Alec Waugh = Evelyn’s brother. I read about his books in Slightly Foxed and then sought some out on my most recent trip to Myopic (conveniently located down the block from my haircut so I’m there quite often). This is subtitled “an erotic comedy” and I remember wondering for the first, oh say, 40 pages or so when exactly that was going to kick in. (But it does, no worries. Hee hee.) Apparently (per the book jacket), this is a spoof on “Anonymous Underground Victorian Novels” and I did find it quite silly at times. Silly mingled with a lil “Eyes Wide Shut” wannabe action.

I’ve read more short stories in the past few years than ever before (I mostly blame Elizabeth Crane for that. “Blame” being a good thing in this scenario), and still I thought these were really unusual.

But now that two months have gone by… I can’t pinpoint exactly why that was. I will say that they were all really truly individuals. I’m sure you’ve come across short story collections that as you read through them, the narrators and/or subjects tend to blur together (when they weren’t intended to, although there are collection that intend that) and it seems you’ve just read a novel with some bits that don’t seem to fit together. No question of that happening here. I think my favorite was “Oh Lord Why Not” where everyone has a hit pop song in them.

Pretty short collection though. Big print, small pages. Not a book that takes long to get through.

So good. So sad. With Lodge, as with Philip Roth, as he gets older, more infirm and perhaps crankier, so do his characters. I loved the diary-style writing. I loved the tone.

Really only one thing rang false to me and that was an extensive description of a pair of breasts (and how the narrator could tell they were natural) on page 5 (only the third page of actual text). I actually called my dad and asked if that paragraph stuck out like a sore thumb to him as well. AND IT DID. So it wasn’t just a girlreaction, yo.

It was interesting in reading this to think about how there never stops being a time in life when you can inadvertently make bad decisions, or make so-so decisions that cascade into much worse events. Something I think most of us assume will cease to happen as we age.
Really good, but I think I would read other Lodge before this one, if I were to try him for the first time. “Small World” and “Changing Places” are both really great.

In my library this is classified as somewhat academic function. Good companions would be “Straight Man” by Richard Russo or “Foolscap” by Michael Malone (or see the “academic foibles” list on this page).

This was OK / fine for light reading. But the attempt at misdirection seemed way too obvious to me and it drove me nuts the entire time I was reading it that the quilt on the cover of the book was a sampler and not a Lover’s Knot, one of the main metaphors. Dear publishing house: when you’re publishing a book for the crafty market, these types of things WILL be noticed. Idiots.

You know that old joke about “why wasn’t anybody poor in their “past lives”?” How in our past lives, we were all Cleopatras and Queen Elizabeth’s and nobody was “the servant girl”. (Speaking to the females in the audience, obviously.) I often feel that way about fantasty novels, they are always taking place in the world one would WANT to be in, where your special magical talents bring you into interaction with the best crowds, the higher bits of “society” and generally, of course, fighting against evils/evil magics.

This book, on the other hand, is set firmly in the lower dregs. The world of “guild rats”, i.e., abandoned homeless “ghetto” children and, for Azoth/Kylar, the way out is to become an assassin, a “wet boy”, sometimes using those evil magics the heros of your typical fantasy are usually working against. There will be of course times when the “bad assassin” will turn out to be working on the side of the morally good, but for the most part, the focuses of this book are on the other side of things, in the back alleys, in the prostitution houses, on the outskirts. “Under the stairs”, so to speak.

It’s violent, brutal and cutthroat. And very engaging.