Zero The Hero: A Review of Brad Meltzer’s The Zero Game

As I think I’ve mentioned before I am a very slow reader. I also have a tendency to get really into a book and then let it sit on my bedside table for a while as I switch to comics and trades for a while. Well, I picked Brad Meltzer’s The Zero Game a while ago on the discount table. I started reading it a while back and have been on and off for a while.

But I’ll tell you what, Meltzer really killed it with Zero Game. I don’t know if I enjoyed it quite as much as I did The Millionaires, but it still had a lot of the elements of his writing that I’ve come to recognize along with a few new tricks, which is always impressive.

Meltzer is the master at short, action filled chapters that keep the pages turning. And just about every chapter ends with a cliffhanger of some kind and then the next chapter picks up with another character, so you’re drawn back into THAT story.

But I can’t start talking about my favorite aspect of this book without SPOILER ruining a twist about a quarter of the way through. So consider yourself warned. We start seeing this tale of political intrigue through the eyes of one character in the first person and then the unexpected happens. That character dies. I was shocked. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the first person narative changes in such a manner (it switches to the victim’s friend). It’s a very effective storytelling element because you’re really not sure if our new hero, Harris, or his inadvertent sidekick Viv will really make it through to the end.

Aside from our main characters, Meltzer also serves up one of the coolest villains in the form of Janos. He’s the unusual kind of super slick criminal that doesn’t let anything stop him. He’s got enough experience under his belt to handle any and all situations and does so. The fact that he’s being given the runaround by a government dude like Harris only lends to Harris’ credit as a smart, creative hero.

Oh, there’s also a bunch of name references for comic book fans. There’s characters named Dinah and Barry. I feel like there were a few more (like three on one page) but I forget what they are now. It was actually a little distracting, but I can appreciate his homage.

If you’ve only read Meltzer’s comic book work, I highly recommend you check out one of his novels. Even though his Green Arrow arc is one of my favorites, he seems to have a hard time translating the break neck speed and super fast pacing of his novels into his comics (especially his JLoA work). There’s a reason he’s a big time author folks and you should check out one of his big time books. I’m also looking to add Book of Lies to the huge pile of books next to my bed.

Halloween Scene/Book Vs. Movie: The Stepford Wives (1975)

Sometime this year I picked up a copy of The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin at the fantastic Building 19 (one of the best things about New England, as I’ve talked about before). I’m a slow reader but the book was pretty short, so it didn’t take me too long to get through it. And it was a good read. I was impressed with how much Levin was able to fit into (I think) less than 120 pages. Not really knowing more than the basic “something’s weird about the women of Stepford, they’re TOO good at being house wives” idea, I was pleasantly surprised as I read through and found a building sense of dread as Joanna loses friends and a little bit of her mind as all the women around her either are or are turned into the “perfect housewife.”

It also hit on one of the themes that I personally find to be the scariest in fiction/life, which is the main person telling the truth, but no one believes them (as I mentioned in the my riveting review of Dying to Belong). You really get a sense of that as Joanna’s liberated female friends start joining the clean house club.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, I’ll talk more about the movie which watched yesterday, though the movie follows along pretty closely. In the movie version, which was written by the insanely brilliant screenwriter William Goldman, Joanna and her family move from New York City to Stepford, CT. Everything’s fine at first, though you start to see some cracks in Joanna’s relationship with her husband. It seems like he’s been making a lot of big decisions without really consulting with her, like moving and joining up with a men only men’s club in Stepford. As she meets the other women of Stepford, Joanna comes to realize that they’re all the poster children for good housekeeping, worried more about the appearance of their homes and children than any real social issues. This doesn’t sit well with Joanna or her new friend Bobbie who also recently moved to Stepford. Both women try to find other like-minded women in town, but come up short with one exception, Charmaine (played by Ginger from Gilligan’s Island!). As time goes on, Charmaine goes from free wheeling to kitchen cleaning, which completely freaks Bobby out. Both Bobbie and Joanna try to get their husbands to move out of Stepford because they’re genuinely scared about what’s going to happen. Then Bobbie “goes away for the weekend” with her husband and comes back Stepford-ized. Now Joanna’s really freaked out. She goes to an out-of-town shrink who tells her to go home, get her kids and get the hell out of Stepford. When Joanna does, she’s met with hostility and her kids are missing. From there she’s making a mad dash around town to find her kids, but comes face to face with the real reason why the women of Stepford seem so perfect. SPOILER, they’re robots.

