Side Effects

Woody Allen Side Effects (1980)
In reference to the usual objections, please refer back to this review. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is still mostly very funny, and funny beyond simply cracking jokes or overloading the reader with non-sequiteurs.

Our project is coming to a close—unsuccessfully, I am sorry to say. Funding has been cut off, our foundation board having decided that the remaining money might be more profitably spent on some joy-buzzers.

The Kugelmass Episode, for one example, allows the aforementioned Kugelmass to enter literary classics and get busy with the great female characters of fiction, and so feels oddly like a Borges homage albeit with sex and wisecracks. Being the work of Woody Allen - even without referring to more recent transgressions - we begin with an understanding of this collection being maybe one step up from Mad magazine or whatever, because humour is generally regarded as a low form unless dignified by age, as is the case with Rabelais, Voltaire and those guys; but Allen's satire was often both literate and pointed, and would surely deserve to be held in higher regard had he not allegedly pissed on his chips.

That said, of the three collections I've read, this has been the first to hint at anything we probably would have rather not discovered, specifically in Retribution which strikes a peculiar note in describing a man who seduces his girlfriend's mother and, in doing so, becomes suddenly irresistible to the former girlfriend who tries to rekindle the original relationship:

 

'Marrying Mom has made you my father.' She kissed me again and just before returning to the festivities said, 'Don't worry, Dad, there'll be plenty of opportunities.'

Which gets a great big prudish ewww from me, not least because the story's near twenty pages seem curiously lacking in the usual zingers; so it's quite difficult to separate the art from the artist with that one. Of course, it should be remembered that Allen was never convicted of anything, and no evidence of abuse was found; but it's hard to avoid being reminded of the whole shitshow when reading Retribution in particular.

Never mind.

Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff Fire and Fury (2018)
If, like me, you've ever wondered at the transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate, to whisperer for a disaffected demographic, to risible nominee, to rent-in-the-fabric-of-time president elect, then Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury is nothing if not a revelation. Wolff somehow managed to hang around in the White House for long enough to observe the real shit going down without himself becoming a target, and Fire and Fury seems to answer more or less any question you could have regarding the Trump administration.

The picture is shocking, and probably more shocking than you may have realised, amounting to an angry bear at large in the building with a team of handlers vainly striving to keep it happy without being eviscerated. The question of how he got there - as reiterated by all those memes based around a photograph of a turtle floundering on top of a fence post - seems to be that it couldn't have happened without Bannon; and even Trump had no illusions on that score, his campaign being an exercise in building the brand because he knew he had no chance of winning. This revelation additionally incorporates the suggestion - which I find convincing - that without Bannon, Trump's time in office would have been unremarkable at best, politically insensitive at worst, and without the taint of extreme right politics. So, amazing though it may seem, Fire and Fury actually left me feeling just a little bit sorry for Donald. I wouldn't say he's without blame, or even necessarily a nice guy, but he probably didn't quite deserve the shitshow with which his name is now synonymous.

The highly specific combination of factors contributing to Trump's election in 2016 described in this book would seem to make it unlikely he could make a comeback in 2024, but then I didn't think he stood a chance of winning in the first place. I guess we'll see.

The Ladybird

D.H. Lawrence The Ladybird (1923)
Three novellas, one written in 1915 then revised, each more or less exploring the changing dynamic of the relationship between men and women in the aftermath of the Great War. My previous readings of Lawrence's short stories left me with the feeling that the form didn't really allow him space in which to do his thing. These, being longer, seem to support my hunch, although only The Fox seems to work with the same strength of conviction as the novels, or at least the better novels.

Of the three, The Fox seems the least overtly autobiographical and is, presumably as a result, the most direct in delivering ultimately pessimistic observations about the impossibility of true intimacy between men and women, specifically that even with the best of intentions, each sex works against the interests of the other. I personally find this more plausible as a perspective than a statement - keeping in mind here that Lawrence's own relationships tended to be somewhat volatile - but it's impressive that such a perspective can be described without requiring illustration from scheming pantomime characters of obvious ill intention.

The Ladybird and The Captain's Doll may have more going on, and the latter seems to represent a dry run for The Plumed Serpent, albeit with less emphasis on that old time religion; but both seem to stumble here and there - which The Fox avoids - in emptying new people into the narrative at unexpected intervals and unsettling whatever we thought we'd understood up to that point.

Nevertheless, The Ladybird is a reasonably satisfying collection, notable for its characteristic blending of people with their respective environments; for its cautiously progressive, if pessimistic, spirit; for its unflinching analysis of human relationships, and specifically of Lawrence's relationship with Frieda - who was almost certainly doing the milkman during the writing of The Captain's Doll.

Transit

Ted McKeever Transit (1987)
This was where he started. I was aware of its existence but had my head buried in mutant books, so it's taken me a while. The biggest surprise, at least to me, is that you can actually see McKeever learning on the job, developing his style over the course of the original five-issue run; and as learning curves go, this one was dramatic. The first five pages are ropey as fuck, resembling something that a not especially promising graffiti artist might have had printed in Deadline; but the shadows deepen and the bodies take on a more expressionist angularity as McKeever dispensed with the hip-hop munchkins, and everything is in place by the time the art needs to take on any heavy lifting.

The narrative wobbles here and there, finding its feet. It's nothing mind-blowing - corrupt officials, sociopathic evangelists and so on, but with pleasantly odd flourishes of imagination to keep it from sinking into the generic. In places it feels a little like moody artwork in search of a story, but that's okay. These were early days and the atmosphere carries the story with ease, and it's easy to see that Ted McKeever was clearly destined for greater things.