RABBIT REDUX by John Updike

 Refinished Mo 10/25/21

This is one of my ancient paperbacks and this copy of the book I had never read. Although, I've read 'RABBIT REDUX' at least one time and I've always loved this book. My fave or the trilogy....and I think I even have a copy of the fourth book- The epilogue. 

The books cover the years 1960 through 1990.

Rabbit and Janice are separated and Harry opens his home to a black radical, Skeeter, and Jill, a rich, hippy run-away from Conneticut. Nelson, Harry's son is now thirteen.

Mim- Harry's younger sister has returned for a visit. She is kind of a high-priced call girl out of Vegas.

From the book's page at Amazon:

"In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe."

I loved the book (and the character of Harry Angstrom) and I have the third book and will be reading that soon. 

OVER THE EDGE by Jonathan Kellerman

Finished Tu 10/18/21

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at the library booksale on Fr 6/13/97 and finished on We 9/21/97.

This was the third book in the Dr. Alex Delaware series that was released in 1987.

Jamey Cadmus is a mental patient and caught red handed with a bloody knife in his hand, but did he do it?

The book contains a very interesting commentary about whether LSD or other psychedelics mirror the effects of serious mental illness such as schizophrenia.  

The link to Jonathan Kellerman's page on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kellerman

From the books site at Amazon:

"When the phone rings in the middle of the night, child psychologist Alex Delaware does not hesitate. Driving through the dream-lit San Fernando Valley, Alex rushes to Jamey Cadmus, the patient he had failed five years before—and who now calls with a bizarre cry for help. But by the time Alex reaches Canyon Oaks Psychiatric Hospital, Jamey is gone, surfacing a day later in the hands of the police, who believe Jamey is the infamous Lavender Slasher, a psychotic serial killer. Wooed by a high-powered attorney to build a defense, Alex will get a chance to do what he couldn’t five years ago. And when he peers into a family’s troubled history and Jamey’s brilliant, tormented mind, the psychologist puts himself at the heart of a high-profile case. Because Alex knows that in a realm of money, loss, and madness, something terrible pushed Jamey over the edge—or else someone is getting away with murder." 

I would read anything by Kellerman. It's a 'beach or airport read', but always interesting. 

MAO II by Don Delillo

 Finished Mo 10/11/21

This is one of my old hardbacks and no notation when or where I got it.

This might make a good movie, but the book was slightly less than impressive. There were some very interesting scenes and ideas, but I felt it lacked a compelling storyline. 

The beginning sequence of the mass wedding by Rev. Sun Young Moon was very interesting.

"The future belongs to crowds"

A connection between novelists and terrorists. Writers have begun to lose the power to shape and influence. "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunment have taken that territory."

"The novel used to feet our search for meaning." But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. ThThis is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel."

A 'Deaf Child' sign: "When I saw that I thought DEAF CHILD. I thought the state that erects a sign for one child can't be so awful and unfeeling."

PLOT:

A couple caters to a reclusive writer.

A female photographer visits the author to take some photos of him.

His agent cooks up a plan to have the writer switch places with a poet being held by terrorists in Beruit.

The plot summary in Wikipedia is worth looking at and more informative than the book. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_II

I didn't dislike the book and I would be willing to read another by DeLillo. 

 

THE END OF THE DREAM by Philip Wylie

 Finished We 10/6/21

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I've never read and there is no indication where and when I bought the book.

"An infantile majority becomes lunatic". That sounds like a quote that describes our time and tribulations. 

The book is primarily about the future (2023 is the tipping point) ecological disasters. 'Climate Change' isn't really mentioned. 

One 'disaster' concerns frozen foods that cause deadly 'exploding farts'. People and animals die when their farts explode internally. This was easily the highlight of the book.

One incident concerned deadly bees coming across the border from Mexico to Texas. It reminded me of the current controversy over Covid. Many don't believe that it is dangerous. In the novel a Texas mayor chastises the people for being overly sensitive to the threat. "The bees are, at most, a nuisance. They need to cause no deaths and no protracted prostration. Sure, they can and do hurt like hell. But the risk of having a sharp pain  is no excuse for roaring out of town by auto and getting maimed in the eight-car crash just now reported on the Pan-Texas Throughway. What's wrong with those sons and daughters of the Lone Star State, anyhow?"

Near the middle of the novel Wylie provides a long rant against The Sexual Revolution. He's not a fan. 

