The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do you ever experience vellichor — that strange wistfulness of used bookshops? Being surrounded by books that have lived other lives can cause a bit of melancholy. Or have you ever had a jouska — that hypothetical conversation that you play out in your head? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows includes dozens of these spectacular words with equally spectacular definitions such as chrysalism: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.”

Who thinks up these words? I pulled out my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I could find where some of these words came from. I wasn’t successful with the few I tried. Maybe they’re too recent. But wherever they came from, these words would be difficult to throw into the middle of a conversation at a cocktail party. (Do people still have cocktail parties?) I’m experiencing exulansis so I am just going to give up trying to tell my story about swimming across the Atlantic Ocean. People just can’t relate to it!

One of my favorites is Nodus Tollens which is the realization that the plot of your life just doesn’t make sense to you anymore. I mean seriously! How often have you felt that way? In the dictionary there are clues to the derivation.

Directly from the dictionary:

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

From the Swedish ‘eftersom’ because.

agnosthesia

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

From Greek ‘agnostos’ unknown + ‘diathesis’ mood.

Words are amazing! There are so many of them that we’ll never get to know.

Private Viewing - Geoff Palmer

Genre: World Literature

Private Viewing was published in 2015 by Podsnap Publishing Ltd.

I am always pleasantly surprised when I come upon a writer who knows what they are doing and cares about how they are doing it. Geoff Palmer is one of those pleasant surprises. He has won some awards and spent twenty plus years doing freelance technical writing. From his bio, “he has climbed mountains in Africa, picked grapes in Switzerland, sold cameras in London, programmed computers in Fiji, and spent eight years working as a professional photographer. He’s also quite tall.” He lives and writes in Wellington, New Zealand.

Jane Child , the protagonist of this story, is a banker. At the beginning of the novel she thought she had a straight line path to an Divisional Manager role at Bartley’s Bank. It is not to be, however, because the position has been filled by a rising star in the British Banking world who just happens to be the son of Sir Jamieson Trotter, who has deep societal connections.

But Damien Trotter is good looking and Jane is good looking, and despite her best efforts she is not able to resist his charms. It’s not at all surprising that Damien turns out to be an ultimate, salacious sleaze. What is surprising is the role that the seemingly homeless man who sits on the sidewalk across the street from the bank plays in the story. Jane is not the most sensible young woman, but she is a romantic and that gets her into trouble.

Palmer develops his characters well, providing a personality to good-old Aunt Daisy and the neighborhood cat, Bluebell. There is a plethora of spy gadgets and technology which is always fun, and with Palmer’s experience with computers in Fiji, I am assuming that he got that stuff right. There is the occasional word that is missing, but that seems to be common unfortunately these days. No matter how many times you read through your own book, it is easy to see the words on the page the way you are seeing them in your head.

Private Viewing is a fun, entertaining read, with enough suspense to keep the pages turning and the midnight lamp burning.

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Bookfunnel gathers writers together to give books away. My novel - Death at the Edge of the Diamond - and Geoff Palmer’s as well as D.F. Bailey’s Five Knives along with a bunch of others are in this group. This is a very helpful program. The downloads can be to virtually any platform. And they’re free!

The Red Lotus - Chris Bohjalian (Copy)

Genre: Thrillers & Suspense

Chris Bohjalian published The Red Lotus at the very beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic. After reading this book, you have to question whether or not he had an inside track! I’m glad that I read it at the end of the pandemic. (I hope it’s the end. Don’t want to jinx it - as Bohjalian writes about one of the characters at the end of the book.)

Alexis - an ER doctor - and her boyfriend go off to Vietnam on a bike tour. At the beginning of the book she is waiting in the hotel for him to return from a solo ride taken ostensibly to visit sites that were important to his family. But he never comes back. It was a dangerous road. And he probably shouldn’t have been biking alone. But the story is much more sinister than a simple bike accident.

As Alexis begins to learn more about this man, his lies unravel. Her need to know parallels her emergency room character. She could have just left it alone, but she feels the need to hire a private investigator, to contact police sources in Vietnam, and not trust anyone.

