The Grouchy Editor

by Bob McCabe

A real treat for fans, Harry Potter: Page to Screen boasts hundreds of full-color, glossy photos from the creative minds responsible for the eight Potter film adaptations.  That’s the good news.  The not-so-good news:  The accompanying text, although detail-heavy, is a bit bland and what you might expect from the Warner Bros. publicity department – every actor is “wonderful to work with” and “an amazing talent.”  Every director is “brilliant” and “understanding.”  What – in ten years of moviemaking there was no friction on the set?  But this is primarily a picture-book and, although print photography can’t match the clarity of high-definition TVs and computers, there’s still something magical about holding a book like this in your hands.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Ann Patchett

Story:  A doctor is dispatched to South America to learn what she can about a potentially groundbreaking drug – and also the mysterious death of a treasured colleague.

Good:  Patchett is a gifted storyteller. The steaming, swarming Amazon and its menagerie of snakes, cannibals, and other perils seem very real.

Not So Good:  The plot includes some hefty leaps of faith. Why on earth would a pharmaceutical company send the heroine – an “indoor girl” if ever there was one, and certainly no Indiana Jones – on such a hazardous mission into the wilds of Brazil?

Good:  Two themes are intriguing: 1) If an American company discovers the cure for a disease, but can expect little or no monetary gain, is it obligated to persevere for the benefit of third-world countries? 2) Should women well into their 40s – and older – have the right to reproduce, assuming it becomes possible?

Not So Good:  The novel is poorly edited. It’s littered with unclear passages and ambivalent pronouns.

Good:  In domineering “Dr. Swenson,” Patchett creates a true original, an older woman who suffers no fools and delivers an endless supply of amusing quips.

Not So Good:  Most of the other characters, including the heroine and her lover, the ludicrously titled “Mr. Fox,” are flat.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

                                                        by Charles Dickens                                                                 

Crabby criticisms of a beloved book

Admit it:  The world would be a better place if more people were like pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge, a cantankerous old coot who nevertheless kept to himself and contributed to society, rather than like post-ghost Scrooge, a giddy imbecile who ran amok, imposing himself on friends and foes alike.  What an unbearable world it would be if all 7 billion of us went about like the “new and improved” Scrooge – foisting turkeys on each other, barging into family dinners, and frightening small children.

But seriously … I think Dickens is so enduring because his characters and dialogue still sparkle in the 21st century.  Dickens’ stories – like that of Ebenezer Scrooge – are often sentimental and overblown – but oh, such memorable people!  I suppose it says more about me than about Dickens, but I prefer his later, darker works (Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities) to early, syrupy Dickens (Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol).

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Stephen King

Musings:  1) Needful Things was published shortly after King gave up drinking and doping, which coincides with the decline of his most creative period.  I don’t believe it can be happenstance – the man was simply a more inspired, original writer back when he was snorting and swigging.  2) Needful Things is middling King.  It’s well-crafted, often amusing, and laugh-out-loud funny near the climax.  It’s also over-the-top, alternately too somber or too silly, and not particularly scary.  3) The knight-in-shining-armor hero and his perfect girlfriend are the least interesting characters in the story – too bad we have to spend so much time with them.  4) I do like King’s theme about how our possessions tend to take possession of us.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

                                                              by Philip K. Dick

There are reasons I’m not a big fan of most science fiction.  Ubik, by sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick, is a case in point.  Dick’s futuristic tale of life-after-death and alternate universes has some fascinating ideas and some amusing situations – but it also has paper-thin characters and dialogue, and clunky prose.  I can deal with fantasy leaps of logic when they are served up by an H. G. Wells, but Dick was no H.G. Wells.

When I finished Ubik, I felt much the same way that Dick’s main character does in mid-story: “Very confusing, Joe Chip said to himself.  He did not like it at all.  Granted it had a satisfying symmetrical quality, but on the other hand, it struck him as untidy.”

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Nora Ephron

“I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.”  So writes Ephron at the end of Heartburn, her 1983 autobiographical novel about the breakup of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein.  Funny, clever, and ever self-deprecating, Ephron’s humor does indeed cover up any traces of self-pity.  She has the humorist’s gift for seeing ordinary incidents in extraordinary ways, and then putting that vision on paper.  This is Ephron describing an embrace with her housekeeper:  “Juanita gave me a big hug, which was awkward since she was only about four feet six inches tall, and a hug from her felt like the Heimlich maneuver.”  Good stuff, that, but the book is also more than a bit sad.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Kingsley Amis

Reading Lucky Jim is like watching a 1940s Hollywood romantic comedy, but with a British bent.  The novel is polished, clever, amusing … and dated.  I suspect that Amis’s tale of rebellious college instructor Jim Dixon had more resonance for earlier generations, although its puncturing of academic pomposity is a timeless pleasure.  But speaking as a 21st century, American reader, I dare say that much of the book struck me as more peculiar than funny.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was, at times, too gifted a writer for his own good.  Dahl’s short stories in this collection (by the way, not written for children) are so devilishly entertaining, so artful at building suspense, that some of their endings can’t possibly live up to what precedes them.  But often they do.  Dahl’s tales of murder and the macabre are a showcase for colorful characters, locations and – above all – black humor, and so when some of the twist endings fall a bit flat, all is forgiven.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Eric Hodgins

Mr. and Mrs. Blandings want to build their dream house on Connecticut’s Bald Mountain, but somewhere beneath the grounds of their serene and scenic property lurks a roiling, mischievous stream of water.  I can’t think of a better analogy for Hodgins’s clever prose, which is all propriety and elegance on the surface – and a whirlpool of repressed anger and despair down below.

That’s a blueprint for high comedy as we follow the hapless Blandings, two city slickers who run afoul of country anti-bumpkins in their quest to build the American Dream, circa 1946.  Try as the Blandings might to fit in with their new neighbors, alas, it is not to be as tensions on both sides of the cultural divide threaten to – and periodically do – erupt during construction of the jinxed house.  

This might not say much for human nature, but as an observer it can be wicked fun to sit back and read about someone else’s misery.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Jonathan Yardley

What a great book about books.  Yardley, a literature critic at The Washington Post since 1981, has an infectious writing style; I couldn’t decide what I enjoyed more, the prospect of digging into some of his recommendations, or the reviews themselves.  Yardley praises the majority of “notable and neglected books revisited,” but on occasion he unfurls critical claws, most memorably on Steinbeck (“too often, for me, reading his prose is like scraping one’s fingernails on a blackboard”), Ulysses (“a book I simply cannot read”), and The Catcher in the Rye and The Old Man and the Sea (“two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst”).  He also has some choice words for the National Book Award:  “I read Morte d’Urban not long after it won the NBA; in those years that prize still occasionally went to books that deserved it.”  But mostly, Second Reading is a love letter to the 60 books and authors in its pages.  I’d say more, but I have to get reading.

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