AICN BOOKS!! Bascombe Reviews D.B., GHOSTFIRES and The New David Rees!!

D.B. by Elwood Reid

Doubleday

I’ll bet that you don’t know who Elwood Reid is. That’s not unusual; good writers work endlessly for their entire lives while enjoying professional obscurity. I’ve taken it upon myself to give you a quick refresher course on the man in question. I discovered Elwood a few years ago after stumbling across his brilliant collection of short stories, ‘What Salmon Know’. Check out that collection, as an appetizer.

Mr. Reid trucks in a familiar territory, which has been frequented by Charles Portis and Raymond Carver. His short fiction reminds me of a pared down Carver, if that’s possible, and a bolder saner version Chris Offutt, whose stuff I dig, but it has less to do with reality than I’d like. So far we’ve seen two novels from Reid, ‘If I Don’t Six’ and ‘Midnight Sun’, the later seemed to be a homage to Robert Stone, you know, man on a challenge, self fulfilling prophecy, most of which seems implausible to every one except the main character. Robert Stone, Toby Wolff, Richard Ford all seem to carry that internal male angst, the rush to do something definable, sometimes with out thinking. This type of writing is a strong form, respectable and sometimes very difficult to carry off without sounding vague.

After several idle years, Elwood Reid is on the verge of making his biggest splash. With ‘D.B.’, his latest novel, he’s delivered a profoundly unique alternate version of history, told through the very believable D.B. Cooper. Remember him? Myth. Man. Legend. Got the cash and stepped off into the cold night a few days shy of Thanksgiving, circa 1971. We launch into D.B. Cooper’s story just as he hijacks the plane that will bring him to freedom. Sweaty, nervous and pulling a balls of steel heist, he’s going to make it, he thinks so at least. As the first chapter closes we find D.B., parachuting off into the wintry Northwest night, money in tow, and everything worked out, or so it seems, but he forgot to wear his hiking boots. Don’t worry. He makes the jump anyway. After this we backtrack a while into D.B. Coopers life, find out he’s really a man named Fitch who can’t hold down a job or a relationship. He steals, lies and cheats his way through a series of odd jobs and his behavior will make you cringe. Reid delivers some of his finest writing with his ability to show a character as he really is, nothing is sugar coated. You don’t love or hate him. When he becomes an American Legend and folktale you tell your kids at bedtime, then you have no choice but to like him. Everybody has that dream, one big score and then disappear into the night.

At the same time we’re filling out Cooper’s past, we meet Frank Marshall, FBI agent on the trail of Cooper just a day or so after his leap to fame. Frank stumbles on a grizzly crime scene in a remote part of the search area and it sticks with him for the rest of the story. Frank is interested in doing his time as an agent, getting in and going home in one piece. He’s not that excited about Cooper, and half hopes he got away with it. Cooper’s body is never found and Frank goes on about his career with little or no effort. As the narrative bounces back and forth in time, we find Cooper hiding out in Mexico and for a short period of time with a group of hippies, whom he thankfully ditches. Reid runs two parallel stories side by side for almost the entire novel. After two hundred pages you’ll begin to wonder if Frank is ever going to meet Cooper, and thankfully, the ending of this book will buck your expectations. Reid shows the human side of Frank Marshall, a keenly developed character whose retirement is just that, tiring. Frank has taken to drinking water glasses full of Vodka to get to sleep, and deal with his wife, whose no catch by anyone’s imagination. I liked Frank Marshall so much that I looked forward to the domestic upheaval his lazy drunken retirement brings. His wife is a wonderfully drawn nag; her parents torture Frank endlessly and with great humor. Frank has a soft spot that I actually thought would turn into something more emotionally complex, but thankfully did not. To add a layer of emotion to these men would bring an unwanted lacquer to their makeup. Frank retires and does one good deed, wrapped in another, to sum up his character.

Reid brings a fictional history to life like it really happened. His two main characters are strongly rendered examples of the male psyche. Frank Marshall and D.B. Cooper are characters traveling on different paths in life and only the criminal aspect of the hijacking would ever bring them together. This story is reminiscent of Michael Mann’s best work, ‘Heat’ and ‘Thief’, where two men who are solely driven, friendless pursuer’s of their craft who eventually find some solace in their shared interests. If you do one thing this summer, seek this book out and enjoy the clean crisp prose of one Elwood Reid, who become one of the great undiscovered literary talents in America.

My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable by David Rees

Riverhead Books

I’ll be the first to admit that Mr. Rees and his first book, ‘My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable’, went right over my head. Lifting this book out of the jiffy bag, my heart sank, just a little. After a few pages I got into it, found out that Rees worked in corporate America, (where this book was obviously cultivated) and realized that the first book was an esoteric _expression of marginal underground trick lit. What is trick lit? Sometimes when someone is to smart for his or her own good, they trick the reader into thinking that there is something interesting going on, when in fact there isn't. It’s a game; Rees and his first book are a prime example of “Trick Lit”.