The most positive characters in the story are in Vietnam. There is an overlay of the horrible things that Westerners have inflicted on the Vietnamese people.

I had a problem with her insertion into the mysteries of his character because he told her that his father was wounded in battle. And he wasn’t. Would that really have been enough to catapult someone into a cascade of events that resulted in a great deal of death and dying?

And there was a long filler piece about the private eye’s experience in Vietnam during the war that didn’t move the story forward.

On the other hand Bohjalian’s writing is excellent and worth reading. The story is carefully researched and technically well supported. It is a thriller tale that comes way too close to paralleling reality.

Don’t ignore the Epilogue.

Naughty Words & Stuff to Check

Writing a first draft requires writing down the words as they flow out of the brain. No checks. No balances. Only natural tweaks and refinements. JUST LET GO! And then you can take the time to pull out all the weeds as you develop the second draft.

I have a check list that I go through of all these little nasty zingers that pull the power away from what I’m trying to say. Here they are - in no particular order:

• words that end in ing

• words that end in ly

• there

• here

• it was (it)

• down into (down)

• off over (off)

• back away

• up toward

• as

• looking

• glancing

• heading

• turning/turned

• went

• began

• and

• just

• only

Take for example a simple sentence like this, “Mostly he was thinking about what his father had said about his future.” “Was thinking” is a passive approach. If I change that to “Mostly he thought about what his father had said about his future”, it’s still not a great sentence, but improved. My process is to go through every chapter once for each of these naughty words. Some of them I can’t change - I can’t take the ing off spring for example. Some of them cause a struggle to find a way around. Some of them go fast. Give it a try. Expose some of your writing to these little uglies.

Hopefully after I go through each chapter 19 times I can weed out the majority of these weaklings and find a bunch of typos and other gotchas along the way. It always amazes me how much better the writing is after I go through this process.

The Searcher - Tana French

Genre: Mystery

This is Tana French’s eighth novel, but the only one I have had the pleasure of reading so far. This book is going onto my reference shelf - books that I pull out when I want to remind myself how to write a particular scene.

There are numerous levels to this book. First of all, the overall canvas of the story. French’s description of the sky, hills, fields, and weather provides a dynamic, visual background for all the events that transpire.

Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago police officer who buys a run-down house in Ireland. He believes the remote village to be peaceful and untroubled by crime and murder, a place where he can just quietly rehabilitate his run down house and watch the rooks scold him from end of his yard. That’s the way it starts - just sliding into the scenery.

Then there are the people. His neighbor, Mart, likes his cookies, but like everything else in this story there is more to Mart than his neighborly charm.

Cal goes drinking at the local pub and is induced into the local society, drinking some home brew. French does such an amazing job describing this evening that I was concerned that I was going to wake up with a hangover the next morning. She described one of the participants (I’m paraphrasing) as making a face like a toad licking piss off a nettle.

French layers the story on like the skin of an onion with a solid structure, wonderful characters, beautiful scenery and a bit of romance and violence to make it interesting.

The story is written in the present tense which I always find a challenge. There are backstory references in the past tense, but keeping the main stream of the tale in the present tense creates an immediacy to the words. It’s happening now as I’m reading it. It’s the kind of story that fits neatly within the covers - as though Cal’s life begins and ends right there and goes no further.

But the rooks are always there to comment.

It is an entertaining book, but it is also a master class in how to write a mystery without buildings exploding or planes falling out of the sky. Excellent. I’ll have to read more of Tana French’s books.

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

Do you ever wonder how authors can embed themselves into the minds of characters, characters who are purely evil or mentally deranged. Where do those horrific thoughts come from? I suppose it's better to write them down than manifest them in reality.

Gone Girl is written from binary first person points of view - alternating between Amy Elliott Dunne and her husband, Nick Dunne. The book starts out slowly, to the point where I almost abandoned it. Too many books too little time. But it builds and this book was listed as one of the top mysteries of the past decade AND it was made into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike so something has to happen, and it does.

