So, GENTLEMEN received a starred review in the May 1 issue of Booklist. I am thrilled, not just because of the star but because the reviewer really seems to get what I was trying to do with the book, which makes me think I might have, you know, actually done it. In any case, I have now completed the debut novelist’s clean sweep: starred review, Publishers Weekly; starred review, Booklist; dissed by Kirkus. (1, 2, 3: Screw you, Kirkus!)
“I got… two stahs. One fo’… each a you!”
From Booklist: ☆Gentlemen. Northrop, Michael (author).
Apr. 2009. 256p. Scholastic, hardcover, $16.99
This is a rare sort of book that may work just as well for reluctant readers as it will avid ones. Mike (the narrator), Tommy, Mixer, and Bones form the core of the remedial set at their small-town high school. When Tommy goes missing and their reviled English teacher, Mr. Haberman (who’s trying to get them to read Crime and Punishment), starts acting awfully strange, the three remaining friends jump to some alarming conclusions. Despite the teacher’s Raskolnikov act, this is not a reworking of Dostoevsky’s classic in a modern high-school setting; rather, the book works as an amplifier of both the boys’ suspicions and the plot’s intrigue, and while readers familiar with it (or the serviceable graphic-novel version reviewed above) will certainly glean more, it is by no means a prerequisite to get caught up in the mystery. The guessing game of what happened to Tommy, how guilty is Haberman, and what are the boys going to do about it propels the action, and the well-rounded characters and their plausible obsessions provide buoyancy to the story. Laced throughout is a steely and intricate look at the permutations of adolescent friendship and the various roles that teens adopt or are assigned in both their social and academic worlds. A riveting thriller? Yep. A nuanced examination of morality? Yep again. What’s amazing is that they never get in each other’s way. — Ian Chipman .
Central Park Zoo, April 27, 2009. Listed in no particular order.
Chinstrap penguins
Bats!
Dexter cow, which I petted
Polar bears, which I did not
Prehensile-tailed slink
Superb starling
Bufflehead (like a little duck)
Black and white ruffed lemur (panda-colored)
Red panda (red-panda-colored)
Sea lions (It was feeding time! They do tricks!)
IMPORTANT NOTE: The snow leopards arrive on June 13, so I will probably have to amend this list then. Snow leopards are rock stars, in every sense, as they thrive in high rocky terrain.
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So I walked like three long avenue blocks with my fly wide open today. I finally realized it in the middle of a jam-packed Worldwide Plaza. Did anyone see? Please: The better question might be did anyone not. Which begs the question: Is it too much to ask for a quick “XYZ” (eXamine Your Zipper)? A neighborly “Barn door’s open”?
When I was a kid, we would trip over ourselves to tell someone their fly was open. Some poor kid would wander into the classroom at half mast and three kids would blurt it out at once. And it seems like it happened a lot back then: open flies, untied shoes, you name it . . . I think it just takes a while for that kind of buttoning up to become good and habitual.
So maybe we’re out of practice letting each other know. Or maybe NYC is too anonymous a place for that kind of verbal assist. Or maybe everyone just assumed an open fly was the new fashion (it’s really no stranger than low-slung pants or Ugg boots). I’m not sure. All I know is that it was a little drafty there for a few blocks this afternoon. And that spring is here; it’s not the kind of mistake you’d make in the winter. .
This is just to say, if you recite a poem tomorrow (Sunday, April 26) at the 440 Gallery in Park Slope, Brooklyn, artist Nancy Lunsford will give you a signed print! It’s a cool little gallery; her work is fascinating; and it’s a nice way to wrap up National Poetry Month.
I will be training in all the way from Hell’s Kitchen (it’s the 9th St/4th Ave stop in BK, by the way) to recite my warbly rendition of Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” I think. If I blank, I will tell her all about a very important red wheelbarrow, how it has rain on it, and how there are some chickens nearby.
In 1200 B.C., the Greeks packed around 30 men inside a wooden horse.
Last night, we packed 80 people (including at least one Greek) inside a wooden Moose.
And unlike the Greeks, we stayed neither still nor quiet. Thanks so much to everyone who came to my launch party at the Bull Moose Saloon. That, my friends, was frickin’ crazy. As evidence, I offer the following, snapped by Aris, the aforementioned Greek:
Yes, that is a moose snout behind me.
In the raffle, Gary won the mini-motorized schoolbus, Lane won the handcuffs (what have I wrought?!), Tricia won the rubber-band gun, and Elizabeth won the profanity-laced ARC. Allary won the barrel of jelly beans, with a guess of 312 (actual number of jelly beans: 311!). Allary and Tricia are both members of the powerhouse Books of Wonder crew, because their posse rolls deep. So, apparently, does mine, and I am just really happy and grateful for that. So, at the risk of repeating myself, thanks again, party people! .
