Skinny Annie Blues
by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Kensington, $21.95
Publisher’s Weekly recently said that Austin author Neal Barrett, Jr.
writes like “Robert Ludlum on laughing gas.” What a ridiculous thing to say.
Robert Ludlum couldn’t write anything like Barrett no matter what kind of drugs
he took. Barrett’s latest mystery, Skinny Annie Blues, is in many ways
his most off-beat, outrageous yet. And, coming on the heels of his last two, Dead Dog Blues and Pink Vodka Blues, that’s saying a lot.
Among Barrett’s many considerable talents is his knack for Texas redneck
dialogue. He’s got the rhythm and rhyme and downright loopiness of it down pat;
and no matter how surreal or over the top Barrett paints the scenario, you can
actually hear and see these sneering, swaggering, dangerous misfits. This time
out, Barrett tells a fish-out-of-water story, with the unlikely hero, Wiley
Moss, an entomologist (he draws bugs for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)
who flies down to Galveston to find out who murdered his father. It’s a little
hard for Wiley to decide just what his emotional reaction to the news ought to
be. After all, he hasn’t seen or heard from the man since his sixteenth
birthday. He says: I simply couldn’t picture Daddy dead. You don’t know
someone’s alive, it’s hard to get from there to dead. Daddy started leaving
home in the year that I was born. I grew up thinking that’s what fathers
did.
Despite all that, Wiley does harbor a sliver of affection for his departed
dad. Wiley recalls that on his sixteenth birthday, his father gave him a Tour
de France bike. (“It had the Camagnolo components — crank set, derailleurs,
the works.”) The next day, his father disappeared for good. Two weeks later,
cops stopped Wiley on his way to school. Turns out that bike was stolen.
Mother said I should remember that he’d picked out the best bike there was
for his boy. He could have gotten something cheaper, but he didn’t do that. He
got the best.
Wiley probably wouldn’t have dropped everything (including his relationship
with a gorgeous though somewhat dizzy girlfriend) to fly to Texas to try to
solve his father’s murder, except for the fact that the cop who calls to give
him the news is obviously trying to cover something up. After vainly trying to
discourage Wiley from coming to Texas, their conversation degenerates into a
surreal, long-distance wrestling match, and the cop calls Wiley “a sissy wart
fuck.” That does it. He’s on the next flight out.
And so goes the rest of Skinny Annie Blues. Wiley comes to Galveston,
ogles pretty girls who mostly give him a hard time, gets on the wrong side of
bizarre criminals with names like Halfass, Pound, and Tommy Clit and a very
mean, very fat stripper called Skinny Annie, and strikes up dangerous
friendships with over-the-edge characters like Stirling R. LaFrance (aka
“The Chicken Man”), Harry Sykes, and a waiter named Bob.
The novel is in many ways one long extended chase scene and a chain of
elliptical, jazzlike conversations between the seriously off-kilter hero and
the series of weirdos whose orbits he is flung into and out of with dizzying
speed. There’s Stewart L. Stewart, the exceedingly eccentric writer who writes
his novel manuscripts on the bodies of shaved dogs. There’s the girl he meets
on the plane, who causes a scene after she catches Wiley staring at her foot,
which she takes to mean that he’s fantasizing about having wild, uninhibited
sex with her. Wiley is all-guy, and he’s the kind of guy who gets in trouble
for just thinking guy-thoughts.
Barrett’s palette of guy-thoughts is as real as Milk Duds melting in your left
hand during a Saturday afternoon matinee while your right attempts to craftily
negotiate the alluring frontier between her shoulder and breast. As Wiley’s
girlfriend emerges from the shower, the aroma is “a pleasant mix of Animal
Crackers and lemon soap, vodka and Diet Coke, the heady scent of moving parts.
If I touched her she’d be slick as olive oil. She might be hard to catch.”
Skinny Annie Blues is not your typical tough-guy mystery novel and
Barrett is not your typical tough-guy mystery writer. But when it comes to what
he does, he’s the best there is. Robert Ludlum on laughing gas? I’d say think
about Robert Parker and Elmore Leonard spiked with cheap margaritas and truck
driver jokes. Or just read the first page of this book, or any of Barrett’s
novels. You’ll get the picture. — Jesse Sublett
My Aces, My Faults,
by Nick Bollettieri and Dick Schaap
Avon, $25 hard
Tennis is rife with celebrities, and its lexicon of players, both off and on
the court can rival that of Hollywood. Nowhere is that more evident than in
Nick Bollettieri, the sometimes acclaimed, always self-proclaimed, wizard guru
to rising tennis stars. Nick Bollettieri is the George Hamilton of tennis. And
the similarities don’t end at the tan line.
