The world is coming to an end. Well, at least it is according to Isabel Raven’s father, a Cal Tech physicist, who has conclusively proven exactly when the world will end. An earthquake hits LA right in the first few pages of the book, followed by several more earthquakes. Roads are torn up, buildings are falling down, and some are sinking back into the tar that is underneath it all. Instead of doom and gloom, this book turns out to actually be a very fun read!

Isabel Raven lives in LA, and is an artist. She makes art I wish I had the creativity to make, which include dropping celebrities into famous paintings. Cher as Mona Lisa. Tom Cruise and Katy Holmes in American Gothic. Her agent, Dahlman, is a bit crazy, and does her career more harm than good with his misguided attempts to make her famous. For example, he posts nude photos of Isabel on her website, without her knowledge or consent. He got these photos from Isabel’s mom, of all people, and they might have been taken before Isabel was quite eighteen. Doesn’t stop Dahlman. He also appears to have made a deal with a billionaire that involves the sale of Isabel’s paintings, and of Isabel herself, for at least one night. Isabel’s boyfriend might be leaving her for an underage pop star with a fake Latina accent, and her new (also underage), friend turns out to be a drug dealer with a penchant for stealing rare artifacts. Oh, and there are a series of earthquakes going on while Isabel is running around trying to get her life together.

I really like the sense of humor that flows through this book. This is one of those books that drops cultural references and doesn’t bother to explain them to the reader, knowing full well that the reader is going to get the joke without the author having to take time away from the story to give the explanation. It’s refreshing.

I also found this book to be very “Californiacentric”, if that’s a word. I just recently moved to California, so I found these little references to be fun. Little things might trip up a reader not from here though. (I never had heard of a Thomas Guide before I moved here. They don’t seem to exist in the Midwest). I really enjoyed that despite the series of earthquakes, all the characters in this book were going about their day as if nothing unusual had happened. Just another day in LA. It’s like they all are thinking something along the lines of, “Sure, I know the world is going to end, but, I’m working on a deadline, and I really want a Starbucks right now, so, be right back!” Maybe this is because so much of LA is a facade. Botox, plastic surgery, movie sets, celebrities dolled up in false images to sell more records… it’s just a little bit unreal. If this was your day to day world, perhaps you wouldn’t be troubled by the end of the world itself either. Isabel is, in some ways, trying to find herself amidst this sea of facades. Not an easy task.

Anyhow, I really had fun reading this book. I was reading an advanced copy. The book won’t be on sale until August of this year, so you have to wait just a little while before you can get a hold of one for yourself. The fun doesn’t end when you get through the last page, however, because it turns out there are two websites connected to this book. One showcases some of Isabel’s paintings, and the other gives further details on her father’s work “The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse”. I just love it when books have cool websites that go with them!

Can you think of another instance where two people in the public eye broke up, and then both of them wrote a book about it? Neither can I. Each book is a compelling read on it’s own, but, if you really want to get the full “he said/ she said” effect, you need to read them one right after the other.

The main idea goes something like the following. Governor James McGreevy ended his political career with a (now at least somewhat famous) speech in which he declared himself to be “A Gay American”. At the time, he was married and he and his wife had a very young child. He later wrote the book The Confession describing what led up to that moment. This, of course, got a lot of media attention, which led to his then wife Dina Matos McGreevy to write her book Silent Partner. Her book is a memoir of their marriage, from her point of view, and answers the question everyone has been asking since James McGreevy made that life changing speech, “Didn’t you know he was gay?”.

In the wake of Brokeback Mountain(a movie based on a book by Annie Proulx), there has been a lot of commentary about these kinds of marriages. So much so that there is a new term created, “straight spouse”, to refer to the spouse whose partner comes out of the closet after years of marriage. A quick tour of the internet will show that this is not as rare an occurrence as one might expect. There is even a Straight Spouse Network created to meet the needs of the people who find themselves in this sort of situation. (Dina Matos McGreevy mentions this group in her book). This is happening in the lives of lots and lots of people.

Once upon a time, people hesitated to get divorced, in part because of the stigma society placed upon it. Today, divorce is taken much more lightly. Now, society is starting to look at “mixed marriages” between a straight person and a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person. The term “mixed marriage” (once used to refer to marriages between two people of different races) has had it’s definition expanded. Surprisingly, it seems that just because one spouse has come out of the closet, this alone does not necessarily mean that the marriage will end. For better or for worse, our concept of marriage is changing.

