Posts Tagged ‘Book Reviews’

‘When the Nines Roll Over’

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Before David Benioff become a successful screenwriter he was a novelist. 25th Hour, the Spike Lee film staring Ed Norton, was first a book written by Benioff, for which he did the adaptation himself, and it’s an excellent book at that. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend doing so (the movie is pretty good, too1).

25th Hour is an incredibly well written and captivating book, and I thorougly enjoyed reading it. Based on that, I decided to give Benioff’s second book, the collection of short stories When the Nines Roll Over a try. Here’s a break down of the different stories in the book2, and my brief thoughts on each:

“When the Nines Roll Over”

It’s incredibly unfortunate that the book starts with, let alone is named after, this absolutely insipid story about an LA music exec and the young singer he finds, steals away from her band, renames, turns into a star, then beds. The whole way through I waited for there to be a moment that I’d start to care about anything I was reading, but nope. Nothing. Maybe this story is written for people who are still watching TRL, I don’t know. It was boring, uninteresting, and frankly I found the writing to be weaker on a technical level than what was in 25th Hour.

After reading this story I almost gave up on the book entirely. Thankfully I didn’t, because the next short story is…

“The Devil Comes to Orekhovo”

“The Devil Comes to Orekhovo” is, in my opinion, the most well written in the book. It paces slowly, but paints an amazingly vivid picture of a trio of young Russion soldiers on a mission in Chechnya. They’re alone in the woods, searching for rebels, and the eighteen year old Leksi has a lot to learn about being a soldier. The real meat of the story, which is where the story’s title comes into play, is captivating, and ultimately there’s a very sad element to the ending that I like a lot. This story reminded me the most of his book 25th Hour, in how clearly the world he’s describing is communicated. Really excellent.

“Zoanthropy”

At this point I was starting to think Benioff’s stories were going to be like Star Trek movies: the odd numbered ones would suck-ass and the even numbered one would be great. That is to say, “Zoanthropy” is another insipid tale about stuff. Honestly I don’t really remember what happens. I do, however, recall that I didn’t care, in spite of there being some thing about a lion in the story. And, as I’m sure you know, I’m a big fan of giant man eating cats, so that’s saying something.

“The Barefoot Girl in Clover”

“The Barefoot Girl in Clover” tells the story of a high school stud who steals a car and ends up meeting (big surprise) a barefoot girl in Clover.

I think the title of this story sets it up to be a whimsical love story — which it certainly is — but really this is a story about growing up, and how irreplaceable the moments of our youth are. As a person who does have a tendency for fond remembrance of the past, I really connected with this story the most of all the stories in the book, though I think the writing’s a bit shakier here than in some of the other stories. I think it’s a really compelling story.

“De Composition”

In “De Composition” Benioff tells the story of a man alone in a bunker, with only his computer to keep him company. It’s quite clearly a comment on our dependence upon these little machines, and on how truly fragile computers can be (from that you should be able to guess the ending). If I were still in school, and this was something I was reading in a lit class, I might be compelled to make the argument that this story is also a comment on the needs of a writer, and how desperately important the composition of a writer’s thoughts are. Of course, I’m not in school anymore, and we’ll just pretend it’s all about ‘puters.

The story is well written and effective.

“Garden of No”

Crap. It’s about a waitress who becomes an actress who blah blah blah I don’t care. David Benioff is married to actress Amanda Peet. I’m not saying she had anything to do with this story, but what I am saying is this story is worse than Saving Silverman.

“Neversink”

“Neversink” is the story of an English lit professor who falls for a free spirited girl who likes to tell stories about her deceased biker dad.

It’s an odd story, in that it’s written in the first person, as a letter or communique to someone. You find out who pretty quickly, and the story is pretty interesting, which is good. The other odd thing about the story, though, is that it’s not really about anyone. Sure, there are characters in the story that do things, but it’s hard to really pin down who the story was really about in the end. Is this really about the English lit professor? Is it about the girl? Is it really all about the dead dad? No clue. Totally up in the air. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

I found it enjoyable, otherwise.

“Merde for Luck”

The final story in the book begins on an airplane, with a stewardess baring down, nose in the air, upon the narrator, determined to figure out who crapped their pants. No, that’s not a joke or a metaphor. It’s poop. That is following by a jump into the narrator’s backstory, which consists of him at a “party”, naked on a tarp, with thirteen other men, a bucket of soapy water by his side, shaving the legs of one of those men with a straight razor. Ummmm… yeah.

It turns out that “Merde for Luck” is by far the best story in the book. No, not because of the poop, or the naked soapy men, but rather because it tells the most human story in the book. The characters are real. Their feelings are real. What they do is real. What they say is real. What happens to them is, unfortunately, quite real as well. And believe it or not, by the end of the story that first paragraph’s worth of description I just gave you all makes sense. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Benioff lived this story himself, which is the mark of excellent writing. While “The Devil Comes to Orekhovo” is a more well written story, “Merde for Luck” is certainly the most powerful of the bunch, and therefore, I believe, the best. Real human emotion in a story beats technical skill every time.