My Aces, My Faults hit the stands when the U.S. Open began and you have
to wonder if the debut wasn’t as much a calculated attempt to unnerve some of
Bollettieri’s estranged students as it was to ride the coattails of the Open’s
publicity. Bollettieri hangs some pretty private laundry out on his lines, and
as unabashed as he may be about his “faults,” Andre Agassi, Mary Pierce, Boris
Becker, Monica Seles, and especially his cousin Kenny, may not have wanted to
be quite so forthcoming. He reprints long-winded, pompous letters to his
students that are best read aloud to whooping, disbelieving tennis buff
friends. In his letter to Mary Pierce, he writes, “A. On court… You
have a habit of looking to the box, raising your hands in disgust, or smiling,
as well as a few other irritating habits. These must stop.” Other sections of
these letters, which often take the form of outlines with lots of numbers,
letters and Roman numerals, include: III. Your Personal Relationships,
VI. Mary Pierce’s Present Game and Techniques and, VIII. (but not
least) Nick Bollettieri.
Co-authored by veteran sports biography writer, Dick Schaap, the book is a
tightly woven and entertaining tale. Schaap deftly manipulates time and
players to create a lively picture of a quixotic character who is surrounded
(at least through his perception) by controversy, betrayal, triumph and
retribution. Bollettieri and Schaap spare no punches, either to Nick or to
those he strips bare in his book. Even in the toned-up writing, you get a sense
of the man’s raw charisma and begin to understand how a law school dropout who
knew very little about tennis got to be a rich man with a stable full of top
players and the notoriety to match. And who couldn’t love a man whose favorite
thing about being the Rockefeller’s family pro was the abundance of huge
terrycloth towels scattered around their pools. “I took a few of those towels
home with me every summer. I figured they wouldn’t miss them.” — Hollis
Chacona
Aaron Spelling:
A Prime-Time Life
by Aaron Spelling with Jefferson Graham
St. Martin’s Press, $23.95 hard
For the purebred gossiphound, the biography of the master of such juicy on-
and off-the-set TV antics as Dynasty, Charlie’s Angels, and
Melrose Place would seem a veritable salt lick of Sodom & Gomorrah
delight. Too bad. If the smell of month-old unmentionables is what you crave,
one whiff of this fabric-softened, Prime-Time laundry may be too fragrant. What
was Aaron Spelling thinking? We want the dirt and he is holding out!
Where’s the lowdown about Shannon and Lauren and Herv� and Farrah?
Where’s the gooey, nasty, sticky stuff that kept the tabloids in black ink for
so long? As it becomes apparent that the man who launched so many myths and
feathered hairdos has no interest in demystifying his creations, it becomes
clear that this book ain’t the place.
What does remain is a backlot full of future Trivial Pursuit� (TV:
The Jiggle Years edition) questions, like:
Who came up with Victoria Davey (Tori) Spelling’s nickname?
What famous late Seventies TV icon had a sign on his on-set trailer that
read: “The Doctor of Sex”?
Who was originally hired to play Blake Carrington?
and
Who was the 500th guest star of the Love Boat?
Hmmmm. Interesting, but not as satisfyingly twisted as half the
characters on Spelling’s shows.
Despite all the tip-toe discretion, the general tone of this epic is quite
dishy. In fact, one might get the impression, through reading the prose of the
diminutive Mr. Spelling, that he is a Total Queen. His understanding of
(and albeit, total exploitation, usually to the sheer delight of) Gay America
has created turning-point characters in small screen history like Steven
Carrington, Doug on Melrose, that lesbo doctor on the short-lived series
Heartbeat, and hell, even Kristy McNichol’s Buddy Lawrence (swoon!) on
Family. He must be down. Okay, maybe the pioneering producer
isn’t really a homo. Spelling gets off the hook, not so much for his
exhaustive chapters on straight-guy philandering and eventual total devotion to
his wife Candy (herself a total queen in the truest sense: The woman has a
skadillion-dollar doll collection. ), but for being a good guy about queers, in
general.
Personally, I lay the blame of this tame book on co-writer Jefferson Graham.
Sure, the guy co-authored the bio of mega-sales genius Ron Popeil, but he also
covers the TV-industry for USA Today, not exactly the bastion of
butt-nekkid controversy. The life and accomplishments of Aaron Spelling deserve
a more thorough dishing.
Oh, the answers to the questions? Well, don’t not get the book on our
account:
Barbara Stanwyck
Herv� Villechaize
George Peppard (bonus points if you knew that Dynasty was
originally titled Oil) and
Mr. Andy Warhol.
— Kate X Messer
Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico Translated by Elisabeth Plaister
Dalkey Archive Press, $14.95 paper
Many will find this great novel daunting at first glance. Del Paso has been
influenced by writers from Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne to Joyce and
Fuentes, and he employs sentences hundreds of words long, paragraphs that go on
for pages. Actually, it’s not that difficult; Joyce’s departure from
conventional grammar, punctuation and syntax in Ulysses provides readers
with more of a challenge.
There certainly have been precedents for Palinuro, aside from
Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, including works by Proust,
Marguerite Young, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Miguel Asturias. However,
their novels are not familiar to most readers, although they may have read
stuff by Thomas Pynchon, the world’s most overrated trivia buff.
