U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Back when I was in middle school, I found Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" in the Mystery section of the local library, and fell in love. (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. Though being the rebel that I am, I think I started with "C.") Somewhere in the binge, I decided to use one of the books for an oral book report for Reading class. It wasn't until halfway through my presentation that I realized that it was impossible to summarize the plot in a way that would a) hold my 13-year-old peers' interest; and b) do any justice to the book itself. And that's what Sue Grafton's mystery novels do--they create deft mazes of people, information, and red herrings.

Her 21st, U is for Undertow, is part of that tradition. Like all the other books, its primary voice is that of Kinsey Millhone, a California private investigator. Kinsey isn't really your hardboiled type--she hits the criteria of being fiercely independent and jaded, but her beachy town and wacky friends are more sitcom than noir. But she's smart, sneaky, and tenacious as hell, so she's definitely the person you want ferreting out information for your cold case murder or missing person.

Undertow takes place over a few weeks in April, 1988, when a twentysomething guy wanders into Kinsey's office and insists that a newspaper article about a long unsolved kidnapping case (a 4-year-old girl disappeared in 1967, never found) triggered a buried childhood memory of him stumbling upon two guys burying a bundle a few days after the girl disappeared. The guy, Michael, isn't the most stable or reliable dude around, and no one believes him. So he hires Kinsey for a day to try to figure out whether he could possibly have seen what he thinks he saw.

Of course, the plot mushrooms from there, but did you not see what I wrote earlier about summarizing? Lost cause. Rest assured that as with many of the other novels in the series, we get introduced to various members (savory and otherwise) of the Santa Teresa community, who have odd connections to the original kidnapping, the aftermath, and the present day investigation. The climax is a little unsatisfying--Grafton takes the unusual (for her and for mystery writers in general) approach of lining up pretty much everything early on, and using pure exposition to fill in the blanks. But overall, the mystery is a good and layered one.

There's also a B-plot involving Kinsey's own personal life, which I found more interesting. After 21 books, you feel pretty attached to someone, whether she's fictional or not. And Kinsey (despite her protestations that she needs nothing more than her spartan lifestyle and one or two token friends) has steadily grown from an orphan (by circumstance early on and then later by choice) to someone with actual obligations in life. In Undertow, that means possibly opening up to estranged family. And checking in with her hot (and unfortunately platonic) detective friend.

I also appreciate that Grafton has stayed within the 80s timeline. These books would be totally ruined by modern technology. There's something appealing about a detective who does her work by cross-referencing old directories and schlepping to a cat hospital to ask questions that Google would answer so easily today.

So overall, a very entertaining read. I'm starting to get nervous because there are only five novels left. But I probably have seven-ish years before I really need to worry about the end. In the meantime, I'll just wait impatiently for V.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

So there's this writer. He was brilliant, restless, and died young while trying to maintain both his creativity and a stable life. Sounds familiar, right?

Not so fast. The troubled writer in question here is the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. His novel The Savage Detectives (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) was the most recent book club book, chosen as much for its unique perspective on modern Latin American literature as for the hesitance that 2666, Belano's posthumous, 900-page opus, instilled in at least one of us.

The Savage Detectives is a novel that spans the 70s to the 90s, tracing two young poets (and co-founders of a poetry "movement," the Visceral Realists) from their early shenanigans in Mexico City to nomadic lives in Israel, Spain, and Mexico (again). The young Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano gather a group of self-serious young poets to overthrow Mexico's reigning literary elite (mostly just Octavio Paz). And through them, we see the joys and pettinesses of poetic revolution--which happens to be high on drama here, and low on actual poetry and actual revolution. But they assemble a ragtag group of young writers who like the idea of literary godhood, even if they have no idea how to achieve it. So the group members mostly just drink, talk endlessly, sleep with each other and various hangers-on, and occasionally write poetry that no one publishes.

The first third of the book, which follows the group as it coalesces around Lima and Bolano, is written as a diary by Juan Madero, a 17-year-old who sees the Visceral Realists as his entry to sex, excitement, and more sex. Juan drops out of school to pursue poetry and waitresses, and sets his sights on becoming a Visceral Realist like Lima and Bolano. Juan doesn't really know what a Visceral Realist is, per se (and neither do we), but he knows he wants in. The section is a humorous, rather joyous coming-of-age set piece introducing us both to the Visceral Realists and 1976 Mexico City. The section ends on a bit of a dark note, though, as Lima, Bolano, Madero, and a prostitute named Lupe flee Mexico City in a borrowed car, trying to get Lupe away from her violent pimp.

The second section of the book is written in a completely different style--instead of one kid's journal, it's a series of documentary, first-person interviews with a parade of previously unintroduced characters. After a few pages, you realize each new speaker (whose recollections range from a page to several) is someone who came into contact with Ulises Lima, Arturo Bolano, or both, since their abrupt exit from Mexico City. The timeline unfolds more or less straightforwardly, giving episodic updates on the pair's travels. Ulises Lima becomes a drifter throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, seemingly content with a hard, very physical life of odd jobs and fleeting sexual encounters. Bolano is also a drifter, but he seems slightly more concerned with his intellectual and philosophical development. He moves around Europe for the most part (Spain especially), but ultimately becomes a freelance journalist with a penchant for African war zones. With both men, you get the impression from all of these different voices that they're haunted by something that changed them fundamentally, and that dimmed the youthful arrogance that held the Visceral Realists together in the first place.

