The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 1

TV #30 of 2022:

Abbott Elementary, season 1

A really strong and funny sitcom debut! I have a couple critiques that are holding me back from an utterly glowing five-star review, but this mockumentary series about teachers at an underfunded, majority-Black, inner-city Philadelphia school is generally sweet and hilarious alike. It also feels fresh in its subject matter, at least compared to other comedies that I’ve watched, thanks to the distinctive workplace rhythms and events of the elementary curriculum. There’s a real confidence and specificity to the writing that helps the characters pop, both in service to and beyond their immediate punchlines. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets built on such a solid foundation after this.

As for my nitpicking: logistically, it’s very weird to me that our main cast so far consists of one kindergarten teacher, one first-grade teacher, two second-grade teachers, a social studies teacher, and their principal, with little of an extended supporting ensemble behind them. There is one custodian in a recurring role, but otherwise no other faculty or students who register as consistent presences throughout this run. Maybe the documentarians are only following a handful of staff who all share the same lunch schedule or something? It gets odder the more you think about it, though, like when those particular classes take a field trip to the zoo and their kids who didn’t get permission have to stay with the janitor, rather than in one of the countless classrooms that apparently aren’t attending either.

My other issue is that this first year leans hard on a Jim/Pam dynamic between two coworkers while missing what exactly made that relationship on The Office so special. On that program, the pair are already intimate pals and the single one is struggling with the blossoming romantic interest he’s feeling for his friend who’s unfortunately seeing someone else (a manchild we’re encouraged by the narrative to root against). That framework gets mapped pretty directly onto the people at Abbott in the early episodes, complete with Gregory’s best deadpan Halpert stares at the camera, but it doesn’t fly when he’s a new long-term sub who’s never even met Janine before. Staring longingly at a stranger you work with isn’t a cute crush or a mark of a star-crossed love affair; it’s just plain creepy!

So the concept has some problems that will hopefully be workshopped and smoothed out as the show continues, but overall these thirteen initial installments represent a terrific start.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Book #104 of 2022:

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

This Argentinian novel is a stomach-churning dark satire, presenting a dystopian future where all animals have caught a virus making them poisonous for human consumption and people have resorted to widespread cannibalism in order to satisfy their protein needs. Some individuals give up their flesh upon death, and some volunteer to be hunted in exchange for a massive payout if they elude capture, but mostly, this new demand is met by converting the existing slaughterhouse supply chain and raising an entire class of undesirables as livestock. I cannot overemphasize how disgustingly brutal a read this is, even as someone who just finished Battle Royale, with author Agustina Bazterrica matter-of-factly covering every step of the process from forced breeding and removal of infant vocal cords to a lifetime in solitary cages all the way through to an early end in a grisly abattoir, sometimes with individual limbs harvested piecemeal in advance.

It’s effective cultural commentary, both on the awful things that humans have done and continue to do to one another — this feels so over-the-top, but it’s admittedly hard to draw clear-cut lines between it and the worst excesses of chattel slavery — and on the way we currently treat farmed creatures like chickens and cows. In the exaggerated style of an offensive PETA ad, it traffics in highly-problematic imagery of dehumanization, and while it probably won’t convert you to veganism, it might well get you feeling defensive and introspective about that choice.

My problem here is twofold. First, I don’t think the premise is set up well enough to make the leap necessary to suspend disbelief. (Folks can’t just turn to tofu, or beans, or lab-grown meat, or Impossible / Beyond Burgers, or any of the countless other commonplace strategies that vegetarians use everyday without eating anyone? These cannibals are honestly fine with serving, cooking, and consuming recognizable body parts, something that many of us are too squeamish to do even for other species today?) And secondly, in a world of such horrors, I simply don’t have much patience for the butcher protagonist’s angst about his dead son, elderly father, or estranged wife, let alone the way he illegally domesticates and impregnates one of the female subjects under his jurisdiction. Maybe that’s intentional on the writer’s part, to emphasize how we apply euphemisms to the ugliness around us and focus on our petty personal lives; I don’t know. But it comes off more as a weak counterbalance to the shock-effect grossness on display, and doesn’t offer anyone or anything worth investing in as a reader.

[Content warning for racism, rape, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Book #103 of 2022:

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

First published in 1999 (or 2003, for the English translation), this controversial thriller posits a dystopian Japan where school classes of fifteen-year-olds, selected by random lottery, are forced to fight one another to the death each year. The children are kidnapped, locked into metal collars lined with explosives and GPS trackers, given an assortment of weapons and the instruction to kill their classmates, and then set loose on a deserted island that will steadily grow more and more off-limits as the time goes on. It’s one part The Long Walk, one part Lord of the Flies, and one part obvious early precursor to The Hunger Games.

