A funeral hotdish is hot stuff

Jana Bommersbach's new mystery, Funeral Hotdish, is interesting for several reasons. The author is a Phoenix journalist who broke the story that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the Mafia soldier who ratted out John Giotti and who was supposed to be safely stashed away in

the Witness Protection Program, was actually swanning about in Tempe, Arizona. She is a native of Hankinson, North Dakota, a town of about 900 people in the southeast corner of the state.

Her mystery features a Phoenix journalist, Joya Bonner, who discovers that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano is signing autographs in Tempe and the tragic death of a North Dakota high school girl who has a bad reaction to the drug Ecstasy (or Molly). So Bommersbach, writing about what she knows, weaves living people, actual events, and invented characters into a plausible and satisfying story.

Funeral Hotdish begins with the death of 17-year-old Amber Schlener and the coma of her boyfriend, Johnny Roth, at a high school dance. Joya becomes enmeshed in the Gravano story because the Phoenix police suspect Sammy is involved in dealing drugs—and Joya's part-time live-in boyfriend is a Phoenix cop. She is astonished to learn from her mother that Amber, back in tiny Northville, North Dakota, is dead from drug overdose. Northville? With a high school graduating class of 17? Not possible. Or a Phoenix connection?

Some readers may have problems with the shifting points of view as we move from head to head as the chapters move by, even from head to head on a single page. That said, I had no trouble following the POVs and by organizing her story the way she has, Bommersbach is able to give the reader insights and observations she would have been hard-pressed to give from a single POV.

Here, for example, is a description: "The Catholics put a low rock wall all the way around their cemetery and fancy iron gates at the entrance. Nobody remembers the gates ever being closed and they're rusted in place by now. The cemetery rises in front of you as you drive up the long entrance, the road splitting around a giant marble altar flanked by two towering alabaster angels. Christ on the cross dominates the altar. You could say Mass out here, but nobody remembers any one doing that. Mostly, people just wander around it, admiring the beautiful angels that were imported from Germany decades ago. . . ."

And here's a woman's observation: "Women gossip like a doubles game of ping-pong, everybody talking at once and throwing an idea back and forth. They'll chew on a thing until it's shredded, and then they move on. But men parcel out their thoughts slowly—two, three trains of thought with everyone naturally keeping track. Like multiple lanes of bowling where everybody knows each score. And in the middle of one train, somebody will tell a joke, and when they pick up again, nobody has to be reminded where they left off. So if you want gossip from women, they hand it over neat and tidy. But if you want it from men, you've got to hang in there for hours to get the whole story. . . ."

A funeral hotdish, of course, is what the church ladies prepare to feed the congregation—and in an appendix to the book, Bommersbach includes the recipe that comes from St. Phillip's Church in Hankinson. It's something you'd want to modify to make at home, of course; St. Phillip's version feeds 175.

Funeral Hotdish is a satisfying and engaging hybrid.

On not seeing the light of "All the Light We Cannot See"

Long time readers of this blog know that I am fascinated by the Amazon comments of readers who hated a book I liked. Did they see something I missed? Do I agree with their criticism? If not, why not?

Anthony Doerr's WWII novel All the Light We Cannot See" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is a legitimate New York Times best seller. As I write, it has over 21,100 reviews

on Amazon—72 percent of them five-star, 18 percent four-star. How many novels provoke that many Amazon reviews—90 percent of which are positive? For me, it makes the critics who gave the book one star that much more interesting.

A reader writes: "I rarely give up on a book but here I am on page 151 and I just can't see the point of continuing. The chapters are two pages long each and they switch between the two main characters. I just looked ahead and the whole book is set up like this. Maybe this is good writing and a good story but the lack of flow just kills my interest." In fact the point view shifts between more than two characters, and many chapters are more than two pages, not that this would make any difference to this reader.

A reader writes: "It felt like reading a cookbook. I didn't feel that invested in the characters, which was probably a good thing since the plot sputtered out and died. My favorite character disappeared." True, Doerr does not tie up every single loose end, but I would not agree that the plot sputtered out. And a character does disappear, which is a shock to the reader (this reader), but seemed appropriate in the story's context.