The third section brings us back to Juan Madero's diary, and the poets' exodus into the Sonora desert with Lupe. The little group is not only hiding from the pimp, but also seeking out Cesarea Tinajero, a woman who had been considered the "mother of Visceral Realism" sixty years before. Cesarea left little (if any) poetry behind, and completely disappeared from the literary social scene. The traces followed by Lima and Bolano (with Madero and Lupe just kind of along for the ride) are increasingly sad, and the climax sheds light on why both men led such effed up adult lives after the fact.

This may be one of my favorites of the book club books--I loved Bolano's complexity of language and perspective, while he kept an unwieldy structure mostly under control. There were spots that could have been pruned (the middle section is approximately 400 pages, with some unnecessarily repeated speakers and themes), but overall I think he did an excellent job making about a hundred different speakers seem like unique voices and characters. And he does that while also developing Lima and Belano in a thoughtful and believable way. The language he uses is terse when it needs to be, lush and sensual when it needs to be, and absurd when he needs it to be. And one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that for a book about poets, there's extremely little poetry in it, making the story about the Visceral Realists and the motives behind them much more than the words any of them put on paper.

I think I'll still wait a while to tackle 2666, but in the meantime I'm glad to have finished out 2009 with this one.

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

I believe in radio omens. Or these days, given that I rarely listen to the radio, iPod omens. Like, if I'm feeling nostalgic for the zaniness of college, my iPod turns up that song that happened to be playing in the background at Spring Weekend 2002. Even this morning, I was on the subway, thinking about how much has changed in the past few months, and the Whiny Frat Rock song that dominated my summer playlist came on.

Of course, they're not really omens. These songs are on my iPod because I've sought them out, and kept them in the rotation for their sentimental attachments. But part of me believes in the possibility that the universe knows what I really want to hear. (And sometimes, that's just gonna be Justin Timberlake--let's be honest.) And that's part of what made me so receptive to Arthur Phillips's novel The Song is You. Like Phillips, I'm happy to suspend logic and cynicism as long as there's a patina of pop music gloss.

The Song is You follows another iPod omen believer, Brooklynite Julian Donohue, a commercial director whose sense of self is largely defined by his music collection. (This isn't a Nick Hornby novel, I swear.) He sees his iPod as an extension of his old portable CD player, which was in itself an extension of his Walkman, which provided the soundtrack to his days as a young and soulful stud. But Julian hasn't just been pining for his youth--in the intervening years, he's gotten married, started a family, even given up his casual infidelities. But a family tragedy pushes all of that aside, and pretty much all he's left with is the music collection. This isn't to say he's a sad sack--just a more philosophical version of his younger self. Julian, like so many Modern Men (literary and otherwise), couches his shallowness and narcissism in existential hooey. He convinces himself that his aesthetic preferences are just so much more refined than everyone else's, and that's why he only sleeps with models.

This is about where he is when he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and scoffs at the hipsters assembled there to hear Cait O'Dwyer, spunky Irish lass (do we know any other kind?), perform with her backup band. Cait, we see, is upwardly mobile. Her demo CD has already been optioned by a label, the hipsters whisper over pitchers of PBR. Julian isn't really impressed, one way or another--but he does pick up her demo, which works its way into his iTunes rotation. Suddenly her poignant pop songs are getting to him like nothing else can, and he starts attending her shows around the city. At one, he leaves her a gift, which he doesn't really expect will get to her--but it does, and she, in turn, starts becoming fascinated with him as well.

Thus begins a game of stops and starts, of borderline stalking, of infatuation, of wistful song lyrics posted online. Both Julian and Cait get off on the thrill of their hidden Svengali relationship. They're both in love with the idea of a shared future of passionate love and creative fulfillment, but they can't figure out how to make the jump into physical reality--or at least they can't figure out how to do it without turning into the mundane. So they whip themselves into a frenzy of potential, as her career starts to flourish and he stokes it.

Both Julian and Cait come with entourages trying to pull them away. There's Ian, Cait's guitarist, who puts up with a more-than-friends-and-less-than-kind relationship with her, because their unconsummated co-dependency pushes their music further. Ian, suspicious of the stranger who leaves cryptic messages for Cait wherever they go, has a vested interest in taking the guy down--as does a has-been rockstar who sees Cait as his path back to the A-list. In Julian's corner, there's a sweet-but-neurotic estranged wife, and a socially inept brother--both of whom have strong (and valid) reasons for not wanting him to follow a cute pop star around the world.

The book follows both Julian and Cait pretty closely, but Julian is by far the more clearly defined. Cait is a little too perfect. By the middle of the book, you realize that's because Phillips himself is probably a little too in love with her. And because it's hard to get a real perspective on her, it's difficult to get 100% behind the Julian-Cait relationship--especially by the time things take a definite "Every Breath You Take" turn.

But as with Prague, what Phillips does well, he does exceptionally well. I do love his writing style. And the bonus point? A critical scene is set in a college bar in Storrs, Connecticut. Well played, Arthur Phillips. Brooklyn landmarks + UConn landmarks + pop songs = high score.

Some of my favorite parts:

"The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn't known the choice was going to be inscribed as eternally as grave marble law. That was her will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he'd known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have."

"When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it too."

"...He laughed at himself, and he laughed at Cait O'Dwyer's sorcery, and he wondered if, in real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only mircons wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."