The Grouchy Editor

by Hanna Rosin

Barring some sort of nuclear catastrophe, in which case all of those post-apocalyptic movies will come true and Denzel Washington will rule the Earth, it looks as though Rosin is correct:  The end of male dominance as an economic and social force is nearly here.  Rosin makes a convincing argument that the future belongs to the gender more able to adapt to a health and service-oriented economy – and that ain’t Denzel.  But if she thinks men will cede all that power with a whimper and not a bang, I think she’s mistaken.  Here are a few of this lowly dinosaur’s gripes about her (well-written) book:

1)  While cheering the advances women have made over the past 40 years, Rosin tells us, numerous times, that she is “mystified” by men’s reluctance or resistance to conform to the new, estrogen-fueled world order.  But I’m mystified why she is mystified.  Is it really so hard to grasp that any human being, regardless of sex, will be unhappy to relinquish money and power in exchange for … well, not much?  If a man is passed over for promotion, subject to stagnant wages, and required to attend touchy-feely seminars in the workplace, should he really consider it an upside that he is also expected to go home and do more housework and change more diapers?  That might sound like feminist nirvana, but it’s not exactly a brave new world for most men.

2)  The title of the book is misleading.  Rosin does address the “demise” of men, but she seems more interested in adding to the canon of literature about our new “you go girl” society and the hurdles that remain – for women.  One chapter is devoted to women’s struggle to crash through the glass ceiling, a topic we’ve all heard about once or twice:  “I’m sick of hearing how far we’ve come.  I’m sick of hearing how much better situated we are now than before …. The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned, women in nearly every realm are nearly nowhere.”  This is the lament of a female Harvard professor.  I, for one, am “sick of hearing” people who are quite privileged whine about their world not being perfect.

3)  Rosin is generally fair but doesn’t always contain her female bias.  A passage about highly paid professional women dropping out of the workforce is described as a “tragedy,” and the blame for this tragedy is laid squarely on evil, equally high-paid husbands.  Apparently, even at the top of the economic ladder, women reserve the right to play the victim card.

4)  Rosin’s prescription for men is depressing.  She is not pleased with the current state of gender relations, in which many couples have a sort of Ma and Pa Kettle arrangement, with Ma running everything and Pa playing video games.  Can’t blame a girl for resenting that.  But, dear lord, I can’t help but feel for boys in the future, because Rosin, a mother of two boys herself, draws inspiration from this Korean woman’s child-rearing example:  “Stephanie Lee is doing her part to make sure the next generation of men will make a clean break.  She has taught her son to speak softly, and she buys him pink stuffed animals and enrolls him in cooking and ballet instead of tae kwan do, even if he’s the only boy in the class, even if the teachers object.”  Says Lee, “He needs a more feminine side.”  And I need a drink.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Dorothy Cannell

What a bloody mess.  Cannell adopts a 1930s, Agatha Christie-like style for her debut novel, which is a pleasant enough mystery for about two-thirds of its length.  But then the author loses all sense of reality.

The heroine-narrator, an interior decorator obsessed with food, utters howler after howler (“I desired a roast beef sandwich with horse-radish and pickled onions with a wanton savagery that I had never felt for any man”), and her romance with an oddball male escort almost – but not quite – plunges the book into “so bad it’s good” territory:

Ben:  “This is how it could have been if only I had confessed my love before you went and got so skinny.”

Ellie:  “Part of me will always hunger for the wrong foods but I have to tell you that I am not prepared to eat myself back to my old proportions so you can prove the integrity of your love.”

The biggest head-scratcher of all is that, somehow, this amateurish junk food was included by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of its “100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century.”

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Suetonius

Complain all you want about our current leaders, but their flaws are chicken feed compared to those of the power-crazed, toga-clad rulers of ancient Rome.  For proof, we have this series of short biographies of the Roman emperors, written by someone who was actually there, the Roman scholar Suetonius.

As I read, I would sometimes begin to cut a given ruler some slack, deciding that – at least compared to the others – he wasn’t so bad.  And then I’d learn that he tortured and executed some unfortunate peasant for a trivial offense.  And that he helped himself to a senator’s comely wife.  And that he did worse.  Much, much worse.

