Disgusting! (and I Don’t Mean the Maggot Scenes)

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly landfall, most authors whose regular beat is the Gulf Coast worked the tragedy into their next storyline, just as many writers (and musicians and artists) expressed their grief after 9/11. Homage to the victims – and the heroes – of New Orleans was probably best done by James Lee Burke in 2007’s Tin Roof Blowdown. It’s also been done, err, not so well in First the Dead (A Bug Man Novel) by Tim Downs. Not at all well, in fact…

The Bug Man? Think forensic entomologist, like television’s Gil Grissom of “CSI,” with all that talk of corpse beetles and blowfly larvae (aka maggots). This one’s Nick Polchak, PhD: a North Carolina State professor summoned to staff the mobile morgue set up to handle hurricane victims. Chafing at orders to participate in search and rescue operations before collecting bodies (chafing, in fact, at any order), Polchak reluctantly acquiesces long enough to rescue one pre-teen roof-sitter. When he begins, however, to stumble across bodies in the Lower Ninth Ward that his expertise tells him were already dead when Katrina arrived, all pretense of following orders ends, even though he’s been ordered by a DEA agent to leave the floaters alone. Within a day, Polchak is in mortal danger; as is anyone near him.

Amid the horrors of the drowning Crescent City, Polchak and his helpers – a funeral director from Indiana and the rescued boy, J T – float around looking for more suspicious bodies. And as for the living and the city’s thousands of residents dead in the aftermath of the storm? Tough noogies: the bug man’s on the track of a killer, and those bodies take precedence over everything else.

I know no other way to say it: First the Dead is pure crap. Between Tim Downs’ stilted, boring writing and an absolutely idiotic protagonist; the book is an affront to New Orleans, the victims of Katrina, and forensic entomologists everywhere. Polchak, regardless of his considerable knowledge of his subject matter and his MacGyveran improvisational skills, has the interpersonal knack of an abnormally surly thirteen-year-old. Unable to relate to living humans, Polchak has been heard to say that sometimes he likes to imagine he’s a bug – and he’s closer than even he might think. While it’s not uncommon for mystery protagonists to be antiauthoritarian, c.f., Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch; Polchak is misogynistic, cynical, misanthropic, and downright unfriendly. And he’s just the protagonist – think what the villain must be like…

But things do get worse than merely having an antisocial protagonist: Polchak’s actions and situation simply make no sense. As he putt-putts about the flooded Ninth Ward in search of more bodies, he encounters residents in need of rescue only two or three times; and each time he’s an irritant instead of a savior. By the time I was done reading this tripe, I was ready to find Polchak and hold his head underwater for a few hours. Yes: he’s that unlikable.

Besides a protagonist the reader wants to strangle and a plot that’s a slap in the face of Katrina survivors, First the Dead suffers from frequent editing faults; continuity and research foremost among them. For instance, three nights after landfall, one character in the drowned city awakens and glances at the glowing red numbers on his digital clock: mmmmm-hmmmmmm. Then there’s the crucial clue that places a body at an abandoned copper mine somewhere out in the cypress swamp: ohhhhh, suuuuuure (the only things mined out in the swamps are salt and shells). Or perhaps a character named “LaTourneau” (it’s “LeTourneau”), or Downs’ laughably inept grasp of the geography of New Orleans. It turned out to be far more fun to track the mistakes than to concentrate on the plot (it still took me something like five days to read this thing, it was so uninteresting).

The sins of poor writing notwithstanding, First the Dead remains most disturbing in its callous treatment of the people and the spirit of New Orleans. It boggles the imagination that anyone could even think of writing about a character who ignores living victims while searching for bodies that are abnormally decomposed (the descriptions get a bit grisly, but the dead bodies are still more likable than Polchack, if you ask me). Regardless of the occasional cute moralization – as befits a book published by a Christian publishing house – and the chaste relationship between Polchak and the love interest, the actions and attitudes of the protagonist should by no means be considered an example of living a life of grace. By all means, avoid this book.

See it done right: James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown

Juts and Wheezie Go to the Beach

Nearly thirty years ago a friend introduced me to the Hunsenmeier sisters, Julia and Louise. Juts and Wheezie, as they prefer to be known, were sibling rivalry personified in the form of beautiful, headstrong young women. The two are key members of the rich tapestry of strong female characters woven by Rita Mae Brown, beginning with their first appearance in Six of One and strengthened by their once-a-decade reappearances in Bingo and Loose Lips. Fans of the irregular - not to mention out-of-order - series know the sisters as feisty yet forgiving, the very embodiment of the silly song Rosemary Clooney and VeraEllen sang in Holiday Inn, “Sisters’: Lord help the mister / who comes between me and my sister / and Lord help the sister / who comes between me and my man!