It’s also astonishingly graphic in its violence, even by the standards of those already-bloody comparison works. Although written pre-Columbine, it’s hard to read now, two decades of school shootings later, without at least a twinge of unease at all the juvenile murder. Not that books like this have necessarily normalized or even encouraged such massacres, but author Koushun Takami is clearly being political with this concept as a critique of totalitarian government, and it’s discomforting to realize how his provocative excess has grown less and less removed from our reality today, and accordingly difficult to enjoy the subject as fiction. I’ve never seen the movie adaptation, and I certainly don’t intend to now.

Yet for all those qualms, it really is a fantastic story. The presentation of 42 Japanese character names is initially somewhat overwhelming, but many die soon after becoming the focus of a chapter, which makes it easier to track the ten or so who predominate throughout the text. What follows is a pulse-pounding page-turner, especially with each section ending on a dwindling reminder of how many students remain alive. And while the Hunger Games similarities are unavoidable for a modern reader, I greatly prefer how this novel takes us from perspective to perspective, rather than staying fixed on just a single hero like Katniss. Takami writes with great empathy for these doomed schoolchildren, only a couple of whom are truly bloodthirsty and relishing the opportunity to lash out at the cohort they’ve known all their lives. For the most part, they are just frightened and trapped by circumstances into becoming the worst versions of themselves at the least convenient moment. It’s a trust exercise writ large, and it’s heartbreaking yet understandable as we successively get to know them and see them fail.

In fact, I’d argue that the real thematic point of the project, beyond its gore and its pointed digs at bureaucratic notions of acceptable losses, is in the importance of community-building. Again and again across the plot, the players who band together survive for a while longer, while the loners or the groups who fracture under the strain inevitably come to a sorry end. It’s a tragic arc that repeats itself in various configurations till the end, and it’s why that conclusion does not actually follow a particularly grim fake-out in the final pages, besides just the fun of the twist. For the moral heart of the tale being told, it matters who ultimately leaves the island and how.

Even setting all that aside, the book is packed with iconic scenes and personalities (many of which are expanded upon further in the manga version by the same author). They live and breathe until they don’t, feeling like real teenagers in their nobility and foolishness alike. An overactive sex drive distracts and kills some, while a core protagonist goes out of his way to protect a dead friend’s crush. There are kids who willingly if not eagerly participate in the game, while others aim only for survival and a few seek a way to bring down the system on its overseers. All in all I can understand exactly why I found it so striking back in high school myself, although I don’t think I’ll need to reread it again now for quite a long time to come.

[Content warning for rape, underage prostitution, suicide, homophobia including slurs, domestic abuse, and gun violence.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 5

TV #29 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 5

Another strong year of Bob’s Burgers, albeit maybe a slight step down from the one before, if only because I don’t know that I’d include any of these individual episodes on an all-time favorites list. But they generally remain funny and confident explorations of characters, with the writers periodically coming up with new insights that still feel familiar and true to this wacky family and their even weirder extended town. So we get some deeper shading of Louise’s mixed jealousy and protectiveness of her sister in bits like “Tina Tailor Soldier Spy,” for instance, or a good look at Gene’s particular sort of eleven-year-old flightiness in “Best Burger” or “The Itty Bitty Ditty Committee.” While he continues to be more of a caricature than anyone else in the main cast, any further development on that front is most appreciated.

Sitcoms are hard to review, but this one reliably surprises me and makes me laugh, and by this point it’s rare for the plots to seem either derivative or predictable (although the water balloon fight in “The Oeder Games” surely owes quite a bit to Community‘s paintball adventures). For now, I’m happy to keep on watching.

★★★★☆

Book Review: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke

Book #102 of 2022:

This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke

Author Katherine Locke nails the tense and paranoid atmosphere in this fictionalized account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (a student-led uprising against Soviet control that ultimately failed, although the novel doesn’t track the conflict all the way to its bitter end). And as ever with this writer, I enjoy the #ownvoices Jewish representation that they have incorporated in the text, including but not limited to some ugly yet realistic antisemitism from people on either side of the struggle. However, the more fantastic / magical realist pieces here don’t quite succeed for me, from the river in Budapest randomly turning into stone and back to the late-reveal that everything before has been in grayscale, with the blue sky glimpsed through a torn flag the first color that the revolutionaries have seen in years.

