The Quiet Game

The Quiet Game
© 1999 Greg Iles
576 pages

Caitlin Masters: "God, I'm trapped in a Southern gothic novel!" (p. 204)

Wow. I have rarely been as transfixed by a book as I have in the past two days while reading The Quiet Game. The book is my sister's, and she recommended and lent it to me, describing it as somewhat similar to John Grisham. Her more extended description matched that: she told me that it was the story of a lawyer turned novelist who returned to his hometown -- the small but storied town of Natchez, Mississippi -- and found himself involved in a mystery of sorts that required him to become a servant of the law once more.

We're introduced to Penn Gage as he stands in line in Disneyworld, trying not to cry in public because his four-year-old claims that she just saw her recently deceased mother in the crowd. Gage loved his wife, and her memory haunts him. "Haunting" is a word that can be applied to much of the book's plot and atmosphere. Gage decides to return to his parents' home so that he and his daughter Annie can adjust to life without their beloved Sarah, only to find that his father is being blackmailed by a thug. Thomas Gage, Penn's father, is far too good of a man to be humiliated like this, and Penn decides to take action -- not knowing that this issue, as important as it seems to him and the reader for the first hundred pages, is going to be rendered trivial. A casual remark to the town's newest reporter -- Caitlin Masters, whose wealthy daddy has just purchased the local newspaper and who is anxious to make a name for herself in investigative journalism -- dredges up a murder from 1968: the murder of Del Payton, a local civil rights leader whose killers were never found. Or...were they?

Masters promptly publishes the remark, and Payton's family comes forth. In a town with deep-seated but devotedly ignored racial tensions, the Gages are the rare white family that seems to give a damn about Natchez's marginalized black population. They ask Penn Gage to find out what happened to Del, to give his spirit rest. He regretfully declines them at first, but when more ghosts arise he finds himself drawn toward the case when the name of "Judge" Leo Marston, a powerful politician who has the town and apparently much of the state in his pocket, is somehow connected to the crime. Marston's elegant daughter - Livy Marston, an extraordinarily fantastic creature -- was Penn Gage's first and greatest love, and the Judge ruined that relationship and nearly destroyed Gage's father when Martson pursued a dramatic lawsuit against him. At first, Gage seeks to destroy Marston to get him back for ruining his and his father's life -- but as the plot develops, he will rediscover the passion for justice he lost when he removed himself from the law and the passion for life he lost when his wife passed away.

This is one book with a lot of layers: we have the plot-driving mutual hatred between the Marston and Gages, a romantic story that develops when Livy Martson returns to town and throws Gage into the past and the what-could-have-been (further agitating him against her father), the action element (which kept my attention even though I tend to scan over action sequences, pausing only if a character gets hurt), almost a dozen secondary characters struggling with personal demons that all relate to the plot, and the legal battle that ties everything together and ends lastly. All this is tied together gorgeously: I could not leave the book be, I had to keep reading it, and when it finally ended and I saw the last period I was hit with the feeling of hearing the echo of a symphony that just finished.

What is so appealing about this book? The plot and story are very well-done, I think: to say it kept my attention is an understatement. Not only is it tightly-weaved, but it's deep. When something happens, it will effect at least three of the plot elements or subplots, and what will happen can't be predicted. There were a lot of plot twists: the last one was the most dramatic. It was if part of a song was there, but very subtle, and then toward the end it builds up and then that part of the song just guides the ending. I was also entranced by the format of the southern gothic, which is not a genre I am familiar with, except in that it left a bad taste in my mouth when I first encountered it in English 102. I didn't know what was meant by it, but I had vague impressions that it was romantic in the cultural sense -- not in the Cupid's Arrow sense. That is true of this novel, especially with the character of Livy Marson. Despite my aversion to romanticism, I was able to enjoy this book -- to be enthralled about it. Gage and the other characters gripped me right from the start , and they never let go.

I am pleased that my local library has other books by Greg Iles. I will be reading more of this guy, although I suspect that this book has set the bar so high that I will be disappointed by any other books I read.

Gump & Co.

Gump & Co.
© 1995 Winston Groom
242 pages

"Mr. Gump, I want you to meet Tom Hanks," [the hostess] says.
"Pleased to meet you," I say, an introduce him to little Forrest.
"I've seen you," little Forrest says, "on television."
"You an actor?" I ast.
"Sure am," Tom Hanks says. "What about you?"
So I tole him a little bit about my checkered career, an after he listened for a while, Tom Hanks says, "Well, Mr. Gump, you sure are a curious feller. Sounds like somebody ought to make a movie of your life's story."
"Nah," I said, "ain't nobody be interested in somethin stupid like that."
"You never know," says Tom Hanks. "'Life is like a box of chocolates.'"