I decided to read The Confession first. After opening with a short narrative where Dina asks him “Are you gay?”, James goes back in time to his childhood. He is Irish, and was raised Roman Catholic, and was very devout. As a young child, he was told all about his father’s brother, a war hero, who James was named after. His father stresses how important it is for James to live up to his name. This sets the stage for a young man who desperately does not want to be gay.

James points out, more than once, that many of his early experiences were repressed, and it was only with the help of a therapist that he was able to write this book. He had years where he was seen dating women, and then having anonymous sexual encounters with men. This became more risky once he got into politics, especially since what he describes sounds to me to function very much like a “boys club”. Meeting were often held at strip clubs, and to get work done, James needed to go with, and play the game.

Much of James McGreevey’s book is about politics. What offices he held, which wonderful things he helped to get passed, what the campaigns were like. I, personally, don’t care to read about politics, and I found myself confused about just how all those details fit together. What I did understand is that his story could not be told any other way. James was a workaholic, in part, to avoid some aspects of his marriages, and it is clear to me that this is where his head was at much of the time. Readers who enjoy books about history and politics are going to get more out of this book than I was able to.

In short, it goes like this. James got married, to a woman he truly loved named Kari, and had a child with her. The marriage ended, largely because Kari did not enjoy the political life, and did not want their daughter raised around all that deceit and nastiness. A few years later, James met Dina at a political function, and then married her. Shortly after the marriage, James went to Israel (for political reasons), and met a man named Golan Cipel, who he was smitten with. James finds a way to bring Golan to America, and gives him a questionable job as one of his employees. Dina gets pregnant, and ends up hospitalized due to complications before the baby was born. This is when James and Golan start their affair. Years later, after Golan and James are all over and done with, Golan threatens to blackmail James. Golan wants a whole lot of money, or his is going to tell the world about their affair. This is what leads to the “I am a Gay American” speech.

One thing I heard a lot before I read The Confession was that it was scandalously lurid, and detailed the sexual acts between James and Golan. This is simply not the case. James instead gives just enough details to give the reader a good idea about what likely went on. The book is not pornographic, and does not read like “Penthouse Letters”.

I read Dina’s book Silent Partner next. Her book is mostly focused on their marriage, with just enough information about her childhood. She and her family immigrated from Portugal when she was a small child, due to a major health problem one of her brother’s had. She loved America, became a citizen, and got involved with local politics before meeting James.

Her book is not simply a diatribe about hating her ex-husband. It is a very detailed dissection of the years of their marriage, including details of specific instances, as well as describing the roller coaster of emotions involved. In short, no, she had no idea he was gay.

I was fascinated by the little things in this book. She describes how James proposed to her, first by asking his friend to ask Dina if she would marry him, and later by presenting her with a ring, but not actually asking her the big question. Dina notes it as odd even at the time, but can find realistic reasons why James decided to do things this way. She was shielded from much of the speculation about James being gay that was all over the media because she got her news from the television instead of the newspapers or internet. Dina believed for a long time that James might have been involved with someone else, but suspected that someone else was his ex wife, Kari, whom James had regular contact with. Readers of this book will understand exactly how blind sided Dina was by James’ public announcement that he was gay. Dina then goes on to describe what life was like after that speech, with the media hounding them, the difficult decisions about their divorce still up in the air, and a very young child to care for through it all. There is no doubt that Dina suffered. What she shares about these very personal experiences will help other “straight spouses” to feel like they are not alone.

What was the most interesting to me about these two books was not in the details where they agreed, but in the places they differed. It’s the he said/ she said aspect that I find the most telling. Somewhere in the middle, where things overlap, is the truth.

Jonny X67’s house has been stolen while he was at work designing dreams. Not robbed, not broken into, the entire house has been taken away. All that is left is a business card, dropped by the thieves, that says “Don’t you hate it when this happens?” and a phone number. From out of the sky drops a relentless encyclopedia saleswoman, who has jumped from an helicopter. Seems she knew he would be vulnerable at that moment, and is going for a big sale. Things get more bizarre from there.

Jonny must get his house, and his life, back from wherever it has gone. But first, he meets up with his friend, Mat, at a favorite bar of theirs called “The Most Inconvenient Bar in the World”, a name it lives up to. Before they can sort things out, four motorcycle riders smash into the bar, trash the place, and kidnap Jonny. They want him to assassinate God for them. Jonny spends the rest of the book unraveling the mysteries about just how and why he is in this situation in the first place, while also trying to figure out a semi-supressed memory he is carrying concerning the death of a close friend.

