Mr. Mercedes

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
(Scribner / Simon & Schuster Audio, 2014)
Format: audio download from library (narrated by Will Patton)

From Goodreads: "In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.

In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the "perk" and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.

Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again.

Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands."

As a teen, I tore through my parents' collection of Stephen King books. Even though they scared me, I was always sucked in to King's deftly constructed, uncomfortable worlds. Some time in the decades since, I lost the King habit. Then Audies season rolled around, and Mr. Mercedes was on the fiction nominee list. 

I thought I'd dislike the creeping sense of horror. I thought I'd be antsy to finish and move on to a title with far less suspense. I was so wrong. The things I was right about: I knew Will Patton would do a great job, and I knew Stephen King would force me to care about characters he would proceed to endanger. 

Retired investigator Bill Hodges and his misfit companions are complex, complete characters. Hodges' inability to let the Mercedes Killer go, and his sharp insights into the mind of the man taunting him with his crimes, drew me fully into the plot. And it's no surprise that King is a master plotter.

Patton is consistently strong, and I learned long ago that I could trust his instincts when he is narrating a story. His pacing is excellent, which is so important during suspenseful moments, and he always seem to relish language and word play while narrating. I appreciate that he doesn't go overboard with dramatics - voices are distinct but mild, and even the crazy people sections remain understated, leaving room for the listener to process the narrative.

Fingers crossed that Patton narrates the next books in this trilogy, because now that I've reacquired the King habit, I want Patton to be my dealer.

Armchair Audies 2014: Literary Fiction

I'm such a cheater. I committed to judging 3 categories in the Armchair Audies project this year, and judge I will. But this category (LitFic) I'm judging with a bit of an asterisk, given that I didn't actually listen to all of the nominees. But! The discerning Jennifer at Literate Housewife also listened to almost all of them, and we've chatted about them and decided on a winner.

Here are the Audies Literary Fiction nominees:

So - the two I didn't touch were Eleanor Morse's White Dog Fell from the Sky and Stephen Kiernan's The Curiosity (neither of which Jennifer enjoyed enough to want to talk me into listening to them as serious contenders.)

Given that I can't argue otherwise, I suppose that I have to put Meryl Streep's reading of Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary in 4th place. I haven't mentioned it here before, but that's because thinking about it puts me to sleep; listening to it was a struggle to drive safely. I adore Streep as much as the next gal, but this was a dull dull audio, and felt way longer than the three CDs it took to hear.

Of the other three, I enjoyed the novel most but the audio least when it comes to Amy McFadden's reading of Jincy Willet's Amy Falls Down. The novel was funny and smart and wry but McFadden's voice was too young for the titular Amy.

Which leaves us with two Big Books of 2013 - both literally and in how they impacted the literary landscape.

My mom suggested that instead of listening to David Pittu's reading of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, I should have read it and I would have liked the Pulitzer Prize winner better. Of course, she hadn't gotten to the end of it herself when she said that. I will note that my post complaining about the novel - especially the ending - has gotten far more hits in the six months since I put it up than anything else in the history of this blog. And I've had tons of conversations on various sites regarding similar complaints. So. It's not just me, is what I'm saying. And Pittu does do a fine job with the material. He portrays the characters consistently and with energy (perhaps more energy than they earn in the text), although he give Boris a semi-Slavic accent that Tartt intended to be semi-Australian instead.

But the multi-cast (Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and Clifton Collins, Jr.) reading of Philipp Meyer's The Son was definitely the best audio of this bunch. Although I also had some quibbles with this book, they were a lot more personal than universal. And the audio cast did a lot to keep me engaged with the text even when I was irritable about it. They were true to their characters, fluid, and indefatigable across the long length of the novel. It was a notably good listen, and well worth the nod among this particular batch of nominees. The Armchair Audies vote goes to The Son.

The Son, Reviewed by a Texan Daughter

The Son by Philipp Meyer
(Ecco & HarperAudio, 2013)
Format: audiobook via library (read by Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and Clifton Collins Jr.)

From Goodreads: "Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny. 

Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world."

So. My husband's from Ireland. I explained to him why this book rubbed me wrong this way: your hero is the son of mythic Celtic queens and kings. He fought off the Normans and the Vikings and the  British, too, for good measure. Helped St. Patrick with the whole snake issue. Meets the locals down the pub of an evening for a reflective pint. Has a son he lost to the IRA, a daughter who married a Protestant land owner, an aunt or three who perished in the potato famine. Let's see, what else? Oh, yes, he's best friends with a Druid and learned to write Ogham symbols before being shown the mysteries of beehive burial chambers. When the Troubles began, he watched the younger generation struggle to choose sides, all the while holding true to his abiding principals and playing the tin whistle and attending church every Sunday. His favorite child was in the GPO that day; his least favorite was the only one to survive. One granddaughter becomes a famous Irish dancer, another is part of the diaspora, and his descendants are uncannily good at surviving when the Celtic Tiger roars off into the sunset. They all invest properly in technology and also know how to farm their long-held land for bricks of peat to burn of an evening. 

Do any of their characters need to be more deeply developed than that? Is having a tangential role in every Child's History of Ireland significant moment enough to make their dynasty worth reading about for hundreds and hundreds of pages? If so, great. The Son is just right, then. 

And I don't dispute that it's well-written. I mean, I could have done without the detailed descriptions of how to use every bone of the buffalo, or how to cap an oil well, or how wild mustangs are different from domesticated horses. But then again, I'm a 7th generation Texan. I not only had all those lessons from my own schooling, but I've reviewed them all when my sons took the same year-long Texas history classes in 4th and 7th grades. So Meyer is telling a very (very) romanticized version of Texas lore here, and that's delightful and romantic and fascinating if you've never heard it, but once you have, or if you take that away from this tome, is what's left worth the hype?

For me, it wasn't. I felt beat over the head by his themes (you should probably respect who came before you, while keeping in mind that whoever that was that you're displacing stole the land from someone else to start with). I liked Eli okay,  and his progeny to some extent, but he never hit me as one of those vital characters you just can't escape once you close the book.

I do have tolerance for the sensationalizing of a dramatic history. I've enjoyed plenty of epic sagas full of sweeping adventures ripped from the headlines of whatever era they visit. In this case, though, I didn't feel like the underpinnings were enough to support the hype.

And then there's JA, who is worthy, I grant, of lots of pages because she encompasses so much that her great-grandfather would admire. And yet, she can only do so by eschewing everything 'girly' about herself, including her non-initialed name and the pearls from her grandmother. She works damn hard to fit into a man's world, and that was interesting and engaging, but also sad. I'd not have minded another female character who was interesting and engaging, even though she was 'only' raising her children on the frontier or surviving years as kidnapped Comanche chattel, or subverting societal expectations of her role as a member of the non-white underclass. (These women existed in the book, they just... didn't do much, except act as foils to the men and sometimes deliver succinct speeches about their lives before being shunted off to the sidelines for the rest of the book.)

The narration of this audiobook was great. The various narrators were quite in tune with their characters' cadences, especially in the case of Eli, whose patterns of thought were so well-suited to Comanche life even before he was kidnapped. I wish I hadn't had so very long to get acquainted with everyone, but as I did, I'm glad I enjoyed that aspect of this novel.

There, I'm done being surly now.