Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson


Now, I must admit that I am not the target audience for Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but with all of the widespread praise the mystery had been receiving, I thought it may be worth my time. Or at least it would be a fun waste of time. It was, instead, a frustrating waste of time.

It's bad hen you come in with pretty low expectations and are still let down. I tend to be annoyed with genre conventions, but that wasn't even the problem here. In fact, it probably would have been a better book if it had tried to adhere to a standard format. Instead, we get what amounts to hundreds of pages of meandering, useless back story, no plot development, and not actual progression. I say all of this without criticizing the line-level quality of the writing (it is dry and dull).

I'd like to summarize the plot, the central storyline, here, but it so convoluted that is not worth the paragraph it would take to write it. There is a mystery that involves two dozen or so family members, and a secondary mystery that sort of bookends the first mystery. Then there are another twenty characters, each with Swedish names that make them hard to distinguish from other characters (Don't miss Nora Ephron's New Yorker piece if you too struggle with this book).

Around two-hundred pages in, after being sufficiently frustrated and confused, the action begins. It is for this action that we're meant to enjoy these sorts of books, right? On a personal level, I enjoyed the concept of Mikael Blomkvist holed up in a spartan guest house in northern Sweden, tasked with chronicling a family history and attempting to solve a murder along the way. I also enjoyed the character of Lisbeth Salander, for all of her supposedly shocking characteristics, but I do think Larsson misunderstands her at times, giving her thoughts and actions (some critical) that are wholly inconsistent.

When the action gets good, when things are building to a climax, though, Larson lets some events happen so matter-of-factly that they fall flat. A couple of key moments in the novel happen without any sort of build up. Its as if the author needed something to happen, and instead of leading us to it, it just happens. When I wanted more of what the genre should have served up, the book let me down.

The action only lasts a few hundred pages, and then we return to the meandering, the other irrelevant characters, and the ancillary mystery (which, like the other, is a let down). The last hundred pages of the book were so frustrating to get through, so indulgent and self-serving. I could not help but wonder where the editor was for this book. This isn't a Stephen King book, where you pretty much let him write whatever he wants to write, slap a cover on it, and wait for the money to pour in. This is a debut novel. Sure, there had been international success before it ever appeared in the U.S., but couldn't we have pulled it into shape first?

Unless you're so inspired by the cover that you have to read this book (it was one key reason I was interested), don't. Wait for the David Fincher film. Or, better yet, see the Swedish film, which is getting good reviews. Though maybe you shouldn't believe the reviews.

Movie Review: Winter's Bone

Movies based on good novels rarely seem to match whatever quality made the book so good in the first place. Winter's Bone, directed by Debra Granik, is one of those rare films that live up to the novel on which it is based. While I found myself questioning some of the plot points and the sequence of events, the movie does well by Daniel Woodrell's novel.

Set in the drug-addled Missouri Ozarks, the movie follows 17-yr-old Reed Dolly as she searches for her missing father. Busted for cooking meth, Jessup Dolly put the house, in which Ree lives with her vacant mother and two younger siblings, up against his bond. If he doesn't show up for his court date, they will lose the house and land.

The film focuses more on this mystery than the book does. (Certainly the marketing--and the hideous movie poster--try to play it up.) In the book, it seems like a lost cause from the beginning. Indeed walks into situatiopns she shouldn't and finds herself in some trouble. Played by Jennifer Lawrence, Ree is steely and hard, determined and stubborn, but the acting never lets us miss the teenager she really is.

Filmed in Missouri's Christian County, the film must have caused quite a stir when the film trucks came to town and borrowed real locations, real people's homes for filming. There some gritty squalour here that should remind us how people live in this country. There are many sides to American life, and this may be one that art film audiences may not have known actually existed.

A big winner at Sundance, Winter's Bone is an excellent, realistic movie that will probably pass largely unnoticed. And it is too bad, too. I can only hope that by the time it goes to DVD, more people will have heard how good it is.

A Solution for Job Creation

I’ve just read former Intel chief Andy Grove’s article “How to Make an American Job” in the July 5-11 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek and I have to quibble. He argues that we ship jobs overseas at our own peril. Not only do we lose the jobs, we also are left out of the next round of development in that industry. To solve the problem, he states, “Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory—and job-centric political leadership—to guide our plans and actions.”

Surely, the US cannot survive on knowledge and service work alone. I would agree. Manufacturing in the US gives the country the flexibility to change and grow and to be a part of new technological revolutions. Pressing the government to get involved in this, in any way, walks us straight into dangerous territory.

Incentives provided by the government for job creation can hardly be effective. I would bet that for every dollar of incentive provided, less than fifty cents pass through in the form of wages. Probably a greater portion goes straight to corporate profits. We cannot forget that profit creation is the greater incentive for companies, coming well before job creation. Wringing the profit out of every dollar is the way things work.

