"Nobody is born whole"

Book: Black Jack, volume 1
Author/artist: Osamu Tezuka
Published: 2008 (Veritcal) (this edition)


And I'm off in the uncharted (for me) territory of serial manga without the reassuring map of all volumes at hand ready to read like the straight clear road that takes me home every night. 

 You guys, I love it.

Black Jack is a series of interlocking but not necessarily chronologically dependent stories about the best surgeon in the world who was stitched back together and saved from death by a mentor when he was young. Now he's uncertified, mysterious, and called in for all sorts of weird-ass surgery needs.

 I think my favorite in this volume was when this guy had a face tumor, which is a Japanese demon in the form of a gross face that grows usually on someone's like knee or chest or something - only this guy's had covered his actual face. It talks, and says they'll never be able to cut out the evil, but Black Jack cuts it off anyway and it turns out the guy is a serial killer whose urges subside when the face tumor is all up in his business. So when it's not there anymore, he kills again, and then the demon grows back and makes the guy throw himself off a cliff to stop the killings.

 You can find all sorts of unexpected but poetic justice like that in here, starting from the very first story where a rich brat is beat up in a car accident and they sentence a poor witness to death for "causing" the accident because they need new body parts to restore him to life, but it turns out the only thing Black Jack transfers is the brat's face to the poor honest witness's body.

 At some point you meet Black Jack's old paramour's "brother," whose "sister" was "disfigured beyond repair" in the "war," and those quotation marks are winking so hard at you that I should've already put in a big ol' SPOILER warning. And Black Jack goes back to his mentor and tries to save him when he hears he's ailing, and there's a computer who thinks it's a person so Black Jack comes in to fix it, and there are these delicious small teases of his past sprinkled among the audacity of saving human lives that I'm looking forward to piecing together in future volumes.

 The art is a shrewd mix of cartoon people and realistic surgery shots, rounded and friendly but still horrifying when necessary, and sometimes such a mixture that it takes an extra minute to figure out what's so unsettling about it. And Black Jack himself is, there's not another word for it, just plain cool.

 But yeah, I think this series pushes past my need for a whole story at once by being self-contained pieces that fit together well. Back to the library, and I will pick up volume 2 when I find it. 

Good intentions, stupid people, predicable results of blessed release

Book: Me Before You
Author: Jojo Moyes
Published: 2012 (Penguin)
Pages: 369


You know what doesn't work? Convincing paraplegic people that life is worth living by shoving six months' worth of planned activities down their throats when all they want is the comfort of dying. Nothing earns the careful structure of the word more than the shit this protagonist plans for her disabled charge - who, by the way, used to be fully functional and still remembers all that - and reading about it made me actively angry. Because weeks of outings like a day being pushed in a wheelchair by unskilled hands through layers of mud to watch a sport he specifically and explicitly said he'd never liked in the first place at the racehorse track is really going to convince a former lawyer/rock climber that he shouldn't euthanize himself. JESUS CHRIST IN A CHARIOT-DRIVEN SIDECAR, DOES NO ONE LISTEN TO THE GUY, HIS LUNGS AND SARCASM STILL WORK PERFECTLY.

 Up to a very small point, I can understand the protagonist's motivations. She's a girl who loses what tiny little life direction she had when the cafe she waits at closes, and she has to take whatever job wants her first, which is companion for said quadriplegic. She's generally cheerful and sort of dreamy and likes her small-town life, so it makes sense that she would be horrified when she found out what her charge planned on doing to himself and that she would make the plans she did to help him. 

 That makes sense. For a start. But once she gets going, of course he sees through it real fast, and here's the dumb thing - she keeps going and gets super frustrated and convinced that the reason it's not working is his attitude and that everything would be sunshine and roses if he just cheered up. She doesn't think, "Maybe I should adjust my plans to be more like what he can handle and, you know, enjoyed in the first place" or "You know, I should try seeing things from his view and then maybe I'd better be able to figure out what really did make life living for him and bring it back to him in some meaningful, totally-not-superficial way" or at the very least, "My way isn't working, I should try something else." NOPE. 