Del Paso, a Mexican who’s spent years abroad, transcends the Latin American
literary tradition here, although much of Palinuro is set in his nation.
Palinuro‘s name derives from Palinurus, Aeneas’ helmsman. A young
medical student, he appears in both the first and third person, partly because
del Paso includes a good deal of autobiographical information and is
self-referential, e.g., “And into my novel had fallen the hyperbolic and
hollow.” In fact, del Paso stated during an interview, “…I realized I wasn’t
creating a number of characters but, in fact, one character with a number of
facets or masks. In that multiplicity I myself, as the novel’s creator, was
also included…. This all-encompassing character could at times become Cousin
Walter, who ends up being another aspect of Fernando del Paso…. But this
omnipresent character can also unfold into Molkas, Fabricio, and Palinuro’s
other friends — Molkas representing the most vulgar, unrefined aspect of this
character of characters, whereas Fabricio symbolizes his most refined side.”
Palinuro‘s most distinctive feature is del Paso’s frequent reference to
medicine and medical history, using them in metaphorical contexts often. Once a
medical student, he commented, “I began to understand that it (medicine) is
nothing but a science of failure. It attempts to save a person’s life and,
although it succeeds at times, it is truly powerless in that it cannot explain
the enigmas of the human body. Our body is a microcosm and is the only thing we
truly enjoy in life: with the body we love and hate, with the body we enjoy and
suffer.” With this in mind, del Paso makes the sexual relationship of Palinuro
and his first cousin, Estefania, a major part of his novel.
There are also many references here to painting, literature and political
history. One chapter contains an account of what happened to Ambrose Bierce
after he wandered into Mexico and supposedly met Pancho Villa. This was before
Fuentes published The Old Gringo. He deliberately avoided reading
Palinuro so that he would not be influenced by it. Palinuro is
non-linear and the chapter order less important than in most novels. In one,
del Paso, who had previously worked as a publicist and employee of the BBC in
London, deals with Palinuro’s Travels Among the Advertising Agencies and
Other Imaginary Islands, a satire during which he refers to Gulliver’s
Travels. Another chapter, taking the form of a theatrical script, has to
do with the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City.
The variety in del Paso’s work and his technical skill impress as much as his
erudition. He loads Palinuro with gorgeous prose poetry, and also
displays a consistently sharp sense of humor. For those of you hung up on
“magic realism” which, incidentally, existed in Europe as well as the Western
hemisphere, before the term was invented, the book does contain some fantasy
content and hallucinatory passages.
Now that you’re aware of this novel, don’t let it scare you. Seek it out, let
it seep into you.
— Harvey Pekar
The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self
Vintage, $12 paper
There’s a lot of Dickens in Will Self’s short story collection, The
Quantity Theory of Insanity: domineering mothers, omniscient doctors,
befuddled academics, urban clutter, psychiatric hospitals. But an Amazon tribe
that resembles West London suburbanites? Mothers who return from the dead?
Insanity that can’t be cured, that spreads like toxic waste, changing hands but
never diminishing? Nothing is what it seems in these interlinking stories;
this is warped Dickens, Dickens on speed. And despite the many similarities to
Dickens, Self’s stories are highly topical. To anyone conversant with the
world of psychiatric medicine, Self’s fictional territory — with its daily
doses of Thorazine and Prozac, celebrity psychologists, endless smokes,
conspiracy theories — will be familiar. In “Ward 9” an art therapist
discovers a bizarre collusion between doctors and patients when he takes a job
in a psychiatric ward. In “North London Book of the Dead” a middle-aged man
wonders if he’s going mad when he learns that his mother, who died months
earlier, is living in a London suburb. In the title story an academic
psychologist `proves’ his theory that there is a measurable amount of insanity
in the world.
While Self’s story-telling method is straightforward, his language can be
elliptical. It’s peppered with thesaurus-friendly words — cloacal,
scrofulous, sussuration, epicine — which add a jargony, diagnostic flavor to
the prose. In fact, the overall tone of these stories is clinical. This is
how the narrator of “Ward 9” describes himself: “After a few weeks on Ward 9,
and a generous handful of mutant M&M’s, everything began to resolve itself
into the patterns I had always dimly thought I apprehended. The violet swirls,
purple beams and glowing coils that lie within the world of the pressed eyelid
— the distressed retina.” In “Waiting” a journalist decides that a
traffic-obsessed friend is turning destructively insane. Self’s narrators
diagnose various states of madness, but, like white-coated doctors standing
behind observation windows, they maintain an uncomfortable distance from the
madnesses at hand. The stories don’t begin to explore the complex geography of
madness. They quickly begin to feel cold, repetitious — like a sheaf of
medical reports. The concepts driving this collection are interesting, but the
stories themselves left me wanting more. — Tamsin Todd
This article appears in November 15 • 1996 and November 15 • 1996 (Cover).