One of the love interests for the heroine is also a literal angel of death who’s there to escort fallen children to the beyond, which is the sort of idea that could work, but would need a much stronger foundation supporting it, especially given this being’s status as a secondary viewpoint protagonist. Like the other supernatural elements, his nature is described in an unsatisfyingly vague and oblique way, and never questioned by the characters who seem otherwise grounded in a recognizable reality. I do appreciate how he settles into a polyamorous relationship with Csilla and a human boy, one of several queer touches throughout the story, but overall this just doesn’t read as a cohesive whole to me.

[Content warning for gun violence, secret police, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

Book #101 of 2022:

The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #19)

It was interesting to read this novel soon after watching the first season of Bosch: Legacy, which adapted both of its main plotlines: the quest to find a possible heir to dying billionaire Whitney Vance and the hunt for a serial rapist who cuts through window screens to access his victims. Those parallel stories obviously don’t carry nearly the same weight as one another in either version, but at least here, both cases are Harry’s to work on. (His daughter Maddie is still a college sophomore at this point in the book series, whereas she’s a rookie cop investigating the crime spree on the show.) So there’s a natural tension as the ex-LAPD detective tries to split his time and satisfy both his PI client and the smaller police force he’s been volunteering with lately, especially once he starts improperly using resources from the latter to help out with the former.

But the Vance issue is a cold case that feels abstract and bloodless for too long as the hero scans through archival records from decades ago, and the prowler takes on new urgency when — spoiler alert for both this and the TV program — he abducts and assaults Bosch’s partner, raping her and holding her captive while the rest of the team scrambles to determine where she crossed paths with the suspect and rescue her. It’s a problematic victimization of a character we barely know just to raise the stakes for the male protagonist, and it makes me even more wary of how the Freevee adaptation ended its debut year with a cliffhanger of Maddie’s apparent abduction by the same creep. While that sort of climax is undeniably pulse-pounding in the moment, I would not say this is the franchise’s finest hour overall on either page or screen.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Resistance by K. A. Applegate

Book #100 of 2022:

The Resistance by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #47)

Although the Animorphs books are short, they tend to be rich in heavy and complicated thematic material, which is why my reviews discussing them often wind up quite extensive. But there’s honestly not much to say about this one. The plot is half the regular length, because Jake’s story alternates with that of his ancestor fighting back in the Civil War. The parallel situations are reductively obvious, and the alternate viewpoint contributes basically nothing to justify its share of the pages. Meanwhile in the present, the team helps the free Hork-Bajir defend their colony by turning into beavers and rerouting a river to drown the approaching Yeerk army.

A few interesting details stand out, like that the kids have apparently learned how to morph jeans and t-shirts at some point, rather than the skin-tight bike shorts and leotards that have been their morphing outfits for so long. Or how the once-pacifist aliens refuse to flee their land without a fight, just like how a group of freedmen in the past insist on staying and helping the Union soldiers against similar overwhelming odds. Or the sci-fi enthusiast campers who won’t move from the path of the coming battle until Jake makes them the latest humans to learn the big secret about the invasion, after which several decide to pitch in with the immediate resistance effort too.

But overall, this is an okay three-star outing hitched to a two-star dud of a throughline, for a two again altogether taking that structure into account. It’s a rare miss both for credited author K. A. Applegate and prolific ghostwriter Ellen Geroux, and it doesn’t feel remotely appropriate for such a late-franchise volume. Jake has scenes with his family in which no one even mentions how his lifelong best friend and his dad were supposedly recently killed! It just doesn’t track logically or emotionally for where the series ought to be at this stage.

[Content warning for body horror, gun violence, racism, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Movie #11 of 2022:

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

This is generally another fun Marvel movie, but it’s one that feels frustratingly both overstuffed and understaffed. True to its title, there is a lot of universe-hopping, yet only to realities we’ve never seen before (after Spider-Man: No Way Home, for all its own faults, showed the power of tapping into audience nostalgia by applying the multiverse framework to film franchises not originally in the MCU). So although we get a version of — spoiler alert — Professor Charles Xavier here, it’s not one that actually corresponds to any of the prior X-Men movies, nor is he joined by any other mutants from that corner of the Marvel Comics IP empire. Reed Richards, too, is the sole representative of his traditional team for some unexplained reason, and while there’s a certain thrill in seeing these characters in this continuity for the first time since Disney bought Fox Studios and thus reunited their adaptation rights, the effect feels somewhat threadbare when examined too closely.