‘My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable’ is miles from his first book. What surprised me most was just how much of Tyler Durden this book has in it. I expect ‘Fight Club’ sicko’s, (I’m one, so don’t come to my house and kick my ass) to find this stuff interesting. Rees uses clip art with great style and panache, over and over; images appear and reappear, each one with a different comic bubble over its head announcing a new filing technique. What’s so Durden about this? Office politics and how every one in this book is a fucking slave to the man, the borg and the god damn Death Star. Corporate America, the one out there that most of you slug off to everyday fulfilling other people’s dreams and the one portrayed in this book are nothing more than whore houses. Either you lie down and get fucked, or you get up and leave. The people in this book are standard issue politically and anatomically proper representations of men and women, the corporate world over. Women with perfect teeth and smiles, men with enough hair and no potbelly’s. Supervisors with arms “akimbo”, standing in doorways waking up sleeping drones. Rees gets the office world just right and this book will remind you of the movie ‘Office Space’. At one point an African American woman is sitting at her desk developing a schedule for who will clean the common area kitchen and a co-worker thinks to him self, “Is this really your job?”

Exactly.

Like the women who do nothing in your office except be nice to everyone, lunch with all the right people, (make countless Excel spreadsheets to help organize the memo’s) and coordinate so everyone gets their birthday cake delivered, and has the entire staff sing that silly fuckin’ song aloud to you once a year. Those people. You know them and so does David Rees. In one section towards the end of this book, (I’d tell you what page, but this book doesn't have any page numbers), one guy gets really pissed at his computer that he’s obviously enslaved too and screams;

“Pie chart reveal your slices to me!”

Have you ever had that anger at your computer or one of its programs?

Rees hits it on the head. This stuff is an R rated version of his Rolling Stone pieces that appear monthly (I wonder if he'll find the typo on the press release for this book). He’s got a great wit and style that’s such a breath of fresh air in this FCC controlled world. Run out there and check this book out, then go home and surf his website right here.

Ghostfires by Keith Dixon

St. Martins Press

From time to time you can walk into any bookstore, step into their current fiction section and find something completely worthless. That’s easy, you don’t even need a high school education for that. Other times, perhaps, you discover an up and coming talent. Keith. Dixon can thank his publisher for an arresting cover image that grabbed my attention. St. Martin’s track record in the world of serious fiction isn’t stellar, but it’s improving, with the help of exciting new works like this dizzyingly trip into addiction. A lot of ink has been spilled over the years about alcoholism, drunks, booze and addictions to pharmaceutical grade to painkillers. This story continues that trend, but with an eye on the realism it takes to fulfill that vice. Thom Jones did wonders to the ideas of both of these maladies in one of his early stories in ‘The Pugilist at Rest’. If Thom Jones were to write a novel it would look and sound something like ‘Ghostfires’. That’s a lot of praise to heap on one writer, especially one at the start of his career. But I think this book is worth it.

At the heart of this story, is just that, a good story. Ben and is father Warren greet us with the kaleidoscope turned the wrong way and from the first chapter on we’re likely to get one or more skewed versions of the past, both shared and separate. Warren has developed a voracious appetite for Dilaudid. Ben, his delivery boy, has been battling a nagging sensation that comes in amber colored bottles, 80 proof, thick warm liquids, stuff that’s hard to kick. To write about alcoholism, and to write it well, you need to either be one, or be on intimate terms with someone who’s an alcoholic. Mr. Dixon delivers a little of both and at times a little too well for my liking. He cuts to close to illusion of booze, the hypocrisy in the drink, the absence of reality. Ben is a vivid drunk. An abuser who knows no limit, except that when his family finally threatens to leave him that this might be the end of the road. There’s this thing with time, or the lack of it that is most profound about Ben. He knows that it disappears through the looking glass when he drinks, and it’ the only thing that he can hold onto. His father on the other hand is a plain old stereotypical junkie. Ex-Doctor, fired for operating on a healthy patient, Warren is a piece of shit extraordinaire. Developed over the course of the book we find that he’s not only alienated everyone in the book, his son, grandkids, his son’s wife, his friends, but he’s also a murderer. See, he killed his mother. Not willingly, but he was responsible to the point where his own father practically disowned him. Ben’s a failure, and with the help of Warren, a drug dealer. Ben spends his time toiling on his mistakes, looking at the bad things in his life, and worrying about money. When he finally gets a break, Dad swoops down on him to ruin it, on purpose. They deal drugs together, try to run a game on one of Warren’s old doctor buddies, and at the same time beat up on each other. It’s funny how a father son story is usually told from the son’s perspective. Not in this case, we see it from both sides. Everyone is motivated by something, Warren isn't just motivated by his addiction, he’s consumed by it.

What’s the most interesting part of this book? The whole thing. The flashbacks. How each character is imprisoned by past misdeeds and current addictions and there’s a line early in this book that outlines what’s in store for the rest of the ride:

“Some people, he knew, believed that he'd earned whatever suffering be encountered during the years of vice. He rejected that. Vice, after all, wasn't an acquired taste. That was precisely what made it vice.”

This part of the book describes accurately what a recovering alcoholic endures, daily. And Mr. Dixon gets it right in the first ten pages. What follows is just an old fashioned good story. I'm out of adjectives to describe this book. I'm too thrilled to even go into the rest of it and how great it is. Just check it out.

If you have something you want to say to me, go ahead.

Thanks, buddy. Nice work.

"Moriarty" out.