Amy is amazing and she says so. She is a shape shifter who plans and schemes those future shifts well in advance so that she can punish those who offend her. She forecasts not only her own actions but how those effected will react to those actions. The writer, Gillian Flynn, is manipulating her characters and her readers and how the reader will react to Amy and the rest of the characters in the book because that’s what writers try to do.

In her diary at the beginning of the book, Amy seems to be sweetness and light. She was brought up as a star in her parents' children's book series. Everyone loves her and is devastated when she disappears. But she has set up her disappearance to point the finger at Nick as the perpetrator who has been abusing her and cheating on her.

The author does paint the story into a corner. Wonderful openings can sometimes lead to an unsolvable situation, when the options for solutions are limited. The one that Flynn chooses is possible but not the best. The resolution seemed forced and not the way the story itself wanted to play out. There are details of money and timing that bother me, and I think that Nick, the husband, although seriously badly treated could have done better and doesn't come out of this story well.

This is one of those stories that I felt the reader and the story itself was not treated kindly.

Monetizing the Return on Mechanical Ventilation

Insulating a house saves energy and that saves money. However, using mechanical ventilation causes conditioned air to be removed from the house only to be replaced by air that requires energy to condition - to warm it or cool it. Utility programs are reluctant to pay for adding mechanical ventilation to the house because it can’t be justified in terms of energy savings. DALYs (Disability Adjusted Life Years) provide a means to monetize the savings in health and productivity. One of the difficulties is that DALYs are population aligned and not individual aligned - although populations are made up of people.

Tight, energy efficient homes must have well designed and well installed mechanical ventilation systems for the health of the occupants as well as the health of the building. So what’s a DALY? DALYs represent the total number of years lost to illness, disability, or premature death within a given population. There is a growing population of people who live in air-tight houses. We’re sealing everything up from windows and doors to light fixtures and heating systems. And not only are we making houses tighter, we’re spending more time in them - closing in on 100% of the time.

If you click on this button and enter your zip code, it will provide you with the number of years of life expectancy at your location.

There are a lot of elements that impact our life expectancy. All the diseases that we face growing up like mumps or measles or COVID-19. There is mold and soot from roads and furnaces. There may be rodents and maybe the range hood or the bathroom fans don’t get used.

And then there is cigarette smoke. Tobacco smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals.Thirdhand smoke is residual nicotine and other chemicals left on indoor surfaces by tobacco smoke. People are exposed to these chemicals by touching contaminated surfaces or breathing in the outgassing. This residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic mix including cancer causing compounds, posing a potential health hazard to nonsmokers - especially children.

EXPOSOME

The exposome, conceptually and practically, provides a holistic view of human health and disease. It includes exposure from our diets, our lifestyles, and our behaviors. The human exposome is the environmental equivalent of the human genome . It is a representation of the complex exposures we are subject to through our lives. The exposome encompasses much of what we refer to as nurture - in the old battle of nature vs nurture.

What we are particularly concerned about here are the pollutants that are floating around in the air that can be ameliorated with good ventilation. The ultra-fine particles - PM2.5 in size - have the greatest impact on DALYs. Much of the acrolein and ultra-fine particles come from cooking and those can be removed from the house with a range hood with an effective capture efficiency. Common sense clearly shows that air quality has a significant impact on human life. In fact, it has been estimated that the most common diseases cause the loss of 2,129,090 years of Europeans’ life.

But we don’t want to cut off the connection in bacterial diversity between the inside and the outside of the house. There needs to be a balance. Microbes are all around us. Many species are beneficial to us and help our immune systems to function and control and compete with pathogens and pests. We can’t thrive in a purely sterile environment. We need the air exchange that ventilation provides.

PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity is the key source of economic growth and competitiveness. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. In the United States it’s about $34.02 per hour.

HEALTH CARE COSTS

US employers paid nearly $880 billion in health care benefits for employees and dependents. However, illness-related lost productivity costs them another $530 billion per year. That amounts to 60 cents for every dollar employers spend on health care benefits. In the U.S. almost 1.4 billion productive days are lost annually because of absent employees.

