The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Burden by Mary Westmacott

Book #11 of 2023:

The Burden by Mary Westmacott

The sixth and final novel that author Agatha Christie published under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym is unfortunately also the weakest. It starts off alright, tracing the childhood of a girl whose mother and father both resent her for living when her older brother dies of polio, and how she initially hates her younger sister in turn before eventually saving her from a fire and then stepping up to raise her when the parents are killed in a plane crash. But all that death speeds by rather quickly, and just when it seems like the narrative is going to slow down and focus on the two surviving characters as adults, we switch to an entirely different protagonist who then spends most of the rest of the book philosophizing about religion until his story finally reconnects with that of the young women. It’s overall a bit of a mess, with multiple proclamations of love and marriage proposals following after an acquaintanceship of mere weeks, and what feels intended to be a shocking reveal in the last few pages is built up so poorly that it barely even registers.

Generally I think that the psychological Westmacott titles are unfairly overlooked amid the writer’s more famous mystery career, but this one, like the earlier Unfinished Portrait, absolutely deserves the modern obscurity.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, and alcohol abuse.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #10 of 2023:

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One-and-a-half stars, begrudgingly rounded up for my enjoyment of the heroine’s extended family. I nearly quit this book several times, and it’s by far my least favorite of the five Taylor Jenkins Reid titles I’ve now read. The characters are decently fleshed-out, and the basic premise of a couple realizing their marriage is in trouble and embarking on a one-year trial separation is an interesting hook. But they’re both such awful, destructive people to each other and themselves that I’ve found it impossible to stay invested in their respective happiness and the question of whether they’ll ultimately find it by staying apart or getting back together.

I think for the structure of this piece to work, we would need to see that Lauren and Ryan used to be great partners, that they’re currently in crisis, and that they eventually manage to improve again. And although the writer does provide initial flashbacks to their eleven-year romantic history, their dynamic feels aggressive and off-putting to me all throughout. They’ve sunk to a new low at the story’s start only in that they’ve become outwardly hostile and resentful, but they were already belittling and picking fights with one another on their honeymoon! There are no good times to ever return to — which could still be the setup to a solid narrative, but it’s not the one we’re presented with here. Instead, all the talk is on these ex-lovers recapturing a magic that I’m not convinced was real in the first place.

And they’re no better further into the experiment, either. While separated, she logs into his inbox and reads his emails, including the unsent drafts addressed to her. (Some folks in her life call her out on this blatant invasion of privacy, but she keeps doing it and appears to be reassured by her friend’s bizarre victim-blaming logic that if he really wanted to shield those messages from her, he would have changed his password.) He later confesses some wildly inappropriate and violent thoughts, like that he wants to punch a wall every time she suggests getting international food like pho or that he’s had dreams of killing her new boyfriend, despite the hypocritical fact that he’s now dating someone else at that point too. Please save these things for therapy, sir! At least his domestic abuse stays mostly inside his head; she actually does throw a vase across the room at him just before they decide to try splitting up.

I don’t require protagonists in fiction to be perfect. Most of the time, their flaws render them more believably human and feed a stronger drama around them. Yet for the thrust of a novel to be about nominally recognizing and addressing such faults, it’s galling to see no evidence of personal growth whatsoever. I guess by the end both spouses have learned that they should communicate better and make fewer assumptions about what the other one is thinking? But this is not a revelation that seems remotely earned in the text.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Book #9 of 2023:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I’ve seen so many book reviews and even official publishing descriptions that compare other titles to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History — it’s apparently a belated inspiration for the modern ‘dark academia’ genre — so I knew that I would eventually need to check out this 1992 novel for myself. And although the slow pace and apparent aimlessness at the beginning doesn’t thrill me, everything clicks into place and starts humming along nicely about a quarter of the way through, with the revelation of the big secret that the narrator’s new classmates have been keeping from him and its grisly aftermath tensely driving the remainder of the text.

