Justin Robinson's GET BLANK

Justin Robinson's Fill in the Blank series has the makings of a classic except for one small but significant flaw: it is a bit too much a product of the moment, that moment being early 2014, during the grand epic swan song/swan dive of that remarkable but possibly not unforgettable TV series Mad Men*. Which is to say that I'm a bit concerned, regarding this second volume, Get Blank, that it's not going to stand up quite as well as it deserves to in the years to come, when that show and the other pop culture ephemera of this moment are distant memories. And make no mistake, these books deserve to stand up. They deserve to stand up a lot. And that's not any kind of double entendre. Or at least not much of one.

But you know, perhaps early readers of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson had similar concerns, back in the day.

All questions of long-term survival of the book aside, Get Blank is a worthy successor to the book in which our conspiracy-juggling hero was introduced, 2012's thigh-slapping romp Mr. Blank. It has all of the qualities I enjoyed most in that first book, without feeling like the mixture same as before; Robinson importantly proves early on that "Bob" Blank is far from being a one-note character, even as again he goes to a familiar crime/noir plot well, that of the getting-too-old-for-this-ish, it's-somebody-else's-turn wannabe retiree who is sucked back into his old life by forces he can't control and complains about it entertainingly.

Robinson wisely narrows the focus, this time around, on his protagonist/narrator's amusing narrative voice, resisting the temptation to fill this second volume chock full of MOAR. MOAR CONSPIRACIES! MOAR VILLAINS! MOAR SURREALS! MOAR PUNTASTIC DIALOGUE! MOAR MOAR MOAR.

Instead, we rather a more restrained and thoughtful look at Blank's weird world through his grudgingly maturing eyes.** As Bernard Black (perhaps my only pop culture hero that doesn't get a sly mention or allusion in this novel) would say, he's a boytfriend now; he's got duties, responsibilities, lots of hand-holding and sighing... except unlike Bernard, Blank really is a boyfriend now, whether people believe him or not; the buxom bombshell who shared his adventures last novel, Mina the gorgeous plus-sized model, saw something special in him that no one else seems to (except for us, of course) and decided all he really needed to be a suitable partner was some decent clothes. It's sweet!

Alas, the damsel no sooner won is lost again, framed for murder in an obvious but effective ploy to draw the supposedly retired Blank back out into his former, laughably complex, orbits. As plot devices go, it's a bit ho hum, and it deprives us of a character that really enriched the prior novel, but really, how the hell else are a bunch of conspiracy nuts going to suck their favorite gopher back onto the sacrificial goat delivery circuit? I can't think of a better, can you?

Taking Mina's prior-novel place as sidekick/helpmeet-cum-source of bafflement is one Victor Charlie, a genuine Man in Black, complete with old-fashioned-looking car that can speed like a rocketship, but who is way more bizarre than anything Lowell Cunningham et al imagined for the comic book/film franchise of that name. VC is one weird amalgam of person and program, popping off stock phrases like "hubba hubba" at inappropriate times, taking instructions like "hang on a second" too literally, and generally both helping and hindering Blank's progress, often at the exact same moment. I wish he'd come into the story sooner, though. Ditto Elias. O, Elias, O VC. I would read the crap out of the adventures of Blank and Elias and VC, I really would. 23 Skiddo.

Did I laugh out loud on every other page like last time? No. But what I did do was begin to feel for Mr. Blank, to understand what a life like his might actually be like, and to root for his romance. And that's no mean feat when dealing with a cranky reader like me.

Bravo, Justin! Bravo, Blank!

*Remusly, lots of references to Mad Men here, and I'm not just talking about the main female character/quest object (yes, sadly, the magnificent Mina is more of an absence than a presence in this second Blank novel) being pretty much a role crafted expressly for Christina Hendricks in all her stacked and begirdled red-haired Marilyn Monroe sex-bomb glory.

**Lest this make the book sound too po-faced, though, let me assure you, there are still bits that are funny as hell. A running gag in which Blank keeps enlightening us on the seekrit conspiratorial messages hidden in a litany of pop songs Mina has loaded onto his iPod is lots of fun, for instance. And yes, one of them is by R.E.M. and yes it's probably the one you're thinking of.