Winston Groom's novel Forrest Gump made the rounds in my high-school class during my senior year after one of the football players read it and began raving about it. Gump & Co. is a sequel to that novel, and I spotted it on display at my local library. As said, it is a sequel to the novel -- not the movie. It's been years since I read the novel, so I don't remember all of the story -- only that it was so popular among my high school class because the novel's story was "dirtier" than the movie, and being basically kids, we were attracted to that. Although the sequel begins with Jenny alive, Groom quickly connects it with the book by killing her off. Forrest' situation is different from the movie ending, however: at the start of Gump & Co., the shrimp company has gone bankrupt and Forrest is reduced to sweeping the floors in a strip joint.

The book is written from the first-person point of view and in a very...colloquial fashion. At first I was bothered by the fact that all of the characters seemed to speak in the same voice, but then I realized that Groom was portraying Gump doing what most people do: when repeating the words of others, we generally repeat their meaning in our own words. Although the book's story does have a beginning, something resembling a climax, and an ending, the plot isn't all that developed. After one of his former fellow Crimson Tide football players spots him in the strip joint, Forrest is introduced to the world of professional football (playing for the New Orleans "Ain'ts") and from there has one adventure after another, most ending hilariously and poorly for Forrest. Just as in the original book, his antics will thrust him into history's march: he will invent New Coke, destroy Jimmy Bakker's religious theme park, sink the Exxon-Valdez, help Oliver North escape the Iran-Contras situation, accidentally topple Communism, and invade Kuwait, finally coming back to where he started from, but united with his son and committed to thinking more.

I would recommend this book to two types of readers: those who enjoyed Forrest Gump and those who enjoy a humorous story that obliquely makes fun of American society in the 1980s and -90s.

This Week at the Library (3/6)

Books this Update:

• Sarek, A,C, Crispin
• The Hobbit, J.R. Tolkien
• The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong
• The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck
• A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

I began this week with a little Star Trek literature. The novel Sarek is about the titular character, better known as Spock's father -- played by Mark Lenard in every Star Trek production except the most recent movie. The book is set immediately after The Undiscovered Country, and it will build on plot elements of the movie as well as connect itself to almost every preceding Trek movie. When the book begins, Ambassador Sarek is investigating a conspiracy to set the Federation and the Klingon Empire at war with one another. Relatedly, Peter Kirk -- Jim Kirk's nephew -- is about to graduate Starfleet Academy when he accidentally gets caught up in a xenophobic Earth group called the "Keep Earth Human League", who intend to evict all non-terrans from Earth and drive Vulcan out of the Federation, allowing it to be wholly driven by the needs and wants of humans. Sarek's conspirators and Kirk's rabble-rousers are connected -- something larger is in the works, but Sarek will have to hurry if he wants to save the Alpha and Beta quadrants from interstellar war, and he'll have to do it while his wife dies. The story is done well: it connects to much of the canon while giving Vulcan, Sarek, and the rest of Spock's family more depth.

Next I read Tolkien's The Hobbit, which needs no real introduction. I attempted to read the book several times as a child but could never maintain interest in it. Perhaps growing older has given me a less capricious attention span, as I did finish this time. The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo Baggins, who is drafted by Gandalf (a wizard) to help some dwarves slay a dragon and reclaim their ancestral home in the "Lonely Mountain" -- and recover their wealth, which the dragon is currently sleeping on. The book serves to introduce the reader to a magical world while forcing poor Baggins to realize that yes, he can face a dragon without running away. (So long as he has a magic ring that makes him invisible, anyway.) I found the book enjoyable, although I'm still not sure that I will read the much-lauded Lord of the Ring trilogy.

I looked forward to Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation, and she did not disappoint. The book deals with both comparative religion and history, examining the development of four centers of religious and philosophical traditions: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in China, transcendental monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Armstrong begins with Mesopotamian civilization and religion and moves north into Iran before shifting to India and beginning the book proper -- which is organized into a number of themes (Knowledge, Suffering, Ritual, etc) that encapsulate the developing traditions. I found Armstrong's narrative to be both informative and tightly woven: despite how much information Armstrong had to deal with, she worked it well into the overall book while connecting ideas for greater clarity.

Although some of Armstrong's writing dealt with the importance of reason, the old religion's approach to spirituality seems to be more mystical than not. M. Scott Peck takes a different approach, taking on spirituality from a psychological point of view in The Road Less Traveled. He begins it with "Life is difficult", and the title seems to come from the fact that pursuing Peck-style spirituality takes much discipline -- so much so that Discipline constitutes his first section of the book. He also writes on Love -- what it is, and what it isn't. Among what it isn't: romance, emotional investment, or dependence. He next examines the role of religion and God. His criticism of both surprised me, given that he promoted deity-based ethics in A World Waiting to be Discovered. The last section, "Grace", does not seem to tie into the book as well and I did not find it engaging in the least. Overall, I found the book to be challenging and interesting.