ADDING IT UP

Clearly indoor air quality has a direct impact on the health of the occupants. Changing the air - diluting the pollutants - will improve health.

Make some assumption:

• Outdoor air is generally 75% better than indoor air;

• Choose an effective air change rate of 0.35 ACH;

• Multiply those two numbers together: 0.75 x 0.35 = 26.25%

• Lost productivity in the U.S. per year is about $1,608 per person

Attributing 26.25% of loss of productivity to poor ventilation: 26.25 x $1,608 = $422/person/year.

This is not perfect math, but the assumptions are reasonable. A well designed, well installed, well maintained residential mechanical ventilation system will pay for itself in less than a year, particularly if there are two people living in the house. And it will keep on paying back year after year after year.

Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead - Sara Gran

Genre: Mystery Thriller & Suspense

I discovered this at https://crimereads.com/the-10-best-crime-novels-of-the-last-decade/  Is there a mystery here? Absolutely. Is there a detective? Claire Dewitt claims to be the world’s greatest detective. At least in her own mind. And her mind is exceedingly complicated. But if you’re looking for a crime novel, that is not the main track of this story. A crime does indeed occur and Claire unravels the mystery, but the story is as much about the mysteries of life as it is about this particular crime.

While she is in California, Claire gets a call from a new client in New Orleans who wants her to find his uncle, Vic Willing, a prosecutor. The story is set a year or two after Katrina when the city was devastated by flood waters, and the city of New Orleans is one of the main characters in the book. There is none of the buzz and pulse and bright lights of touristy New Orleans. Houses are falling over. Buildings are abandoned. Garbage and death are everywhere, and it is a war zone populated by gangs and drive-by shootings. And Claire has little respect for the police or the criminal justice system. “New Orleans’ labyrinthine legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, didn’t help matters. Put it all together and New Orleans had both the highest murder rate and one of the lowest conviction rates in the country.”

She is haunted by memories of her mentor, Constance Darling, who introduced her to Jacques Silette. “Jacques Silette was a genius. So I thought.” Gran does such a good job developing this fictional character that I had to do a Google search to determine if Silette or his book Détection was actually real. One of the numerous threads in the story is learning to see the world and its accompanying clues as Silette saw them. Détection magically permeates many parts of Gran’s story - levels removed from reality by Gran to Dewitt to Constance Darling to Silette. The dominant characters in the story are Silette and New Orleans.

This is not a cozy, quick read, comfy chair crime story. And it’s definitely worth reading.

Social Media For Authors Review

Social Media for Authors

There are a lot of very good sales people touting their services to us poor, independent authors who are doing our best to try to figure out this crazy, crazy world of writing, publishing, and marketing a book. Some independent authors appear to be outrageously successful. You don’t hear as much about the millions who aren’t. There are services and then there are services to help with the services. There are organizations who offer help in sorting through the services. But I suppose, the same thing is true with colleges and universities. You really don’t know what you’ve got except by reputation. Unfortunately many of the services, schools and individuals who offer help and guidance to struggling authors, have no reputations except among themselves. So you have to do whatever research you can, test the waters on social networking, and then jump in and try. So that’s what I did.

I’m not very good at social networking. I always loved those advertisements that showed the father sitting outside his housing torturously typing in, “I’m sitting on the patio”. I could never see the point of telling the world everything that I am doing. If I was living an adventurous life, I wouldn’t have time to type that information into my phone.  I wouldn’t be able to pause and type one letter at a time, “Well, the squirrels are back in the attic.”

So I signed up for “Social Media for Authors” from the Self-publishing School”[1] I want to start out by saying that the promotions for these kinds of courses are remarkably good. They know how to push the right buttons, the buttons that you and I are looking for, answers to your most pressing questions like become a bestseller, sell more books, become a top selling Amazon author today, sell a 1000 books in the first year. I listened to one person who said, “If you’re making a five figure income with you books now, I want to get you to a six figure income. And if you’re making a six figure income, I want to push you to a seven figure income.” Really? Where do I sign up? And another thing, it is amazing how similar these pitches are. It’s like they all went to the same school to learn how to do this stuff. Well, they better be good at it, I guess. It’s what they’re professing to teach you how to do.

