Wounded, The Automatic Detective
Jul. 15th, 2010 10:58 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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50books_poc40. Wounded by Percival Everett
I wrote 3 rave reviews of Percival Everett novels a few weeks ago.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zahrawithaz pointed me in the direction of Wounded with the dubious recommendation, "I loved Everett's Wounded, though I hated its ending." I flew through it and now... hm... I think the recommendation is well-stated. It's likely necessary to consider the two things separately: the book and its ending.
I loved the book. It's a story about an unlikely tribe that forms on a horse farm in Wyoming- a black horse trainer, John, his ex-con uncle Gus, his white cowgirl girlfriend Morgan, his college roommate's gay son David, their loyal dog Zoe, their 3 legged baby coyote, their untamed mule, and a couple of magnificent horses. All of them have demons and the story is largely concerned with how families do and don't share with each other, the things they hide and the things they tell. How people who have been hurt learn how to fall in love. It's a beautiful story.
John is perfect, and broken. He is a cowboy, in a word. It's a great set of eyes for Everett to use to narrate the story, because John feels all the weight of the world on his shoulders, feels responsible for everybody's shortcomings, and this lets Everett scan far and wide without losing any focus at all. The novel is short and reads fast. It's tight as hell, not a wasted word in sight, and yet somehow feels airy and spacious like the wide open plains John patrols on his horse.
But lurking underneath is another story, a story about tragedy and life as a minority, and in this story John and his clan are part of a larger clan, isolated by the white patriarchal culture of the west and yet brought together by nothing more than their shared isolation. And this story is the one that results in the book's ending, which is a very, very difficult ending to deal with. I wouldn't say that I hated it. I'm profoundly disturbed by it. Scared. Sad. Uncomfortable. But also thought-provoked, because if you can separate out all the emotional responses that it produces, it's a brilliant reappropriation of the Wild West ethos of John Wayne movies. Even when Percival Everett reaches straight for your heart and pulls as hard as he can, he never stops being the clever smartass who wrote I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
I don't know... maybe you'll like it, maybe you'll hate it. You can't know until you give it a try, I think.
41. The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez
If you like slightly campy pulp stories, this will be a treat. Set in a present day noir city called Empire, a city that cheerfully persists in absurd art-deco pulpiness despite the requisite onslaught of evil mad scientists, disproportionate ecological disasters, and killer robots, it tells the story of one of those killer robots: A bot named Mack Megaton who turned on his evil master and is currently driving a cab to pay the considerable electric bill that
keeps him running.
When I say present day noir city, mind, I means something different from the way most authors mean it. Most contemporary noir authors take the noir feel, the so-called "hardboiled" style, and try to use it to tell stories set in a more realistic present day. Martinez has placed Empire in the middle of a non-pulp world, a bizarre outlier where sentient robots patrol alongside biological citizens and jazz has never been supplanted by rock and roll. It is stubbornly and delightfully preposterous, and it makes a great setting.
Martinez does all the little world building things right. I first spotted his eye for worldbuilding detail when I noticed that Mack never 'sees' or 'hears' anything, but 'scans' or 'detects' instead. The narrative voice is sharp and charming and the sense that you're spending time in a truly alien reality never goes away, and never gets tiresome. The detective plot is well-executed and all of the characters are lively and dynamic. I really can't praise this novel enough, for what it is. And I can't praise it enough for resisting the urge that a lot of slumming noir SF writers get to try to transcend the genre somehow. Martinez knows what his novel is and what it isn't.
tags: a: everett percival, a: martinez a. lee, african-american, postmodernist, western, mexican-american, sf/fantasy,
I wrote 3 rave reviews of Percival Everett novels a few weeks ago.
zahrawithaz pointed me in the direction of Wounded with the dubious recommendation, "I loved Everett's Wounded, though I hated its ending." I flew through it and now... hm... I think the recommendation is well-stated. It's likely necessary to consider the two things separately: the book and its ending.I loved the book. It's a story about an unlikely tribe that forms on a horse farm in Wyoming- a black horse trainer, John, his ex-con uncle Gus, his white cowgirl girlfriend Morgan, his college roommate's gay son David, their loyal dog Zoe, their 3 legged baby coyote, their untamed mule, and a couple of magnificent horses. All of them have demons and the story is largely concerned with how families do and don't share with each other, the things they hide and the things they tell. How people who have been hurt learn how to fall in love. It's a beautiful story.
John is perfect, and broken. He is a cowboy, in a word. It's a great set of eyes for Everett to use to narrate the story, because John feels all the weight of the world on his shoulders, feels responsible for everybody's shortcomings, and this lets Everett scan far and wide without losing any focus at all. The novel is short and reads fast. It's tight as hell, not a wasted word in sight, and yet somehow feels airy and spacious like the wide open plains John patrols on his horse.
But lurking underneath is another story, a story about tragedy and life as a minority, and in this story John and his clan are part of a larger clan, isolated by the white patriarchal culture of the west and yet brought together by nothing more than their shared isolation. And this story is the one that results in the book's ending, which is a very, very difficult ending to deal with. I wouldn't say that I hated it. I'm profoundly disturbed by it. Scared. Sad. Uncomfortable. But also thought-provoked, because if you can separate out all the emotional responses that it produces, it's a brilliant reappropriation of the Wild West ethos of John Wayne movies. Even when Percival Everett reaches straight for your heart and pulls as hard as he can, he never stops being the clever smartass who wrote I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
I don't know... maybe you'll like it, maybe you'll hate it. You can't know until you give it a try, I think.
41. The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez
If you like slightly campy pulp stories, this will be a treat. Set in a present day noir city called Empire, a city that cheerfully persists in absurd art-deco pulpiness despite the requisite onslaught of evil mad scientists, disproportionate ecological disasters, and killer robots, it tells the story of one of those killer robots: A bot named Mack Megaton who turned on his evil master and is currently driving a cab to pay the considerable electric bill that
keeps him running.
When I say present day noir city, mind, I means something different from the way most authors mean it. Most contemporary noir authors take the noir feel, the so-called "hardboiled" style, and try to use it to tell stories set in a more realistic present day. Martinez has placed Empire in the middle of a non-pulp world, a bizarre outlier where sentient robots patrol alongside biological citizens and jazz has never been supplanted by rock and roll. It is stubbornly and delightfully preposterous, and it makes a great setting.
Martinez does all the little world building things right. I first spotted his eye for worldbuilding detail when I noticed that Mack never 'sees' or 'hears' anything, but 'scans' or 'detects' instead. The narrative voice is sharp and charming and the sense that you're spending time in a truly alien reality never goes away, and never gets tiresome. The detective plot is well-executed and all of the characters are lively and dynamic. I really can't praise this novel enough, for what it is. And I can't praise it enough for resisting the urge that a lot of slumming noir SF writers get to try to transcend the genre somehow. Martinez knows what his novel is and what it isn't.
tags: a: everett percival, a: martinez a. lee, african-american, postmodernist, western, mexican-american, sf/fantasy,
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Date: 2010-07-15 04:55 pm (UTC)I really like your idea that you need to consider the book and the ending separately, which resonates with my inability to hold both in my head at the same time. I rather felt that Everett needed to write another 50 pages to deal with that ending, especially given the way the book is grappling with the real-life murder of Matthew Shepard. But I haven't stopped recommending it, evidently to good effect!
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Date: 2011-09-10 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 12:26 am (UTC)