Lastly, I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which is a short popular science book about black holes, time, the big bang, quantum physics, and various other and related topics. Although Hawking was informative, I think he expects the reader to know part of the information ahead of time: he didn't explain the concepts he worked with in detail before building on.

Pick of the Week: The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong

Next Week:

• The Quiet Game, Greg Iles. A recommendation.
• Gump & Co, Winston Groom. The sequel to the novel Forrest Gump, which I read in high school.
• Buddha, Karen Armstrong
• The Faith Club: A Christian, a Muslim, a Jew -- Three Women Search for Understanding; Ranya Idliby, Suzaane Oliver, and Priscilla Warner
• Asimov on Astronomy, Isaac Asimov.
• The Last Olympian, Rick Riordian. This is the last book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and was just released in May.

In the Beginning

In the Beginning
© 1981 Isaac Asimov
496 pages

Please note that my copy of In the Beginning was in large print, so the page count is very much inflated. Adjusted for fontsize, the actual size of the book should be about 240 pages. (Courtesy of Amazon.)

I'm growing perilously close to exhausting my local library's Isaac Asimov holdings, but I shall keep the flame aglow for as long as I can. Asimov wrote in his Asimov's Guide to the Bible that he had enjoyed writing in-depth commentaries on the first books of the Bible and would have gleefully continued to do so had he the time and his publisher the faith that there were enough people willing to buy them -- but the two had neither, and so Asimov settled for writing his bigger guide and leaving only a few books of the Judeo-Christian bible with extended commentary. In the Beginning is one such book, and it concerns (as you may guess) the book of Genesis. More specifically, it concerns the first eleven chapters of Genesis -- from "In the beginning" to Yahweh telling Abraham, "Hey, go over there."

The book offers verse-by-verse commentary, although Asimov will often group verses together for the sake of readability. It was slow reading at first, as he slowly dissected every word of the first verse, examining the scientific account of the beginnings of the universe and comparing it to the words of Genesis. The first parts of the book offer a lot of comparison between the opening verses of Genesis and the scientific account of cosmological development and biological development. Asimov's information is a little dated twenty or so years in the future, but perfectly up to date for his time -- or so I would imagine.

Once Earth is created, the book got a lot more interesting for me, as Asimov spends more time writing on comparative myth, legends, primitive histories, language, comparative symbolism, and all sorts of things of interest to a student of the social sciences like myself.The flood prompts more scientific comparison, but not as much as I'd expected. Although I've read Asimov's Guide to the Bible, there was much more detail here and I did learn quite a bit. (Asimov's explanation for why Creation took six days was particularly helpful: he delves into the history of the standard "week" and its introduction into Hebrew culture.) I don't know that the writing style itself is worth commenting on: it's Asimov -- of course it was enjoyable. Even so, I will say on or two things. I found Asimov's approach to be fairly professional: he writes well, and he keeps judgments to a minimum -- enough to make an orthodox student think, perhaps, but not enough to offend him or her to the point of closing their mind further. Here is an example of some commentary (with intersource comparison).

9. These are the generations of Noah: (200) Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. [...].

200. Here we have a new introduction, which might better be translated, "Following is the story of Noah." The reason for the introduction is that we now switch to the P-document which carries on the tale from the end of Chapter 5. In fact, the story of the Flood, which follows, is to be found in both the P-document and the J-document, each telling it characteristically. The P-document is full of numbers and details, while the J-document concentrates on drama. The Biblical editors, finding the tale in both documents, included both, interweaving the P-document and the J-document in an attempt to tell a single story. Actually, they managed to introduce repetitions and self-contradictions.*

This is worth the read if you can find it.

* page 326, large-print edition

A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes
© 1988 Stephen Hawking
198

Our minds can play tricks on us: my experience with this book is a case in point. I remember vividly being at a big chain bookstore and perusing the science section for something seditious. In my memory, I note with amusement a massive book called A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I know there's no way I can reach such a tome, so I look at the book next to it, called A Briefer History of Time. I buy neither, going with Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything instead.

And yet, here sitting upon my freezer is a small book titled A Brief History of Time. It is not the tome I remember. Clearly, my memory is in error -- I shall keep that in mind (if I can) as a practical lesson. The book itself is very straightforward: it's a brief popular science book. I think its ideal (if not intended) audience is college-educated and curious about the object. It doesn't seem that accessible to new students: I would recommend Hawking's own Universe in a Nutshell or a few others as an introduction to general relativity and quantum physics. Those are two of the subjects covered, by the way, along with black holes, the big bang, the nature of space and time, and a few other sundry topics. Although Hawking's writing in this book is easy to follow, it didn't seem to me as if he explained the topics in detail enough -- my take is that he expects the readers to know a little something ahead of time. I do, somewhat, although in the year or so it's been since I've read about physics, my knowledge of this particular area has faded.