Perhaps the most damming critique was by the reader who wrote more than a thousand words that include: "I am a lifelong reader with a PhD in literature and 40 years experience teaching college writing and literature. The more I study fiction, the more I admire a writer who can use structure (the arrangement of the chronological elements of plot) strategically to develop the novel's themes . . .  Doerr . . .  fragments his plot for no apparent purpose. It is disjointed and difficult to follow, with no payoff for the effort. He not only switches back and forth between the two narratives but also along the timeline. Switching back and forth between the two narratives . . . would have been plenty; also switching back and forth along the timeline before, during, and after WWII creates too much discontinuity and makes the narrative hard to follow. . . . Both plots also depend on too many farfetched coincidences, so much so that it strains credulity." This critic's analysis is correct; the conclusion less so. Clearly, thousands of people were either able to follow or were caught up in Doerr's language—as I was.

I thought that at the sentence level, All the Light We Cannot See is extraordinary. This last critic, who is far more sensitive than I, points out examples in which "far too many of the descriptive passages use words as words—a piling on of sounds—rather than to convey actual meaning." Perhaps another slow edit of the book would have caught these, although I suspect not. (Reportedly Doerr spent eight years writing it; one more pass through would probably have been one too many.)

For what it's worth, I had no trouble following the chronology. I did not for a moment believe that these characters were real people in a real WWII. I was not put off by the anachronism I was able to spot. I was willing to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy Doerr's language and admire his ambition. I'd give it four stars.

"Boy Nobody" is a thrill ride from page 1

Let me start by disqualifying myself to give an authoritative review of Boy Nobody by Allen Zadoff. I do not read thrillers as a general rule, and Boy Nobody is, if nothing else, a thrill

ride. I read it on the recommendation of one of my middle school writing students and I am delighted I did so.

The narrator is a 16-year-old assassin trained by and (apparently) working for a super secret US Government agency. As a teenager he is able to ingratiate himself with his peers, become a friend of the family, and in short order murder the target with an undetectable poison. The death looks like a heart attack and who would suspect a kid?

By page 24 we have accompanied the narrator (whose real name we do not learn until very late in the book) into the secure Natick, MA, home of a Chinese businessman, watched him kill the man (the boy uses a special pen and the poison is painless), watched him slip away in the confusion following the man's "heart attack," and watched him disable four Chinese security thugs who suspect foul play. On page 25 we speeding down the Mass Pike in a stolen Mercedes with diplomatic plates.

The point of a thriller (in contrast to a mystery) is that the reader knows what bad thing is supposed to happen and is following the detective/the police to see if they can stop it, or, as in this case, following the narrator on his next assignment, which on the surface seems impossible. And in fact turns out to be more difficult than the narrator, or this reader, realized. For one thing, the narrator begins to recall events from his life before he entered The Program and they begin to complicate his assignment.

The book and the story zip right along. Many short chapters. One- and two-word sentence fragments. one line paragraphs. No extraneous description. Present tense. Lots of dialogue. Yet within the thriller conventions, Zadoff is able to give his 16-year-old some humanity, a code of ethics, and—more problematic—feelings.

If you can accept the idea that a super secret US Government agency is recruiting 12-year-olds and training them to be stone cold assassins, and the idea that the US Government is willing to use assassination as a policy, and that the super secret US Government agency has enough intelligence to know who should be killed, the Boy Nobody is a hoot. I don't accept any of those things, but I was still cheering for the narrator and shocked by the decisions he had to make.

It turns out that Boy Nobody is the first of a series (that Zadoff left the possibility open at the end of the book was clear). The title is now I Am the Weapon. The two more recent books are I Am the Mission, and I Am the Traitor. I'll mention them to my student.

Why all 5-star reviews are bad news

Aside from my feeling that a star system is much too crude a measure to evaluate books (or restaurants or coffee pots or airlines or most products and services), they have another

What you want to see for your book.

deficiency: too many good ones can deter prospective buyers.

As Tom Collinger, a Crunch Network contributor, writes in Tech Crunch, "when consumers see only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off. They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as 'perfect.'"

Collinger cited a Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews study of 40 product categories that looked at the impact of reviews on purchases. In moderation, bad reviews actually help boost sales—"product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5."

Amazon says that it "calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases." I'm not sure what this means because when I post a review, the site asks me to assign a star to the book.

In any event, this means don't tell all the friends you inveigle into reading your book to give it a five-star review. You want a mix of five-, four-. and even one or two three-star reviews. Better yet, you want a thoughtful, appreciative comment.

What's Prison Like in Rwanda? Thailand? Norway?

As one who has spent more than 20 years as a volunteer teacher in prison, I wanted to read Baz Dreisinger's Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World. Dr. Dreisinger is an Associate Professor in the English Department of John Jay

College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which helps incarcerated men and women obtain college degrees. Before talking about the book, however, let me lay a little pipe.

