, for him, there is no turning back.

Beyond that, I will just say you have to read the book to find out what happens.

Garbage World is a lot like the pulp science-fiction adventure stories of the 1920s and I am sure the author was aware of that. Those stories often had a colonialist mentality either latent or overt. A courageous spaceman travels to another planet or another dimension and encounters tribes of dangerous creatures that often bear the physical characteristics of non-European people. The hero falls in love with a local female and manages to escape before getting chopped up and eaten, killed by bug-eyed monsters, or flayed with primitive lasers. Garbage World turns this whole fictional paradigm on its head. In the post-colonial 1970s, there were more than a few social scientists pushing the idea that colonial subjects were just as human as the colonists and deserved to be treated as such. Charles Platt obviously took a cue from this change in attitudes and wrote Garbage World. It is an obvious critique of the way people in developed countries treat people in the Third World. The people of Kopra are portrayed as being resourceful and intelligent enough to make the most of their living conditions, even thriving on Kopra, finding happiness and the full realization of their human potential. Meanwhile the neat-freaks who invade their territory are the ones who created the conditions on Kopra and then plot to destroy them for being dirty, useless, and primitive. The dirty people of Kopra are the good ones while their technocratic adversaries reveal a link between colonialism, fascism, and obsessive cleanliness. By the end of the book, dirtiness is a virtue and Kopra looks like a borderline utopia. This book also reflects the growing concerns over ecology and environmentalism of the times in the 1970s.

Charles Platt’s Garbage World is a simple book on the surface. It was written primarily for entertainment. But when looked at in the context of the time when it was written, and the chronological space it holds in the progression of science-fiction writing, it makes a definite humanitarian statement. Despite the statement it makes, it is not a serious work of literature and it should not be approached as one. But if read solely for fun, the morality of the story may come out a lot more strongly. So go ahead and read it for fun and see what happens. Just don’t hide it under your mattress so your mother won’t find it; it’s not that kinds of a dirty book. And if anybody ever wants to have some filthy sex in a warm mud puddle, remember this book and don’t deny yourself that opportunity. 

 

Book Review

The Rochester Mob Wars

by Blair T. Kenny

     Ah Rochester, my hometown. The weather is harsh. The people are chronically ill tempered and unfriendly as wellas insular, provincial, and myopic. One of Rochester’s nicknames is Smugtown. The most popular food here is the Garbage Plate. It’s the eastern edge of the Great Midwestern Rustbelt. It’s the kind of place that produces serial killers like Arthur Shawcross and the Hillside Stranglers; Timothy McVeigh was living in the suburb of Webster when he decided to go to war against the US government. It’s the city where Jimi Hendrix got booed offstage, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Buddy Rich got arrested for possession of cocaine, and Billy Idol got arrested for attempted sexual assault. It’s also a haven for record collectors boasting of legendary stores like the House of Guitars, the Record Archive, Lakeshore Record Exchange, the Bop Shop, and Buzzo’s in Geneseo. We’re also the birthing ground for such musical luminaries as Cab Calloway, Wendy O. Williams, Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, the Chesterfield Kings, and Mitch Miller. Road construction is endless and we’ve got potholes in the road the size of elephant heads. It was once the hometown of Rob Black of Extreme Associates, a pornographer who made such extreme content that Larry Flynt told him to tone it down a few notches; he went to prison on obscenity charges. On the brighter side, Mt. Hope Cemetery has got to be one of the most beautiful boneyards in the country and a great place for drug parties and sexual trysts in the moonlight; it is the burial ground of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. There should be no surprise that such a sordid place would have its own arm of La Cosa Nostra, especially with its sizable population of ethnic Sicilians.

If you were around here in the 1970s, you are probably aware of the car bombing that killed Sammy G Gingello and the string of shootings which are documented in Blair T. Kenny’s The Rochester Mob Wars. The author does a historical service to this small town with a big attitude, documenting a side of life that wouldn’t surprise anybody from this region. But beyond simple documentation, this short book is a chore to read.

The story of this band of Goombatas is nothing unique. The Mafia demanded protection money from a handful of illegal gambling dens while involved in various other forms of crime. When the local big boss, Frank Valenti, was given an all-expenses paid vacation up the river courtesy of the local police force who, as we all know around here aren’t a whole lot different from other gangs, the Mafia split into three factions dubbed by the police as the A Team, the B Team, and the C Team. The A Team controlled all the rackets while the B Team rebelled against them and tried to seize control. The C Team was just around to cause more trouble.

Frank Valenti rose up in the ranks, having ties to the mob in Pittsburgh and the Bonanno Faimily in New York City. When he went away for a while, he put the slow-witted and unimaginative Tom Didio in charge of the B Team, thinking he would be easy to control from prison and ready to step down upon the boss’s return. But Didio wouldn’t budge and all hell broke loose. Didio was gunned down in the parking lot of the Blue Gardenia restaurant in Irondequoit. This was followed by car bombings, arson, and lots of shooting.

The book also mentions some ties to Hells Angels chapters from as far away as Tennessee and Georgia and Mafia infiltration of the Teamsters Local #398 which eventually was liquidated by the government for being mob controlled, although Blair Kenny doesn’t say a whole lot about what the paisanos did when they ran the labor union rackets.

I suppose it all sounds interesting, especially if you come from the great city of Rottenchester. However, this book is so poorly written that any excitement you might get from it is beaten down like a day at Charlotte Beach that got ruined by a heavy rainstorm or possibly even by the stench from the polluted water, making the air around Lake Ontario smell like a sewer. The whole thing reads like paperwork from a police department’s filing cabinet. Actually, the author just seemed to indiscriminately throw together a bunch of newspaper clippings from the local rag known as the Democrat & Chronicle, merely summarizing them as he went along without any effective narrative scheme or organization. You get the same stories, largely lacking in detail, repeated over and over again without much information about who any of these people are or why we should even be interested in them. Finally at the end, Blair Kenny rewrites the whole story into a coherent narrative as some sort of summary, but at that point it is too little too late to save the entire book from itself.

As someone who grew up in Rochester, this book is mildly interesting. I know all the neighborhoods and suburbs where the action took place; most of them are in neighborhoods you should avoid these days. I recognize the names of some police officers and journalists in the story, including Gordon Urlacher, the police commissioner who went to prison for embezzling money from the police department in the 1990s. I can remember hearing rumors about Charlie the Ox when I was a teenager. Several of the people here share last names with kids I was friends with in grade school. And yet there is no mention of the Garibaldi Gardens or the Rio Bamba. But other than that, this is such a poorly written book that it won’t be of much interest to most readers; it probably will appeal only to those fascinated with the most obscure elements of Mafia lore or those with especially low standards in reading materials. Any time you see that a book is self-published, proceed with caution.