Related Books:

• The Ascent of Science, Brian Silver
• Universe on a T-Shirt, Dan Falk
• The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking
• The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene*

* I've not finished this one yet, but the first few chapters allowed me to understand concepts I'd never understood before, like why we think space is curved.

The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
© 1978 M. Scott Peck
315 pages

In February, I read A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered by M. Scott Peck, a psychologist who applied the tools of his craft to society at large. In that book, he focuses on relationship/organization-building behavior (his working definition of civility), but the general idea of using psychology or psychiatry in a "mindful" sense fascinated me. Granted, Peck's mindfulness is more "clinical" than "spiritual", but I think they're similar. I decided to read his first and apparently most known work this week in The Road Less Traveled.

In his first book, Peck uses psychology to address the matter of spirituality, and the results for me are fascinating. The book addresses the importance of discipline, love, growth and religion, and finally "grace". He begins by saying that "Life is difficult" and compares this to Siddhartha Gautama's first noble truth -- life is suffering. According to Peck, people create suffering for themselves when they attempt to avoid facing life's difficulties-head on. He proposes an unflinching path of self-discipline that involves (among other things) delaying gratification, avoiding deceit, keeping our minds clear of dogma and being open to new evidence, and giving though to the things we do.

Peck devotes his second section to love, which he defines as the extension of one's self for one's own or for someone else's spiritual growth. While acknowledging its "mystery" -- holding the opinion that we don't really know what it is -- he is quite stern on what it isn't, and writes at length on romantic love, ego boundaries, dependency, cathexis (emotional investment: it's my word for the week), and various other behaviors or concepts associated with the idea of love. He's definitely gotten me to thinking about the subject more.

He writes next on spiritual growth and religion, and his criticisms are more sharp than I expected, given how much emphasis he placed on deity-based ethics in A World Waiting to Be Discovered. His definition for religion is very broad, encompassing "worldview" and bringing in science under its wing. Peck does not criticize science-as-religion: indeed, he advocates the scientific approach as a very necessary part of human studies. A good bit of this chapter consists of case-studies, the common theme of which is that ideas about religion and god can both hurt and help people. I found this section to be somewhat thought-provoking as well.

It is in the last section that I find the most fault -- the section on "Grace". He begins the section with a series of "Isn't it interesting" type essays in which he identifies a Mysterious Quality about good health, the unconscious, serendipity, evolution, and power. He then attempts to reconcile the Judeo-Christian creation story with his own worldview by interpreting the "original sin" as laziness -- Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise not because they'd disobeyed an arbitrary rule, but because they didn't bother to question God about the rule.

Although I found this section weak and more than a little unfocused, the book as a whole was well-done. It was definitely one of the more thought-provoking reads this week.

The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation: the Beginning of our Religious Traditions
© 2006 Karen Armstrong
469 pages

I looked forward to reading this book, and my expectations were met. Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation is a historical narrative detailing the creation of four of the most influential religious and philosophical traditions to date -- Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, transcendental monotheism in Israel, and rationalism in Greece. She begins by examining the state of the "axial peoples" who lived in a time of transition -- when cities were becoming civilizations, and the thoughts of a few becoming the codified belief-systems of a few. The book is both a history book in its own right and one on the formation of these religious and philosophical traditions.


She begins where civilization began -- the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates -- and moves to Iran before focusing on the first axial people, the Indian "Aryans". Beginning with the chapter "Ritual", Armstrong devotes a single chapter each to a number of themes that may sum up the growing traditions -- detailing thoughts on knowledge, suffering, cosmic unity, and the like. Each of the four civilizations gets its due in every chapter, although some traditions may dominate a given theme: the teachings of Buddha, for instance, are covered in more detail than the others in "Suffering". The book ends with comments on how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each built on parts of those traditions, connecting ancient religions to more contemporary ones. (Armstrong's treatment of Israel reminded me of Isaac Asimov, and like him she makes a distinction between early Hebrew monotheism (which he called "Yahvism") and Judaism. The book's ending chapter. Also in the interests of connecting the old with the new, Armstrong summarizes her books and emphasizes the common themes that connected the axial traditions -- particularly empathy for all humans.

Armstrong writes quite well, creating a compelling narrative that seems to be quite well-informed. She keeps her various chapters and sections-within-chapters connected to one another in such a way that the reader doesn't lose focus, but instead keeps her thesis in mind. I enjoyed the book very much. I think I may obtain a personal copy sometime in the future.