Book Review: American Neolithic

American Neolithic

by Terence Hawkins

200 pages

C&R Press, 2014

I love a literary mashup, whether it’s Ben Winters’ end-of-days murder mysteries or Kirsten Bakis’ feverish mix of Frankenstein science and pop culture. So when I received a review copy* of Terence Hawkins’ new sci-fi legal thriller, American Neolithic, I tore into it with relish.

        Hawkins, a longtime attorney, puts a fresh spin on a classic genre, the hardboiled crime novel, by framing it in an alternate reality: In a United States governed by a fanatic religious regime, a small community of Neanderthals lives hidden in the shadowy margins of New York City. Aside from the Neanderthals—who, in our reality, died out 30,000 years ago—the idea isn’t that far-fetched. In Hawkins’ dystopian America, Homeland Security oversees law enforcement with brutal efficiency, government propaganda constantly stirs public panic and xenophobia, and—most germane to this story—the religious political machine has officially “debunked” evolution, dismantled scientific facilities, and made it illegal to espouse any theory but creationism. This sets up a complication larger than a few genetic misfits trying to quietly survive in the back alleys of humanity. In this world, living Neanderthals present a scientific conundrum that doesn’t fit the theological story the government is trying to tell, and this government has ways of erasing what it doesn’t like.

        Woven into this backdrop is a quirky crime story about a soft-spoken Neanderthal who becomes a sort of mascot to a hip-hop group, then gets entangled in a murder. There are legal machinations, A Guantanamo-style detention center, court dates and behind-the-scene wrangling among lawyers and judges, with rapid-fire dialog and just enough details for authenticity. The book’s pacing is brisk, and the cynical narration of the main protagonist, a hard-bitten defense attorney, alternates with chapters narrated by the more poetic Neanderthal, who traces the secret history of his people with a wry tenderness. The contrasting voices keep the tone lively, but each has its pitfalls—the lawyer is so disillusioned that his salty narration sometimes overpowers the story, and the Neanderthal’s passages turn syrupy at times.

        The lawyer’s bleak world view presents another thorny issue: In his eyes, the few women in the story are described mostly in terms of their bodies, and the African-American characters all seem to be drug-addled music moguls or bouncers. This character flaw in the main narrator could have made for some welcome nuance if it had been further developed; as it stands, the reader is left wondering what to make of these misogynistic and bigoted remarks tossed off without apology. But, that said, Terence Hawkins can write—he keeps a headlong high-wire act going all through the book, with pacing that never flags and a nightmarish world that’s frighteningly believable. And his inside knowledge of the legal system brings the lawyers’ behind-the-scenes wrangling and one-upmanship vividly to life. I look forward to seeing more books from Hawkins.

      

* The hardcopy of the book got lost in the mail so I ended up reading it on Kindle, which is fine—I like Kindle books. And then—funny story—a day or two after I wrote this review, the hardcopy arrived, the packaging mangled but the book unharmed. I only mention this because I then got to compare the physical copy with the Kindle one, and they are very different animals. The hardcopy is beautifully designed, printed on good-quality paper and elegantly formatted for effortless reading. But the Kindle version has a lot of formatting errors: no white space signaling section changes within a chapter, ambiguous chapter heads that make it hard to tell where one chapter ends and another begins, and lengthy newspaper excerpts in shoutycaps. To make matters worse, when I tried it on an iPad (via the Kindle app), the whole book was in boldface. (Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature for this book has the same problem.) I’m going to take the book’s publisher to task a little bit here because bad e-book formatting is so prevalent and has become such a pet peeve. I’ve converted books to e-book and Kindle, and I can tell you that the only difference between a sloppy one and a tidy one is a few hours of (admittedly tedious) work. The real time-sucker is testing it out on all the different devices (part of the proofing process when you enroll your book in the Kindle program) because each device uses a different fonts, spacing, chapter head styles, etc. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out a format that looks good (or at least not bad) on all of them. There are lots of good resources online to learn how to do this, and you don’t need any special skills; it’s just work. I wish more publishers would put in the time to do it. Of course in a few years this technology will have changed again, and this will be one those quaint little topics that nobody talks about anymore.