We Americans lock people away in prison for four reasons: (1) as punishment for a criminal act; (2) to remove dangerous people from society; (3) to deter others from doing the same thing; (4) as an opportunity to change—to correct—criminal/anti-social behavior. Spelling these out, of course, raises all kinds of questions. How much punishment is appropriate? Is losing one's freedom enough punishment? Does prison—even long mandatory minimum sentences—deter crime? (One student told me that the certainty of being caught deters crime, not a long sentence.) Is it even possible to correct a person's behavior? We call them correctional institutions, but does anyone think they correct anything?

With a background as a "white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies, a Caribbean carnival lover who is also a prison educator and criminal justice activist, a freelance producer for National Public Radio, [and] an agnostic New York Jew," Dreisinger took two years to visit prisons in Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Jamaica, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Norway, comparing and contrasting their prisons and answers to the questions above to America's answers. She visited prisons and met with prisoners, staff and officials, criminal justice advocates, and more.

The result is a number of fascinating snapshots of very different institutions, culture-bound in some ways, American-influenced in others. For example, "Throughout the colonial world . . . prisons served the aims of whites, extorting money by the way of bribes to stay out of prison and obtaining free labor from prisoners for cotton production . . . colonial powers adroitly manufactured reasons to put bodies behind bars." (So that could be reason (5) for locking people away: Obtain cheap labor.)

Perhaps examples of American-influence are drug laws. "Across the globe, draconian drug policy is packing prisons. Drug users and traffickers represent more than half of those in federal prison in the United States and Mexico, a quarter of all those in prison in Spain, and one-fifth entering prison in Japan; in Malaysia they constitute more than half of the nine hundred incarcerated people awaiting execution. And these are mainly small-time users, more than 83 percent of them, worldwide, convicted of possession."

But while much of the news is grim (don't get arrested for drug possession in Singapore), it's not all dire. It turns out that, given the Australian experience, private prisons may not be all bad all the time. Thanks to Thailand's princess, the country's prisons for women are becoming less oppressive. Norway is showing the world its commitment to corrections over punishment. Whether the positive lessons can—or should—be replicated elsewhere remains in my mind an open question.

I thoroughly enjoyed Incarceration Nations for the insights Dreisinger gives into foreign prisons. I would have enjoyed it more with end notes and an index. It does have an extensive bibliography, but, buff that I am, I would like to be able to look up the original studies she cites. Nevertheless, I recommend the book to anyone interested in incarceration here and elsewhere in the world. 

Who Should Be in the American Writers Museum?

Plans for the American Writers Museum

The American Writers Museum plans open in March 2017 in Chicago, a block north of Millennium Park on Michigan Avenue. According to the website its mission is "to engage the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture, and our daily lives.

"The American Writers Museum will:

• Educate the public about American writers – past and present
• Engage visitors to the Museum in exploring the many exciting worlds created by the spoken and written word
• Enrich and deepen appreciation for good writing in all its forms
• Inspire visitors to discover, or rediscover, a love of reading and writing

"Through innovative and dynamic state-of-the-art exhibitions, as well as compelling programming, the American Writers Museum will educate, enrich, provoke, and inspire the public."

It sounds great, and I was wondering who all will be included. Considering that the Library of America has already published almost 300 volumes of the works of American writers, including several anthologies assembling several authors, I wonder who will be included, and who may be overlooked. Clarence Budington Kelland? Erskine Caldwell? Robert Riskin? Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Who do you think should be included in the American Writers Museum? And why?

Why you make friends with librarians

I have the impression from the comments I read on websites for writers that many self-published authors do not fully appreciate a basic marketing law: Consumers must first be aware a product exists before they can consider buying it. This is why we have press releases, reviews, advertising, interviews—anything to get the word out.

And you want to get the word out to people who buy and read books. Independent bookstores have always been a wonderful source of getting the word out. There was a time (perhaps mythical, perhaps real) when the bookstore owner and clerks knew their customers' interests and preferences well enough to suggest new titles. (Amazon is trying to accomplish the same thing with its "Customers who bought this item also bought" lists.)

Libraries are also filled with people who read books—and, according to Library Journal—50 percent of the people who start an e-book they've downloaded from their library actually buy the book. I have been giving my book to libraries where (a) I have a relationship and (b) the library is willing to put the book into the circulating collection, which is not always. However, in some cases, the librarian has actually put the book on display where, as in the display illustrated here, it was immediately checked out.