The young lady who teaches this Self-publishing School course is very enthusiastic and bubbly. It must have been hot where she talking from because she seemed to be sweating. The audio was good. She scrolled through things like my kids do – at a rapid rate, which was okay because since it’s recorded you can go back and figure out what you missed as it flew by. There is a lot of hype at the beginning talking about how important an author platform is which I knew because that was why I plunked down the money (or the credit card) for the course. There was a lot of fluff when there could have been substance. “Show don’t tell.”

The description of the course says that it will cover all the fundamental social networking platforms – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She starts with Twitter and spends the most time there. She provided information about cleaning up your account. (I think it looks pretty good: https://twitter.com/paul_raymer  ) She did a good job of showing how to search through hash tags. She talks about following people and using the daily Twitter hash tag “games” like #1linewed and #slapdashsat, things that I would never have known about.

When she moved on to Instagram, she related that the content that performs best are stories, your real face, your real life, and use of aesthetically appealing images of your book. Quotes do really well. She talked about Linktree (https://linktr.ee/ )which is a really cool way to squeeze in a bunch of connections when you only have one link to connect with.

Facebook, she said, is an older audience. I didn’t need to take this course to hear that. My kids have told me that! But that’s fine for me since the profile of my average reader is an older, well-educated audience. She provided guidance in how to clean up that profile as well. But there were little pieces of information missing like how do you set up a page as opposed to a profile. She said Facebook needs to be a very professional snapshot of what’s going on in your writing life.

When she finally got around to LinkedIn, the information was pretty thin. She made it clear that she didn’t think it was the place for fiction. I have had a page on LinkedIn for my professional profile for years and have many more followers there than on any of the other social networks. So I have taken it as a challenge to make it work for my fiction efforts. And that’s okay.

★★★☆☆

So in the spirit of the star rankings, I would give this course three stars, both for content and for value for money. I learned stuff, no doubt, but I’m not in a hurry to take other courses from these folks no matter how many times they bug me to do so. I am hopeful that there will be better places to spend my scarce, hard-earned writing dollars.

Oh, and one more thing. In the Master Class program, I love the way the instructors talk to me. They address me as ‘you’, as though it’s just the two of us sitting there talking. The instructor in this course talks to ‘you guys’ as though there are a dozen of us sitting here in front of my computer. Well, I certainly hope not.

[1] https://students.self-publishingschool.com/courses

In the Ground by Jeff Carson

Jeff Carson’s In the Ground is the 14th book in the David Wolf mystery thriller series and I have to tell you that I came into this series with this book and that was a problem for me. Both going into this story and coming out of this story there are a whole lot of connections to other episodes both in the past and to come in the future. There were lot of people who were only connected to this particular story because the protagonist knew them. I didn’t know them, and I wondered who they were and why they were there.

It’s a fascinating thing about characters in a series. Some authors manage to get the books to stand clearly on their own pages. Paul Doiron does that. Patrick O’Brien, Dudley Pope, and Dewey Lamdin do that in their sea stories. Elizabeth George does it well with Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Some authors don’t write their books in sequence but use the same characters like Agatha Christie with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

But it is a challenge to write the books in series, having the character age as the pages and books turn, with the risk that a new reader (like me in this case) is going to walk into the middle of it. My wife has a big family, and the first time I walked into the room and they all looked at me, I knew that I was never going to remember who they all were and how they were connected. But that was okay, because I knew that I was going to have time to get to know them. They were family and that was a reason to care.

It takes a powerful writer to rope a new reader so tightly into a group like that and keep their interest. All the characters have to be memorable. All the characters have to be interesting. The risk is that all those characters are in the author’s head, and they may be in the heads of faithful readers as well, but as a newbie to this series, it didn’t work for me. And looking through the reviews on Goodreads, Jeff Carson certainly has a lot of loyal fans.