But let me back up a second and set the scene. The story dawns at a small liberal arts college in New England, where the protagonist has just transferred and joined an exclusive clique of classics students. He’s looking back on this time from much later, and one of the first things we’re told is that the study group will eventually band together and murder one of its members. At that aforementioned pivot point, we learn it’s because the future victim has been blackmailing the others and threatening to go to the police over his knowledge of their crimes, but until then, the newcomer is on the outside of all that, vaguely sensing an occasionally charged atmosphere but generally oblivious to its specific contours.

Once we know why Bunny is in the crosshairs, the narrative progresses to the planning and execution (sorry) of his demise, followed by the repercussions on campus, the ensuing investigation, and the steady unraveling of his murderers’ psyches. It should be obvious that none of these characters are particularly nice people, but I appreciate how richly they’re drawn, especially our matter-of-fact hero who never stops to consider whether killing someone for inconveniencing your friends might be in any way morally wrong or even up for debate. The implicit sociopathy there reminds me of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and indeed, our leading man is the only one of the killers who doesn’t seem to be spiraling into a crisis in the period after, although none of them ever evince significant guilt or remorse. At one point, one appears genuinely perplexed at the idea of punishment and accountability, saying, “It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers’ interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.”

To a certain extent, this is also a blistering commentary on the insistent privilege of the uber-wealthy, since the original crew are all scions of the upper crust, although Richard’s own status as the poorer outsider who becomes equally complicit somewhat muddies that reading. But I personally don’t think Tartt is condemning their social class per se, so much as the moral emptiness endemic to it, which the latest arrival happens to share despite his own lack of wealth. Left unspoken is whether the author is suggesting that the study of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations precisely inspires such nihilism, which is an interpretation I know some have advanced.

The most surprising aspect of this work to me is that the students’ professor / advisor is barely in it beyond being introduced with the major red flag that he will be the sole teacher and guidance counselor for his program, leaving his pupils isolated and with no easy avenue to report him for any perceived misconduct. I also know from other tales of this sort that a charismatic figure is typically to blame for the initial fall from grace, so I was expecting either him or one of the undergraduates or even the narrator himself to eventually fill this role. But the book subverts that expectation, keeping Julian largely outside of the sphere of drama and in his absence never really coalescing around a leader who’s primarily responsible for all the discord. If any temptation derailed the trajectories of these bright young folks, it must have happened well before the plot begins.

That’s a wonderfully unsettling notion, as intriguing as the barest hints of the supernatural that we get on the outskirts of the story, or the writer’s immersively textured portrayal of campus life amid all the hedonism and violence. I would not want to attend the fictional Hampden myself — or Tartt’s real alma mater of Bennington whose decadence in the 80s reportedly inspired it — but its miscreants are presented in a way that’s difficult to look away from, all the way through to their deservedly sordid ends.

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, suicide, gore, incest, disordered eating, domestic abuse, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 1

TV #3 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 1

This will be at least my third full watch-through of Gilmore Girls, which I think speaks to the overall quality of the program, but also to the ways in which a multigenerational drama like this can resonate with various audiences at various ages. The first time I watched this show, I identified strongly with Rory, the overachieving A-student bookworm who’s struggling with making friends at her new school and navigating her initial forays into dating. The big hook to the series is of course that she’s the child of a teen mom, now at that same age herself — and while Lorelai’s background is thus very different from mine, when I returned for a rewatch closer in age to her than to her kid, I found her adult plots had grown more relevant and I’d often see things more from her perspective during the occasional mother-daughter squabbles.

I’m now slightly older than Lorelai, and with young kids of my own, so I was interested to see whether she’d still be my primary point of entry and identification here. (Surely I’m not old enough to be an Emily yet, right? I’ll admit there are a few fights this year where I take the matriarch’s side and think Lorelai is being immature and needlessly hostile.) But honestly, I’m not sure if I’m feeling that sense of affiliation with any of them right now. I’m between Gilmores for once! If anything, I think I am vibing most heavily with Rory’s academic rival Paris, who is blisteringly funny, just as intelligent as her friend/nemesis, and quite plainly somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum. Her prickly exterior is a clear cover for a lot of pain, and I look forward to seeing her character get explored and developed further in the seasons ahead.