Jessica Mitford's THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED

In 1963, investigative journalist Jessica Mitford, youngest of the amazing brood of literary siblings that includes my beloved "U and Non-U" Nancy, published a tartly observed expose of the American funeral industry that opened a lot of eyes and angered a lot of undertaker funeral director grief therapists and made her a hero to the kind of flinty-eyed, savvy observers and consumers of American culture that I would most like to be myself.

At that time, The American Way of Death focused mostly on the racket of coffin casket sales and marketing and the budding collusion between undertakers and florists and other providers of goods and services used in disposing of honoring the dead during the apex of American civilization. The coming of giant funeral home conglomerates, industrial-scale mausoleum development and aggressive "pre-need" marketing was hinted at but still, in the 1960s, still all just potential. For this newer edition, published in 1998, The American Way of Death Revisited took on those developments with just as jaundiced, as funny, as tartly observed glee as the original work, and while yes, it disgusted me in many ways, it also made me laugh the way Paul "Dumbing of America" Fussell makes me laugh: bitterly but heartily.

I haven't had direct experience with this industry as yet, but sooner or later I will, and I'm already mad at the kind of crap they're going to try to pull. Suggesting, for instance, that cremation is disrespectful but that if I must I still have to buy a casket to cremate someone in (not true). Insisting that the body is required by to be embalmed as a public safety measure (not true). Intimating that I'm a bad, cold, unfeeling person if I don't shell out for embalming and for a big fancy satin lined casket and an open casket funeral so everybody can look at the deceased one last time looking better than he or she ever did in life (!) and a for vault to go over the casket and protect it from the elements and by the way it's really more tasteful to buy a bronze plaque to go over the hole in the ground where you stash the meat than to have a headstone made by a monumental mason. Because the bronze plaque manufacturers are our sort but those headstone people are really not the thing, you know. And don't even talk about scattering ashes, horrors!

By the way, as Mitford confirms (I had long suspected it but never been sure) embalming isn't really preservation at all; it's pretty much just an exercise in human taxidermy, its aim to make the corpse look good for that open casket funeral; its effects start to go to crap almost before the earth hits the coffin lid internment. You're paying to have your loved one (wink at Evelyn Waugh fans) stuffed and mounted like an elk head for display so that your friends and family can admire the taxidermist's embalmer's handiwork* so they'll choose him or her when it's their turn to let someone go.

 But I'm only scratching the surface of what's disinterred here. The Death Industry has, we learn, lobbyists every bit as powerful and persuasive as Wall Street, and they've skewed so many laws and codes in that industry's favor that it's hard to tell what the consumer's rights still even are. I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 1998. I'm waiting for pre-need funeral ads to start showing up in the margins of my Gmail. And the grief therapist marketing spam. And...

And it's all such a horrible mess, really, because the majority of Americans seem to think a big showy expensive open casket funeral is traditional and only decent and anyone who doesn't opt for this must be an unfeeling jerk who hated his deceased; i.e., the marketing has been successful as hell. So now the "conventions" the Death Industry pretty much invented to squeeze more money out of the recently bereaved (preying on their emotional vulnerability unconscionably) really are what's expected. Only the very strong and stubborn are coming out of the experience with their fleeces intact, I suspect.

But, you know, you can't take it with you. Whatever your culture's funeral customs.

*It's impossible not to think of John Waters' gleeful turn as a funeral director in My Name Is Earl, he of the "living tableau." And yes, Six Feet Under too, of course. But I think Waters did it way better. Because John Waters. Der.

Netflix Finds: Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EVIL

I like a mockumentary almost as much as I like a documentary, especially when it's got lots of layers of complete WTFery. So I'm pretty much exactly the audience for something like Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's One Hundred Years of Evil, which concerns itself with a (fictitious) researcher and documentary filmmaker's pursuit of proof that Adolf Hitler not only survived World War II but came to America and continued to mastermind evil in his adopted homeland.