All in all, I recommend the book, though it would have been a lot stronger as a whole without a couple of these stories, including the titular one. Still, “The Devil Come to Orekhovo,” “The Barefoot Girl in Clover,” and “Merde for Luck” make the book absolutely worth checking out, though I’m not sure if there’s a lot of replay value here. You have to buy it second hand online, which I wasn’t comfortable doing, so I got it from the University library. If you are interested in the book I’d recommend checking your library options first.

  1. Aside from being an interesting story, it’s the first film that was made in New York after 9/11 that actually references 9/11. In one scene Barry Pepper’s character, a Wall Street guy, looks out the window of his apartment, and straight down into Ground Zero. It’s haunting, to say the least.↩
  2. Fun Trivia: I noticed there’s a Trojan Horse reference in the book, as well as the word “stay” highly emphasized. Benioff wrote the screenplay to the terrible film Troy, and he wrote the screenplay to the also terrible film Stay (staring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts). I didn’t notice a 25th Hour nod in there, though I might have just missed it.↩

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On Writing

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

I finally got around to reading Stephan King’s On Writing, and wow, it’s just excellent. King explains that the book is meant to be a short (and it is), but not shallow (and it isn’t), take on the art of writing. Half of the book focuses on King’s experiences on the road to becoming a writer, and the other half is dedicated to instruction on the craft. Though the second part of the book — the “textbook” part — is incredibly informative, there are countless gems to be found in the King’s personal story. In following his path to becoming a writer King is sharing with us not only what he learned, but how he learned it. For example, he writes of his first experience writing for the local newspaper:

I took my fair share of English Lit classes in my two remaining years at Lisbon, and my fair share of composition, fiction, and poetry classes in college, but [newspaper editor] John Gould taught me more than any of them, and in no more than ten minutes. I wish I still had the piece — it deserves to be framed, editorial corrections and all — but I can remember pretty well how it went and how it looked after Gould had combed through it with that black pen of his. … When he finished marking my copy … he looked up and saw something on my face. I think he must have mistaken it for horror. It wasn’t; it was pure revelation. Why, I wondered, didn’t English teachers ever do this? It was like the Visible Man Old Raw Diehl had on his desk in the biology room. “I only took out the bad parts, you know,” Gould said. “Most of it’s pretty good.” “I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good — okay anyway, servicable — and yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.” He laughed. “If that’s true, you’ll never have to work for a living. You can do this instead. Do I have to explain any of these marks?” “No,” I said. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

It’s remarkable to me that the idea of writing as though you’re telling yourself the story had never entered my mind, and yet it’s probably the most powerful concept expressed in King’s book. Over the course of the book that phrase — write with the door closed — comes up over and over again; it’s influence on King is unquestionable. At it’s core, it is a profound notion. Writing in a vacuum is actually much harder than one might suppose, and yet that’s what this is saying to do; to push out any concern for what other people will think about your writing, and focus on writing to feed your own artistic interests. I know I’ve never been able to do that, but after reading this book I feel that it’s of paramount importance that I do so in the future.

The book is written in a conversational style, with a wit and charm that makes the book easy to read. King’s personality pours off the page, though his can be a prickly personality at times. He takes every chance he can get to insult the worst of his writing brethren, which, as you might expect, makes him my kind of guy. King begins the “textbook” portion of the book with the following paragraph:

There are no bad dogs, according to the title of a popular training manual, but don’t tell that to the parent of a child mauled by a pit bull or a rottweiler; he or she is apt to bust your beak for you. And no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers. Some are on-staff at your local newspaper, usually reviewing little-theater productions or pontificating about the local sports teams. Some have scribbled their way to homes in the Caribbean, leaving a trail of pulsing adverbs, wooden characters, and vile passive-voice constructions behind them. Others hold forth at open-mike poetry slams, wearing black turtlenecks and wrinkled khaki pants; they spout doggerel about “my angry lesbian breasts” and “the tilted alley where I cried my mother’s name.”

Aside from the irresistible urge to write about my own “angry lesbian breasts”1 I feel a total connection to King and his description of these shit-writers. I’ve met these people. I’m probably one of these people. It’s this kind of fun irreverence that carries on in the book, and it makes On Writing a joy to read.

If you’re a writer, or you have any kind of passing interest in writing, I cannot recommend this book enough. It is nothing less than required reading. If you’re not a writer, then I still recommend this book. The personal stories King tells are fascinating — and sometimes moving — and his writing style is lively and entertaining. It is a fun, easy read that can teach you something in the process. I got my copy from the library, but I going to order a copy from Amazon to have on hand. And remember, I’m a cheap bastard, so that’s saying something.

  1. That makes no sense for so many reasons.↩

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