It’s a good story. Wolf is the sheriff of a county in Colorado and he gets called into a murder scene when a body appears on the top of a gigantic machine in a mining operation. Wolf has all sorts of issues with his job and the people around him, while he tries to sort out who did the deed and why. In the process, another body shows up. Added to the mix is a female deputy that Sheriff Wolf finds attractive despite some disparity in their ages.

I wouldn’t call this a ‘thriller’ in the ilk of Robert Ludlum, David Baldacci, or Ian Fleming. The scenery is great and the main characters do have substance, but I felt that the plot line took a back seat to the ongoing story of the characters. As in all good mystery stories, the why drives the who. In this story, Using a maze of clues in following the how, Carson does a good job of burying the why until close to the end in an explosion of revelation and gunfire.

Carson’s writing is solid and the editing is good. This might be a story line that would be worth turning back, and following from the beginning.

One Last Lie by Paul Doiron

One Last Lie is the eleventh in the Mike Bowditch series by Paul Doiron. Mike is a Maine game warden but this book starts in Florida where Mike has been sent to perform his due diligence on the background for a new chief pilot for the Maine Warden Service. Mike’s friend, Charley Stevens, told him, “Never trust a man without secrets.” This is one of Doiron’s promises to the reader. He promises that he will tell us what the lie in the title means. He promises that he will tell us why Mike is in Florida and not Maine, and who the person might be that doesn’t have secrets. That’s a lot of promises before the reader makes it through the first paragraph.

Doiron is a solid storyteller and his books are a pleasure to read, and Mike is a wonderfully imperfect protagonist. Doiron follows through on those early promises and makes and answers a bunch more along the way. This story is a treasure quest that begins with a python hunt in the swamps of Florida, proceeds to a flea market in Machias, Maine, and then a plunge into the woods and a northern trek to the border with Canada. Mike seeks to find his friend and mentor who has mysteriously professed to disappearing forever, leaving a note which in itself is mysterious. Why leave a note if you want to disappear forever and not have anyone try to find you?

There are some great lines like, “Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences”. And “My love for the old man was close to unconditional. But this day signaled the end of my apprenticeship. I had no doubt that Charley Stevens would continue to teach me life lessons, but only small boys and fools worship other men. The point of life is to find heroism in yourself.”

There are some great action scenes like in the Florida swamp wrestling with a gigantic python. Doiron puts Mike on an island in a rushing river where there seems to be no way out. Threats all around - to him, to his friend Charley, to a partially innocent bystander with an evil, Dudley Do-right character changing his skin from good guy to villain. Nature plays a role - as it should in the wilds of the Maine woods.

This is not a major Don Quixote fable, but it is a solid backwoods yarn. Mike does have problems with his girlfriends, and it seems that Doiron is undecided about which way to go with that issue. It reminds me of the Lovin’ Spoonful song Did you ever have to make up your mind? Say yes to one and leave the other behind. Mike finally ends the story by lying to himself. And that is the last lie.

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Roseanna was published in 1965. It is a wonderful example of what appears to be a true police investigation of that era. I was not a police officer in Sweden in 1965 so I can’t say that for sure, but it seems real enough. There is a lot of waiting. There is a lot of down time when nothing happens. And the protagonist police officer, Martin Beck, gets a cold, doesn’t get enough rest, and doesn’t treat his wife well. But the authors carry it off and managed to retain my interest even through the quiet times. Slow moving stories like quiet singing can be difficult to execute well.

A naked and abused female body is found in the Göta Canal, during dredging with no way to identify her. With dogged investigation work and little bit of luck her identity is finally established as Roseanna McGraw, a tourist from the American midwest.

Besides the complexity of the lack of identity and the fact that the victim was on a boat with other tourists from all over the world, all of whom have to be tracked down and questioned, the world in the early ‘60’s was very different in terms of communication from what it is today. No cell phones. No internet. The fastest communication was a telegram and a telephone. Evidence was mailed and carried by plane across the Atlantic and then had to be translated into Swedish so Martin Beck - the lead police officer - could read it.

