Hello all! Got a fresh new review for you. A lousy book, a mediocre book, and a pretty good one, and a cute Mithra pic! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Piper, Uller Uprising
Yurick, The Warriors
Cohen, The Netanyahus
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Melty Kitty
H. Beam Piper, “Uller Uprising” (1952) - Well, I think after two books, I can put this dude on the list of “old scifi hands I’ve learned enough about, and who aren’t compelling enough to pursue anymore.” I read “Kalvan of Otherwhen,” one of the original “conquering a primitive alternate dimension” stories about a Pennsylvania state trooper conquering, like, Hittite Pennsylvania… a fun premise, but wasted in dull depictions of maneuvers across the map of the alt-Keystone State. I’ve now given the beginning of Piper’s Terra-Human Empire series a shot. The first novel is about humans who have lightly settled a pair of planets that supply some kind of space-resource. The natives have gotten restless! They’re, like, partially-silicate lizard people.
“Uller Uprising” is basically the Sepoy Mutiny, but in space, with humans taking up the role of British people and the space lizards as the people of India. But it’s a version of the Mutiny as told by a right-wing troll scifi writer. So the humans/British “only” want to mine their unobtainium (using lizard labor, effectively slaves but treated nicer than local practices, you see) and bring “progress” to the lizards, and dang old “progress-hating” “bigoted” (!!) lizards impelled by a lizard-prophet try to massacre them. At first the humans seem overwhelmed, but they get reinforcements and figure it out. Better, they steal a nuke mean lizards were going to use on them, so, you know, it’s ok when they use the weapon that readers still had a supernatural dread of in the early fifties.
I say it’s trollish because Beam knows who actually had a grievance in India in the nineteenth century and he knows it wasn’t the British. He just likes the British side better, and likes stories of massacring mobs of “fanatical,” underarmed, underorganized opponents (still a popular trope, everywhere from zombie stuff to contemporary military stories), and wants a moral excuse to do so. Piper was known as a “contrarian” or whatever, like a lot of those old guys — Niven, Heinlein, whoever — were supposed to be, but they still always wanted the moral high ground, they couldn’t just tell stories about killing sentient beings for fun. So Piper goes out of his way to show how smart and sensible (but tough!) the human corporation in charge is, how irrational the lizards in the sway of their prophets are, how the “good guy” rational lizards (think a patronizing British depiction of the Sikhs) are treated fine, the few humans with lizard-liberationist leanings are fools who quickly learn the score and marry tough human army guys, etc. The main character is descended from Argentine Nazis and is meant to be a Prussian officer stereotype, just for fun.
The action is better than in “Kalvan.” Piper could have had a good book here. It wouldn’t even have to be, like… “good” in some moral or political sense, not hardly. But the action quality is not enough to make up for the smirking and ultimate lack of originality- if you know what happened to the Mutiny, you know what’s going to happen here. And don’t give me some shit about the joys of non-virtuous writing, or whatever. I’ve probably read eight books by good “edgy” writers for every (likely shitty) one you have, and this ain’t it, chief, not with all the cheating in the rigging Piper does. **’
Sol Yurick, “The Warriors” (1965) (read aloud by Joel Richards) - The sports teams of my hometown high school (which I did not attend because I am a special prince) are called “the Warriors,” and I’ve been told that none of their rivals, in the unnamed corner of Massachusetts from which I came, taunt them by calling out “Waaaaaarriors, come out and plaaaaaaaaay!” You’re leaving money on the table, Mansfield, Sharon, King Philip, North Attleboro! Money on the table.
Maybe kids don’t watch “The Warriors” these days, but they should, because it’s a fun movie. It’s based on a book! Sol Yurick was a journeyman writer of what today might be called thrillers when his experience as a schoolteacher and social worker in his native New York inspired him to write a novel about the youth gangs that were, at the time, a city institution. He famously based the plot on Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” an Athenian account of ten thousand Greek mercenaries, stranded deep in the Persian Empire after a botched job, fighting their way back to Greece. Here, a youth gang from Coney Island has gone to the North Bronx for a big meeting of the gangs. The meeting goes badly wrong, all the gangs flee, and these kids have to make their way home in the dark, weird 1960s New York night. Complications ensue!