But I’ll give the emperors this:  They didn’t discriminate with their atrocities.  Most of them were apparently bisexual, using men, women, relatives, and children as sex toys, and they were just as likely to decapitate a general as a fruit seller.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Janet Evanovich

I’m not sure who’s more foolish, Stephanie Plum or me, because I continue to read this silly series.  Eighteen is more of the same-old slapstick, but what’s new is that, for some inexplicable reason, Evanovich has made her plot ridiculously complex.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Dan Ariely

In all honesty, this book was a letdown.  The human propensity for lying and cheating should be a juicy topic, but Ariely manages to squash reader interest by (mostly) confining his experiments to sterile classrooms, where one group of student volunteers after another pencil in answers to one dull test after another, usually involving dotted matrixes, one-dollar bills, and paper shredders.  When Ariely and colleagues do leave the artificial environment of the classroom – sending a blind girl into a farmers’ market to buy tomatoes, for example – their research yields some interesting results.

But back to that classroom … our intrepid social scientist’s big discovery is this:  We all cheat, but only a little bit.  And if we can just get a few reminders that cheating is bad, maybe we won’t do it so much.

That’s not exactly a scientific breakthrough; it’s simple common sense.  And that’s the brutal truth.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Margery Allingham

British mystery novelist Allingham is less interested in clever plot twists than in her characters, which is both good and bad.  Good, because she’s created an unusually strong villain, the knife-wielding, tortured-soul Jack Havoc (a.k.a. “Johnny Cash” – I kid you not), but bad because her heroes are a bland bunch.  Whenever the action shifts to the story’s quartet of lovebirds, I was reminded of those old Marx Brothers movies – pure genius whenever the boys were on screen, but barely tolerable when the obligatory lovers took center stage.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

                                                                 by Thomas Harris                                                                      

I suppose this is an example of why you should always read the book before you see the movie.  Harris’s Lambs is intelligent, suspenseful, and clearly one of the better serial-killer novels.  Yet in my Hollywood-influenced mind’s eye, F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling has morphed into Jodie Foster, malevolent Hannibal Lecter is  Anthony Hopkins, and every dramatic chapter is accompanied by images from the film.  But kudos to Harris, because even though the book holds no surprises for anyone familiar with the movie, it’s still a gripping read.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Jess Walter

Pasquale is an insecure young man drifting dreamily through life in his small, Italian fishing village.  Dee Moray is an up-and-coming starlet on the set of Hollywood’s infamous epic, the Richard Burton and Liz Taylor vehicle, Cleopatra.  Pasquale and Dee would seem to have little in common, but in author Jess Walter’s capable hands, their journey from 1962 to the present is a fanciful treat.  Ruins isn’t perfect; there are passages that resemble an old Doris Day-Rock Hudson farce with contrived situations, but Walter’s hopscotching, time-traveling story is mostly funny, bittersweet, and wise.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Hilary Mantel
                                                                        

This fictional account of life under England’s King Henry VIII, centering on royal advisor Thomas Cromwell, is an “admirable” book – but reading it was more chore than pleasure.

The upside:

Mantel’s dialogue is sharp and often witty.  The repartee between members of the king’s court, Cromwell family members, and even lowly commoners, is consistently engaging.

The sense of time and place is vivid.  I have no idea how accurate any of it is, but as a work of fiction, Wolf Hall opens the doors to palaces, chambers, and courtyards in Renaissance England and makes you believe that you are actually there.

The downside:

Mantel’s vocabulary is impressive, but I grew frustrated over her abuse of the simple pronoun, “he.”  I challenge anyone to read this novel without, at least occasionally, being surprised to learn that the “he” Mantel is writing about is not the “he” you had imagined.

Wolf Hall snagged numerous awards, including the Man Booker Prize.  But I side with scholar Susan Bassnett, who writes, “I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome.”

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Lisa Alther 

Can you dislike a book, yet hold its author blameless?  That’s the pickle when reviewing Blood Feud, writer Lisa Alther’s chronicle of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.  Alther’s problem – and the source of much reader frustration – is that so few records survive from the period of time (late 19th century) and location (West Virginia-Kentucky) of the decades-long family feud.  As the author puts it, “Almost every incident in this feud has several conflicting versions that blame different participants, depending upon whether its source supported the Hatfields or the McCoys.  But which conveys what really happened?  No one can possibly know except the participants themselves, and they are all long dead, the truth buried with them.”  But Alther perseveres with insight and, appropriately enough, gallows humor.

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