Inefficiencies of government spending or tax breaks aside, other methods to encourage domestic manufacturing are dangerous. Tariffs on imported goods may protect American jobs, but often at a higher cost for American companies. They will pay higher prices on imported raw materials, higher wages, and will likely see import tariffs on their own products overseas. Duties are a bit of an arms race. As long as we have the same amount as our competitor, we are secure. An escalation by either side will be equally met by the other. Grove, though, thinks this okay. “Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)”

What works is when American businesses seize opportunities, finding the right spots to take advantage of things. Here, Grove is onto something. He suggests the promotion of scaling, of moving a product from development and small-run manufacturing to complete large-run, full-scale production. This is a particular pinch-point in the process. US companies have had trouble relying on overseas manufacturers to take a new product to full-scale production because of the normal tweaks to design and production that are necessary. Keeping that work in the US can allow companies to be better tuned to making quick changes, refining processes, and making better products.

But instead of penalizing US companies through taxes or tariffs on overseas production, we need to help them get what they need to keep this scaling in the US: access to capital. A program of government-backed loans available to companies looking to scale up would be exactly what is needed. Let’s face it, shareholders or the bond market are probably unwilling to take this risk and help a company fund the creation of US manufacturing. Why would they when they continue to see the profits that come from displacing American workers for Chinese? Venture capital isn’t interested, as Grove points out. And banks aren’t willing to take the risk without government support. Yet, it is in the country’s interest to create jobs here and to take a little risk in the process. There is no up-front cost to the taxpayer, no taxpayer dollars going to line the pockets of greedy corporate execs or handout-seeking labor. There is market-rate interest to be made by banks and a little downside risk to the government.

The dangers of a US devoid of manufacturing jobs should be apparent. It may provide greater profits to US corporations, their executives, and the smaller base of knowledge workers, but all of their spending cannot support our service and retail sectors. Yes, maybe shipping jobs overseas and rising US unemployment can be severe enough to depress US wages to the level of those of Chinese workers, making it cost efficient to return jobs to the US. Indeed, maybe this is the intent of some. But the US thrives on a diverse workforce. We need not only manufacturing workers, we need the line managers, the division chiefs, and all the other middle managers as well. Maybe with a little government backing (not support, incentives, or protectionism) we can get them back.

Book Review: Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run by John Updike


I feel bad for putting this book off for so long. If only someone would have told me how good it was, how sentences would jump off the page, nailing emotions, confusions, context. Not to say the book doesn't have it's faults (it does), but I do wish I'd have read this some time ago.


I had read the first few pages a half-a-dozen times, and despite the sharpness of the writing in the first few paragraphs I always chose another book to read instead. I only had to get past those first few pages, past Rabbit's pick-up basketball game and his run home, to his home and wife and dissatisfaction with both, to the drive and I was hooked.


He drives through the thickening night. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires. He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. So angry his cheeks feel parched inside his mouth and his notstrils water. He grinds his foot down as if to squash this snake of a road, and nearly loses the car on a curve, as the two right wheels fall captive to the dirt shoulder. He brings them back but keeps the speedometer needle to the right of the legal limit.


He turns off the radio; its music no longer seems a river he is riding down but instead speaks with the voice of the cities and brushes his head with slippery hands. Yet into the silence that results he refuses to let thoughts come. He doesn't want to think, he wants to fall asleep and wake up pillowed by sand. How stupid, how frigging, fucking stupid he was, not to be farther than this. At midnight, the night half gone.


I hadn't expected this. I hadn't expected the run, right in the beginning, with narration so close and free-flowing. And then Rabbit turns out to be so exhasperating and simple. Always doing what he shouldn't do, but with no real good reason for it. Sure, he had been frustrated at home, but his initial flight was on a whim. There was no reason in it, and worse, he turns around and heads back. But does he go home? No. And this is the way it goes for the length of the novel.


Where the novel runs into trouble, besides the meandering, the pick-ups and drop-offs of motivation and reason, is when suddenly we leap from Rabbit's mind to the mind of others. It tends to happen for good reason, but I find it troubling to enter another character's mind halfway through the novel after being firmly established elsewhere. Yet, when Updike does this, he lets nothing fail (another long quote follows--my apologies).


Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have--Pilly--" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body: he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vaccuum.


"The boy's taken his truck," he tells Mrs. Springer.


"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."


"Billy." The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. "Give it back." Billy considers this new evidence and and hesitates indeterminately. "Now, please." Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.


The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.


The brilliance is everwhere in this novel, despite the way it bumps along at times, infuriating in its twists and the impending tragedy. You know that things must truly fall apart for Rabbit, and you know that he may learn nothing from it. And you wish he'd have kept driving south to the beach and avoided all of this.


Again, I wish I'd have read this sooner. There is so much to learn from the way Updike captures emotion, the way his close third-person narration takes you behind the scenes. You are not a witness to the thoughts of the character, but you experience what he experiences. Makes me wish I'd have really seen the brilliance in the writing workshop staple "A&P" and read more Updike sooner.