* Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead: Maybe I bought into the hype. Maybe it's because I received an ARC, and not the hardcover I was expecting. At any rate, Sag wasn't as enthralling as I had hoped. Don't get me wrong-- Whitehead is a fine writer, and a few sections of his latest novel really shine (including a wince-inducing incident involving a BB gun) but overall the whole thing seemed to lack focus. And there's an issue with Sag Harbor that should not surprise anyone who's read Whitehead; he seems hesitant to get into the nitty-gritty. He polishes each wonderful sentence to a shine, and has some great quips (there's an  "equation" he puts forth concerning his hair's "fuckedupedness" that left me chuckling) but he never really digs into the life of our narrator, Benji. We see glimpses of an uneasy home life that're never followed through. And I felt like, at the end, I didn't know Benji that well; despite seeing Sag Harbor through his eyes for almost 300 pages, all I really came away with was that he disliked sweets and was perpetually awkward. Sadly, I'd say that this one's a library rental. However, I point anyone interested in this writer toward  "Apes Hides The Hurt", where his standoffish prose and general coolness are put to much better use.

Madly, by Neal Bailey: To be honest, I was a little hesitant about reading this-- even though I've guffawed my way through many of Bailey's Smallville smackdowns, there's a world of difference between online reviews and great novels. But that's what this is. Jacob Madly (who describes himself more than once as the story's hero) is basically  Holden Caulfield with a flamethrower, setting fire to his hometown, his friends, activists he disagrees with, and sometimes his own future. Even if you groan at Madly's crazed, punk rock sensibilities and self-righteousness, you can't stop reading. You have to know how he's going to make it to the next chapter without getting himself killed.

Also, from a dorky, writerly perspective, there's a bit of meta fiction that I really dug. See, many authors love to have their characters themselves become writers, and then describe this character's fiction at great length. Madly is a writer; a poet, specifically (a non-rhyming one, he violently insists). And Madly does describe his work and his struggle to finish it, but this has a point in the narrative. There's a part of Madly's journey from California to Washington that he's reluctant to tell us. Later on, we learn what he did via a book excerpt. He advanced the "Madly writing his first book" storyline while closing a hanging narrative thread.

This isn't to say that Madly is a intellectual affair; this book has two of the craziest sex (or, to steal from Wil Wheaton, “sex adjacent”) scenes I've ever read in a book, and even though they're cartoonish, it's obvious that Madly attracts the most unhinged whackjobs in a ten-mile radius. I don't think this book is currently available, but I hope it is soon. Besides a lack of explanation for one character we meet near the end (really, one sentence could've grounded this person's place in Madly's life) this one's ready for print. And now that Bailey's getting all famous and shit with his "Female Force" line of comics, I wish him more success in the future.

Joker, by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo: After reading this, I think I'm officially "over" continuity in mainstream comic books. In the past, creators like Grant Morrison and Azzarello have been criticized for (among other things) writing stories that blatantly contradict the universe they're writing in. Though I can't vouch for Morrison's work, I can say that, if ignoring DCU continuity gives us books like this, I wouldn’t miss the loss of company crossovers. In this very slim title, Azzarello gives us the kind of ugly, vile, ground-level view of Gotham I've been missing since "Gotham Central." The plot focuses on Johnny Frost, an ex-con who becomes Joker's henchmen. We see the Joker through his eyes, and the book answers the question; what's it like to work for the most insane man in Gotham? The answers aren't pretty. The book gives us a very "Dark Knight" styled Joker; a swaggering, self-mutilated monster and calculating criminal who spends his nights doing all the terrible, illicit things the regular DCU Joker supposedly does off-panel. Azzarello also offers up some clever re-interpretations of classic Batman rogues like Killer Croc, Harley Quinn and (I think) The Penguin, who are somehow believable in this real-world setting.

Also, Bermjo's pencils made the story whole, as he communicates the city (and the Joker's) depravity like few others. The most stunning pages of Joker are ones that Bermejo inked himself; they are as captivating as any piece of art hanging in a metropolitan gallery. I can't wait to see more from these two.

I'm putting to paper (Internet paper, that is, paper as a petroleum byproduct) to organize my thoughts on the books I've read over vacation:

* The Cradle, by Patrick Somerville-- A brief journey into the American family today, which is pretty bleak. It has a great hook (a MacGuffin, in Somerville's own words); a newlywed wife begs her husband to find the cradle she was raised in. This sends him on the classic quest, and along the way he meets one of the first Internet nerds, philosophical white trash, and a secret his wife's family had hidden for decades. Also, interwoven with this narrative is the story of a middle-aged writer whose connection to the other story is (at first) unclear. What I enjoyed is that the narrative is so straightforward, the voice so clear-- without realizing it, I often mumbled the character's dialogue with my version of a dignified Southern accent. A very strong read.

*The Throat, by Peter Straub-- This one was anything but brief; like many of Straub’s novels, this one ran on for more than six hundred pages. The upside to the long read was the massive cast of characters, an interesting setting (in this case, a somewhat grittier version of Milwaukee, complete with aging jazz musicians) and a complex mystery that most of the characters can’t seem to get their arms around. Perhaps the best part is in the first seventy or so pages, where our protagonist, Tim Underhill, describes two very different encounters he had with the same man-- the first in the basement of his Christian high school, the second outside a military base in Vietnam. As I said over on the Ward Six blog, at first I thought there were one too many red herrings leading up to the final “whodunit” revelation. But mulling this over, I decided the true end of the book was Underhill solving, almost by accident, his own mystery, the source of his own darkness. I’ve read four Straub titles, and this by far is my favorite.

*Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons-- What is there to say about this graphic novel that hasn’t been shouted, screamed, ranted about and debated over by legions of comic book aficionados over the past twenty-five years or so? It’s probably the most epic thing the medium has produced-- a piercing examination of the underbelly of Golden and Silver Age heroics, a screed against Cold War’s “us or them” mentality, as examination of decaying urban life, with a psychics lesson thrown in for good measure. Watchmen is the base for just about every grand-scale comic story since, from Kingdom Come to Identity Crisis (Frank Miller even said that he altered the tone of The Dark Knight Returns’ second half after reading the first issues of Watchmen) and it’s easy to see why-- every character has just enough panels devoted to them, the plot and world continuity in dense and intriguing, and--best of all-- everyone talks like real people, and not ridiculous he-man. However, I did think the ending was a bit too convoluted for its own good, and somewhat contradicts one of the main tenants of its own world. That said, it’s a read for anyone who likes probing literature, stunning art, big mutant cats, or massive blue genitalia.