Overall, it’s a joy to become reacquainted with Stars Hollow, that impossibly cute and quirky small town in New England populated with troubadours and ridiculous community meetings and brunettes who talk with the fast patter of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing staffers. I love how this is a serialized narrative about these people’s lives that unfolds naturally over time, and will continue to do so from here on out, with every episode carrying a clear sense of the prior context it’s building upon. Showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino makes it all look easy, especially given the TV landscape in the year 2000 when this debuted. (She was only 34 then, too — my current age!)

Two decades on, it’s also impressive how timeless these moments feel. Beyond the presence of pagers and a few dated cultural references, it all seems more or less set in the present day still. That’s the nature of this sort of slice-of-life storytelling, I suppose: homework and relationship troubles and family arguments remain topical forever.

Not all of the plots entirely land for me, at least when grading on a curve in memory of what’s yet to come. Luke and Lorelai’s mutually skittish interest is a real winner, as is the general premise of the program and how the setup of Friday night dinners brings Emily and Richard Gilmore back into their daughter and granddaughter’s lives. Dean as Rory’s first boyfriend is generally fine. But neither Max nor Rachel ever feels like a wholly fleshed-out creation, with each registering more as an obviously temporary roadblock than a legitimate romantic option for their respective partner. And for all that the season one finale tries to dramatically summarize and wrap up several important ongoing threads, it makes the major misstep of leaving out the older generation of Gilmores completely.

So four-out-of-five stars (Hollow) seems appropriate for this debut run of the series. It’s a strong foundation, and I can’t wait to see it get even better from here.

[Content warning for homophobia.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Book #8 of 2023:

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Romance is not one of my typical genres, but every once in a while, a title picks up enough positive chatter to break through and catch my attention. It probably helps that this particular novel is about two very bookish characters — the heroine a literary agent and her eventual love interest an editor — which means that folks in my social circles who follow such new releases have been very eager to buzz about their fictional counterparts.

And it is a fun story, with a handful of personal caveats. I like how driven and genre-savvy the protagonist is, and how she immediately establishes that she’s the kind of person who gets dumped at the end of a Hallmark movie — the Peloton-riding, big city career woman whose boyfriend has chosen to ditch her for the Christmas tree farmer or whoever he just met while traveling through the American heartland. I also enjoy that although she herself does experience a reawakening of sorts during a visit to a small town in rural North Carolina, it’s with a fellow New Yorker she already knows professionally, rather than the type of yokel she’s been left for in the past. That setting is cute in a Stars Hollow sort of way too, complete with ridiculous community meetings full of colorful personalities. And I appreciate how the family drama with Nora’s sister is ultimately of greater importance than the prospect of whether she’ll end up with the guy or not.

As for the negatives, I don’t feel like the inclusion of a secondary romantic interest is ever necessary to the plot or justified as in-character for the heroine to pursue when she’s already quite smitten with his cousin. Similarly, the stretch of the book when the couple keep insisting that they can never be together despite their obvious attraction and burgeoning feelings strikes me as pretty flimsy, as though manufactured for maximum melodrama by authorial fiat rather than arising organically from the people and situations themselves. But maybe readers who are more into this kind of rom-com narrative in the first place wouldn’t mind those tropes as much.

Finally, I have to say that as strongly as I can identify with these lovers as fellow bookworms and relate to how they feel about stories in the abstract, I am very pleased that author Emily Henry hasn’t gone the route of peppering her text with constant name-dropping of her/their favorite books and writers. I’ve read novels like that before, and they always turn out sounding smug and self-satisfied whether I get the references or not. It works much better here for the main authors under discussion to be the protagonist’s (fictional) clients, rather than a stream of real-life plugs. So overall, this was a fine read for me, and a reminder that sometimes it’s nice to wander a bit from our familiar routines.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)

Movie #1 of 2023:

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)

This seemingly-unnecessary feature film installment for the long-running Fox cartoon turns out to be a delightful surprise, especially coming after several seasons of television that haven’t struck me as all too creatively fruitful. Perhaps the production team’s attention was on this project instead? Whatever the reason, Bob’s Burgers translates very well to the big screen, essentially playing out as one massive but thoroughly excellent episode.