Juts and Wheezie return in supporting roles in Brown’s latest, The Sand Castle. It’s an expanded short story that’s - at least on the surface - about a family trip. A remembrance of a summer day at the beach in 1952; it’s as viewed through the eyes of eight-year-old Nickel (Nicole), Julia’s adopted daughter. Nickel, her mother, Aunt Louise, and Cousin Leroy are at the beach for the summer’s last picnic in a year marred by the death of Louise’s daughter, Leroy’s mother Ginny. The once happy-go-lucky Leroy has withdrawn into grief, unable to comprehend his mother’s untimely death. Nickel nevertheless continues to torment her slightly older cousin, for the sisterly rivalry of the elders is reflected in the relationship between the cousins, and the latter is all the worse for the natural boy-girl conflict between two eight-year-olds.

When a long-simmering argument between the sisters re-erupts into flames, the holiday appears to have ended. Nickel and her mother are left with downtime that Julia uses to impart to her daughter some homespun philosophy and a few object lessons. Blood being thicker than water, however, the sisterly crisis is quickly forgotten when an untimely (and exceedingly uncomfortable) accident occurs; and the women as always prove themselves strong and level-headed in a crisis.

2008 Pontiac G5: A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

The key tag from Enterprise says that the 2008 Pontiac G5 they gave me to drive while the truck is in the shop (again) is “slate blue” - but I’m not fooled: it’s really Cobalt blue. After all, the G5 is nothing but your average everyday ordinary Chevy Cobalt dressed up with the classic dual-port Pontiac grille. At first glance it kinda looks sexy, with that low-slung wedge shape and the spoiler on the trunk lid, but once you get inside and take the G5 out on the road any resemblance to a sexy sports car is over.

Exteriorily speaking: The G5, which replaced the unlamented Pontiac Sunbird, is the smallest and least-expensive car the label sells in the US; the hatchback Vibe (which is really a re-badged Toyota) excepted. At a base MSRP of $16,335US, one can’t expect a great deal of car - and one doesn’t get it. The base model G5 (which I’ve been driving) is exactly what “base” would lead you to expect: basic. The body is plain painted metal without even the cladding that Pontiac usually slaps all over its cars (e.g., Grand Prix); which leaves the rear end looking vaguely bulbous and “hippy.” Thus though wedge-shaped, the car still looks slightly fat - think a Ford Probe with a weight problem, if you will. An undersized spoiler rides the trunk lid to no apparent purpose other than, perhaps, to help shade the driver’s eyes from the headlights of tailgaters. Tiny, undersized fifteen-inch plain steel wheels further detract from any semblance of sportiness, leaving huge gaps in the wheel openings that make it almost like one is driving on four of those temporary spares.

Does Anyone Have a Bucket of Water?

I’m a grump. That means that there aren’t many things in this world that will make me laugh out loud. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a couple: the story-within-a-story in Stephen King’s “The Body,” the one called “The Revenge of Lardass Hogan” is a sure-fire candidate - and the other is listening to David Sedaris reading his essay “The Santaland Diaries.” For some reason, the way he intones the name Crumpet just cracks me up.

I’ve been hearing Sedaris for years on NPR and PRI, where he’s a semi-regular contributor to Ira Glass’s “This American Life” - this in spite of the fact that Sedaris hasn’t had a truly American life for at least a decade: he and boyfriend Hugh live in Paris and vacation in Normandy. If the surname seems familiar, yes, he is Amy’s brother (her funnier brother: I can say that with certainty because I’ve read Wigfield). Be that as it may, when Sedaris published his latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames, I gave it a read. Around our house, we know when the other person likes a book because he - or she - insists on reading passages aloud. Ask the Ms whether or not I liked this one: at one point I was laughing so hard I was in tears.

If anything, reading aloud from the essays makes them even funnier (at least for me) because I can envision - or would that be “enhear”? - Sedaris reading his own words in that queeny Peewee Herman-esque voice of his. He slays me… so I probably would have been better served to have gotten a copy of the audiobook, because (or so I’ve heard) Sedaris himself reads it. I can already hear his voice dripping with scorn as he describes his parents’ art acquisitions in “Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool”; sense the lopsided cadence of his speech as he rips some woman named Becky a new one in “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle.” I repeat, he slays me - the man puts the “ab” in “absurd.”