This isn’t the most dramatic example of a book being worse than the cinematic adaptation – “Children of Men” probably takes the cake there, though “The Godfather” and “Starship Troopers” are also in the running – but the movie is definitely better. Yurick (who grew up with the Popular Front and was a SDS supporter at this time) was trying to do a pulpy version of social realism. That’s cool and all, but it’s not as fun as the movie’s delirious world. The gangs are all more or less the same in the book, maybe with different racial makeups or outfits, but nothing like the Baseball Furies or the kaleidoscope of opposing forces in the movie. The meeting of the gangs and the speech the biggest gang leader makes, calling on them to seize the city, lacks the intensity of the speech in the movie, no refrain of “Caaaaan… you… DIG IT??!!” There’s no plot to blame the protagonists for the betrayal of the gang king in the book, no real rival gang- just the difficulties of traversing the city at night when you’re a gang kid in a city of rival gang kids. The Warriors in the movie have some other silly name in the book. Basically, the screenwriters and directors of the adaptation took the kernel of the story and made it cooler, and arguably got the classical world Yurick was borrowing from better, in its “gigantism and ineptitude” as Borges put it, its comic book colors.
One thing both the filmmakers and Yurick strive to get across is a sort of non-Christian (or non-post-Christian, fairly similar), Achaean-style ethics motivating the gang youth. Whatever money-making schemes they might have, these aren’t the sort of youth gangs we got familiar from with the crack epidemic. These are just neighborhood kids who fight other neighbor kids, have their own little street world with its own rules and rituals. It may be a counter-world but there’s no hippie levity- they take it deadly seriously. Probably the most interesting parts of the book for me were the negotiations over status and ritual between rival gangs, as the Warriors try to move from place to place, gang territory to gang territory, without violence. It’s a world seriously invested in the manner in which people, other kids mostly, walk down a sidewalk, where their eyes go. People have potentially lethal fights over that! I’m acquainted with the desire for violence, especially on the part of teenage boys, but even at my most testosterone-poisoned, I never paid that much attention to gait (probably helped that I was in the suburbs- people drove). There’s also distinctly different ideas about gender and consent. Rape is considered to be on the spectrum with provocative eyeballing, more severe, but very much “on the table” and in the open as far as the moral code of the rumbling kids is concerned. That’s something the filmmakers softened- one of the Warriors in the movie gets fresh with a woman in the park and winds up in cuffs, but things get a lot worse in the book. Yurick observes all this in a cool, detached, somewhat regretful (“the cast-offs of society,” contrasts between gestures of childlike innocence and desire for a sense of family with the violent and amoral behavior of the gang kids) air. A “this is the way it is” from someone on the social work front lines. It’s not bad. Paul Verhoeven found the kernel of satire in a deeply bad book when he adapted “Starship Troopers,” the exploitation filmmakers who adapted “The Warriors” found the epic that was always there in the somewhat self-serious novel that couldn’t decide if it was about thrills or about sadness. ***
Joshua Cohen, “The Netanyahus” (2021) (read aloud by the author) - Did you know that Benjamin Netanyahu lived in the US, mostly in Philadelphia and New York state, as a child with his family? I did but now have had it dramatized by Josh Cohen, one of the brighter young things out there in contemporary American letters, in this often-amusing novel. I don’t know if “bright young things” (he’s forty, I’m pretty sure, but hey, we live in a gerontocracy) want their books regarded as amusing, especially if they previously wrote what I’m told are great big difficult humdingers, but there it is. Supposedly, Cohen based this book on an anecdote told by the great old opinionmonger of American letters, Harold Bloom. Bloom loved getting in what passes for celeb gossip in wordy circles, and he liked to tell a story about hosting Benzion Netanyahu, his wife, and three preteen children, the middle of whom would grow up to be Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, for a disastrous job talk at a university.
Cohen’s narrator, historian of taxation Ruben Blum, doesn’t have Harold’s job or his mad self-mythologizing swagger. He’s a humbler sort, but doing pretty well for himself, holding a tenure track job at small upstate New York Corbin College, has a nice house, a wife, a high school aged daughter. But life isn’t necessarily so great for him. He speaks from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, but in the early 1960s, he has many of the insecurities of upwardly mobile, assimile American Jews (similar to those faced by writers Cohen admires, most notably Philip Roth): the general upper-middle-class malaise of the time, combined with uncertainty of how he really fit in to the culture. Blum is irked – but quiet, impotent – when his drunk WASP-y gladhandler department chair has him, the only Jew in the department, shepherd a Jew the department is considering hiring, one Benzion Netanyahu. Things only get worse when Benzion turns up on the Blum doorstep, during a snowstorm, with a wife, three pre-teen boys, and numerous ideas and eccentricities in tow.