In the best of all possible worlds, the patron read Death in a Family Business and liked it enough to recommend it to friends and acquaintances and, like ripples in a pond, the friends told friends and so the word got out.

The Best Book Covers of 2015

Matt Dorfman, the art director of The New York Times Book Review, has chosen what he feels are the best covers of 2015.  His brief introduction to the dozen covers makes a couple interesing points: "When considering the book as a whole, I prefer that the interiors contain answers and the covers ask questions. To the extent that my favorite reading experiences empower me to confront uncomfortable truths and honest answers about people, societies and the greater universe, the covers that lure me into the pages often do so by posing questions that I don’t want to ignore."

One of the best covers of 2015

He also notes that today books and their covers are having to compete for attention with everything from Jumbotrons to smart phones to wristwatches. The article reproduces the covers that made him "stop, stare and ask aloud to no one in particular what the cover means, only to turn to the first page and then the following and then the one after that and onward.'

Making something of it

I attend a writer's workshop sponsored by a local library and led by a writer friend. Why, you ask, do you attend a workshop when you have ghostwritten twenty-one business books and published three novels? For what do you need a workshop?

I do not believe I need a workshop. I do believe I can still learn something, that I can be stimulated to try something new. One of the new things I tried is an exercise called "Make Something of It."

Take a list of random phrases and turn them into sentences in a poem, a story, an essay. In each case, the subject and verb must appear in which they appear in the list. Their relationship must remain the same and they must appear in the order in which they are listed. Beyond that you are invited to decorate or elaborate upon the sentence as you will. Can you make something of the following?

Springtime mattered.
Sophie recoiled.
The twins bled.
The Volkswagen lurched.
The mountains glowed.
The children wept.
Wayne stole.
Alice tripped.
Run Sue.
Bruce felt down.
Scott breathed.
Darkness fell.

Not easy, is it? Here—without boring you about my struggle to hammer the phrases into some semblance of sense and coherence—is what I was able to come up with:

Springtime mattered because without it
We perish in the boundless ice.
Sophie recoiled at the vision
Of winter interminable.
As the twins bled, their feet raw,
And the Volkswagen lurched
Through slushy ruts,
The mountains glowed, indifferent,
While the children wept in the dusk.

Wayne stole kindling, firewood.
Alice tripped at the threshold.
Run, Sue, run! Fetch a burning ember!
Bruce felt down at the sight of living flame.
Scott breathed wood smoke, perfume
In the warming air.
Darkness fell.

Good luck coming up with your own version.

The story begins with 31 wonderful stories by Tobias Wolff

I tell people who tell me they want to write to do two things:

(1) Write something every day.

(2) Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Our story begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff is one of the best things I've gotten my hands on recently.

The book published in 2008, contains 21 stories from earlier collections, plus 10 new

stories. In his author's note, Wolff asked himself about this book: "Should I present my stories, of whatever vintage [some are 30 years old], in their original form? Or should I allow myself the liberty of revisiting them here and there?"

I am sure every writer, looking at earlier work, sees ways to improve, to tinker, to touch up. While there is a good argument for leaving the published text alone, there is, I believe, a better one to edit. "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts," writes Woolf. "If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can, for now."

Because Woolf wrote the 31 stories over a 30-year period, they cover an enormous range of subjects, themes, and settings. We are in the peacetime Army, in prep school, teaching college, married, single, a child. "For two days now, Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush."  So begins "The Other Miller" putting the reader into a muddy foxhole with Miller.

"'A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.' Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class." So beings "Smorgasbord" putting the reader into the head of a prep student narrator.

"The number 64 bus stops at St. Peter's, so it's always crammed with pilgrims or suckers, depending on your pont of view—a happy hunting ground for pickpockets. Mallon was not a pilgrim, or by his own reckoning a sucker." So begins "The Benefit of the Doubt," in which Mallon, in Rome, indulges the Gypsy who has attempted to pick his pocket.

Although Wolff is widely anthologized, I recognized only one story, "A White Bible," perhaps because I read it in Best American Short Stories; it is unforgettable. A female schoolteacher is accosted at her car and forced to drive to a remote spot by a man who turns out to be a student's father. The confrontation between a single American woman who has actually had an alcoholic drink on a Friday after work and a puritanical immigrant Islamic man who only wants the best for his son is powerful, convincing, and moving.

All I can say is, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Our story begins.