 I completely understand why he went ahead and did it anyway, especially considering his living pain and how comfortable that classy Swedish suicide house made him in the end. I'm going to get a little political here and say my version of the sanctity of life includes being able to leave with dignity when you're no longer having more fun than pain. 

 So I actually did like the story, because ultimately it showed that mercy. And I liked the protagonist's family, which was a messy group of mom and dad and sister and grandpa who were all living together on nonexistent money while still trying to forge their own paths. That was a good anchor conflict compared to the paraplegic guy's trying to get used to being the helpless center of his cold family when he was used to being so happily independent around its edges. 

 But oh my god, that girl was so annoying to read. I think I'm going to donate this, because since she was the first person narrator, I stayed mad through the entire book and got superficial-at-best glances into the more interesting bits of agony, and she didn't really change in the end, and if you want to read about being trapped in a body with a mind that still functions better than anybody ever imagines, read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Not this.

The poison of a mother's love

Book: White Oleander
Author: Janet Fitch
Published: 1999 (Little, Brown)
Pages: 469


Holy shit, you guys. This is some mother-daughter intensity right here.

It's about a lady poet who's a single mom raising her daughter in the American desert until she poisons her boyfriend (with ground-up oleander distilled oil, y'all - ON HIS DOORKNOB) in a jealous rage. Then it's about the daughter rebelling her way through a series of foster homes while her mom's poetry gains new notoriety as she serves her prison sentence. 

 Throughout what could be registered as Standard Deviations of Foster Care, Coming-of-Age Literary Version 2.0 (you got your hardscrabble Jesus-jumping crazy trailer trash, your unnecessarily vicious rich bitch, your foreign-born hustlers who need another worker, your damaged woman who is more like a friend than a guardian and ends up needing the kid more than the kid needs her), the girl grows up with her mother's poetic skepticism deeply entrenched into wherever her new lives take her. Her mother won't let her ignore her, and it's tearing her apart until she finally grabs some backbone and runs with it. 

 I really liked this, although I can't emphasize how intense it was. I read it over a couple days of staycation I had this month, and I basically had to make myself take breaks so I could remember that life is more than flower vendettas and the hum of my bedroom window's fan.
So, bookcase for sure. I admire the hell out of such a fierce outlook, and it's great to find that I'm not the only one who wants to find such intense meaning, and it feels more sincere and hard-won optimistic than a lot of literary fiction - it looks things more square in the eye and fights rather than dithers about shit it can't change. But it's got to be tempered with something lighter - not to be confused with something shallower - to stay fully appreciated.

Living social commentary

Book: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Published: 2001 (Holt)
Pages: 221


It's not possible to survive on minimum wage in America. It's not possible now, and it wasn't possible in the economic upswing of 1998 - 2000 when this book was being written. And it's not just about money; it's about life and its tendency to bitchslap you when you're down.
So finds out this intrepid journalist who makes a calculated decision to find low-skilled jobs in three parts of the country and try to survive completely on the wages of each. She works at a hotel restaurant as a waitress, a cleaning lady with an in-home service, a nursing home cafeteria attendant (briefly, on the weekends), and a Wal Mart associate. 

 Every job puts physical and mental strain on her that makes it more difficult to better her situation than she'd ever imagined it. All the jobs pay her just enough to buy cheap food that makes her feel even crappier and cheap housing that - oh my god, I never knew the trappings of by-the-week hotel rentings were so bad. They cater to low-wage people who can't get the rent for better apartments, and the pricing is just enough to let them live somewhere without giving them any wiggle room to save or use for emergencies. Yet the conditions pretty much guarantee that there will be emergencies, and usually sooner than later, and basically if you don't have relatives or a car to live in, you are up the creek without a paddle or lifeboat or canoe.

 The journalist admits that coming from a place of privilege that she can fall back into whenever her life is seriously threatened takes away most of the real panic she would feel if this was her real life, but she still has a hard time keeping herself afloat and does a good, heartbreaking job of sharing the stories of people who really do this for a living.

 I'm coming from the same place she is in reviewing this, so take my compassionate outrage with a healthy dollop of middle-class mobility guilt and know that this wasn't the most rigorously controlled experiment, but it was an eye-opening experience that has only gotten worse in the real world where McDonald's sample budget for its employees includes income from a second job.    