The world this takes place in is complex and imaginative, and seems like something that could possibly happen, someday. Record companies have become so powerful that they have taken the place of government, so now instead of towns, there are places named “Classical” or “Jazz”. People live in the zone named for the music they enjoy the best, with others who have the same interest, and everything around them is tailored to suit this interest. Jonny lives in “Chillout” and hates both “Compilation” (where he feels people choose to live when they aren’t good at making decisions), and “Christmas Single” (which he feels is just plain ridiculous). The police once in charge of traffic have become powerful enough to now be in charge of everything. People have phones embedded in their wrists, and little jacks in their wrists that they pay for everything with, simply by connecting a wire into the jack. Faster than credit cards. Elevators are sentient, and want to tell you the same stupid joke that is going around. Soda machines walk around hallways of businesses. Pop up ads have become holograms, that can appear out of thin air anywhere at all, not just on your computer screen. The world is elaborate enough for me to want to go visit for a while. Few books create worlds that hold my attention like this one did. I found myself wondering about the intricacies of the world in this book when I was bored at work.

Fans of bizarre fiction will enjoy this book. It also has a Douglas Adams sort of vibe going on. I really liked this one.

I was rather disappointed with this one.

This book was first published in 1980, and, to me, it hasn’t aged well. Bands in bars are playing songs by Billy Joel. Police are using land lines at the scene of the crime to call in information to headquarters. A famous agent uses a phone at a posh restaurant that was brought out to him, and puts down the receiver when his client arrives. The killer searches for an actual phone booth to make a call from, and is disappointed when all he can find is one of those phones with a small plastic screen surrounding it instead. The main character wants to know what her date thinks of the television show “Mork and Mindy”. All the clothing mentioned, as well as the way most of the settings are styled, are hopelessly stuck in time.

These small details kept jarring me out of the story, sticking out as something very wrong. The parts where the killer was chasing after the other characters, I kept thinking “Well, why doesn’t she just use her cell phone to call the police?”. Maybe I’m just not ready to think of a story taking place in the 1980’s as a “period piece” yet.

The story takes a good long time to get where it is trying to go. First, the reader is introduced to the bad guy, Bruno Frye. He sits in a restaurant, eating an ungodly huge amount of food, and thinking about exactly how he’d like to kill the waitress.

Then it jumps to a bit about the heroine, Hilary (a name I cannot read today without immediately thinking of Hilary Clinton and her upcoming election campaign), who is a newly rich screenplay writer. She is the stereotypical formerly abused kid from inner city Chicago that grew up and “made it”. She now lives in a big house in California, but is still haunted by the demons of what she endured as a child. Granted, it was pretty bad, but it just comes across so…. I don’t know… “After School Special”. Hillary is also fighting to be a success as a screenwriter, and having difficulty because she is a woman. That part feels so very outdated as I read it now, in 2007.

Then the book jumps to Tony, the hero of the story, a detective who really would rather be an artist. He’s just too afraid to make that jump. He is another walking stereotype, and it’s clear right away that Hilary and Tony will meet and fall in love. It takes forever to get there, and you get to sift through a lot of “but how can I trust you, after the abuse I suffered through?” stuff. It’s no suprize when they finally do get together, because it was so blatantly telegraphed in the preceding story. The love scenes are poorly written, and made me cringe more than some of the scenes where people were getting stabbed and killed. Ick!

Bruno, of course, attacks Hillary and tries to kill her. He thinks she is his dead mother, Katherine, back from the dead. She survives, and when he comes back to try a second attempt, Hillary ends up killing him. So many pages are spent detailing exactly what happened to Bruno’s body. Where it was found, what hospital it went to, where the autopsy was done, which funeral home prepared it for the funeral, etc. etc. It’s a big neon sign flashing on and off that says “This guy is coming back from the dead.” I wasn’t surprised when Bruno seemed to return from the grave.

This book leaves a lot of important details hanging until the very end. There is a whole other story line the reader slowly and painfully discovers bit by bit as you dig through the story about what happened to Bruno when he was a child, and what happened to his mother as a child. Some attempt is made to feel sorry for this homicidal maniac, because he was also an abused child. Hillary feels sorry for him, reflecting on her own terrible childhood, which to me, felt very fake. This is a guy that tried to kill her more than once, and was a serial killer for years and years, claiming many victims. Who could empathize with that?

Anyway, in short, I didn’t really enjoy this book. It feels very dated, it takes forever to get where it was going, and it throws together at the end what could have been a much more interesting story if it was more developed. The characters are flat, and the story line tends to signal ahead of time way too much of the events before they happen. Just wasn’t scary enough for me.

If you like Koontz, do yourself a favor, and read The Husband instead. It just came out in paperback, and is ever so much better than Whispers was.

Click here to read my review of The Husband by Koontz.