“You are working with the Falcon? And he’s working for the Nazis?”
There are maybe one million things I could say about this, so I will limit myself to three:
1) That is some deeply unimpressive running.
2) Is the villain having, like, a really severe allergy attack?
3) Please tell me “Where is the Falcon?” is code for something. Something, you know, personal . . .
Here are the first sentences of 10, okay, 11, of my favorite books. I plucked them from the bookshelf without rereading the openings, and it’s cool to see the different approaches, some poetic, some seemingly casual, and some downright profane.
“In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.” And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
“They entered the house at 9:02 p.m. on the evening of April Fools’ Day.” We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
“Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda.” We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch
“I ran into Steve a couple of days ago.” Rumble Fish by S.E. Hinton
“Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling your head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man.” How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
“I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.” At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
“Do not set foot in my office.” Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
“I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.” A Separate Peace by John Knowles
” ‘Sons of bitches.’ ” Who Killed Palomino Molero by Mario Vargas Llosa
“My birthday’s the fourth of January, 1951.” South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
“Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat.” Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
For the record, the first sentence of my book is: “It started out as just another Tuesday at the Tits: first period, Practical Mathematics, nothing special.” But only because “Ye’re no a good man” was taken. .
This Schoolhouse Rock video is one of the first things that ever really made me think about how a story is constructed. I was still a little kid at the time and mostly just watched/read/listened until the story reached the happy ending (which it always did, right up until I encountered Charlotte’s Web. Man, I cried at the end of that, mostly out of sadness but partly, I think, out of a sense of betrayal. A story had never done that to me before. I thought my job was to follow along and its job was to end happily).
Anyway, I remember being floored by the lines, “He even had the nerve to tax our cup of tea/To put it kindly king, we really don’t agree.” That’s really the “dramatic turn” in this video, the pivot from the early history of the colonies in the first half to the fighting in the second. I was amazed that you could build up to a fight with anything other than shouts and exclamation points. “To put it kindly king…” I was so impressed by the restraint there. I also understood that it somehow made the story more dramatic.
It was like that moment in Kenny Rogers’ The Coward of the County, another big favorite at the time: “And you coulda heard a pin drop when Tommy stopped and blocked the door.” It’s like: We’ll get to the punches and shots and exclamation points, but right now, we’re going to take a moment to slowly and deliberately curl our hand into a fist. It’s about pacing and tone and structure. I didn’t know that at the time, but I think that’s when I started thinking about those things.
And one more thing: No More Kings . . .
So living in New York, you get to go to a lot of cool events and performances. You just don’t always get such good seats. So what’s a guy to do? Say hello to my little friend: opera glasses!
The UPS guy just delivered ‘em. These bad boys magnify my vision by 300 percent and my coolness by at least that. Admittedly, they aren’t great for baseball, since I am always wearing a glove and carrying a [beverage] at those. And yes, I’d get my ass kicked if I busted them out in the nosebleed seats at a Rangers game. But say you’re in the fourth ring at New York City Ballet and you want to see Ashley Bouder clearly. (Trust me, guys: You want to see Ashley Bouder clearly.) Well who you gonna call? First name: Opera; last name: Glasses.
Today is the official pub. date for Gentlemen. You can find it at your local bookstore, on Amazon, on BarnesandNoble.com (where my name was misspelled until I wore them down with emails), and random places like flipkart in India, where it costs 919 rupees and is paired with Slumdog Millionaire.
All lengths will be gone to and all torpedoes fired! There is no such thing as bad publicity on launch day, only dangerous, impractical, and deeply unethical publicity—and I want to go to there! Publicity Stunts and Minor Crimes I Am Considering
(I may add to this list if I get any inappropriate suggestions.)
1) A significantly paler, less buff Naked Cowboy. Don’t think I won’t do it: I live just blocks from Times Square!
2) Start an online scrabble game with thousands of people. If I win, they buy the book. Should sell two, maybe three copies!
3) Launch my little red Geo Metro south on FDR Drive North:
Televised coverage + posthumous sales = ca-ching!
4) T.P. City Hall. (No offense, Bloomberg, but some of us are still working on that first billion…)
5) Hang precariously from something very tall. Good city for that.
6) Hi-jack Staten Island ferry with water pistol. Take it to some other borough.
7) Leave barrels around the city with human bodies inside. (Peter’s suggestion. Great publicity, but I can’t help thinking that this could backfire…)
Any other ideas? Anyone? Bueller? .
