Already Dead, Denis Johnson

Already Dead: A California Gothic, by Denis Johnson, is among the stranger books I've read in a while, and for followers of this blog, you know that takes a bit of doing. It is a loose, freewheeling drug-trip (quite intentionally) of a novel, maybe more delightful to reluctant Californians like me than to True Believers in the Golden State. The characters ramble through a semi-mythical Northern CA filled with redwoods and pot groves and hippies and witches and a giant and the deeply, criminally insane. Nobody in the book is remotely likable, but the poetic style of the prose of the book becomes almost a character, unto itself. It will be off-putting to many readers, I think, but I found it lovely for long stretches. A paragraph should suffice to tell you if you want in or not:

"Past the boardwalk onto the street, the gauntlet of shops and beachside people, the quantum dregs, the never-ending pavement in their sighs, and always that music, dark rock. And you kept going, beyond the seaside part of town. Homes of stucco in the ashy twilight, the street no longer dabbed with sand. Past the edges, way way past, out into the big place east of town, they call it America."

Give it a second read. Lovely.

The shifting narrators, the loosely stitched plot, and the poetry of the text make the ostensible noir crime drama seem like an existential investigation, which surely is the intent. The hard-boiled detective genre washes ashore in this romantic 'California Gothic' tale, leaving me, at any rate, delighted.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

You might be wondering what such a title is doing on my list, following such books as Mutants, Pigtopia, and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. However, you would only be wondering if you were unaware of Quirk Books new series of what might be considered fan fiction, of a sort, with adaptations of classic English novels into, eh-hem, rather new forms.

I read the first of these offerings, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a few months ago, to great delight. I read Sense and Sensibility as a warm-up for the second in the series, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

That said, I found the original, monster-free though it is, to be quite good. Not quite as strong as Pride and Prejudice, but enjoyable front to back. It concerns, as is the formula for Austen, a family of lovely young women, eager to find husbands. They fall first for the flashy man-about-town types, only to be heartbroken by them, and then to come eventually to see the attractions of the quieter, more sensible and stable types.

The family intricacies, here were a bit difficult to keep track of (*Who* is Lucy, again?), but such problems do not mar an enjoyment of Austen's sharp, satirical wit. Here, it is again the E. sister (Elizabeth in P&P, Elinor in S&S) who is the smart, sensible one, but even she is often skewered by Austen's constant jibes. I am left to wonder at her original audience's reception. Surely, they were the very sort of people that she routinely attacks. Did they, as her characters surely would, merely look across the ballroom at other members of their set, and assume that Austen was mocking those types, unaware that they themselves were, likewise, targets?

Tune in again for a review of S&S&S-M, when I've had the chance to read it...