Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

So long ago that every man and woman who might remember the day now lies moldering in the grave, every member save one of a North Dakota farm family was slain for reasons unknown. A quartet of Michif Indians from the nearby reservation happened upon the scene the next day and gave succor to the sole survivor, a baby girl. For the sin of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the four were lynched by a self-appointed posse. One survived… The Plague of Doves is his story, and it is not…

Out on that windswept prairie, where North Dakota snuggles against Minnesota as if to draw some warmth, the tiny town of Pluto lies on the wrong side of the Ojibway Reservation; the side opposite the interstate. This unfortunate accident of location will eventually be the death of Pluto, but as the village lies dying there remain stories to be told and history to be written. Seraph Milk remembers the plague of doves, when passenger pigeons coated the wheat fields like a Biblical plague. His granddaughter Evelina Harp recounts her Mooshum’s saga of the hanging of Holy Track and Cuthbert Peace so long ago. Judge Basil Anthony Coutts looks back upon a checkered past and forward to a life with Evelina’s aunt; Marn Wolde relives her brief but fiery marriage to evangelist Billy Peace. Evelina’s other aunt remembers the day her second, no third husband arranged to have her kidnapped by that same Billy Peace, so that he might live with Billy’s sister and the child he fathered – the child who will grow up to be Evelina’s first love. The tiny community seem all related by blood, marriage, or both; their stories like their bloodlines intertwined like the strands of a long black braid.

Sixty, seventy, eighty years of history have fanned out from the day the four were hanged; while the real murderer was never identified and the lynching never punished. Some have not forgotten; some refuse to remember; none can understand. Read the rest of this entry »

Back when I was a college undergraduate the line of demarcation was clear: if you were headed for a B. S. degree, you took neither Music nor Art Appreciation. Those classes were for the people who planned to wimp out with a mere B. A. As the child and brother (and, eventually uncle) of music teachers, I’ve absorbed enough over the years to be able to tell a Pachabel from a pachysandra and differentiate Bach from Beethoven. But art? I know nothing beyond American Gothic and La Giaconda; and as for artists? Well, how about the drip guy¹ and the squares guy ²? My dirty little secret, I guess, is that I’d never much cared that I knew very little of art.

That’s all different now, and it’s Michael Gruber’s fault – Gruber’s and Chaz Wilmot’s:

Will the real Chaz Wilmot please stand up? Is he a fabulously gifted artist wasting his talent on a hand-to-mouth existence drawing magazine illustrations? a renowned modernist painter whose recent retrospective at the Whitney was a smash success? the modern world’s most gifted forger?

Or is he all three?

When the fiftyish painter volunteers for tests of a “creativity-enhancing drug,” he figures the results will be no more striking than the decidedly bogus “creativity” of his youthful LSD trips. His expectations are far too modest, however: in the drug’s afterglow Chaz paints some of his finest work, and does so at an astonishing pace. More striking, however, than even his increased output is that the drug seems somehow to pierce the veil of time. Chaz \believes his mind to be linked with the mind of 17th-century Spanish master, Diego Velázquez.

In Venice on commission to “recreate” (for a none-too fastidious Italian robber baron) a ceiling fresco by Velázquez contemporary Tiepolo, Wilmot is approached to “create” a hitherto unknown work by that same Velázquez. Some might call it forgery, others simply call it art… the affair of the Alba Venus, however, will shake Chaz Wilmot to the very core of his humanity, the place from whence rises his talent. And his becomes a talent of terrifying power.

Inhabiting a strange world that seems to span centuries, Chaz Wilmot becomes Velázquez – or perhaps he does not. Perhaps he is but a tortured artist driven mad by his own talent – or perhaps not. Perhaps the drug has liberated his mind, given it the power to journey through time and space – or perhaps not. Perhaps all are true; perhaps none are true – for what is truth? For Chaz Wilmot and for The Venus Forgery, Art is Truth, and naught else matters. Read the rest of this entry »