Moore's Serpent of Venice: Improving on the Fool

I like Chris Moore’s work.  I have read several previous books, and I have been an advocate of his by telling others that they need to read his work.  I think there are still a couple I haven’t read, but I think based on what I do know of his work I can rate him amongst the best at what he does recently. I’m not sure just what that is, or if there are genre considerations or cliques that I am not aware of, but in my mind he is a fabulist humorist – so he’s up there with Calvino and Tom Robbins.

That said, I did not like _Fool_. I really liked what he did with his version of the greatest story ever told, but for some reason I couldn’t get into his retelling of King Lear. I didn’t like the characters he fleshed out, and to be quite frank, Lear is a boring play. It took me a while to understand why I didn’t like Fool, and my conclusion is that Moore was too close to the source material in Fool. It took 300 pages for King to give away his stuff, and then yell at the wind.

So to be honest, I wasn’t too excited to learn that Moore resurrected Pocket for his next book. He was flat and too smart and too powerful without granting a full believable explanation of his back story. He was taking Pocket (And Jones, Drool, and Jeff) to Venice to live the Shakespearian Venetian plays of Othello and A Merchant of Venice.   Here’s the thing: I liked this book much more than I did Fool. I have read and seen the source material staged (with much enjoyment). What I was able to do was to stop comparing the book I was reading to the source material. Moore makes A Serpent of Venice his own story where Fool was too derivative of its source. It’s like how A Wide Sargasso Sea is both Jane Eyre and nothing like Jane Eyre – Rhys created her own world, and that’s what Moore accomplishes.  This one is also less bawdy and Pocket feels more fleshed out, but that could just be me. I recommend this book to any Chris Moore fan, and those who will soon be.

A couple of notes: Moore claims that the Poe story A Cask of Amontillado is also a source. It is, but just barely. What I more appreciated was slipping Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn in the work. Moore was able to play with the classics and create his own, which is hard so he deserves credit.  

A quick thought on the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and local tranist in general.

I like the CTA. I lived in the city until a year ago, and I was a fairly regular user of the bus and rail system (Archer Heights: 62 Bus, Orange Line). I moved to the suburbs in Brookfield, and though I am closer here to the Metra station than I was to the Orange Line station, I use transport much less.  The trains are fewer when I would need them, and they're all locals so it takes forever to get into the city on teh weekend.  The pace bus that runs on Ogden shuts down way too early to be of any use. 

If I were designing the system from scratch, I would scrap the Metra system and have something like a more unified CTA throughout the metro area. It already has trains that go to the Suburbs -- I have a friend who takes the blue line in from Forest Park, and there are no trains for a wide swath of the city.

My favorite story about the efficiency of the CTA is that after the big snow storm in 2011, I was able to make it to work downtown with the CTA. When I got to the Depaul Center in the south loop, the whole city was pretty much closed down, but the CTA ran. For all the horror stories that pass around about Metra delays and the like, you can't beat the fact that the CTA ran.

Breakfast of Champions: Vonnegut's book, not a breakfast cereal.

This book stars Dwight Hoover, who is locally rich and famous in an Ohio town. 

This book also stars Kilgore Trout, who before being honored by Eliot Rosewater is nowhere famous. 

Actually, Trout is famous because the writer who created him, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is famous, and he wrote this book. Vonnegut is also a character in the book, and he knows that he is writing it.

Vonnegut makes Hoover, Trout, and Rosewater his puppets.  It is a fun breaking of third and fourth walls, almost metafictive, and it doesn’t make you feel like Vonnegut is trying to say “Look how clever I am” because he really is clever.  In an understated way. All the characters come together for a thing that happens.  I won’t spoil it for you. 

I first read this when I was in my early 20s. I lay on full-sized mattress as the springs poked me through the cheap foam pad, and I was deep in Vonnegut’s world.  The time passed too fast.  I read it again this weekend, after a dozen years or so. The only difference is that I sat up for the most part, on a comfortable couch I own. That, and I appreciated the drawings differently (There are a number of drawings). The younger version of me liked them because they were a bit risqué. Older me wanted each new drawing to be a new tattoo.