Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
The writing has that Chabon spark … but I have to admit. The book is 90 pages long – and I had to force myeslf to finish it. Why don’t I just read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – and go to the source – rather than read your fanboy ramblings?
Now look. I’m a huge fangirl. I am THIS CLOSE to writing some Quantum Leap fanfic just to LET OFF SOME STEAM … and also because most of the writing I’m doing now is off-line, and serious, and takes up a lot of my concentration … and it would be fun to just sit down and be a big fat freakin’ fangirl, imagining what would happen if Al and Sam did THIS or what if Sam leapt into THAT … etc.
Fun!!
(Would I want anyone else to read it though????) But that’s beside the point.
So obviously, I got no problem with the fanboy aspect of it. But to me, it’s not good enough. The original is better. The original Sherlock Holmes books are better. Go read those.
But great American novel? Great sweeping panorama of American life? Read Michael Chabon. I won’t hold his fanboy books against him – I have them all – and I read them all. Not saying I like them all – but I sure as shit read them all. He’s important. I know what it means to be a fan.
I can’t wait to read Chabon’s latest – The Yiddish Policeman’s Union … I get that writers have different ways of working and creating, and that writing a book takes time to recover from. All that focus and energy – and also pressure – if you’re already successful. It’s draining. Something like The Final Solution must have been a lark for Chabon, and really fun to write – relaxing, easy … and hell, he knows there are folks out there like me who will buy it. (He even speaks to that in interviews. Basically it is his hope to broaden the appeal of Sherlock Holmes – but again, I find that condescending. Anyhoo, I’LL LET IT GO!)
Here’s an excerpt – where the detective, referred to as “the old man” looks around for clues. \
Excerpt from The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
With a series of huffings and grunts, laboring across twenty feet square of level ground as if they were the sheer icy face of Karakorum, the old man turned his beloved lens upon everything that occupied or surrounded the fatal spot, tucked between the lush green hedgerows of Hallows Lane, at which Shane’s half-headless body had been foound, early that morning, by his landlord, Mr. Panicker. Alas that the body had already been moved, and by clumsy men in heavy boots! All that remained was its faint imprint, a twisted cross in the dust. On the right tire of the dead man’s motorcar – awfully flash for a traveler in milking machines – he noted the centripetal pattern and moderate degree of darkening in the feathery spray of blood on the tire’s white wall. Though the police had made a search of the car, turning up an ordnance survey map of Sussex, a length of clear rubber milking hose, bits of valve and pipe, several glossy prospectuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley’s Common Diseases of Milch Kine, 1929 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a certain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This procedure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 caliber cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to indicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or romance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.
He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase, and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and countless insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered garments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.
That one’s sitting on my coffee table, actually. It’ll be one of the next couple I’ll read….
I’ll be really interested to hear your thoughts, tommy!
My copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes is well worn; one of my all-time favorites. It’s funny; my wife won’t read it, or Hammett, or Chandler, or Christie, all of whom I love, because she doesn’t like “period” mysteries. But she is a mystery junkie. It’s all she reads. She is missing the best of it.
Though a Chabon fan, I also found “The Final Solution” difficult to get through, especially for such a short book. Sitting here today, I can’t remember much about it.
Sheila – didn’t he also write “Summerland” between “Kavalier & Clay” and “Final Solution?”
Jeff – I just looked it up – you’re right! 2 books – final solution and summerland. Tributes to genres Chabon loves.
My brother loved Summerland – I think he read it out loud to Cashel, but I’ll wait for Bren to show up and confirm that.
You know, Im getting to that stage where I am needing a new venue of reading and I just realized – I have never read any of Doyle – or Chabon, for that matter! I was contemplating getting back into the Western, as I used to read that in high school and havent for a long while, but for some reason have shied away from the mystery.
I went thru a big Sherlock Holmes phase when I was about 11 or 12 – haven’t read any since, actually – but I remember LOVING them!
Oh yeah. By the way
BE A FAN GIRL!!! I’ll read it!! (I need company!!)
Sharon – hahahaha!! I’ll keep you posted, then, on any fanfic I create!
Just getting into the debate about genre fic vs “mainstream” (am I on the right topic????) – I like that Chabon is defending genre fiction. A lot of writers I talk to seem to want to avoid “rules” – but one of the things I have learned in trying to write fantasy/sci-fi is that rules are important in world-building and that often those ‘walls’ FORCE a person to be creative. I wonder if some of the distaste of genre comes from people who reduce genre to a ‘formulae’ and then churn out dozens using that formulae – they create the image of success, but upon further inspection there is no ‘there’ there. I can understand how genre has become a horror for many – but I also think those that dwell within it and understand its perimeters can really make a genre ‘new’ again. I am always telling my daughter “you can’t BREAK the rules until you learn what they are” and rules are so much more than formulae. I think its also why fanfic appeals to me in some ways. Fanfic isnt just about imitating what you love, its about learning the boundaries that have been established and pushing that much further to define the edge.
Just blathering…
Cash read ‘summerland’ on his own, freak. i just reread ‘the final solution’ and i have a different take on it. not quite sure what it is, but i’ll give it a go.
