Chester Brown's "Ed the Happy Clown"

Confession time: I only picked this up because my name can be shortened to Ed and sometimes I like to dress up as a clown. But we all read books for different reasons, that in no way invalidates that I read this book and enjoyed it, for the most part. When I had just started reading it, my wife asked me how it was, and I told her “Weird and dark,” to which she replied that it might not be the best thing to read before bed. I should listen to my wife more, but I didn’t here. There’s a story about Ed and a vampire woman and Ronald Reagan from an alternate dimension finding himself in existence in a very weird place in our dimension. My only criticism is that there is action that is logical from frame to frame, but there is no real overall arc. Reading the end notes of this edition shows that the writer, Chester Brown, seems to have written that way too, so early on there is not real strong characterization of any of the characters until he finds their voices. I liked this more as a way that it shows an artist’s potential, and I will check out some of his later work, but this is lacking in a way I can’t fully articulate.

General Props to Tom Holt, and here in specific "Doughnut".

Tom Holt is someone I only discovered recently. I was looking for a writer to fill the void of smart funny writers that I had since Vonnegut died and I caught up with the Terry Pratchett series and Tom Robbins is not nearly prolific enough. Holt fits the bill, and he is woefully unknown in the states. He writes smart fiction that takes off from what we know of science and plays with it. It is like comedic science fiction, but I don’t know if that pigeon –holes him too much. Here he takes the idea of an analogue of the Large Hadron Collider blowing up and multiverse theory. Some bits are overdone – the main character has an invisible hand – but overall the effect is a fun ride of speculative fiction. I’ve only read his five most recent books, but I’m glad he has a big back catalogue. 

Flaubert's Parrot: Leave this From the Canon

When I was going to college, this was talked of as a relatively recent book. It was new when my professors were in the place I was, but it wasn’t good enough to make the syllabi. Barnes was just part of an overrepresented demographic when a new canon was being put together.

But does it deserve to be part of a new canon?  The blurbs on the cover hint at inclusion, drawing comparisons to some of my personal favorite writers, such as Joyce and Calvino. One specifically mentions “Pale Fire,” which is one of my favorite books in my mind even though I haven’t opened it in years. Personally, I didn’t like this book as much as I thought I would. I liked other Barnes, having read England, England and The History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. I  don’t like it but  I can’t place my finger on why not. Do I not care about Braithwaite, his protagonist? Do I not care about Flaubert? Or do I not like Flaubert’s characters? I can only think of one – Emma Bovary. I didn’t like her, but not as much as I didn’t like Anna Karenina. I wanted that train to come so bad, but when Emma took up poison, I was at most indifferent. 

It can’t be the structure. I like the random pastiche stuff, and it is done well here. It’s just that the book lacked life of some sort. I just wasn’t there. I should have picked up a different Barnes off the shelf.