Books: The Institute By Stephen King (2019)

"In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.” In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extra normal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute"

Like all King’s books, The Institute is a battle between good and evil. But while the book owes a lot to King’s past works –Firestarter and Carrie comes to mind, but a few others as well - and the huge success of Stranger Things, he does give us a novel that is still unexpectedly different, if only because it starts off one way and then goes another way. We start with a troubled ex-cop from Sarasota, who’s on his way north and whose stopover in a small backwater town becomes more permanent. And in typical King fashion, while the town of DuPray does not exist in a vacuum (it’s modern and even has a black sheriff), it still carries the DNA of other small towns King has introduced to us Constant Reader –a place where everyone knows everyone’s business. Then it shifts to a story about Luke and events of The Institutes. It’s here where the bulk of the book takes place. As I read, I was curious how Tim Jamieson and Luke will intersect.

As usual, just as well, we get character development –something King has always excelled in. We get a lot of backstory most the characters, including the bad folks as well (who are not evil –though they are- but more people who do bad things in pursuant of a goal). We’ve also seen King use the special child trope before (see above) and Luke is no Danny Torrance or Carrie White, because his “powers” seem more about his ability to puzzle out problems than read people’s minds or move objects (though he can do that, but he needs the abilities of the other kids to enhance that). So Luke is written as a 12-year-old genius and seems more adult than the adults, but he still has believable, well written pre-teenager who has a lot issues. The fact that he can still function, still plan, is still more a plot device, but King works in magic here.

It’s a big book, dark with ideas, more science fiction (or magical realism) than horror, but still a well paced tale.

Books: Drowned Hopes By Donald E. Westlake (1990)

"In his day, Tom Jimson (a sort of parody of certain characters crime writer Jim Thompson used to create in the 1940s and 50s -who went unnoticed during that era but was “rediscovered” in the 1980s, years after his passing in 1977) was a hard man. He came up with Dillinger in the 1930s, and pulled a lot of high-profile jobs before the state put him away. They meant it to be for good, but after twenty-three years the prisons are too crowded for seventy-year-old bank robbers, and so they let the old man go. Finally free, he heads straight for John Dortmunder’s house. Long ago, Tom buried $700,000, and now he needs help digging it up. While he was inside, the government dammed a nearby river, creating a reservoir and putting fifty feet of water on top of his money. He wants to blow the dam, drown the villagers, and move to Acapulco. If Dortmunder wants a clean conscience to go along with his share, he needs to find a nice way to get the money before Tom’s nasty instincts get the best of both of them."

Drowned Hopes is Donald E. Westlake’s seventh Dortmunder novel and it leaves a bit of the slapstick behind (though there is still plenty of humor here) as we are introduced to a really dangerous man, the after mentioned Tom Jimson. He’s a bully, a murderer, and probably a psycho. Most of the book has Dortmunder coming up with one plan after another to try and prevent Jimson from blowing up the dam and ending the lives of hundreds of people. So Dortmunder takes the plunge –and fails. He then successfully dissuades the group from attempting to burn off the water with a huge laser. Still, feeling pressure from Jimson, he makes another attempt. And then another.

I felt the plot is sort of a variation on The Hot Rock, with one elaborate plan of Dortmunder’s backfiring for various reasons, but it’s still a fun read. John may be a petty criminal, but he does have morals and a soul, and you can't help but love his curmudgeonly ways of trying to avoid living in a world that is always moving forward. The book goes on way too long, though, and Westlake could’ve dropped one or two of the plans to retrieve the money, dropped a sub-plot here and there (Guffey was more a plot device than a character), but ultimately it’s a vastly entertaining caper.

Books: A Long Way From Home By Peter Carey (2018)

"Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the 1954 Redex Trial, a weeks-long endurance contest of a car race that circles the entire continent. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator: deposed quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher Willie Bachhuber. If they win the Redex, the Bobs name alone will get them a dealership, and Willie will have recharged a life currently ground to a halt. But before any of that might happen, their official strip maps will lead them, without warning, out of the comfortable white Australia they know so well"

A Long Way From Home is often hilarious, heartbreaking and eyeopening, as it’s Peter Carey’s attempt to come to terms with the true history of Australia’s founding and confront, as he’s noted, that “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”

The novel unfolds in alternating first-person narrative. We meet Irene Bobs, a spunky, petite you woman married to the equally diminutive Titch –who has an amiable personality and has dreams of running a local Ford dealership. Still, he lives in fear of his domineering father, “Dangerous” Dan. But being the father that Dan is, he makes a deal with General Motors Holden in their town of Bacchus Marsh. The other narrator is Willie Bachhuber, who is fair haired and son of a preacher and who seemly has fled to Bacchus Marsh due a faithless wife. Or so it seems. He also brings with him his books and maps of his beloved Germany. To help fund their dreams (and despite what his father is doing), Titch and Irene attempt to win the Redex Trial, a round-Australia rally. They enlist Willie as their navigator. And it’s here that Carey is able to give the readers a vivid portrait of Australia and its dark history of racism and destruction of the Aboriginals.

The book peters out long before the end, though. It’s not so much what the author is trying to say, the horrors of that white people did in taking possession of such a timeless culture (and much like Columbus, it seems Captain James Cook was much more a devil than a hero the history books paint him to be), but that beyond Irene and Willie, none of the other characters seem to have a life to them –they’re rather flat and two-dimensional. Titch is amusing at first, but become childish and stupid as the book continues and race becomes less important than Willie’s issue about who he is and where he comes from. And while knowing Willie’s past is important to the narrative structure of the novel, it eventually overwhelms everything else. I’m conflicted if this is good or bad due to what Carey was attempting to confront.

However, I did enjoy the book and Irene is such a great character –you can’t help but love her.

Books: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine By Gail Honeyman (2017)

"Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one." 

For the most part, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a dazzling debut novel, filled with darkness, humor, and out- right charm. Eleanor is not original in many senses –she’s like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, combined with Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet, if you please) from Keeping Up Appearances and a few other odd-ball traces we’ve seen on TV and movies over the decades- but she is clearly smart, enduring and very, very damaged.

Honeyman’s prose is addictive and there a number of passages that made me laugh out loud (the whole waxing scene was brilliant comedy gold) while equally there were many parts that were sad (her childhood is slowly revealed as the book goes on, and it is pretty horrible). It takes a good writer to balance the humor –which ping-ponged between broad jokes, observational humor, social cues, and outright snark.

While Eleanor’s back-story slowly comes life (as her present life begins to unravel), you can see where Honeymoon was subtlety dropping hints (and for fans of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte will see where this book was going), but I did guess early on about her relationship with her Mummy and their weekly conversations. I mean, at first it wasn’t obvious, but eventually you catch on here.

And while I did mention Sheldon form the popular TV series, it’s not meant to cast Eleanor as someone on the autism spectrum. I’ve read that some people believed this because she did not pick up social clues, had little or no knowledge of pop culture, but knew a great detail about a lot of odd things. You knew early on she was damaged in some way in her youth, so I felt connected to her because of this,  understood some of things she talked about (like being alone: “Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself”). I can also see why she compartmentalized her life, as this is something I have done about my own childhood and now my adult life. Still, I can talk about it somewhat, but getting over it seems difficult. I’ve never been one to fully understand the part about maintaining a healthy relationship with friends and family. Committing to being fully present is difficult for me, as I’ve been flying on autopilot for the last four decades. It’s not perfect, but for Eleanor, like me it’s best I can do.