Thomas Mullen

Wow, it's already that time of year. As I haven't been a very good blogger over the last few months, I thought I'd post about some of the books I most loved this year. Of course, these aren't necessarily my "Best Books of 2010" because most of them were written in years past -- these are just "Best Books Tom Happened to Read in 2010."

Before getting to that, in case anyone's curious, here's what I've been spending my time on during the last few months, since The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was published:

--Writing, putting aside with discouragement, then picking back up again with renewed excitement, and writing the living hell out of, my upcoming third novel, The Revisionists, which will be published in fall of 2011.

--Putting the finishing touches on what I think is a young adult novel crossed with a murder mystery, called Fast Food Noir.

--Experimenting with the fine art of screenwriting by turning my first novel, The Last Town on Earth, into a screenplay. No, there is no film deal to report as yet, but it's been fun to write in a different form.

--Writing some short stories during breaks in my longer works.

--Visiting some institutes of higher learning that have assigned Last Town to their incoming freshmen.

--Helping plan and throw the Decatur Book Festival, the coolest book festival in the country.

--Performing copious amounts of research, and doing a not insignificant amount of writing, for what I think will be my fourth novel, about which I'm not divulging anything quite yet, other than to say that I love it.

But back to my Best Books of 2010. Ever since graduating college in 1996, I've written down the name of every book I read, and if I found it especially wonderful, I've put an asterik beside it. This is ridiculously anal, I know, but now that I've been doing it for 14 years I don't dare stop. Also, this way, when someone asks me to recommend a great read, all I have to do is look up the asteriked titles and name one. (This is also why, when I'm giving a lecture and someone asks me to name my favorite writers or books, I completely blank out and mutter something unintelligible -- if only I carried the list with me!)

Anyway. As I look over which books I've asteriked this year, I see:

Serena by Ron Rash. An astonishing book. It earned a spot on many real critics' Best of 2009 lists, and deservedly so, but I didn't get around to reading it until this year. I have a great fondness for the western Carolina mountains, which comprise the setting of this amazing and beautiful book. It's set during the Great Depression, in a logging community, thus it has a weird kinship with both of my first two novels. I will admit with shame that Mr. Rash does a much finer job of describing the depredations and arduous beauty of being a logger in the early 20th century than I did in The Last Town on Earth. His book also won raves for its unique spin on the MacBeth story (the first Shakespeare play I really loved, back in sophomore year of high school); here, playing the role of Lady MacBeth is Serena, the bride of a young timber baron. To call her ruthless is an understatement. Indeed, one of things I admired most about this book, in addition to its poetic language, its unashamed use of a great plot to power the narrative, and its fine dialogue, is the way Mr. Rash dared to imagine such a horrifically evil character.

I found myself reminded of the film There Will Be Blood by P.T. Anderson. I thought that movie was very well made but it didn't quite move me the way it did many critics. What I particularly didn't buy was its treatment, at the end, of the oil tycoon played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Always driven (and blinded) by greed, to the point of ignoring his suffering son (which totally broke my heart), he is shown at film's end to be an empty, lonely, broken man. This struck me as too much the liberal fantasy, that all those super-rich tycoons are, at heart, empty and miserable people. It seems to me that what would be really terrifying, what would truly shock us as viewers (or readers), is to imagine a character like that -- cutthroat, bloodthirsty, trampling other people according to profit-minded whim -- as being not empty and sad but triumphant and quite pleased with himself. Retiring to luxury, with a trophy spouse, laughing at the rest of us. Isn't THAT the really horrible truth, that such people get away with it? And live happily ever after? In Serena, Ron Rash dared to imagine such a vengeful creature, with zero attempts to pyschoanalyze her or make her palatable to our sensibilities. That took guts, and it's part of what makes his book so brilliant and disturbing.

More on my faves from 2010 in the days ahead...


link to this | File:  Writing  Films  Book Reviews 

I was born in 1974, which means that the summer Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hit the screens, I was 10, the perfect age to appreciate -- indeed, adore -- that film. I saw it in the theaters six times. I wanted to be Indiana Jones -- I even received, for my birthday that summer, an official Indiana Jones fedora, which I wore pretty much constantly until I tragically lost it at the end of the summer (evidence is mixed as to where/when I lost it, but one theory is that I left it at the theater at viewing #6). I would have loved a bullwhip as well, but my parents wisely drew the line at weaponry, though I was able to find some rope in the garage that I could coil up through my belt loop.

People in my generation -- Generation X, as it has so condescendingly been labeled -- have been put in an odd position the last few years by Hollywood and its marketing, money-craving genius. First a few years ago, with the dreadful new Star Wars trilogy, and now this summer, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we are being granted the unusual opportunity to relive (or at least revisit) the experience of seeing the films that we so adored as children (or at least newer sequels/prequels to such films). This has proven to be rather "illuminating," to borrow the line from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- an experience both fun and depressing. Kind of like growing up.

It is hard to overestimate the impact that Star Wars and Indiana Jones had on the collective childhood of Generation X. I do not think I was unusual in that I owned nearly all the Star Wars toys and spent countless hours with them, imagining new stories and adventures for Luke and Han, silently (or loudly) creating my own sequels in the backyards and family rooms of my family and friends. Indy didn't have the same relentless toy marketing as Star Wars, but damn those films were awesome -- I am somewhat unusual in my generation in that I liked the Indy movies even more than Star Wars. In addition to my fedora and makeshift bullwhip, I collected the Topps trading cards for Temple of Doom, I memorized all the film's lines, I owned the John Williams score on cassette and listened to it so much that even today I can hum you the entire film. Indy and Star Wars were the stories my generation was raised on, the atheistic religion we were baptised into, the background against which all other stories would be judged -- and our own stories would be created. When I was encouraged to enter a creative writing contest in the sixth grade, I wrote an Indiana Jones adventure. I lost the contest. But I probably had more fun than the winner did.