Ladies be fightin'

Book: The New 52: Wonder Woman Volume 1: Blood
Author: Brian Azzarello
Artists: Cliff Chiang, Tony Atkins
Published: 2012 (DC) (this collection)

I got some great advice at Free Comic Book Day. (This aside is going into its own parenthesis so I can point out that A., technically it's Free Comic Book Day EVERY day at the library, and B., the library welcomes girls who wear cute dresses while debating the character arcs of Batman villains and etc., and I feel like I have to point this out because one of my friends said she got looked at funny for wearing her Derby dress to get her new issue of Hellboy at her local 'shop, whereas I wore one of my favorite dresses to the library and got nothing but good reading suggestions. JUST SAYIN', y'all.)

So the continuity and history and backstories of superhero comics are especially intimidating, what with their 60+ years of history and baggage and reboots and such. And when I brought this up as a major barrier of my own comics reading, one of our esteemed speakers said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, "Just start reading what looks interesting and make your own connections."
BAM. MIND. BLOWN. GENIUS.

(Another aside: I mentioned I was a Doctor Who fan, and that made them both chuckle and say I got no room to talk. At first it sounds equivalent, right, but really, even though there's 50 years of TV shows and numerous storylines, Doctors and companions and villains, formats, spinoffs, and media-leaping - really, it all goes back to the one core concept of a madman in a blue box. Comics are not nearly as neat and tidy. SO THERE.)

We spent at least an hour in the stacks Mystery Science 3000-ing Main's collection, and I saw this Wonder Woman comic that I liked the look and sound of. Wonder Woman finds out her origins are different than she's been told in a way that would both make her more a part of her Amazonian tribe and start a war among the gods. It's called Blood and it's drawn in my favorite bold-lined bright-colored style, and who cares what everyone says about Wonder Woman and the New 52 reboot, this is gonna be AWESOME -

...and it's about womenz fighting over a man. That is the whole story, at least in this volume, and the implications of that are far-reaching enough to put me off the rest of the story (sorry, Paul Harvey).

 It turns out Wonder Woman's mom Queen of the Amazons didn't make her out of clay because she wanted a kid so bad, as in the legend that had always made WW feel like an outsider. Nope, philandering Zeus came to the Queen and the strong lady got weak in the knees for an even stronger man and they got all busy and made Wonder Woman.

So fast forward to now, and Hera, Zeus's wife, knows he's been around while they're married and she's hella jealous and the discovery of one more of his outside children doesn't make her mad at him, oh no, she goes on the warpath to find that skank who bore his illegitimate daughter and turns the skank to stone.

And then somehow Zeus has died and so there's a power vacuum that all the boys rush to fill. Nobody once thinks or says, "Hey, you know, Hera's been here like this whole time, maybe she knows something about ruling heaven. Can't we just like combine the thrones and make one giant one for her that'll be big enough for her ego?" Nobody once thinks or says, "You know, there's at least one legit daughter floating around here, and sure, she's prone to chaos, but you know, her half-sister, the Amazonian warrior who pledges to help keep justice and the peace and suchnot, she seems pretty solid. Why not throw her hat in the ring as a consideration, at least?" NOPE.

Of course, Wonder Woman would refuse, and that's why despite her story I still like her as a character here. She is a noble I can get behind - truly trying to do the right thing as defined by what would do the least harm to everybody involved. She's realistically conflicted when she learns where she actually came from; it means she is actually one of the Amazons and not the outsider that she's never wanted to be. On the other hand, her dad was a jerk sperm donor and her mom didn't turn out as the independent woman she wanted her to be. This makes Wonder Woman run away, then come back too late, and it also made me want to hug her as a sister in solidarity. Parents are weird, man, and how're you supposed to forge your own way while honoring where you came from, especially if that changes so hard?