The story really isn’t doing much that a typical half-hour of the program couldn’t — even the musical numbers and action sequences have clear TV predecessors — but the jokes have more time to build and land, and the whole thing just feels like a love letter to the show’s particular strengths while remaining entirely accessible to newcomers. The script includes a lot of our favorite weirdos who have featured over the past dozen years, avoiding the threadbare feeling of some sequels like this, but it also doesn’t strain to incorporate every such figure, which would be another easy pitfall.

The core focus is on the Belchers as it should be — followed by Teddy and the Fischoeder brothers, which is a sharp choice for solid stakes and hilarious drama — and each member of the family gets their own arc and specific crisis / dilemma over the course of the movie (with the exception of Linda, whose issue of the financial straits facing the restaurant is of course shared with Bob). Louise is worried that people think she’s babyish for still wearing her pink bunny ears everywhere. Tina wants to find the courage to ask Jimmy Jr. to be her summer boyfriend. Gene has a new sound that everyone else finds super-annoying. And Bob himself is struggling to stay optimistic in light of the giant sinkhole that’s opened up in front of the building and revealed a literal buried skeleton.

The ensuing murder mystery is what ties in the landlord and his circle and gives the narrative its primary momentum, but it’s all mostly just an excuse to hang out with these wacky characters at Wonder Wharf for a couple hours. Although the upgraded animation style may be a little jarring at first, it’s overall a smooth transition that’s well worth it for anyone who’s ever been a fan of the franchise, and relatively forgiving continuity-wise for those viewers who have fallen off keeping up from week to week. I could even see recommending this for someone as an introduction to the series at its best, which is much higher praise than I expected to have for the piece before watching.

[Content warning for bullying, gun violence, live burial, and desecration of human remains.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Book #7 of 2023:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

I know this 1968 novel is a beloved fantasy classic for many, but I’ll admit that reading it for the first time today, I’ve struggled to connect with the characters or their story. The imagery is certainly beautiful enough, and the equity in gender representation is a step up from The Lord of the Rings, but the long stretch of plot during which the titular unicorn has been transformed into a fair human maiden of minimal agency (who’s initially titillatingly naked, of course) really leaves me cold. I’m also not a big fan of the half-hearted anachronisms in what’s otherwise a straightforward fairytale out of mytho-historical Europe, which was the same issue I remember having with The Once and Future King. I think tonally I need either a full-on Shrek level embrace of that sort of chaos, or else the use of elaborate worldbuilding in place of generic olden times for the setting.

Now, there’s something very poignant about the initial premise of a creature discovering she might be the last of her kind left in the world, and I especially love the detail that most folks have lost the ability to even recognize a unicorn when they see one, somehow overlooking the glowing horn and continually mistaking her for a simple wild mare instead. (I’m reminded of the similarly forlorn Narnians in The Last Battle who convince themselves that animals can’t talk despite all evidence to the contrary, to the extent that it finally becomes tragically true for them.) I also appreciate how author Peter S. Beagle skews against genre convention / expectation for his ending, even to the point of making characters metafictionally reflect on the unwanted yet compelling nature of their respective hero, damsel, and villain roles.

Yet all of that ultimately adds up to a title that I enjoy in pieces, rather than as a composite whole. The soul of the work generally passes me by, resulting in a personal rating of three stars on the Goodreads scale: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Book #6 of 2023:

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

This sophomore work from 2010 is definitely an Emily St. John Mandel title, displaying that author’s trademark tendency towards a narrative that unfolds nonlinearly, disclosing new elements of explanatory character backstory well after we’ve been following the cast’s foibles in the present day. I think it’s an improvement over her debut novel Last Night in Montreal too, although I don’t love it nearly as much as her later Sea of Tranquility or especially Station Eleven.

I particularly enjoy the beginning of this book — long before either the titular singer or her gun has shown up in the plot — which largely revolves around a rather Kafkaesque situation at the protagonist’s office. His employers have discovered that he likely falsified his credentials to get the job, but they don’t have quite enough proof to fire him, so instead they gradually restrict his company access until he is showing up each day to an empty room on an otherwise unused floor of the building with no responsibilities whatsoever. (And why not? He’s still getting paid for this! It doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me at all, and I wouldn’t even have to resort to throwing crumpled-up pieces of newspaper out the window to keep myself occupied.)

