The Grouchy Editor

  by Stieg Larsson

Sometimes the movie is better than the book.  That isn’t to say that Stieg Larsson’s novel isn’t entertaining, because it is.  It’s just too long, and unlike the Swedish film version of his story, it gets its climaxes wrong.  There are two major plot threads in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one involving a white-collar criminal, and the other about a serial killer.  The movie rightfully builds to a tense wrap-up dispatching the sadistic murderer; Larsson’s mystery takes care of the killer and then devotes 100 anticlimactic pages to the other business.

But it’s a sign of a good read when it isn’t until after you put the book down that you say to yourself, “That was highly improbable.”  There are lots of head-scratching moments in Girl, but they don’t occur to you while you’re turning the pages.  Alfred Hitchcock realized that some of his movie plots were downright silly, but he didn’t care as long as the audience was ensnared.  By that measure, “you go Girl.”

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Jesse Ventura

Earlier this month, Jesse Ventura was on CNN asking why so few in the mainstream media were reviewing his new book, American Conspiracies.  Now that I’ve read it, I’m wondering the same thing.  Ventura raises too many provocative questions, and offers too much documentation, to have his book dismissed as the work of a “conspiracy nut.”

The book has failings – sloppy editing, and so many allegations that the book becomes a fact-checker’s nightmare (which could explain the lack of reviews; it requires hard research to prove or disprove his theories) – but his overall message is clear:  You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.  The kind of assaults on our cherished institutions that Ventura outlines, covering everything from Lincoln’s assassination to the Wall Street bailout, are not pleasant, so it’s easier to go into denial than to acknowledge that some of his allegations might be true.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell, the popular Swedish mystery novelist, writes two kinds of books:  novels with a strong social conscience, and novels worth reading.  Sad to say, The White Lioness falls into the former category.  Mankell has created a wonderful protagonist in Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander, a depressive, middle-aged cop from tiny Ystad, Sweden.  It’s a joy to follow this miserable man as he solves crimes in and around his seaside village.  We care not only about whatever crime Wallander’s trying to solve, but also about his relationships with a senile father, a maturing daughter, and his sometimes unreliable police colleagues.

But this winning setup isn’t always enough for Mankell, who in some of his books turns Wallander into a globetrotting James Bond (The Dogs of Riga), and in others like this one, puts the reader to sleep with preachy moralizing, in Lioness about South Africa circa 1993.   Mankell is so intent on teaching us all lessons that the actual mystery suffers.  And once the story loses allure, every little plot twist becomes less and less believable.  My advice to the first-time Mankell reader:  Stick to pure Wallander in books like Faceless Killers or Sidetracked.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Daphne du Maurier

Years ago I read Daphne du Maurier’s spellbinding Rebecca, and to this day I believe it’s one of the best novels I ever picked up.  So how are her short stories?  My impressions:

Don’t Look Now features nine du Maurier tales of the supernatural.  She was a versatile writer, in that her narrators are young, middle-aged, male, and female.  The stories range in tone from whimsical to dead serious.  Rod Serling might have been impressed by du Maurier, because most of  her stories have nifty, Twilight Zone-style endings.  In fact, I think Serling might have borrowed some of her plots (we know that Hitchcock did).  Best of the stories here: “The Birds,” “Don’t Look Now,” and “Monte Verita.”

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Ira Levin

Were I to publish a bestselling suspense novel and then have Hollywood come calling, I can’t think of a better director for the project than Roman Polanski.  I recently finished Robert Harris’s The Ghost, and Polanski’s film version of that political thriller was superb.

Ditto for Rosemary’s Baby, which Polanski filmed back in 1968.  But the greatness of the film is as much a testament to Levin as it is to Polanski.  With an economy of words and an atmosphere of middle-class ordinariness, Levin injects a wallop of horror that still resonates 43 years after his novel was published.

Jaws made some people think twice about swimming in the ocean, and Psycho compelled others to lock the bathroom door before showering.  I wonder: Did birthrates drop when this book came out?