So I liked her, and I really liked Hera's peacock motif - although guys, the dress she was wearing in the preliminary sketches extra bit at the back was GORGEOUS so WHY WAS SHE NAKED UNDER HER CLOAK IN THE ACTUAL STORY? I don't know. But I loved Hades's design, too: he was a rather small, mostly-human shaped guy with a too-wide grin and a wreath of lit candles on his head that dripped wax in a thick veil over his eyes. Creepy and insightful portrayal of a dude who, when you read it properly, isn't actually the prince of hell but the underground, which is rather more calm and existentially terrifying than the fire and brimstone of Christianity. 

But the rest of it I will abandon to go find less misogynist stories (before you laugh, I know librarians who specialize in this stuff, so it's possible I swear) to connect. Wonder Woman is awesome and we should keep her that way, y'all. I'm still sold on that bit.

World War, take II

Book: Tales of Grabowski: Transformations, Escape, and Other Stories
Author: John Auerbach
Published: 2003 (The Toby Press) (this collection)
Pages: 307

This is another set of War stories, these about World War II and the Jewish guy who disappears into his new identity as a German clerk to escape persecution. 

 It's an interesting exercise in dual identity and how a new identity can take on its life on its own and basically suffocate the old one until the grief sort of explodes in exactly the wrong place and time. The new identity is basically written as a whole separate person who for some reason keeps flashing back to this other dude's much grimmer life.

 And believe you me, this doesn't skimp on the grim. World War stories have all earned their grit and the right to hand you their realities on a chipped tin plate with no fork in the middle of a trench next to a corpse that doubles as the dining room table if you care to sit at it. But I don't blame you if you pass that up.

 I read these right after I finished Pat Barker's trilogy, and unlike that I didn't take breaks between the stories because they weren't full novels, not really, and they were a bit more sparse on the psychoanalysis so they read faster, but other than that they felt very similar, just moved up thirty years.

 That's what makes war interesting (and horrible) to study yet kind of boring to read about in fiction - that unrelenting grinding sense of dingy dull dread stays constant across all levels and eras of combat. When it's written well like this, that's the best I can say about it - it's written well, and I will keep this on my bookshelf because of that, but I think maybe something a lot lighter and more speculative should go between these. Probably not deadly serious lit fic, though, because if the protagonist ends up being any sort of whiny I will want to seize them by their entitled neck and shove them behind a tommy gun and see how well they'll turn out.

 Did not mean for this review to get, uh, violent. But no, this is good, and based a lot on the author's own experiences, so if you haven't read a lot of war fiction I recommend this because it's no-nonsense while still being completely descriptive and feels achingly real.

They walk among us and wonder why we feel pain

Book: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Author: Jon Ronson
Published: 2011 (Riverhead)
Pages: 272

According to this book, "psychopath" and "sociopath" are the same thing and used interchangeably; according to my Psych 101 and sociology professors, they are not. I hope I am not being to presumptuous by believing them over this guy, because I do love the offbeat adventures he gets into in the name of journalism.

 This is the same guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, and I heard him interviewed on the podcast "How Was Your Week?" (which, honestly, I love but had to stop listening to after the hostess went through a major breakup at the same time as I did - so go listen to it, we're both mostly over it by now), and now I'm going to have to read his book Them! because it's about conspiracy theorists and if he adds any of the affable  semi-skepticism that is still willing to be taken in if the evidence is good enough that he adds to his other work, then I'm already sold.

 Anyhoo, this book didn't depend so much on his ability to take leaps of logic, but it did wear down his faith in the mental health industry and their classifications of what's normal and what's not. It starts with a coded book that one of his friends receives and can't, you know, decode, so he tells the author about it and the author starts to dig in and in the process finds fascinating insight into how we measure psychopaths.

 I phrase it like that because it's not so much about the actual psychopaths that he gets to interview (one's in jail!) and run across, but more about how to tell if someone qualifies or not. Stemming from the checklist that was standardized in the 1960s, his increasing wonderings on the subject only get more tangled up in the development of the diagnosis and its history, why psychopaths make such successful business people, and what does it actually feel like to not have any clue what other people are feeling. 

 It was great first-person narrative journalism, which sometimes to me feels truer than complete objectivism, especially when the facts are also there between the anecdotes.
You should read this, and I'm going to put it on my bookshelf so the goats can stare at it, and I'm going to find Them! (which is all They want from us, really) and report back.