It’s a great sketch and a pointed satire of corporate America from the Canadian writer, but she loses me in the back half of the text, when we’ve learned enough about the estranged worker to find him more pathetic and odious than endearing. He gaslights and cheats on his fiancée, whom he then marries and abandons on their honeymoon to help the cousin he’s had a lifelong incestuous crush on, whose criminal career appears to have progressed from smuggling and selling fake IDs to outright human-trafficking. Phew! I suppose the smooth reversal of reader favor is evidence of Mandel’s skill, but at a certain point I have difficulty investing in her creation’s self-inflicted angst or still rooting for a happy ending to come his way. While the closing arc does indeed bring us the promised singer and her gun, their arrival comes too late to feel integrated as storyline essentials, let alone to make up for how little I care for the ostensible hero by then.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

Book #5 of 2023:

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn (Legendborn #2)

The plot in the middle of this YA fantasy sequel picks up a little, but the beginning spends too long reiterating the overall premise — a Black teenager from North Carolina finds herself the unlikely inheritor of King Arthur’s magical powers, which she must use to fend off both an impending demon war and the racists in Legendborn society who don’t think she belongs — and engaging in some empty political intrigues. And while the action improves as the story goes on, it also becomes more of a romance with the protagonist’s angsty brooding bodyguard, which is not especially to my taste. (Plus it’s strange to read an apparent love triangle where the heroine was with / still has feelings for the first guy, but he’s now absent for most of the present volume and she evinces no guilt or conflict over her budding attraction to his best friend. If they all survive I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if these characters end up in some sort of polyamorous triad, but it’s bizarre that no one is talking or thinking about the potential for misunderstanding, betrayal, and hurt here in the meantime.)

I’m not sure whether this is intended to be a trilogy or a longer series, but I remain interested enough in where it’s all headed to check back in for the next novel. I do think this one is a step down from the debut, however.

[Content warning for slavery and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 12

TV #2 of 2023:

Bob’s Burgers, season 12

I’m not quite caught up on Bob’s Burgers — there’s the block that’s currently airing, plus the feature film that came out last summer yet to go. But this is the latest full season to be released, which I’m finally through after starting from the pilot and watching an episode most nights for close to a year. At this point it’s hard to be wholly checked-in as a viewer, especially since the series itself hasn’t evinced any particular aspirations of growth or substantive plot developments in rather a while. At best… I guess Louise has a new loft bed now? That actually comes up again in episodes after its introduction, which makes it feel more meaningful than nearly any other incident across this run. But we’re obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel for continuity there.

I think part of the problem I’m having with this show rests in its stubborn insistence on doing annual holiday episodes for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and so on, while also keeping the characters in a permanent state of timeless stasis. The kids are 13, 11, and 9, as they have been for over a decade now. It’s a sleight-of-hand that plenty of other long-running cartoons engage in as well, but it’s made weirder when Bob’s Burgers keeps showing us these new installments of festive celebration. We’ve seen twelve Christmases with nine-year-old Louise. Which ones are ‘real’ for her, in the sense that she remembers and could plausibly have been shaped by experiencing them? How are we meant to understand it when she complains about how her father always acts on Thanksgiving? How can we respond emotionally when her sister and Bob share happy dreams about the older girl’s future prom, when she’d already be well out of college in any reality with a normal progression of time?

Maybe these things don’t bother you. If you’re an audience member who tunes into a program like this primarily/exclusively for the jokes, you are in luck: it’s still pretty funny! The central family and their extended town of weirdos have well-established personalities that clash nicely and produce a range of entertaining comic scenarios and punchlines. In any given half-hour, I’m certain to laugh repeatedly. I’m not disappointed by the humor, even though I’m rarely entirely surprised by it.

Nevertheless, I personally watch television for at least the illusion of serialization, the impression that events are building in an ongoing narrative that has a weight and texture for the protagonists living it. Some sitcoms can achieve this, and this particular title managed to do so at first, which is one of the main elements that helped get me hooked. But it’s all felt considerably more hollow lately.

★★★☆☆