And then there’s the Wanda of it all, an antagonist whose arc doesn’t read coherently even if we ignore the massive leap from where she ended her Disney+ series as a conflicted but relatively decent heroine. She wants to return to the children that she dreamed up on WandaVision, seeking a timeline where they’re real, but she can’t find one where they’re already orphaned and she wouldn’t have to kill and replace their mom to get custody? She can’t use her new witchy powers to just, I don’t know, create new fake kids for herself? I hate indulging in this sort of what-about nitpicking, but the fact is, the script to this movie doesn’t ever give us enough information about the limits of its magical elements, which makes it hard to remotely accept her bad guy logic of ‘the single possible way I can be a happy mother is by murdering my way to stealing someone else’s babies.’

The visual effects are good, if a tad overindulgent of director Sam Raimi’s quirks at times, and Hispanic daughter of two moms America Chavez is a wonderful bit of added diversity to a franchise that remains pretty white, male, and straight overall. The returning Doctor Strange himself is a fine leading presence, as usual at his best when facing some sort of comeuppance for his customary arrogance. I wouldn’t call this a must-watch for casual fans — despite the surprisingly high body count of recognizable named heroes, it’s all in alternate dimensions we’re unlikely to visit again — but its humor and inventiveness places it above something like Eternals, at least.

[Content warning for strobe effects, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Book #99 of 2022:

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

This novel is pretty good, but it’s a little short and takes too much of its limited space to actually get to the point. It’s a time travel story about a forty-year-old woman who discovers a way to revisit her sixteenth birthday, but she doesn’t get there until around a quarter through the text, and we’re well beyond the halfway mark before she finds out that her father has made similar trips himself and learns from him the basic rules of the mechanism. (It basically functions like the portal from Stephen King’s 11/22/63: only leading to one particular day, where your changes can affect the future you return to. Going back again directs you to the same destination, undoing your previous actions. Except here, your consciousness alone makes the journey, always arriving in the past in the body of your younger self.) The actual stakes appear in the last 15% of the book, when the protagonist starts making visit after visit, seeing what possible fates she can create and aiming to avert her dad’s terminal medical condition that seems a constant in each one.

All of these are interesting concepts that are handled fine by author Emma Straub — other than the heroine seizing the opportunity to sleep with her high school crush, which reads like a sleazy act of statutory rape to me — but they just aren’t given enough time to register. If this plot had unfolded over a lengthier narrative, or at least had used its minimal page count more efficiently, its tale of losing a parent right as you’re gaining an adult understanding of who they were in your childhood could have achieved real pathos. But I feel as though I still barely know these characters, in any iteration.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1

TV #28 of 2022:

Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1

In terms of the other live-action Star Wars shows, this new release is somewhat better than The Book of Boba Fett yet substantially worse than The Mandalorian. I’m glad that the miniseries doesn’t solely revolve around the title figure and a 10-year-old Luke Skywalker on Tatooine as the previews seemed to imply, but I’m ultimately not sure that it adds much to the existing canon beyond a chance for Ewan McGregor to suit up in his robe and beard from the prequel trilogy and say “Hello there” one more time.

Oh — and a young Princess Leia, who really should have been in the trailers since she’s in literally every episode and given how delightfully newcomer Vivien Lyra Blair embodies the former Carrie Fisher role and makes the precocious junior version her own. (Her brother, whose actor I’m not even going to look up, makes no impression whatsoever in his few short scenes.) But on a plot level, I’m not sure we especially needed to see her and Old Ben as the franchise’s latest surrogate parent/child duo, following in the recent footsteps of Mando/Grogu as well as Hunter/Omega on The Bad Batch. Her kidnapping and rescue feels really weird in the context of her holographic plea to him that we know is coming later on, in which her adult self won’t mention the incident at all but will only say formally: “General Kenobi. Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.”

In another slight retcon, this program brings the Jedi together with his old apprentice Anakin once more, for a series of clashes across the run. There’s one great scene here that flashes back to his pre-Darth days on Coruscant for a never-before-seen practice duel and makes me wish for a version of this show that had incorporated more such material into its narrative. But outside that moment, it seems a bit of a waste to bring back Hayden Christensen and then mostly confine him to the Vader suit with the usual James Earl Jones voiceover work. The other lightsaber fights are serviceable, but unnecessary, and somewhat weakening of that final reunion on the Death Star that had previously been long implied to be the men’s first meeting since the Sith Lord’s original downfall.

And then there’s Inquisitor Reva, our third character featured in every hour of the show. She’s a capable antagonist, but the big twist in her arc is telegraphed way too early and often to land with much impact, and her exact actions don’t make a whole lot of sense if you stop and think about them for too long. Like many elements here, she carries a degree of potential, but maybe would have benefited from another draft or two of the scripts to really draw out what exactly she’s adding to a generally perfunctory tour of old Star Wars hits.

[Content warning for gun violence and violence against children.]

★★★☆☆