(by the way, ‘summerland’ is a boatload of fun. total imagination.)
i love that in a small diversion of a book, chabon encapsulates the horror of the holocaust in the character of a parrot.
period. end of story. that takes balls.
Sharon – Really interesting thoughts about fanfic!! Thank you!
One of my favorite blogs is “The Rejecter” – a blog by an assistant to a literary agent – and she gives advice to writers who are trying to get published.
Here she answers a question about fanfic – and she pretty much echoes what you said! That fanfic is a great way to learn the rules.
Oh and Sharon – if you Google Chabon’s name – you could probably find a lot of his extensive essays about genre fiction, and how he’s pissed that someone like Poe, say, or HG Wells, has to be relegated to genre shelves as opposed to being integrated with the rest of the books.
Because that ghettoizes the genre to JUST the fans of that genre … which (Chabon argues) means you are limiting the audience to these awesome types of literature – mystery, sci fi, fantasy, whatever.
And it’s true. I love Stephen King – but I’m not a “horror” fan, in general – I’m never gonna go to a “horror” shelf and browse around – it’s just not my taste. King happens to be integrated into the rest of the bookstore – he’s not in a “horror” section – but if he were, I might never find him.
It would be like putting Jane Eyre into a shelf of “women writers” or something.
That would be so unfair – to the book but also to the many people (meaning, men) who might not pick up a book that was labeled as ‘chick lit’ or ‘female writers’ or ‘romance’ or whatever.
I just finished this, my first book of Chabon’s, and found it to be really easy on the mind and light in my hands. For a ninety page book (which might take less than an hour on the subway to read) I burned through it in a mere week. Only a slight blow to my bookworm ego and after reading your post, and comments, I didn’t feel so bad after all.
Also, after lugging Jonothan Strange and Mr. Norrell around, I found having a very thin book to read refreshing.
(LOVED JS & Mr.N by the way!)
The rules for what constitutes genre seem unevenly constructed and applied, too. I note that in some places Wells, Doyle, Poe, Rider Haggard et al are shelved in general fiction — one more reason to love my local liberry ;-) — and other places not.
I want to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Morrell, and perhaps I’ll get to do over the holidays. I think I want to start reading Coetzee too.
Oh and Sharon – if you Google Chabon’s name – you could probably find a lot of his extensive essays about genre fiction, and how he’s pissed that someone like Poe, say, or HG Wells, has to be relegated to genre shelves as opposed to being integrated with the rest of the books.
Because that ghettoizes the genre to JUST the fans of that genre … which (Chabon argues) means you are limiting the audience to these awesome types of literature – mystery, sci fi, fantasy, whatever.
OOOOOOH – I get what Chabon/you is/are saying now…I’m easily confuddled. Yeah, I wish it were all just a matter of answering the question of ‘what’s a good book to read?’ without pigeon-hole-ing writers…or readers. It was the same for Patrick O’Brian – even though I have long professed a love for tall sailing ships, it would never have occured to me to look in certain areas of the book store because all that nautical stuff is only the kind of thing guys are interested in…usually…
Sharon – yes, exactly!!
Like I’m not a big fantasy fan – just not my thing at all – and I’ve always been grateful that Madeleine L’Engle’s books were shelved in with all the other books in my local library – because as a kid, I NEVER would have picked up Wrinkle in Time if it had been in a “fantasy” shelf. It’s one of my all-time favorite books – and in a way it transcends its genre – but also, it opened up my mind to that TYPE of book … in a way that no other book ever did.
I don’t know – I definitely think genre labeling has some value. I remember going to my stupid Blockbuster and being unable to find any John Wayne movies because they were all classified as “action” movies. What???
For a long time, I thought I wasn’t a fan of Western movies … it was the LABEL that put me off. I’ve since learned how great some of those movies are – period. LIke The Searchers isn’t just a great Western – it’s a great movie – PERIOD.
But still. I would HOPE that a video store would at least have a Western section to make stuff more easily find-able.
Not sure the answer – I realize I’m contradicting myself here … but I guess that just means I think it’s an interesting conundrum!
LOL!! – I was contradicting myself too when I was writing the last post…”yeah! No genre-fixing! but…I like knowing where to find stuff!!”
Im going to have to get over my prejudice against Steven King, I guess. Back in high school, I had an utterly miserable evening on a date centered around seeing “Children of the Corn” and Ive never forgiven the writer for it. And I think I had written off a good amount of 20th century literature because of English teachers who obsessed over William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Faulkner frustrated me (I dont know why), and our theatre competitions saw one too many VERY VERY bad performances of “Glass Menagerie.”
Reading your recommendations has me reconsidering…
ha! Yeah, a bad Tennessee Williams production could ruin you for life!! As is probalby obvious, he’s my favorite … and I think the journey with all of that started with me seeing the movie Streetcar when I was babysitting, and I was 12 years old or something (oh, the inappropriate movies I saw when babysitting! Thank God for babysitting!!)
High school English ruined Herman Melville for me for a good 15 years – thank God I decided to go back and re-visit Moby Dick. But to read that as a 15 year old?
bah!!