The fun starts right in the opening credits, where we keep seeing an improbable yet euphonious name over and over again: Idelfonso Elizade, named as the auteur but not, it turns out, an actual person. But soon we're immersed in stranger things as our researcher character, Skule (quoth my roommate "Dude, I wish I had a name as cool as Skull") starts unearthing secret after secret, his discoveries and interviews intercut with "found footage" in which, for instance, our maybe-Hitler sitteth on the (camera) right hand of Joseph McCarthy almighty, bobbing his head right along with everybody's favorite Red Scare menace as he lectures about the insidious threat of Communism in post-war Amurrka or makes a brief and totally deadpan stage appearance with a troupe of transsexual singers for whom he served as a roadie for a while.

Meanwhile, Skule starts getting harassed by unseen forces eager to keep the truth hidden and starts getting entertainingly paranoid in an almost Blair Witchian fashion. And the hilarity continues. My roommate and I laughed our asses off. You might, too.

If I have a criticism, it is only this: too many of the performances were a little too on the nose, spoiling the illusion that this actually was a documentary. No one ever made the amateur mistakes of looking into the camera, no one ever stumbled or paused in delivering their lines, it was all just a little too perfect, and thus obvious that these were actors playing crazy sources and not just crazy sources. But perhaps that, too, was intentional, a further sending up of the documentary format and its conventions? I'm just not sure.

100 Books #125 - Charles Palliser's QUINCUNX

I suppose we could regard Charles Palliser's Quincunx as final proof that for every genre or great genre master of fiction, however obscure or archaic, there is not only someone who will attempt a pastiche of it/him, but sometimes there is even one who is very, very good at it. Charles Palliser is one of these, an otaku's otaku in the realm of... the nineteenth century social novel?

I didn't know there could be such a thing. Did you?

For Quincunx* is a Dickensian pastiche of the very highest order, though it goes Dickens one better, or at least earlier, by setting itself in Britain's late Regency (and therefore pre-Victorian by a good bit) period. And perhaps it takes the Dickens to 11 at the very least, both in terms of legal/inheritance wrangling as plot driver and of risible degrees and numbers of coincidences at least in that Dickens' and Palliser's Londons have hilariously small populations.

And there is still more to keep the 21st century reader chuckling, for about halfway through, when a certain heraldry puzzle assumes paramount importance, the penny drops and one realizes she is in fact reading a high quality prose version of a hidden object game. All that is missing is the frustrating experience of "breaking" the cursor by mis-clicking on too many objects, but then again, that could be substituted for by our young hero's continually narrowly escaping yet another assassination attempt -- or only sort of escaping, continually forced as he is to more or less respawn as the penniless, near-helpless, delerious, paranoid, starving waif that he is for most of the novel.

And why is this so? Because, as I said, property inheritance and greed are the great drivers of the plot. An ancient francophone family (lots of glorious surnames feature in this story: Umphraville, Palphramond, Mompesson!) whose possession of a profitable estate dates back, apparently, to the time of William the Conqueror and whose bloodline includes Plantagenet ancestry, fell on hard times a few generations before our hero (John Mellamphy, he who answers to oh so many other names as he grows up) was born has been shadow-fighting over different versions of the patriarch's will in addition to publicly battling it out in the Court of Chancery (shades of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, eh wot?). Depending on what document finally surfaces and is approved, one family could be turned off the estate in favor of, well, several others.

The plot is intricate and small details matter; like in playing a hidden object game, we have to scrutinize every scene with care, somewhat hampered by our guide through all of this, John of the Many Surnames, from whom Secrets Have Been Kept and whose life is perpetually both endangered and protected by different interests, depending on which will from which they would benefit.

All this and all the Dickensian social justice hand-wringing you could ask for, as we spend time with body snatchers, dishonest bankers and lawyers, out-and-out bandit gangs, "down below men" who make their living salvaging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers, starving Victorian garment workers, and, every once in a while, the gentry living high and betting too much on cards and horses. Like you do.

If that sounds like something you might enjoy, you'll enjoy the hell out of this book. I did, even though I snickered a lot. Hey, snickering is good.