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Robert Harris

Like most book lovers, I prefer to read the book first, then see the movie.  But I was anxious to see director Roman Polanski’s version of Robert Harris’s thriller (retitled The Ghost Writer for the film), so this time I reversed the process.  I don’t recommend doing so.

Although the novel is very good, the movie’s images kept implanting themselves in my brain as I read.  I kept wondering, “Was this scene cut from the film?” or “Who played this character?”  It’s more satisfying to read the book, create your own mental pictures, and then see them played out on the big screen.  But never mind the movie.  Harris’s The Ghost, as Stephen King put it, has “got the goods.”

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Michael Lewis

When Wall Street premiered in 1987, Oliver Stone’s movie was pitched as a morality tale.  Its lesson was that when greed gets the upper hand, bad things happen.  In reality, the movie served as a “how-to” guide for aspiring Gordon Gekkos.  Michael Lewis, in his book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, laments the fact that his previous expose of Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, had the same unintended consequences:  It inspired materialistic-minded future Gekkos.

The Big Short’s topic, global financial failure, is not only depressing but ongoing.  Most books need some semblance of a hero, but Lewis had to scrape to find protagonists for this story.  He discovered a handful of small-timers who, through sheer gumption, hard work, and contrariness, managed to make killings out of Wall Street’s meltdown.  These men appeal to the underdog-loving Lewis, but it’s hard to disguise the fact that even these guys acted more out of self-interest than any sense of social responsibility.

But my biggest obstacle to fully appreciating The Big Short is related to something that contributed to the financial crisis in the first place:  the onslaught of insider jargon, economic voodoo theories, and meaningless acronyms geared to befuddle anyone lacking an economics degree.  As a reader, I became exasperated by the financial hocus-pocus and simply wanted to just walk away from it.  In other words, it engendered in me the same attitude that allowed Wall Street hooligans to swindle so many others.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Ernest Hemingway

It’s funny.  You go back and read the critical reaction to Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea, and you learn that some critics saw it as a vengeful allegory — Hemingway placing himself in the shoes of an old man who battles on, despite being constantly assailed by outside forces (in this case, Hemingway critics).  Other analysts were struck by the story’s religious significance, especially in a passage in which Santiago, the “old man,” alludes to his crucifixion.

But in rereading the novella, I think of it first and foremost as the middle link in a trifecta of epic man-versus-sea-monster sagas.  First Ahab and his great white whale, then Hemingway’s Santiago and the sharks, and finally that Hollywood bad boy, “Bruce the Shark” in Spielberg’s Jaws.  Critics don’t seem all that interested in what might be Old Man’s strongest asset — it’s a gripping adventure tale.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Sam Lipsyte

Milo Burke, the middle-aged, failed artist protagonist of Sam Lipsyte’s new novel, is the kind of New Yorker you like to visit but don’t want to live with.  For the first 75 pages of The Ask, I had to ask myself if I really wanted to spend the next 225 pages with the class smartass that is Burke.  Sure, Milo is often hilarious (think Groucho Marx let loose in a diversity-training class), but geez, too much of that can send you screaming to the wheat fields of Kansas.

But gradually, inexorably, Lipsyte adds substance to his story.  There’s more to Milo than his dead-end job at a “mediocre” college fundraising office, and his interactions with his drifting wife, an amputee Iraq war vet, and a rich friend from his college past transform The Ask from mere screwball ranting into something deeper and more satisfying.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

 by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

If you’re a politics junkie, you won’t find much new in Game Change.  The 2008 presidential campaign has already been covered exhaustively, from cable TV to the blogosphere.  In fact, unless you simply cannot get enough politics, there isn’t much reason to buy the book.  What it does offer is juicy bits of gossip about the candidates and their spouses.

Heilemann and Halperin will no doubt be accused of liberal bias, but of all the dysfunctional (to put it mildly) political couples they showcase – the McCains, Palins, Edwardses, Clintons, and Obamas – only the Obamas come off as people you would remotely want to run the country, even though one of those couples already has.

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