Of course, such naked adulation only sets you up for disappointment. Five years later, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade hit the theaters, I saw it on opening day (an early matinee, just after getting out of my last day of ninth grade, a terrible year for growing up). I thought the movie was lousy. It lacked the cool darkness of Temple of Doom, which had so appealed to my preadolescent mind; worse, it had replaced young Short Round, the sidekick with whom I had so identified, with Sean Connery's doddering old Henry Jones. And I was flabbergasted at the dogfight sequence in which Indy guns down two German planes -- hadn't we been told, in Temple of Doom, that Indy didn't know how to fly? Such narrative inconsistency stunned me. Only when I saw Last Crusade for a second time (a few days later) did I change my mind and realize, hey, that's a pretty good flick. The action sequences were as well orchestrated as the first two films', the lines were great, Indy kicked butt, and I wound up seeing Last Crusade at least two more times on the screen. I didn't run around with a fedora and fake whip anymore (hey, I was 15 now; even if I'd still wanted to wear the fedora -- which I probably did -- I knew I would have gotten my ass kicked). But at least I felt that Spielberg hadn't let me down.

And so, 24 years after Temple of Doom (and 19 years after the most recent Indy adventure), Spielberg & Lucas & Ford have graced us with installment four. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last week, and I was underwhelmed. My wife liked it, but -- and she might disagree with me on this -- she never loved Temple of Doom the way I did. Maybe I was only repeating the experience of seeing The Last Crusade in '89, setting myself up for disappointment. Maybe I just wasn't in the proper mindset. But the dialogue seemed leaden, Ford seemed bored (which is even worse than seeming old), the CGI special effects were downright goofy (did we really need anthropomorphic ground hogs, or magic monkeys, or an amada of killer ants?), and too many sets looked like the half-hearted Hollywood stage sets that they surely were. It felt like the masterminds of the first three films were going through the motions, eager to cash their million-dollar checks. But maybe not. Maybe the fault was mine: for being older, for not being 10 anymore, however much Hollywood would like me to remain a bright-eyed ten-year-old forever.

The fact is, it is impossible for me, now, to love a movie as much as the ten-year-old me loved Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even some of the critics who have given lukewarm or negative reviews to the new film still say that at least it was better than Temple of Doom. Indeed, many critics and fans claim that Temple of Doom was the worst of the Indy films, but the fact remains that I was 10 when I first saw it and I will never be 10 again, therefore no sequel can possibly do it justice. When I watch Temple of Doom these days (which I do at least every few years), I do see that the plot is as threadbare and ridiculous as Crystal Skull's, that the action sequences are full of events that defy the laws of physics (leaping out of a plummeting airplane and landing on an inflatable raft? not to mention the entire mining car chase scene), that the heroine is a sexist stereotype and that, yes, wow, there are some pretty icky racial stereotypes throughout the film. But the 10 year-old me was deliriously, gloriously blind to such flaws.

So even while I make note of all Temple of Doom's flaws, it is impossible for me to view it with fully adult eyes -- I know the darn thing so well and equate it so strongly with that period of my childhood that I can't give it a sober assesment. It's like being asked how pretty you think your mother is compared to other women her age. Um, how can I judge that, and how is my judgment fair? The re-creation of the Indy and Star Wars films puts us Gen Xers in an unusual position -- even if the new movies are indeed as good as or even better than some of the earlier ones, they can never seem that way to us, because they're still kid films, and we're not kids anymore. Just as I can't watch Temple of Doom with fully adult eyes, I couldn't watch Crystal Skull with kid eyes either. Sitting through the new movie is less like watching a new film and more like watching an old home video of the 10-year-old me: it's awkward and embarrassing, and I cringe now and then, thinking, "Wow, did I really look like that? Think like that? Dream like that?"

A friend of mine says summer action blockbusters like Crystal Skull are great so long as you "check your mind at the door" and have fun with it, but I've never known how to do this. My brain is kind of attached to the rest of me, to my capacity for wonder and excitement and thrills. I tell stories for a living, so I like to think I have a pretty healthy and vibrant inner child, but that still isn't enough to inoculate me against the kinds of gaping plot holes and clunky dialogue that might have washed over my younger self.

Just as a slightly older generation of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem drew its childhood inspiration from Spiderman and Hulk comics, Indy was huge in my formative storytelling brain. I can't help wondering how different a writer I might be if I hadn't been raised on the Indy films, and whether that's a good or bad thing. Even today, I'm typing this sentence beneath the watchful gaze of my framed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster, which has been at my side throughout the writing of my first two novels (the second one coming soon to a bookstore near you, as the previews say). In it, Indy's holding a machete and standing in a temple entrance, looking not so much tough or angry as ready. Ready for whatever obstacles might come his way: stampeding Thugees, Chinese mafia, sophomore year of high school, first dates, college. He might not be the same guy after he's been confronted by and somehow survived these various cliffhangers, and his past might not make as much sense in a more adult future, but I'm still glad he let me tag along as his sidekick.


link to this | File:  Films