It’s actually cooler than that might sound. The set-up is that a bunch of the men in the men’s club are genius scientist type guys. One is an animatronics expert from Disney World, one’s a famous artist, one studies voices and tricks the women into recording a list of words for his “private study.” There’s also a number of companies like General Electric and other computer companies. It’s actually kind of a brilliant plot element, as dreamed up by Levin in the book and put on screen by Goldman. The men even go so far as to steal Joanna’s dog and keeping it in their clubhouse (a huge old mansion), presumably to get the dog to become familiar with the Joanna-bot. There’s some really great touches in there that you can thank both Levin and Goldman for.

I can’t remember the exact ending of the book, but in the movie SPOILER Joanna comes face to face with her robot replacement and the robot (presumably) kills her. The robot then takes her place and you end on the bleakest shot of beautiful women walking around the supermarket you’ll ever see. It’s just so hopeless, which is the real gut punch for me. There’s also such a sense of betrayal that feel towards Joanna’s husband. He seems like an okay dude in the beginning, but then he signs up with these dudes who want to kill his wife and replace her with “the perfect wife.” Jeez, man, you’ve gotta be stone cold to do something like that. The whole point, from the men’s perspective, is that you work hard, you might as well have the perfect woman who will have awesome sex with you, clean up after you and never give you any problems. Or have independent thought. I think it’s a cool commentary on the time that it was written but can still be read and watched with an eye towards today.

The movie was longer than I expected, almost two hours, but it does a great job of doing the slow build. I can see how it might be boring for some people, but, even though I hadn’t seen it before, I knew what to look for because I had read the book (like when the men are meeting at Joanna’s house and one of them draws her, the drawing is like the kiss of death, once you’ve got it and have finished the word recordings after living there for four months, your donezo). So it was kind of like I had seen the movie. All the major beats are still there. I think the main differences are the seasons, I remember there being snow in the book, but it’s rain in the movie. And like I said, I can’t remember the specifics of the book’s ending, though Joanna does end up getting replaced.

The big question for me is, what do they do with the original wife. Do they get flat out killed? Do their memories get erased? These dudes are basically mad scientists who run a small town, so they’ve got a good amount of options. I’d also like to see someone like Dirty Harry roll into town and offer up some justice. Maybe I’ll start writing my script treatment…

Oh, one last thing, I forgot to mention initially. According to IMDB Goldman’s original intent for the movie adaptation would be that all the women would be walking around looking like Playboy Playmates, wearing short shorts and what not. So how did the movie end up feature what look like Southern belles in big floppy hats and long dresses? Well one of the producers agreed to finance the film only if his wife could get a role in it. And, while she was pretty, she wasn’t the type that Hef would put on the cover of his mag, so they had to switch the WHOLE look that they were going for because this woman looked homely. I know they just remade this move with Nicole Kidman a few years ago (haven’t seen it), but I’d like to see a remake that’s more of a period piece, set in the 70s with this look. Mostly because 70s Playmates were super hot! Who’s with me?!

Book vs. Movie: The Virgin Suicides

So, remember when I said that I didn’t read books too often? Well, after finishing Slam I looked at the growing stack of novels I have next to my bed and picked one kind of at random. It was Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993). Someone had put it on the free table at work and I snatched it up, not really knowing anything about it.

So I started reading it and was hooked instantly. It only took me about three dedicated days of reading to get through it (so about a week, real time) and it was one of the most moving, ghostly reading experiences I’ve ever had. The story follows the Lisbon Family as all five of the daughters kill themselves over the span of a year, the first of which Cecilia, predates her sisters by a full year. What really grabbed me about the telling of the tale was that the narrator speaks in the “we” and comes from the point of view of one of the boys in the neighborhood who fell in a sort of love with the girls and desperately wanted to help them. After they killed themselves, the boys spend the rest of their lives (at least to the point we find them in the book), trying to figure out why these five young women took their lives.