My Year in Books, Part 1

This was the year I started reading again. Why I stopped reading is a long tale; the nutshell version is that a few years ago I came down with a mysterious illness that made me dizzy—constantly, every waking moment. Many things aggravated it: driving, walking, anger, talking to people who made me nervous, stress in general, grocery shopping, and—perhaps most distressing—reading. So for two or three years, books piled up around me but I couldn’t read them. It’s only been in the past year that I’ve been able to read again, but I found I was out of practice; I didn’t have a set reading time and routine like I used to, and I’d become embarrassingly addicted to television. But all those books were calling, so I figured it out—more or less—and am happy to present some book reviews from the past year’s catch.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★  The Mount
Carol Emshwiller (2002)

2012’s not over yet, but I can’t imagine finding another book that will take this one’s place as my favorite book of the year. The premise of this lyrical, wildly entertaining sci-fi tale is an uneasy one: Aliens have invaded Earth and enslaved humanity, but not in the usual TV-movie way, with plucky rebels taking potshots at sleek spaceships. In Emshwiller’s far more frightening world, the toddler–size aliens are so much smarter than humans that they’ve turned us into beasts of burden who work the fields and are ridden and raced by the wealthier aliens for pleasure. By the time the story takes place, this enslavement has gone on for many generations, and the humans are largely resigned to it. And for the protagonist, a young man who’s the favorite mount of an alien aristocrat, it isn’t a bad life: He gets good food, plenty of exercise to keep him in racing shape, and a warm stall to sleep in at night—often curled up next to his alien owner, also a youngster, who is completely devoted to his human pet. How the aliens control the humans—with a sense of entitled stewardship and the sincere belief that the humans would die or descend into barbarism without the aliens’ care—mirrors our own justifications for slavery in the past and, more immediately, our attitudes toward the animals who live alongside us right now. This important, mind-altering book is also a rollicking good read that may change the way you look at the cats, dogs, and horses around you.

★ ★  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson (2008)

Sometimes a thick, mass-market blockbuster lives up to its hype—Lonesome Dove or The Firm, for instance. And sometimes it doesn’t, which was the case with this book that probably needs no introduction. I’m going to swim against the tide here and say that though I tore into this first volume of Larsson’s trilogy with relish, I ended up quitting about two-thirds of the way through. It took too long to get going, and the dark parts were so dark that it made me not want to spend my evenings with this book. I gave up crime novels long ago for this very reason—they focus too much on a small, twisted segment of human society that I don’t want my dreams to dwell on. I did love that bleak little Swedish town in winter, though, and I kept feeling like the book was about to knock my socks off—any time now, any day now, maybe right around the corner. Then I just got tired of waiting and decided to read something I enjoyed instead.

★ ★ ★ ★  An Old Junker: A Senior Represents

Howard Junker (2011)

Disclaimer: I know Howard Junker, a little. He published one of my poems a few years ago in his fine journal ZYZZYVA*, and many of us West Coast writers consider him literary royalty. So I was delighted to find that he’d written a book about his experiences as an editor, and as a college student, and…well, as a person. And this book does not disappoint. Basically a collection of blog posts, it runs the gamut from reminiscences about his school days (and an astonishingly large number of soon-to-be-famous schoolmates) to the vagaries and gossip of life in the litmag world and the motley and combative writers who make up the San Francisco “scene.” The book is—like its author—funny, erudite, wide-ranging, and sometimes scathing (don’t get him started on Dave Eggers), and it touches on dozens of authors that I now want to read, particularly Ploughshares founder DeWitt Henry, about whom Junker writes elegantly and affectionately. The only curious speed bump is that An Old Junker is presented (at least on Howard’s website) as a “blognovel of old age,” which calls into question how many of the perfectly plausible stories are actually fiction. Similarly, the subtitle A Senior Represents doesn’t do the book justice; this is a fresh, entertaining journey through an unusual life, told through the very modern device of short, snappy blog posts. So, while I wished that the book would have picked a less ambiguous genre (or spelled out more clearly what makes it a “novel”), I loved An Old Junker and genuinely couldn’t put it down.

But that's not all . . . part 2 is here.

* When I got published in ZYZZYVA, I was invited to read at an issue-release party at the San Francisco main library. As part of the deal—and perhaps even more thrilling—I got to have dinner with Howard, along with a few other starstruck contributors, at a Thai restaurant. There were too many of us to sit at one table, so we had to split up into two groups. Normally well-mannered, I shoved my way through the crowd to grab a spot at Howard’s table. And I swear, it was like having dinner with Gore Vidal—he was gracious, charming, and funny, shifting gears effortlessly between literature and current events, world travel and good restaurants. But he was no snob; I got the impression he could converse just as easily about Netflix vs. Hulu or where to find a good mechanic.