Blood & Whiskey #35
Belated Happy 420 Day + Earth Day; Percival Everett; Kimberly McCreight; Deepti Kapoor; Robert Dugoni; and a Rye Presbyterian cocktail.
Hello friends and readers,
I started this newsletter on Saturday, which was 420 Day, but I got so baked I couldn’t finish. I’m kidding. I don’t smoke or pop edibles and rarely have since high school. But 420 Day has special meaning in our house. As in: I fucking hate it. I’m happy for those who celebrate, I guess, but for me it’s a PTSD day. Getting whiffs of weed around Seattle gave me flashbacks to the skunk-smelly days of raising skateboarding teen boys, days that are thankfully now in the rearview. (You can find plenty of dad rants on that topic in my book Kickflip Boys.)
Better yet… Happy (day after) Earth Day! From the guy who made that great My Octopus Teacher film, here’s a story (half fun, half depressing) about the octopus that stole his camera. Also about the end of the world as we know it.
Or… more appropriately, I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s Independent Bookstore Day and to visiting a few local faves: Phinney Books, Elliott Bay Book Co., Secret Garden Bookshop, Third Place Books, Edmonds Bookshop. Shoutouts also to a few far-off faves: Malaprops (Asheville, NC), Tombolo Books (St. Pete, FL), Square Books (Oxford, MS), The Last Bookstore (LA), Harvard Book Store and Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA), Munro’s and Russell’s (Victoria, BC).
Speaking of the Indies… I’ll kick this off with a note from Tom Nissley at Phinney Books, on Percival Everett’s latest: “It'll make you want to read Huck Finn again; it's so good it'll also make you want to read James again.”
James, the latest from Percival Everett
If you haven’t seen Jeffery Wright in American Fiction (based on Everett’s 2001 book Erasure), do it. And if you haven’t read James yet, do it. This is one of those high-wire “how’s he pulling this off?” novels, and one that’s stuck with me long after. In short, it’s a re-telling of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. When Jim/James learns that his owner plans to sell him, separating him from his wife and daughter, he runs away. Huck, meanwhile, has faked his own death to escape his violent father and the two join forces and start their epic journey by canoe and raft down the Mississippi. Among many clever twists: before his escape, Jim gives speech lessons to enslaved kids, teaching them the slave-speak dialect they must use around white people. As James explains to his students: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint.” He also coaches them to avoid eye contact and occasionally stutter or mumble “so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble.” The real joy of the story is watching James’s friendship with Huck deepen and see Huck wrestle with the reality of James as another man’s property. There are moments when James slips out of character and Huck wonders why “Jim” sounds smarter that a slave should. James can read and write (with stolen books and stolen nub of pencil). He converses with the ghosts of Rousseau and Voltaire. But he must hide his intellect to survive and hopefully reunite with his family. In the end, we learn, this has been a book about family all along. And like other Everett books, it can veer from angry to funny to sad to beautiful, sometimes within the span of a sentence.
Like Mother, Like Daughter, by Kimberly McCreight
Speaking of family… Based on my own (flawed) parenting experience, especially the brutal teen years (see 420, above), McCreight (who has two daughters) clearly knows the fear of being bad at the job. “My mistakes as a mother had been accruing over time, as Cleo grew from little girl to teen and, increasingly, simply needed me to love her, and not try to fix everything.” And this: “It was as if I was following instructions from a What Not to Do as a Mom textbook.” Yup. Been there. McCreight’s story (not out till July) launches with NYU student Cleo coming home to Brooklyn for a rare dinner with her mom, Kat, but finding smoke spewing from the oven and her mom's bloody shoe under a sofa. While Cleo and the cops and Kat’s ex all search for her, we learn: Kat and husband Aidan are separated. Kat is “controlling and judgy as hell,” as Cleo puts it. Aidan is the nice parent, or tries to be. But he’s hiding something. Actually, everyone is, from Kat’s boss to her neighbor to Kat herself, lying about what she really does at her law firm and still holding onto the secrets of a dark (and bloody) incident from her tragic past. This is the best kind of mystery: layered and tangled but easy to devour, a twisty mix of crime drama, legal thriller and domestic thriller, with believable characters and lots of heart. It’s also a book about learning to raise a teenager, about learning to let go.
Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor
I really enjoyed this one and was a bit awed by the epic sprawl of it, with no wasted words — of which there were many. It starts with a violent incident: a car has plowed into a crowd in New Delhi, a pregnant woman is dead, a well-dressed drunk man is behind the wheel. But none of it is quite what it appears. The man behind the wheel is Ajay, who was plucked from an impoverished home in the Uttar Pradesh of northern India and forced into servitude but learned survival skills that helped him become bodyguard to Sunny Wadia, the handsome playboy son of a crime boss. The story veers from New Delhi to Goa to London to Mumbai to the slums and farms of Uttar Pradesh, also from the POV of multi-talented Ajay to dreamy-but-naive Sunny to ambitious but conflicted Neda, a journalist in New Delhi who reluctantly falls for Sunny, then falls hard. Some of it is over the top, frenetic, relentless. The dialogue is hyper-paced, slick and boozy. What I admired most were the smaller moments, how “the yolk of a sun cracks over the peaks,” how a tube light “gathers yearning moths” and “steam escapes resting truckers’ mouths.” Ultimately (it seems to be a theme this month), it’s a story about flawed fathers and their aspirational sons who admire but also hate and fear their dads and yearn to break free. And the motto of it all? “Money is a fucking curse … It annihilates everything.”
I reached out to Kapoor for a Q&A, which I hope to share next week.
A Killing on the Hill, by Robert Dugoni
At a recent Left Coast Crime writers’ conference in nearby Bellevue, I heard Dugoni speak on a panel and realized I hadn’t read any of his books. I picked up his latest (from the Third Place Books table), drawn by the moody cover, the newspaper reporter protagonist, and the setting: my hometown of Seattle, in 1933. I’m only halfway through but it’s been a blast. I love when a writer clearly sweats the historical details, from the candlestick telephones to the price of a coffee to the nuances of the dying days of Prohibition. Cub reporter William “Shoe” Shumacher lands his first big story when ex-prizefighter Frankie Ray turns up dead at the mob-run Pom Pom Club on Profanity Hill. (See? Pure poetry.) For a Seattle local, it’s a blast reading about the earlier days of salmon-throwers at Pike Place Market (a job my son once had), speakeasies and “disorderly houses,” the Italian neighborhood called Garlic Gulch, and Seattle’s rain and misty marine layer hanging over it all. I also love it when the cops talk dirty, like: “Let’s go talk to the coroner.”
Lit bits…
Watching: Ripley (Adam Scott as a creepy and excellent Tom Ripley, on Netflix); Sugar (Colin Farrell and Amy Ryan, Apple TV); The Nice Guys (hilarious 2016 film with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe).
Listening: The Rest is History podcast. Lots of Khruangbin.
What my current wife is currently reading: the rest of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody series (and watching the TV series, too).
Celebrating: Speaking of my current wife, we just hit 30 years. Just shy of half my life with this one. So far so good.
Waiting: up next = Wandering Stars, the new novel from Tommy Orange. Also a few from scrappy, Blood & Whiskey-friendly Soho Crime: Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips; Murder at La Villette, by Cara Black; Broiler, by Eli Cranor; The Murder of Mr. Ma, by SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee
Cheering: I was glad to see three writers I admire pick up LA Times Book Prizes this past weekend — mystery/thriller winner Ivy Pochoda, for Sing Her Down; fiction winner Ed Park, for Same Bed Different Dreams; and Seattle’s own Claire Dederer, for Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. (I’m headed to see/hear Claire read tonight at my local Phinney Books).
Cocktails of the Month
There’s lots of whiskey in this month’s books, especially Age of Vice (often chugging from whiskey bottles, but also some high-end cocktails). I liked the sound of the Venetian spritz (a 2-1-1 mix of prosecco, Aperol, and soda water) that hottie bad boy Sunny insisted be made not with Aperol but with Mauro Vergano Americano, an Italian herbal aperitif/vermouth. I haven’t been able to find a bottle, but as the days start to get warmer (so slowly here in Seattle), I plan to experiment with other vermouth or amaro spritzes. I’ll report back.
Meanwhile… My longgggtime friend Blaise and I were recently discussing our parents’ 1970s drinking habits. Blaise remembered that his mom’s favorite was the Rye Presbyterian, which she called a “Rye Press.” So I give you…
The Presbyterian
2 oz. rye whiskey
2 oz. ginger ale
2 oz. soda water
Pour the rye over ice in a Collins glass first, top with ginger ale and soda. Optional: replace ginger ale with ginger syrup + fresh lemon and/or lime juice.
Optional: for the full 1970s effect, fire up a Parliament and, say, the Eagles.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.
And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:
Or just:
Till next month,
-Neal
Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
Good stuff as always. I love Clair's voice in Monsters. So smart, sharp, and affable.