Replay

In the mainstream-with-sci-fi-conventions category, Lisa Roberts recommended Ken Grimwood's Replay, originally published in 1986. It is (in some sense) the serious version of the movie Groundhog Day. A man repeats a chunk of his life again, and again, and again. There's no clear-cut purpose, though. He doesn't need to make one perfect day or one perfect life so much as experience it from different angles and be grateful for what he's got. He can make money by betting on horse races he already knows the winner of and investing in unknown companies that will make it big, but he can't stop Kennedy from being assassinated. He can marry his college sweetheart, but not reconnect with the woman who is also caught in a similar time loop. In the end, when he pops out the other end of his loop, he has to deal with life as it comes, one day at a time.

     (Two anachronisms which pop out painfully, and I note because I'm a nit-picking pain in the butt: The desk in the hero's office features Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, which is a lounge chair, not a desk chair. Our hero is drinking Glenlivet scotch in a New York bar in 1964 --- to the best of my knowledge, the only bottle available in the US at that time had been smuggled into my father’s liquor cabinet from Scotland as a gift by an Inverness-bred friend of his: it wasn't generally available until the late '70s.) 

The Secret History of Science Fiction

I picked up an anthology at the library edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) which contains stories such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis" and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent", which are mainstream stories in sensibility, but use the conventions of science fiction. You and I would recognize them as speculative fiction, but they could hide in plain sight in The New Yorker. Kelly and Kessel’s intention is to bring material in that middle ground to your attention. And they do a good job, providing some excellent stories, many of which I'd read before, but some, like the Chabon, Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat", and Connie Willis's "Schwarzchild Radius" were new to me.

Kahawa

Since I just posted a review of Donald E Westlake's Dancing Aztecs, it's worth also taking note of Kahawa.  He considered the pair of them to be his best work, and I'd have to agree. On the surface, this is a familiar Westlake caper: some guys steal a 33-car-long train of coffee in Uganda, and spirit the coffee out of the country during the era of Idi Amin. But it's not his usual light-hearted caper, since it graphically takes place amidst the backdrop of Amin's reign of terror. It is tightly plotted, with setbacks, double-crosses, mixed motivations from the principals, piracy and hijacking, romance, sex, and quite a bit of violence.  But, it's tightly plotted, and tells the fictional tale of what was, apparently, an actual robbery.

Dancing Aztecs

In all the years I've been mentioning it, I realize that I've never written a proper review of Donald Westlake's masterpiece, Dancing Aztecs. My opinion about it has varied, but I've always believed it's the pinnacle of Westlake's comic caper writing, surpassing even his Dortmunder books, because it stands in its own little universe. The story is that a shipment of duplicates of a pre-Columbian artifact from South America includes the smuggled solid gold original, and our large cast of characters spend the book trying to locate and cash-in on the find. It features well-drawn, amusing characters with quirks and foibles, and a fluid set of alliances among them. Entertainingly, it includes the lowest-speed car chase on record. It's a wonderful rendition of the lost treasure story told in a 1920s Russian novel (which was filmed as The Twelve Chairs by Mel Brooks). I've complained from time-to-time that Dancing Aztecs suffers from being stuck in the decade in which it was written, the 1970s, with a number of prejudices and dated ideas that come from that. However, that is a problem only in the way that Gatsby being stuck in the roaring twenties is a problem: it doesn't change the overall quality of the narrative and the timeless nature of the conflict.

Welcome to Temptation

Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation is a novel about the children of a con man coming to visit a small town in Ohio to make a movie at the behest of the town's success story --- the high school ingénue who went off to Hollywood. The hereditary mayor-for-life, his mom, his political rival, the other loony city council members, the police chief, the ingénue's self-important news anchor husband, the mayor's daughter, a boy dog named Lassie, and a freezer full of Dove bars round out the cast. Witty dialog, good sex, a pool table, and a tone reminiscent of Westlake's Dancing Aztecs make it worth a bit of a slog through the early pages that set up the action. But then they start to make the porn movie under the eyes of the burghers and it gets really amusing. The real attraction, though, is Crusie’s ability to actually capture human interaction, and show those flashes of insight when one character understands another.  While this isn't as good as Bet Me, it's still an excellent story.  And in a world where romance novels have been supplanted by "mommy porn," three-dimensional characters are a real pleasure.

The King of Sports

As an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and columnist for ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook has the credentials to write The King of Sports, which, as its subtitle claims, analyzes "Football's Impact on America." He wanted to write about a college football program he could profile that had a reputation for being honest and graduating its players at a rate roughly equal to the general student body. He had a hard time finding one, finally resorting to Virginia Tech. He then compared the program at VT to other big money colleges, and examined the way in which the NFL treats it customers and players. To summarize his conclusions: The NFL exists as a monopoly organization to funnel money from television networks to the team owners. The teams are a way to funnel public money, in the form of stadium bonds, tax abatements, and free rent, into private hands. Lucrative money from cable television is further encouraging already-bad practices. College football exists in a region outside normal college life, where very few universities are actually interested in seeing that students playing big-money sports actually graduate, and the universities are happy to play along, paying their coaches more than their presidents, to keep the money rolling in. Except that the money doesn't benefit the universities as a whole, they only benefit the athletic programs. And the NCAA is a co-conspirator in this. The NFL teams and big money colleges regard their players as essentially disposable commodities. None of the football programs at any level are interested in making clear to starry-eyed players how unlikely it is that they'll get to the next level --- one in two thousand high school players eventually get to the NFL, and of those, very few play the four years required to vest their benefits.

"There are no words strong enough to express how little the NCAA cares about whether the football or men's basketball players who generate economic returns also receive an education. To the NCAA, the barometric pressure on the planet Neptune matters more than whether football and men's basketball athletes receive educations."

     --- Gregg Easterbrook, The King of Sports

The Intern's Handbook

Nobody ever notices the intern. That means if you're an assassin, you can sneak into the law firm as an intern, and kill one of the partners. And your guide for doing it would be Shane Kuhn's recently-published lovely black comedy, The Intern's Handbook, which is just wonderful. It's told from the point of view of "John" one of the operatives at HR, Incorporated, who place hitmen/interns at various companies. He's on his last assignment at a mob-connected law firm. This volume is the notes he is assembling for the operatives who come after him, giving them hints about his hard-won knowledge through multiple murders. It's also the story of meeting and falling for an FBI agent named Alice, who's investigating the law firm with the intention of sending someone to jail rather than the morgue. The whole thing is a black comedy of the first order, and a lot of fun.