*And I absolutely wound up reading this one now because of Aliette de Bodard, whose Obsidian and Blood Aztec godpunk trilogy employs the visual device and term of "quincunx" - a five-fold cross, more or less - and every time I came across the term, I remembered that my mother had presented me with a battered but still nice hardcover edition of Quincunx and it was still the substantial base of my small but formidable tower of dead tree TBR. Brains are funny old things.

100 Books #101 - Justin Robinson's MR. BLANK

Was Tobias Knight your favorite character in Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's fiction, or did you at least wonder what it would be like to be him?

Did you dig X-Files but think it was kind of cheap that Mulder & Scully only had to deal with one freakshow at a time? And too much FBI red tape?

Do conspiracy theories make you horny, baby?

Then, brother, have I got the novel for you.

The title character in Mr. Blank makes Tobias Knight, quintuple agent, look like a monogamous pansy. As he tells us in the novel's exquisitely perfect opening sentence, "Every conspiracy needs a guy like me." The sad bit is, as he goes on to explain, he's that guy for every single conspiracy. And there's only so much of him to go around. So, he has established more false identities than any sane person could keep track of, each with its own email address, cell phone and contract, and contact within a secret organization; the Masons know him by one name, the Satanists by another, etc. Across conspiracies, though, he is at core the same guy: the go-to guy, a low-level initiate/enthusiast who is willing to be the gopher, delivery guy, purchasing agent, evidence hider, witness confuser, whatever dumb little task you need today, Worshipful Sir or Ma'am or Thingie.

The premise could work with any number of plots (har har). The temptation that could waylay it being just to watch him in action, which could be fun as the quotidian-for-him early pages establish; his to-do list (or lists, one for each identity/role) are quite entertaining. I was especially amused by bits like this one: "Commercial candy is allowed to have up to five rat droppings per ounce by law. What they don't say is what kind of rat droppings or whose job it is to put them there."

You get the idea.

So this could have turned into the kind of sprawling hot mess that the Illuminatus! Trilogy (clearly its primary inspiration) was, but Robinson was more interested in producing a piece of quality genre fiction/entertainment than in imparting his mystic-comic wisdom to us in a gigantic parable. I think. At any rate, he found a plot that worked, the good old "someone is trying to kill me and this stacked redhead I just happened to meet along the way" that's straight out of mid-century crime noir. Hey, why mess with perfection?

And this book is so close to genre-mashing perfection that it's almost painful to contemplate how it also kind of bothered me: there's a major sub-plot involving female body-image politics that I didn't quite like, pitting one conspiracy of Rubenesque, curvy women (the stacked redhead and her fuller-figured overladies, whom Mr. Blank refers to as "hippos" and worse) against another of stick-thin model-pushers (though bonus points for the neologism "ascetorexics"). Mr. Blank more or less comes down on the side of the former, mostly due to the presence at his side of their prettiest and smartest (Mina, whom he wants to "paint on the side of a bomber"), so I guess there's that, but still, focusing on that one characteristic of a woman -- her body, her shape -- still counts as objectification, whether you're turned on by it or not, guys. Ew.

If that kind of thing doesn't bother you*, or if it does but you're able to square your shoulders and march on and get past it and focus on all the good stuff, this is quite an enjoyable read. Fnord.

*And usually I'm of this camp, able to dismiss the odd quip about a female character's appearance or a gay character's clothing or whatever as just something that is missing the mark with me but that the author felt necessary to include to appeal to other readers. But here, it is very much front and center, with Mr. Blank all but smacking his lips over Mina on almost every page. What saves it is that she notices this, calls him on it, and occasionally delivers the kind of reprimand that leaves a mark. So that brings up a question for me that I'm not sure I have the answer to: does the presence of a strong and self-determined female character who refuses to be a sidekick justify or compensate adequately for the author's over-the-top rubbing of my readerly nose in all of this body-image crap? Like I said, I don't have an answer, so my annoyance is only mostly assuaged by the fact that everything else in this book was over-the-top awesome.