Fourteen, Fifteen, Fake Foer Sighting
I just got back from a weekend trip to Chicago that involved very important nerd business, as well as beer consumption and walking around neighborhoods that I once knew but now don't know very well at all. Still, I found a Harold's Chicken Shack when I needed one, and a cup of mate, and ate a plate of much-needed machaca on a Sunday morning. I would have had a heart attack on the El, but when you walk five miles a day, it tends to counteract, somewhat, the Italian beef.
There was plenty of time to read on this trip, and I smacked down books number 14 and 15 for the year. The first was an excellent and creepy psychological mystery by Liz Jensen called The Ninth Life Of Louis Drax, set in Provence, reminiscent, to some extent, of J.G Ballard, but shot through with a little more humanity. It seems I've read a lot of books lately that question our perception of the afterlife and how it relates to waking consciousness. That's just the fascinating kind of fellow I am. The Lovely Bones, which wasn't that good, was the most popular. Death Of An Ordinary Man was good, but written too experimentally to be widely appreciated. This one struck a nice balance. The plot was clear and tense, the characters very vivid. I also liked the fact that the book featured a clever nine-year-old protagonist, with many chapters in his voice, but didn't try to exploit that device for anything other than the story. I think you well-read types know to what other book I'm referring. Jensen is a mature writer very much in control of her material. Highly recommended.
Book Number 15 was another Hard Case Crime number: Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas, which got nominated for an Edgar Award this year. I liked this one as well. It's just as pulpy as any Hard Case book, and the plot moves pretty much by the numbers. As I've said before, noir/pulp plots don't really matter much. It's all about the atmosphere, and Aleas gives Manhattan a sinister tone that you don't see very often portrayed. The street descriptions seem authentic and earned. I also love the fact that the protagonist has a Reservoir Dogs poster in his boyhood bedroom at his mother's apartment, where he hides out whenever he's in trouble. The young detective character is very appealing, and Aleas leaves the story hanging enough so that he could come back, sort of like Easy Rawlins. This isn't as good as Mosley, but it's a solid effort worth reading, particulary for genre fans.
Meanwhile, I came home to the following letter. I will reprint it in all its absurdity, but let me tell you all now, in no uncertain terms, that I will not become a repository for Jonathan Safran Foer sightings, even fake ones. "Stacey," who sent me the sighting, later wrote back to say that she'd sent it to me as part of an assignment on "blogs, fact-checking, and gossip." My life leaks away from me, one hour at a time....
"So my friend Kristy and I saw Jonathan Safran Foer at the Duane Reade
on Broadway and 8th Street. This was April 7th, around noon. He was
wearing his coat that he wore in that Pages Magazine profile. He
picked up one of those cheap $1.89 shampoos. It was green, and he
stared at it for a really long time, maybe 20 seconds. I walked
really slowly by him (my friend was in the candy aisle then) and he
said kind of loudly, "Holy shit," and he was still staring at the
shampoo, and I had to get out of that aisle to laugh. My friend
Kristy was there too and she can verify. Safran Foer was alone as far as we could tell. He looked at the shampoos for a long time and then left without buying anything. He seemed really confused when he left. Kristy and I were going to follow him but he went into that subway station across the street, the 8th street one. It was definitely him, because Kristy and I were both at the 92 Y reading too, and saw him there, that was the night before."
What a crazy fake Foer sighting!