Cohen gets a lot of mileage out of contrasting ideas of what it is to be a Jew. Blum is the assimilationist midcentury Jew, a WWII veteran and supposedly successful assimilationist. His in-laws are upper-middle-class Manhattan German-descended Jews, and his parents reasonably well-off but less “classy” Bronx Ashkenazim, and we get minutely observed takes on both as they interact with Blum and his family. The Netanyahus represent an altogether different take on Jewishness. It’s not even so much the Jewishness of Zionism, in Cohen’s depiction – all the Jews in the book accept Zionism of some sort – as much as that of radical, revisionist Zionism… though, as someone who’s known a fair few Israelis, including little Israeli kids, in my day, the Netanyahu family in the book lived up to some cultural traits I’ve observed. They’re loud, blunt, bold. They’re a little more like the less-assimilated Blum grandparents, but with a different reaction to the fear and horrors Jews encountered in the twentieth century: straightforward aggression and truculence. The kids are funny, and there’s some slapstick as they tear-ass around the place, both more “childish” seeming and more knowing than American kids their age- that’s been my observation of Israeli kids, for what it’s worth.
One question this brought up for me: stereotypes! Are they “good writing” if they’re used self-consciously, as they are here, by an in-group member? How about with “good intentions” by an out-group member? What makes in or out group members, anyway, for literary purposes? Where does exploring identity end and stereotype begin? Who’s to say? I wasn’t offended by any of it, but I wear my Jewishness pretty light.
In any event, Benzion Netanyahu and his family pose challenges for the Blums, and not just logistical ones. Benzion’s work was notionally on the history of the Jews of Iberia, but really, it was about the Spanish Inquisition (unexpected, I know!). That Inquisition is weirder and creepier than most, because instead of persecuting heretics, it persecuted Christians. The Spanish Inquisition hunted Christians of Jewish descent, many of whom were in families that had been Christian for generations, from conversions made, mostly not at swordpoint, to Christianity after the Christians started conquering much of Spain and Portugal. If anything, the Inquisition undid what Christians supposedly wanted all this time: the conversion of the Jews. From this baffling situation of terror and violence, and from his immersion in the violent, tragic, fascist-leaning Revisionist Zionism of his master Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Benzion Netanyahu extracted the lesson that Jews and Christians would never live in peace together. Moreover, he came to think that the Jews were forced into history – away from a temporal order defined by scripture and myth – by the exterminationist violence of Gentiles.
Needless to say, this is not a viewpoint which Corbin College was ready for, and one which rubs even an American Jew with as finely honed a sense of irony as our Ruben raw. Benzion irritates him, with his theories, his brusqeness, his occasional dishonesty (there’s a pretty funny bit where Benzion tries to get Ruben to lie to a rabbi about a borrowed car the Netanyahus fucked up), and his showing of Ruben’s ass. You don’t need to agree with Benzion’s Revisionism to think that maybe he has some points about the role of Jews in Western societies. Quite beyond shocking staid WASP academics and forcing Ruben into uncomfortable self-examination, the Netanyahus, Benzion’s brassy wife and half-wild children, introduce chaos into the Blum home. Ruben’s frustrated, overeducated/underemployed wife and deeply insecure daughter both wind up in the whirlwind, and publicly, in a way that scotches Benzion’s employment chances.
All told, this was both psychologically involved – Ruben never accepts Benzion’s views or the impositions of his family, seeing them for the violent, uncouth, and disruptive forces that they are, though he can no more entirely reject Benzion’s critiques than he can boot his family into the snow they haven’t got the shoes for, until forced to – and narratively satisfying. It’s a tad “too cute” in places, in the way of literary writers who think they’re funny, but also gets some real laughs. David Duchovny is listed in the audiobook credits, for a sort of cameo he does as a rabbi who recommends Benzion (probably to get him off Philadelphia’s hands), but I’m not sure why they went with him for that? Anyway. All in all, decent. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Melty Cat
Cats are desert creatures originally, used to the heat. Mithra does like to do a good tile-sploot when it’s hot out.