Another element of the book that got me was the way that Eugenides packed each page with so many characters, either actually involved in the story or just mentioned by name. Almost all of them seem incidental at first, but come back into play later on. The great thing about it, though, is that I never felt lost. Maybe I didn’t take much stock in such casually mentioned characters, but they all came back in one way or another, which really makes the reader feel like a part of these boys’ (and later mens’) club of failed avenging heroes.

The sense of not being able to penetrate another person is one that I’ve often thought about. Even the girls’ own father who lived under the same roof as them had no idea what was going through their heads as they planned an elaborate suicide plan that involved a number of the neighborhood boys. No matter how hard you try to decode someone’s thoughts and actions, you just can’t get inside their heads. The best you can do is gather accounts to try and put the puzzle together.

Sophia Coppola’s adaptation (1999) is pretty faithful to the book, but not necessarily to the version in my brain. But I think a lot of that comes from the basic differences between books and movies. For instance, in the book, you don’t really get a sense of the girls as individuals until the narrator does which is well into the book. Of course, in a movie, you can obviously see the differences. Though, I do have to give props to the casting folks for making the non Kirsten Dunst sisters all look pretty similar and easily confused.

Aside from Dunst who nails the promiscuous and evocative Lux to a T, the casting didn’t quite do it for me. I didn’t get the same feel from Kathleen Turner’s mother character as I did in the book, even though she looks almost exactly like how I pictured her. The way its conveyed in the book, it’s hard to not feel like she’s majorly to blame for the girls’ suicides. Again, I’m thinking this is because we actually see her reactions to things like her first daughter’s suicide.

I was really most curious to see how Coppola and Co. handled the first person plural narrator of the book in the film (he always uses “we” and never deviates). She got Giovanni Ribisi, an actor I’ve liked since I randomly rented Suburbia at the age of 16 and developed a pretty deep man crush on. Anyway, he does a great job, but isn’t utilized enough to really set the same tone as the book. The lack of entrenchment along with the neighborhood boys leads to more focus on the girls, which almost completely removes the element of being an outsider looking in on them which is central to the novel. Heck, it’s hard to be an outsider when you’re right in their living room as they play Chinese checkers and watch wildlife shows.

One of the downsides to watching such a faithful adaptation so soon after reading the book (I finished it Saturday in between and after errands I didn’t want to run) is that you know when everything’s coming and what’s going to happen. I didn’t feel that way watching Virgin Suicides. I was mostly curious to see how Coppola translated such an artfully crafted novel onto the screen. And kudos to her for doing such a great job. The movie never lags (it’s just over an hour and a half) and, while you’re nowhere near as firmly entrenched with the neighborhood kids as you are in the book, you still develop an attachment for these girls and desperately want to help them, even though it’s a forgone conclusion from about the second line of the script that they’re not going to make it.

All in all, I enjoyed both works, though obviously I liked the book better. I can’t recommend the book enough to people. Heck, if it only took me a few days to read, you should be able to get through it quickly. But, if books aren’t your thing, I also give the movie my thumb’s up.

Nick’s Knack

Every now and then between reading trades, watching movies and re-watching Buffy I do read some books without pictures. A personal favorite author of mine is Brit Nick Hornby. I got introduced to Nick’s work after finding out that High Fidelity was based on a book. Soon I went to the bookstore and picked up my own copy of one of the few books I’ve actually read twice and read it for the first time. I was blown away by the way his narrative weaved in and out between the world of record collecting and intense relationship stuff that I didn’t really understand at the time.

I haven’t read About A Boy or How to Be Good, which are the two books after High Fidelity that everyone asks me about when I tell them I like Hornby. What can I say? I’m a slow reader and I had plenty of books to read throughout college. But, after getting a real job and moving to New York I started trolling Barnes and Noble and Borders for their bargain books. I now have a stack of about 20 books that I’m getting through slowly but surely. Two of those books have been by Hornby: A Long Way Down and Slam.

