UFOs and donuts

Joe R. Lansdale turns out one entertaining novel after another, yet somehow flies under the radar of most readers. His The Donut Legion (2022) is another enjoyable experience.

As the title suggests, the novel is a bit off the wall. There's a ghost, flying saucers, a killer chimpanzee and, of course, lots of donuts.

Charlie Garner is visited one night by his beautiful ex-wife, Meg. Yet it soon becomes clear that she was never really there, although a hint of her perfume remains. When he goes looking for her, he discovers that both she and her new husband have disappeared. Did she somehow get mixed up in a nearby flying saucer cult, into which both people and large sums of money seem to be disappearing?

With assistance from his brother, Felix, a private investigator; Cherry, his brother's girlfriend and an attorney; and Scrappy, a pretty woman pretending to be a newspaper reporter who soon proves she deserves that nickname, Charlie begins digging into what's really going on inside that cult.

This proves to be dangerous business, even after they enlist the local chief of police in their campaign. As for the donuts, it seems the cult gets much of its money from a string of donut shops.

The novel proves to be fun, even as bodies keep piling up.

Saving our schools

Charles Dickens

Nowadays computers and iPhones outnumber books in so many American classrooms. It is no coincidence that reading scores have dropped and so few young people read books. They may read social media, but not Austen, Dickens or Twain.

So many teachers don't even assign books to their students. Instead assignments require reading just a few pages. The potential impact is tremendous — the loss of mental skills, a decline in the ability to hold jobs and a shrinkage of western heritage. At one time most people knew at least something about Animal Farm, Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Salvation may depend more on state legislators than on educators. Mark Bauerlein and Stanley Kurtz are pushing legislation they call the BOOKS (Books Optimize Our Kids' Schools) Act. This would require English teachers to assign at least two books per semester to their students. Half of these books must have been published before 1900, meaning that students would be required to tackle something written by the likes of Shakespeare, Alcott, Thoreau and Homer.

For us older folks, that sounds like a normal and good education.  To too many students today it sounds impossible. This explains why so many parents are turning to home schooling, private schools and charter schools to educate their young. If Bauerlein and Kurtz have their way in a few state legislatures, even public school students may start doing better.

Miss Kopp rides again

Amy Stewart's Constance Kopp novels make compulsive reading, and Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit (2018) ranks with the best in the series.

Six-foot-tall Constance Kopp, based on an actual person, is the first female deputy sheriff in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the years just before America enters World War I. She takes care of the female prisoners and sometimes spends the night in her own cell. Yet as a woman in a man's world, she is always newsworthy and even controversial. especially now that it is an election year. The election of a new sheriff could jeopardize her fledgling career.

Yet that is a mere subplot here. The title's real significance applies to her determination to help a housewife whose husband routinely sends her to a mental asylum. Charged with taking the woman to the institution, Constance becomes convinced there is nothing mentally wrong with Mrs. Kayser. Although told to back off because it is not her responsibility to question a judge's order, she nevertheless pursues justice for this woman, even to to the point of getting an attorney and a private investigator.

Meanwhile her home life once again proves entertaining. Her sister, Norma, remains all business, always busy and totally committed to getting the Army to use her carrier pigeons when they go to France. Her other sister (actually her secret daughter), Fleurette, remains flighty, gifted at making clothing but more interested in singing and dancing.

This novel doesn't end with a bang, but rather peters out, but keep in mind that it is fiction based on true events.

Novel relationships

Every novel. every narrator can't help offering the promise of a relationship.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Relationships are important to all of us — friends, lovers, families, even store clerks and those working in medical offices whom we see periodically. But novels or the narrators of novels? Can we have meaningful relationships with them?

Jane Smiley

I like that Jane Smiley, in making the statement above, clarifies it with the phrase "offering the promise of a relationship." This promise is not fulfilled in every novel or in every narrator. Some novels we read and soon forget. Of course, that also may be true of some human relationships. First dates don't always lead to second dates. Even close friendships can evaporate quickly after one person moves away.

I think something very much like a relationship can develop while one is engrossed in a novel. The same is true of movies, of course. We become invested in the story. The words and actions of the characters matter to us. We want to give them advice: Don't open that door. Don't believe what he's saying. Kiss her, you fool.

Some fictional relationships can last longer than many real human relationships. Why do we keep some novels on our shelves long after we have finished reading them or why do we want to read some novels again and again?  It's because the relationship isn't over.

Fun with English

Patricia T. O'Conner formerly worked for the New York Times, helping writers and reporters clean up their prose, but perhaps she might have been been more at home at the New York Post.

The Post is known for its fun-filled and pun-filled headlines, A recent issue, for example, had headlines like "AND THE DRESS IS HISTORY," about Melania Trump's inaugural gown being donated to the Smithsonian, and "Snow way! More white stuff for us?" about another predicted storm for New York City.

If you can enjoy the Post for its headlines, you might enjoy Origins of the Specious by O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman (2009) for its subheads (and a lot more). For example:

"Wake My Day" — Should we say "I woke" or "I waked" or "I have woken" or "I have waked" or "I have woke"? I have been a writer for most of my life, but I am still confused by that one. O'Conner, in her always witty and informative fashion, sets us straight. Any will do.

"A Niche in Time" — What is the proper way to pronounce the word niche? Should it be NITCH or NEESH? She says NITCH, thank goodness. Only snobs say NEESH.

"Ivory League" — Here she digs into the question of why we use the term "ivory tower" to refer to the intellectual elite. She gives us quite a history of the phrase, beginning with the Song of Solomon, where we can find, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." She moves on to Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group," which include the sentence, "We called you the Ivory Tower group."

"Axe, and It Shall Be Given" — Here she delves into the question of why so many people, especially black Americans, pronounce the word ask as axe. Guess what! This goes back to England hundreds of years ago. Chaucer, for example, wrote, "a man that ... cometh for to axe him of mercy."

O'Conner, with Kellerman's assistance, makes the language fun.

An escape or a confirmation?

Lawrence Durrell

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality," the British novelist Lawrence Durrell said. "A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he had not experienced."

But can't both be true, even at the same time?

A man may work in an office in Cincinnati or as a plumber in Philadelphia and, in the evening, enjoy reading western novels. He may want to both escape the reality of his own circumstances — perhaps there is even a nagging wife — while at the same time wanting to experience a reality, even if it's an imagined one, that he can never experience in real life.

Or a war novel may be read by someone with no military experience at all. He will never know what it is really like being in combat, but a book can confirm that reality, while at the same taking him briefly away from his normal routine.

A lonely middle-aged woman who has never experienced romance in her life may read one romance novel after another to confirm a reality that she believes other women have known.

And so on.

Thanks to books, one can travel into space, explore the deep ocean, find true love, win a bar fight, hit a home run in the World Series, solve mysteries, travel the world or do almost anything else. There are many more realities than any one person can experience in one lifetime. Books expand our possibilities.

Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.