Some random reviews at Goodreads:

"This isn't so much a novel as a poorly-written list of a bunch of horrible ecological disasters - except rather than being horrible, so many of them are so far-fetched as to be really hysterical. There's a huge, huge, huge anti-industrial/anti-corporate feel to the book, down to frozen dinners that make people explode when they fart (I'm not kidding). I would be hard pressed to say which of the "disasters" is the funniest but boy there's a bunch of them. There's also a metric ass-ton of amateurish sociological analysis that just winds up leaving a bad taste in the mouth and a slightly sick feeling to the stomach. But no matter! We're all doomed anyways."

"It's a mess but I found myself always fascinated."

"The End of the Dream is Phillip Wylie’s pulpy tale of the end of the world. It’s his final work after a history of writing for films equally as creepy, adventurous, and campy (Island of Lost Souls, The Invisible Man) and after scathing indictments like Generation of Vipers. It reads as a compendium of newspaper clippings, editorials, letters, and classified government documents that tell of escalating catastrophes that befall the world thanks to man’s technological death march. A second narrative concerns the narrator who is a part of a global group to stem the toxic problems like London Fog-style smog in NYC, flesh-eating worms washing up out of the oceans, blighted rice crops, and energy addiction that causes the destruction of Antarctica. It’s less cerebral as PKD and less literary than JG Ballard, who are more masterful of this sort of thing, but Wylie is certainly the most blunt, leveling blow after blow about how the ignorance on the part of civilization begins to deteriorate rapidly.

Books like this are always in trouble of aging as soon as they’re published. Dream is set in 2030 and catalogs events of the previous 60 years. There was no major crop failures which saw two continents effectively turn over to cannibalism in the 2000s, for example, but Wylie is writing with an unabashed sense of his fans. His pen dips toward pulp and wonder a la HG Wells and is effectively anticipating the second wave of B-movie Natural Horror films that would come after the success of Jaws but recycles things the Cold War era radiation stuff-- think THEM.

Despite the hyperbole, Wylie bends his points around them. Much of what he has written has come in some form: perhaps mutated Brazilian bees will not pour over the Rio Grande, but the fact that the bees only kill four people and cause a panic in which thousands are trampled and squeezed to death is a good representation of things that have already happened, and had happened when Wylie wrote his book. A plane flies into a building in New York City. At points, he backs out of the pulpy punches into the book's strong miasma of malaise. The hedonic mess that people continue to march into never lets up and neither does the result. Scenes of futile washing of glaciers for freshwater and the “invisible scythe” causing the screams of thousands of New Yorkers succumbing to smog are the high points. Pair this with scientists over-explaining and pundits continuing to “monitor” the situation and the warning seems to ring quite true today." 

'The End of the Dream' was published posthumously in 1972 and foresees a dark future where America slides into ecological catastrophe.  Wylie is probably most known for his 1943 book, 'Generation of Vipers'. Here he invented a concept called 'momism' which railed against America's adoration of mothers. He felt that this was a weakness. Seems kind of strange to come out with this during the darkest days of WWII and it was very controversial. 

If alive today I would bet the farm that Philip Wylie would be a fixture on Fox News. 

FLOATING CITY by Eric Lustbader

 This was a paperback that I bought at the library booksale on Sa 4/13/19

I was surprised to learn that "Eric Van Lustbader took over the Jason Bourne series from Robert Ludlum on his death. Ludlum had just published The Bourne Identity, sharing the New York Times bestseller list with Lustbader's The Ninja and Ludlum wanted to meet his rival. The pair talked long into the night."

I read to page 200 of this 500 page novel when I finally gave up. Too many characters and almost a complete lack of focus. It was not worth the effort to finish.

"A ruthless American killing machine named Rock rules over a secret, blood-soaked empire of riches and murder: Floating City. At his command is the Torch—the tool of ultimate evil that one man can destroy: Nicholas Linnear. But only when he faces the harrowing truth about the Yakuza—the Japanese criminal underworld he despises—and about Koei, the woman he loved as no other, will he find the inner strength to annihilate Floating City and honor his family’s debt to the dead of the Yakuza, the Kaisho. While half a world away, his longtime friend and ex-NYPD detective Lew Croaker hunts the Kaisho’s would-be assassins, Linnear infiltrates a vast web of terror, crossing the line that divides good from evil, sensuality from death, and love from betrayal."

At page 200 the characters had not even reached 'The Floating City'. 

The only idea that interested me was the collusion between the American government and the Yakuza. After WWII the Americans dealt with the Yakuza to keep the new Japanese government in line. 

Too many good books, and too little time for bad.