I picked both books up (in hardcover even) without even reading what they were about. His name (and the under $7 price tag sold me from the word go). I read A Long Way Down in a few days, which is pretty impressive for me. It’s a book about four very different people who all meet at a popular suicide spot on New Year’s Eve. What I like about Nick is that he gets to the part of the story that a lot of other authors would use as their endings and then pushes on from there. In this case, you’d think that the people meeting on the building to kill themselves would be the end, but it’s just the beginning as they become friends, form a strange little club and learn more about each other (as we do when each character takes a turn at narrating).

Tonight, I finished Slam which is about a 16 year old kid who talks to his Tony Hawk poster and gets the first girl he’s ever slept with pregnant. Again, Hornby really delves deep into the psyche of a kid who’s about to have a kid. And while it’s funny, it’s also incredibly scary and intimidating. I actually put Slam down for quite a while after starting it (I do that a lot). Sometimes its because I don’t really like the book and sometimes its because I’d rather watch TV or read trades. For some reason I thought that Slam was the latter, but I’m glad I picked it back up last week and finished it because I really, really dug it. Horny keeps the focus on Sam the whole time, telling the story from his perspective. It’s an imperfect perspective, of course, but that’s what makes it so charming. It wasn’t TOO long ago that I was 16 (though I didn’t have the problems Sam does), but I can distinctly remember feeling some of the same things he does and feeling the same way. It’s a great book for guys to read and enjoy, but I also really think it’s the rare book that you could hand to a woman and tell her “this is what it’s like to be a 16 year old boy.” Even if he is British.

I do wish his books came with a bit of a glossary though. I’m familiar with most of the British slang, but there’s always something that throws me. I had to look up the word “skint” (it means poor) and I wasn’t sure if British college is the same as ours. I think it is, but I’m not sure. I do think I’m going to start using “do my head in” when someone’s driving me crazy. Also, I kind of want to go to Hastings to see what it’s really like.

Feeling Tarantino

So, this weekend was a little weird, mostly for all of the weird Tarantino-ness that sneaked its way into things. The wife and I headed up north to New Hampshire to visit her folks for Father’s Day. On Saturday we went to this flea market where I picked up Evil-Lynn from the 2002 Masters of the Universe line along with NECA’s The Bride figure from Kill Bill.

Later on, we went to this place called Building 19 where I picked up three books (for $2.98 each). One was the script to Pulp Fiction which I ended up reading for the rest of the day (it reads just as well as it watches), Spike, Mike Reloaded by John Pierson (a book I’ve heard about on plenty of Kevin Smith DVD commentaries) and Sonata For Jukebox by Geoffrey O’Brien, a book that caught my eye like just about any other book with a record on the cover does.

Finally, my Quentin Tarantino weekend ended with a viewing of Incredible Hulk (hey, Tim Roth was in it, he was also in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, close enough right?). I wasn’t all that excited about this flick at first, partly because I was one of the few people that liked the original Hulk movie. It’s been a while since I watched it, so there will be a Hulk review up later this week (hopefully). Anyway, I just wasn’t feeling IH. Ed Norton just didn’t feel like Bruce Banner. The Hulk and Abomination CGI looked fine, but the helicopters looked ridiculously fake.

Frankly, the best part of the flick was Roth. He’s super-crazy and the scene where he fights the Hulk as himself (before Abomination-ing out) made me psyched for the Captain America movie. The only problem? Wouldn’t it have been cool to see Roth play Union Jack down the line? Oh well, too late for that now probably.

On a different note, Em and I were talking with the in laws about the upcoming movies and we all suggested that Matt Damon would make a great Captain America. This got me thinking that if it is Brad Pitt, as some of us around the office have thought about, Damon could make a great Hawkeye down the road. Let’s just not wait too long on this, okay Marvel? Thanks.

Um…I guess I ran out of Tarantino stuff, but you get the idea.