The story unwinds slowly and carefully. A couple of scenes near the end of the book as Martin Beck seeks to trap the killer are somewhat contrived, but that may be the distance of years.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the authors of the 1968 novel Laughing Policeman which was made into a movie in 1973 starring Walter Matthieu and Bruce Dern.

Review of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Mystic River

The praise has been effusive for Mystic River since it was published in February, 2001. The movie version came out on October 3, 2003, almost exactly 17 years ago. The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred Kevin Bacon as Sean Devine, Sean Penn as Jimmy Markum, Tim Robbins as Dave Boyle, Laurence Fishburne as Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers.

Lehane draws a clear social line between Boston neighborhoods of what he calls The Point and The Flats. He paints scenes of family life of both comradely and combative relationships and sets the story up with Sean, Jimmy, and Dave playing on the street as boys when a strange event occurs that will bring the three of them  - Jimmy as a former felon, Sean as a police officer, and Dave as someone very deeply scarred by the opening event who never figures out how to fight off his internal image of the Boy who Escaped from Wolves. The story involves several mysteries that seem to be intertwined, and Lehane does a masterful job of disentangling and resolving them.

Lehane paints vivid descriptive pictures of his characters such as this description of Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage. He “entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders.”

Sean’s thinking as a cop with a cop’s intuition, “You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes – beyond logic – and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes – to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.”

Lehane takes liberties with the control of his POVs, shifting from the inside of one character’s head to another, but it works for the story and for the atmosphere he created. These people are in a world they’ll never escape from. The neighborhoods themselves as they are moving from long term communities to yuppy havens getting gentrified and raising rents – the neighborhoods become characters in the story, characters that will clearly outlast the occupants because they are changing and the occupants are not.

It makes a good story, one that leads the reader on. I found the ending a bit slow and I found myself wishing that Lehane would just wrap it up. I can see why it was made into a movie as the tale has a depth and complexity if you want to pursue it or filtered down to its key elements that would fit into 137 minutes.

I would rank Mystic River as a Keeper.

402 pages

Wonderful Words

Sometimes a word in a book looks wrong, like a misspelling, like the copy editor made a mistake. And sometimes it is. But there are a huge number of wonderful words in the English language that we rarely run across. Chirk is a word like that.
“He emerged from the water, surged ahead, and caught up to her. Grabbing her, she chirked, emitting a happy high-pitched squeal.”
Chirk means to make a shrill, chirping sound.
Or how about mephitic: “Some of the players were returning to their cars, lugging bags filled with mephitic athletic attire.”

My son played football in high school and when he would climb into the car with that huge bag of sweaty jerseys and socks and the cowboy collar, the air in the car reeked for days even with all the windows open.
Procacious means insolent or arrogant in attitude or tone. “The twin, sloped, two-color taillights procaciously blended into the small tail fins on either side of the curving top of the tiny trunk, barely large enough to hold the spare tire.” This is part of the description of Jon Megquire’s MG Midget.

These are a couple of excerpts from my latest novel, Death At the Edge of the Diamond. Sometimes these words just seem to appear. Sometimes they come from Roget’s Thesaurus - a truly wonderful reference. I haven’t been able to make an electronic thesaurus work half as well.

Sometimes an author is just showing off and doesn’t truly appreciate the words he or she is messing around with. I might have found a simpler word than procacious, for example, but I was trying to evoke the almost sexual attraction of a first car to a new driver.

Sometimes a word is just wrong, misspelled or misused. A good copy editor will pick up most of these minor typos, but good copy editors are expensive and most self-published authors can’t afford them so unfortunately many hurriedly printed books even from reputable publishing houses have typos in them. Personally I think that this is strongly influenced by fast fingering small keyboards and reliance on auto-correct.

“If you read Death at the Edge of the Diamond carefully you may uncover other interesting words. If you send me what you find, I’ll put you on my list for a free, signed copy of my next book!”

— Paul H. Raymer